In 2020, Barry Bussey of the Canadian Centre of Christian Charities (CCCC) published a book titled The Status of Religion and the Public Benefit in Charity Law. In it, lawyers and others from several countries objectively justify why advancing religion is a public benefit and therefore is a charitable purpose.

I wrote a chapter for it titled “The Public Benefit of ‘Advancing Religion’ as a Charitable Purpose: A Canadian perspective.” There is a wealth of academic and peer-reviewed research that proves clearly and undeniably that advancing religion benefits every Canadian, whether or not they are religious. Even the most atheistic Canadian who would never darken your church door should say a prayer of thanksgiving for your church everytime he or she passes by (humour intended!).

CCCC’s members can discuss this post in The Green.

Let’s get the word out that churches do a whole lot more to bless Canada than anyone realizes.

Enjoy the read!

The post The Public Benefit of Advancing Religion in Canada: A Canadian Perspective appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

There are three main points in these articles that need a response:

1. CFIC asserts that “[I]t is no longer appropriate to confer charitable status…on organizations whose sole purpose is evangelism, the aim of ‘advancing religion’ is not an intrinsic good, and Canadians should not continue subsidizing organized religion.”¹
2. CFIC’s attempt to analyze the cost of the charitable tax credit for donations to religious charities is incomplete and therefore very misleading.
3. The rationale for CFIC’s position is based on a faulty premise: “CFIC believes that Canada’s social safety net is better provided by organizations that do not require program participants to adhere to the tenets of a religion in order to participate.”²

CFIC: Advancing religion is not an intrinsic good

CFIC’s assertion that advancing religion is not an intrinsic good is indeed just that: a mere assertion. It is an opinion not grounded in evidence and research. It comes nowhere close to answering the volumes of peer-reviewed research showing the opposite. Just one Canadian example of this research is the 2020 book, The Status of Religion and the Public Benefit in Charity Law. It contains chapters on the public benefit of advancing religion by authors from several countries, replete with evidence of the numerous benefits of advancing religion.

CFIC: The charitable tax credit for advancing religion is an unfair cost to Canadians

CFIC’s approach to valuing the charitable tax credit for donations to religious charities is deeply flawed because it considers only the tax credit’s cost. Its focus is exclusively on the cost of religion to Canadians, and that’s fine if someone is merely curious about tax expenditures. However, it is woefully inadequate for any discussion about the tax credit itself. Public policy decisions must include a full analysis of the costs and the benefits. CFIC’s approach is akin to valuing stocks and bonds based only on the purchase price without regard to expected return on investment or risk. We wouldn’t use the Centre for Inquiry Canada’s simplistic methodology for personal investment decisions. Neither should Canadians use CFIC’s simplistic methodology when investing through the tax system.

The Centre for Inquiry Canada frames the entire issue as a cost issue, the cost of religion, without considering the value of religion at all. In fact, one of the authors of the report, Sandra Dunham, dismissed robust, academically rigorous research that examines value aspects of the tax credit as “offensive” and “drivel.” In the same opinion piece, Dunham castigated the media for reporting this research. Using these terms and tone is inappropriate in serious public policy discussion, greatly undermining CFIC’s claim to be scientific and rational.

Who really benefits from religion?

Fortunately for all Canadians, others have done a much better job than the Centre for Inquiry Canada of examining the socioeconomic benefits of religion. Every Canadian, even the most secularist or atheistic Canadian, benefits from the places of worship that the Centre for Inquiry Canada writes off so easily. One example will show what the CFIC has overlooked.

Every Canadian (religious or non-religious) who values—or who has benefitted from or might ever benefit from—organizations involved in the following initiatives, along with many other charitable causes, have places of worship to thank for transforming people into civic-minded, caring, generous neighbours who support Canada’s secular charities:

• Wildlife and environmental conservation
• Arts and culture
• Education
• Healthcare
• International aid
• Shelters and care for people who are homeless and those who are poverty-stricken

How do secular charities benefit from religion?

Evidence³ makes it clear that the health of the charitable sector rests on the health of the religious charitable subsector. Statistics Canada has shown that the 19% of Canadians who are very committed religious people fund 74% of all donations to religious charities and 22% of all donations to secular charities.⁴ The same relationship has been found by Statistics Canada in its surveys over the decades, so we can have confidence that the relationship between religion and generosity is consistent over time.⁵ The median donation by Canada’s very committed religious people to secular charities is almost double that of secular people.⁶ Overall, Imagine Canada reports ⁷:

• that 47%  of weekly [worship service] attenders are in the top 25% of all givers in Canada, while only 12% of the non-religious are in the top 25% of all givers.
• that the religious give an average of $1,284 to charity while the non-religious give only $313.

Why so generous?

What makes these religious Canadians so generous? According to Carl Juneau, who worked on the regulation of charities in the Tax Policy Branch of the federal Department of Finance, the teachings and practices found in places of worship inspire them to be better members of society. It is precisely the religious beliefs that are taught in places of worship (the very same places that the Centre for Inquiry Canada says have no public benefit) that result in the generous behaviour that funds religious and secular charities. In turn, these charities provide huge public benefit to all Canadians. The investment in places of worship has helped create the people who are most likely to give and to give generously. The small religious sector of Canadian society provides a large part of the social safety net that CFIC says it values.⁸

A global phenomenon

If Canadian research is not compelling enough for CFIC, the same objectively measurable generosity found in very religious Canadians is consistently found across the globe. After an extensive review of about 550 different studies from many countries, two Dutch professors confirm⁹ that a positive relationship between church membership and/or frequency of church attendance and secular and religious philanthropy appears in “almost any article in which this relationship was studied.” 

CFIC: Places of worship benefit only their members

Finally, the Centre for Inquiry Canada asserts that places of worship serve only members of their own religion. This is far from the truth. Such an unfounded and false claim only further undermines the credibility of CFIC’s work. According to an Imagine Canada report, “Perhaps contrary to expectation, religious organizations tend to serve the public, regardless of faith. Religious organizations are less likely than nonprofit and voluntary organizations in general to have membership restrictions or to serve a specific segment of the population.”¹⁰ A study of 46 Ontario churches supports Imagine Canada’s report with objective evidence. The study concluded that non-members were four times more likely to use a church’s community programs than the church members were.¹¹

The tax credit for advancing religion is a great investment

If, rather than use the simplistic cost-only approach promoted by the Centre for Inquiry Canada, we use an investment approach involving both costs and benefits to assess the value to Canadian taxpayers of the donation tax credit for advancing religion, a peer-reviewed study found that for every public dollar invested in places of worship through the tax system (charitable tax credit, GST/HST tax reduction, property tax exemptions), the public receives a return on investment of more than $10.

This remarkable rate of return on tax support for advancing religion supports the wellness of our nation. Removing this charitable purpose would have serious undesirable consequences for all Canadians by reducing the dollars the religious among us have available to donate to secular charities. Advancing religion is truly a benefit, not a cost, to Canadian society.

The post Centre for Inquiry Canada and the Cost of Religion appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

CCCC members who would like to discuss this post can do so in The Green.

