I have made a mistake in coming to America. I must live through this difficult period of our national history with the Christian people of Germany. I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people.
–Dietrich Bonhoeffer in a final letter to Rienhold Niebuhr before departing America for Germany in 1939
Gracious God, the Beyond in the midst of our life, who gavest grace to thy servant Dietrich Bonhoeffer to know and teach the truth as it is in Jesus Christ, and to bear the cost of following him: Grant that we, strengthened by his teaching and example, may receive thy word and embrace its call with an undivided heart; through Jesus Christ our Savior, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
–One of the prayers appointed for his feast day today
This is what we mean by cheap grace, the grace which amounts to the justification of sin without the justification of the repentant sinner who departs from sin and from whom sin departs. Cheap grace is not the kind of forgiveness of sin which frees us from the toils of sin. Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves.
Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without Church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without contrition. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the Cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.
Costly grace is the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of it a man will gladly go and sell all that he has. It is the pearl of great price to buy which the merchant will sell all his goods. It is the kingly rule of Christ, for whose sake a man will pluck out the eye which causes him to stumble, it is the call of Jesus Christ at which the disciple leaves his nets and follows Him.
Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock.
Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. It is costly because it condemns sin and grace because it justifies the sinner. Above all, it is costly because it cost God the life of His son: ‘ye were bought at a price,’ and what has cost God much cannot be cheap for us. Above all, it is grace because God did not reckon His Son too dear a price to pay for our life, but delivered Him up for us. Costly grace is the Incarnation of God.
–Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship
To fight global warming, a bill in Sacramento would enable Los Angeles County transit officials to increase taxes on motorists. It’s a bad idea that may foreshadow even worse to come.
Billed as a “climate change mitigation and adaptation fee,” the measure would cost motorists either an additional 3 percent motor fuel tax, or up to a $90 annual flat fee, based on vehicle emissions. The new charges would be on top of taxes already paid at the pump. Either option requires a majority approval by a vote of the people.
“At this point the people of the Los Angeles region have just had it when it comes to traffic and air quality,” claimed Assemblyman Mike Feuer, a Los Angeles Democrat and author of Assembly Bill 2558.
I am beside myself with grief over this unnecessary action taken against my predecessor especially at a time when he is mourning the death of his son this past Friday. I am particularly saddened that with the exception of the Bishop who initiated this action those involved in determining this course have never spoken with Bishop MacBurney directly.
In the midst of this difficult time for Bishop MacBurney and his family I am really much more concerned about the implications of St Matthew 18:15-17 as it relates to how reconciliation is pursued than I am with Title IV, Canon 1, Section 6 as it relates to disciplining my dear brother.
In the meantime we are ministering to the needs of the MacBurney family.
X Keith L Ackerman, SSC
Bishop of Quincy
President, Forward in Faith North America
The careers of two of Africa’s most prominent politicians — Robert Mugabe and Nelson Mandela — have striking similarities. Both were born in an era when white power prevailed throughout Africa, Mandela in 1918, Mugabe in 1924. Both were products of the Christian mission school system. Both attended the same university, Fort Hare in South Africa. Both emerged as members of the small African professional elite, Mandela a lawyer, Mugabe a teacher. Both were drawn into the struggle against white minority rule, Mandela in South Africa, Mugabe in neighboring Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. Both advocated violence to bring down white-run regimes. Both endured long terms of imprisonment, Mandela, 27 years, Mugabe, 11. Both suffered the anguish of losing a son while in prison, and both were refused permission to attend the funeral.
But whereas Mandela used his prison years to open a dialogue with South Africa’s white rulers in order to defeat apartheid, Mugabe emerged from prison bent on revolution, determined to overthrow white society by force. Military victory, he said, would be the “ultimate joy.”
