Stalking the ‘moderate’ Southern Baptist

December 5, 2007 By

fworthbbc2It has been a long, long, long time since I have been inside the imposing sanctuary of the Broadway Baptist Church in Ft. Worth, Texas.

I do remember my first impressions, however. I walked in, looked around, whistled a few notes to test the acoustics (I am one of those classical-music choir fanatics), and said to myself, “This looks like a Presbyterian church to me.” Indeed, Broadway had a very oldline Protestant air to it back in the 1970s, when I lived in Texas and was very active in one of those strange, liturgically minded Southern Baptist congregations that mainstream reporters like to describe with that troublesome adjective “moderate.”

As it turns out, Broadway Baptist has a fight going on in its pews right now that is, in many ways, linked to the wider, national story that your GetReligionistas keep noting from time to time — the painful rise of a true evangelical Protestant left.

The bottom line: When does a church cross a line from its old roots in evangelicalism and into its new home in mainline Protestantism? What are the signs that you need to look for, in terms of doctrine and in terms of, well, sociology?

This story ran last weekend in The Dallas Morning News — that great bastion of mainline Protestant culture in heavily evangelical Texas — and I missed it. The key issue: Should this church have photos of gay members and/or gay couples in its 125th anniversary photo album? The sharply divided church has decided it will hold off making a decision — perhaps, I think, in light of media coverage.

Doesn’t this sound mainline Protestant? Thus, the News notes:

Broadway is well known in Southern Baptist circles as a moderate church, where a diversity of views is welcomed and women have a strong role in leadership. The church has long had gay members.

But controversy erupted recently over whether photographs of gay couples should be in the directory being assembled for the church’s anniversary.

Brett Younger, senior pastor, said during Sunday morning’s worship service that some Broadway members believe homosexuality is a sin, based on certain Bible verses. Others think differently and note that Bible verses have been used to justify polygamy, slavery and the oppression of women, he said.

Earlier, in a church newsletter, Dr. Younger wrote that some members feel that allowing gay couples’ photos in the directory would be too strong an endorsement of homosexuality. Others hold that letting gay members be shown in the directory, but only on an individual basis, would constitute an unfair “judgment” against gay couples, he wrote.

A third option, recommended by Dr. Younger, would forgo individual and family pictures in favor of more attention to the church’s worship, Sunday school and ministries.

In other words, there is a point of doctrine here that cannot be avoided. The final option is to try to avoid it. The congregation is delaying the Baptist option — vote on it and the winners, well, win — because it is clear that there will be high costs either way.

But what about Broadway’s high standing in the world of “moderate” Baptist churches? This is where this story adds one key detail that shows what life is really like out in this small, niche-Baptist world on the left side of the sanctuary aisle. Pay close attention:

… (Some) Baptist churches welcome gay people as they are. One is Myers Park Baptist of Charlotte, N.C., which left the SBC years ago but continued to be affiliated with the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina.

When the state convention decided that its churches must refuse to “affirm, approve, endorse, promote, support or bless homosexual behavior,” Myers Park turned itself in as not following such a policy. Last month, amid much publicity, state convention “messengers” voted to expel the church.

Myers Park’s pastor, Stephen Shoemaker, preceded Dr. Younger as pastor of Broadway Baptist.

What a small world. Myers Park was the last Baptist church I called home, before starting my pilgrimage toward the ancient church.

So what is the crucial doctrine at stake in this story? You will not be surprised that I think the doctrines in the infamous tmatt trio — click here or here — are lurking in the background. I also wondered, frankly, if one of the reasons this Broadway fight is so painful is that this church is aging and that gays and lesbians may be a powerful new force, in terms of energy and money, in a declining congregation.

That might be a good angle for a follow-up report. Broadway Baptist is not alone.

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Filed Under: Evangelicals, Godbeat, Mainline, Sex, Social Issues

News flash: Obama is not a Muslim

December 1, 2007 By

obama in a churchWhat is the point of reporting on Web rumors that are plainly false and contribute little to the political discussion? Unfortunately it becomes necessary when the rumors and false reports become too much of the story.

