First, a couple how shall I say, not highlights but low-lights from the article.
1. Jim Wallis the white guilt so-called progressive so-called evangelical has pronounced Barak Obama a Christian and is helping him campaign.
2. Barak's faith is more communal and in terms of inequality read redistribution.
3. Barak's spiritual mentor saw everything in terms of black and white oppression and Barak was apparently estranged from his pastor and spiritual mentor at his mentor's death.
4. Barak's pastor mentor once told him if he won the primary he'd have to distance himself from his pastor, but my guess is this will be no problem for Barak because as recently as the late 80s Barak was being urged to be a Christian and join a church but refused. And he is eager to cheer those who want the church separated from politics and the State, unless they are of the more liberational theology sort (like Wallis and his alleged former pastor Wright).
5. Barak is a Christian but he doubts the existence of God and isn't big on miracles and wonders if there really is any afterlife and wonders if anything ever existed before the Big Bang. Christians can have doubts and thinking ones do, but they don't tend to let ones of this magnitude go without some word of witness to believing in the Creator, Redeemer, and Source of eternal life.
I'm guessing Jim Wallis and Barak Obama may need to coin a new kind of Christian for Barak, "the atheist-Christian". And perhaps they can coin a new one for Jim Wallis, 'the atheist Christian affirming evangelical'. That is real progressive! Or was that regressive?
The New York Times, Jim Wallis, and Rick Warren (apparently) on the faith of Obama.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/30/us/politics/30obama.html
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23 comments:
I found it interesting that Obama (at least according to the article) was drawn by this profanity-spewing "pastor."
My, how Emergent of him!
You could at least spell his name right. It is "Barack," not "Barak."
1) Jim Wallis' quote reads:
His embrace of faith was a sharp change for a man whose family offered him something of a crash course in comparative religion but no belief to call his own. “He comes from a very secular, skeptical family,” said Jim Wallis, a Christian antipoverty activist and longtime friend of Mr. Obama. “His faith is really a personal and an adult choice. His is a conversion story.”
In no way did he "pronounce Obama a Christian." Who has the authority to pronounce someone a Christian? He is giving testimony as a "longtime friend. Moreover, nowhere in the article does it say that he is "helping him campain." So unless you garnered that tidbit from another source, you are misrepresenting what is written here.
2)"Barak's faith is more communal and in terms of inequality read redistribution."
This is simply a case of theory-laden observation. Christianity has had many thinkers and adherents. Different thinkers emphasize different things, Barack is personally affected by the communal, familial aspects of religion over the supernatural ones (a very rational position). In no way should this lead one to talk of "redistribution." Which really is just saying "soft-communist."
3. "Barak's spiritual mentor saw everything in terms of black and white oppression and Barak was apparently estranged from his pastor and spiritual mentor at his mentor's death."
Okay...so what? Let's look at the piece shall we:
Does Obama hold the same views as the man who brought him to Christ? Is this "race-centric" thinking the views of Obama?
"Mr. Obama says they are not."
Was it this wild rhetoric that really inspired Obama? Nope:
"It was a 1988 sermon called “The Audacity to Hope” that turned Mr. Obama, in his late 20s, from spiritual outsider to enthusiastic churchgoer. Mr. Wright in the sermon jumped from 19th-century art to his own youthful brushes with crime and Islam to illustrate faith’s power to inspire underdogs. Mr. Obama was seeing the same thing in public housing projects where poor residents sustained themselves through sheer belief."
Did Obama think in Black and White reasoning? Nope:
"He tends to emphasize the reasonableness of all people; Mr. Wright rallies his parishioners against oppressors."
"4. Barak's pastor mentor once told him if he won the primary he'd have to distance himself from his pastor, but my guess is this will be no problem for Barak because as recently as the late 80s Barak was being urged to be a Christian and join a church but refused. And he is eager to cheer those who want the church separated from politics and the State, unless they are of the more liberational theology sort (like Wallis and his alleged former pastor Wright)."
I'm not sure what the logical connection between the two is, and I think I've already dispelled your created myth that Obama adopted Wright's way of thinking. He is eager to cheer those who want the church separated from politics...you know...like the founding fathers! As George Will lays out in this essay:
"Not since the medieval church baptized, as it were, Aristotle as some sort of early --very early-- church father has there been an intellectual hijacking as audacious as the attempt to present America's principal founders as devout Christians. Such an attempt is now in high gear among people who argue that the founders were kindred spirits with today's evangelicals, and that they founded a 'Christian nation.'" (New York Times Book Review)
and Brooke Allen lays out here:
http://www.amazon.com/Moral-Minority-Skeptical-Founding-Fathers/dp/1566636752/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-6960751-3992025?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1178260783&sr=8-1
This is common knowledge by now.
