Faith

From an op-ed piece in the NY Times by Garry Wills, professor emeritus of history at Northwestern University and the author, most recently, of "What Jesus Meant.". Some of his assertions are unconventional, but I suspect that some of them are closer to the truth than not:

THERE is no such thing as a "Christian politics." If it is a politics, it cannot be Christian. Jesus told Pilate: "My reign is not of this present order. If my reign were of this present order, my supporters would have fought against my being turned over to the Jews. But my reign is not here" (John 18:36). Jesus brought no political message or program. This is a truth that needs emphasis at a time when some Democrats, fearing that the Republicans have advanced over them by the use of religion, want to respond with a claim that Jesus is really on their side. He is not. He avoided those who would trap him into taking sides for or against the Roman occupation of Judea. He paid his taxes to the occupying power but said only, "Let Caesar have what belongs to him, and God have what belongs to him" (Matthew 22:21). He was the original proponent of a separation of church and state. Those who want the state to engage in public worship, or even to have prayer in schools, are defying his injunction: "When you pray, be not like the pretenders, who prefer to pray in the synagogues and in the public square, in the sight of others. In truth I tell you, that is all the profit they will have. But you, when you pray, go into your inner chamber and, locking the door, pray there in hiding to your Father, and your Father who sees you in hiding will reward you" (Matthew 6:5-6). He shocked people by his repeated violation of the external holiness code of his time, emphasizing that his religion was an internal matter of the heart. But doesn't Jesus say to care for the poor? Repeatedly and insistently, but what he says goes far beyond politics and is of a different order. He declares that only one test will determine who will come into his reign: whether one has treated the poor, the hungry, the homeless and the imprisoned as one would Jesus himself. "Whenever you did these things to the lowliest of my brothers, you were doing it to me" (Matthew 25:40). No government can propose that as its program. Theocracy itself never went so far, nor could it. The state cannot indulge in self-sacrifice. If it is to treat the poor well, it must do so on grounds of justice, appealing to arguments that will convince people who are not followers of Jesus or of any other religion. The norms of justice will fall short of the demands of love that Jesus imposes. A Christian may adopt just political measures from his or her own motive of love, but that is not the argument that will define justice for state purposes. To claim that the state's burden of justice, which falls short of the supreme test Jesus imposes, is actually what he wills - that would be to substitute some lesser and false religion for what Jesus brought from the Father. Of course, Christians who do not meet the lower standard of state justice to the poor will, a fortiori, fail to pass the higher test. Some may think that removing Jesus from politics would mean removing morality from politics. They think we would all be better off if we took up the slogan "What would Jesus do?" That is not a question his disciples ask in the Gospels. They never knew what Jesus was going to do next. He could round on Peter and call him "Satan." He could refuse to receive his mother when she asked to see him. He might tell his followers that they are unworthy of him if they do not hate their mother and their father. He might kill pigs by the hundreds. He might whip people out of church precincts. The Gospels are scary, dark and demanding. It is not surprising that people want to tame them, dilute them, make them into generic encouragements to be loving and peaceful and fair. If that is all they are, then we may as well make Socrates our redeemer. It is true that the tamed Gospels can be put to humanitarian purposes, and religious institutions have long done this, in defiance of what Jesus said in the Gospels.

The Gospel of Judas has been in the news lately. From an article on MSNBC.com:

An ancient manuscript rediscovered after 1,700 years takes a "contrarian" view of the relationship between Jesus and Judas, the disciple who handed him over for crucifixion. The papyrus manuscript was written around 300 A.D. in Coptic script, and is a copy of an earlier Greek text, said Terry Garcia of the National Geographic Society, which made the manuscript public. Discovered in 1970, the papyrus was kept in a safety deposit box for several years and began to deteriorate before conservators restored it. More than 1,000 pieces had to be reassembled. The manuscript was authenticated through radiocarbon dating as well as ink analysis, multispectral imaging and an analysis of the content for linguistic style and handwriting style, National Geographic reported. Garcia said the National Geographic Society has spent "north of a million [dollars] and south of $2 million" on the restoration so far, and "the bills are still coming in." Unlike the four gospels in the Bible, this text indicates that Judas betrayed Jesus at Jesus' request. The manuscript thus represents "one of the most unusual and contrarian" views of New Testament events, said Bart Ehrman, a scriptural scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The newly translated document's text begins: "The secret account of the revelation that Jesus spoke in conversation with Judas Iscariot." In a key passage Jesus tells Judas, "You will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me." This indicates that Judas would help liberate the spiritual self by helping Jesus get rid of his physical flesh, scholars said. "Step away from the others and I shall tell you the mysteries of the kingdom," Jesus says to Judas, singling him out for special status. "Look, you have been told everything. Lift up your eyes and look at the cloud and the light within it and the stars surrounding it. The star that leads the way is your star." The text ends with Judas turning Jesus over to the high priests and does not include any mention of the crucifixion or resurrection.

Edward Fudge made a few comments here and here about this subject.

