Since my pal Eric is more organized and takes the time to write this good stuff, I will simply applaud, saying "well said" copy and paste and hope you read it. The Bible. I think this is a very very important conversation. I'm so thankful for the way that Eric approached it. Realizing the historical human side of "Holy" stuff is so important. Dealing with the reality that God is woven into the tapestry of life somehow - and yet the gospel story though rooted in human history stays true to its demands...
Such a good post. So below is Eric's bit which I 100% agree with. Some stuff may be hard to understand so I'll define a few terms that I think are important to sit with and see the process of Christian theology - Heretics were often the theologians who were trying like heck to figure it out. The later were declare wrong! Poor guys. But we should be thankful for them - they gave it their best shot - and so should we, as eric says, we may be the next heretic, trying really hard to get it right.
E, mentions:
"gnostic, arian, docetic, monarchian, and modalistic"
(you may want to skip my defining attempt and just read Eric's piece)
quickly,
"gnostic"
- (a trap that is easy to fall in, pieces of this are found in all relgions) basically our souls are trapped in this material world. The material world is evil and the point of life is to escape this world. Sound familiar? "I'll fly away oh glory..."
"arian"
- dude from the 4th century who stumbled along trying to figure out Christ's relationship to God. He was claimed heretical because he didn't put Christ as one with the Father. The Trinity later came around to slam them into one monotheistic God, yet separate. One but Three.
"docetic"
- sort of gnostic. This one tripped into herecy while trying to figure out how Christ was God and man at the same time (what orthodox Christianity believes today). Docetics are unable to let Christ be a human saying that Jesus' physical body and physical death were just an illusion. (the implication is that God really didn't experience all of humanity.
"monarchian"
- contains both "modalistic" and "adoptionist" ideas. Claimed heretical by overemphasizing the singleness of God - creating a God who happened in modes (spirit, Christ) or "adopted" Jesus after he proved himself loyal. The heretical implication of these ideas are easy to see from a Trinitarian perspective.
(The idea that God was incarnated and fought on behalf of a goodness that was crucified by men yet ultimately triumphs to save even those who kill the God who made them - a universal sacrificial love that is more powerful that the death and suffering of this world... this is good stuff!)
BELOW IS ERIC'S BIT...
(A gnostic or docetic would say that Emmanuel, "god with us" is rather "almost with us")
"creeds and criticism (Part III) :: the Bible :: or why reading scripture apart from theology is like eating without food"
May 26th, 2007 at 10:41 pm (scripture, heresy, creeds, Jesus, history, church, truth)
Despite the contemporary desire to treat it this way, the Bible did not fall out of the sky. Christians are not “people of the book” in the same way that Muslims or Mormons are. The Bible is not eternal truth dictated word for word from the clouds to faithful scribes waiting pen in hand. Christianity’s attitude toward its book is significantly different.
As a starting point, we need to realize that the Bible wasn’t written for us. At least not primarily. Paul was not thinking of you when he wrote (or dictated) his letter to the Romans. We abuse scripture itself if we refuse to let Paul write to his friends at Rome, and recognize this as a conversation that we’ve been allowed in on. And if we start there, we had better understand what his friends would have understood from his writing before we start proof-texting individual verses out of context. That means hard work and study.
For some reason, learning about the historical process of scripture’s formation is threatening to many believers. I think that this discomfort reveals an unbalanced view of scripture (which this post is attempting to counteract…). The Bible came into existence through a real human process (involving real humans!). That is not to say that God was absent and uninvolved, nor is it to deny that the Bible is genuinely God’s word. It is only to insist that God’s word is made of real human words.
The early church dealt with a huge range of documents. As bishops and pastors dealt with matters of faith, worship, and church discipline, they came to rely on certain documents as authoritative in ways that others weren’t. The early church placed a huge importance on the teaching of the apostles – those people who had been with Jesus and had been commissioned to continue his ministry. The documents that had demonstrable apostolic connections had greater authority than those without. Early documents held more sway than later ones. The church came to the conclusion that these particular letters, gospels, and exhortations were inspired by God in ways that others weren’t. That is not to say that the other documents weren’t inspiring – or worth reading and contemplating.
The tricky thing is this: the people who were involved in the formation of the canon are the same people who brought the creeds together. One way or another, you are stuck trusting the judgment of early Christians as authoritative (whether you choose to recognize it or not).
Either you trust their judgment about the apostolicity and authenticity of the New Testament or you do not. If you do, why should you distrust their understanding of its teaching? If you do not, then this whole discussion is probably of little interest to you as a whole. This has always been the argument of the Roman Catholic church against the protestant rallying cry, “sola scriptura.”
“What do you mean, ’sola scriptura,’” they say. “There would have been no Bible apart from the church’s tradition, so there is no way to read the Bible outside the church’s reading of it.” Tradition shaped scripture, scripture guides tradition.
I am less comfortable with notions of ecclesial infallibility (the idea that the church can’t go awry) than much of the Catholic church is. For that reason, I still prefer scripture to stand above tradition. Nevertheless, the point stands - the Bible is a product of the church. And the Bible is a product of the same church that produced the creeds. Furthermore, the beliefs that shaped the canon shaped the creeds, they go together.
It is a foolish mistake to separate scripture and the creeds as if one is the “pure” word of God and the other is a historical “extra.” This attempt falls apart when we recognize that scripture does not interpret itself; nor does scripture plainly answer every question that we bring to it. We need help to read well. The lens that we bring to our reading is not irrelevant - it often determines what we get out of it.
The best example of this is the doctrine of the Trinity (though we could certainly choose others). Christians of all stripes consider belief in the Trinity as fairly basic to what it means to be Christian. But scripture never states that God is three co-equal persons co-inhering in one being.
Nevertheless, as the church wrestled with its experience of God in Jesus Christ, struggled to understand their scriptures (by which the early church meant the Old Testament), and began to read the apostolic writings we’ve come to know as the New Testament, they agreed on a few things. Something like the doctrine of the Trinity is simply the best lens for reading the whole of scripture without falling into mistakes that pit scripture against itself, or deny aspects of the church’s experience of Christ. Reading the Bible outside the creeds, outside the teaching of the church leads one to unnecessary contradictions and confusions.
In other words, if we ditch the creeds we are liable to face gnostic, arian, docetic, monarchian, and modalistic readings of scripture (more than we already do). The people that the church knows as heretics were no strangers to scripture (neither are contemporary representatives like the Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and pseudo-Christian cultic groups). It would be convenient if heretics had red eyes, breathed smoke, and broke crosses in half where ever they went. Unfortunately, heretics look mostly like well-meaning and sincere Christians. Please don’t misunderstand my language, I love heretics (I may be one for all I know!), but false teaching is dangerous. Bad theology kills people.
The creeds are indispensable because they represent the best way to read scripture as a whole. Tossing the creeds out of the church is a bit like pretending that you can use your computer without virus software or the operator’s manual. You will manage just fine until the first hiccup. At that point, it’s much easier to have the right software in place (or the necessary information at hand), than to try to learn code and reprogram the whole thing from scratch. That would be a bit unnecessary and foolish, would it not?
