From a website titled “Spark Notes” about Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, I learned the following: “In order to suggest the profundity of the old man’s sacrifice and the glory that derives from it, Hemingway purposefully likens Santiago to Christ, who, according to Christian theology, gave his life for the greater glory of humankind. Crucifixion imagery is the most noticeable way in which Hemingway creates the symbolic parallel between Santiago and Christ. When Santiago’s palms are first cut by his fishing line, the reader cannot help but think of Christ suffering his stigmata. Later, when the sharks arrive, Hemingway portrays the old man as a crucified martyr, saying that he makes a noise similar to that of a man having nails driven through his hands. Furthermore, the image of the old man struggling up the hill with his mast across his shoulders recalls Christ’s march toward Calvary. Even the position in which Santiago collapses on his bed—face down with his arms out straight and the palms of his hands up—brings to mind the image of Christ suffering on the cross. Hemingway employs these images in the final pages of the novella in order to link Santiago to Christ, who exemplified transcendence by turning loss into gain, defeat into triumph, and even death into renewed life.”

The conversation revolves around the word “purposefully”in the Sparks Notes first sentence. I have read that Hemingway himself has affirmed he intended no purposeful religious connections in his novella The Old Man and the Sea. Scot McKnight and I have a ritual of reading TOMATS at least once a year. I have catalogued the religious references in the story and it seems incredulous to me that Hemingway can “beg off”that the religious symbolism was not purposeful. The clincher for me is the reference to the stigmata. Hemingway wrote, “‘Ay,’he [Santiago] said aloud. There is no translation for this word and perhaps it is just a noise such as a man might make, involuntarily, feeling the nail go through his hands and into the wood.”How can this not be a profound, purposeful reference to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ?

Carlos Baker in his book Hemingway: The Writer as Artist makes this observation, “Santiago shows, in his own right, certain qualities of mind and heart which are clearly associated with the character and personality of Jesus Christ in the Gospel stories. There is an essential gallantry, a kind of militance”( 299). Santiago’s humility, formal prayers, and love for the marlin are offered as examples of a Christ-like figure (299-302).

How some can write that there is no comparison of the Old Man, Santiago, and Jesus Christ is beyond me. Carlos Baker continues, “Were these symbols intentionally put into the story?  Who can know for sure? Hemingway, himself, when questioned, said:  There isn’t any symbolism.  The sea is the sea.  The old man is an old man.  The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish.  The sharks are all sharks, no better or no worse.  All the symbolism that people say is sh*t.  What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know.  Personally I think that Hemingway used these images to convey meaning.  He didn’t intend to make Santiago, Christ or a Christ-type figure, he simply used images that all readers would be familiar with, to help us feel the old man’s struggle, pain, and sacrifice, and to share his triumph when he returned with the experience of the catch of his life.”

So, I am caught betwixt and between. Is Santiago a Christ-figure or not? Many Hemingway scholars say yes, but Hemingway said no. Lukas McKnight pointed me to a 1999 TIME magazine article where we, once again, can read Hemingway’s own words about symbolism in The Old Man and the Sea. Hemingway stated, “No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in…That kind of symbol sticks out like raisins in raisin bread. Raisin bread is all right, but plain bread is better.…I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things. The hardest thing is to make something really true and sometimes truer than true.”

What do you think?  Is Santiago a Christ-figure or not? Dust off your copy and read the story again.

Some are allergic to the term “salvation” because of how they were treated by it in their churches while others glory in the term because how they were treated by it in their churches. But here is one (almost) indisputable claim about salvation: most operate on one side of the term. That is, the spectrum runs from the spiritual notion of salvation (forgiveness, relation with God, eternal life with God) to the social notion of salvation (justice, healing, systemic evil vanquished). Very few hold them together: Jesus did and so too did the Evangelist Luke.

We are back to Justo Gonzalez, The Story Luke Tells: Luke’s Unique Witness to the Gospel, a recent offering by Eerdmans, and a book written so clearly it can be used in home Bible studies, Sunday School classes and classrooms — college and entry level seminary classes (I will be using in our NT 301 Jesus and the Gospels class this Fall at Northern Seminary).

