Stem Cell Update: Progress being made

Charlie Cris (R), Governor of Florida, is recommending spending $20 million in Florida for stem-cell research so long as no embryos are destroyed. Cris noted recent findings that amniotic stem cell research may hold as much medical promise as embryonic stem cells - as I recently noted. It remains to be seen if the Democrats who recently won Congress will take note.

Saving souls vs. Serving soup: Wright on mission

N.T. Wright is among the best living theologians. Here is a great quote from his recent interview with Christianity Today that really connects with much of my own theology and practice as well. The whole interview is a nice introduction to Bishop Wright's major themes and concerns.

"The longer that I've gone on as a New Testament scholar and wrestled with what the early Christians were actually talking about, the more it's been borne in on me that that distinction [between saving souls for hereafter and improving human lives here and now] is one that we modern Westerners bring to the text rather than finding in the text. Because the great emphasis in the New Testament is that the gospel is not how to escape the world; the gospel is that the crucified and risen Jesus is the Lord of the world. And that his death and Resurrection transform the world, and that transformation can happen to you. You, in turn, can be part of the transforming work. That draws together what we traditionally called evangelism, bringing people to the point where they come to know God in Christ for themselves, with working for God's kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. That has always been at the heart of the Lord's Prayer, and how we've managed for years to say the Lord's Prayer without realizing that Jesus really meant it is very curious. Our Western culture since the 18th century has made a virtue of separating out religion from real life, or faith from politics.When I lecture about this, people will pop up and say, "Surely Jesus said my kingdom is not of this world." And the answer is no, what Jesus said in John 18 is, "My kingdom is not from this world." That's ek tou kosmoutoutou. It's quite clear in the text that Jesus' kingdom doesn't start with this world. It isn't a worldly kingdom, but it is for this world. It's from somewhere else, but it's for this world.

The key to mission is always worship. You can only be reflecting the love of God into the world if you are worshiping the true God who creates the world out of overflowing self-giving love. The more you look at that God and celebrate that love, the more you have to be reflecting that overflowing self-giving love into the world."

-N. T. Wright, The Lord Bishop of Durham and defender of the Northcountry from the savage fury of "the Scot." (seriously! sorta...)

Politicians, Public opinion, Media and War

I must confess, that I am losing confidence in our ability to win the war on whomever it is we are fighting now...or any future wars with Iran, North Korea, China, or even France. I am losing confidence in the ability of the United States of America to prosecute and successfully conclude any war on foreign soil at all.

I had a conversation recently over pizza with a friend - an older man with more personal experience with these things than me - about fighting a war in the information age, whether it was even possible (for a democracy) to do so: what follows is a reconstruction of the themes of that conversation (not necessarily my own convictions) and I would like to know what you all think about this:

We all know what it takes to win a war - absolutely decimating - that is, HURTING - the enemy. Consider World War II - we brought Germany and Japan to the brink of the stone ages in the firey and sometimes atomic onslaught. Much the same thing happened in large portions of the South in the Civil War. We fought "total war." Those wars the USA (and her allies) won. This one, like Vietnam, we will not win.

So what is the difference between Vietnam and Iraq on the one hand and the Civil War and World War II on the other hand? It is certainly not a case of diminished skill or competence of our military. The new mass media is one primary difference. In the past (before the 1950s) the media was optimistic and nationalistic on the one hand and limited to mainly to newspapers on the other. The only video footage Americans saw of World War II was the news-reel at the local cinema that was of course controlled by the Government: it presented the nobility of our cause and our sacrifices and the ingenuity bravery of our soldiers. If the deaths of American soldiers were mentioned at all it was a means to demonizing the enemy (rather than our own politicians or president).

Consider the issue of collateral damage. Americans, as basically good and soft-hearted Christian-ish people are loathe to cause civilian casualties in the course of our wars. For some reason, cotnrary to all historical evidence, we think soldiers not civilians ought to die in wars (this was connected to my initially opposing the invasion of Iraq for religious reasons). The news media knows this and so every time a daycare or an oldfolks home gets hit by a stray smart bomb (one of the very expensive weapons of our very expensive war that exists for no other purpose but to prevent collateral damage), CNN will be all over it like flies on rotting meat. Compare that to WWII: certainly no one in America watched close-up and detailed (and continuous) news footage of the total incineration of German cities such as Dresden, when our tactics were to use massive bombing raids to deliberately create "fire storms" that would create a vacuum effect, pulling tens of thousands blond-haired, blue-eyed women, children, old people, infants, and German soldiers alike into a firey oven with its intense winds. We did not constantly view their charred remains - of mothers hovering over infants, nor did we interview their relatives to see what they thought. We can be assured that if THAT is what the American public was constantly reminded of (or were watching it live on TV and on the net), then we would have lost the heart to fight very quickly.

