Russ Pierson

DMIN 548 Spiritual Leadership in Christian Community / Jason Clark

Russ Pierson

Accommodation or Assimilation?

John Roxborogh’s Christianity in Southeast Asia, 1914-2000

#dminlgp #korea #roxborogh #poon #gdot

We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.

—The Borg, Star Trek: First Contact

*  *  *

Korea is looming large in my thought process, given that I will be in Seoul, South Korea late this month, part of our curriculum in the Leadership and Global Perspectives doctoral program at George Fox University. Earlier, I wrote about the silver lining behind the global Pentecostal-charismatic movement, with its potential to embody both primal and modern sensibilities as a prospective path forward for Christianity in the postmodern age, a notion I drew primarily from Simon Chan’s excellent chapter in Michael Poon’s book, Christian Movements in Southeast Asia.^[1]

But Chan likewise hints at the dark side of Pentecostalism’s genius for contextualization:

Contextualization may be defined as the attempt to bring the gospel message to a context in a manner that is relevant to that context …. Syncretism, in contrast, involves appropriating substantial material contents from the context in order to bridge the gap between culture and context. The result of syncretism is that instead of the gospel challenging culture, it becomes a part of culture.^[2]

This is a theme taken up by John Roxborogh (who also contributed to Poon’s book) in his article, “Christianity in South-East Asia, 1914–2001” in The Cambridge History of Christianity, Volume 9: World Christianities. Roxborogh also dances gingerly on both sides of the coin:

White syncretism is usually seen as a heresy to be rejected, and may certainly be evidence of a confusion of loyalties, it may also be considered intrinsic to conversion in a real context.^[3]

This “either/or” of accommodation vs. assimilation is a huge and thorny issue for Christianity, and will only be more so as the texture, shape and color of global Christianity ebbs and flows over the rest of this century. Roxborogh has Singapore in view, but he could be writing more generally about much of South/Southeast Asia as he notes:

It may appear to have left its rural and animist roots far behind, but its familiarity and congeniality to Western tourists, businesspeople and missionaries is deceptive. Spirit and ancestral shrines in high-technology business premises and the growth of an Asian Pentecostalism are parallel indications of a pervasive supernaturalist worldview. The values of the society are not those of the West.^[4]

This accommodation—or “contextualization” in Roxborogh’s parlance—is in essence a simple “making room” for culture that seems to be in the very DNA of Christianity. Indeed the so-called Jerusalem Council in Acts 15 represents an accommodation of the early Messianic movement’s inherent Judaism as the message took root in various Gentile communities.

The Patristic Era offers sharp illustration that the edge between accommodation and assimilation is both murky and tricky to negotiate. Many a book has been written bemoaning the direction the Church went in the age of Constantine and Augustine,^[5] with the marriage of theology with Greek dualism and philosophy and the birth of the State Church. Countless other books have described the pagan roots of cherished church rituals associated with Christmas and Easter, as Christianity made room for the primitive spirituality of new people groups, reimagining new meanings for old animist practices.^[6]

Is there any way to identify that line where accommodation crosses over into assimilation?

This group of  authors seem unsure how to answer that question, beyond the obvious “irreducible element in the gospel, namely, the concrete particularity of the person of Jesus Christ.”^[7]

But all of them agree that what might be essentially termed “theological fruit” is the best way to determine where contextualization has crossed the line over to syncretism. As Roxborogh notes, “Contextual theology is accepted widely across the theological spectrum, but has some way to go at the parish level.” I might paraphrase Roxborogh this way, “I’ll know it when I’ve seen it ‘on the ground’—but only after the fact, in the wake of theological analysis.”

Virtually all of these authors—Poon and company, Roxborough and S.W. Chung writing in the Global Dictionary of Theology, do agree on one example of contextualization they believe has gone too far, “Third Wave” Pentecostal groups who preach a strong prosperity gospel in the context of cosmic spiritual warfare. Indeed, as Chung ends his contribution to the Global Dictionary of Theology’s entry on “Korean Theology,” he cannot resist offering both a back-handed compliment and stern warning regarding an epic figure in the Korean church milieu—David Yonggi Cho:

Although Cho has been a Christ-centered, Bible-believing and gospel-loving theologian and pastor for the last fifty years, it is undeniable that his Pentecostal theology of prosperity and positive thinking has had a negative impact upon Korean churches in general by diluting their evangelical identity and authenticity.^[8]

Cho has been widely heralded as pastor of what most experts believe to be the largest church in the world—ever. With as many as one million adherents, Yoido Full Gospel Church, pioneered by Cho, is by itself a de facto denomination, and its swollen numbers have given Cho phenomenal “street cred” in the Assemblies of God movement he calls home.

This hangs some of Pentecostalism’s dirty laundry on the line for all to see. There is a connection between this particular brand of what Chuck Smith once called “Charismania” with phenomena like the so-called “Toronto Blessing” in Canada and the “Brownsville Revival” in Florida—both of which Cho nurtured from afar. All of these are noted for outrageous spiritual expressions (uncontrollable laughter and barking among them), an emphasis on “spiritual warfare,” and—always—the prosperity gospel (made most popular today by the omnipresent televangelist, Joel Osteen).

Though the “Toronto Blessing” began in a Vineyard fellowship, “Sides were drawn, and ultimately, even (founder John) Wimber chose to distance himself from the events at the Toronto Vineyard.”^[9] Interestingly enough, the Assemblies of God, with Cho serving as head of the Worldwide Assemblies of God Council, has generally embraced Toronto, Brownsville and the like. In fact, it may be we are seeing parallel sociological phenomena play out in America within the Assemblies of God on the church front, and the Republican Party on the religious front, with strong elements generally considered to be “fringe” in the past (Third Wavers and the Tea Party, respectively) now pulling the entire organization in their direction.

The next generation of world theologians will need to grapple with this accommodation/assimilation dynamic in order to “keep the faith,” and, among these authors, they can find excellent direction in the counsel of Simon Chan:

The reason why we come to recognise these cultural accommodations as syncretism is because questionable theological presuppositions underlie their practices. For instance, the prosperity gospel is predicated on an over-realized eschatology. It presupposes a theology of glory (theologia gloriae) without a theology of the Cross (theologia crucis).^[10]

Having addressed the prosperity gospel, Chan then goes on to critique Third Wave theology:

Thus what seems like a rejection of culture turns out to be based on an unquestioning acceptance of some other aspects of a religious worldview quite foreign to Christianity.^[11]

At the end of the day, it’s like Jesus says, “You will recognize them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:16a, ESV).

* * *

DMIN 548 Spiritual Leadership in Christian Community / Jason Clark

Russ Pierson

Primal, Postmodern Pentecostalism

Michael Nai-Chiu Poon’s Christian Movements in Southeast Asia: A Theological Exploration

#dminlgp #korea #poon

Pentecostalism is a major feature of Southeast Asian Christianity. ^[1]

—Roger E. Hedlund

*  *  *

Late this August, my doctoral cohort at George Fox University is headed to our final stop on our “world tour” that is the Leadership and Global Perspectives program. In what seems now like a lifetime ago, we gathered for the first time just two years ago in Oxford, England, on the grounds of one of the Oxford colleges that looked like it might well have been the inspiration for Harry Potter’s Hogwarts. We also ventured to Cambridge, to London  and to Nuremberg, Germany on that initial trip. “Wow.”

Last year, we journeyed together to Nairobi, Kenya and to two very different stops in Ethiopia—in the capital city, Addis Ababa, in the heart of the nation, and Mek’ele way to the north near the border with Eritrea. “Wow” again.

Thus far, we have been exposed to parts of the globe that are “worlds apart,” in terms of their sociology, their political situation, their economies, their health and welfare, their culture, their religious traditions and their place in the world’s Christian community.

And it’s about to get even more interesting.

Soon we will find ourselves—for the final time as an official cohort—in Seoul, South Korea. I am certain another “wow” is in the making.

As has become our custom, much of our reading leading up to these trips focus on the history and current state of affairs at our destination. More than reading about these places, we also read primary documents coming forth from these places. For example, I have already written about the history of North Korea and its relationship with its neighbor to the South based on first-hand accounts of six defectors.

While Barbara Demick’s Nothing to Envy was broad in scope, painting a dark and dreary picture of everyday life on the other side of the Korean DMZ, our current reading, Michael Nai-Chiu Poon’s Christian Movements in Southeast Asia: A Theological Exploration, takes us directly into the religious world of South/Southeast Asia, where we find its various flavors of Christianity mixing and dancing with Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and a plethora of folk religions.