The Washington Post reported in a front-page article, “Foes Use Obama’s Muslim Ties to Fuel Rumors About Him.” From the start, the story rightly exposes rumors and false reports that Obama is a closet Muslim. In the second paragraph, the story explains why these rumors are silly and mentions the nugget of fact that gives these stories their spark:

Since declaring his candidacy for president in February, Obama, a member of a congregation of the United Church of Christ in Chicago, has had to address assertions that he is a Muslim or that he had received training in Islam in Indonesia, where he lived from ages 6 to 10. While his father was an atheist and his mother did not practice religion, Obama’s stepfather did occasionally attend services at a mosque there.

The story attempts to lump together two issues: the first is the false Web rumor about Obama being a closet Muslim. The second is that Obama sees his time overseas in the world’s largest Muslim country as an asset and a reason for people to vote for him. It shores up the international experience portion of his presidential resume:

“A lot of my knowledge about foreign affairs is not what I just studied in school. It’s actually having the knowledge of how ordinary people in these other countries live,” he said earlier this month in Clarion, Iowa.

“The day I’m inaugurated, I think this country looks at itself differently, but the world also looks at America differently,” he told another Iowa crowd. “Because I’ve got a grandmother who lives in a little village in Africa without running water or electricity; because I grew up for part of my formative years in Southeast Asia in the largest Muslim country on Earth.”

While considerable attention during the campaign has focused on the anti-Mormon feelings aroused by former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney (R), polls have also shown rising hostility toward Muslims in politics. It is not clear whether that negative sentiment will affect someone who has lived in a Muslim country but does not practice Islam.

That last sentence is a pretty poor piece of writing and reporting. First of all, you shouldn’t start sentences with an “it” in general. It (oops) makes it hard to know what the writer is referring to. Second, what isn’t clear about people’s sentiment toward a person who lived in a Muslim country for a few years but doesn’t practice the religion? No one is thinking about opposing a candidate because he lived overseas. They are thinking about opposing a candidate because they think he is a closet Muslim.

The two issues to an extent go hand-in-hand, and one has to wonder how many people out there really believe that Obama is a closet Muslim versus those who consider his time overseas and understanding of Muslim culture as an asset.

Buried at the end of the story, we get these fairly surprising poll numbers that may be out of date, given the coverage already devoted to Obama’s faith:

A CBS News poll in August showed that a huge number of voters said they did not know Obama’s faith, but among those who said they did, 7 percent thought he was a Muslim, while only 6 percent thought he was a Protestant Christian.

The last half of the story repeats the false accusations that Obama is a Muslim and cites the frequent references to it in magazines and Internet message boards. I guess this is necessary for a reporter to convey the message that there are people out there who like to spread false rumors, including talk radio hosts and chain e-mails, but it seems like overkill. Is it really news that there are many instances of people spreading false rumors about a politician?

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Filed Under: Islam, Journalism, Mainline, Politics, Religion

Failing to sort out 1968

November 21, 2007 By

mlkFive years ago, political scientists Louis Bolce and Gerald De Maio wrote a fascinating story about the media’s failure to cover the rise to power of “secularists” in the Democratic Party. Bolce and De Maio studied The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times between 1990 and 2000. While the papers ran 682 stories about the GOP and evangelical or fundamentalist Christians between 1990 and 2000, they ran only 43 stories identifying secularists with the Democratic Party.

That imbalance has surely lessened after reporters in 2004 discovered that Howard Dean was more of a secular liberal than a religious one. Yet when it comes to broader-gauge topics, such as recent political history, reporters continue to ignore or slight its importance. Witness the recent cover story in Newsweek about the legacy of 1968 on American life:

What, after all, did the baby boomers really achieve 40 years ago? Why does Newsweek commemorate 1968 instead of 1918 or 1941?