Or consider the issue of casualties - in three years less than 4000 soldiers have been killed in Iraq. Compare that to the 400,000 we lost in 4 years of WWII or the 600,000 in the 4+ years of the Civil War, or even the 59,000 in 15+ years in Vietnam.

Basically, at our current rate of losses, we would have to stay in Iraq roughly until the year 2056 (for a nearly-sixty year long war!) to hit the number of casualties we had in Vietnam. We would have to stay there until the year 2366 (for a nearly 400-year-long war!) before, at our current rate of losses, we would hit the number of casualties suffered in World War II and we would have to stay in Iraq for over 500 years to even approach, at our current rate of losses, the number of losses we suffered in the Civil War (when our total population was much smaller)! In other words, this is, in terms of American lives, one of the LEAST COSTLY wars ever fought by our nation. Yet if you read the headlines, watch the news or ask your friends (who are reading the headlines and watching the news) you would think the War was a dibacle beyond comparison to all other wars, since every time we look up we hear about (or better yet, watch live footage of) another HUMVEE being destroyed by a roadside bomb killing a half-dozen servicemen (and the occassional woman). And then we see the biography specials of soldier after soldier - watching interviews with weeping widows and mothers and fatherless children. No wonder we and our politicians are loosing our nerve in the face of this war. And, in a more inter-connected society, we are all more likely to know and care for an individual killed. I personally know two or three who have been killed and at least one more who was injured, and several more still who are in the service - and I come from a small town!

Consider abuses: what happens when a few hot-headed, bored, and drunk US soldiers take pictures of a few POWs with their underwear on their heads (that naturally end up on prime time new the next evening)? Brave and righteously-indignant politicians and church-leaders start condeming "the war" and "the administration" (and, oh yeah, "the perpetrators") using over-the-top rhetoric, words like "torture," came quickly to many lips. But on the whole, this has been a closely scrutinized and therefore marvelously sedate war (relative to previous wars). Yet there is an uneasiness we feel about how the enemy is treated (that I suspect was not the case in WWII) in part because if they are mistreated, we will certainly watch/hear about it on TV. And we are supposed to be "the good guys"...right?

The bottom line is that War is, always has been, and always will be HELL. In war people die. Innocent people, women, children old people, little boys and little girls die. In fact, the country that wins is usually the one that causes the most of the other people to die. In the past our news media, both by its technical limitations and by its nationalistic agendas shielded us from close proximity to Hell. No longer. Now we can see it close up, now we can study intently its hideous features. And now an envelope-pushing, nationalism-deconstructing, scandal-driven, bad-news-selling mass media is more than happy to press our faces right into it, and that continually. And no one likes to be in hell. So we call for an end to the war - at any cost - perhaps even the cost of losing. This is what will happen in this and all future wars that are scrutinized by a free and ideologically diverse press like our own. Americans are fickle and therefore so are our poll-watching American politicians (ALL of them - we should not forget it was large majorities in both parties authorized this war to begin with, regardless of how the Democrats will try to pin that on the Republicans in the coming months - I mean 2 years - leading up to the presidential election); we do not have much resolve. The war has scarcely affected our standard of living at all, yet we feel weighed down by it - maybe such that we do not know what we want to do next. And this may be appropriate for normal people given the horrible nature of war.

The above is basically what was discussed in the conversation which left me with several questions: In a mass media society, where the masses also elect the leaders, is it no longer possible to fight and win a war (or at least, a war on foreign soil)? Is this even a bad thing? Might it simply mean that "wars shall cease" - or at least become more rare if they are found to be more difficult to win? One can hope - but I sorta doubt that, given what we learn from history about human nature. What can the government do to address this new difficulty? They cannot very well control all media in the information age. Maybe we will really learn that war is hell and not commit to prosecute one (in the future) unless we are willing to go to hell and to stay in hell until the war is won (since the media is not likely to spare us the hell, as it would cost them ratings and ultimately money to do so). But are we contemporary Americans really willing to do that? I doubt it. Maybe the government, if it wants to win its wars, should arrange massive public spectacles and entertainments to keep the people distracted and apathetic as the Romans did? Well, I doubt that would work either.