The Civil War changed virtually every aspect of American society, from religion to gender roles. Drew Gilpin Faust, president of and Lincoln Professor of History at Harvard University, has devoted her new book to exploring how the war changed American death. In the Civil War, over 2 percent of the nation’s population died””which, as Faust points out, was roughly equivalent to the entire state of Maine being killed, or twice the population of Vermont. The Victorian choreography of “the good death” was inadequate for dealing with the mind-boggling numbers, the stench, the mangled corpses of men too young to die. Americans had to overhaul their notions of what death could and should look like, and even what kind of God could be said to be present””or absent””during such death.
Many of the concrete changes in American dying that Faust documents involve the government’s role in military death; indeed, it was the Civil War that created governmental responsibilities that we now take for granted, such as next-of-kin notification, which neither the Union nor the Confederacy viewed as their job in 1861. At the outset of the war, the Union had no organized method for burying, or even identifying, dead soldiers. That began to change with the 1862 passage of a law giving the president power to purchase land for a national cemetery for soldiers; cemeteries were established at Chattanooga, Stones River, Knoxville, Antietam, and, of course, Gettysburg.
In the years during and after the war, the government developed a more aggressive system for counting the war dead (the figures of Union soldiers killed were constantly revised until the 1880s, when the War Department settled on 360,222) and paying pensions and survivor’s benefits. The erstwhile Confederacy didn’t have a government anymore, and certainly didn’t expect the Union to give money to Confederate war widows, so states stepped in.
Indeed, it is precisely because I find so much to agree with in [Charles] Hodge’s critique of liberal theology that I am also pleased that he added the personal footnote about Schleiermacher. I believe he was sending us a signal””one that we very much need to hear today as evangelicals.
Many evangelical commentators these days insist that salvation is closely tied to doctrinal clarity. Here, for example, is how one prominent evangelical leader criticized those of us who have endorsed the various “Evangelicals and Catholics Together” documents: “What those signers ”¦ are saying is that while they believe the doctrine of justification as articulated by the Reformers is true, they are not willing to say people must believe it to be saved. In other words, they believe people are saved who do not believe the biblical doctrine of justification.”
I can’t speak for others who look for common ground with Roman Catholics, but he certainly has me right: I am passionate in my agreement with Martin Luther on justification by faith alone. But do I believe that a person can be confused about this doctrine and still be saved? Absolutely. I wish that many of my Catholic friends would subscribe unambiguously to the views about salvation by grace alone that I hold preciously. But is their failure to do so a reason for me to doubt their salvation? Here I side clearly with Charles Hodge: “To whomever Christ is God ”¦ Christ is a Saviour.”
The sure mark of an unliterary man is that he considers ”˜I’ve read it already’ to be a conclusive argument against reading a work. We have all known women who remembered a novel so dimly that they had to stand for half an hour in the library skimming through it before they were certain they had once read it. But the moment they became certain, they rejected it immediately. It was for them dead, like a burnt-out match, an old railway ticket, or yesterday’s newspaper; they had already used it. Those who read great
works, on the other hand, will read the same work ten, twenty or thirty times during the course of their life.”
–C.S.Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism
Not all of the essays in Wrestling with Angels command comparable attention, however. For example, there is a piece from 1984 on Don Cupitt, a thinker little known outside the UK, whose attempt to construct a kind of post-theistic theology is simply too slight and slapdash to bear the weight of much serious scrutiny. Read now, when the discussions that prompted them have long faded from memory, many of Williams’s objections to Cupitt’s project look more or less obvious, and the essay in which they appear seems of little more than archival interest. For quite different reasons, Williams’s reflections on Gillian Rose, in many ways a brilliant and original philosopher, are more likely to provoke consternation from his readers than to aid them in understanding Rose’s thought; for those unfamiliar with her work, Williams’s discussion will probably seem somewhat elliptical and vague; and, for those few who have read her, it will not necessarily be clear how Williams has further illuminated the questions he addresses.
