Alan Jacobs

All you then have to do is to keep out of his mind the question “If I, being what I am, can consider that I am in some sense a Christian, why should the different vices of those people in the next pew prove that their religion is mere hypocrisy and convention?” You may ask whether it is possible to keep such an obvious thought from occurring even to a human mind. It is, Wormwood, it is! Handle him properly and it simply won't come into his head. He has not been anything like long enough with the Enemy to have any real humility yet. What he says, even on his knees, about his own sinfulness is all parrot talk. At bottom, he still believes he has run up a very favourable credit-balance in the Enemy's ledger by allowing himself to be converted, and thinks that he is showing great humility and condescension in going to church with these “smug”, commonplace neighbours at all. Keep him in that state of mind as long as you can.

— C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

What is the ‘present moment’ of the Church’s life like? Well, it is all too like the response of the disciples in Jesus’ lifetime. How very tempting, then, to turn our emotional energy and imagination towards a ‘better’ Church, away from the embarrassing present moment. Nonetheless, it is here, in Jesus crucified and in the struggling and failing community, that the coming of the Human One in glory is made visible to the world.

It is a vision that the contemporary Church might well ponder. Paraphrasing St Paul, we might say that ‘liberal’ Christians look for a clear and purified future and ‘traditionalists’ look towards a more faithful and less compromised past. Yet the gospel remains the gospel of the crucified, asking of us an attention to the reality that is before us and within us here and now, a reality that will be scandalous and painful. Pascal’s stark assertion that ‘Jesus will be in agony until the end of the world’ is much in the spirit of Mark; and it is not an observation about the deplorable state of unbelievers, but an exhortation to believers to keep awake — awake to their own inability to stay in the almost unbearable present moment where Jesus is — rather than look for an unreal future or past to run to.

— Rowan Williams, Christ on Trial

Matthew’s narrative does not allow the believer — in particular the articulate and educated believer, the teacher, the expert — any fixed answer to the question of how I might know that I am still with Jesus rather than with Caiaphas. As soon as there seems to be an answer to such a question, it becomes part of just that system of religious words and religious fluency that helps to make possible the exclusion of Jesus. In the presence of Jesus at his trial, faith unavoidably takes on something of a catch-22 dimension. What matters is to hold still before the question.

Yes, of course we may discover specific acts, specific patterns of behaviour and speech that put us on the side of Caiaphas, and there are things we can do to change those and to make reparation. There is no escape, however, from the summons to be in the presence of Christ on trial. It is as if he said to each believer, ‘Stand where I can see you,’ and my faithfulness to him is going to be bound up with the whole diverse process of keeping myself ‘in question’. This is not a matter of obsessional self-scrutiny, the search for an impossible transparency to my ‘real’ motives or desires. It is only a sober and consistent recognition that I have no final and satisfying account to give of myself, and must wait in Christ’s presence to learn who I am.

— Rowan Williams, Christ on Trial

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“1280”] images from the book Beautiful Minecraft[/caption]

Well, at least we’ve found one thing Democratic and Republican leaders can agree on: anti-Semitism is no big deal. I’m sure Steve Bannon and Keith Ellison can commiserate with each other over a power lunch.

I’m not altogether sure why Andrew Wilson includes me in this post — he says, “I’ve deliberately avoided talking about … the question of whether those who affirm such relationships should be called false teachers,” but that was the only question I addressed in my earlier post. Andrew’s post denounces antinomianism, but I’m not an antinomian and I doubt that Steve Holmes is either. (I mean, didn’t the Apostle Paul settle that?) But I’ll let Steve respond to that if he’s so inclined.

Andrew’s post avoids the vexed question I raised, which concerns how to deal with serious disagreement within Christ’s church about sexual ethics. He therefore leaves all the really tough questions not only unresolved but unaddressed. Here are some of them:

• How do we distinguish between error in interpreting Scripture, which we are all guilty of, and “false teaching”?
• How do we distinguish between error in interpreting Scripture and sin? (Presumably not all errors are the product of sin, though some are.)
• How do we distinguish between the accountability of those who promote erroneous interpretations and the accountability of those who believe those interpretations? (The argument that those who affirm same-sex unions are “leading people onto the highway to hell” implies that God will damn people for being badly catechized. That’s an implication that requires some scrutiny.)
• While, as Andrew points out, there are many passages in Scripture that emphasize the importance of correcting erroneous teaching and calling out sinful behavior, under what circumstances may we say that someone who teaches error, or who commits certain sins habitually, is not a Christian at all and that we must say so? If we do believe that we can and should make this judgment, how then do we interpret the parable of the wheat and the weeds?
• Presumably those who denounce interpreters who affirm same-sex unions as false teachers who are leading people on the highway to hell would readily acknowledge that they themselves are sinners — but redeemed sinners; people not on the broad path that leads to destruction but on the narrow way that leads to salvation. How do they distinguish between their sins and those they are denouncing? Why does Jesus’s contrast between the speck in your brother’s eye and the long in your own not apply to them?

I don’t think we’ll make much progress in sorting out particular theological and moral questions unless we first decide how, practically, we are to deal with one another when we have significant disagreements. That’s something Christians have rarely been good at, and that’s why the questions above are, in my view, so important.

This is the tombstone next to my dad’s at Hopewell Cemetery in Hanceville, Alabama. 

“Well, there is precedent,” Pravuil said. “I mean, if you look at it in a certain way.”

I asked him what he meant. He said, “Elijah and the priests of Baal.”

Atid kept writing, but Raqib lifted his pen from his scroll for a moment and looked up. “That’s not precedent,” he said.

“They think it is, is my point,” Pravuil said. “Or Ahmad does anyway. Dowie is scared.”