God has an exciting trajectory for humanity that leads from a world populated by two people with nothing of human design in it to a highly populated society designed and built by humans. Jews and Christians know this trajectory as the Creation Mandate, which was given to all humanity in Genesis 1:26-28. Everyone else is on the same trajectory but thinks of it as simply human progress. Either way, all well-intentioned people have the same objective: to build a good world that will sustain and support a thriving humanity. This shared goal gives Christians a great way to build bridges into all other communities.

However, it may be that some Christians are not making the most of this opportunity to reach out to our neighbours because the Creation Mandate is often sidelined in favour of the Great Commission. We could all benefit from a fresh review of the Creation Mandate and our response to it because the mandate is vitally important to God and his plan for both creation and humanity.

The Creation Mandate

I find it remarkable, but in line with God’s generous character, that he gave humanity the responsibility of co-creating the world that will support our growing population. In giving the Creation Mandate, God charged Adam and Eve (and through them, all humanity) to subdue the earth and to rule over all living creatures.

Subdue

Since Genesis 1 is all about how God created order out of chaos, the best of the different meanings of subdue in this context is “to control for the purpose of establishing order.” Today, we call this creation care.

Genesis 2:15 helps us understand how to care for creation as God’s stewards in a way that pleases him: “Then the Lord God took the man and put him into the Garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it.” The crucial words are cultivate and keep. Here’s a good explanation of what God wanted Adam to do:

[Cultivate] can be translated as work, nurture, sustain, and husband; [keep] means to safeguard, preserve, care for, and protect. These are active verbs that convey God’s intention that human beings both develop and cherish the world in ways that meet human needs and bring glory and honor to him. . . . Human beings are, by divine intent and their very nature, world-makers.

James Davison Hunter. To Change the World, p 3.

God expects us to bring order to the natural world and then cultivate and care for it so that it continues to provide sustenance and enjoyment to humanity. Without idolizing creation, we are to cherish it as the treasure it is.

Rule

The best of the available meanings of rule in the context of Genesis 1 is “to have charge of.”  We have charge over all living things, and the way we rule must align with the way God rules. That means we must rule with the goal of ‘justice‘ because God created humanity in a condition of justice (shalom), where each person had his or her due share of God’s creation. And it means our rule must be characterized the same way as Psalm 145 characterizes God’s rule. He rules by wisdom, power, goodness, grace, compassion, faithfulness, generosity, provision, protection, justice, and love.

Our Responsibility

Since the Creation Mandate was given before the fall and has never been rescinded, it continues to apply to everyone, Christian and non-Christian alike. Theologian N. T. Wright is careful to distinguish between the Creation Mandate to build our world and God’s work of building his kingdom, and he makes it clear that fulfilling the Creation Mandate is not optional:  

God builds God’s kingdom. But God ordered his world in such a way that his own work within that world takes place not least through the human beings who reflect his image. . . . He has enlisted us to act as his stewards in the project of creation. . . . Through the work of Jesus and the power of the Spirit, he equips humans to help. . . . The objection about us trying to build God’s kingdom by our own efforts, though it seems humble and pious, can actually be a way of hiding from responsibility, of keeping one’s head well down when the boss is looking for volunteers.

N. T. Wright. Surprised By Hope. P 207.

Another theologian makes the same point about the obligation of fulfilling the Creation Mandate. Doing so as God’s representative “is the basic purpose for which God created humanity. We are responsible to God to manage and develop and care for creation.”¹

The Necessity of the Creation Mandate

Continuing to build our world helps it provide for our growing needs. As the population increased beyond Adam and Eve, there was a need to construct social institutions to help us relate to one another and coordinate our activities. We needed economic systems for trade and investment so we could diversify and specialize our work so some people produce what we need for survival and others work in science, medicine, or the arts. We could also pool resources to do projects that no single individual could do. As populations became denser, we developed technology to provide more bountiful food supplies and to distribute food and goods across longer distances. We built an educational system to support discovery of new knowledge and to pass it on to others. Today we still need to learn how to use the world’s resources wisely, particularly for energy, and create ways to sustain life on an increasingly densely populated planet.

These are all issues that Christians ought to care about and be involved in, so we should not withdraw from politics, banking, the arts, or any of the other things that evangelicals have tended to shy away from. Christians need to be active in all aspects of world-making to fight against the effects of sin (including our own) and keep all human-designed systems working for the good of all humanity.

What Creation Care Looks Like

Not properly stewarding God’s physical creation has dire consequences, according to the authors of Caring for Creation (Mitch Hescox and Paul Douglas). They say that disregarding God’s instructions to tend and care for the earth results in the earth’s failure to provide the necessities for sustaining life. While I haven’t done my own research, they cite research showing, for example, that there is a strong link between petrochemicals and fossil fuel energy and conditions such as asthma, autism, ADHD, and allergies. Breast cancer has risen from a lifetime risk of 5% to 12.5% since the 1960s, and research is increasingly showing that plastics and chemicals that act like hormones in our bodies are the likely culprits.² Environmental stewardship is crucial to our future! As Christians, we should be at the forefront of environmental activism.

Caring for Creation is an excellent book for anyone wondering about how real the environmental issues are or anyone wanting to start caring more for God’s creation. The authors provide plenty of research, some theological reflection, and ideas for what individuals and churches can do.

N. T. Wright describes a different aspect of creation care: adding beauty to our world:

Part of the role of the church in the past was – and could and should be again – to foster and sustain lives of beauty and aesthetic meaning at every level, from music making in the village pub to drama in the local primary school, from artists’ and photographers’ workshops to still-life painting classes, from symphony concerts . . . to driftwood sculptures. The church, because it is the family that believes in hope for new creation, should be the place in every town and village where new creativity bursts forth for the whole community, pointing to the hope that, like all beauty, always comes as a surprise.

N. T. Wright. Surprised By Hope. P 231-32.

Beauty is not superfluous. It was important enough to God that he did not make a utilitarian world. He wasn’t concerned only with functionality. Because beauty is important to him, he demonstrated great creativity and artistry in creating a world that delights, amazes, and stimulates wonder. He gave us our senses to enjoy beauty. He gave us minds that can appreciate beauty. If beauty is important to God, it should be important to us too.

Creation care is about much more than environmental stewardship; it is about caring for the complete environment in which humans exist — social, intellectual, emotional, and so on.

What Justice Looks Like

Here’s one vision for what ruling with justice looks like:

Part of the task of the church must be to take up that sense of injustice, to bring it to speech, to help people articulate it and, when they are ready to do so, to turn it into prayer. And the task then continues with the church’s work with the whole local community, to foster programs for better housing, schools, and community facilities, to encourage new job opportunities, to campaign and cajole and work with local government and councils, and, in short, to foster hope at any and every level.

N. T. Wright. Surprised by Hope. P 231.

Greg Paul’s book Resurrecting Religion: Finding Our Way Back to the Good News puts a human face to the suffering caused by injustices right here in Canada. The book is challenging because readers will come to realize that we can’t ignore our role, whether active or passive, in sustaining these injustices that are part of our own society. Paul writes:

Imagine if the church in this world, and the individuals who make it up, actually looked and acted like Jesus. Instead of spending most of our time and resources on a razzle-dazzle Sunday morning service, together we’d heal the sick, feed the hungry, embrace the unwelcome, set prisoners free, restore the dignity of people who have been humiliated, flip the tables of oppressive economics, offer forgiveness instead of seeking vengeance, sacrifice rather than protect ourselves, and much, much more. We’d vote for governments that promised to do those things . . . we’d be content with having enough, we’d share our excess with those who don’t have enough. We’d do all this as well as announcing the Good News of salvation for the individual soul — in fact, we’d do all this as a means of announcing it. Because that is what Jesus did.