Poon’s anthology focuses most squarely on what is generally referred to as “Southeast Asia,” including the mainland Indochina region along with several significant island nations in and near the South China Sea. While North and South Korea are most often specifically associated with Japan to the north of “Southeast Asia,” in what is called just “South Asia,” people often mix and match the two regions. Indeed, Poon and his fellow writers make passing reference to Korea and Japan multiple times through the book while maintaining their focus on the southern region states.

As someone who continues to identify with Pentecostalism and the charismatic movement (often with fear and trembling), this book was heartening. Every single one of the seven articles (including the introduction) mentions Pentecostalism as an incredibly significant strain within Southeast Asian Christianity. Consider John Roxborough:

For some, it was the association with modernisation [what in the world do the British have against the letter “z”?] which made mission churches and schools attractive. In the long run, the charismatic and Pentecostal movements provided space for a spirituality which European missionaries often lacked.^[2]

Simon Chan, in a chapter titled, “Folk Christianity and Primal Spirituality: Prospects for Theological Development,” explores this observation further. Citing Harvey Cox, he “notes that the success of Pentecostalism in the southern continents lies in its ability to relate both to primal spiritualities on the one hand and to the social reality on the other. It has the unique ability to integrate premodern and modern modes of thought.”^[3] Chan goes on to connect this with Grant Wacker’s idea that Pentecostalism manages to hold both “pragmatic” and “primitivist” impulses in tension.^[4]

Having been recently reading works describing postmodernism, from Brian McLaren’s A New Kind of Christian^[5] to James K. A. Smith’s Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism?: Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church,^[6] it occurs to me that Pentecostalism’s “unique ability to integrate premodern and modern modes of thought” might well both describe and prescribe an authentic Christian life in the Postmodern Age.

As a long-time “worship leader” in multiple charismatic settings over the past almost 40 years (ouch—it hurt to write that!), it has been interesting to watch and see, for example, how nearly all broadly evangelical worship these days is, in essence, charismatic worship. Be they Baptists, Methodists or basic Bible churches, the vast majority of local churches share a common “worship vocabulary” that springs from the early “Jesus People” revival of the 70s and beyond, Maranatha! Music, Integrity’s Hosanna! Music, Vineyard Music and Hillsong Music—all with a charismatic sensibility.

Could it be there is something in the culture in this liminal age that invites a more emotional, supernatural, enchanted understanding of our relationship with God?

I think Simon Chan would agree—and he thinks this is a good thing:

The interaction between Pentecostalism and the primal worldview of its host culture is more often instinctive rather than theologically reflective, but the result could often be the opening up of fresh theological insights.^[7]

In short, Poon and his fellow authors seem to suggest that Southeast Asia is ahead of the curve, leading Christianity into meeting the challenge of life in the postmodern future. A growing charismatic sensibility within American Christianity hints that they are right. We can look, then, to the East, to lead the way as our postmodern way of life must become postmodern theology.

I am excited for this trip to South Asia with my cohort. I am equally excited for a bright and exciting future for the  Church as she embraces the strengths of other kinships within the global Christian community.

* * *

DMIN 548 Spiritual Leadership in Christian Community / Jason Clark

Russ Pierson

A New Kind of Seminary

Brian McLaren’s A New Kind of Christian

#dminlgp #gfes #brianmclaren
#anewkindofchristian

… It would be so good if there was a seminary that was
preparing you for ministry in 2040, not 1940. Oh, well. ^[1]

—Brian McLaren

*  *  *

This summer, I’ve been re-reading “early” Brian McLaren books interspersed with some of his newer work—and it all began with A New Kind of Christian, a book that helped launch what became known as the emergent church movement. These days, it is hip to be post-emergent (or even anti-emergent), and indeed, in retrospect it is difficult to believe that leaders as different as Tony Jones and Mark Driscoll were ever on the “same team,” but back in the bygone days at the turn of the century, countless church leaders who had grown weary, both of the “pastor as CEO” model and “seeker-sensitive” churches (whose broad moniker masked their narrow focus on the boomer generation), found solace and inspiration in McLaren’s trilogy set as a fictional conversation about life and ministry in the liminal years between modern and postmodern.

McLaren has become a lightning rod within the Evangelical “church wars” that have increasingly marked these days of ecclesial infighting in the new millennium. While he continues to—barely—identify with Evangelicalism most of the time, many conservative Evangelicals have voted him off the island on the basis of his later writings. I recently read The Girl with the Dove Tattoo, a fictional prelude to a major book he has coming out on 9/11/2012 called Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road?: Christian Identity in a Multi-Faith World. If many conservatives hadn’t already written him off, it would surely cause a huge firestorm with what promises to be a thoughtful but difficult book about, among other things, the potential of Christian universalism for good in a pluralistic. postmodern context.

A New Kind of Christian, however, was written early in his journey, when many of these later thoughts were as yet unspoken and unwritten—perhaps even “unthought.”

In fact, I’ve already used the early book as fodder for conversation in a post about the New Atheism as a weird corollary of fundamentalism, but I also want to point out another obvious and more personal connection. What kind of seminary might attract an older student who had been out of grad school for 30 years and out of the ministry for a decade? What kind of faith-based doctoral program could possibly appeal to someone with experience in the built environment (AKA the construction industry) with credentials in sustainability, interested in studying the intersection of environmentalism and faith?

Brian McLaren understands that kind of seminary. He painted its broad outlines more than a decade ago:

… most Protestant seminaries fight with vigor the battles of yesterday, largely oblivious to the issues of today, hardly thinking of the issues of tomorrow. They still preoccupy themselves with fighting the Protestant Reformation and the liberal-fundamentalist debates.

When I said that seminaries operate on the modern model, I meant (among other things) that they put theory before practice and that they assume that knowledge (not character, skill, experience, know-how, passion, and so on) is power. In the postmodern world, I think we’ll interweave theory and practice (which will mean that education will be lifelong, not pushed to the beginning of one’s career), and we’ll believe that power in ministry flows from character, know-how, experience, relationships, spiritual disciplines, passion, AND knowledge (and probably some other things too). The dethroning of theoretical knowledge will require something far more radical than rewriting seminary curricula; it will require reinventing the whole idea of professional ministry training. (It might even make us deconstruct the idea of “professional,” but that would be another subject for another time.)^[2]

I have gushed adoringly about George Fox Evangelical Seminary on multiple occasions, but McLaren’s early roadmap to the future of thoughtful, intellectually-honest, high-level, faith-based education clearly leads to the doorstep of George Fox. In my mind, this is not faint praise.

Whatever one thinks of the further territory Brian McLaren continues to explore in his thinking, in these early writings his voice was a clarion call daring the American Church to think beyond its heady days as an insider in the halls of power, to think about darker times that might lay ahead. He challenged the Church to reimagine herself as she always must in each and every generation. He pulled the veil from the near future, anticipating globalism, the advance of technology and a pluralistic world of many faiths and no faith at all that was fast moving to America’s shores. As an earlier Christian thinker, Francis Schaeffer, asked another generation, How Should We Then Live?

George Fox has made an incredible investment in the future of Christianity in its Leadership and Global Perspectives doctoral program, that now joins its other hallmark DMin programs in Semiotics & Future Studies and Leadership & Spiritual Formation. Together, they provide an answer to the question inherent in McLaren’s statement: THIS is where you can prepare for broad-based ministry as a reflective practitioner that has 2040 in view—not 1940. Portland, Oregon is where someone is “reinventing the whole idea of professional ministry training,” and Exhibit A is the fact that you don’t have to be anywhere near Oregon to be a part.

I can’t say enough about how deeply I respect, admire and appreciate our cohort’s lead mentor, Jason Clark, who has worked with the Dean, Chuck Conniry and Loren Kerns, the Director of the doctoral programs, to attract such an excellent faculty and staff, and forge such a rock-solid, relevant program as the DMINLGP. These doctoral programs are world-class … and in the case of the Leadership and Global Perspectives program, not only is it “world-class,” but the world is your class!

* * *

DMIN 548 Spiritual Leadership in Christian Community / Jason Clark

Russ Pierson

North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un with the woman recently revealed to be his wife, Ri Sol-ju.

Party Like It’s 1984

Barbara Demick’s Nothing to Envy
#dminlgp #demick #nothingtoenvy
#northkorea

I was dreamin’ when I wrote this so sue me if I go too fast

But life is just a party  and parties weren’t meant to last

War is all around us, my mind says prepare to fight

So if I gotta die I’m gonna listen to my body tonight

Yeah, they say two thousand zero zero party over

Oops … out of time

So tonight I’m gonna party like it’s 1999.

—Prince

*  *  *

Surely George Orwell, in the classic 1984, foresaw the odd little fiefdom known as North Korea:

And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. “Who controls the past” ran the Party slogan, “controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”^[1]

Barbara Demick, in Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea,^[2] offers an incredibly rare “insiders” view of life inside this modern day “Oceania.” She profiles six defectors—at least one of whom, Song Hee-suk, was tricked into leaving this country that she loved to the last, in spite of the ineptitude of its leadership that led to widespread, lengthy famine that quite literally starved several members of her family to death.