“Not scared enough,” Atid muttered, still scribbling.

“He’s remarkably brazen,” Pravuil said, agreeably. “Though he might be insane.”

“You don’t know?” I asked.

They all looked at me. “Of course we don’t know,” Pravuil said. “How would we know?”

“Well, you’re the Recording Angels,” I said.

“That’s right,” Raqib said. “We’re the Recording Angels. We record what people say and do. We’re not mind-readers. I don’t think even Gabriel can read minds.”

“Anyway,” Pravuil said, chewing the end of his quill — the others resumed recording — “the whole concept of a prayer duel is pretty interesting. If it weren’t for the case of Elijah you’d have to say that the thing is impossible.”

“Why impossible?”

He pointed his quill at me. “Because in a ‘prayer duel’ you’re not really praying, are you? ‘Hashem, prove that you’re on my side’ isn’t exactly a prayer. It’s testing Hashem, and we’re warned against that.”

“Not that different than most prayers,” Atib said, bending towards his parchment. “And there’s a real point to this duel, since presumably the results would show whether Islam or Christianity is favored by Hashem, who, also presumably, cares about such things.”

“Ahmad calls himself Messiah,” Raqib said. “And has challenged a number of people to prayer duels. It’s a thing for him. When people question whether he really is Messiah, or whether he’s even a true Muslim, he challenges them to prayer duels or ‘spiritual duels.’ A lot of the debate is about whether Jesus is dead or alive. I can’t say that I understand the details very well.”

“Dowie should accept the challenge,” I said. “After all, as Pravuil said, Elijah had a prayer duel with the priests of Baal, and Dowie calls himself Elijah the Restorer.” They looked at me again. “I read it in the Chicago Tribune.”

“Don’t believe everything you read in the newspaper,” Pravuil said. “Though in this case the paper is right. Dowie calls himself a great many things, all of which are meant to coerce people into giving him money.”

“Nasty piece of work,” Raqib said.

“Of course, Ahmad is something of a megalomaniac,” Pravuil said, “but he’s not a con man. At least not in the lining-his-pockets way Dowie is. And while he’s dismissive of Christian claims he’s not on the kind of crusade Dowie pursues against Muslims.” He grinned. “See what I did there?” Then he composed his face to look serious. “Look, I don’t want to take sides in the larger debate,” he said, nodding towards Atib. “I’m not sure Hashem is on anybody’s side.”

“Sort of like Treebeard,” I interjected. Everyone ignored me. Though they must know who Treebeard is.

“But maybe,” Pravuil resumed, “this is one of those cases where it would be better for all concerned if someone put a thumb on he scales. Not literally scales in this case, this isn’t the Iliad, but … Go talk to the Sisters, would you?”

“Me?” I said. “But I —”

“Just talk to the Sisters. It’s not like you have anything else to do.”

•

So I went down to see the Sisters. They had to have been a little surprised, but they didn’t look up. Unlike the Recording Angels, who at least paused from time to time, the Sisters never look up, as far as I can tell.

“There’s this prayer duel,” I said, but almost before I could get the words out Morta said “Nowt to do with me,” in a Yorkshire accent. I don’t think she’s from Yorkshire, she probably heard it on TV or the radio. Anyway the phrase was appropriate, I guess, since I expect they get a lot of visitors who want some kind of exception or intervention. “Pravuil sent me,” I said. They didn’t respond to that, which I took as a willingness to hear me out. So I told them the story about the prayer duel, how Ahmad challenged Dowie but Dowie refused.

“Who are these people?” Decima asked. So, as best I could remember from what I’d read in the Tribune and what the Recorders told me, I explained about Ahmad’s peripatetic career as a preacher and lecturer and debater and (for lack of a better phrase) spiritual dueller. And then I told them about Dowie’s claims to being a faith healer and the reincarnation of Elijah, and about his founding of the city of Zion and all his money troubles. Also his obsession with Muslims and how wicked they are.

Nona said, “Ahmad is a good bit older than Dowie. You’d expect him to die first in the natural order of things” — the three of them chanted that last phrase in unison, creepily I thought. “But let’s take a look at these threads,” she said, and spun out a length of slivery string, and then another length. Decima placed her ruler — it wasn’t an ordinary ruler, it was a kind of slide rule, with lots of obscure markings and a clear plastic slider — alongside them and moved things about in a calculating sort of way. “Well …” And then I saw a quick glint of a small knife.

“Whoops, my hand slipped a bit there,” Morta said. “Nowt to do with me,” Nona said. They all giggled at that, and then resumed their work.

 

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500”] Mahendra Singh[/caption]

The night of May 7, after a chase that began in Watts and ended some 50 blocks farther north, two Los Angeles policemen, Caucasians, succeeded in halting a car driven by Leonard Deadwyler, a Negro. With him were his pregnant wife and a friend. The younger cop (who'd once had a complaint brought against him for rousing some Negro kids around in a more than usually abusive way) went over and stuck his head and gun in the car window to talk to Deadwyler. A moment later there was a shot; the young Negro fell sideways in the seat, and died. The last thing he said, according to the other cop, was, "She's going to have a baby."

The coroner's inquest went on for the better part of two weeks, the cop claiming the car had lurched suddenly, causing his service revolver to go off by accident; Deadwyler's widow claiming that it was cold-blooded murder and that the car had never moved. The verdict, to no one's surprise, cleared the cop of all criminal responsibility. It had been an accident. The D.A. announced immediately that he thought so, too, and that as far as he was concerned the case was closed. This story was published, not in 2016, but fifty years ago, in June of 1966. Its author was a young writer whose second novel had appeared a few months earlier. His name? Thomas Pynchon.