The answer: because all of us, young and old, are stuck in the ’60s, hostages to a decade we define ourselves as for or against. As the pages that follow demonstrate, the ’60s were not necessarily, as some baby boomers would have it, America’s defining moment. But they were an era when a generation held sustained argument over the things that have always mattered most: How should America show its power in the world? What rights were owed to African-Americans, to women, to gays? What is America and what does it want to be?

No doubt, the events of 1968 continue to be emotional and even painful for many in the pressroom. But is examining that year dispassionately as impossible as Newsweek implies?

I don’t think so. After all, the story suggests that America has become more individualistic, noting that Republicans pine to cast the 2008 election as a choice between “family values versus free love, the order and comfort of the ’50s versus the trauma and extremism of the ’60s.” Yet this story, by Jonathan Darman, and the others in the package view the secularist-religious liberal alliance as one that never occurred. None of the stories make the point that today traditional religion is weaker or that Americans are more materialistic and less communal.

Newsweek misses or slights those post-1968 changes in American life. While acknowledging that women and gays are treated differently, the magazine should not have stopped there as far as cultural issues. Divorce was not generally legal; cohabitation was not widely practiced; cloning was only found in sci-fci stories. If the magazine were more daring, it could have explored the religious or secularist elements of other changes. Military service was still universal; the top marginal rate on federal taxes in 1968 was 70 percent.

Being an American today often means bowling alone, to borrow from Putnam. American life is less about self sacrifice and more about autonomy; less about traditional religion and more about secularism and religious liberalism; less about formality in dress and speech and more about doing your own thing. That represents a sea change in values from 1968. Yet like intelligence officials before 9/11, we reporters continue to fail to connect the dots.

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Filed Under: Creeping Fundamentalism, Evangelicals, Mainline, Politics, Social Issues

WABAC: How to cover a priestess story

November 12, 2007 By

wayback400The Divine Mrs. M.Z. Hemingway has, through the ages, written more than her share of posts on this blog about the women who are holding ordination rites and then proclaiming that they are now Roman Catholic priests.

So, this time around, I thought I would take a shot at one of these stories. However, I was slow at the switch and young master Daniel jumped in front of me with some comments focusing on new coverage of a controversial ordination service in St. Louis.

This is going to be strange. But I want to jump in the WABAC machine and take a look at an earlier news feature that Tim Townsend of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch wrote about the controversy that led up to the actual ordination service.

If you want to know how to cover a story rooted in an obvious clash between liberal and traditional groups, this is the way to do it. Welcome to “How to cover a priestess story 101.” The tensions are there, of course, between the local Roman Catholic leadership and their friends in the Jewish community. But that is not the real issue. Townsend makes sure that everyone knows who is who and who is not who.

Rose Marie Hudson and Elsie Hainz McGrath want to be Roman Catholic priests. Their ordinations will not be recognized by the church, which does not ordain women as priests.

St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke has reacted strongly, and Jewish leaders are questioning the synagogue’s decision to host the ceremony.

The president of the Interfaith Partnership of Metropolitan St. Louis, who is Jewish, said the decision by Central Reform Congregation may have been a mistake.

Now that wasn’t all that hard, was it? A woman cannot be ordained a priest in a global Communion — built on a clear chain of authority — that does not ordain women to the priesthood. It’s kind of like this: The folks at Apple cannot hold a meeting and elect Steve Jobs as the new CEO of Microsoft (not that he would want the job).

Masthead RCWP 700However, Townsend’s reporting includes the kinds of details that let us know this fight isn’t between the Catholic establishment and the local Jewish community. No, this is a fight inside the local Catholic community — as is the case all across America. This was a case of some active local Catholics deciding that enough was enough. They were going to act on the convictions they had been expressing in other channels for a long time.

Thus, we read:

Hudson, 67, is a grandmother of 11 from Festus who retired three years ago after 40 years as a teacher, the last 21 in the St. Louis public school system. McGrath, 69, of St. Louis, has eight great-grandchildren and recently retired after a dozen years as an editor at a Catholic publishing house. Before that, she was a campus minister at St. Louis University.