This post is aimed mostly at the understanding of the Bible that I think is most dangerous within the church. I’m tempted to write another post directed toward the understanding of the Bible that I find most often on the fringes of the church. There is a reductionist temptation at least as pervasive as the “God said it, that settles it” position. We “enlightened” sorts like to reduce everything down to the scientific-historical level that fits with our rational scope of control. We are always in danger of missing God’s voice and God’s presence precisely where it is clearest – simply because we are skeptically bent on de-mythologizing everything down to the lowest common denominator. But, I shouldn’t get too far down that trail tonight…
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Mary Oliver
Ran across this poem recently - reminded me how much I enjoy her stuff...
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When Death Comes
When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;
when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.
When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom; taking the world into my arms.
When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.
Mary Oliver (from the book New and Selected Poems)
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When Death Comes
When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;
when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.
When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom; taking the world into my arms.
When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.
Mary Oliver (from the book New and Selected Poems)
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Sunday, May 13, 2007
Rios Montt - http://indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1059765879
I would love to hear what you think about the Catholic church article and this one on Guatemala from 2003. It gives a little more perspective on the country. Today Montt is not going for presidency, but rather congress. If he gets a seat he may weasel his way farther out of the genocide charges that are currently against him for his work in the '80's...
General Rios Montt of Guatemala: Return of the evangelical tormentor?
Posted: August 01, 2003 by:
Editors Report
Indian Country Today
The nightmare that was Guatemala in the 1980s is returning. Twenty years after hundreds of massacres were conducted against Maya communities; many of the same people who ordered and committed the violence last week took over Guatemala City. General Efrain Rios Montt is back, wanting the presidency after 20 years. A wave of fear swept over Guatemala that has not been felt in over a decade.
Just before the time of the 1980s massacres, the Maya highlands teemed with thousands of relatively harmonious agricultural villages. In the relative peace of the mid-1970s, hopeful improvements were occurring in village cooperatives where Indian farmers could be guaranteed better prices and access to credit. However, a residual non-Indian guerrilla movement was moving into the Mayan mountains, and the Guatemalan Army of the day declared a brutal, pre-emptive war on Indian people.
The rationale of the Guatemalan Army generals was to terrorize the Indian population into submission, and to massacre it at the slightest contact with the revolutionary (Marxist-led) guerrillas. As the guerrilla movement trailed through indigenous Maya mountain villages, the Army swept behind, conducting the most horrific of massacres against tens of thousands of men and women, elders and children. A holocaust-in-progress emerged, a state-operated genocidal war against Maya villagers of such terroristic proportions that the trauma of that time still hangs over the country like a veil of shame and pain.
Not so the thought of shame, however, for General Efrain Rios Montt, the main living author and perpetrator of the policy that terrorized and eradicated over 600 Maya communities. Of those years of massacre, which actually mark from 1978 (Panzos municipal massacre, Kekchi country), to the late 1980s and even beyond, the worst and most brutal season of killing came during the 1982-83 military dictatorship of the evangelical General Efrain Rios Montt.
Once denied a presidency gained legitimately at the polls (1974), General Rios Montt conducted a military coup on the Guatemalan presidency in March 1982. The U.S.-trained general, born-again with the Church of the Verb, a California-based evangelical denomination, unleashed the worst wave of killings in the country's history. Some 20,000 died at the hands of his death squads and the policy of scorched earth against Maya people, which would ultimately claim 200,000 lives, was perpetrated with brutal exactitude.
As a former coup-de-etat conspirator, Rios Montt had been barred by the Guatemalan Constitution from seeking the presidency, that is, until July 14, when a Guatemalan Supreme Court decision overturned the 1985 constitutional ban. Rios Montt's goal is now to run for the presidency in November. The current president, Alfonso Portillo, is a cohort and former prot￩g￩ of Rios Montt's, while his own son, is a senior army general. The moment is ripe for a Rios Montt return to power and, as a warning that terrified the country, last week the general unleashed his forces on the city. Death squads and well-ordered militias scoured the city, beating political opponents and journalists, causing serious social and political chaos.
In 1983, then U.S. president Ronald Reagan praised Rios Montt highly for his great work on behalf of democracy. This is part of the history, forgotten here, remembered there, of how the U.S. in years past has propped up bloody dictators. The Guatemalan army received substantial U.S. military aid throughout those years. Not only Rios Montt, but also most of the top echelon of generals in the Guatemalan military under Rios Montt were trained at the U.S. School of the Americas, then concentrated in Panama.
It is most unfortunate that it was this group precisely who coordinated the military horror sweeps in the Indian countryside. Horrendous and directed terror characterized the campaign - beheadings, live-burnings of large groups of people tied together, the forced killing of relative against relative, much rape - and evidenced a deeply inhuman psychological mandate. Even seasoned human rights observers had great difficulty sustaining intense scrutiny, as the brutality against women and children was so repugnant.
The Maya village population was not only subjected to broad sweeps by armies backed by helicopter gunships, which targeted whole villages as "enemy encampments" and marked them for annihilation. These direct attacks were reinforced by a broad network of local army-organized militias empowered to kill at random over long periods of time. Many of these militias were purposely recruited from the ranks of evangelical members, who were prone to target and brutalize traditional spiritual leaders and Catholic workers. Recently residents of just 12 Mayan villages which were massacred by Rios Montt's troops in 1982 - over 1,200 people were killed - have filed a complaint against Rios Montt in Guatemala. The general claims immunity but the eyewitness testimony in the case is heart wrenching.
Deposed by a broader military junta after nearly two years in power, Rios Montt in the ensuing 20 years has built a sizable political base among the country's radical and military right wing. The general has developed his own political party, the ultra-right National Republican Front, of which he is chairman for life. He is now the president of the Guatemalan National Congress and often speaks throughout Guatemala, part evangelical minister, part nationalistic prophet, and very much the aging caudillo hungry for his lifetime crowning shot at political power. The evangelism resonates in a country beseeched for centuries by every religious tendency in the world, from Mormon missions to Jehovah's Witnesses and on to dozens of other increasingly bizarre sects. Church of the Verb - old hippies turned military boosters via a "brother" general - actually helped justify years of horrible injustice. "God gives power to whomever he wants," Rios Montt once raved. "And he gave it to me."
This push from the extreme right wing in Guatemala is partly fueled by the international climate set by the war on terrorism. It is not lost on Rios Montt and the Guatemalan generals that the Bush Administration rewards police power and military action. Important Bush Administration insiders such as UN ambassador John Negroponte, John Poindexter, Eliot Abrams and Otto Reich, all tainted in the Contra war and other foreign policy adventures and misadventures, have favored good relations with General Rios Montt.
For those who wonder "why they hate us," Rios Montt, his training and his backers during the years of massacre, provide ample answer that the history of this great American nation is checkered; there is a past to critique and understand; there is much to improve upon, as there are many avenues to a more encompassing, people-supporting foreign policy.
Certainly for the tens of thousand of families who lost relatives to that horrible U.S.-sanctioned state violence of only 20 years ago, like a re-occurring nightmare the resurgence of Rios Montt is shocking. Even as the Guatemalan people last week appeared to substantially reject Rios Montt's muscle-flexing, the shadowy memory of horrendous terror that swept the capital city reminded everyone that "those years" are perhaps not yet quite over; that the evil was never quite vanquished; that the killers remain in dark corners, ready to pounce.
General Rios Montt of Guatemala: Return of the evangelical tormentor?
Posted: August 01, 2003 by:
Editors Report
Indian Country Today
The nightmare that was Guatemala in the 1980s is returning. Twenty years after hundreds of massacres were conducted against Maya communities; many of the same people who ordered and committed the violence last week took over Guatemala City. General Efrain Rios Montt is back, wanting the presidency after 20 years. A wave of fear swept over Guatemala that has not been felt in over a decade.