So as I sit and listen to the politicians (who have all suddenly become expert military strategists) debate whether they will vote "no confidence" (whatever that even means) on the new "surge" plan, I cannot help but think that they (we) are not willing to "get their hands dirty" - to do what it takes to win the war (whether that means a "surge" or whatever), yet at the same time they are not (yet) willing to lose it either, since most all are agreed that "throwing in the towel" would be colossally irresponsible - even wicked since our invasion has de-stabilized everything.

Now, I have not even begun to get a really good handle on the complexity of our problems (this post has not addressed cultural or religious issues either on our side or that of the terrorists, nor the difficulties of fighting an insurgency vs. conventional war - but only the relationship between mass media and public resolve because that is what the conversation was about), much less begin to propose an answer. But what do ya'll think? I would like to broaden this conversation. Is it possible for a society like ours to maintain the sort of resolve it takes to fight a war? If not - is that a good thing? Bad thing? Depends?

Maybe it IS about numbers

That's what Post-Methodist says. He makes a good point.

"...and Open Doors" ??

Not long ago I decided to catch the train over to Fort Worth to see First United Methodist Church downtown there, which I understood to be (architecturally) one of those great Cathedrals built by United Methodists to the Glory of God. Not surprisingly, since it was a Saturday, I found all the doors locked and had to simply enjoy the sort of cloister/garden and the outside of the church. The two groundskeepers that I did find refused to give me a peak inside the sanctuary but told me to come back the next day (Sunday).

Compare that to St. Alban's Episcopal Chapel on LSU's campus: the doors to the church are wide open, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year - even on Christmas Day and Easter!! The same is true of many Roman Catholic and especially Episcopal/Anglican churches. In fact, it was St. Alban's doors being open that led me to discover The Book of Common Prayer and the Anglican tradition to begin with.

For God's sake (really), can we (I speak not only to United Methodists, but pretty much everyone) trust in God enough to open our church doors - at least during business hours? Can we not at least tell the congregation that it really is ok for them to use the sanctuary beyond 1 hour on Sundays if they want a quiet place to pray? Who knows - some of them might even show up to pray. Better still, maybe some outsiders will come shuffling in like I did at St. Albans and become curious about what goes on in such a place. Maybe...if we open our doors.

Thoughts on Christian Unity

January 18-25 is traditionally (since 1908) the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. The 18th is the Feast of The Confession of St. Peter (see Matt. 16) and the 25th is the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul (see Acts 9) and so the week of prayer for Christian unity is bracketed by these two feasts which, I am told, is supposed to have symbolic value.

Christian Unity has been on my mind a great deal in the last week, especially as I read Pope John Paul II (the Great)' s extremely important and thoughtful encyclical: Ut Unum Sint (from John 17:11 in the Vulgate), and again re-read the Catholic-Lutheran Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification which the World Methodist Council endorsed last year.

Christian unity has always been intuitively important for me, most likely because of the dizzying array of churches I have personally been involved with, and has become even more important intellectually in recent years. First there is the issue of credibility - we claim to have "one Lord, one faith, one baptism" yet we are divided and often enough suspicious of one another. We claim to have been reconciled to God and to be his ambassadors entrusted with a ministry of reconcilliation, yet we are not reconciled to one another. We claim to all be citizens living in right relationship to our one king (against whom we formerly were in rebellion), yet we do not have good relations with one another. We claim to be sharing in the very life of the one God through union with the one Christ, yet we do not even share communion with one another as one body. Our dis-unity is a scandal to the credibility of the gospel that we preach, as has been many times pointed out.

My other primary reason has to do with interpretative authority. I have come to believe that the Bible in a very real sense belongs to the Spirit-led Church as a whole - through the ages and across cultures - not to any individual. The Church as a whole took individual books and letters and put them together as one canonical Bible and the Church as a whole is therefore the legitimate interpreter of Scripture - indeed deciding on the canon was itself an interpretative act by the whole Church. Since the fragmentation of the one holy and catholic Church, beginning in 1054 or even earlier, into the various churches, the Church as a whole has no longer been able to gather a truly ecumenical council to speak decisively on any issue, as it could before. Now just as the conensus of the Early Fathers is discernable before the fragmentation of the Church, so also there is a discernable consensus of faithful Christian teaching through the ages down to this very day - so that in a sense the Church still exercises this interpretative authority - but not as decisively as would be possible in a fully United Church.