After their ordination Sunday, Hudson and McGrath say that they will co-pastor a faith community and that they will celebrate Mass each Saturday at the First Unitarian Church of St. Louis in the Central West End.

I was left with one or two questions. Before she moved to the public schools, was Hudson a teacher in Catholic schools? That detail would have provided one more piece in the puzzle. Also, what was the name of the Catholic publishing house at which McGrath was an editor?

Meanwhile, the key details on the Womenpriests group have not changed. We are still looking for the names of the Catholic bishops who are supposed to have ordained the first women back at the head of this chain reaction. Catholicism — like Eastern Orthodoxy — has a two-step test for ordination, requiring right orders and right doctrine. Something tells me that Rome would have questions about the right doctrine of any bishop who ordained women to the priesthood.

The two women will be ordained as priests of an organization called Roman Catholic Womenpriests, which, in its constitution, defines itself as “an international initiative within the Roman Catholic Church.”

The group was founded in 2002, when seven women were ordained aboard a boat on the Danube River in Germany. All of them were later excommunicated. The organization says other women have since been ordained by male Roman Catholic bishops, including Patricia Fresen, a former Dominican nun and Roman Catholic Womenpriests bishop, who will ordain Hudson and McGrath.

The group insists that it is Roman Catholic, but the church says it is not.

That’s stating the matter rather clearly.

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Filed Under: Academia, Catholicism, Judaism, Mainline

Here they stand, er, leave

November 6, 2007 By

pittsburghbishopMan, the hits keep on coming. The Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh voted to leave the Episcopal Church and realign with an Anglican province in another yet-to-be-determined country. Ann Rodgers, who writes religion news for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and is a board member of the Religion Newswriters Association, has been covering the story. Apparently Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori warned the diocese that she would remove Pittsburgh Bishop Robert Duncan (pictured) from office if the diocese voted to leave. Rodgers went to the annual convention where laypeople and clergy voted by very large margins to leave:

“We have a tough road ahead. We will be faithful and charitable and do everything we can to help those congregations who are uneasy about this, or who may be very opposed to this, to be part of our fellowship,” Bishop Duncan said after the vote. During his speech prior to the vote, he proposed finding ways for two local Anglican dioceses, one of which would be the minority still aligned with the Episcopal Church, to share important assets such as Trinity Cathedral and Sheldon Calvary Camp.

He read the brief reply to Bishop Jefferts Schori. The first of its three lines was a famous quote from Martin Luther when he broke with the Catholic Church: “Here I stand. I can do no other.” It continued, “I will neither compromise the faith once and for all delivered to the saints, nor will I abandon the sheep who elected me to protect them.”

Rodgers reports that the vote needs to be approved again at next year’s convention, after which the diocese will choose a province to join. She gets the church’s position on the matter and provides some context:

Because of the requirement to vote again next year, “Today’s action of the Diocese of Pittsburgh is not final,” said Robert Williams, director of communications for the Episcopal Church. “But, more to the point, dioceses do not leave the Episcopal Church. Dioceses are set in place by the churchwide general convention.”

The divisions between liberal and conservative Episcopalians, and between many of the U.S. bishops and their counterparts in the global South, derive from differences over biblical authority and interpretation. Many conservatives say their main concern is that some bishops do not believe that Jesus was God incarnate.

Wait, you mean it’s not all about sex? Who knew?

So nice to see Rodgers explain the concerns from a broader context. Rodgers writes that at least three other dioceses have initiated or are contemplating leaving the Episcopal Church. Williams is probably correct that dioceses can’t leave the church. But they might not have many parishioners left if the votes continue this way.

Rodgers interviews various folks who opposed the vote and says convention participants discussed the chance of litigation and pension losses.

“At the end of the day, the issues before us aren’t about canons and conventions and procedures and lawsuits. They are about the centrality of the cross of Christ,” said the Rev. Jonathan Millard, rector of Ascension parish, Oakland, who introduced the resolution.

