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Bill Cork has posted two excellent reflections upon having returned from the recent "Questions on Doctrines" conference at Andrews University. In the second he summarizes how much the debating parties actually have in common. I'm looking for ways to make this more widely available. Let's spread the good news!
The "Questions on Doctrines" Conference at Andrews University, October 24 - 27, about a book that has caused fifty years of controversy within the Seventh-day Adventist denomination, surpassed my expectations in every way. My thanks to Julius Nam, Michael Campbell and Jerry Moon for planning and bringing about so outstanding a weekend! For excellent daily reports by Richard Rice, please visit the "Spectrum Blog" and use "Search."
It is 4:39 a.m. California time on Tuesday, October 23, and my wife and I are on our way to Andrews University in Berrien Springs, Michigan for a three-day conference celebrating the 50th anniversary of the book Questions on Doctrines (Washington, D. C.: Review and Herald Publishing Association, 1957).
This book undoubtedly has caused more controversy within the Seventh-day Adventist Church than any other the denomination has published. Authored by a small group of leaders in response to inquiries to Donald Barnhouse and Walter Martin, two very conservative Protestants, it is widely credited for making Adventism more credible in the eyes of such Christians while also creating much division within it. This theological discord has continued for half a century.
Some summarize the debate as one over whether the human nature of Jesus Christ was like that of Adam and Eve before the Fall [prelapsarianism] or after the Fall [postlapsarianism]. This seemingly arcane question continues to be debated outside the denomination as well, albeit without a literal reading of the stories of the "first parents" of all human beings, with theological giants as influential as Karl Barth and Wolfhardt Pannenberg taking sides. Both are postlapsarian.
Philosophical and theological differences are often like points on a compass. If one is traveling short distances their variations hardly matter. But the further away from the compass one goes, the more the lines established by its different points diverge. They can eventually be so great that a difference in only five or so degrees can cause one to miss the destination if it is thousands of miles away. Likewise, in the short run theological differences have negligible consequences. In the long run they can matter a great deal.
In this case the difference between the prelaspsarian and the postlapsarian views of the human nature of Jesus is an unimaginably small variation on the theological compass, so tiny that within the last couple of weeks, Jan Paulsen, the denomination's world-wide leader, a theologian himself who earned his doctorate at Tubingen University in Germany, stated in public that he doubted the value of the upcoming conference partly because he can't imagine that the contesting doctrines would be of any interest to a postmodern person in Europe, a business man in Asia or a farmer in Africa.
This comment has itself become a matter of further discussion with some agreeing, others disagreeing and still others thinking that this new debate about Paulsen's remark not worth anyone's time and energy!
Because for years my position has been very much like Paulsen's, I am surprised that I have been invited to the conference and even to present a paper. My recently deceased father was very active in these debates, especially during the last fifteen years of his life; but as far as I can recall this is the first time I will have commented on them in public because I have felt that I have more important things to do. Some at the conference may be surprised that my father and I have both been postlapsarian all along because his reputation for being traditional is as great as my reputation for being the opposite.
This demonstrates that it is not the case that one of the positions is "conservative" and the other "liberal," even though some may try to frame the issues this way. We are talking about overlapping but somewhat different paradigms within which there are more and less traditional stances.
Generally speaking, the prolapsing position emphasizes the differences between Jesus and the rest of us and thereby the importance of God's forgiving graciousness. Some say that it eventually leads to moral irresponsibility. The postlapsarian emphasizes the similarities between him and us and therefore the significance of God's empowering graciousness. Some say that it leads to legalistic perfectionism. The first sees him more as "Saviour" and the second more as "Lord."
My view is that the unattractive implications that each side attribute to the other are exaggerated. I also believe that both sides have shared certain unpersuasive premises that have resulted in what theologian James Gustafson, who long taught at Yale and the University of Chicago and then Emory University, in another context called "a misplaced debate."
So, we're off! This should be an interesting weekend!
Last weekend my wife and I saw "For the Bible Tells Me So," a movie about how we straight Christians relate to gay and lesbian ones. it is a sobering account. I recommend it very highly!
If you can't see it now, watch for the DVD. It should be available early in 2008. More information is available at its web site.
For reviews by Daneen Akers, Obed Vazquez and Jacqueline Hegarty and me, followed by a lively thread of comments, please visit the "Spectrum Blog."