Where to begin? Where the Bible does:

The main saving act of God in the Old Testament is the liberation from the yoke of Egypt, and it is to that liberation that many of the texts which speak of God as Savior refer (62).

Totally right: the archetypal saving event in the Bible is God the Savior saving the children of Israel from the clutches of Pharaoh and ushering them into the Sinai peninsula and then across the Jordan into the Promised Land. Salvation for them, what did it mean?

In the Old Testament, therefore, salvation is the action of God and of God’s servants in freeing Israel from slavery and subjection to the Egyptians, Philistines, Syrians, Babylonians, and all the threatening neighboring nations. Salvation is also the divine action protecting Israel in the field of battle, giving it victory over its enemies (62).

Right again. But there is another sense of salvation in the Old Testament, the notion of redemption, or buying back what is rightfully due to one. Thus,

When the prophet Isaiah says that “your Redeemer is the Holy One of Israel” (Isa. 41:14), this means that Israel properly belongs to God, and that therefore in delivering the people from the yoke of Egyptians, Babylonians, and others, God is simply reclaiming what is God’s possession (63).

With this in the background of the early Christians, the term “salvation” had senses that are largely ignored by those on the spiritual end of the spectrum though at times the other end too ignores the spiritual. But the term “salvation” in the Bible has a strong sense, especially in the Gospels, of healing and health and physical restoration. Hence,

Taking all this into account as we examine first the Gospel of Luke and then the book of Acts, we shall see that when in these books we find the word salvation, it refers not only to what we today understand as “salvation” [spiritual], but may also refer to the restoration of health, to liberation from an enemy or a threat, and to the reclaiming of what properly belongs to God (64).

Which leads Gonzalez to a wonderful set of observations on the famous shepherds at the birth of Jesus scene in Luke 2.

‘Do not be afraid; for see — I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord’ (Luke 2:10-11). Today we know that this reference to a savior has eternal dimensions [again, the spiritual end of the spectrum], that Luke is referring to an eternal salvation. But for those shepherds, mention of such a savior would immediately have reminded them of the other saviors of whom the Bible spoke: Moses, Joshua, Samson [in other words, especially the socio-political spectrum end] (65).

So, then, what about the famous statement in Acts 4:12 (italics and bold below)? In context, beginning at 4:8 we see that 4:12 might just have a full-orbed sense of salvation in mind far more than most say when they use this text (to emphasize salvation exclusively in Christ):

Then Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, said to them: “Rulers and elders of the people! If we are being called to account today for an act of kindness shown to a man who was lame and are being asked how he was healed,  then know this, you and all the people of Israel: It is by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified but whom God raised from the dead, that this man stands before you healed. Jesus is “ ‘the stone you builders rejected, which has become the cornerstone.’ 

Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved.”

Gonzalez offers this possible re-balancing translation to show the context: “there is healing in no one else…” (70).

This leads him to see all healing as the work of Jesus in the world through the power of the Spirit:

There is no health, no well-being, no truth, no existence that is not a gift of this Jesus, apart from whom there is neither salvation nor health (71).

Biblical salvation is an integral salvation. It is a matter that has to do not only with liberation from the power of death, but also with liberation from every oppressive power (73).

On p. 74, then, Gonzalez looks more directly at the church today with four observations:

Those Christians today who emphasize the healing power of God are making an important contribution to the discovery of Luke’ theology as well as of the biblical vision of an integral salvation.

But it does mean that while we proclaim the message of salvation in the sense of eternal life, we also have to proclaim the same message in the sense of liberation from every power of evil.

The truth is that purely material help is incomplete, and that a purely spiritual gospel is also incomplete.