Just before the time of the 1980s massacres, the Maya highlands teemed with thousands of relatively harmonious agricultural villages. In the relative peace of the mid-1970s, hopeful improvements were occurring in village cooperatives where Indian farmers could be guaranteed better prices and access to credit. However, a residual non-Indian guerrilla movement was moving into the Mayan mountains, and the Guatemalan Army of the day declared a brutal, pre-emptive war on Indian people.
The rationale of the Guatemalan Army generals was to terrorize the Indian population into submission, and to massacre it at the slightest contact with the revolutionary (Marxist-led) guerrillas. As the guerrilla movement trailed through indigenous Maya mountain villages, the Army swept behind, conducting the most horrific of massacres against tens of thousands of men and women, elders and children. A holocaust-in-progress emerged, a state-operated genocidal war against Maya villagers of such terroristic proportions that the trauma of that time still hangs over the country like a veil of shame and pain.
Not so the thought of shame, however, for General Efrain Rios Montt, the main living author and perpetrator of the policy that terrorized and eradicated over 600 Maya communities. Of those years of massacre, which actually mark from 1978 (Panzos municipal massacre, Kekchi country), to the late 1980s and even beyond, the worst and most brutal season of killing came during the 1982-83 military dictatorship of the evangelical General Efrain Rios Montt.
Once denied a presidency gained legitimately at the polls (1974), General Rios Montt conducted a military coup on the Guatemalan presidency in March 1982. The U.S.-trained general, born-again with the Church of the Verb, a California-based evangelical denomination, unleashed the worst wave of killings in the country's history. Some 20,000 died at the hands of his death squads and the policy of scorched earth against Maya people, which would ultimately claim 200,000 lives, was perpetrated with brutal exactitude.
As a former coup-de-etat conspirator, Rios Montt had been barred by the Guatemalan Constitution from seeking the presidency, that is, until July 14, when a Guatemalan Supreme Court decision overturned the 1985 constitutional ban. Rios Montt's goal is now to run for the presidency in November. The current president, Alfonso Portillo, is a cohort and former prot￩g￩ of Rios Montt's, while his own son, is a senior army general. The moment is ripe for a Rios Montt return to power and, as a warning that terrified the country, last week the general unleashed his forces on the city. Death squads and well-ordered militias scoured the city, beating political opponents and journalists, causing serious social and political chaos.
In 1983, then U.S. president Ronald Reagan praised Rios Montt highly for his great work on behalf of democracy. This is part of the history, forgotten here, remembered there, of how the U.S. in years past has propped up bloody dictators. The Guatemalan army received substantial U.S. military aid throughout those years. Not only Rios Montt, but also most of the top echelon of generals in the Guatemalan military under Rios Montt were trained at the U.S. School of the Americas, then concentrated in Panama.
It is most unfortunate that it was this group precisely who coordinated the military horror sweeps in the Indian countryside. Horrendous and directed terror characterized the campaign - beheadings, live-burnings of large groups of people tied together, the forced killing of relative against relative, much rape - and evidenced a deeply inhuman psychological mandate. Even seasoned human rights observers had great difficulty sustaining intense scrutiny, as the brutality against women and children was so repugnant.
The Maya village population was not only subjected to broad sweeps by armies backed by helicopter gunships, which targeted whole villages as "enemy encampments" and marked them for annihilation. These direct attacks were reinforced by a broad network of local army-organized militias empowered to kill at random over long periods of time. Many of these militias were purposely recruited from the ranks of evangelical members, who were prone to target and brutalize traditional spiritual leaders and Catholic workers. Recently residents of just 12 Mayan villages which were massacred by Rios Montt's troops in 1982 - over 1,200 people were killed - have filed a complaint against Rios Montt in Guatemala. The general claims immunity but the eyewitness testimony in the case is heart wrenching.
Deposed by a broader military junta after nearly two years in power, Rios Montt in the ensuing 20 years has built a sizable political base among the country's radical and military right wing. The general has developed his own political party, the ultra-right National Republican Front, of which he is chairman for life. He is now the president of the Guatemalan National Congress and often speaks throughout Guatemala, part evangelical minister, part nationalistic prophet, and very much the aging caudillo hungry for his lifetime crowning shot at political power. The evangelism resonates in a country beseeched for centuries by every religious tendency in the world, from Mormon missions to Jehovah's Witnesses and on to dozens of other increasingly bizarre sects. Church of the Verb - old hippies turned military boosters via a "brother" general - actually helped justify years of horrible injustice. "God gives power to whomever he wants," Rios Montt once raved. "And he gave it to me."
This push from the extreme right wing in Guatemala is partly fueled by the international climate set by the war on terrorism. It is not lost on Rios Montt and the Guatemalan generals that the Bush Administration rewards police power and military action. Important Bush Administration insiders such as UN ambassador John Negroponte, John Poindexter, Eliot Abrams and Otto Reich, all tainted in the Contra war and other foreign policy adventures and misadventures, have favored good relations with General Rios Montt.
For those who wonder "why they hate us," Rios Montt, his training and his backers during the years of massacre, provide ample answer that the history of this great American nation is checkered; there is a past to critique and understand; there is much to improve upon, as there are many avenues to a more encompassing, people-supporting foreign policy.
Certainly for the tens of thousand of families who lost relatives to that horrible U.S.-sanctioned state violence of only 20 years ago, like a re-occurring nightmare the resurgence of Rios Montt is shocking. Even as the Guatemalan people last week appeared to substantially reject Rios Montt's muscle-flexing, the shadowy memory of horrendous terror that swept the capital city reminded everyone that "those years" are perhaps not yet quite over; that the evil was never quite vanquished; that the killers remain in dark corners, ready to pounce.
Listening to the Periphery
I shot this article to Eric when I noticed his bit about Liberation Theology and his point of concern about the church being able to regulate Theologians. This is specifically talking about the Catholic church - and in the past few decades they have critiqued in a way that hinders the "set the captives free" nature of the gospel.
I am very concerned about the "top down" approach to theology these days - especially with the sickening complex web of injustices, lies, and suppression of the poor done by the "top" (wealthy powerful nations that USE evangelical Christian sects and the entrenched powerful Catholic positions).
Liberation Theology was born from the Catholic church as they saw the dying, starving, dehumanized reality in Latin America. Those priests involved in this movement, as they genuinely found that the God of the Christian religion desired these people to be fully human found that this necessitated social change. This was not appreciated by those in power. In Guatemala, where I've been spending some time, those in power we're coorporate and also part of the United States CIA - the US trained leaders at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia in suppressive military tactics, supposedly to fight communism...actually it was to support US corporation success...
Website on school of the americas:
http://www.soaw.org/
Website on Guatemalan Dictators trained at Fort Benning, Georgia USA.
http://www.derechos.org/soa/guat-not.html
Below is the article I tossed to Eric:
E's blog is:
http://ericdarylmeyer.wordpress.com/about/
Pope John Paul II, the Reagan years
& Liberation Theology
JPII became pope in 1978 and in June 1979 his visited Poland. When his plane landed in Warsaw, the bells in all the country's churches began to ring out. (In 1966, Pope Paul VI was refused permission to visit Poland.). Ronald Reagan, then campaigning for President, was watching the Polish welcome on TV at Santa Barbara, California with his friend Richard Allen, a Catholic, who later became the first national security adviser.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Polish-born national security adviser to Jimmy Carter, had represented JPII's inauguration at St Peter in 1978. In June 1980, Carter met with JPII in June 1980 at the Vatican.