The more I look into these matters, the more convinced I am that the most important ethical issue at this time is not what gay and lesbian people do in private but what straight people do in public.
When last did we hear of homosexual men hurting or even killing a heterosexual man? Although this probably happens, it seems to me that usually it is the other way around. Straight white Christian men like me may be the most dangerous animals on earth, particularly when we think that something is "unnatural."
Yet what we take as "natural" and "not natural" partly reflects our circumstances. We see this in the New Testament itself and how we read it. In his letter to the first Christians at Rome, Paul describes homosexual activities as "against nature." Most Christians take him seriously at this point, even if they end up partly disagreeing. But in his correspondence with the first Christians at Corinth, Paul says that nature teaches that it is disgraceful for men to wear long hair. Perhaps he was wrong about this or perhaps there was something about the situation in Corinth that gave long hair on men a negative meaning there that it does not have everywhere. My point is that most of us do not take Paul seriously enough at this juncture even to wrestle with what he says. Why?
If we stick with Scripture a bit longer, we will notice that it condemns homosexual activity and condones slavery. But many Christians today say that it should be the other way around, that we should condemn all forms of slavery and condone some types of homosexual activity, and they say this in the name of Scripture! Some find this puzzling and who can blame them?
One way to understand all this is to note that Christians differ in how they interpret and apply Scripture. In a way that is roughly analogous to how people differ in the readings of the Constitution of the United States, some view it as static and the others see it as dynamic.
Another way to put this is to say that for some Scripture is a series of snapshots of the past that depict how we should live in the present. For others it is more like a movie that has not yet ended. We can see the people and the plot and we can trace the direction in which they are moving; however, it is up to us to continue the story. This is how I see it.
Slavery is discredited by the trajectories of Scripture and so is treating women as property. We can say the same things about the movements from patriarchal and monarchical forms of government to democratic ones and the responsibility of the group to the accountability of the individual. In all these cases the important point is to trace the trajectory and to move forward in the direction to which it points.
Thinking of the trajectories of Scripture highlights how important it is that we neither excise nor ignore any portion of it. We must know where we have been in order to know where we should go. Those who have no past also have no future. Scripture is the Christian's memory. It sets the course. It plots the play. It moves us into the future with a sense of moral direction. Without it we would be lost.
Last night faculty and friends of the Loma Linda University School of Religion discussed a book by one of its newest professors. Published by T &T Clark in its Library of New Testament Studies series in 2006, the revised St. Andrews University doctoral dissertation is titled "Saving God's Reputation: The Theological Function of Pisits Iesous in the Cosmic Narratives of Revelation." Sigve Tonstad, a physician and Biblical scholar from Norway, is its author.
As indicated by the Greek words in its title, Tonstad's book examines the meaning of the expression "faith of Jesus" as found in Revelation 14:12. Over the centuries, commentators have tried to clarify the meaning of these words in several ways. Tonstad makes an unusual case for understanding them to mean "the faithfulness of Jesus," and thereby God, to others rather than the other way around. I think that the phrase therefore becomes analogous to the exclamation of some Psalms that "God's steadfast love endures forever."
Because he cannot make it on linguistic grounds alone, Tonstad buttresses his case by providing a detailed study of the entire book of Revelation and this is where things get more interesting and controversial. Most commentaries these days on the last book of the New Testament make the conflict between the first Christians and the Roman empire its foreground and the cosmic conflict about the way God governs the universe its background. Reversing these, Tonstad holds that the imagery of cosmic conflict is primary.
In addition, even if it is qualified by some commentators, there is a widespread impression that in the Book of Revelation God conquers all foes by violently abolishing them. Tonstad reverses this as well. He holds that the book's imagery of the victory of the "slaughtered lamb" suggests that God prevails by using persuasive rather than coercive power.
Either one of these major revisions would have been provocative. Taken together they constitute a major challenge to most interpretations. Tonstad avers that his case is a "complementary and partly contrary" alternative. This puts it gently!
One might anticipate that responses to his book would probe both his emphasis upon the theme of "cosmic conflict" and his proposal that in the book of Revelation God wins by using persuasive power. These are exactly the directions last night's discussion headed with one addition. This is that we explored not merely what the ancient document says but what we should say today about its central question: If God is as good and powerful as so many say, why do we see so much evil around and within us?