If it is true that there is health in no other name than that of Jesus Christ, then all health is Christian, and therefore all health is part of the mission of the church. 74-75

From Donald Nwankwo (Anglican Deacon)

News about the response of relatives of some of the slain members of Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C. was so strong it stood on its own legs as a news item, side by side the massacre at a weekday prayer meeting. At the bond hearing, some of the victims’ family members pronounced their offer of forgiveness to the alleged killer, Dylann Roof. Reactions to this pronouncement have been mixed – welcomed by some, unwelcome by others, all over the media. In the past few days, I have pondered the issues, and below are some of my thoughts.

Why such forgiveness could be discomforting to some:

It is normally helpful to hear all sides with the best possible benefit of the argument. Some of the negative reactions were more constructive than others. In this section, I will simply attempt to garner what I think to be the main idea behind the reactions of those who showed disfavor with the pronouncement of forgiveness.

1. Was it too quick? Some of the negative reaction, I think, reflected a background question of whether these church members had even had enough time to process this magnitude of an experience and verified that they really have forgiven. Millicent Brown, a civil rights activist was reported on NPR as saying: “I think it’s disingenuous at best. I understand the stages of grief and you don’t usually jump to forgiveness first” (NPR Morning show, Jul 2, 2015). For this group, they are wondering if this declaration is real, or simply an attempt at some public show of Christian life that denies the reality of their deep feelings.
2. Does such response help or hurt the wider social problem? “This is a wider social issue that can’t be solved just by forgiveness,” some critics seemed to imply. For this group of reactions, It seems they are reacting from a perspective that sees the pronouncement as a way to dodge, or avoid, confrontation within the wider society on what they consider an endemic social issue that should be addressed. They must be afraid that a pronouncement of forgiveness might cause an end to, rather than stretch out, what should be a continuing public confrontation, especially in the way they would rather it continued.
3. Is this not simply a sign of weakness veiled by religion? I will simply generalize on this third group as the one that considers the offer of forgiveness to be a sign of weakness.

Possible misunderstandings about such acts of forgiveness:

1. The nature of forgiveness: Forgiveness says less about one’s actual feeling and more about the choice of a response. It does not deny the reality. In fact, in many ways, it acknowledges reality. Offering forgiveness to anyone, by itself at least, must imply an acknowledgement of wrongdoing, adverse to us, done by that person. So it sounds a bit strange, logically speaking, for anyone who offers forgiveness to be directly accused of denying the reality. On what basis then are they forgiving? It follows then, that the suggestion to react in a different way is still not one that is centered of the feeling, but rather it is advice that is at the realm of the response. Forgiveness is a response, not the feeling itself. It says something like, “Even though I have been hurt or wronged, I choose not to keep you under the tyranny of my grievance, but to set you (and myself) free from the cold battle of ill-feelings, hate, and desire for retaliation.” This then puts it in good context when the daughter of a 70-year-old victim acknowledges some of the implications: “I will never talk with her ever again. I will never be able to hold her again.” And yet goes on to say: “But, I forgive you.” It allows a revered, superior way of life to trump natural impulses and propensity.

It is tricky to strap down forgiveness as a manifestation of any specific stage of grief. First, the stages of grief do not necessarily refer to our actions as much as to what is happening internally that might help explain those active responses or tendencies. They are tools to help us understand our shifting attitudes as we grieve over time. This is why for different people, the same stage could play out differently externally. Forgiveness, therefore, does not solely have to be a product of the final stage called ‘acceptance’. In any case, acceptance as a stage does not necessarily mean you have become okay with what happened, it simply means you have come to terms with the reality and implications of it. The point is, forgiveness can come at that stage, but nothing prevents it from playing out at any stage (except perhaps, denial). If anything, its timing could be indicative of a person’s in-depth shaping and formation, playing out in character.

In fact, speaking of grief and the stages of it, in certain cases forgiveness could be a good way to lift a heavy burden off our shoulders which then allows us to grieve in a healthier manner – again, depending on situations.