Your remaining comments about an "atheist-christian" are amazingly ignorant. (Don't you know that such people exist?!) And to say that you have never doubted that there "was nothing before the Big Bang" or that "miracles never occurred" shows a man so entrenched in dogma, so in love with unreason, it is beyond comprehension. A guy named David Hume (ever heard of him?...) once wrote a little diddy against miracles:
http://sun.soci.niu.edu/~phildept/Dye/HumeOfMiracles.html
Thomas Paine, the impetus for the American Revolution, thought the whole idea of miracles hogwash and called them "hearsay" in The Age of Reason.
Thomas Jefferson tore out all passages that were supernatural from his Bible.
Mr. Whitechurch, I am standing on the soldiers of giants. You are standing upon an ancient book that is so infantile in its knowledge, so barbaric in its prescriptions, it simply boggles the mind that it is in every hotel drawer.
shoulders* not "soldiers" in that last passage
Indeed! I have been blogging since 2004. Well, I just started the blogger site a few months ago, but I had a LJ for a while. Anyway... I will be reading yours. I recently discovered Newsfeed, and it has been keeping me up to date every 30 minutes or so. Haha.
BaraCk Hussein Obama. Happy? This is his full name. Exactly. Thanks Devin. Let's get it quite exact. So what is your point? Barak was a good guy in the bible. Sorry for the spelling.
BaraCk knows why he chose the church he chose to attend and what it does, the shared values therein, leadership influence(s), and why they do and he does what he does, etc. The choice is illuminating for those who believe that what a person believes affects them. Whew. Fun to see you so defensive of a church.
Wallis is a Democrat campaign advisor instructing the Democrat party candidates how to speak to evangelicals. This isn't a secret. It is effectual because as you have been quick to point out, Christians in general and sometimes even evangelicals can be low in discernment.
There are socialists and other Christians like Ron Sider, author of "Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger" on an evangelical press for the organization I am employed by who lean more in a redistributionist direction. If you are calling them soft communists, that is your word choice not mine. I didn't call M.L. King such either. Did you?
I have had doubts about aspects of the Christian faith but I do not let them stand without some word of affirmation of my current beliefs. I'm sure you sometimes doubt your atheism. Doubt can be a helpful thing sometimes. But you wouldn't have a major news periodical quote you as doubting atheism and naturalism with no rejoinder that you clearly do not believe in God, would you?
Do tell me more about the Christian Atheists and how they loathe the bible and such. It sounds like a very interesting group of Christians. Wax on.
Devin,
I think you would do well to look again at how the Bible is viewed historically in Western Civilization. I have been in a running dialogue with an atheist in Canada who is one of the most educated people I have ever known in terms of his breadth of knowledge. If he were to read your remarks on this blog, he would snort in derision and tell you to "get an education, Sonny."
You also have a huge amount to learn about Christianity before you dare wax too eloquent in making such ludicrous statements as you did in reference to "atheist Christians." Ever heard of the word "oxymoron?"
I actually get a chuckle out of watching the back and forth between you and Joe. He hoists you on your own petard routinely and you're oblivious to it.
"Happy?"
Yea, thanks for the correction.
"BaraCk knows why he chose the church he chose to attend and what it does, the shared values therein, leadership influence(s), and why they do and he does what he does, etc. The choice is illuminating for those who believe that what a person believes affects them."
...? I'm not sure why this is posed as a disagreement with me. What is this replying to?
"Wallis is a Democrat campaign advisor instructing the Democrat party candidates how to speak to evangelicals. This isn't a secret. It is effectual because as you have been quick to point out, Christians in general and sometimes even evangelicals can be low in discernment."
I made it clear that it was only a problem if you didn't get the information from outside of the article. If you did, fine.
"I didn't call M.L. King such either. Did you?"
He was a communist, wasn't he? Most of his top advisors were socialists, and King himself studied Marx heavily.
"Do tell me more about the Christian Atheists and how they loathe the bible and such. It sounds like a very interesting group of Christians. Wax on."
Christian atheists don't loathe the bible. Christian atheists are those who do not believe in god but follow christs philosophical teachings, simply by replacing "god" with something else.
Solameanie,
Usually when someone argues, they actually point out the PROBLEMS IN THE OPPOSING ARGUMENT. To say that it is bad...without giving reasons does nothing. I'll wait till you actually give your reasoning why your all-knowing canadian atheist would think I'm such a moron.
here is the short mention of christian atheism on wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_atheist#Christian_Atheism
"The Gospel of Christian Atheism" by J.J. Altizer
http://www.religion-online.org/showbook.asp?title=523
Christian Atheism is a known (and relevant) belief system. In fact, this year my professor described a member of his own church as holding this specific belief system.