This question always expresses the greatest possible objection to Biblical faith, whether Jewish, Christian or Islamic. It is the problem of theodicy, or the "justice of God." When it comes to monotheism, in the end it is the only question worth discussing. If we believers answer it in ways that are at least partially satisfactory, much falls into place. If we fail here, nothing else matters.
Although in this volume Tonstad does not engage his Biblical scholarship with contemporary philosophical theology, I hope that in time that he or others will bring them together in mutually fruitful ways. I believe that his emphasis upon God's persuasive rather than coercive power in the Book of Revelation should be interesting to process theologians and vice versa, for example.
It will be tempting for these to square off against each other as to whether this is how God chooses to act (Tonstad, I think) or is compelled by the inescapable nature of reality to do so (process theology). I hope that this does not happen because I think it more important for them to collaborate against other positions in providing an alternative to what Alfred North Whitehead called "the deeper idolatry."
This is the tendency of Christians and others to depict God as a capricious dictator rather than the loving parent for whom Jesus of Nazareth lived and taught. Because it is the case that in the long run we become like those we worship, the future of human civilization rests in part upon which form of power we most prize. We have magnified our reliance upon coercive power beyond measure and we can see the results. Perhaps it would be helpful to try another approach. It is difficult to imagine that the outcomes would be worse.
Memorial Service
Loma Linda, California
September 1, 2007
Our father was born on November 14, 1920 near Salem, Oregon. He was the eighth child in a family that would include five sons and four daughters, once his younger sister Doris was born. Of the nine children in his family of origin, she is the only one who still lives and we are delighted that she and her husband are with us today from Maryland. His mother’s family, which was of Irish and Scottish descent, traversed the Great Plains in the wagon trains of the nineteenth century. His father was an undocumented immigrant from Sweden.
The men in his family worked in the forests, lumber mills, dairies and businesses of the Pacific Northwest. He might have lived a similar life had he not become a Seventh-day Adventist through the evangelistic campaigns and radio broadcasts of Elders Dan and Melvin Venden, the “true” Venden brothers who are respectively the uncle and father of Louis and Morris. One evening when he was a teenager, after listening to one of their radio sermons, he knelt beside his bed and quietly gave his life to God.
He studied at Walla Walla College, quit for a while to earn some money when his father died, and returned to continue his preparation for ministry. He noticed that in the meantime Jeanne Reiderer had arrived on campus from Ketchikan, Alaska. Although she was in a steady relationship with another man, she noticed him too. They were married after our mother had graduated and worked in Portland, Oregon for a year because she refused to walk down the aisle with anyone until she had proven that she could support herself.
They transferred to La Sierra College where she worked and edited the student newspaper. He studied during the day and drove taxi cabs at night, often delivering military men to March Air Force Base. They lived in one of the tiny cabins that still stand on the west side of the campus. After he graduated, he did his ministerial internship in Elko, Nevada where they lived in a house that had been built out of used railroad ties. This was the start of sixty years of ministry.
The Early Years of Ministry (1946 – 1966)
In 1946 he took our mother and me, when I was three weeks old, to Hawaii by way of Alaska to see her family. With her gregarious and intelligent help, he pastored the church in Kappa, Kaui for three years, moved to the congregation at Hilo on the “Big Island” for another three and then transferred to the Central Church in Honolulu for an additional four. By then our family had expanded to include Thomas, who was born in Honolulu in 1948, and Karen, who was born in Hilo in 1950. Along the way, in order to benefit the church schools, he had helped run a poi factory on Kauai and an orchid exporting business on the Big Island.
In 1957 the Hawaiian Mission made our father’s dreams come true by commissioning him to full-time public evangelism. We moved from Honolulu to Kailua on the Windward side of Oahu. This home was our family’s headquarters from which we traveled throughout the Islands accompanying our father on his evangelistic tours. We studied in a correspondence school, helped out with the efforts, and enjoyed the experience immensely.
We moved to the Northern California Conference in 1959 where he continued his evangelistic work. We first lived at Walnut Creek on a ten-acre property near the North Gate of Mount Diablo State Park and then we moved to another 10-acre property at Angwin where he built the first of three homes that he would construct with his own hands and some hired help.