Greg Paul. Resurrecting Religion. P 76-77.

Ensuring all humanity experiences God’s justice (shalom) is the basic rationale for all compassion ministry.

We Can’t Go Back

Because some people have romantic ideas about returning the world to what they consider is some earlier idyllic time when everything seemed to be just right, it must be noted that God’s trajectory does not include a return to the past. The trajectory is not a circle, but a line that takes human history in only one direction: from God’s creative work in the past to God’s ideal future for humanity.

And we should also watch out for another error: dualism. That happens when we think that a pure, pristine, 100% natural world is the goal. In that thinking, nature is good and human development (such as cities) is bad. But God’s ideal future for us includes nation states, economies, and political governance (see Revelation 21:24), and those structures will be the continuation of what we have built by fulfilling our responsibilities under the Creation Mandate.

This last point needs to be emphasized. The work we do today to create a better world has eternal consequences. Our work isn’t going to be undone by God at the end of time. Instead, God will perfect it! N. T. Wright has a great explanation of how what we do today will carry over into God’s ideal future:

The final coming together of heaven and earth is, of course, God’s supreme act of new creation. . . . He alone will make the “new heavens and new earth.”. . . But what we can and must do in the present, if we are obedient to the gospel, if we are following Jesus, and if we are indwelt, energized, and directed by the Spirit, is to build for the kingdom. . . . You are accomplishing something that will become in due course part of God’s new world. Every act of love, gratitude, and kindness; every work of art or music inspired by the love of God and delight in the beauty of his creation; every minute spent teaching a severely handicapped child to read or to walk; every act of care and nurture, of comfort and support, for one’s fellow human beings and for that matter one’s fellow nonhuman creatures; and of course every prayer, all Spirit-led teaching, every deed that spreads the gospel, builds up the church, embraces and embodies holiness rather than corruption, and makes the name of Jesus honored in the world – all of this will find its way, through the resurrecting power of God, into the new creation that God will one day make. That is the logic of the mission of God.

N. T. Wright. Surprised By Hope. P 208.

Our goal is not to stay put at some comfortable place we find along the way, or to return to an earlier point, but to keep pressing on toward God’s ideal future.

Engaging with the Creation Mandate

As Christians, our knowledge of God and his ways will help us decide at each step along the trajectory what is good and what is not. These are matters that the church can and should address. Christians should be at the forefront of caring for and ruling over creation. While we certainly shouldn’t browbeat people with biblical verses to support this or that Christian view, we can use Scripture and theology to form a godly position and then because creation follows natural laws laid down by God, find good research to support our position and convince non-Christians of the goodness of it.

There are two reasons why Christians must engage in the Creation Mandate:

1. It is our responsibility: If we leave the responsibility for God’s creation to only those who do not know God, we would be irresponsible stewards. We have perspectives that might not otherwise be heard. Although non-Christians can manage reasonably well using human wisdom founded on natural revelation and their God-given capacity for reasoning, they won’t have the benefit of the knowledge of God and his ways as Christians do. And we should be working beside them anyway. It would be to our shame if the non-Christian world took better care of God’s world than we did.
2. It builds a bridge: Working on the Creation Mandate builds a bridge from the Christian community to all other communities because we both want the natural world to be in the very best condition for humanity to thrive. Doors may open for the Gospel message to be conveyed and accepted when we work together in common cause.

How Churches Can Fulfill the Creation Mandate

The discussion guide attached to this post will help your church get started on identifying the role it could play in helping Christians fulfill the Creation Mandate. Here are some high-level ideas to prepare for that discussion:

• Deliver a sermon series on the theme of justice throughout the Bible. A great resource for preaching about justice is Let Justice Roll Down by Bruce Birch. Alternatively, find a Bible study or write one for small group or personal study.
• Teach the biblical principles that should guide how Christians should think about any of the issues in our society so they can do their own analysis and develop a position. How does God want us to think? What should our priorities and values be? What are the parameters of a good position?
• Prepare your congregational members to be great stewards of the Creation Mandate by ensuring they have been transformed by Christ to rule with the characteristics of God’s rule as listed above. As N. T. Wright says, “If the gospel isn’t transforming you, how do you know that it will transform anyone else?”³

Key Thought: Christians must engage with the Creation Mandate as part of God’s plan for humanity.

“The books, Caring for Creation: The Evangelical Guide to Climate Change and a Healthy Environment and Resurrecting Religion have been provided courtesy of Graf-Martin Communications, Inc. Available now at your favourite bookseller.”

The post The Creation Mandate: Our Responsibility and Our Bridge appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

But what about those who opposed their reforms?

• What is it like to be on the resistant side of reform?
• More pointedly, what if we are the ones people want to reform?

An Evangelical Reformation?

Five hundred years ago today on October 31, 1517, Martin Luther launched a critique of the Catholic church. Might there be any other “Martin Luthers” making a similar critique of the Evangelical church today?

Any organization or movement inevitably calcifies from the “encrustations of time”¹ and periodically needs reform that reinvigorates it, calls it back to its roots, and helps it focus on the right things. Calls for reform can expose our blind spots, mission drift, and untested assumptions. The Evangelical church has had a run of several hundred years, and who’s to say we ourselves are not in need of reform? A healthy church needs to be open to that possibility if it wants to stay healthy.

Calls for reform should be examined, tested and, if valid, accepted. But even if not accepted as a whole, there could still be a part of the call to reform that points to opportunities for improvement. We shouldn’t dismiss our critics too quickly, because God could be using them to speak prophetically to us!

For example, calls for theological reform are perhaps the most difficult of all to handle well. We might just dismiss them out of hand, but then we would miss an opportunity to look for ways we could become a better church. For example, a call to reform our theology of gender identity could be rejected but still lead to an examination of:

• how well we understand issues of gender identity and the experience of people who question their identity or who have identified with a non-traditional gender identity,
• how we serve people who see things differently than we do but who still need God’s love and forgiveness just like us, and
• how we engage in dialogue with people who oppose our convictions.

Every call for reform gives us an opportunity to learn and become a better church.

The Reformation

Let’s take advantage of the 500th anniversary of the start of Luther’s reform movement to see what the Evangelical church can learn from how the Catholic church responded to Luther’s 95 Theses.

Martin Luther’s Reform

Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of All Saints’ Church (also known as the ‘Castle Church’) in Wittenberg, Germany.²

Nailing the theses to the door was not an act of defiance or protest, but was the accepted way that university professors announced topics they would like to debate. Martin Luther was a theology professor at the University of Wittenberg and he was not instigating a public uprising against the Catholic church, but a discussion about its problematic practices.

At this early stage of the Reformation, Luther’s goal was to reform the corrupt and abusive practices of the Catholic church at the time. He didn’t want to break with Rome. Had the Catholic church corrected the abuses and ended the corruption promptly, it is quite possible that Luther would have remained a Catholic. It was only over time that the break became inevitable.