The title, Nothing to Envy, comes from a “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”-like song that every North Korean child learns at an early age,

Our father, we have nothing to envy in the world.

Our house is within the embrace of the Workers’ Party.

We are all brothers and sisters.

Even if a sea of fire comes toward us, sweet children do not need to be afraid,

Our father is here.

We have nothing to envy in this world.^[3]

The last line, “We have nothing to envy in the world,” is a constant reminder through adulthood, appearing as one of the countless slogans on billboards located throughout the country. Every North Korean is taught to believe that—even as everyday life was unraveling into famine and loss—life elsewhere, in South Korea and, certainly in the United States, was much worse. Indeed, the US was the constant foil for both North Korea’s founder, Kim Il-sung, and his son, Kim Jong-il, who reigned from 1994 till he was succeeded by his son, Kim Jong-un, upon his death in 2011. Over and over again, the official media would blame blockades and other actions by the US as the nation slipped into abject poverty while its neighbor to the south became one of the world’s most powerful economies.

For a real-world example of the—almost literally—night and day difference between the economies of North and South Korea, see the stunning photograph posted by my doctoral colleague Michael Hearn that depicts a night-time satellite shot of a brilliantly lit South Korea just below its neighbor to the north, plunged in utter and absolute darkness, but for a lonely little flicker in the capital city of Pyongyang.

North Korea’s “Supreme Leader,” whichever of the Kim family one may be speaking of, maintains power through a powerful cocktail of misinformation, disinformation, reward and punishment. Reporting even the most innocuous act by one’s neighbor as an act of treason is practically a national sport. Advancement is linked to patriotism. Even the religious aspirations of North Korea’s population has been redirected back to the ruler. Demick recounts the sobering story of Mi-ran, who had worked as a kindergarten teacher in the years preceding her defection:

As her students were dying, she was supposed to teach them that they were blessed to be North Korean. Kim Il-sung, who ruled from the time the peninsula was severed at the end of World War II until his death in 1994, was to be revered as a god, and Kim Jong-il, his son and successor, as the son of a god, a Christ-like figure.^[4]

Later, Demick clarifies:

Broadcasters would speak of Kim Il-sung or Kim Jong-il breathlessly, in the manner of Pentecostal preachers. North Korean newspapers carried tales of supernatural phenomena. Stormy seas were said to be calmed when sailors clinging to a sinking ship sang songs in praise of Kim Il-sung. When Kim Jong-il went to the DMZ, a mysterious fog descended to protect him from lurking South Korean snipers. He caused trees to bloom and snow to melt. If Kim Il-sung was God, then Kim Jong-il was the son of God. Like Jesus Christ, Kim Jong-il’s birth was said to have been heralded by a radiant star in the sky and the appearance of a beautiful double rainbow. A swallow descended from heaven to sing of the birth of a “general who will rule the world.”^[5]

North Koreans enjoy no access to the internet. Televisions and radios are specially modified to receive only North Korean signals. Visits to or from the country are stringently limited and carefully controlled. Robin Morgan, one of the pioneers of American feminism, might well have been writing about the kind of authority we find on display in North Korea when she penned these words:

Knowledge is power. Information is power. The secreting or hoarding of knowledge or information may be an act of tyranny camouflaged as humility.^[6]

How Can This Be?

The more one learns about life inside North Korea, the more incredible it can seem that an entire country can essentially have the proverbial wool pulled over its eyes. But Demick reminds us:

North Korea invites parody. We laugh at the excesses of the propaganda and the gullibility of the people. But consider that their indoctrination began in infancy, during the fourteen-hour days spent in factory day-care centers; that for the subsequent fifty years, every song, film, newspaper article, and billboard was designed to deify Kim Il-sung; that the country was hermetically sealed to keep out anything that might cast doubt on Kim Il-sung’s divinity. Who could possibly resist?^[7]

This, my friend, is the region to which my doctoral cohort will travel in less than a month’s time as I write this. We will be, I trust, safe and sound in Seoul, South Korea, a nation whose fortunes have gone a decidedly different direction, but whose people live hemmed in on all sides, by the East China Sea to the south, east and west … and by the strange kingdom ruled by a demi-god with nuclear weapons at his disposal to the north. It promises to be a fascinating adventure and a tale of two kingdoms.

* * *

DMIN 548 Spiritual Leadership in Christian Community / Jason Clark

Russ Pierson

Fundamental(athe)ism
A Conversation
#dminlgp #boghossian #plantinga
#bauerlein #mcgrath #barbour #casper #henderson #mclaren

I don’t have illusions. I’m one of those people who see through to nothing.

—        Flannery O’Connor’s character, Joy/Hulga, in Good Country People^[1]

*  *  *

Peter Boghossian is certain … which is one-third of the way toward delusional thinking.

But I digress.

Boghossian is brilliant, passionate and, like a good preacher, knows how to work a crowd. In his controversial public lecture at Portland State University this past year, provocatively titled Jesus, The Easter Bunny and Other Delusions: Just Say ‘No!’ this philosophy professor took aim at all faiths, every faith and, in the end, at faith itself. Christians, Jews, Muslims, Mormons, Hindus, Christian Scientists, pagans and Buddhists (in a related talk the good doctor included by name —or better—by title, the Dalai Lama); no faith tradition is exempt from his contempt.

When I say contempt, here’s what I mean:

As long as people remain silent, this juggernaut will continue. There has to come a point in the discourse when we just don’t allow certain claims to be made. I think maybe part of the solution to making these cultural changes is to treat faith-based claims like racist claims. To stigmatize those claims. “That’s not cool, we don’t let that into the discussion.” It’s not about a right to believe—believe whatever you want. It’s about the truth or falsity of a belief and about a process that will lead you to the truth or not. Clutch your Bible? Sit at the children’s table.^[2]

In his talk, Boghossian notes that professional psychology’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders grants religious exemptions to delusions; Boghossian has a student who is  “… working to remove the religious exemption from the DSM,” and he is “helping her to do so.” Why? “ … because a belief is shared doesn’t mean it’s any less delusional.”

The Children’s Table

Dr. Boghossian took a seat at the children’s table recently, to enjoy a conversation with my apparently delusional doctoral cohort in Leadership and Global Perspectives at George Fox University. While their realms of influence are all over the map, both “secular” and “sacred,” all of my fellows (male and female alike) are people of faith attending a faith-based university, enrolled in a program meant to integrate our faith and work in an increasingly interconnected world.

And you know what? Immediately, I liked this guy.

Peter Boghossian is surely forthright and (I think) needlessly antagonistic in his public presentations, but in private discourse he is also gracious and thoughtful, with a quick wit and a sincere interest in his conversation partners. He was thankful for the opportunity to join us—as we were thankful for the opportunity to engage a real, live … drumroll please … atheist. He quickly found his way in an online chatroom that can be terribly disorienting. Questions and comments can seem to come from every direction, with all kinds of exchanges on the side—indeed, it is not at all unlike the children’s table as I remember it from those holidays long ago.

Much of the hour we spent in conversation included defining terms that can mean different things to different people. In Peter’s talk, he identifies three aspects of delusional thinking: certainty, incorrigibility and implausibility. Notably, when several of us clarified that our faith wasn’t quite “airtight”—or “incorrigible,” to use his word—the good doctor helpfully noted that Christians then sometimes use the term “faith” to describe what he thinks of as “hope,” a point that seems consistent with the author of Hebrews’ declaration that “… faith is the assurance of things hoped for ….”^[3] 

This is also consistent with what Christian author Jim Henderson says in the book he co-wrote with Matt Casper, a “kinder, gentler” atheist, Jim and Casper Go To Church:

For Christians, it is wrapped up in hope and faith and, well … a divine hunch. And yet I’m often tempted to act as if I know, when in fact I trust, and that is all that I really know for sure…. I am very comfortable asserting my faith and my hope and my confidence that Jesus is God, but I will not say that I know he is God in the way I say I know there is gravity.^[4]

Casper—the atheist, not the friendly ghost—who was a guest in our chatroom the week after Dr. Boghossian, adds:

Stop treating faith as a fact. Call it a hope. Call it confidence, not certainty….^[5]

This is good counsel. It keeps the lines of communication open with others and keeps us humble as we approach our relationship with God and the ultimate mysteries of life. Contrast this approach with the Fundamentalist bumper-sticker mentality: “God said it. I believe it. That settles it.”

It also ends the conversation.