He rooted us on these plots of land as he commuted to the evangelistic meetings that he held throughout Northern California in an airatorium, an inflated tent that attracted much attention because it looked like a huge upside down bathtub. He enjoyed mechanical things of this sort, preferring to overhaul the engines of the family automobiles himself and being one of the very first to build a motorized home by riveting a trailer house it to the chassis of a truck in which he had installed a powerful Chevrolet engine. We called this mammoth vehicle our “ark.”
Those were very happy years for our family. He was an excellent father who regularly scheduled us time with him for swimming, horseback riding and other fun things and he let no one interfere. While we lived in Honolulu, for instance, our parents made certain that the family was always ready for Sabbath by noon on Friday. Every week we then spent the rest of the day at Prince Kuhio beach at Waikiki, returning home only after we had all enjoyed an ice cream cone at the nearest Dairy Queen. This is how our Sabbaths always began!
Our father was not a severe disciplinarian, spanking me only three times: once for going out of my way intentionally to insult another youngster, a second time for lying and a third for joining another fellow in roughing up a third. His expectations were simple and clear: act respectfully, speak truthfully and fight fairly.
His response when as an early teenager in Northern California I was suspended from school for striking a bully hard enough to burst some blood vessels in his left eye was characteristic. “How would you like to spend a few days with me at the campaign in Camino?” he asked. “Sure!” I replied and the two of us had a great time together. Not once in my entire life did he ever say a word to me about that fight.
Knowing that someone was about to present to our parents a long list of complaints about her, including the charge that she was acting inappropriately with young men, one evening many years later Karen sat down our parents and explained in advance her side of each the stories. When she had completed her detailed defense, our father’s reaction was typical. “May I please go to bed now?” he asked. They never discussed these issues again.
Although it may have seemed to blunt to others, his candor made us feel secure. When Karen regained consciousness after a very serious horseback accident that nearly took her life, she was frightened by a woman who kept saying, “Don’t cry, Don’t cry! Everything’s going to be all right!” when she knew in or six or seven year old heart of hearts that this was not true. She felt safe when our father pushed his way through the gathering group and said, “Karen, you’ve been badly hurt. But I will never leave you.” True to his word, he rushed her to the hospital in a car because the ambulance drivers would not let him ride with them. All the way he kept saying to her, “Squeeze my hand, Karen. Keep squeezing my hand!”
Our father was not the most scrupulous member of our family. That would have been me! We once tethered a horse on a distant property and it was my responsibility to ride him bareback to the house, groom him and give him grain and water and either take for a ride or back to his grassland. Somewhere along the line I became convicted that I should neither ride nor lead him on Sabbath because I enjoyed it too much. I insisted that our father transport the water to the horse by car in a large and heavy container. “Are you certain that this is what God requires?” he asked. “I’m working harder than the horse!” “Never mind,” I replied, “we are not supposed to do our own pleasure on the Sabbath.” He hauled the water.
I once listened with much moral admiration as a young man explained to our father that he had progressed in his Christian life to the point that he no longer played popular music on the ukulele, some of which was for Hawaiian dances. “Don’t be impressed,” he said. “That kind of fanaticism is usually the last gasp of a spiritually dying person.”
Many years later, when I was old enough to know better, I asked my father at Sabbath dinner whether he knew that his church organist was gay. I knew I had said the wrong thing the minute the words left my mouth because everyone at the long table stopped eating to see what would happen next. My father glared at me as if to ask if I had lost my mind. “I know that,” he replied in measured words that all could hear. “But we need that young man. That young man needs us. He is not hurting anybody. So nothing is going to change.” With that he returned to his meal and eventually everyone else did too.
The Middle Years of Ministry (1966- 1985)
Our father’s middle years of ministry, roughly the time between 1966 and 1985, flourished in a time of much turbulence. In society at large, after the ethos of the 1950s disappeared with the murder of John F. Kennedy in 1963, everything seemed to change. This was a tumultuous time in the life of our denomination too. As we should have expected, the turbulence in our society and in our church found their parallels in our family. From our infancy on our father had taught us to think for ourselves, never imagining that in doing so we might come to see some things differently. As children we naively assumed the same thing, that if we thought clearly and followed the evidence wherever it led, we would arrive precisely where our highly respected and deeply loved father had. When it slowly became clear to all of us that this is not how things were turning out, everyone in our family experienced much pain. And yet, although they were often stressed and strained to the very end, the cords of love that bound us never snapped. That he requested that his children tell the story of his life on this occasion is evidence of this. He trusted us.