Recently I took a course on the Reformation which was taught by a very scholarly and influential Benedictine monk. Surprisingly, he agreed with most of Luther’s theses! In his words, “The church really did need reform!”

The Catholic Church’s Response

So how did the Catholic church respond? Well,

• Luther sent his theses to the church hierarchy on October 31, 1517
• The Catholic church condemned his writings in 1518, declared him a heretic in 1520, and excommunicated him in 1521
• The church still had to deal with the growing dissent. After receiving the 95 Theses in 1517, the church took 28 years to create a process to respond to Luther’s objections and try to prevent a permanent breach. In 1545, it convened the Council of Trent for this task
• It took the Council 18 years to formulate its conclusions, closing in 1563
• The turnaround time for the church’s response was an amazing 46 years!

Luther died in 1546, just a year after the Council convened. The church’s delay meant that, even if he had been willing to participate in the Council, Luther died before it got to meaningful debate.

Lessons for Evangelicals

Engage Early

During the 28 years of apparent inactivity on the Catholic side, the Protestants were very active, developing their own theology and then dividing into multiple camps as they argued over various theological matters. By the time the Council convened, there was no single Protestant leader or group to dialogue with, and a Protestant ecclesiology had solidified which did not include the papacy. The situation had become way more complicated than at the beginning. As the saying goes, it was too late to shut the barn door because “the horse” was long gone!

• Some issues aren’t all that significant and will disappear on their own. But a call to reform on a significant issue is likely to gain traction and be sustained over time because the reformers are heavily invested in bringing about change. Either the pressure will continue to mount for you to reform, or they will take matters into their own hands and move ahead on their own. The world will not stop and wait for you to plan your response.

Be Aware of History

The Catholic church invited some leading Protestants to attend the Council and discuss their differences, even giving them an offer of ‘safe conduct.’ Very few came though, and then only for a short time, because just a century before, in 1415, Jan Hus had also protested the very same things that Luther was protesting, and even though he had been given ‘safe conduct’ to attend the Council of Constance to discuss his views, once at the Council he was tried and condemned, was scalped, and then burned at the stake! It’s no wonder that a ‘safe conduct’ didn’t mean much to the Protestants!

• We may have some history to apologize for. Be humble and get the dialogue off to a good start by acknowledging past actions that have made the situation worse today. It may take a while to build enough trust with the reformers to have a meaningful conversation with them.

Set Aside Fears

Part of the reason for the Catholics’ long delay in responding to the Protestants was that a response would require a church council, and popes had feared calling a council ever since the Council of Constance. In addition to condemning Hus, that was the council that decided church councils are superior to the Pope and could declare a pope to be heretical. Although this decision was overturned at the Council of Florence, popes were disinclined to call a council for fear it would get out of hand.

• Don’t let fear prevent engagement. Have faith that God is involved in your affairs and will support you through challenging times.

Be Humble

As I reported in an earlier post, when the Council of Trent discussed another of Luther’s theses (disagreement over the sacraments), a cardinal proposed that the communion cup be given to the laity as well as to the clergy, and it was acknowledged there really wasn’t a good argument against doing so. This change would have satisfied the Protestants, who felt lay people should receive both the bread and the wine. But the Council shot down the proposal only because it would mean admitting that the church had made a mistake in the past!³

• If we’ve made a mistake, admit it and do the right thing. Our goal isn’t to save face, it is to be faithful. Pride will stop honest dialogue and self-examination in their tracks. The only way forward requires humility.

Explore and Inquire

John O’Malley, author of Trent: What Happened at the Council, wrote that “Each side could not help playing according to its own rules and therefore making demands on the other that required it to surrender or severely compromise its identity.” This pretty much guaranteed there would be no reconciliation.

• Engage in a spirit of inquiry with the goal of exploring and discovering what is right together. If agreement isn’t possible, you can always end in disagreement if necessary and still have made some progress or improvement. But you won’t get even that far if you create barriers to engagement.

Be Intellectually Honest

O’Malley also noted that the Catholic theologians suffered from two systemic weaknesses:

1. The first was a penchant for proof-texting, lifting statements, and even ideas of the Protestant Reformers, out of context, the result of an undeveloped skill in textual analysis.
2. The second weakness was an underdeveloped sense of historical criticism, which resulted in the Council affirming apostolic origins for beliefs and practices where there were none, or where those origins were much less secure than the council intimated.

• Engage with intellectual honesty. Be sure to understand the other’s position completely, and to acknowledge weaknesses in your own position. For example, not every practice needs to be seen in the New Testament church to be valid. As I discussed in my book, The Church at Work, if that were the case there would be no room for the Holy Spirit to do anything new or for us to adapt to new circumstances that the early church didn’t have to deal with.

So, …

Calls for reform in the church should be taken as an opportunity for self-evaluation with the goal of becoming the best church possible. We don’t need to agree with everything others believe in order to learn something from them.

For example, here’s an article by a reporter for the United Church of Canada Observer magazine explaining what the United Church can learn from Evangelicals.

What could conservative Protestants learn from liberal Protestants? Perhaps they could help us think through how to do a better job speaking out on social justice issues. We do great with compassionate ministry, but tend to be uncomfortable with issues of systemic injustice.

The real equivalent to Martin Luther’s reform movement would be those within the Evangelical church who are now drawing apart from it as they critique their Evangelical beliefs and practices. One such group is the highly controversial “emerging church.” I am no expert on this brand of Christianity, but generally they call for a more inclusive Christianity, one that is more focused on service than doctrine, and one that emphasizes love and grace over truth and sin. Even if we disagree or have concerns with aspects of their theology, could we learn from them about being present with those outside our faith and engaging them where they are at?

A Vision for the Evangelical Church

A great vision for the Evangelical church is that it remain faithful to Christ and be both self-aware and self-correcting so that it is exemplary, healthy, and effective in mission. It would be open to critique from any source and use it to become a better church.

Since there is no centralized structure to the Evangelical church, it is up to ministry leaders to show community leadership and dialogue with other Evangelical leaders with whom they are in relationship.

Key Thought: Critics show us where there is room for improvement.

A Mighty Fortress is Our God

Here’s a bonus for you. Martin Luther wrote and composed many hymns, but the most famous of them all is A Mighty Fortress is Our God (“Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott” in German). It captures Luther’s spirituality so well that the church in Wittenberg has it inscribed on its tower!

I recorded a 2 minute fughette based on the very memorable opening line, which you can listen to in the video below. Enjoy!

The post Reformation: When Others Want You to Reform appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

Christianity and Modern Thought

Science, Reason, and Religion

Many people try to pit science against religion, as if only one can be true. This is a false dichotomy. The popular assumption of a conflict would only be true if they both claimed to explain the same thing, and this simply isn’t the case. Albert Einstein aptly summed up the complementarian relationship between science and religion as: Religion without science is blind. Science without religion is empty. Another way to phrase it would be that science answers the “What?” and religion answers the “Why?” Science explains how things work, and religion explains why things are. They are two very different topics that actually work quite well together.

The same logic can be applied to reason and religion. Most people believe that the Enlightenment was an age of reason that juxtaposed faith and reason, assuming again that only one could be true. However, all the early thinkers of the Enlightenment were sincere Christians who believed that reason was possible only because God exists and is orderly in his ways. It is because of God’s orderliness that we can study and increase our knowledge about how God’s world works.