Taken as a whole, though, this is a marvellous collection, full of riches, in equal measures provocative and profound. It is testimony to a lively and subtle mind, one unusually adept at penetrating far beyond the surfaces of texts, and at finding curiosities and rewards where most of us would not have thought to look. It is, as I have said, only a fragmentary portrait of Rowan Williams the theologian, but it is enough to mark him out as a thinker of great stature and imagination. It is, moreover, resplendent proof that there is far more to this man than a beard ”“ however luxuriant it may be.
The world is on course to halve extreme poverty by 2015, but Africa will fall far short of the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund said on Tuesday.
A new report by the global institutions also warned that urgent action was needed to tackle climate change, which threatens to exact a hefty toll on particularly poor countries and reverse progress in fighting poverty.
The 2008 Global Monitoring Report, released ahead of the IMF and World Bank meetings in Washington this weekend, said strong economic growth in much of the developing world had contributed to the decline in global poverty.
It said the number of extreme poor — those living under $1 a day — declined by 278 million between 1990 and 2004, and by 150 million in the last five years of that period.
Globally about 1 billion people still live in extreme poverty, the report added.
Global warming will force faith organizations to significantly increase spending on humanitarian efforts–including refugee resettlement, feeding the hungry and disaster relief–according to a new study by the National Council of Churches.
More financial resources and volunteer services will be needed due to global climate change, which is expected to increase the lack of food, shelter and water available, especially among the poor, the study said.
“Individuals or communities living in poverty in developing countries tend to rely on their surroundings more for their day-to-day needs,” said Tyler Edgar, associate director of the NCC’s Climate and Energy Campaign. “These people are more likely to go down to a local river or stream to bring water for their family. With climate change, those systems are extremely vulnerable.”
The free ride for American consumers is ending. For two generations, Americans have imported goods produced ever more cheaply from a succession of low-wage countries ”” first Japan and Korea, then China, and now increasingly places like Vietnam and India.
But mounting inflation in the developing world, especially Asia, is threatening that arrangement, and not just in China, where rising energy and labor costs have already made exports to the United States more expensive, but in the lower-cost alternatives to China, too.
“Inflation is the major threat to Asian countries,” said Jong-Wha Lee, the head of the Asian Development Bank’s office of regional economic integration.
It is also a threat to Western consumers because Asian exporters, even in very poor countries, are passing their rising costs on to customers.
Developing countries have had bouts of inflation before. Indeed, some are famous for them, like Brazil, which experienced triple-digit inflation in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But two things make this time different, and together promise to send prices higher at Wal-Mart and supermarkets alike in the United States, just as the possibility of recession looms.
Forty years after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, the storied organizations that propelled the modern-day civil rights movement alongside him are either struggling to stay relevant or struggling to stay alive.
In Atlanta, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) — which was founded in 1957 after Alabama’s Montgomery bus boycott and was led by King through the most difficult days of the movement — clings to life. Three years ago, utilities shut off the lights and the phones when the group did not pay its bills.
In New York, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), which helped shape the movement’s philosophy after adopting Mohandas K. Gandhi’s doctrine of nonviolent protest, is scarcely known outside Manhattan. CORE conceded that it now has about 10 percent of the 150,000 members it listed in the 1960s.
In Baltimore, the near-century-old NAACP, which tore down racial barriers with deft lawyering in the courts, recently cut a third of its administrative staff because of budget shortfalls. For decades, the NAACP asserted that it was the largest civil rights group, with about half a million dues-paying members, but one of its former presidents recently acknowledged that it has fewer than 300,000.
Some groups have disappeared, such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which organized the Freedom Rides that drew sympathy to their cause and which was later led by firebrands such as Stokley Carmichael and H. Rap Brown. Others, such as the National Urban League, remain viable but have diminished visibility.
“They don’t really exist now,” said the Rev. C.T. Vivian, a former interim director of the SCLC, who spoke with pain in his voice. He added: “They’re just names. There has been so little activity from so many of them. SCLC rose from the dead, but we’re not so certain life has been blown into it yet. And the NAACP is vital, but they’re not doing what I’d expect.”