2. Forgiveness, in view of the wider social discourse: Unlike how it may appear on the surface, forgiveness actually sees beyond the present and certainly beyond the human perpetrator. To be sure, it does not remove responsibility from the person, but Christians ultimately see the underlying enemy (and battle) differently. And, in the battle against this underlying enemy, forgiveness for humans can be deadly for that enemy. This, also, does not remove the wider social range of the issue. In my view, offering forgiveness to Dylan does nothing to shut down the social debates and discussions. It should actually enhance it. It only sets up a different kind of atmosphere for it. If anything, the light shone by the response of these believers only makes the darkness of the evil done by the shooter more disgusting. And such behavior, at least to a civilized society, ought to propel the conscience of the people to want to deal with that issue, which allows the underlying enemy’s intentions even less room for operation in the circumstance. Forgiveness can sometimes be a flashlight that illuminates the dark places and reveals even more clearly the badness of a terrible situation – bringing people to a revived conscience.

The ongoing challenge of forgiveness and the nature of Christian discipleship:

Anyone who has submitted to biblical discipleship understands how some tough aspects of spiritual formation happen. Sometimes we make the right choices because we have already been shaped to do so. But other times we commit to what we know to be the right thing, in spite of our current conflicting inclinations. And that commitment acts as a jump-start to live into it. It is like committing to a tough choice in spite of your weakness, but one you know to be right, and doing so in lieu of what you know or the person you desire to be in that context. This latter scenario is what I might call – advance commitment. That choice, even when our desires prompt us differently, is made in some sort of advance and borne on the wings of hope.

The challenge therefore is with time as it passes, and with the moments of weakness that are sure to come afterwards. These people remain broken. The grief continues. In fact, it should. The church entrance will still bring back fearful memories. Their minds will still play games on them as they gather each weekday and stay out some 90 minutes of prayer time with each other, before that altar. They will go home each night to miss their loved ones. It will be a tough road going forward. These make forgiveness difficult as an ongoing journey. But they committed to forgiveness when they publicly proclaimed it, and that advance-commitment will play a role in their hearts when they battle the bitterness that will come back now and then. Some lonely night will still come when all this media and social upheaval settles down. And sometimes they might wonder, themselves, if they really should have forgiven. The tears and fears are not over yet, but they dared to forgive.

I had the privilege last week of attending the first public conference held by BioLogos. This was in Grand Rapids and featured a number of fascinating speakers – Scot McKnight, John Walton, Ard Louis, Ted Davis, Len Vander Zee … a New Testament scholar, an Old Testament scholar, a scientist, a historian of science, and a pastor … and there were more perspectives as well.  Many of the plenary lectures (audio and video) and contributed talks (audio only) will be available on the BioLogos website. I will point out some of my favorites when these come online.

At this conference I picked up a new book Laying Down Arms to Heal the Creation-Evolution Divide and had the opportunity to meet (all too briefly) the author, Gary N. Fugle of Butte College in Oroville, near Chico California.  Gary was a Biology Professor (now retired) at Butte College and is a Christian who, as he says in his introduction (p. 5), has immersed himself in studying the Bible, has lead home fellowships and Bible studies, and regularly leads worship services at his church as a speaker and musician. He has been involved over the years in SBC and nondenominational congregations and for many years now in a PCA congregation.

Gary Fugle’s book is a call for Christians to lay down arms and think about the creation-evolution questions carefully and reasonably.  He classifies his position as evolutionary creation. As a biologist (Ph.D. from UC Santa Barbara) he finds the evidence for biological evolution overwhelming. As a Christian he has found himself (as have so many of us) on the front lines of a cultural battle. His book works through what he sees as some of the most significant issues in six sections:

I. Introduction

1. The Journey
2. Why Should You Care?
3. What Are We Talking About?

II. Real Issues for Christians

4. What Can the Natural World Tell Us?
5. God Wouldn’t Do It That Way
6. Foundational Views in Christian Faith

III. The Collision of Ideas

7. The Face of Science
8. It’s Only a Theory
9. Design in Nature
10. The Pursuit of God and Science

IV. The Value of Biological Evolution

11. Living Architecture
12. The Fossil Narrative, Gaps, and Hard Work
13. Where on Earth
14. The New Frontier
15. How Did That Happen?