In late 1980, Brz had begun a dialogue with Cardinal J Tomko, head of the Vatican's propaganda ministry in which Poland and the infant Solidarity movement figured prominently and JPII got to know that the US was prepared to back Solidarity. In Dec 1980, Brz phoned the pope and warned him of the threat of Soviet invasion of Poland. He asked for his backing for an ultimatum threatening sanctions if USSR invaded. The Pope agreed to instruct his bishops. The Soviets retreated.
Bishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador had pleaded fruitlessly with Carter to stop the US backing of repression - 6 weeks later, he was murdered in March 1980. Vatican commissions on JPII's orders had visited Romero two times demanding that he explain his outspoken criticism of El Salvador s military rulers. After his murder, the pope appointed Fernando Saenz Lacalle as archbishop, a member of Opus Dei and a starch opponent of liberation theology. The appointment came as a slap in the face to hundreds of peasant church members and religious workers in Latin America. Progressive advancements were reversed and old inequalities were restored.
Reagan took office in Jan 1981. He retained Brz as a consultant on Poland. Brz said: "We involved the Pope directly and he did whatever was to be done to sustain an underground effort. So Solidarity wasn't crushed." Reagan, son of a working-class Irish Catholic father and protestant mother, had won the lion's share of the Catholic vote. He was drawn to other Catholic working class types, like Bill Casey who became CIA Director. Like Reagan, they believed the Marxist-Leninist vision to be spiritually evil and had to be destroyed. Reagan openly forged ties with the Pope and Vatican. By spring 1981, Casey and others were dropping in at the residence of the pope's nuncio Archbishop Pio Laghi for breakfast and consultation. And Laghi visited the White House by the 'back door' for secret meetings with Casey and later the President.
Around 1982, Casey met with the pope at the Vatican and showed him a photo (taken a spy satellite) of the Pope's welcome when he visited Poland in 1979. The photo helped seal an informal secret alliance between the Holy See and the Reagan admin. Western agencies, notably the CIA, provided regular secret briefings on developments in the USSR, Poland, Chile, Argentina, China, on liberation theology, Middle East etc.
JPII & Liberation Theology
JPII's intolerance of left leaning movements arose from the conservative traditions of the Polish church and his experience with the communist regime. Even as Archbishop of Krakow, he was one of 251 bishops who voted agasint the final draft of Gaudium et Spes, the document that sought to reform and modernise the church. (It was passed with 2331 votes in favour.) Any collective initiative for social justice was associated with Marxism and he became a natural ally with the US capitalist government.
His first visit outside Italy was to Mexico in 1979 to attend the Conference of Latin American Bishops (CELAM). He told the assembled bishops: "The idea of Christ as a political figure, a revolutionary or subversive does not tally with the Church's beliefs." As Swiss theologian Hans Kung said: "He saw too much Marxism in Liberation Theology."
In 1983, JPII publicly rebuked Fr Ernesto Cardenal for joining the Sandinista government as Minister of Culture. HE ignored the order and was defrocked. In the same year, on his visit to El Salvador, JPII made a token visit to Romero's tomb, which had become a major pilgrimage centre for Latin Catholics. He called for the end to the civil war but said no word on Romero's martyrdom.
The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) issued a document in 1984 warning that liberation theologians made a "disastrous confusion between the poor of the Scripture and the proletariat of Marx... transforming the rights of the poor into a class struggle..."
In 1984, a meeting of Peruvian bishops convened to condemn the work of Fr Gustavo Gutierrez, the father of liberation theology, refused to do so. In the same year, Franciscan Fr Leonardo Boff was summoned to Rome by the CDF for his work Church - Charism & Power: Essays in Militant Ecclesiology. He was backed by Cardinals Arns and Lorscheider. Boff was silence for a year but when the CDF cracked the whip again in 1991, he quit the priesthood.
the Vatican began pressuring the progressive Brazilian prelates such as Dom Helder Camara of Olinda & Recife and Cardinal Paulo Evaristo Arns of Sao Paulo. When Camara retired at 75 in 1985, he was promptly replaced by an arch conservative, Dom Jose Sobrinho, who re-established the power of the landowners. Radical priests were disciplined and the local Justice & Peace Commission disbanded. Arns' sprawling diocese was split into 5 sections, with those inhabited by the working classes in charge of conservative bishops.
On Cardinal Pio Laghi
He was the Vatican nuncio in Argentina (1974-1980) when the military regime waged its 'dirty war' against political opponents. He was director of an anti-communist crusade. Thousands of trade unionists and community activists simply disappeared, others were tortured and executed by death squads. The Mothers who campaigned for the disappearance of their children accused Pio Laghi for direct involvement in the atrocities, charging that he even ordered the torture of priests connected with left groups. He was seen regularly at the government's torture centres and could decide on the fate of detainees. The Vatican transferred him to the US with the express mandate to combat the liberal tendencies in the North American church. Later in the 1990s returned to Italy where he was appointed to head the Vatican's Congregation of Catholic Education. In 1997, a human rights group filed formal charges against the cardinal in Rome, 75 in 1997 - covered by diplomatic immunity and by the Lateran accords.]
JPII's support for Solidarity finally bore fruit. In July 1988, Soviet President Gorbachev agreed to a role for Solidarity in the government of Poland and in December 1990, Lech Walesa became president of Poland. Reagan's second term had ended in 1989.
References
1. Sunday Times, 23 Sept 1996
2. John Paul II and the Hidden History of our time by Carl Bernstein & Marco Politi (Doubleday 1996)
Note: Bernstein was an investigative journalist in the Watergate scandal
3. The Mixed Legacy of John Paul II, N Menon, Frontline, issue 09, 23 April 2005.
I am very concerned about the "top down" approach to theology these days - especially with the sickening complex web of injustices, lies, and suppression of the poor done by the "top" (wealthy powerful nations that USE evangelical Christian sects and the entrenched powerful Catholic positions).
Liberation Theology was born from the Catholic church as they saw the dying, starving, dehumanized reality in Latin America. Those priests involved in this movement, as they genuinely found that the God of the Christian religion desired these people to be fully human found that this necessitated social change. This was not appreciated by those in power. In Guatemala, where I've been spending some time, those in power we're coorporate and also part of the United States CIA - the US trained leaders at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia in suppressive military tactics, supposedly to fight communism...actually it was to support US corporation success...
Website on school of the americas:
http://www.soaw.org/
Website on Guatemalan Dictators trained at Fort Benning, Georgia USA.
http://www.derechos.org/soa/guat-not.html
Below is the article I tossed to Eric:
E's blog is:
http://ericdarylmeyer.wordpress.com/about/
Pope John Paul II, the Reagan years
& Liberation Theology
JPII became pope in 1978 and in June 1979 his visited Poland. When his plane landed in Warsaw, the bells in all the country's churches began to ring out. (In 1966, Pope Paul VI was refused permission to visit Poland.). Ronald Reagan, then campaigning for President, was watching the Polish welcome on TV at Santa Barbara, California with his friend Richard Allen, a Catholic, who later became the first national security adviser.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Polish-born national security adviser to Jimmy Carter, had represented JPII's inauguration at St Peter in 1978. In June 1980, Carter met with JPII in June 1980 at the Vatican.