After leaving Northern California, our father served in the state of Washington and, after completing additional graduate work at Andrews University, on the campus of Atlantic Union College, where Doctor Herbert Douglass, whom he chose to present today’s homily, served as President. While at AUC, he earned his Doctor of Ministry degree from Andover-Newton Theological Seminary, one of the oldest and most respected in the nation.
He eventually accepted an invitation to do evangelistic work, always his first love, in New Jersey because it included a willingness to put to a trial a detailed formula he had developed for financing such efforts. Shortly thereafter he moved to Phoenix, Arizona to pastor one of its congregations, after he concluded that the leadership of the church in New Jersey was not as interested in testing his formula as he had thought.
Our parents thoroughly enjoyed Arizona, so much so that they did not want to leave it. Only intense encouragement from some administrators and some relatives like me persuaded them reluctantly to move to Loma Linda and to the Campus Hill Church. Because he became embroiled in intense theological debates, this was a difficult chapter in his life. This was not lost on those of us who had encouraged him to come here in the first place. Yet as always he found enough courage and strength to persevere and many people benefited from his ministry. Many of us were happy when he accepted an invitation to teach at the SDA theological seminary in the Philippines! This allowed him to return to public evangelism, which was always his first love, as he took his students on the campaign trail from that campus.
As the theological controversies in our church intensified, our father increasingly identified with those who believed that many of them could be traced back to 1957 and the publication of Questions on Doctrine. In forceful sermons, articles and books, he contended that on some issues this book did not accurately portray the writings of Ellen White and a number of our other pioneers and that these inaccuracies were too massive to be accidental and too important to be ignored. Although he was often lampooned, he did not relent but stood his ground and advanced his cause whenever he could. In the end he and his colleagues turned out to be right on this issue, as the annotations in the most recent edition of QOD repeatedly document. These annotations were prepared by George Knight, an Adventist historian who often disagreed with our father even though he became an Adventist in one of our father’s evangelistic campaigns. George Knight is honest.
QOD and later developments prompted theological issues as well. Although the jury is not yet back on these matters, and perhaps it may never be able to render a verdict, I think that some version of the positions our father and his colleagues took will prevail there as well. I think this will be a good thing. Some may be surprised to hear me say this because he thought of himself as a conservative Seventh-day Adventist and I would not use those terms to describe me and I doubt that many others would. What some may have overlooked is that we are both Wesleyans. This means that we have always had more in common with each other than either of us had with those in our church who seem to us to be trying to nudge it a bit in the direction of a somewhat different paradigm.
Over the years it has been difficult for me to figure out why our father seemed not to understand from the inside why so many Adventists were drawn to the somewhat different paradigm and its relatively heavier emphasis upon God’s forgiveness. While thinking about the whole of his life since his death, I saw clearly for the first time something that I must have known all along without giving it much thought. This is that, as far as I know, our father never obsessed about his salvation or anything else. He never tossed and turned throughout the night wondering if he had confessed all of his sins or if he had fallen short of Christian perfection by making some mistake. Never! This was largely a matter of his temperament. But it was also because he was confident that God would judge him and everyone else fairly.
In this respect our father’s Christian experience was not at all like that of Martin Luther whose obsessions about his sins and God’s wrath in his early life have given some psychiatrists much valuable data. I believe that this made it difficult for him to understand from the inside the anguish of those whose experience is more like Luther’s and why such people need to be told again and again and again and again, as if the gospel contains no other good news, that no matter how many mistakes they make God still loves them.
Our father often viewed this emphasis upon God’s forgiveness as a theological excuse for irresponsible conduct. In some cases this was so; however, in most instances it wasn’t. The more ethically obsessive Martin Luthers of every age like me need to camp on the doctrine of justification by faith and never move much beyond it and then always keeping it view. There was nothing in his temperament to help him understand this. I now think that in this area of his life he was the healthier.
The Latter Years of Ministry (1985 – 2007)
When he officially retired in 1985 at sixty-five years of age, two decades of ministry were still before him. Working with self-supporting ministries whose mission in life is to preserve historic Adventism was a matter of integrity for our father. Also, in these endeavors he enjoyed a measure of collegiality with other ministers that he had not known since he left Hawaii in 1959. In addition they prevented him from wasting his retirement years in idleness, requiring him to preach, teach, write and travel to many parts of the world instead. These were all pluses. Yet these efforts cost him and our family a great deal because for the first time he was working outside of, and in some cases partly against, the denomination. It saddens us that some people became acquainted with him only in this chapter of his life.