Some people believe that the more we understand how things work, the less we need God. They see God as a black box to explain what we do not yet understand. But this is not true either. It is still God who sustains it all. In fact, Sir Isaac Newton, who originated the idea that there are Laws of Nature, believed that those laws proved God’s existence on the basis that if there is a law, then there must be a Law-Giver.

During much of the Enlightenment, reason and God went together quite well. In fact, John Locke (one of the heroes of the Enlightenment) wrote a book called The Reasonableness of Christianity in which he made the case that the Bible, taken literally, is entirely reasonable. However, the one downside to the work of the early Christian Enlightenment thinkers was that it had the effect of downgrading revelation as a source of knowledge.

What really turned modern thought anti-religious was when the French philosophers got involved. They were the first to pit reason against religion. The French philosophers were very anti-Catholic, and by extension, anti-Christian and anti-religion. They did their best to replace God with reason.

More than Reason

While many would like to depend upon reason alone as the infallible guide for acquiring knowledge, it turns out that reason alone is not up to the task.

• First, we don’t agree on what is reasonable! Reason can be quite ambiguous. For example, a later Enlightenment thinker, David Hume, believed it was common sense not to believe in God, while his contemporary, Thomas Reid, believed it was common sense to believe in God.
• Second, it also became clear that reason alone cannot explain everything because:
  • we also learn from experience
  • we allow passion, and not reason alone, to help us make decisions, such as who we will marry
  • we create understanding or meaning based on faith and trust
  • we use our imagination to create preferred futures that go well beyond what reason alone might reasonably project
• Finally, reason cannot tell you the ultimate truth of reality. It can’t prove God’s existence or character. This is because reason functions within what philosophy calls appearances, the physical world. But there is a world beyond appearances that we can only get to by faith. Faith, combined with personal experience of God and with understanding that comes from God’s self-revelation in Scripture, provides a reasonable belief in the existence of God.

And lest we think that those who promote reason as the only way to gain knowledge have successfully made the case against faith, remember that faith in reason alone is still faith!

Engaging the Opposition

There will always be people who don’t think alike. In fact, given our different experiences, education, personalities, and so forth, it is amazing that there are as many people as there are who do think alike! However, the reality is, there will always be people who do not see things as you do.

Rather than shunning or demonizing them as “those dastardly fiends,” get to know them. Talk with them and use the exchange to evaluate the goodness of your beliefs:

• If your arguments stand up to scrutiny, you will be better off and more confident about them.
• If your arguments don’t stand up to scrutiny, you may find there is a better way to defend your belief. Or you may discover you need to correct your belief. Sometimes we believe something without a lot of thought, or we misunderstood something or misinterpreted it.

Etymology Is No Help

When people discuss the Bible and want to drive a point home, they sometimes appeal to the etymology of the Greek or Hebrew word to get at the ‘real’ meaning. Unfortunately, this kind of word study has little, if any, value. A word’s etymology may be of historical interest, telling how the word came to exist, but the word itself means what it meant at the time it was written.

Bear in mind that it may take only a few years for a word to completely change its meaning. Here are some examples of words that have changed their meaning:

1. Wicked and bad now both mean good.
2. The word religion in 1602 meant piety, not a system of belief.
3. When William Wilberforce campaigned for the reformation of manners in the 1800s, he wasn’t campaigning for more politeness, because manners did not mean etiquette but a way of living. Child labour, animal abuse, terrible treatment of prisoners in jail, and so forth all showed how society wasn’t as genteel as the upper class imagined it to be. Its manners, its way of living, needed to change so that these situations would no longer exist.
4. The word careful as used in the King James Version means anxious or worried today. To be full of care is to be full of worry. The word awful used to mean full of reverential awe, and terrible used to mean awesome.

So when you want help with what a word means, check out what it meant at that time (and even, possibly, in that place, as it might have been a local colloquialism) and see what it meant to the writer.

Humanist Morality

Humanist morality is a non-religious morality. Even though we’d like everyone to have a Christian morality, it is vital that there be a non-religious morality or else there is no reason for non-religious people to be moral at all.

The favoured morality today is utilitarianism: Whatever gives the greatest number of people the greatest happiness is moral. This works well for most people, but it does not work well at all if you are part of the minority who gets pain instead of happiness. For example, it might make most people happy to have slaves do their tedious work, so a utilitarian law allowing people to own slaves would be moral. The owners are happy, but the slaves sure aren’t.

The kind of morality that causes a person to be a moral hero and to live sacrificially simply isn’t possible or rational in secular morality.

The one who tells the best story wins!

The strategy of post-modernists today is to out-narrate their opponents. That is, to tell a better story to persuade people and win their argument. It doesn’t matter if the story is true or false, it just matters that it works.

Objectivity

Christians believe that goodness is an objective property that is very real, and it should be loved. Love, truth, compassion, and wisdom are all part of beauty, and all reflect the character of God. The secular world is obsessed with ambiguity, turning things upside-down, and utility over beauty.

The professor (called a tutor at Oxford) says we are indeed in a culture war. Most people do not believe in objective moral truth. They have replaced moral truth with moral opinions. To win people over, Christians must address the issue of whether or not there is objective truth.

C.S. Lewis and the Christian Imagination

Longing for God

Lewis assumes that everyone experiences inconsolable longing for something more than this world. He calls this “desire” in Surprised By Joy.

My question is whether people today are reflective enough to even be aware of longing. With so many ‘needs’ created and so quickly fulfilled in our consumer society, do we get to the bigger, more existential type of longing that Lewis writes about? We probably do if we are languishing in poverty or oppression, but otherwise, maybe not. This has implications for how we evangelize.

Feeling or Experience?

Lewis was very bothered by the fact that a good writer telling a story like Narnia, one that evokes spiritual feelings, can lead people to an experience that is imaginative in nature and not an actual spiritual experience. Worship music can do the same. We get the feeling of being spiritual without actually being spiritual. Closeness and intimacy with God take time spent in Christian spiritual practices. Lewis believed that stories and music can be shortcuts to imitative (false) experiences of God rather than actual experiences of God.

The primary goal of stories and music, according to Lewis, is to show what the good, the virtuous, and the lovely look like. Stories are for moral formation, and this is what Lewis was doing with his fiction books. Modern stories, however, are all about moral ambiguity and dystopia. These stories are programming recent generations of children quite differently than the stories read by their parents. Authors of children’s stories have the power to shape children in their formative years. Both children and adults need stories that train them to make right decisions in real life.

Understanding Those Who Differ with Us

Many of the conflicts we have in our world today are actually the result of people having different understandings about things such as the environment. Lewis says that it helps to know what the purpose of that thing is, because what is good is what fulfills its purpose. So when it comes to the environment, should we chop down a large tree?

• If we think its purpose is to provide shade, we would say the good thing is no, don’t chop it down because the tree is fulfilling its purpose.
• But if we think the purpose of a large tree is to provide firewood for heating, then the good thing is to chop it down and use it.

The real conflict is not about cutting down the tree or not, but what is the reason why the tree exists. That’s what should be debated. The appropriate action (or inaction) would become clear once the purpose has been determined.

Human Progress

Secular people often think that society has progressed a long way since Christianity lost its dominance, They’ll say something like, “We don’t burn witches anymore.”