V. Reading the Bible With Evolution in Mind

16. Reconciling Scripture and Evolutionary Theory
17. Creation over Six Days
18. Adam, Eve, and Original Sin
19. The Biblical Flood

VI. Maintaining Perspective

20. Christian Faith and Science

Over the course of the next few months I intend to post on each of these sections, starting today with the introduction.

Gary begins his book with a little of his own story. Although his mother attended church, he began, even in elementary school, staying at home with his father instead. Church simply wasn’t all that exciting. In college biology fascinated him and he “found particular satisfaction in the evolutionary concepts that pervaded many of my classes as I saw they had the power to explain so much about the complexities of nature.” (p. 4) But in graduate school his worldview began to change through a general dissatisfaction with a purely mechanical viewpoint.

My idealistic sense of our capacity to know and understand was slowly deflated by my observation of an all-too-frail and fallible (read human) nature found in even the greatest minds within my discipline. I became increasingly disenchanted with my mechanistic view of life and its inability to encompass all that I had experienced. My heart softened to a larger realm of possibilities. In my early years of college I was far from neutral toward Christians; I rejected them as weak, anti-intellectuals who stood in direct opposition to my way of thought. But when the timing was right, the message of Jesus and a God that is bigger than all I know and understand became oddly appealing. (p. 4)

This testimony is far from unusual. My background is different than Gary’s, and my story took a few different turns, but ultimately I did not and could not walk away from the faith of my youth because the “nothing buttery” of a naturalist, mechanical view of life is deeply unsatisfactory. It doesn’t seem to mesh with the evidence. Gary talks (p. 18) about the transcendent experience of sitting by a mountain lake on a windless morning. The same experience can come on a lake in the far-from-mountainous Cuyuna iron ranges in Minnesota. (The pictures above are the windless lake. The churned water is not polluted – but the color of the iron range.) Now this experience of transcendence doesn’t lead inevitably to Christian faith, but it does open the door.  It also means that Christians who hold vocally and polemically to an anti-evolution, and especially to a young earth, perspective are slamming shut a door for reaching people in our culture.

People are often surprised at how few Americans actually take a fully atheistic view. The truth is that the vast majority of individuals seek out spiritual realities and that many religious perspectives can be compatible with evolutionary theory. Most students and scientists with whom I have spoken are very aware of the association of young-earth creationism with the Christian faith and they will flatly reject Christianity on this basis. On the other hand, many find an appeal in the approach offered in this book that communicates the joys of Christianity while also allowing an open-minded view of evolutionary processes. (p. 11)

This is, in Gary Fugle’s view and in mine, an evangelistic mission.

Defining Terms. The definition of terms is incredibly important. Too often we talk past each other because we think we know what the other means by key terms. Creationist and evolutionist are such terms.  The third chapter of this book, What Are We Talking About?, focuses on the definition of terms. Fugle starts by defining creationist:

A creationist is someone who believes God is the sovereign Creator of the universe. (p. 23)

By this definition all Christians are creationists – an important point to remember. Now Fugle realizes that this isn’t the common definition at work in our world and won’t use the word creationist in this sense in the book. But it would help the discussion if we all get this straight. All Christians believe in an intelligent designer God who created the world and all that is in it.

Fugle introduces the term spontaneous creation to refer to both Young Earth Creation (YEC) and Old Earth (progressive) Creation (OEC) views.

The defining feature of these views is the belief that God instantly created life forms and/or complex structures from within his unique character and attributes (i.e. “spontaneously” = arising from internal forces or causes – Webster’s Dictionary). Although spontaneous creationists vary in their understanding of the earth’s are and how much evolutionary change may have occurred, they are united by a belief that the history of life on earth involved significant independent origins of biological form by God’s direct and instantaneous involvement outside of normal biological processes. (p. 25)

This is contrasted with evolutionary creation – “any view that suggests that God utilized the modifying and molding processes of evolution over the very long periods of time to create the vast diversity of life on earth.” (p. 25)  This will range from an almost deistic view that God started the process to a much more active view of God at work in the evolution of the diversity of life. But those holding this view tend to agree that the work of God in evolutionary creation is not directly detectable in scientific investigation.