Not only is God not “dead,” as the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche prematurely proclaimed; he never seems to have been more alive.^[6]

— Alister E. McGrath and Joanna Collicutt McGrath, The Dawkins delusion

In our conversation with Peter Boghossian, I pointed out that the way he dismisses people of faith and the way he carefully controls the flow of his presentation seems to play into the current incivility that marks public discourse. Certainly this is true in the media. Fox News, for example, slants decidedly and intentionally to the political right; its audience largely does the same, merely reinforcing their current values, beliefs and worldview. MSNBC provides the same insanity for those who bear left. It is increasingly difficult to find a real conversation being conducted with fairness and civility at the “adult table,” to build on Boghossian’s metaphor.

In Peter’s talk, Jesus, The Easter Bunny and Other Delusions, Boghossian controls the presentation so rigorously that one might reasonably contend he is jousting with nothing but a proverbial straw man. Maybe it is a “straw God” in this circumstance.

Take, for example, what Boghossian says about prayer. He disparages prayer and those who pray by citing the findings of a 2006 Harvard study known as STEP (“Study of the Therapeutic Effects of intercessory Prayer”). The study was a carefully crafted examination of intercessory prayer in very specific circumstances involving heart surgery patients:

 1,802 participants were divided into three groups of about 600 each, with a mean age of 64 years. One group received no prayers. A second group received prayers after being told that they may or may not be prayed for. Members of the third group were informed that others would pray for them for 14 days starting on the night before their surgery.^[7]

In the study, there was no discernible benefit from the intercessory prayer. And for Peter Boghossian, that is the Big News and the End of Story.

But not so fast, Peter.

Harvard’s own press release announcing the results also included several caveats and doubts about its validity in the minds of the research team:

“Our study was never intended to address the existence of God or the presence or absence of intelligent design in the universe. The study did not endeavor, either, to compare the efficacy of one prayer form over another or to assess participants’ understanding of the nature and purpose of prayer. Finally, it was not our objective to discover whether prayers from one religious group work better than prayers from another,” said co-author Father Dean Marek, Director, Chaplain Services, Mayo Clinic….

“One caveat is that with so many individuals receiving prayer from friends and family, as well as personal prayer, it may be impossible to disentangle the effects of study prayer from background prayer,” said co-author Manoj Jain, Baptist Memorial Hospital, Memphis, Tennessee….

“Each study builds on others, and STEP advanced the design beyond what had been previously done,” said Dusek (Jeffery A. Dusek PhD, co-author). “The findings, however, could well be due to the study limitations.”^[8]

Dusek goes on to describe at least one of those significant limitations:

“We found increased amounts of adrenalin, a sign of stress, in the blood of patients who knew strangers were praying for them…. It’s possible that we inadvertently raised the stress levels of these people.”^[9]

What’s more, a much larger analysis encompassing 17 individual studies was done a year later by Arizona State University’s College of Human Services:

“There have been a number of studies on intercessory prayer, or prayer offered for the benefit of another person,” said (David R. Hodge, an assistant professor of social work), a leading expert on spirituality and religion. “Some have found positive results for prayer. Others have found no effect. Conducting a meta-analysis takes into account the entire body of empirical research on intercessory prayer. Using this procedure, we find that prayer offered on behalf of another yields positive results.”^[10]

Now, Hodge also notes that prayer is not so thoroughly and predictably effective that it qualifies as an “empirically validated intervention,” but something scientifically and statistically significant is going on with prayer. In short, Boghossian’s use of the single Harvard study is less than fair.

The Elephant in the Room: Quantum Physics

Another example of both careful control coupled with incivility has not to do with Dr. Boghossian’s reference to the Easter Bunny in his talk, but to a much larger mythical beast—the elephant in the room.

Quantum physics changes everything we thought we knew about how the universe works—and other than a hard-to-understand spat between Boghossian and a proponent of quantum physics who was in the audience, it was barely mentioned beyond Peter’s half-hearted note that “we are searching for a unifying principle” (between relativity and quantum mechanics). While Newtonian science was essentially reductionistic (and at the end of the day, Darwin built on Newton’s work), recent scientific advances in quantum theory make our well-ordered, thoroughly-understood universe look like a freak show of chaos, chance and general—I hesitate to use the word since it’s another of the three signs of delusional thinking—implausibility.

Witness Ian Barbour, distinguished scholar and 1999 winner of the Templeton Prize:

… an indeterminacy in nature itself seems to be present at the quantum level. In quantum theory, predictions of individual events among atoms and subatomic particles give only probabilities and not exact values. A particular radioactive atom might decay in the next second or a thousand years from now, and the theory does not tell us which will occur. Some physicists think that this unpredictability is attributable to the limitations of current theory; they hope that a future theory will disclose hidden variables that will allow exact calculations. But most physicists hold that indeterminacy is a property of the atomic world itself. Electrons and subatomic particles apparently do not have a precise location in space and time; they are spread-out waves representing a range of possibilities until they are observed.^[11]

Dear reader, you might well ask if this is as wacky as it sounds. It is. Or at least Alvin Plantinga, author of Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion and Naturalism,^[12] surely thinks so:

(Quantum Mechanics) permits the equestrian statue of Robert E. Lee in Richmond, Virginia, to leap from its pedestal and gallop off into the distance, waving its hat and bellowing the rebel yell.^[13]

Both Barbour and Plantinga, representing many other distinguished and well-respected scholars from several fields in the sciences, offer multiple and compelling accounts of how God might operate within our space and time at a quantum level without violating physical laws.

I wonder if Plantinga’s vision of Robert E. Lee’s rebel yell might have Dr. Boghossian falling to his knees, eyes to the heavens?

Checkers on the Chess Board

At the end of the day, Dr. Boghossian, a brilliant man by all accounts—including my own account—is using the wrong metaphor. With his radical insistence that faith of any kind in any god is delusional doesn’t make him the adult at the children’s table. Rather, it’s as though he’s trying to play chess with checkers.

He refuses to use all the tools at his disposal—even all the science at his disposal—preferring instead to rail at what he refuses to see.

Alvin Plantinga (again) points out the folly of the naturalist’s insistence upon human reason. My colleague, Anderson Campbell, offers an exceptional précis of Plantinga’s long argument:

Plantinga asserts that one cannot reason one’s way to a scenario of unguided natural selection resulting in the development of trustworthy reasoning skills. The probability is just too low. So the naturalist is caught in a bit of a pickle. On the one hand, he claims that all that can be known about our existence comes through rational reasoning. But on the other hand, that same reasoning leads to the conclusion that the ability to reason could not have come about through the process of unguided natural selection. That, in turn, forces a move by which the naturalist must conclude that if his processes of cognitive reasoning have led to such an fundamental, untrustworthy conclusion, the process itself must be untrustworthy and all conclusions based on that process are subject to being jettisoned.^[14]

Meanwhile, the McGraths offer a compelling example of an “honest atheist”—a little less certain of himself than my recent acquaintance from Portland State University (Boghossian)—in the person of Harvard’s late Stephen Jay Gould:

Though an atheist, Gould was absolutely clear that the natural sciences—including evolutionary theory—were consistent with both atheism and conventional religious belief. Unless half his scientific colleagues were total fools—a presumption that Gould rightly dismissed as nonsense, whichever half it is applied to—there could be no other responsible way of making sense of the varied responses to reality on the part of the intelligent, informed people that he knew.^[15]

Wrong Game at the Wrong Time

Peter Boghossian’s militant and short-sighted atheism not only represents an attempt to play chess with checkers, but it comes at the wrong moment in history. Like the photo above, I fear the good doctor, after the sensationalism of his tactics wanes and he grows weary of preaching the same message to the faithful (uh, faithless?), will find that he is selling sno-cones in a snowstorm.

 I have been re-reading, for the first time in many years, Brian McLaren’s A New Kind of Christian. Now, a decade or more after that first time around, the book makes much more sense and McLaren’s prescience is utterly clear. McLaren takes pains in the book to describe the tension he felt, living in an era between the modern era and whatever we might call the era that is becoming. (Even as McLaren wrote, he noted that postmodern fit in one sense, though it also represents a particular school of philosophical thought that makes the term too restrictive.) Early on, McLaren identifies ten descriptors of modernism:

1. Modernity was an era of conquest and control.
2. It was the age of the machine.
3.  It was an age of analysis.
4.  It was the age of secular science.
5. It was an age aspiring to absolute objectivity, which, we believed, would yield absolute certainty and knowledge.
6. It was a critical age.
7. It was the age of the modern nation-state and organization.
8. It was the age of individualism.
9. It was the age of Protestantism and institutional religion.
10.  It was the age of consumerism, an age when people often quoted the maxim “Money can’t buy happiness” but seldom acted as if they believed it.^[16]

In the postmodern world, we become postconquest, postmechanistic, postanalytical, post-secular, postobjective, postcritical, postorganizational, postindividualistic, post-Protestant, and postconsumerist.^[17]

Many authors (including the aforementioned Alister McGrath) have described a period of “re-enchantment,” as we move beyond the reductionist notions of “modern, Newtonian-era” science to embrace the universe as it is, a totality larger than the sum of its parts, remarkably more mysterious, darker and more beautiful even as we come  to ever broader, deeper understandings.