Is reunion possible? "With God all things are possible" - yet recent events have left us feeling a bit ambivalent. Clearly the recent papal visit to the Patriarch of Constantinople and of the churches of the East, is a powerful indicator of what the Spirit is doing - something that would have been unthinkable in previous centuries. Yet at the same time there are discouraging things going on as well - even as we Methodists are conducting full-communion talks with the Anglicans, the Anglican Communion itself seems on the edge of schism because of the defiant and un-orthodoxy activities of the Western churches.

A recent "Methodist News" article with the hopeful title "Pan-Methodist Commission Continues the Journey of Becoming One" might better have been titled "Black Methodist Churches say "no" to full unity with UMC" despite our sharing the same doctrine, polity, history, and liturgy. Rightly or wrongly, distrust runs deep.

There are a number of stumbling blocks still to be overcome: what should unity look like in practice? What role with the pope and the other major bishops and patriarchs play? And then there are the irreconcilable differences that now exist over questions of polity, doctrine, and ministry - how far must we come toward uniformity on these issues to have unity, since it is unlikely we will ever be of one mind?

Yet, in the light of all that has happened in the last hundred years, and upon reflecting on Ut Unum Sint, I remain hopeful for the future. A friend of mine suggested that after the first millenium of an undivided church, and the second millenium of a fragmenting church, the third millenium of Christianity that we have now begun will be one of reconciliation and reunion. And I am hopeful that he is right.

A way forward on stem cells?

I have often observed that the debates around "harvesting" embryonic stem cells for medical research, like the debates surrounding abortion have often been "adventures in missing the point" as they have neglected to decisively address the most fundamental issue: "is this or is this not a human being?" That makes all the difference in how we should treat the issue, especially if we are among those who believe that human beings are somehow the very image of God.

For this reason I have been deeply discouraged by the vollies of mindless rhetoric being exchanged over these issues since they do not often even approach the level of rational discourse, which our society seems increasingly unwilling or unable to engage in at a popular level. Maybe it was never possible to do such things at a "popular level" in such a large nation anyways (as I recall the Ancient democratic Greeks felt that a democracy by its very nature had to be a small community of only a few thousand citizens so that people were personally connected to one another and could actually debate important matters).

On the stem cell issue, however, it would seem that we may have been (for better or for worse) relieved of the burden of making a decision after all. According to this fascinating article, a new form of NON-embryonic stem cells have been discovered, harvested from amniotic fluid (which is routinely thrown away), that would present an endless and uncontroversial (since they do not destroy human embryos) supply of stem cells that are said to have incredible potential for medical research and treatments.

I only hope that enough people (namely congressmen and researchers) will hear about this apparently revolutionary discovery that could even bring an effective end to the embryonic stem cell debate. The article thinks we may learn a valuable lesson about patience from all this (Bush was right to put a halt to new embryonic research and by doing so, he allowed technology to 'catch up' and make such research obselete just in time for the new Democrat congress to change the law), but I wonder if we have only deferred the inevitable debate to another day.

The Children of Men

I first saw a trailer for this move months ago, and have been intrigued by the idea ever since. What if we stopped having babies? What if there were no more children? What would become of a world that had not had a new birth in almost 19 years?

In The Children of Men, the world has totally fallen apart. Anarchy has broken out across the world and only Britain soliders on, using xenophobic Parliamentary legislation and soldiers on the streets to maintain a fragile social order, constantly threatened by terrorism and the same despair that has consumed the rest of the world.

Then there is a miracle. A man stands in a sort of stable filled with cows as a young woman removes her shirt to show him that she is pregnant. He is dumbstruck and speechless before the pregnant woman...until he finally mutters "Jesus Christ!" And maybe he has spoken prophetically.

But I don't know what to make of this movie. It is at the same time deeply cynical about human nature while also being a story of hope. A powerful and moving scene (pictured above) demonstrates this well: a brutal and chaotic street battle between the British Army and a mix of armed terrorists and innocent bystanders comes to a complete standstill simply at the sound of a newborn baby's crying - the hope of all the world. Yet the moment of reprieve and wonder (end even prayer) comes to an abrupt termination and seems to be instantly forgotten as a rocket explodes and the horrid battle (massacre?) erupts back into its full intensity.