There is something terribly sad about the fighting between the Anglican Church and parishes that wish to break away over the issue of same-sex unions. The fact that people of a shared faith, facing a world with so many physical and spiritual challenges, are wasting time, energy and money in the courts sparks both despair and anger.
Our editorials, as a rule, don’t enter into debates of faith. Those are matters for those directly involved to resolve. And beliefs are not subject to the kinds of arguments editorials usually make.
But this division has become more than an internal debate over religious doctrine. The battle for control of St. Mary of the Incarnation Church in Metchosin brings all religion into disrepute.
Meanwhile, some members of the Anglican-Catholic team in Rome seem to live in a world of their own. Monsignor Donald Bolen, a Canadian priest at the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, recently printed once again the list of ecumenical documents signed by the clerical academics from both sides over some 30 years, implying that they represent a real advance in communications between the two bodies. (“Dialogue beyond the media sensationalism”, L’Osservatore Romano–English edition–February 13, 2008). But as Anglicanim in the West has been disintegrating since 1930, causing a splitting off from official national Anglican churches, this view seems highly dubious. Today, the “Traditional Anglican Church” community is a large umbrella for groups of Anglicans who broke relations with their national bodies as long as three decades ago.
Recently, their representatives in Britain asked for formal talks with Rome. The Church should work with them, not with the British/North American/Australian dissenting liberals whose intellectual and spiritual confusion is severing the last links with Orthodox Christianity.
Similarly, the Anglicans have split already worldwide. Contact should be taken up with groups in Africa and Asia who are defending traditional Christian doctrines against the rejection of biblical and moral teaching by the post-modernist secularizers among Western Anglicans. Canadian Catholic bishops, too, should discourage contact with dissembling Anglicans.
As Prime Minister, Tony Blair spoke little about his faith, believing that religion in Britain is a private matter that does not sit comfortably with public life. But he made no secret of his Christianity and acknowledged, in office and afterwards, the enormous help and sustenance he received from his religious beliefs. His decision to set up a Faith Foundation to encourage interfaith dialogue and rescue religion from extremism is therefore particularly welcome: not only does it draw on his deep personal convictions and long political experience, but also it comes at a time when faith plays an ever more central part in politics and policy. Rarely have faith issues intruded as forcefully into Britain’s largely secular society, or religious extremism been as critical to fanning and prolonging conflicts around the world.
In outlining his hopes for this new forum to The Times, Mr Blair has focused on two key challenges: the reconciliation of faith with modernity; and the interfaith dialogue between the world’s main religions. Already, this dialogue is gathering pace: not only are academic and church bodies playing an ever more visible role in current debates on multiculturalism, extremism, identity and Britishness, but also in the wider world there have been potentially momentous initiatives to end historic schisms and enmities – the Vatican’s overtures to Eastern Orthodoxy, the Pope’s readiness to reassess Martin Luther and the call by 138 Muslim leaders for an institutional dialogue with Christianity. What could Mr Blair’s initiative add to the work of the Three Faiths Forum, St Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace and the Cambridge Interfaith programme, to name but three?
The answer is much needed political weight and experience. Religious leaders speak from the heart; they are not often versed in the pitfalls of politics or public relations.
Alan Greenspan’s reputation is under siege, and he’s incredulous.
Hailed three years ago as “the greatest central banker who ever lived,” the retired chairman of the Federal Reserve now is being criticized for his management of the U.S. economy before he retired in 2006. The Fed’s low rates and laissez-faire regulatory oversight during his final years are widely blamed for sowing the seeds of today’s financial crisis — one that began in the U.S. housing market and is now battering banks, stock markets, borrowers and consumers around the world.
For much of his 18 years atop the world’s most-influential economic institution, Mr. Greenspan was lionized for the economy’s performance. Now, he notes, he’s being second-guessed for it.
I have just hung up; why did he telephone? I don’t know”¦Oh! I get it”¦
I talked a lot and listened very little.