There is a “Reenchantment Resistance Movement” that might be summed up in one word: fundamentalism. Here in this liminal age, on the cusp of what has been and what will become, the last vestiges of modernism are strong, entrenched and on the attack.

It should be no surprise that “fundamentalism” was first ascribed to a Christian movement. Near the turn of the last century, a group of Princeton University scholars published an occasional magazine that promoted the “fundamentals” of the faith. Unlike the fundamentalists of today, these pioneers embraced science and even, in many cases, adopted the basic tenets of evolution.

Frankly then, it dishonors their memory to understand how the term “fundamentalist” has come to be used in the popular vernacular. Today, it extends beyond fringe Christian groups (think of Westboro Baptist Church, the infamous “godhatesfags” group, for example) to other (mostly) religious groups. There are fundamentalist Jewish groups and fundamentalist Muslim groups. And, I would contend, there are “fundamental(athe)ists,” too. Peter Boghossian stands squarely in the shadow of the late Richard Dawkins:

Science and religion are locked into a battle to the death. Only one can emerge victorious—and it must be science. The Dawkinsian view of reality is a mirror image of that found in some of the more exotic sections of American fundamentalism. The late Henry Morris, a noted creationist, saw the world as absolutely polarized into two factions. The saints were the religious faithful (which Morris defined in his own rather exclusive way). The evil empire consisted of atheist scientists. Morris offered an apocalyptic vision of this battle, seeing it as being cosmic in its significance. It was all about truth versus falsehood, good versus evil. And in the end, truth and good would triumph! Dawkins simply replicates this fundamentalist scenario, while inverting its frame of reference.^[18]

In every case, these groups are clinging to the old ways of seeing things, moldy ways of doing things. Consistently, they reach out and attack new ways of thinking, the possibilities of integrating formerly segregated disciplines. They see the world in its sterile, component parts, truly missing the forest for the trees.

I would wish for nothing more than the good Dr. Peter Boghossian to join the twenty-first century, to put away his checkers and to join the adults at the table playing chess. You don’t have to become a “believer.” Just stop being a “basher.”

* * *

DMIN 547 Distilling a Dream for Leadership: The Nature and Art of Global Leadership / Jason Clark

Russ Pierson

The Not-So-Sleeping Giant
A Review of Collapse by Jared Diamond
#dminlgp #diamond #collapse #china

You think you’ve got commuting problems, consider this — in northern China, there has been a mega traffic jam for the past 11 days. At one point traffic was stuck for 60 miles along a highway northwest of Beijing.

—NPR’s Melissa Block, reporting on a Chinese traffic jam on August 25, 2010

*  *  *

Maybe it was the largely-perceived success of the 2008 Olympics, but China has been on everyone’s minds for the past several years. We all know the country is vast, both in terms of population (at least 1.3 billion people, though one source suggested there are at least another 200 million people in rural parts of China that are under-represented in the Chinese census)^[1] and likewise in area. Its economy has been chugging along with double-digit growth for several years in a row as this formerly “sleeping giant” wakens with a start and is sprinting from decades as the world’s backwater toward First World status.

Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs and Steel, adds more astonishing facts to our picture of China’s rush to the top in his recent book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed:

It has the world’s highest production rate of steel, cement, aquacultured food, and television sets; both the highest production and the highest consumption of coal, fertilizers, and tobacco; it stands near the top in production of electricity and (soon) motor vehicles, and in consumption of timber; and it is now building the world’s largest dam and largest water-diversion project.^[2]

Early on in Collapse, Diamond notes his methodology (a comparative study) and his conclusion: that there are five basic factors contributing to the downfall of any given society: environmental change (and here he generally means localized conditions), climate change (often combining with environmental change); hostile neighbors; decreased support from friendly neighbors; and a society’s own institutional response.

While Diamond “had me at hello” with his inclusion of two environmental factors, it is worth noting he is far from a darling of left-wing environmentalists who believe his business connections make his conclusions suspect. But I found his arguments compelling—and at the end of the day, if we can’t find a way for “green” to make business sense, chances are we really are doomed since all of the worst offenders around the globe are the capitalist societies for whom the profit motive is essential.

The Costs of Doing Business^[3]

Speaking of business sense, the photo just above is a good pollution day in Shenzhen, China, which is, globally-speaking, the low-rent district of Silicon Valley. This is where American jobs have gone, and what American consumers receive in return is a gaggle of electronic gadgets.

The old adage “out of sight, out of mind” almost applies to our iPods, iPhones, iPads and Macs. We can ignore the awful reports of labor conditions coming out of the plants Apple uses in China since many economists and labor experts suggest that conditions in the iPlants are, slowly but surely, improving in the wake of several high-profile and horrible suicides as workers at the Foxconn plant (which employs nearly half a million workers in this one location) jumped from several floors above ground level to certain death.

But we ignore the cost to the planet at our own peril.

Daniel K. Gardner, Dwight W. Morrow Professor of Chinese History and Director of the Program in East Asian Studies at Smith College, in Northhampton, MA, notes:

Here’s what you probably didn’t take in account: that the coal that powered the Foxconn plant in the south likely was mined in the far northern province of Shanxi, transported by lorry or rail to coal terminals on the coast (e.g., the port city of Tianjin), and from there shipped by freighter to Shenzhen in the far south. Nor did you likely consider that the air above the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen moves eastward, making its way to Los Angeles in about three weeks’ time.  Scientists have calculated that roughly 30% of the air pollution in Los Angeles originates in China.^[4]

Globalization

Diamond, like Gardner, clearly sees this connection between China and the rest of the planet, in some ways the “unintended consequences” of globalization. The factories that produce our gadgets run largely on coal, and it is the glut of coal-laden trucks that are responsible for those muiti-day traffic jams in Northern China. All the carbon dioxide, sulfur and other particulates have made the capital city, Beijing, one of the world’s unhealthiest environments:

 Average blood lead levels in Chinese city-dwellers are nearly double the levels considered elsewhere in the world to be dangerously high and to put at risk the mental development of children. About 300,000 deaths per year, and $54 billion of health costs (8% of the GNP), are attributed to air pollution.^[5] 

Diamond uses the term “lurching” to describe the socio-political result of China’s unique geography and history. Throughout her history, the country has generally been ruled en toto by a succession of dynasties, “lurching” back and forth between good decisions and bad decisions made by strong centralized governments.

The author himself seems to “lurch” between hope and despair as he considers China’s (and in some ways the world’s) future. In the end, he lands on hope.

I pray Diamond is right. A man well-educated, well-positioned and well-suited to understanding China is Gordon Chang, author of the controversial book, The Coming Collapse of China. Written in 2001, Chang predicts the imminent demise of the present Communist regime due to the rising foment of the underclass in this massive nation.

Writing in Foreign Policy magazine this past December, Change updates his take on China’s future, and he stands by his prediction of collapse:

… we will witness either a crash or, more probably, a Japanese-style multi-decade decline. Either way, economic troubles are occurring just as Chinese society is becoming extremely restless. It is not only that protests have spiked upwards — there were 280,000 “mass incidents” last year according to one count — but that they are also increasingly violent as the recent wave of uprisings, insurrections, rampages and bombings suggest. The Communist Party, unable to mediate social discontent, has chosen to step-up repression to levels not seen in two decades…. That tough approach has kept the regime secure up to now, but the stability it creates can only be short-term in China’s increasingly modernized society, where most people appear to believe a one-party state is no longer appropriate. The regime has clearly lost the battle of ideas.^[6]

Diamond’s hopeful wish for China seems dependent on the regime using its authority and unilateral power to make quick, wholesale changes to damaging ecological practices. If this massive nation crumbles in an “Arab Spring” style uprising, it could spell the end of mitigation in China and—ultimately—the world.

* * *

[1] Alex Clark, “Writing to Bragg about,” The Observer, April 1, 2006 (London: The Guardian, 2006). Online at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/apr/02/classics.features. 

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Melvyn Bragg, 12 books that changed the world  (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2006).

DMIN 547 Distilling a Dream for Leadership: The Nature and Art of Global Leadership / Jason Clark

Russ Pierson

Roots
A Review of A Secular Age
#dminlgp #taylor #asecularage

It is impossible to kill an enemy. You may end a man’s life, but his son becomes your new enemy. A warrior respects another warrior, even if he is his enemy.

—Kintango, Roots by Alex Haley

*  *  *

The mini-series as we know it was a television programming accident.