Lewis would say that yes, we have progressed, but not morally. We’ve progressed in our knowledge that witches cannot cast spells that cause a pregnant woman to lose her baby, for example. If we thought they could still cast spells that result in miscarriages, we’d treat them the same way as we did years ago. The proof is that while we don’t burn witches anymore, just look at how we treat terrorists at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere.

Big Ideas

These last few posts have given you a taste of the topics covered in the four courses I took at Oxford University. They certainly provided me with a lot of food for thought, and I hope they’ve done the same for you.

The post At Oxford: Food for Thought appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

I’m sharing selected points of interest from the courses. I look forward to having time to reflect on both the readings and the classes to draw some conclusions, which I will then work into future blog posts.

The Church Always Needs Reform

This course was taught by Father Henry Wansbrough, a Benedictine monk and impressive scholar who has served on papal commissions and was the general editor of the New Jerusalem Bible. He is a great example of a humble man. With his intellect and experience (he worked at Vatican II), his answers to challenging questions were always restrained and reasonable. He also surprised me with opinions that were not what I expected. For instance, he agreed with many of Luther’s critiques. He also modelled receptive ecumenism quite well, which I’ll explain right away.

Receptive Ecumenism

Receptive ecumenism is the willingness to listen to others to see what you might have missed, to correct where needed, to learn from others, and to enrich your faith.

We may not agree with everything the other person asserts, but we should be humble and accept the possibility that we ourselves may not have everything right either. Shouldn’t we want to be as true to Christ as possible? If we can be better Christ-followers by picking the good out of someone else’s ideas, shouldn’t we? For instance, we may be so focussed on one part of our faith that we’ve missed out on another.

Original Sin

The Eastern church has a much more optimistic view of humanity than the Western church. We both see humanity as made in the image of God, but in the East the Fall was more of a stumble than a fall. When toddlers stumble while learning to stand and walk, we know that the stumbling is a natural part of growing up, and we encourage them to try again. We don’t punish them for stumbling. In the same way, the East sees the Fall as humanity’s natural stumble. As another professor once said, Eastern Christians believe the image of God in us is still whole, but is covered in mud. It has been marred, not broken. They have no concept of original sin because Augustine was not read in the East. The Orthodox believe we are still fundamentally good people beneath the dirt. Christ cleans off the mud and restores our goodness.

The Western church has a much more pessimistic view of humanity. The image of God has been broken by the Fall and needs to be made whole again. The Fall was a willful rebellion, not a stumble. Now we are fundamentally bad, born in sin, and under condemnation. Christ rescues us from our badness and makes us new and whole again through his atonement for our sins.

Papal Infallibility

Papal Infallibility was confirmed in 1870 at Vatican I. It has only been invoked twice, but both times it related to doctrines of Mary and both uses had the effect of making rapproachement with the Protestant church more difficult. The two doctrines are:

1. The Immaculate Conception of Mary – 1854, before Vatican I, but the concept of papal infallibility had been around for a long time: This doctrine states that Mary herself was born without sin.
2. The Assumption of Mary – 1950: The doctrine that when Mary died, her physical body was taken to heaven.

To speak infallibly, the pope must explicitly state that he is speaking ex cathedra. Otherwise, he speaks with an authority that should be given both weight and deference. However, and this was surprising, there is no requirement for Roman Catholics to obey him. He can be disobeyed if conscience demands it, but Father Henry says anyone doing so should feel uneasy about it. Disobedience should not be lightly done.

Vatican II

Vatican I was all about power, specifically the pope’s power. Vatican II was quite different. It was all about service. Some of the new thinking that came out of Vatican II includes:

• Bishops are vicars and legates of Christ, not of the pope. The pope has no control over the bishops, and those bishops no longer rule their dioceses; they serve them.
• The church is a Messianic, holy people, a priestly community; not an ecclesial organization.
• Infallibility is no longer at the centre of the papacy; leadership is. So popes since Vatican II have taken more of a global leadership role based on moral suasion. They have travelled extensively and promoted world peace. Pope Francis is focused on pastoral sensitivity and mercy over justice.

Historical Accuracy of the Bible

When Abraham bought the land for a tomb, it says in verse 17 that the purchase included the trees that were on the land. This has apparently puzzled scholars for a long time. Why would the trees be mentioned? Surely they were included with the land!

The reference to trees was considered an unexplainable peculiarity. But then, fairly recently, other land purchase agreements were discovered from that time period and area, and all of them mention that trees are included in the transaction. A small detail shows that the Bible is right!

Evening Lecture by Diarmaid MacCulloch

We had a special evening lecture on the Reformation. Diarmaid MacCulloch was introduced as the world’s foremost Reformation scholar. He said that Medieval Europe (500 to 1500 AD) was an oddity in the history of the world. There was one religion, one leader, one basic political unit, which made for one culture on the continent. This has never happened before or since, anywhere in the world. The Reformation, which created divisions and ultimately a plurality of Protestant streams, simply returned Western Europe to a normal state.

The difference between those who stayed with the Catholic church (now the Roman Catholic church) and those who became Protestant comes down to which aspect of Augustine’s work they put priority on:

1. Those who stayed Catholic followed Augustine’s thought on the church, with an emphasis on obedience.
2. Those who became Protestant followed Augustine’s thought on grace

On ecumenism, MacCulloch said it is good to work together and eliminate hostility between Christians, but it is a waste of time trying to merge organizations.

The demographics for the future of the church are worrisome, but there are many surprising stories throughout Christian history of incredible advances when the future looked bleak. I’ve read elsewhere that in Medieval times the church had been reduced to a rump in Western Europe and seemed doomed, and then it exploded with rapid growth. MacCulloch referenced South Korea and India as modern day examples of explosive growth of Christianity in unexpected territories. Christianity is the religion of the oppressed and has much to offer today’s world.

No faith in religion?

The content of this course doesn’t lend itself to summary reporting. We discussed some very heady topics like ontology, epistemology, and a process to help congregations figure out what their strategies should be. There was also an excellent Bible study on Jesus’ last words and how they reflect the agendas of the Gospel writers. Each of these is way too big to fit into a summary post like this. However, a few points and quips are worth repeating and do stand on their own.

• Whatever the church teaches, the teaching should be reflected in how the church manages the institutions of the church.
• God loves you as you are, and loves you too much to leave you as you are! I’m sure I’ve heard this before, but it is so good and worth repeating.
• An interesting connection between a prayer and a promise. The books of the Hebrew Bible appear in a different order than in ours, and the Hebrew Bible ends with 2 Chronicles. So the Hebrew Bible’s last words are a prayer for the faithful person going into exile: “May the Lord his God be with him.” The last words of Jesus in Matthew’s gospel, which was written for a Jewish audience, are “I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” The prayer has been answered with a promise!
• We go to church for the sake of the God who is present and the people who aren’t.

This course was about distinguishing faith, which is powerful and liberating, from religion, which is the institutional expression of the church. The conclusion is that religion, how the institutional church operates, needs reform to become more empowering. It must help Christians engage in lay ministry and serve their communities. The church hierarchy should be servants to the laity, in the same way as Vatican II changed the focus of bishops from ruling to serving.

Next Week

I’ll be taking two courses on Christian Faith and Modern Thought, and C S Lewis and the Christian Imagination. I’ll post as I can.