The year of 1990 was especially sorrowful. In its months our brother Thomas died. My first marriage ended. And the Pacific Union Conference revoked our father’s honorary ministerial credentials, something our denomination provides its retired clergy who are in good and regular standing. Especially my mother could not understand how the church that they had served with dedication and distinction for decades could now reject them. Our parents fully expected that they would also lose their church membership. But the Loma Linda University Church became their shelter in a time of storm. In this congregation their membership was safe and secure. Doctrinal diversity has its pluses after all!
Our mother died from cancer on November 16, 1994, one day short of her seventy-fourth birthday. How fortunate our father was that Betty Newman caught his eye in March of 1995 at a meeting of historic Adventists. Thirteen days later, he proposed marriage. She resisted and he insisted. They were married in this chapel in July of that year. Their union gave us three fine adult step brothers: Robert, Paul and Jim.
In comparison with the last nine, their first three years together were relatively easily. Everything changed for them when a misfortunate cardiac procedure nearly killed him, sending him home a physically devastated man after four months in the medical center. Then he was diagnosed with Parkinsonism. As he slowly declined in physical strength, but very little in clarity of mind, at their home in Cherry Valley, Betty’s loving care of him became increasingly heroic. All the rest of us joined our father in requesting that she hire some help, something they could afford. But she refused to transfer to anyone else what she often described as her privilege of caring for our father.
His characteristic courage in the face of adversity did not fail him. Rarely complaining, he suffered from not being able to speak above a whisper, a consequence of having a tube in his throat for so long, and from his inability to continue working with his colleagues. I once asked him what he did when he could not sleep at night. “I rehearse every detail of my life, reciting all the ways God has blessed me,” he replied. These blessings included Gary Larson cartoons, the carbonated beverages he added to virtually everything he drank, including milk, and football, which he watched with the sound off because he believed with some justification that his commentaries on the games were superior to those that were broadcast.
In order to give Betty some rest, Hospice arranged for him to stay at Heritage Gardens for five days, beginning Thursday, August 16. On Friday and Sabbath, he very much enjoyed visits from friends, former students, his wife, his living son and daughter, his daughter-in-law, and three of his five grandchildren. Although his whisper was sometimes difficult to decipher, his grandchildren often doing this better than the rest of us, his faith, courage dignity were as strong as ever. No matter what the adversity throughout his life, he had never blinked and he had never ducked and he faced his upcoming death the same way. When we paused in prayer to thank God for all the blessing of his life and ours, he mustered all of his remaining energy repeatedly to exclaim, “Amen! Amen! Amen!” A hugely powerful man, he never was a wimp; and he certainly wasn’t one now.
He relaxed on Sunday and peacefully slipped away. His nurses told us that rarely do they see such an easy death. Several of us circled his lifeless form for about two hours, grateful that he was no longer suffering. When the vehicle arrived from Montecito Mortuary and Memorial Park, we were ready.
Our father’s greatest legacy is not what he said and wrote in the heat of theological controversy after he retired. It is the thousands of people all over the world who were blessed in his active ministry. In his professional life, first and foremost he was a public evangelist and then he was pastor and teacher. People, not polemics, were always his highest priority.
One of our earliest memories is watching our father leading a congregation in Hawaii as it joyfully sang, “Trust and Obey!” Please help us sing it again!
A social event it was my priviledge to attend earlier this week prompted me to think again about the parallels between cultural and culinary diversity. Organized by the Intercultural Dialogue Student Association at the University of California at Riverside and sponsored by Pacifica Institute, it consisted of a splendid dinner, group discussions and several speakers. The theme of the evening was "Diverse Traditions, Shared Values." The purpose of this annual gathering is to encourage more positive relationships among Jews, Christians and Muslims. Once again this year's meeting was a success.
The three primary speakers were John W. Webster of La Sierra University, Atilla Kahveci of the Pacific Institute and Howard K. Wettstein, of UCR. Kahveci spoke first. As a Muslim he contended that all three Abrahamic religions share important values such as honesty, generosity, compassion and kindness. We should build on these, bringing unity out of diversity without destroying it, he held.