Alex Haley’s Roots aired on ABC for eight consecutive nights in January of 1977. The story was all about the lineage of a proud African-American family whose “roots” were found in West Africa before the slave brought the story’s protagonist, Kunta Kinte, to America. While there had been special serial dramas before—Rich Man, Poor Man had been a recent ratings success—these had always been aired on a weekly basis, never on consecutive nights. What made Roots different? Never before had a television series featured such a large and prominent cast of black actors. And so:

ABC programming chief Fred Silverman hoped that the unusual schedule would cut his network’s imminent losses—and get Roots off the air before sweeps week.

Perhaps in this case Silverman really was an “evil (if inadvertent) genius.” To this day, more than 35 years after it aired, all eight episodes remain in the 100 highest-rated television programs of all time. It proved so popular that the network ran the entire series a second time a year and a half later in this era before Netflix, Blockbuster or even the VCR. Roots managed to single-handedly shift the course of television programming on—at least—two levels: both format and content.

And that is how I feel about Charles Taylor’s epic work, A Secular Age.

This book has dogged me for what feels like a very long time now. Weeks fly by in the Leadership in Global Perspectives program at George Fox University. It sometimes seems as though I am living the all-too-brief life of a canine, and the sands of time are moving lickety-split like so many “dog years.” While most of my cohort-mates wrote about Taylor in mid-February, I have stewed till the final seconds of the term, stymied by its length and breadth. I have taken to reading, whenever I can, on my Kindle or iPad, and I could almost feel myself aging as this book crept past, measured not in pages but on these electronic gadgets as a “percentage” of completion. It is surely the War and Peace of our generation, clocking in at 874 pages in the printed edition.

And nary a word is wasted.

Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable? Part of the answer, no doubt, is that in those days everyone believed, and so the alternatives seemed outlandish. But this just pushes the question further back. We need to understand how things changed. How did the alternatives become thinkable?^[1]

This question is essentially Taylor’s thesis, and as I already intimated, what follows is a long and complicated answer. But what especially interests me is the intersection of religion and science.

The further I explore the crossroads between earth-care and Evangelicalism, the more I see the difficulties that manifest themselves as theological or political are rooted in this basic relationship between science and religion. Strict creationism, young earth theory, visions of earth’s destruction associated with premillennial dispensationalism—all of these are rather uniquely Evangelical responses to that relationship with science. More telling, they are largely modern Evangelical responses: something happened somewhere in the 19th and 20th centuries that gave rise to these theologies intended to give science a good kick in the backside.

There in the sweep and majesty of Taylor’s great work with a broader scope, I think I see the outlines of an answer to my question about the modern Evangelical relationship to science.

It all begins with enchantment.

Taylor makes the point that that the pre-modern world was an enchanted world. This in and of itself is a reasonably common observation; indeed, Taylor himself seems to be building upon and responding to the discussion of enchantment broached by Max Weber in his seminal work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. But for Taylor the sense of disenchantment that is now the accepted norm (though post-modernism may be challenging this—but that is another discussion) is more than what he calls a “subtraction story:”

A common “subtraction” story attributes everything to disenchantment. First, science gave us a “naturalistic” explanation of the world. And then people began to look for alternatives to God. But things didn’t work that way. The new mechanistic science of the seventeenth century wasn’t seen as necessarily threatening to God. It was to the enchanted universe and magic. It also began to pose a problem for particular providences. But there were important Christian motives for going the route of disenchantment.^[2]

The genius of Taylor here is his cogent observation that through the Enlightenment era, Christianity was largely right in the thick of this move toward disenchantment—not as an unwilling “guardian  of the faith” (though we find ample evidence for this kind of response, too) but more often as a proponent. Indeed, in this era, many of the great scientists were among the faithful.  

In fact, while the Catholic church famously mishandled both Copernicus (in the 16th century) and later Galileo, the Anglican church in England under King James (yes, that King James) made ample room for someone like Galileo’s 17th century contemporary, Francis Bacon. In fact, Bacon was, for much of his career, a darling of the king,^[3] actively encouraged to pursue his scientific inquiries and ultimately develop empiricism, a set of inductive approaches that came to be called the Baconian method.^[4]

It is this basic method that served science through the Enlightenment, both in Europe and across the Atlantic in what would soon become the United States of America. Here in the States this new science found fertile ground.

Without the authority of the Crown (in this Revolutionary era) and with lax and dispersed ecclesial authority as well, the American Church took to this new empiricism as a way to underscore and demonstrate its authority. As Weber points out in his afore-mentioned tome, and as Joel Mokyr underscores below, a new marriage of science and capitalism gave rise to the Industrial Age, as enterprising believers used Baconian principles to mechanize society:

The years 1760-1815 witnessed more than just some lucky breaks in a handful of industries: it was also the period in which people defied gravity through hot-air balloons, began the conquest of smallpox, and learned to can food, to use binary codes for manufacturing purposes, to infer geological strata from fossil evidence, and to burn gas for lighting…. In pottery, one of the oldest techniques known to mankind, Josiah Wedgwood and others introduced new materials, new moulding (sic) techniques, and improved over-firing. ^[5]

Mark Noll, in an essay entitled “Science, Theology, and Society: From Cotton Mather to Williams Jennigs Bryan,” suggests how this happy arrangement with religion’s use of science changed with the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859. For centuries, prefigured in the Psalms and stated clearly in the Patristic era,^[6]  religious thinkers had spoken of the “two books” of nature and scripture by which God was revealed. But now, as ethicist Ted Peters notes, science became no longer slave to the scripture but entirely independent—or worse:

Though nature was certainly held to reveal God’s handiwork, this “one book” began to gain independence, if not prominence, over against scriptural revelation.^[7] 

Taylor though, offers a subtler explanation, a “change in the air” that not so much starts with Darwin, but ends there:

The transformation in outlook from a limited, fixed cosmos to a vast, evolving universe starts in the early seventeenth century, and is essentially completed in the early nineteenth century, though the final terminus might be fixed with the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859.^[8]

This is a remarkable understanding, prefigured much earlier in A Secular Age, when Taylor notes:

The enchanted world, in contrast to our universe of buffered selves and “minds”, shows a perplexing absence of certain boundaries which seem to us essential.^[9]

What does Taylor mean when he speaks of the universe, buffered selves and “minds?” And how is this significant for the relationship between Evangelicalism and science in the 21st century?

Taylor uses “universe” here in a particular way, over and against the Greek notion of “cosmos:”

I use `cosmos’ for our forebears’ idea of the totality of existence because it contains the sense of ordered whole. It is not that our universe isn’t in its own way ordered, but in the cosmos the order of things was a humanly meaningful one. That is, the principle of order in the cosmos was closely related to, often identical with that which gave shape to our lives…. This kind of cosmos is a hierarchy; it has higher and lower levels of being. And it reaches its apex in eternity; it is indeed, held together by what exists on the level of eternity, the Ideas, or God, or both together-Ideas as the thoughts of the creator.^[10]

Taylor is also prescient as he notes the “enchanted” world of the “cosmos” was not only a Christian conception. Greek philosophy, the Roman panetheon—all of these pillars of Western civilization understood the cosmos to be a place of order, in some sense,  on a human scale. There was, to use a Taylorian phrase, some sense of “porousness” between this seen world and the very real unseen world, be that world inhabited by saints, angel and demons or gods, goddesses, fairies and leprachauns. Now we see ourselves somehow “buffered” from outside forces, or at least entirely separate from them; they are not in our “mind.”

Biblical religion, in entering the Graeco-Roman, later Arab, worlds, develops within the cosmos idea. So we come to see ourselves as situated in a defined history, which unfolds within a bounded setting. So the whole sweep of cosmic-divine history can be rendered in the stained glass of a large cathedral. But the universe approaches the limitless, or at any rate its limits are not easily encompassable in time or space. Our planet, our solar system is set in a galaxy, which is one of an as yet uncounted number of galaxies. Our origins go back into the mists of evolutionary time, so that we become unclear as to what could count as the beginning of our human story, many of the features of which are irretrievably lost.^[11]

What a sad state of affairs! Moving into the modern era, humanity in its Western conception is without moorings, “irretrievably lost,” much like Don Draper in those opening credits of the American television program, Mad Men, falling, ever falling, lost in perpetuity.

Taylor seems to locate Evangelicalism’s ultra-conservative base here, suggesting a sort of fear-based response “… where Biblical religion was held prisoner to the cosmos idea. Placing the creation of the world on a certain day in 4004 B.C. is a prime example of this kind of thinking, paradoxically using the modes of exact calculation developed in modernity to entrench oneself in the cosmos bastion. As is the refusal of the very idea of an evolution of species (as against the more implausible aspects of neo-Darwinianism).”^[12]

Is there hope there at the end of the rope, in a disenchanted world? Is there hope for a gracious, large Evangelicalism that moves beyond crippling literalism bound to the Enlightenment era to make peace with the “book of nature?”