If there is 1 "christian atheist" in every 10 churches congregations, that is a lot of people.
I'll wait to here why this is moronic though...
From the Oregon Herald, a story that documents one man's journey from Mormon, to atheist, to "positive-christian-atheism."
http://www.oregonherald.com/n/radicalruss/20041124_positive-christian-atheist.html
Have I sufficiently proved that they exist? You don't have to answer that, I have.
Robert Bresson, the famous French director (see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bresson) was a "christian-atheist."
http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/24/bresson.html
Author and professor Robert Jensen also describes himself (and a group of people) as a christian atheist. Key quote:
"I don't believe in God.
I don't believe Jesus Christ was the son of a God that I don't believe in, nor do I believe Jesus rose from the dead to ascend to a heaven that I don't believe exists.
Given these positions, this year I did the only thing that seemed sensible: I formally joined a Christian church.
Standing before the congregation of St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church in Austin, TX, I affirmed that I (1) endorsed the core principles in Christ's teaching; (2) intended to work to deepen my understanding and practice of the universal love at the heart of those principles; and (3) pledged to be a responsible member of the church and the larger community."
http://www.counterpunch.org/jensen03072006.html
Here is another testimonial from someone who is a christian atheist:
"I sit and type before you with beliefs in love, kinship, honestly, fairness, empathy, sympathy, forgiveness, peace, humbleness, honor, respect, and most important of all, faith in humanity; I consider these the pillars of Christianity. My beliefs despite my defiance of the god I believe to exist are why I call myself a Christian Atheist. I claim and worship no god, not even the one I believe to exist, my pantheon consists of zero Gods, a(without)-theist(gods). By all logic, Occam's razor should have deleted this belief that a god exists...but humans aren't logical in the sense of removing emotion. We logically respond to emotion and events however, and that is what I am...a response to knowledge and betrayel. I am a Christian Atheist."
http://www.unexplainable.net/artman/publish/article_462.shtml
Okay, I'll stop posting now. I think I've made my point.
Devin,
I answered you on my blog, check it out. I trust you won't be satisfied.
Second, why do you find it necessary to make a plethora of individual posts with each point. The word limits on Blogger aren't quite that severe.
Third, I might as well make the point I made on my blog here. The Christian church reserves the right to define itself. A Christian by definition is someone who believes that Jesus Christ is the Logos, the Second Person of the Trinity, or God the Son. They believe that Jesus died on the cross for our sins, and rose again from the dead for our justification. It matters little how many quotes or comments you have from people claiming to be "Christian atheists." The very term itself is an oxymoron. The definition for what constitutes a Christian has been around for 2,000 years, and one cannot pick it off a bush.
Again, in case you find it hard to understand, let me spell it out for you one more time. You even ask, "Who has the authority to pronounce someone a Christian?" I suggest you read Scripture closely, and you might discern the answer to that question. Christianity by definition involves a God, a Supreme Being. Atheism by definition denies this. Get it yet? If you can't get it, I suggest remedial education instead of college.
Solameanie and DevinCarpenter, thanks so much for your volley herein. I think I need to visit Solameanie's Blog to see your ongoing discussion, but before I go there, one thing for you Devin.
One of the quotes you blogged from one of the christian Atheists states humbly the person's "faith in humanity".
Perhaps it is because it is an election year and this jargon is bantered around a lot, but I find this 'faith in humanity' extremely challenging and tend to reject it.
Humanity is tricky. Yes I do affirm that humanity is still in the image of God and yet marred fatally by permeating selfishness, greed, self centeredness, ethnocentrism, ...sin. I think it is probably more precisely this 'faith in humanity', oddly enough while holding to some vestages of the 'image of God' still present in humanity, where we most likely would disagree.
There are limits on how high I believe humanity can lift itself and in terms of depravities I do not yet believe I've seen an end to the depths of these. There are nice (pleasant, civil, engaging) atheists and you are likely one of them and it doesn't surprise me that for the principle grounding of character one would chose to put on the adjective of Christ-like or little-Christ or a 'christian' Atheism. In that sense I would consider it a compliment that one recognizes an ethical depth to the person and teaching of Jesus Christ that is not as rich or deep or profoundly found elsewhere. Otherwise I'd assume this group would be the Ghandi Atheists or some such.
But the borrowed capital while perhaps intended as compliment is at root still oxymoronic. And because it is borrowed from a world view 180 degrees out of phase in belief system, emotions run high as the borrowed-ness seems more as insult and theft. I don't take it as that intent in your tone and contributions but it might provide some understanding to why it isn't likely to catch on, though you believe it apparently already has.
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