On the scientific side there is mechanistic or naturalistic evolution where natural processes alone are thought to be at work in the world. There is nothing but that which can be investigated scientifically.  This is contrasted with theistic evolution where the science is the same, but in place of the philosophical commitment to naturalism we have a theological and philosophical commitment to the reality of God as Creator in some fashion. (Of course there could be other possibilities of spiritualistic evolution in other religious traditions, but here we are concerned with Christian belief.)

Theistic evolution and evolutionary creation are, for all intents and purposes, the same. Evolutionary creation emphasis the united view (with spontaneous creationists) that God is the creator. Theistic evolution emphasizes the scientific consensus that evolution accounts for the diversity of life.  Thus there are three major views: Spontaneous creation (both YEC and OEC), Evolutionary Creation/Theistic Evolution, and Materialistic Evolution/ Philosophical Naturalism/ Materialism. All of these views can be nuanced and further divided, but most people fall into one of the three categories.

Fugle also points out that it is important to distinguish between the robust debate surrounding the mechanisms of evolution and the “fact” of evolution found in many related lines of evidence (fossil record, genetic, embryonic).  It is also important to separate the questions surrounding the origin of life from the evolution of the diversity of life once the first single cellular organisms are formed. Lack of knowledge about the origin of life does not undermine the strength of the evolutionary evidence for subsequent formation of the diversity of life we see around us.

Does Fugle’s distinction between spontaneous creation and evolutionary creation make sense? Is this the major divide?

What role does the sense of wonder and dissatisfaction with a strictly material view of the world play in the acceptance of the Christian message?

Is this an evangelistic issue?

If you wish to contact me directly you may do so at rjs4mail[at]att.net

If interested you can subscribe to a full text feed of my posts at Musings on Science and Theology.

Apparently when Jesus shed his blood in fulfilling his redemptive mission, his blood was red, white and blue. That’s my observation from watching and reading many Christian reactions to the recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions. Too many USAmerican Christians have fused (one version of) American history with some of their favorite Bible verses and with their real fears of living in an increasingly complex, pluralistic culture.

Fear is the key factor.

So many Christians are now doubling down on the belief that the Great Commission is “to save America”or “to take America back for God.”(Tell that to my Native *American* Cherokee forefathers.) As a Christian pastor, I agree with the biblically-informed definition of marriage that God, our Creator, intends marriage to be a covenanted union between one man and one woman for life. But like so many of God’s intentions, rebellious people, including Bible-believing Christians, twist up God’s word to fit their lifestyles (exhibit A: divorce).

Why should I expect a nation, even one like ours, of increasingly secular people to live by God’s definition of marriage, let alone to obey the Ten Commandments? The USA is the number one arms dealer in the world, the number one producer of pornography, a leading consumer of the world’s resources, awash in the market for and the violence caused by illegal drugs, and, since Roe vs. Wade, a leading practitioner of abortion with increasingly, ghastly abandon. Tell me, what’s so “Christian”about any of this? Bible verse-bearing stone monuments in our national capitol have never made this a Christian nation. We’re fools if we think so. Parroting all that is good about America does not erase all the evil.

Why do we (Whites) think that our Black citizens might get real jumpy about “taking America back for God”? Why might African Americans be cautious about going back to the good old days of a controlling Judeo-Christian consensus? What religious affiliation dominated the Ku Klux Klan?  Do some Christians really want to continue “a kinder, gentler apartheid” than that which was practiced in South Africa?

Grade school versions of “American history” never did tell us white U.S. citizens what atrocities were committed against Black human beings. We simply learned about George Washington Carver and the peanut and Lincoln freed the slaves. Being so clueless about the historical pain of Blacks, we Whites are now truly confused about the current racial turmoil.