In a word, yes. I hope so.

First, Taylor does us a great service by reminding us that the great opponent in the “religion vs. science” battle that plays out in the minds of Evangelicals is a straw man. It is not Darwin, nor Darwinism per se. The earliest Fundamentalists were a group of Evangelicals at Princeton at the turn of the 20th century who championed a high view of scripture —and most of them had no problem with the theory of evolution. Even before Darwin, many Evangelicals were content with either the “day-age theory,” that took the six days of creation to represent vast eons of time, or the “gap theory,” that read the “in the beginning” as separate from the Edenic creation, in essence seeing a gap between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2. These Evangelicals saw evolution as a means to explain one or the other of these common theories.^[13]

Extrapolating from other readings and research, I also believe that the “green Evangelicals” of the post-modern era will be able to offer the gift of hope both to those whose theology is rooted in the dualistic belief earth will be destroyed and environmentalists who have their own apocalyptic vision of “Gaia Gone Bad,” an earth that turns on its human inhabitants in a move straight out of Avatar.  Like the earliest Evangelicals—most of whom were post-millennialists—the new green Evangelicals will find deep satisfaction in joining with the Creator in healing and restoring the earth. After all, it is “New Jerusalem” that descends to earth—not a new earth that ascends to heaven.

Finally, I am hopeful that the the post-modern influences so many sociologists, theologians and commentators have noted over the last several years will forge a new relationship between religion and science, a “reenchantment” of a vast and ancient universe initiated at the hands of a loving Creator seen with eyes wide open.

* * *

DMIN 547 Distilling a Dream for Leadership: The Nature and Art of Global Leadership / Jason Clark

Russ Pierson

The Man Behind the Curtain
A Review of Global Warming: A Very Short Introduction
#dminlgp #globalwarming #maslin

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain

—The Wizard, The Wizard of Oz

*  *  *

Let’s be blunt: Politics, economics, media, religion and science—all of these come together to form a toxic stew that has resulted in the current state of public discourse around the topic of climate change, particularly in the US and to a lesser degree in other Western countries.^[1] In November of 2009, I posted a simple phrase on Facebook that set off a firestorm in my small circle of Facebook friends—particularly those who are Evangelical Christians. Here’s the phrase:

The global environmental crisis … is an outer manifestation of an inner crisis that is, for lack of a better word, spiritual.

Frankly, that is, by itself, a thoughtful, insightful but for the most part innocuous statement. I am not kidding when I suggest that Billy Graham might have said it or that Rick Warren may have penned those words. But neither of these Evangelicals turned out to be the source I was quoting. If I had it to do over again, I would have posted the message twice—and the first time I would leave the source off completely to see what kind of response I might get. My guess is it might have generated a couple of “Like” notices and perhaps a vague but supportive comment or two. The full quote is from former Vice-President Al Gore’s book, Earth in the Balance: 

The more deeply I search for the roots of the global environmental crisis, the more I am convinced that it is an outer manifestation of an inner crisis that is, for lack of a better word, spiritual.^[2]

I gave full attribution to Gore on Facebook—and that is apparently anathema! Al Gore, Nobel Prize winning author of An Inconvenient Truth, is an absolute lightning-rod in the US. No single cultural icon better represents this nexus I mentioned of politics, economics, media, religion and science.

“Global leadership,” which captures the essential rubric of the Leadership in Global Perspectives program at George Fox University, is broad, and my cohort mates are concentrating on a wide range of important topics, but I find myself alone in specializing in the environment and issues around sustainability. I have been so pleased to read the posts submitted by my deep-thinking doctoral colleagues in this past week or so as each has responded to Mark Maslin’s Oxford Press primer, Global Warming: A Very Short Introduction, though it isn’t all that short, clocking in at 192 fairly dense pages, and though it’s meant to be an “introduction,” is still quite technical, with an emphasis on the science of climate change.

The following graphic, for example, titled, “The Earth’s Annual Global Mean Energy Balance,” is arguably the friendliest and most understandable of all of Maslin’s many graphics, charts and tables:

^[3]

To further complicate things, in an online chat about Maslin’s book, we began to realize that when Mark Maslin publishes a “revised” edition, he means it! There is apparently more science in the 2009 edition with less philosophical framing than the original 2004 edition, all in an effort to keep the book “a very short introduction.” Some of my colleagues’ posts highlight that difference. Here’s a quick (and admittedly incomplete) sampling:

1. Tim Buechsel offers a scriptural rationale for creation care and highlights the fork in the road that seems to lead either to adaptation or mitigation.
2. Mike Ratliff focuses on an excellent classification system Maslin offered in the 2004 edition that helps us understand the various responses to the issue, based on “four myths of nature” and “four myths of human nature.”
3. Anderson Campbell connects the Big Hair of the 1980s with ozone depletion and worries about climate change and its impact on the world’s poorest. [Author’s note: Indeed, our two African colleagues, David Niyonzima and Joy Mindo, are often unable to participate in web-based discussions in anything close to “real time” due to the fragility and slow speed of their internet connections. Is it any wonder that African environmentalist and Nobel laureate Wangari Mathaii hails from Joy’s native Kenya?]
4. Glenn Williams describes Australian reaction to their national carbon tax and ponders the counsel of the Seuss character, The Lorax: UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.
5. Andrew Bloemker tentatively explores the connection between climate change and poverty and describes what he is doing about it via Feed the Crave.
6. Chris Marshall writes a kind of letter to his children with incredibly wise counsel about the deeper issues behind and underneath the climate change controversy.
7. And Rodger McEachern, the Canadian among us, concludes with these words in his post titled, “Is It Any Wonder We’re Confused?”:

The irony in this is without any coherence amongst the experts, opinion shapers and policy makers ordinary people are left to themselves and their personal beliefs and prejudices in their decisions as to how to respond to climate change and its future impacts; perhaps it is not surprising that many people agree that climate change is occurring whilst not making any changes.^[4]

Indeed. For many of my colleagues, reading Maslin’s excellent book is their first serious introduction to all the issues surrounding climate change. But I fear Maslin is so careful, so thorough and so generally kind to naysayers that my fellows and you, my readers, might well walk away with nothing more than the notion that this is so complex I’ll just keep doing nothing.

That would be a mistake. And a misunderstanding.

For me, the most astute section in Maslin’s book is his discussion of the role the media has played in framing this entire discussion, with real differences in the US as contrasted with other nations:

… in the USA media coverage has been different. First, until recently there has been no pro-global warming media coverage equivalent to that delivered by The Guardian [in the UK]. Second, climate change sceptics have been very strong on using the media in the USA.^[5]

Maslin clarifies:

There are two possible explanations for this extraordinarily media-facilitated public scientific debate. First, political sceptics who do not want to see political action to address climate change may be using this debate about methods and scientific uncertainty as a convenient hook on which to hang their case for delay…. Second, the media’s ethical commitment to balanced reporting may unwittingly provide unwarranted attention to critical views, even if they are marginal and outside the realm of what is normally considered ‘good’ science…. Overall, such exchanges contribute to a public impression that the science of global warming is ‘contested’, despite what many would argue is an overwhelmingly strong scientific case that global warming is occurring and human activity is a main driver of this change.^[6]

^[7]

There is almost no scientist—period—who thinks climate change isn’t occurring. The only “debated” issue is its cause. As you read through Maslin, you come to understand just how phenomenally complex the climate system is, and there are cyclical changes that appear to repeat in everything from deep ocean currents (e.g., the El Nino effect) to the jetstream to global temperature itself, which has certainly moderated within a given range over the course of history. Here Maslin mentions, for example, the “Little Ice Age” in the Middle Ages where we know the River Thames occasionally froze over (though Maslin likewise notes the Port of London hadn’t yet been built so the entire river flowed much slower and was more susceptible to freezing).

If the only issue is whether or not human activity is a significant causative factor, how is it we all talk about the “butterfly effect” and believe a single moth somewhere in, say, Argentina flaps its wings just so and contributes to a hurricane a couple of weeks later on the Atlantic coast, but we doubt whether or not 9 billion humans ripping up the forests and burning all the oil can have an impact on climate?

As Maslin suggests, our media in the States has done us a disservice by suggesting there are two equal sides to climate change story.  Naomi Oreskes, professor of history and science studies at the University of California is co-author (with writer Erik Conway) of the Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming.