Not all theological conservatives advocated breaking now. The Rev. Daniel Hall, an Episcopalian working at First Lutheran Church, Downtown, said he shared Bishop Duncan’s theological concerns, but that the primates of the Anglican Communion should be allowed more time to try to resolve the situation.

“I cannot support this resolution because of this time of spiritual desolation in which I find myself … St. Ignatius commends us to refrain from making significant decisions when we find ourselves so desolated,” he said.

Though I didn’t excerpt them all here, Rodgers quoted folks from all along the spectrum. Her lengthy story helped explain and flesh out the raw numbers of the vote. We’ll be sure to check out her follow up stories in the coming year.

The New York Times had a brief story on the vote. It emphasized how Jefferts Schori had promised repercussions against Duncan. I think it would be interesting for a reporter to explain why Episcopal leadership is so hardcore when it comes to canonical issues and so lenient when it comes to theology, church teaching and worship style. To be clear, I’m not saying that critically. If one understands Anglican and Episcopal structure it is certainly defensible and understandable. I just think the seeming incongruity should be explained.

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Filed Under: Anglicanism, Mainline, World

Mourning Columbine, yet again

November 5, 2007 By

columbineThere are very few news stories that have affected me as deeply as the massacre at Columbine High School. Obviously, Sept. 11 hit the whole country. It still stands as an event that I cannot even comprehend. But for me as someone who lived on that side of Denver for a decade, Columbine remains a kind of small-scale, very personal, horror that stands alone.

Looking back, it is hard to believe that many people tried to tone down the religion element of this complex story. This story was more than the story of one or two or three young people who were gunned down after they confessed their faith. There was more to this than debates about what is and what is not martyrdom.

In that video made before their rampage, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold talked about starting a “religious war” and mocked an outspoken Christian girl named Rachel. In audio tapes aired on CNN, and transcripts released by parents, Klebold said: “Stuck-up little b---- , you f------ little Christianity, godly little w----.”

Harris: “Yeah, ‘I love Jesus, I love Jesus.’ … Shut the f--- up.”

Klebold: “What would Jesus do? What would I do? (Makes shotgun sound at camera)”

“Rachel,” of course, must have been Rachel Joy Scott, who wrote in her personal journal — precisely one year before the tragedy — these words: “I have no more personal friends at school. But you know what? I am not going to apologize for speaking the name of Jesus, I am not going to justify my faith to them, and I am not going to hide the light that God has put into me. If I have to sacrifice everything I will. I will take it.”

There’s so, so, so much more to this story, of course. But all of that came back the other day as I read Stephanie Simon’s news feature in the Los Angeles Times about the dedication of the new memorial near the high school. It has all the small details that you would expect:

Cut into the hillside, the memorial features two curving walls of rough red sandstone. The outer wall is engraved with remarks from the community about that day. The inner wall supports 13 granite slabs, each inscribed with a victim’s name and a message from the family.

It’s a beautiful place. Wind rustles golden trees. Laughter drifts from a nearby playground. …

Cassie Bernall longed to know heaven. Lauren Townsend wrote in her diary: “I am not afraid of death for it is only a transition.” John Tomlin lost his faith for some time, then reconnected, with great joy. Rachel Scott’s killers asked if she believed in God. Her final words: “You know I do!” …

The victims of Columbine were regular kids, and that’s how they are honored here. They asked annoying questions, failed to make the soccer team, were obsessed with Chevy trucks — and the Packers. They struggled with depression. They liked ice cream.

The GetReligionistas love Simon’s work, as a rule. But this story is almost too nice.

You really wouldn’t know, unless you followed the coverage through the year, how hard it was to cross the tricky church-state territory surrounding that killing field. There were debates about memorial services. There were debates about civic prayers. There were debates about religious expressions in memorial tiles inside the school. Could you use crosses in a civic memorial? The debates were painful, but that was to be expected.

Simon says that there were complex issues linked to the memorial, but keeps things gentle.