In late 1980, Brz had begun a dialogue with Cardinal J Tomko, head of the Vatican's propaganda ministry in which Poland and the infant Solidarity movement figured prominently and JPII got to know that the US was prepared to back Solidarity. In Dec 1980, Brz phoned the pope and warned him of the threat of Soviet invasion of Poland. He asked for his backing for an ultimatum threatening sanctions if USSR invaded. The Pope agreed to instruct his bishops. The Soviets retreated.
Bishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador had pleaded fruitlessly with Carter to stop the US backing of repression - 6 weeks later, he was murdered in March 1980. Vatican commissions on JPII's orders had visited Romero two times demanding that he explain his outspoken criticism of El Salvador s military rulers. After his murder, the pope appointed Fernando Saenz Lacalle as archbishop, a member of Opus Dei and a starch opponent of liberation theology. The appointment came as a slap in the face to hundreds of peasant church members and religious workers in Latin America. Progressive advancements were reversed and old inequalities were restored.
Reagan took office in Jan 1981. He retained Brz as a consultant on Poland. Brz said: "We involved the Pope directly and he did whatever was to be done to sustain an underground effort. So Solidarity wasn't crushed." Reagan, son of a working-class Irish Catholic father and protestant mother, had won the lion's share of the Catholic vote. He was drawn to other Catholic working class types, like Bill Casey who became CIA Director. Like Reagan, they believed the Marxist-Leninist vision to be spiritually evil and had to be destroyed. Reagan openly forged ties with the Pope and Vatican. By spring 1981, Casey and others were dropping in at the residence of the pope's nuncio Archbishop Pio Laghi for breakfast and consultation. And Laghi visited the White House by the 'back door' for secret meetings with Casey and later the President.
Around 1982, Casey met with the pope at the Vatican and showed him a photo (taken a spy satellite) of the Pope's welcome when he visited Poland in 1979. The photo helped seal an informal secret alliance between the Holy See and the Reagan admin. Western agencies, notably the CIA, provided regular secret briefings on developments in the USSR, Poland, Chile, Argentina, China, on liberation theology, Middle East etc.
JPII & Liberation Theology
JPII's intolerance of left leaning movements arose from the conservative traditions of the Polish church and his experience with the communist regime. Even as Archbishop of Krakow, he was one of 251 bishops who voted agasint the final draft of Gaudium et Spes, the document that sought to reform and modernise the church. (It was passed with 2331 votes in favour.) Any collective initiative for social justice was associated with Marxism and he became a natural ally with the US capitalist government.
His first visit outside Italy was to Mexico in 1979 to attend the Conference of Latin American Bishops (CELAM). He told the assembled bishops: "The idea of Christ as a political figure, a revolutionary or subversive does not tally with the Church's beliefs." As Swiss theologian Hans Kung said: "He saw too much Marxism in Liberation Theology."
In 1983, JPII publicly rebuked Fr Ernesto Cardenal for joining the Sandinista government as Minister of Culture. HE ignored the order and was defrocked. In the same year, on his visit to El Salvador, JPII made a token visit to Romero's tomb, which had become a major pilgrimage centre for Latin Catholics. He called for the end to the civil war but said no word on Romero's martyrdom.
The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) issued a document in 1984 warning that liberation theologians made a "disastrous confusion between the poor of the Scripture and the proletariat of Marx... transforming the rights of the poor into a class struggle..."
In 1984, a meeting of Peruvian bishops convened to condemn the work of Fr Gustavo Gutierrez, the father of liberation theology, refused to do so. In the same year, Franciscan Fr Leonardo Boff was summoned to Rome by the CDF for his work Church - Charism & Power: Essays in Militant Ecclesiology. He was backed by Cardinals Arns and Lorscheider. Boff was silence for a year but when the CDF cracked the whip again in 1991, he quit the priesthood.
the Vatican began pressuring the progressive Brazilian prelates such as Dom Helder Camara of Olinda & Recife and Cardinal Paulo Evaristo Arns of Sao Paulo. When Camara retired at 75 in 1985, he was promptly replaced by an arch conservative, Dom Jose Sobrinho, who re-established the power of the landowners. Radical priests were disciplined and the local Justice & Peace Commission disbanded. Arns' sprawling diocese was split into 5 sections, with those inhabited by the working classes in charge of conservative bishops.
On Cardinal Pio Laghi
He was the Vatican nuncio in Argentina (1974-1980) when the military regime waged its 'dirty war' against political opponents. He was director of an anti-communist crusade. Thousands of trade unionists and community activists simply disappeared, others were tortured and executed by death squads. The Mothers who campaigned for the disappearance of their children accused Pio Laghi for direct involvement in the atrocities, charging that he even ordered the torture of priests connected with left groups. He was seen regularly at the government's torture centres and could decide on the fate of detainees. The Vatican transferred him to the US with the express mandate to combat the liberal tendencies in the North American church. Later in the 1990s returned to Italy where he was appointed to head the Vatican's Congregation of Catholic Education. In 1997, a human rights group filed formal charges against the cardinal in Rome, 75 in 1997 - covered by diplomatic immunity and by the Lateran accords.]
JPII's support for Solidarity finally bore fruit. In July 1988, Soviet President Gorbachev agreed to a role for Solidarity in the government of Poland and in December 1990, Lech Walesa became president of Poland. Reagan's second term had ended in 1989.
References
1. Sunday Times, 23 Sept 1996
2. John Paul II and the Hidden History of our time by Carl Bernstein & Marco Politi (Doubleday 1996)
Note: Bernstein was an investigative journalist in the Watergate scandal
3. The Mixed Legacy of John Paul II, N Menon, Frontline, issue 09, 23 April 2005.
Thursday, May 10, 2007
religion and politics...Wallis & Dobbs...
A long one. Read at will.
I believe in the separation of the church and state, not in a way that disqualifies the church, but rather in a way that qualifies it through and through, that gives it the ability to question our governments and power structures when they lose their role of being FOR the people - ALL the people.
I believe in the separation of church and state - we don't need any more God ordained dictators who are blessed to kill the evil doers of the world
(wait! we have that right now! Check out the bbc article - Bush says that God told him to invade Iraq)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2005/10_october/06/bush.shtml
But I also firmly believe that the church has the right to question the state, the state the right to question the church, the church the right to question the church, the state the right to question the state!
Below is a Jim Wallis / Lou Dobbs conversation that brings up some interesting points.
I'm with Wallis on questioning authority when the reality around the authority is unjust (border problem, Iraq war...)
And though Dobbs is critical of it, I'm also excited to hear Los Angeles Archdiocese, Cardinal Roger Mahoney say,
"Anything that tears down one group of people or one person, anything that is a negative in our community, disqualifies us from being part of the eternal city."
This type of motion in the realm of theology is good. No longer can we stand for theology and churches who sit quietly by offering heaven after death while allowing hell to exist here and now. To Eric's glee I'll quote Bonhoeffer for support - he writes from prison as a Christian who questioned the motion of the Nazi's and the Christian church that supported them:
From the Tegel Prison in 1944 Dietrich Bonhoeffer
“…During the last year or so I’ve come to know and understand more and more the profound this-worldliness of Christianity. The Christian is…simply a man, as jesus was a man… I don’t mean the shallow and banal this-worldliness of the enlightened, the busy, the comfortable, or the lascivious, but the profound this-worldliness, characterized by discipline and the constant knowledge of death and resurrection. …It is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith. By this worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and helplessness. In doing so we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world... How can success make us arrogant or failure lead us astray, when we share in God’s sufferings through a life of this kind?”