From an article by Alan Cooperman in The Washington Post from several weeks back:

Last December, some evangelical Christian groups declared that the religious celebration of Christmas -- and even the phrase "Merry Christmas" -- was under attack by the forces of secularism. This week, radio commentator Rick Scarborough convened a two-day conference in Washington on the "War on Christians and the Values Voters in 2006." The opening session was devoted to "reports from the frontlines" on "persecution" of Christians in the United States and Canada, including an artist whose paintings were barred from a municipal art show in Deltona, Fla., because they contained religious themes. To many of the 400 evangelicals packed into a small ballroom at the Omni Shoreham Hotel, it was a hard but necessary look at moral relativism, hedonism and Christophobia, or fear of Christ, to pick just a few terms offered by various speakers referring to the enemy. To some outsiders, it illuminated the paranoia of the Christian right. "Certainly religious persecution existed in our history, but to claim that these examples amount to religious persecution disrespects the experiences of people who have been jailed and died because of their faith," said K. Hollyn Hollman, general counsel of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty. "This is a skirmish over religious pluralism, and the inclination to see it as a war against Christianity strikes me as a spoiled-brat response by Christians who have always enjoyed the privileges of a majority position," said the Rev. Robert M. Franklin, a minister in the Church of God in Christ and professor of social ethics at Emory University. White evangelicals make up about one-quarter of the U.S. population, and 85 percent of Americans identify themselves as Christians. But three-quarters of evangelicals believe they are a minority under siege and nearly half believe they are looked down upon by most of their fellow citizens, according to a 2004 poll.

More linkage and comments from kendallball.net.

It strikes me as ironic that, at a time when science and faith are apparently in conflict in our culture, science has or is on the verge of duplicating many of Jesus' miracles. About the conflict between faith and science: for example, the battle that's been going on in the courts lately between those who view "Intelligent Design" as an alternative scientific theory to be taught alongside evolution and those who view it as nothing more than pseudoscience or thinly-veiled creationism that might be taught in church but not in school. I really don't think there is actually an inherent conflict there, as I discussed here. However, if faith and modern science aren't inherently in conflict, they're orthogonal to each other. Science relies on observation. "faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see" (Heb. 11:1). I've been thinking about a different kind of conflict. Or maybe it is a way that they are complementary. When questioned about his identity by the followers of John the Baptist, Jesus pointed to his acts of healing as proof of his identity: "Go back and report to John what you hear and see: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor." (Matt. 11, Luke 7) Recently, I listened to a very interesting segment of NPR's Science Friday. The summary:

Doctors announced this week that they have created a bladder using living cells, the closest they've come yet to making a fully functioning organ. The bladder was tailor-made using the cells of a woman suffering from spina bifida. The researchers say that the replacement organ seems to be well tolerated by the human body, and it did work as a functioning bladder. In this hour, we'll take a look at tissue engineering. How close are scientists to making organs to order, or getting limbs to regrow? Plus, a look at bionics. We'll talk with the inventor of a computer controlled hand for amputees, and hear about the latest in bionic eyes.

William Craelius, a biomedical engineer from Rutgers University, was on the show. From a press release from a few years back:

Bionic limb replacements that look and work exactly like the real thing will likely remain a Hollywood fantasy, but fast advances in human-to-machine communication and miniaturization could bring the technology close within a decade. That is the outlook of Rutgers biomedical engineer and inventor William Craelius, whose Dextra artificial hand is the first to let a person use existing nerve pathways to control individual computer-driven mechanical fingers. Craelius published an overview of bionics entitled "The Bionic Man - Restoring Mobility," in the international journal "Science," ...

Advances in prosthetics have allowed people who have lost one or even both of their legs to walk around freely on their own. In addition to bionic limbs, scientists are also developing the bionic eye...attempting to treat blindness via chips to be implanted in the retina. According to wikipedia, "leprosy is easily curable by multidrug antibiotic therapy." Cochlear implants have restored a form of hearing to people who are profoundly deaf or severely hard of hearing. From wikipedia:

A cochlear implant is a surgically implanted hearing aid that can help provide a sense of sound to a person who is profoundly deaf or severely hard of hearing. The cochlear implant is often referred to as a bionic ear. Unlike other kinds of hearing aids, the cochlear implant doesn't amplify sound, but works by directly stimulating any functioning auditory nerves inside the cochlea with electrical impulses. External components of the cochlear implant include a microphone, speech processor and transmitter. An implant does not restore or create normal hearing. Instead, under the appropriate conditions, it can give a deaf person a useful auditory understanding of the environment and help them to understand speech when coupled with post-implantation therapy. According to researchers at the University of Michigan, approximately 100,000 people worldwide have received cochlear implants; roughly half are children and half adults. The vast majority are in developed countries due to the prohibitive cost of the device, surgery and post-implantation therapy...

Of course, scientists can't bring people back from the dead on demand, but it's not exactly uncommon for cardiac resuscitation techniques to revive people who are clinically dead. It's interesting how, in a sense, science has been able or is on the verge of being able imitate most of the miracles that Jesus used to confirm his message. It makes me wonder what sort of miracles he would have used if he had been here today. The guests on the Science Friday show emphasized that the main obstacle preventing further advancement is funding as the governemnt funding agencies are having to divert funds elsewhere. I'd much prefer my tax dollars go to research like this than to some of the other ways they've been used lately.

I watched the first two episodes of God or the Girl series on A&E. I was afraid it would be silly or cheesy or a joke or a soap opera or something, but it's not. It's actually a serious show. It almost seems more like old-school documentary instead of new-school reality TV. Four interesting, dedicated, and like-able young guys are trying to make the agonizing decision of whether or not it's God's will for them to choose seminary and celibacy. Set your vcrs or Tivos for 1 to 5 PM and 10 to 11 PM this Sunday (April 23) to see the five episodes.