Talk of a memorial began soon after the last funeral. But families of the victims wanted to focus first on rebuilding the school library, where Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris targeted several classmates, then turned their guns fatally on themselves.

It would be nearly four years before parents, teachers and civic leaders agreed on a memorial design. It took another four years to come up with $1.5 million for construction.

This is part of the story and a very beautiful part. But, sadly, we live in a day and age when it is even hard to mourn without battles over freedom of religion. I have no idea how you cover this story now, without focusing on the divisions as well as the unity.

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Filed Under: Academia, Catholicism, Evangelicals, Mainline

Are Holy Communion rules legal?

November 2, 2007 By

EC505I wish I could remember the name of the op-ed page columnist who, a decade or so ago, wrote that she had a legal right to receive Holy Communion in the Roman Catholic Church, even though she rejected most of its teachings. No, it wasn’t Maureen Dowd.

It’s clear that the issue of whether Catholic leaders have a right to enforce their own doctrines is not going to go away anytime soon. Can you say “Rudy Giuliani”? I knew you could. And, as the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence story showed the other day, there are going to be groups on the far lifestyle left that continue to push this button, too. For that matter, if ACT UP attacks the sacramental elements of the Mass, is that a hate crime of some kind?

Anyway, several GetReligion readers sent me links to a story by reporter Elaine Jarvik that ran the other day in the Deseret Morning News that wove together several of these themes into one piece of cloth. The headline: “Who shall partake? Churches grapple with the question of when to deny sacrament.”

At the very least, this is a story inside the Catholic culture wars. But broken Communion — in every sense of the word — is also a major factor in the Anglican crackup. Anyway, here is the lede of that Jarvik story. This kind of newswriting is hard to pull off, in mainstream pages:

When two men dressed in whiteface and strange outfits came forward to receive Holy Communion at a San Francisco Catholic church three weeks ago, no one batted an eyelash. At least that’s what it looks like on a video secretly recorded that morning and then posted on a conservative Catholic Web site.

Since then, though, that communion has caused a stir among some Catholics around the country, who think that San Francisco Archbishop George Niederauer was wrong to let the two men take the wafer and wine of the Eucharist. Archbishop Niederauer, the former Catholic bishop of Salt Lake City, had celebrated Mass that Sunday morning at Most Holy Redeemer Church in San Francisco’s gay-leaning Castro neighborhood.

The incident raises questions not only about whether Archbishop Niederauer realized who the two men were (members of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a group of gay men who identify themselves as nuns), but also about the rules of communion, a ritual that is central to Christianity.

The big question, again, is how church leaders strive or ignore their own teachings. Thus:

The question that tripped up Archbishop Niederauer was not what or when or how, but who. It’s a question that all Christian churches have considered, and with which some are still grappling. Do you only allow true believers? The doctrinally sound? The baptized? The members? The worthy? Anyone who wants to?

clinton communion1Or how about Baptist Bill Clinton, in a Roman Catholic Church?

The answer to this, and other questions, is suppose to depend on the teachings of the church — or Church — in question. Catholics are not supposed to be receiving unless they are active in the full sacraments of the Church. That includes Confession — which is the great forgotten secret of modern Catholicism. Here is how I put that a few years ago, in a column about Great Lent:

It’s time for the Catholic bishops to go to confession.

It’s time for all of the Catholic priests to go to confession.

Actually, with Easter a few weeks away, this is a time when all Catholics are supposed to go to confession.

But most of America’s 65 million Catholics no longer know or no longer care that their church requires them to go to confession at least once a year in order to receive Holy Communion. Confession is especially important during this season of Lent.

But what does this look like in public life? Was Tim Russert, back in 2004, supposed to ask John Kerry to name his spiritual father and cite his last trip to confession? (What if Kerry had asked Russert the same question?) But here is the real question: How about Kerry’s bishop? Can a bishop ask a communicant and/or his/her priest that question? Is it an attack on them to ask if they are living out the teachings of the faith in which they are — of their own free will — a member?