And,
Martin Luther King wrote from the Birmingham city jail addressing “critical churchmen” who objected to his persistent fight against racism,
“I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes.”
He continues saying,
“It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city’s white power structure left the negro community with no alternative.”
AND THE TWO ARTICLES THAT INSPIRED THIS WHOLE MESS!...
Jesus and Lou Dobbs. By Jim Wallis
At our press conference on Monday announcing the formation of Christians for Comprehensive Immigration Reform, I remarked, "If given the choice on this issue between Jesus and Lou Dobbs, I choose my lord and savior, Jesus Christ."
As you might imagine, Lou didn’t like that very much. In his column on CNN.com, "A call to the faithful," rather than addressing the need for reforming a broken immigration system, he accuses us of being "hell-bent on ignoring the separation of church and state" as we "conflate religion and politics" by our "political adventurism." Then he suggests:
... before the faithful acquiesce in the false choice offered by the good Reverend, perhaps he and his followers should consult Romans 13 where it is written: "Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves."
I don’t think Lou read our statement, where we clearly said:
We believe in the rule of law, but we also believe that we are to oppose unjust laws and systems that harm and oppress people made in God's image, especially the vulnerable (Isaiah 10:1-4, Jeremiah 7:1-7, Acts 5:29, Romans 13:1-7).
The current U.S. immigration system is broken and now is the time for a fair and compassionate solution. We think it is entirely possible to protect our borders while establishing a viable, humane, and realistic immigration system ...
Dobbs doesn’t understand that compassion is not amnesty, and that reforming an unworkable system is not simply flinging open our borders. But then, he long ago stopped being a journalist, and is now one of the leading advocates against comprehensive immigration reform.
He also doesn’t seem to understand that most people now believe that bringing our faith into public life is not undermining the separation of church and state. As I’ve said many times, where would America be if Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had kept his faith to himself? And on this issue, given a choice between Jesus and Lou Dobbs, I’ll still choose Jesus.
------AND HERE IS LOU'S ARTICLE---------
By Lou Dobbs
CNN
NEW YORK (CNN) -- The separation of church and state in this country is narrowing. And it is the church, not the state that is encroaching. Our Constitution protects religion from the intrusion or coercion of the state. But we have precious little protection against the political adventurism of all manner of churches and religious organizations.
The leadership of the Catholic Church and many Protestant churches, as well as Jewish and even Muslim religious organizations, are driving that political adventurism as those leaders conflate religion and politics. And while there is a narrowing of the separation between church and state, there is a widening schism between the leadership of churches and religious organizations and their followers and members.
Conservative evangelical leader James Dobson recently said actor and former Sen. Fred Thompson wasn't Christian enough to be president. He instead chose to commend Newt Gingrich, who has been married three times and recently admitted to an extramarital affair. Five evangelical Christian leaders signed the "Land Letter" to President Bush in 2002 affirming a Christian theological basis to invade Iraq.
This week the head of the Los Angeles Archdiocese, Cardinal Roger Mahoney, basically threatened his faithful with denial of heaven if they don't support amnesty for illegal aliens. The good Cardinal said: "Anything that tears down one group of people or one person, anything that is a negative in our community, disqualifies us from being part of the eternal city."
The nation's religious leaders seem hell-bent on ignoring the separation of church and state when it comes to the politically charged issue of illegal immigration. A new coalition called Christians for Comprehensive Immigration Reform Wednesday will begin lobbying lawmakers with a new advertising and direct mail campaign on behalf of amnesty for illegal aliens.
The Rev. Jim Wallis of Sojourners Magazine put it this way: "If given the choice on this issue between Jesus and Lou Dobbs, I choose my Lord and savior, Jesus Christ."
But before the faithful acquiesce in the false choice offered by the good Reverend, perhaps he and his followers should consult Romans 13, where it is written: "Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves."
There is a more obvious and immediate judgment offered by the followers and members of both the Protestant and Catholic Churches. A Zogby poll last year asked churchgoers if they supported the House bill that would make illegal aliens return home and reduce future illegal immigration by securing the border and performing checks on illegal employers. Seventy-five percent of Protestants responded that was a good or very good idea, 77 percent of born-again Christians also agreed, and 66 percent of Catholics also backed tougher enforcement measures.
This schism between our church leaders and church members is just as broad and deep as that between our elected officials and their constituents across the country. Neither the state nor the church is exhibiting wisdom or fidelity to our national values in permitting the widening of that divide.
I believe in the separation of the church and state, not in a way that disqualifies the church, but rather in a way that qualifies it through and through, that gives it the ability to question our governments and power structures when they lose their role of being FOR the people - ALL the people.
I believe in the separation of church and state - we don't need any more God ordained dictators who are blessed to kill the evil doers of the world
(wait! we have that right now! Check out the bbc article - Bush says that God told him to invade Iraq)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2005/10_october/06/bush.shtml
But I also firmly believe that the church has the right to question the state, the state the right to question the church, the church the right to question the church, the state the right to question the state!
Below is a Jim Wallis / Lou Dobbs conversation that brings up some interesting points.
I'm with Wallis on questioning authority when the reality around the authority is unjust (border problem, Iraq war...)
And though Dobbs is critical of it, I'm also excited to hear Los Angeles Archdiocese, Cardinal Roger Mahoney say,
"Anything that tears down one group of people or one person, anything that is a negative in our community, disqualifies us from being part of the eternal city."
This type of motion in the realm of theology is good. No longer can we stand for theology and churches who sit quietly by offering heaven after death while allowing hell to exist here and now. To Eric's glee I'll quote Bonhoeffer for support - he writes from prison as a Christian who questioned the motion of the Nazi's and the Christian church that supported them:
From the Tegel Prison in 1944 Dietrich Bonhoeffer
“…During the last year or so I’ve come to know and understand more and more the profound this-worldliness of Christianity. The Christian is…simply a man, as jesus was a man… I don’t mean the shallow and banal this-worldliness of the enlightened, the busy, the comfortable, or the lascivious, but the profound this-worldliness, characterized by discipline and the constant knowledge of death and resurrection. …It is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith. By this worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and helplessness. In doing so we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world... How can success make us arrogant or failure lead us astray, when we share in God’s sufferings through a life of this kind?”
And,
Martin Luther King wrote from the Birmingham city jail addressing “critical churchmen” who objected to his persistent fight against racism,
“I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes.”
He continues saying,
“It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city’s white power structure left the negro community with no alternative.”
AND THE TWO ARTICLES THAT INSPIRED THIS WHOLE MESS!...
Jesus and Lou Dobbs. By Jim Wallis
At our press conference on Monday announcing the formation of Christians for Comprehensive Immigration Reform, I remarked, "If given the choice on this issue between Jesus and Lou Dobbs, I choose my lord and savior, Jesus Christ."
As you might imagine, Lou didn’t like that very much. In his column on CNN.com, "A call to the faithful," rather than addressing the need for reforming a broken immigration system, he accuses us of being "hell-bent on ignoring the separation of church and state" as we "conflate religion and politics" by our "political adventurism." Then he suggests:
... before the faithful acquiesce in the false choice offered by the good Reverend, perhaps he and his followers should consult Romans 13 where it is written: "Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves."