The post Update #3 from Oxford University appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

Here are some highlights from today for the two courses.

The Church Always Needs Reform

In the morning class, we covered the Council of Trent, which was the Roman Catholic response to the Reformers. I’ll share two points that are relevant to the relationship between church and society in our time.

We Need Theologians!

The Council recognized that people did not know the Bible because the priests were not trained to preach the Bible. Many did not know Latin and could not even understand the words they recited of the Mass. Because the people were not allowed to read the Bible, they got their theology from the gnostic gospels and other non-canonical books and tracts. These had lurid details of Purgatory that made people eager to pay for Indulgences and Masses for the dead. The lesson for us is that if parishioners are not getting their biblical-theological knowledge from their church, they will get it from somewhere, and the quality of what they get could be anything from very good to terrible!

The Council responded by creating many seminaries to train the clergy. It recognized that the job of theologians is to make the Bible intelligible to the church.

There are lots of passages even in the Bible that could be misunderstood from a simplistic reading. For example, when Jesus says to cut off your hand, should you? How do people know how to properly read and apply the Bible? How do we help Christians move from their first experience of faith in Christ to a mature, nuanced, understanding of what Christian faith is all about? How can we help them get an accurate picture of who God is? This is a task that theologians can help us with.

A good example of a theologian working to improve biblical and theological literacy among the laity is the “For everyone” series of books put out by theologian Tom Wright (a.k.a. N.T. Wright). Advent for Everyone and Matthew for Everyone are just two of the many books in this series. Few will read his Paul and the Faithfulness of God at 1,700 pages, but anyone can read the accessible books in the Paul for Everyone series, which are about 175 pages each. Small group studies are very helpful too.

Don’t Drag Your Heels!

Cardinal Cajetan extended an olive branch early on to the Reformers with three proposals:

1. The Communion cup would be given to the laity, not just the priest;
2. Clergy would be allowed to marry; and
3. Reformers could informally accept church doctrine—in other words, they would not have to say they were wrong, just that they believed as the church believed.

Unfortunately, the Council rejected the Communion cup proposal because it would mean admitting that the church had made a mistake in the past, and they rejected married clergy because it was “inopportune at this time.” The olive branch died on the vine!

I would hope that if the Evangelical church were in a similar position, we would not be afraid of admitting a mistake but would do the right thing without delay.

No Faith in Religion?

In the afternoon class we explored faith and religion.

Blaming Religion for Evil

When secular people blame everyone in a religion for any evil acts carried out in the name of that religion, we usually say that our faith was hijacked by insincere people with ulterior motives such as politics or greed. Sincere Christians of real faith would not do those bad things.

This may be true, but secular people don’t distinguish between religion and faith. And that defense doesn’t account for times when whole populations of Christians get carried away, for example, with a political agenda, and become vulnerable to being hijacked by someone running for office.

Responsible Christian leaders must ask the really hard question, which is, Why is religion so vulnerable to hijacking? Every pastor should take on the job of ‘street-proofing’ their church members. They should be biblically and theologically literate enough that they can assess for themselves whether this or that appeal for their loyalty truly represents authentic Christian faith.

Faith and Religion Defined

Faith is the disposition of the mind and will to entrust oneself and one’s interests to the reality, reliability, and benevolence of the Living God.

Religion is the formalization of faith with doctrine, discipline, creeds, organizational structures, sacred sites and symbols, etc.

The professor noted that the freedom which is inherent in faith is not typically experienced in religion. However, some structure (religion) is required if we are to express our faith in community. So one is not good and the other bad, we just want the right mixture—lots of faith, and just enough religion to hold our communities together.

A Great Story

We heard the story of Thomas Cooper, an Englishman born in 1805. He left the Christian church for all the same reasons that Richard Dawkins outlines in his book The God Delusion. It appears Dawkins has nothing new to say against Christianity but is merely repeating arguments from a century before!

Anyhow, Cooper became a leading speaker and author promoting atheism. He hooked up with about twenty other leading atheists and they formed the Organized Society of Atheists, which had members both in England and in America.

But that’s not the end of the story. The best part is that not only Cooper, but every other member of the Society, eventually reconverted to Christianity!! Cooper became a Baptist minister and pastored a church in Lincoln, England. In the late 1880s, the church honoured Cooper by changing its name to Thomas Cooper Memorial Baptist Church, known as tcm today.

Why did every atheist in the group return to Christian faith? Timothy Larson, in his book Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth-Century England says there were five main reasons:

1. They experienced skepticism as entirely negative. It had nothing positive to offer them. They found it shallow and unfulfilling.
2. Morally, they were running on the fumes of the morality they had acquired from their previous Christian faith. On its own, they saw that skepticism provided no moral direction.
3. They became skeptics because of their commitment to reason as the sole source of knowledge, as opposed to revelation. But they came to realize that humanity has other sources of knowledge beyond reason, including instinct, feelings, experience, etc. and this opened up the possibility of a world beyond the physical realm.
4. They discovered that skeptics had a far too simplistic view of Scripture and read it too literally and without nuance. When they gave it serious study, they discovered the Bible wasn’t as bad as they thought it was.
5. Throughout their skepticism, they had retained great respect for the man, Jesus, and ended up returning to him in his fullness as Jesus Christ.

While they were skeptics, everyone said how intelligent, wise, and educated they were. When they returned to Christianity, those same people couldn’t now claim that they were ignorant, foolish, and unthinking, the usual charges thrown at Christians!

Perhaps these same five reasons could appeal to skeptics today. I have not studied them enough to know, but I suspect they would still be helpful arguments. How could you make use of this knowledge in preaching to or relating with those who do not yet know Christ?

The post At Christ Church: I Heard a Great Story Today! appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

This Week

• The Church Always Needs Reform
• No Faith in Religion?

Next Week

• Christian Faith and Modern Thought: Are they incompatible?
• C.S. Lewis and the Christian Imagination.

Reformations

Since this is the 500th anniversary of Luther nailing his 95 Theses to the Wittenberg church door, the beginning of THE Reformation, the Summer School theme is Reformation: Reform and Renewal in Christian Life and Experience. There have been many reformations in the church over the millennia, and the question is, Are we in need of another reformation?

This is a timely question, and the opportunity to study up on how the church has historically dealt with upheavals of various types might be instructive for us today. How has the church decided what to hold fast to, and what is cultural and can change or adapt?

Monday was the first day of classes and I’ll just give some key ideas and impressions. Of course, these are provisional ideas because they will all be developed over the next four days.

The Church Always Needs Reform

Today we concentrated on the first three years of the Reformation: 1517-1520. All of the major issues that the Reformers had with the Catholic church were on the table by the end of this short period. Here are some interesting points from the lecture:

• Pope Francis said in a 2016 homily that there were two good things that came out of the Reformation:¹
  1. “With gratitude we acknowledge that the Reformation helped give greater centrality to sacred scripture in the (Catholic) Church’s life.”
  2. “With the concept “by grace alone”, he [Luther] reminds us that God always takes the initiative, prior to any human response.”
• The Catholic Church’s response to Luther was way too long-delayed to have any hope of healing the relationship with the Reformers. They waited 28 years before holding a council to address the issues, and then the Council of Trent took another 18 years to decide what the response should be! Forty-six years is a long time to formulate a response to a crisis! By then the horse was out of the barn and there was no returning. This made me think of the need for the church today to respond quickly to the issues of our times. If we don’t respond in good time, then the world will just pass us by. And when we do finally respond, it will be too late.
• The Roman Catholic church did make a surprising number of the corrections Luther had called for.
• Incidentally, it was from the time of the Reformation that the Catholic church became known as the Roman Catholic church, a far more accurate description of what it really is than just Catholic alone.