Webster, a Christian, contended that first of all Jews, Christians and Muslims must overcome some mutual misunderstandings. Once they do this they will recognize that they have enough in common to collaborate, even on matters of public policy.
Wettstein reflected on his life and work as a Jewish Zionist who is ethically uneasy about Israel's occupation of Palestinian lands. He also spoke about his experiences teaching in Palestine and about religion's great power for good and evil. He agreed that it often takes religion to make good people do bad things. It often takes religion to make bad people do good things, he added.
Webster distinguished between "experiential expressivism," on the one hand, and "cultural linguistics," on the other. The first holds that at bottom all people experience life basically the same way even though they express themselves diversely. The second holds that the differences among cultures are so thoroughgoing that finding experiential common ground beneath them is difficult.
The intercultural stratigies of these two groups differ correspondingly. The first attempts to identitfy views and values people share and build upon them. Regarding this as an unsuccessful and undesirable enterprise, the second attempts to find methods by which people can interact in mutually acceptable patterns even though they experience life in fundamentally different ways. Diversity, even in this radical form, should be viewed as something positive, he held.
It is at this point in such discussions that my mind returns to cultural and culinary diversity and how they might be analogous. The number of different things people around the world eat is incredibly vast, so much so that we might be tempted to think that we can eat anything can get away with it. Yet we know that this is not so.
It is true that there are some things that some of us can eat and others can't and vice versa: nevertheless, whether they do so slowly or swiftly, if we eat them some things will kill each and everyone of us without regard to factors such as race, religion and society. Although we ingest nothing that is fataly toxic, we will also die if we our diets do not include certain basic nutritional necessities. Culinary diversity is great and good, but it is not limitless. At some point it stops. This is a description, not a prescription. It is the way things actually are whether or not we think they ought to be.
We can say some similar about cultural diversity. It is incredibly and delightfully vast; however, speaking descriptively, it has its limits. Cultures can arrange their lives in self-destructive ways, as the study of human history amply demonstrates. Also, there are certain fundamental human needs that all cultures must provide. If they don't, these societies will die just as certainly as those whose diets do not provide their basic nutritional needs.
Over long periods of time we have learned what each culture must avoid and what it must provide, just as we have learned what we must not eat and what we must. All cultures need to develop ways for different generations to relate to each responsibly and respectfully. They must figure out how to identify and protect property. Although they differ in how they define unjustifiable homcide, all cultures must find some way to protect human life. Likewise, they must figure out how to encourage people to speak truthfully, especially about issues of great significance. And they must learn how to prevent envy from escalating into destructive class warfare. This usually means that they must not let the gap between the rich and poor get too wide.
We know what at minimum each culture must and must not do to survive and flourish. We know that these requirements have long been summarized in ethical mandates such as the Ten Commandments. We also know that it is dangerous for any individual or group to ignore these basics needs. The parallels between cultural and culinary diversity are almost exact.
The Loma Linda University Health and Faith Forum for October 10 focused upon the recent travails of the Safe Motherhood Initiative in Malawi, a tubular shaped nation in southeastern Africa. Ronald Mataya of the university's School of Public Health made the presentation and responded to questions from the audience of students, faculty and members of the community.
Mataya is an obstetrician and gynecologist from Malawi who divides his time between clinical medicine and public health endeavors. The session was moderated by Mark Carr, a professor in the School of Religion who also serves on campus as the Director of the Center for Christian Bioethics, one of the two organizations that sponsor these events. The other is the Center for Spiritual Life and Wholeness. Carla Gober, also a professor in the School of Religion, is its Director.
If I understood Mataya correctly, 75% of all health care in Malawi is provided by the government for which its citizens "prepay" in their taxes. There is no doubt that this system has dramatically reduced the rates of maternal and neonatal deaths; however, in recent years, despite the Safe Motherhood Initiative, which has been funded by various international organizations around the world, things have worsened. Earlier, I think it was in 1987, though I might be mistaken about this, there were 550 deaths per 100,000 live births. But by now this number has doubled to about 1,100 deaths per 100,000. Mataya holds that this change cannot be directly attributed to the prevalence of HIV/AIDS, though indirectly this fatal disease has made things worse by taking the lives of a signficant number of health care professionals.