I don’t think Lou read our statement, where we clearly said:
We believe in the rule of law, but we also believe that we are to oppose unjust laws and systems that harm and oppress people made in God's image, especially the vulnerable (Isaiah 10:1-4, Jeremiah 7:1-7, Acts 5:29, Romans 13:1-7).
The current U.S. immigration system is broken and now is the time for a fair and compassionate solution. We think it is entirely possible to protect our borders while establishing a viable, humane, and realistic immigration system ...
Dobbs doesn’t understand that compassion is not amnesty, and that reforming an unworkable system is not simply flinging open our borders. But then, he long ago stopped being a journalist, and is now one of the leading advocates against comprehensive immigration reform.
He also doesn’t seem to understand that most people now believe that bringing our faith into public life is not undermining the separation of church and state. As I’ve said many times, where would America be if Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had kept his faith to himself? And on this issue, given a choice between Jesus and Lou Dobbs, I’ll still choose Jesus.
------AND HERE IS LOU'S ARTICLE---------
By Lou Dobbs
CNN
NEW YORK (CNN) -- The separation of church and state in this country is narrowing. And it is the church, not the state that is encroaching. Our Constitution protects religion from the intrusion or coercion of the state. But we have precious little protection against the political adventurism of all manner of churches and religious organizations.
The leadership of the Catholic Church and many Protestant churches, as well as Jewish and even Muslim religious organizations, are driving that political adventurism as those leaders conflate religion and politics. And while there is a narrowing of the separation between church and state, there is a widening schism between the leadership of churches and religious organizations and their followers and members.
Conservative evangelical leader James Dobson recently said actor and former Sen. Fred Thompson wasn't Christian enough to be president. He instead chose to commend Newt Gingrich, who has been married three times and recently admitted to an extramarital affair. Five evangelical Christian leaders signed the "Land Letter" to President Bush in 2002 affirming a Christian theological basis to invade Iraq.
This week the head of the Los Angeles Archdiocese, Cardinal Roger Mahoney, basically threatened his faithful with denial of heaven if they don't support amnesty for illegal aliens. The good Cardinal said: "Anything that tears down one group of people or one person, anything that is a negative in our community, disqualifies us from being part of the eternal city."
The nation's religious leaders seem hell-bent on ignoring the separation of church and state when it comes to the politically charged issue of illegal immigration. A new coalition called Christians for Comprehensive Immigration Reform Wednesday will begin lobbying lawmakers with a new advertising and direct mail campaign on behalf of amnesty for illegal aliens.
The Rev. Jim Wallis of Sojourners Magazine put it this way: "If given the choice on this issue between Jesus and Lou Dobbs, I choose my Lord and savior, Jesus Christ."
But before the faithful acquiesce in the false choice offered by the good Reverend, perhaps he and his followers should consult Romans 13, where it is written: "Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves."
There is a more obvious and immediate judgment offered by the followers and members of both the Protestant and Catholic Churches. A Zogby poll last year asked churchgoers if they supported the House bill that would make illegal aliens return home and reduce future illegal immigration by securing the border and performing checks on illegal employers. Seventy-five percent of Protestants responded that was a good or very good idea, 77 percent of born-again Christians also agreed, and 66 percent of Catholics also backed tougher enforcement measures.
This schism between our church leaders and church members is just as broad and deep as that between our elected officials and their constituents across the country. Neither the state nor the church is exhibiting wisdom or fidelity to our national values in permitting the widening of that divide.
Food and, of course, Liberation.
From the moment you put a piece of bread in your mouth you are part of the world. Who grew the wheat? Who made the bread? Where did it come from? You are in relationship with all who brought it to the table. We are least separate and most in common when we eat and drink.
Thomas Merton
Again I will encourage all who read this to deeply think about our interconnectedness with one another and the world of nature around us. We truly are but a breath - but a glorious breath. Our time is short here and we may as well take this life in as deep as we can - breath deep, eat deep, look deep into the eyes of others. All truly are one - naturally, not just contrived from a religious dogma. We eat therefore we are one.
In my second breath...I encourage you to check out Bread For the World and the Farm Bill. If you have concerns for people any where at anytime the Farm Bill will touch on it! It deals with food, hunger, agriculture, nutrition, and developing nations.
I planted corn today! May 9th. My grandpa always said plant on the 10th, so I guess I'm making sure it gets done in case I keel over tomorrow.
A few quotes from my theology reading of the day - from the civil rights movement:
“Black Power is the spirit of Christ himself in the black-white dialogue which makes possible the emancipation of blacks from self-hatred and frees whites from their racism. Through Black Power, blacks are becoming men of worth, and whites are forced to confront them as human beings.”
James Cone the first black Liberation Theologian:
“It means that the slave now knows that he is a man, and thus resolves to make the enslaver recognize him. I contend that such a spirit is not merely compatible with Christianity; in America in the twentieth century it is Christianity…The Church not only preaches the Word of liberation, it joins Christ in his work of liberation…”
The Incarnation is a major building block to Liberation Theology. The logic is if Emmanuel (God with us) was with us in a particular time, place, ethnicity, and socioeconomic struggle for justice and the church continues that movement then, as the Liberation Theologian James Cone wrote,
“Thinking of Christ as nonblack in the twentieth century is as theologically impossible as thinking of him as non-Jewish in the first century.” (p379)
He writes,
“If the Church is a continuation of the Incarnation, and if the Church and Christ are where the oppressed are, then Christ and his Church must totally identify with the oppressed to the extent that they too suffer for the same reasons persons are enslaved. In America, blacks are oppressed because of their blackness. It would seem, then, that emancipation could only be realized by Christ and his church becoming black.”
Thomas Merton
Again I will encourage all who read this to deeply think about our interconnectedness with one another and the world of nature around us. We truly are but a breath - but a glorious breath. Our time is short here and we may as well take this life in as deep as we can - breath deep, eat deep, look deep into the eyes of others. All truly are one - naturally, not just contrived from a religious dogma. We eat therefore we are one.
In my second breath...I encourage you to check out Bread For the World and the Farm Bill. If you have concerns for people any where at anytime the Farm Bill will touch on it! It deals with food, hunger, agriculture, nutrition, and developing nations.
I planted corn today! May 9th. My grandpa always said plant on the 10th, so I guess I'm making sure it gets done in case I keel over tomorrow.
A few quotes from my theology reading of the day - from the civil rights movement:
“Black Power is the spirit of Christ himself in the black-white dialogue which makes possible the emancipation of blacks from self-hatred and frees whites from their racism. Through Black Power, blacks are becoming men of worth, and whites are forced to confront them as human beings.”
James Cone the first black Liberation Theologian:
“It means that the slave now knows that he is a man, and thus resolves to make the enslaver recognize him. I contend that such a spirit is not merely compatible with Christianity; in America in the twentieth century it is Christianity…The Church not only preaches the Word of liberation, it joins Christ in his work of liberation…”
The Incarnation is a major building block to Liberation Theology. The logic is if Emmanuel (God with us) was with us in a particular time, place, ethnicity, and socioeconomic struggle for justice and the church continues that movement then, as the Liberation Theologian James Cone wrote,
“Thinking of Christ as nonblack in the twentieth century is as theologically impossible as thinking of him as non-Jewish in the first century.” (p379)
He writes,
“If the Church is a continuation of the Incarnation, and if the Church and Christ are where the oppressed are, then Christ and his Church must totally identify with the oppressed to the extent that they too suffer for the same reasons persons are enslaved. In America, blacks are oppressed because of their blackness. It would seem, then, that emancipation could only be realized by Christ and his church becoming black.”