No Faith in Religion?

This course is promoting faith while critically assessing religion (the institutional structures of the church). It was heavily philosophical today, and I’ve never taken a philosophy course, so this is all heady stuff for me.

The whole lecture boiled down to a couple of key points:

1. Plato and his student Aristotle disagree with one another. The dichotomies between them have never been resolved, leaving everyone frustrated. Dominicans, such as Thomas Aquinas, follow one, and Augustinians, such as Martin Luther, follow the other. And that’s why Luther disagrees with Aquinas. The question is, Can we live with the tension between different philosophies without having to synthesize them?
2. I wondered why philosophy would be an issue at all when discussing theology. So I asked, “Given that the Bible is God’s self-revelation and that philosophy is humanity’s own thinking, why should questions about God and his nature be subject to the approval of human philosophy?” Some theologians reject Biblical-theological insights to God because they don’t fit within human philosophical concepts. The answer was that there are two ways that the Bible and philosophy interact, and to me these are extremely important because I think they explain the difference between Mainline (liberal) and  Evangelical (conservative) Protestants:
   • Philosophical Theology starts with theological reflection and then uses philosophical concepts as a servant to theology to help explain it. In essence, Biblical theology rules.
   • Theological philosophy does the opposite. Biblical theology is tested against philosophy and when the two are incompatible, philosophy rules.
   • As I read the four textbooks for this course, I had a major “Aha!” Conservative Protestants use Philosophical theology while liberal Protestants use Theological philosophy.
   • A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and I wonder what a real philosopher would make of my little, but for me anyways, significant insight!
3. René Descartes messed everything up with his “Cogito, ergo sum” idea. Everything we experience in society today can be traced back to these three words. What “I think, therefore I am” means is that the only truth there is, is inside us. There is no objective truth ‘out there’. You can have your truth, and I’ll have mine, and they’re both equally valid even if they cannot both be objectively true! To me, Descartes’ thinking can have bizarre implications. Here’s an example: In the class, there was a projector on the table, and eighteen people in the classroom. How many projectors are there? This is not a joke! Descartes would say there are eighteen projectors because we all see the projector differently, each from our own perspective. The ‘imp’ in me thought, “Okay then, I’ll just get up and take my projector out of the room and leave the other seventeen projectors for them to use! Then we’ll see how many projectors there really are!” Fortunately, the wiser person in me did not say any of that out loud! But back to serious business. Subjectivism and individualism are the natural consequences of Descartes’ philosophy. The professor stated that we need to transcend Descartes, but that no thinker has yet toppled him. There needs to be a better way to think, he says, that draws us back into community. However, there is no quick fix to the way society thinks today. If Descartes is ever overcome, it will be a long time before society is transformed once again.

So there’s some food for thought for you. Hope you enjoy ruminating on it.

The post Monday at Christ Church, University of Oxford appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

I’ve been recommending for years now that ministries should be telling their stories. Some ministries are pretty good at telling stories to their supporters, but they could be telling some of their stories to the public too. Not only does public storytelling promote a particular ministry, but it also increases awareness of the value of the Christian ministry sector to the public. When people wonder what good Christian charities produce, your stories are powerful answers that not only support our public benefit (and therefore our charitable status), but make our faith more attractive to potential believers as well!

I just came across a publication of the Bible League of Canada (a CCCC Certified Member) called One Dominion, which tells the story of how the Word of God shaped the Canada we live in today. I’m bringing the book to your attention as an inspiring example of how a story for the public might be told.

Here’s why I think the Bible League’s way of telling this story is effective:

• It is topical: The softcover coffee-table quality book was published to celebrate Canada’s 150th birthday, so it has a connection to an event that the general public is currently interested in. They are more likely to read the book now than they would at some other time. Kudos to the Bible League for a timely publication!
• It builds on the familiar: They’ve successfully connected the story of Canada to the story of their cause – the Word of God – by showing how Scripture has been publicly or quietly behind key events in our history. It takes facts that should be familiar to the public and weaves in the not-so-familiar facts, leaving people feeling that the Canada they know has been explained to them and they now understand it better. Some of the connections with the Word of God are written in stone (such as on the Peace Tower on Parliament Hill), and other connections are in the way the Word of God has motivated people to live out their faith in a public way, such as by creating an educational institution or a hospital.
• It has a through-story: The Bible League crafted the story well. Its structure reminds me of the structure of Luke-Acts, which has a trajectory from the remoteness of Judea to the centre of the world, Jerusalem, and then travels away from Jerusalem to the outermost parts of all the world. In a similar way, One Dominion starts with the entire nation of Canada and our place in the world, then zeroes in on individual people of faith throughout our history who did something good, and finally projects outward exploring how individuals today might affect the world tomorrow. It seems to come full circle, leaving the reader to wonder, “I know what individuals did to make my world so great, so now what can I do to make the world of the next few generations great as well?”

The story’s point is that Canada was shaped by Christians for a purpose, and Christians today should still do what they can to support that purpose. 

Although the book’s distribution isn’t all that wide (primarily sold from the Bible League’s website and a few Christian bookstores), it presents our faith well to those who do not yet believe, and who may even question what good Christianity has done for Canada. It presents Christian faith in a way that others can appreciate what it accomplished, and perhaps might even give it some consideration for themselves.

My only suggestions for improvement, if there is a second edition, are:

1. Indicate where the gorgeous pictures were taken! There are many places I’d love to go based on the beautiful photos, but where are those locations?
2. Since it is essentially a picture book with commentary, put a picture on the front cover.

Thanks to the Bible League for their investment in such a worthy project! It is a well-crafted book that all Canadian Christians can be proud of. Through this project, the Bible League of Canada is inspiring other ministries to creatively tell their stories in the public realm. Well done!

“The book has been provided courtesy of Graf-Martin Communications, Inc.”

The post How One Ministry Is Telling a Story appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

To help get our stories out, CCCC started a new blog called Stories of Faith from Canadian Charities, in which Certified members of CCCC explain how they contribute to the public good.

Another way of getting a good word out is to write opinion articles or stories for the media to use. Milton Friesen, Social Cities Program Director at Cardus (a Christian think-tank), does a fantastic job of explaining why the public should not take Canadian charities for granted in an article that appeared in the Kitchener-Waterloo Record.

I suggest you read Milton’s article and then consider how you might better tell your story to the public. His arguments are ones that you can incorporate into your own communications. If you want help with how to craft a story, see my post The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling.

With tens of thousands of Christian charities in Canada, we have a lot of good stories to tell about how life is better because of our work. Can you do your part to get the good news out? Based on the testimonies I hear from ministries across the country, I know we do amazing work. Don’t be shy about talking about it!

The post Voices: Why We Can’t Take Charities for Granted appeared first on CCCC Blogs.