Privilege is a blindness.

You can quote Jesus on that (John 9).

In the middle 1970’s I was a young pastor of a church plant in Texas. [This next sentence is graphic, yet 100% true.] I had an elder tell me, “As long as I’m here, there’ll be no ‘niggers’or ‘spicks’ come through these doors.” I could hear the Apostle Paul’s scream all the way from heaven. I was shocked. Why? The one and only gift to this fractured planet that offers a way out of the power-keg mess that globally prevails is Christ’s commitment to “build his church.” The church Jesus is building is a global community of transformed human beings, a new humanity of Black, White, Hispanic, Asian, Arab, Israeli, Poor, Wealthy, and on and on.

U.S. Christians want to build America in order to keep their privilege.

Christian civil religion acting as the main character to save America may actually be her downfall. When the national props and expected privileges are knocked away and the only things that matter to the church are the grace of God through Jesus Christ and the power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, we might see an emerging shalom that catches a desperate world’s attention. The world that God sent Jesus to as The Hope of all was a world of ISIS terrorists, WASPs, KKKs and many others.

When they bleed, they bleed only red, as Jesus did.

What to do? Should we arm the ushers? should we put metal detectors? should we restrict fellowship?

Allan Bevere:

Hospitality Can Be Dangerous and Even Deadly

The shooting that occurred Wednesday night at an historic African American church in Charleston, South Carolina has focused our attention, once again, on several issues– racism, mental health, and gun violence, to name three. These are continued discussions we need to have because they are important.

I am quite sad as a write this post. The church affected was an African Methodist Episcopal Church, which has a common heritage with the United Methodist Church, of which I am a pastor. Of course, such a heinous crime at any church would be quite grieving, but there is something for me that hits a little more closer to home as we share a common Wesleyan theological heritage. Pastor, Rev. Clementa Pinckney was by all accounts a wonderful shepherd and also a state senator involved in the community and in the state. Persons like him are sorely missed when they are gone. And then there were the other eight victims, believers who obviously took their faith seriously as they were at a Wednesday night prayer meeting. Christians who darken the church door only on Christmas Eve and Easter Sunday rarely attend a weeknight prayer meeting. They too made a difference for Jesus in their own way, and they too are loved and cherished by family and friends. I am indeed sad.

As I said, once again this outrageous act will foster continued discussion, as it should, on racism, mental health, and gun violence. Those discussions continue to be important and necessary. But the purpose of this post is to focus on another issue–the importance of understanding that radical Christian hospitality can be dangerous and even deadly.

The suspect, Dylann Roof, walked into that prayer meeting and spent a half hour with the parishioners and the pastor gathered there. We do not yet know all the details, but I have no doubt that the pastor and those there welcomed Dylann into their midst. He sat with them while they prayed and lifted up the name of Jesus before he opened fire, killing nine. He was the Judas who would betray them.

Christian hospitality can be a dangerous thing. The Church of Jesus Christ is an intrinsically hospitable community. It is in our DNA. We are the Body of Christ; therefore, we welcome all because Jesus welcomed all. When people enter a church building, whether on Sunday or Wednesday or any other time, there is someone to greet and welcome them. No one is carded, or frisked, or sent through a metal detector. We simply welcome all. For Christians, strangers are only people we hope to make our friends.

I have heard that there are a few churches around the country who have armed ushers and who send everyone through a metal detector. By the wisdom of the world I understand the logic, but by the logic of the gospel, such procedures make no sense to me. The radical hospitality of the gospel demands that all are welcomed as those made in the image of God seeking Jesus, not criminals suspected of getting ready to perpetrate a crime. Some will say that I am naive. So be it. Being the church has been a risk from the beginning of the faith; after all, the Lord Jesus, the founder and center of our faith, was crucified for, among other things, his radical hospitality.

“Security” is not a synonym for faith; it is “risk.”

I really do not have much else to say, except that we need to remember the family and friends of the grieving in our prayers.