It’s hard to answer that question in a news feature. The bishops, of course, have to answer that hard question first. That’s what people called bishops are supposed to do, at least, that’s what bishops do in some churches.

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Filed Under: Anglicanism, Catholicism, Godbeat, Mainline, Worship

Mouw underlines a non-negotiable point

October 30, 2007 By

stairway to heavenThe other day, I raised a question or two — as I tend to do — about a Los Angeles Times story on an interfaith gathering of scholars to address scriptures that appear to “assert the superiority of one belief system over others.”

If you read the Times story, it would seem that all of the Christians, Jews and Muslims in this forum were pretty much on the same page, with few if any sparks of disagreement. It was, frankly, one of those “Can’t we all just get along?” stories that suggested a bright future for Unitarian-Universalist evangelists. However, I also noted:

Late, late, late in the story we learn that one of the other speakers at the forum was the Rev. Richard J. Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary. If I am not mistaken, Fuller is an evangelical Protestant seminary with Reformed theological roots. Did Mouw agree with the other scholars who were quoted by the Times? Was Mouw so out of line that he could not be quoted? If he was in step with the others, that would be a big story in and of itself.

As it turns out, Mouw has responded to my questions in a comment on that post, and I think it’s important to pull it out to the front page and let more GetReligion readers see it. We do that from time to time when people directly involved in stories and posts write us. So here is what the Fuller Seminary president has to say, in full:

I will try to clarify, as much as I can in some brief comments, my take on the important questions you raise.

It was an interesting conference. Each group was asked to talk about texts within their own tradition with which they have struggled. We were not all expected to deal with overtly inter-religious questions. I dealt with Romans 13, since it is a classic locus for evangelical discussions of political authority. But my Fuller colleague Love Sechrest, a young New Testament scholar dealt with some key texts in Galatians on Christ abolishing the law — what she said would have been approved of in any evangelical gathering.

For the record, I was interviewed by the LA Times reporter afterward, and she asked me what I thought of dialogues like this. I said — and she chose not to quote me in the story — that I believe that we need to be in dialogue, and to come with a willingness genuinely to learn from others. But, I quickly added, we do believe that Christ alone can save. My own view on this has been set forth publicly on many occasions. Dialogue with other religions has to aim at three goals: one is learning from others; another is working together for the “shalom of the City” (Jer. 29); but in all of this we must always be ready to point to the Jesus as the only One who is mighty to save. I am willing to allow some mystery in how Jesus actually gets ahold of people — but he alone is the Way.

I also had a fine conversation with a young woman rabbi who certainly did not think me wishy-washy on these matters. “Are you saying that your religious perspective is right and mine is wrong?” she asked. I responded: “I am saying that what is non-negotiable for me is that Jesus of Nazareth is the promised Messiah. That is simply something that we disagree about. You think I am wrong in saying that, and I think you are wrong in denying it. This is a fundamental disagreement.”

There are doctrinal points here that form a kind of spectrum of beliefs about the nature and identity of Jesus Christ and how one does or does not end up in heaven or hell.

In this case, the key is how readers have read Mouw’s statement that he is willing to “allow some mystery in how Jesus actually gets ahold of people.” Do people have to walk an aisle in a particular church? Are the good works and the honest faith expressed in other world religions enough to make someone what many Catholic theologians would call an “anonymous Christian,” a person who is saved by the grace of Jesus Christ, even if they do not believe in Jesus Christ. What about people who explicitly reject Jesus? What about the afterlife? Is the human soul still free to change (think C.S. Lewis and his book The Great Divorce) after death, or does free will end at the grave?

There are many, many variations and I urge you please, please, please not to get started arguing about them in the comments pages.

The key here is whether the Times report on the conference was seriously weakened by the omission of Mouw’s words of dissent or disagreement. I would argue that some kind of balance was needed and, as it turned out, there were voices in the room that tried to provide balance or, at the very least, more nuance.

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Filed Under: Academia, Evangelicals, Godbeat, Mainline, World Religions