Forgive me, Lord, it was a monologue and not a dialogue. I explained my idea and did not get his; Since I didn’t listen, I learned nothing, Since I didn’t listen, I didn’t help, Since I didn’t listen, we didn’t commune.
Forgive me, Lord, for we were connected, and now we are cut off.
–Michel Quoist, Prayers (English translation of the 1963 French original, Avon Books, 1975), p.19
The moment the war ended, I believed ”” we all did ”” that anyone who survived death must bear witness. Some of us even believed that they survived in order to become witnesses. But then I knew deep down that it would be impossible to communicate the entire story. Nobody can. I personally decided to wait, to see during 10 years if I would be capable to find the proper words, the proper pace, the proper melody or maybe even the proper silence to describe the ineffable.
For in my tradition, as a Jew, I believe that whatever we receive we must share. When we endure an experience, the experience cannot stay with me alone. It must be opened, it must become an offering, it must be deepened and given and shared. And of course I am afraid that memories suppressed could come back with a fury, which is dangerous to all human beings, not only to those who directly were participants but to people everywhere, to the world, for everyone. So, therefore, those memories that are discarded, shamed, somehow they may come back in different ways ”” disguised, perhaps seeking another outlet.
Granted, our task is to inform. But information must be transformed into knowledge, knowledge into sensitivity and sensitivity into commitment.
Dear Brothers, each one of you feels the great responsibility to do everything possible to support marriage and family life, which is the primary source of cohesion in communities and hence of vital importance in the eyes of the government authorities. In this perspective, the great network of Catholic schools throughout your region can make a great contribution. Values rooted in the way of truth presented by Christ illuminate the spirit and heart of young people and encourage them to continue along the path of faithfulness, responsibility and real freedom. Good young Christians make good citizens. I am sure that everything will be done to encourage the Catholicity of your schools, which, for generations, have offered a remarkable service to your people. In this way, I do not doubt that the young adults of your dioceses will know to discern their return, in an urgent way, to contribute to the economic and social development of region, because it will be an essential dimension of their Christian witness.
As a practicing Catholic whose eighth-grade son, Michael, has always attended parochial schools, Susan Bisig says it would be best for him to attend St. Xavier High School.
The 144-year-old Catholic secondary school also happens to be Michael’s first choice.
But Bisig’s ex-husband, David Ryan, an atheist who has joint custody of their 14-year-old son, wants Michael to attend a nonreligious high school.
And he says the Kentucky Constitution is on his side because it says no one shall be “compelled to send his child to any school to which he may be conscientiously opposed.”
The battle between Ryan and Bisig, both commercial pilots, has landed in Oldham County Family Court….
One notes that the requirement that a full majority of all the Bishops entitled to vote in the House of Bishops—both active and retired (or “resigned”, as they now say)—has been with us since the very first abandonment canon was adopted in 1853. I shall return to this legislative history in a later comment about the procedural violations that have occurred in the cases of Bishops Schofield and Duncan. But my next post (when it is ready) will show how the (ab)use of the abandonment canons has lately been greatly expanded, to the detriment of the Church and its polity.
The following editorial originally appeared on page 10 of the April 13, 2008 issue of The Living Church, an independent weekly magazine supporting catholic Anglicanism. It is reprinted by permission. If you wish to cite it, could you please include this heading and this blog as a source–KSH.
Inconsistent Treatment
The unusual occurrence of the House of Bishops voting to depose two of its members [TLC, April 6] has pointed out some inconsistencies in the application of canon law. Following the decision by the bishops to depose bishops John-David Schofield and William Cox, questions arose as to whether canon law was followed correctly. At issue is whether there were enough bishops present to be able to take action against these two bishops. The matter is complicated. Title IV, Canon 9, Section 2 of the Constitution and Canons of The Episcopal Church states that a vote to depose requires “a majority of the whole number of bishops entitled to vote.”