This book tells the story of the Tobacco Strategy, and how it was used to attack science and scientists, and to confuse us about major, important issues affecting our lives—and the planet we live on. ^[8]

Oreskes goes on to demonstrate how industry—in this case the Oil Lobby—has intentionally funded benign-sounding foundations and associations to pay off scientists willing to join the chorus of nay-sayers in order to confuse and divide the public and ultimately prevent action. In many cases, these scientists are the same scientists who supported the tobacco industry in their misinformation campaign, denying a link between cancer and smoking till the very end of litigation that proved how wrong they were. These scientists are often award-winning scientists—but not in climate science!

In a very current example, US media flooded us with the news that, as FoxNews noted, a “Nobel Prize-Winning Physicist Resigns Over Global Warming.” Indeed, Dr. Ivar Giaever did win a Nobel Prize in 1973 in physics—a field certainly related to climatology. But in fact, his professional career and his award is entirely related to superconductivity experiments undertaken in the course of working for General Electric. Does that mean he shouldn’t express his opinion on climate change? Certainly not, but perhaps his opinion on the specifics of climate change is no better informed than your run-of-the-mill Hollywood celebrity. Figuring out how electrons tunnel through oxide in metal tubes and huge superconductors is an impressive feat, but bears little on climate science.

What do we have to lose if we move to mitigate against human-influenced climate change? Not much. What do we have to gain? The respect of the impoverished world beyond our borders and—quite possibly—a planet.^[9]

You do the math.

The “man behind the curtain,” flipping all the levers, alternating between benevolence and authoritarianism like some passive-aggressive maniac (but doesn’t want you to know it) is the existing energy sector—Big Oil, Big Coal, etc.—who only stand to gain while we stand still, enchanted by their smokescreen.

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[7] This illustration by UK artist James Fryer appears online here:

DMIN 547 Distilling a Dream for Leadership: The Nature and Art of Global Leadership / Jason Clark

Russ Pierson

No God Like Our God
A Review of The Muslim World
#dminlgp #muslimworld #miroslavvolf

It is a very serious analytic error to say, as is commonly done,
that terrorism is the weapon of the weak.
Like other means of violence, it is primarily a weapon of the strong ….
It is held to be a weapon of the weak because the strong also control the doctrinal systems and their terror does not count as terror.

—Noam Chomsky^[1]

*  *  *

The evil geniuses behind the Leadership in Global Perspectives doctoral program at George Fox University have done it again.

This time they have our cohort reading a journal … an Islamic journal, The Muslim World, that is well-respected in academia but also very specific to Islamic studies. But really, it’s not hard to peer into the thoughts and motivations of those “evil geniuses” this time around. Islam is on the rise throughout the West and global North, even as it continues to grow in the East and South. According to the Pew Research Center,^[2] by 2030 Muslims will make up more than a quarter of the world’s population—and nearly 60% in the Pacific Rim. And much of Africa, in fact—where our cohort visited last year—already have pockets with majority Muslim populations, or where Christian and Muslim numbers are relatively even and the two groups must learn to live in peace if there is to be peace at all.

In short, if we are to be leaders with a “global perspective,” we have to have some understanding of Islam and its adherents.

Like most journals, The Muslim World has a general theme that drives each issue. Volume 101, published in April, 2011, is all about violence—something the Muslim world has unfortunately seen far too much of. The issue is a heady and thoughtful glimpse into the complex interplay of violence and counter-violence shaking our planet these days. It is fair and knowing. As noted in the introduction, “there is no immaculate conception of violence.” Everyone plays a part, from the various sects within Islam to the strong-handed dictators and oligarchs who rule many Islamic states to, of course, the West, with our insistence upon economic development that will always be a game rigged in our favor.

Some of my colleagues have already filed their response to the journal. My friend, Chris Marshall, writes from the heart in an article titled, Islamic Hospitality, that contextualizes his response within recollections of his visit to the West Bank. And Andy Campbell weaves a compelling review and analysis of structural violence into his take on the recent Hollywood blockbuster, The Hunger Games.

My interest in the subject has been piqued at two levels: first, I am a GreenFaith Fellow engaged in a conversation around environmental justice and faith with a brilliant cohort of “believers” from a wide spectrum of faith traditions, including Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, Unitarian-Universalists and more, along with Christians of every stripe. Within this collective, one milk-toast approach might be to stick with the “lowest common denominators” in conversation; but instead, we quiz and critique one another, highlighting the best and the worst of each of our traditions and bringing everything they represent to the conversation. Second, I have long had a special interest in Judaism. I have visited Israel a half dozen times and I deeply respect the roots from which Christianity has grown. But I have had a growing, nagging sense that I have neglected development of anything more than a cursory understanding of the other faith tradition that springs from the bosom of Abraham, Islam. I have spent time over the past year or two trying to broaden my understand of this deep, rich, ancient tradition, and I have found Mirolslav Volf’s Allah: A Christian Response to be a wise and faithful guidebook.

Volf,  Director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture, has a deep understanding and respect for Islam—which may not come easily to the son of a Protestant minister growing up in the midst of the horrific Yugoslavian civil war that was largely divided down religious lines between Christian and Muslim. Indeed, his magnum opus, Exclusion and Embrace, was forged on the anvil of this war. He is one of the prominent voices in “A Common Word,” an initiative that seeks to promote civil discourse between Christians and Muslims … and which is somewhat controversial in the more conservative corners of both Christianity and Islam, as opaquely implied by Yahya Michot in his analysis of the “New Mardin Fatwa,” an Islamic conference that sought to revisit and correct an ancient fatwa often used to justify violence by extremists. Referring to a particular divisive and conservative Syrian figure within Islam, Michot writes:

Some of those who actually took part in the Conference project and its implementation are actively involved in the Common Word initiative, 9/11 wounds healing, New Age Islam, al-Ash‘ari and al-Ghazali studies, neotraditionalism or neo-Sufism. From such quarters, it is often deliberate disinformation, caricatures and insults that people are used to see coming about the Damascene scholar.^[3]

The conservative Christian blogosphere is much less opaque (or apparently kind or thoughtful):

Grovelling at the feet of Islam isn’t going to win Muslims over – even if it really was the right thing to do. It is sickening and each of the signers to the Yale letter [ed. - the letter is a Christian response to “A Common Word”] - including Robert Schuller, Rick Warren, Bill Hybels, Leith Anderson, Jim Wallis, Brian McLaren, Richard Mouw and two prominent Assemblies of God bible college presidents - should fall on their knees in shame and beg Jehovah God for forgiveness.^[4]

Reading through the various journal articles in The Muslim World, my first response was how foreign everything seemed. There were names and places and ideas for which I had little context. But the more I read, looked a few things up and acclimated myself, both geographically and culturally, the more familar everything seemed. It was very much like reading an academic Christian journal, with scholars taking civil but certain potshots at one another, describing impenetrable hermeneutic knots and why a particular passage ought to be read this way rather than that. And of course there were the required discussions of what difference all this theology might mean in the “real world.”

Volf boldly suggests in Allah that, not only do Christians and Muslims share similar hopes and dreams (and scholarly journals) with one another, but in fact we ultimately worship the same God. His final admonition:

The claim that Christians and Muslims, notwithstanding their important and ineradicable differences, have a common and similarly understood God (1) delegitimizes religious motivation to violence between them and (2) supplies motivation to care for others and to engage in a vigorous and sustained debate about what constitutes the common good in the one world we share.^[5]

Virtually every B movie and TV show since 9/11 that has used Muslims in the role as antagonist has included a scene where some crazed terrorist shouts,  Allahu Akbar! which simply means, “God is the greatest!” It is Easter in most of the Protestant churches in the United States as I pen these words, and my guess is there is one Christian who is “working” today, raking in the big bucks, casting a wide net around the royalty stream of Christian music—Chris Tomlin. I’m a fan, but two of his current and most popular songs include these phrases:

How great is our God, sing with me
how great is our God and all will see how great
How great, how great is our God^[6]

Our God is greater, our God is stronger, God you are higher than any other
Our God is healer, awesome in power, our God! Our God!^[7]

Should we get Chris Tomlin a bit part on television, shouting his lyrics in Arabic on some ridiculous TV show? He would be shouting, “Allahu akbar!”

Obviously Christians and Muslims have significant theological differences, and each has an essentially exclusivist message. But if we can first recognize our common ground, we can then discuss our very real differences from a place of respect and understanding. The final word is Mirolav Volf’s:

“No god but God”—a fundamental conviction that Christians share with Muslims—is an anti-extremist creed! First, if Muslims and Christians agree that they should love God above all things, then God will matter to them more than anything in the world, including their respective religious communities or political visions. Second, if they believe that the God to whom they owe ultimate allegiance is the God of love and justice who commands people to love their neighbors and do justice, they will reject all causes and forms of struggle incompatible with love and justice. The fear of the one and common God, the beginning of political wisdom, will thus help drive out the demon of extremism^[8]

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