Sunday, May 6, 2007
Despair...
"When I despair...I remember that all through history, the way of truth and love has always won. There have been murderers and tyrants, and for a time they can seem invincible. But in the end they always fall. Think of it ... always."
-"Mahatma" Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, 1869-1948, Indian Spiritual and Political Leader
-"Mahatma" Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, 1869-1948, Indian Spiritual and Political Leader
Saturday, May 5, 2007
"The Wish to be Generous"
by Wendell Berry
ALL that I serve will die, all my delights,
the flesh kindled from my flesh, garden and field,
the silent lilies standing in the woods,
the woods, the hill, the whole earth, all
will burn in man's evil, or dwindle
in its own age. Let the world bring on me
the sleep of darkness without stars, so I may know
my little light taken from me into the seed
of the beginning and the end, so I may bow
to mystery, and take my stand on the earth
like a tree in a field, passing without haste
or regret toward what will be, my life
a patient willing descent into the grass.
...
68,832 innocent civilians are suspected to have been killed in Iraq as of today.
“Change the channel”
- Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt's advice to Iraqis who see TV images of innocent civilians killed by coalition troops.
[NYT 12th April 2004]
...
We must go deeper, we must care, we must ask questions, we must live further than lunch! Skip lunch! Fast! Starve yourself! Wake freak'n up!
I get SO frustrated at the violence, the hatred, my own selfish conundrums, our surface levels of disconnect to systematic racism, economic worship, normalacy of "good morning neighbor...wave...pay bill, plant seed, wear hat, make joke, retain accent...wear underwear"...
My day of gut wrenching hatred summoned by ambivalence toward world affairs, violence, affluent blindness, attitudes of passive unwillingness to recognize our civic responsibility to each other...to poetry... (Ranting continues...) We are stagnated by tradition, by normality, by a white Jesus Christ with pretty lambs in a green grassy picture who's Hollywood west coast face is so removed from East Coast Wall Street stock market economic reality that I may back track a bit and say that a literal hell does exist - the minute Christ was put in white skin, in hollywood, worshiped in suit and tie on Sunday, forgotten as one invests in foreign oil on Monday...Hell is here and now. Not only in the physical pain that it causes the people affected by reaping that oil, but also the dead nothingness of a life whose sole purpose is to make money without even a thought as to what is happening on the other side of the world and even worse what is happening within their soul... Going to hell one ticker tape at a time!
We must support each other by setting alarm clocks - Wake up! Might as well live with our eyes open...
68,832 innocent civilians are suspected to have been killed in Iraq as of today.
“Change the channel”
- Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt's advice to Iraqis who see TV images of innocent civilians killed by coalition troops.
[NYT 12th April 2004]
ALL that I serve will die, all my delights,
the flesh kindled from my flesh, garden and field,
the silent lilies standing in the woods,
the woods, the hill, the whole earth, all
will burn in man's evil, or dwindle
in its own age. Let the world bring on me
the sleep of darkness without stars, so I may know
my little light taken from me into the seed
of the beginning and the end, so I may bow
to mystery, and take my stand on the earth
like a tree in a field, passing without haste
or regret toward what will be, my life
a patient willing descent into the grass.
...
68,832 innocent civilians are suspected to have been killed in Iraq as of today.
“Change the channel”
- Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt's advice to Iraqis who see TV images of innocent civilians killed by coalition troops.
[NYT 12th April 2004]
...
We must go deeper, we must care, we must ask questions, we must live further than lunch! Skip lunch! Fast! Starve yourself! Wake freak'n up!
I get SO frustrated at the violence, the hatred, my own selfish conundrums, our surface levels of disconnect to systematic racism, economic worship, normalacy of "good morning neighbor...wave...pay bill, plant seed, wear hat, make joke, retain accent...wear underwear"...
My day of gut wrenching hatred summoned by ambivalence toward world affairs, violence, affluent blindness, attitudes of passive unwillingness to recognize our civic responsibility to each other...to poetry... (Ranting continues...) We are stagnated by tradition, by normality, by a white Jesus Christ with pretty lambs in a green grassy picture who's Hollywood west coast face is so removed from East Coast Wall Street stock market economic reality that I may back track a bit and say that a literal hell does exist - the minute Christ was put in white skin, in hollywood, worshiped in suit and tie on Sunday, forgotten as one invests in foreign oil on Monday...Hell is here and now. Not only in the physical pain that it causes the people affected by reaping that oil, but also the dead nothingness of a life whose sole purpose is to make money without even a thought as to what is happening on the other side of the world and even worse what is happening within their soul... Going to hell one ticker tape at a time!
We must support each other by setting alarm clocks - Wake up! Might as well live with our eyes open...
68,832 innocent civilians are suspected to have been killed in Iraq as of today.
“Change the channel”
- Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt's advice to Iraqis who see TV images of innocent civilians killed by coalition troops.
[NYT 12th April 2004]
Friday, May 4, 2007
Miles, 5k's, and Spring Work
The 2006 corn harvest! Kristin, my sis, and me.
Below is current: Here is Father and Mother Bailey after their triumphant mile race at the Ice Breaker in Great Falls. I ran the 5k just before the mile. Spring work is kicking in. We are putting in quite a bit of Barley and a little Spring Wheat. The garden, and I will indeed say it, has the aura of fecundus about it - I've grown to love soil - i know that may be a bit odd, but I think I have created some rather fine garden soil so this year has high possibilities - hopefully evading hail and high water!
Plantings:
Potatoes on April 25th
Onions and first lettuce planting on April 26th
Carrots on May 2nd
In the midst of this we started getting our Barley in on the 3oth of April and are shutdown today due to rain.
We are one chick down! One of my lil chicks passed on yesterday - flat on his back. I don't know what happened.
Started working with the two, almost 3 years old now, horses a few days ago.
Working on getting a band together for a good friend's wedding on the 26th of May. Straying a little from the Jazz combo feel to ROCK AND ROLL!!! and POP STARDOM! I'll let you know what happens.
Theology... still reading and writing...digging in garden soil, each breath passed closer to that worm there chewing on me! "Casting" me out one day, to enrich the future of soil and potatoes, carrots, onions, barley - the awakening spring, beautiful warm and moist, speeds up life on both ends - living greener and faster = dying decomposing quicker...The kernel must die! The natural realm of sacrifice - its the gospel story if you like it or not - oh ball of worms in the compost pile emptying the tomb!!!
I'm excited to read ecology theology that comes out of Liberation Theology -
It simply drives me nuts when people use cute little metaphors about nature to make sense of God and Theology while in reality nature is out there chewing on itself and US! I have a hard time combining the two disciplines: nature and theology. Keep planting stuff I guess!!
Not much internet time these days - Cam and Janelle, thanks for saying hi - hope So Cal is treating you well. Eric and Clyn, you all are almost done! Then the real work starts huh carolyn!
It's May 4th - not only does that mean that it is International Respect for Chicken Day...and it is... but it is also Papa Bob Bailey's birthday! So I better get and enter into the festivities!
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