Because only 131 bishops registered for the gathering held last month at Camp Allen in the Diocese of Texas and at least 15 of them left before the vote to depose took place, and because there were 294 bishops entitled to voted on March 12 when the decision was made, it would appear that the depositions are invalid, for those in attendance were only about a third of the number of those entitled to vote.
Since the voting took place, several bishops have said that those present on March 12 were told that canonical procedures were being followed, and that there were no challenges to the procedure that was used. Later, David Booth Beers, the Presiding Bishop’s chancellor, said the vote conformed to the canons. He said the canon meant a majority of those bishops present rather than all of the bishops eligible to vote.
We are concerned about an apparent inconsistency by some church leaders in dealing with canons. When the Diocese of South Carolina sought consents for its bishop-elect to be consecrated, the canons were applied with great detail when it was decided that procedures had not been followed correctly. The same diligence to canon law should have been given to decisions as important as these depositions.
The casual treatment of canon law in the depositions does not bode well for the future. With the possibility of similar action to be taken against more bishops and other clergy, it is necessary that all involved have a clear understanding of how the Title IV canons are to be applied. If the canons are unclear in their language, then someone needs to take the lead in getting them clarified, for there is much at stake.
Never mind the flap over his “Muslim-sounding” middle name, or the controversy generated by his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. Over the past several weeks, a far more interesting question about Barack Obama’s “true” religion has emerged in the news media’s fascination with the “Obamessiah.”
Even though, as Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift recently observed, his media halo has “tarnished” a bit, pundits and political operatives remain at a loss to explain what Hillary Clinton herself referred to, in a Feb. 26 interview on Pat Robertson’s The 700 Club, as the Obama “phenomenon.” They are particularly befuddled by the intense involvement of so many young people, many of them university students and first-time voters. They dub them Obamaniacs and Obamabots: “glassy-eyed, brainwashed cult worshippers,” who chant “mantra-like” slogans and “swoon with euphoria.”
New York Times columnist David Brooks has likened them to Hare-Krishna people and to Moonies ”” “Soon they’ll be selling flowers at airports and arranging mass weddings.” Joe Klein of Time has dubbed their “mass messianism” to be “just a wee bit creepy.” And William Lowther, Washington correspondent for the Telegraph (United Kingdom), reported something “unnervingly akin to the hysteria of a cult, or the fervour of a religious revival” at Obama events.
Picking up on the hysteria theme, syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker has dismissed their “New Age glossolalia” as spiritual hunger gone terribly wrong, seduced by Obama’s rhetoric, which “drips with hints of resurrection, redemption, second comings.” MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, going Parker one better, was quoted in Australia’s The Age as saying, “I’ve never seen anything like this. This is bigger than Kennedy. Obama comes along and he seems to have the answers. This is New Testament.”
Read it all.
[i][note: the link is to the blog page at USAToday. Some readers are reporting that the site is causing their firewall programs to report spyware, etc. See comments for details. This elf had no problem with the link and our security software reported no adware or spyware problems. But obviously different programs and browsers react differently, and some readers may have higher security settings engaged.][/i]
In nearly every aspect of military capability ”” from cruise missiles to submarines, satellites to cluster bombs ”” China has been working hard to modernize its military. Some see this as a natural result of China’s emergence as a rising power, while others see danger to the United States and its interests in Asia.
The evidence of China’s military modernization is ample: double-digit increases for military spending since 1989; the rapid expansion of China’s cruise and ballistic missile force and the deployment of hundreds of missiles along China’s coast across from Taiwan; the rapid expansion of China’s submarine force and the modernization of the missiles those submarines carry; and last year, China’s destruction of one of its own satellites by a land-based missile, announcing China’s unexpected capability in anti-satellite warfare.
There is no doubt that China is a rising military power, says Kurt Campbell, a former Defense Department official who now heads the Center for a New American Security.
“No country has risen to a status of great power as rapidly as China has, I would argue, over the last 20 years,” Campbell says.