What went wrong? Mataya attributes the greater success of the Safe Motherhood Initiatives in Sri Lanka and Malaysia to their greater collaboration with traditional healers and tribal leaders. Malawi's lessor emphasis upon this has contributed to the three "Deadly Delays." These are delays in (1) deciding to seek specialized medical care, (2) getting to the places where it is available, and (3) actually receiving it once there.
Many women bleed to death at the medical centers while they wait to see a physician, Mataya reported. This third delay is the most deadly. A shocking 52% of the deaths occur because of deficiencies in hospital care. The other half are distributed among a variety of other problems such as pregnancies that reoccur before the recommended three-year interval.
These problems are excaerbated by challenges that we see elsewhere in the world as well. One of these is the absence of health care delivery systems that provide accessible, affordable and acceptable medical care. Another is the unavailability of contraceptive measures and the cultural willingness to use them. A third is widespread and severe poverty. Still another is the prejudice against unmarried mothers that often causes them to receive inferior care. A fifth is the most widespread and deeply entrenched. This is the inequality between men and women. In Malawi this contributes to the three "Deadly Delays" because women often must wait for the men in their tribes to decide to send them away for the specialized medical care they already know they need.
Mataya responded to a number of questions. The first was whether "outsiders" should directly confront Malawi's patriarchal culture or foster change by working within it. Siding with neither, he held out for a "balance" of the two approaches. The last was whether it is appropriate for Westerners to impose their own changing values and norms upon other cultures. If he directly responded to this question, I did not hear his answer. His indirect response makes sense. It is that all people want to change when they see the destructive results of their customary behavior.
Like earlier Health and Faith Forums, it will soon be possible to view this session on the Internet. The easiest way to do this is to "Google" the "Research Channel." Once there, use the Search option to locate Loma Linda University. Having arrived at that location, use the same resource to locate the Forum of your choice by title, topic or the presenter's name.
Class Presentation
Loma Linda University
October 16, 2007
1. John Calvin: All our knowledge consists of two related things: our understanding of God and our understanding of our selves. One can understand neither without reference to the other. All work in Christian ethical thought includes both. This outline concerns the second.
2. Many ways of understanding ourselves are dualistic. The thought of Plato in antiquity and Rene Descartes at the dawn of modernity are examples. Plato pictured Socrates encouraging his friends not to mourn his soon death because his soul would not perish when his body did. Descartes distinguished between thinking substance (“mind”) and extended substance (“matter”) and held that human beings are comprised of both.
3. Despite its less than inclusive language, the Loma Linda University motto “To Make Man Whole” is ethically significant. It expresses the institution’s rejection of dualism. Hoping not to be confused with other positions, the university summarizes its view as “wholism” rather than either “holism” or even “monism.” Wholism is one of the beliefs of the Seventh-day Adventist Christians who founded and still operate the university.
4. SDAs are among many others who reject dualism for a variety of reasons. One of these is that its conceptual incoherence is seen in its inability to depict how two fundamentally different kinds of things (“mind/matter” or “soul/body”) interact. This has led to many forms of idealism that make matter or the body secondary and perhaps derivative and many forms of materialism that make mind or the soul secondary and perhaps derivative. Hegel’s thought is an example of the first, Marx’s of the second. Rejecting both of these alternatives, others have proposed ways they might interact more equally. None of these alternatives is entirely satisfactory.
5. Continuing developments in neurology and other sciences constantly erode dualistic convictions in favor of those that picture the mind or soul as “functions” rather than “substances.” The brain thinks just as the eye sees and the ear hears. We should therefore probably speak of “minding,” along the lines of “seeing” and “hearing,” rather than of “the mind.”
6. The implications of dualism for economic, sexual, medical and ecological ethics have not been entirely favorable. When sharp distinctions are drawn between mind or soul, on the one hand, and matter or body, on the other, the second almost always is depreciated in favor of the first. The negative consequences of this over the span of centuries are evident.
7. Ecumenical Biblical scholarship today widely contends that Hebrew thought was wholistic and Greek dualistic. In neither case is this difference absolute or complete because there are portions of Scripture that sound dualistic and perhaps some forms of ancient Greek thought that don’t. The contention is that in general the weight of evidence tips one way in Hebrew thought and the other way in Greek.
8. Holding that the human body is the temple of the Holy Spirit rather than the temporary prison of the soul, the SDAs who founded and operate LLU have held that physical health and healing is spiritually significant and vice versa. This is one reason why they have invested so much in preparing people for service in the various medical professions.
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