There is hope in the newborn Child (this movie was appropriately released in select cities on Christmas Day), but will we embrace it fully enough to be utterly remade by it? It is unclear if more than a handful of characters in this (very graphic) movie do so.

Click here for Christianity Today's review of this film.

Thomas C. Oden quote

"There is a quality of lightness, easiness, and in some sense blatant unseriousness that pervades Classical Christianity's dialogue with modernity. The Christian intellect has no reason to be intimidated in the presense of later-stage modernity. Christianity has seen too many 'modern eras' to be cowed by this one."

- from Tom Oden's powerful and prophetic book, Agenda for Theology.

This quote calls to my mind G. K. Chesterton, who had just such a levity about his writing. His delightful book, Orthodoxy, is now available online, along with many other classic works at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library.

Are American Protestants really feeling "Mainlne" again?

Since the release of Diana Butler Bass's recent book, Christianity for the Rest of Us, there has been a lot of talk about the historic "Mainline" Protestant Churches making a comeback and "feeling Mainline again," as for example in this USA TODAY article. Bass argues that churches that offer a more moderate or even liberal "Christianity" will be a welcome alternative to conservative and fundamentalist churches in the future. There is some truth there, but I suspect she and I would disagree profoundly on what it should/could look like.

Bass recieved a grant to find 50 Mainline Churches that were vital and well-rounded, and on the basis of what she saw at these churches has argued that the doom-and-gloom forecasts for the Mainline denominations ought to be challenged.

I think this sort of "always look on the sunny side" analysis of mainline Churches (based on a sort of anecdotal "this particular church over here is doing just fine" analysis) is actually part of our problem. I realize that many of our churches are doing fine (so far, every Methodist Church I have been active with has been a growing congregation, and I rejoice in the good things that the Spirit of God is working in them), but most are not. In my United Methodist Polity class at SMU/Perkins, one of the books we read argued that the language of "decline" was actually a power play and that it was not helpful for diagnosing our problems. I suppose this is precisely the sort of reasoning we ought to expect from the folks who have been a part of the establishment for the last few decades (who write many of the books we read in seminary "Polity" classes). After all, if there really WAS a crisis, their jobs, their legacies, and (worst of all) their way of "doing church" would be in danger.

But the simple fact of the matter is that while the US population around us has swelled, we in The United Methodist Church have lost over 2 million US members in the last 40-ish years. Other Mainline denominations have (proportionately) fared even worse. Covering our eyes and ears and pretending there is no problem, as some of our leaders would have us do, is called "denial." It is the sign of a delusional leadership that is unwilling to actually change and address problems. To simply deny that there is a problem is like a deathly ill man pretending he has no sickness and therefore refusing treatment - it is insane and can only tend in one direction.

There are a number of reasons for the decline; some are demographic and are not really the fault of our churches. Some have to do with leadership, some with theology. But our number one problem is: fear (which is related to leadership and theology, I suspect). Gone is the confidence of the martyrs, the Church Fathers, the Reformers, or the Revival leaders. We are afraid. We are afraid of losing what we have. We are afraid of dying, so we don't take risks. We don't plant new churches, or sacrificially support those that are planted. We organize our ministries to meet the needs of members, but too often neglect the spiritual needs of those outside our walls. As long as we are afraid of dying, we won't live. Fear is basically the opposite of faith, hope, and love. If we really trusted God (and perhaps if more of us had theology and spiritual experiences that deeply inspired us to do so) then we could walk without fear, knowing that our churches are in his hands.

There are a number of "mainline" Protestant Churches in America. The most prominent are the "seven sisters": Episcopal Church, USA, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (as opposed to the more conservative Lutheran Church: Missouri Synod), Presbyterian Church in the USA (as opposed to the more conservative Presbyterian Church in America), United Church of Christ, The United Methodist Church (by far, the largest), The Disciples of Christ ("Christian Church"), and the American Baptist Churches in the USA, (as opposed to the more conservative Southern Baptist Convention). All of these churches are in decline by any measurable standard (The United Methodist Church - an international body - is actually growing overall, but declining in the USA). And if the denial continues, they will continue to be so.

I have my own (not really well-informed) ad hoc guesses and predictions about what will happen for each one of them. Any guesses anyone?