A Global Split?

Friday, May 5, 2006
Mark Tooley in the Weekly Standard - “The Religious Left thinks that global warming is about to break-up the Religious Right.”
According to Wallis, “biblically-faithful Christians” are soon going to turn against the Religious Right and instead follow his Religious Left. Instead, it seems more likely that an easy acceptance of apocalyptic warnings about a burning planet will ultimately confirm, not overturn, the political leanings of conservative evangelicals.

It troubles me that Wallis seems to hope it does; confirms the fear of many that ecology is too devisive for the Church. But I don’t see average Christians looking at GW apocalyptically either. If there’s a CO2 problem, people will respond to it appropriately and expect things to get better when they do.

Christian folk fall into the same camps secular greens do, with progressives (main-line liberal denominations like the PCUSA, etc) taking a more activist line and conservatives (generally evangelicals) doing church-level stewardship like recycling cans.

I agree with Dobson and Colson:
“We are evangelicals and we care about God’s creation,” read the Dobson-Colson-Land letter. “However, we believe there should be room for Bible-believing evangelicals to disagree about the cause, severity, and solutions to the global warming issue.” The letter urged NAE to foster “unity” in the Christian community.

GW is a devisive issue from a completely human standpoint. But if the Church Universal depends on a God who made the world and who has not abandoned it, maybe we can agree to disagree and still keep fellowship with each other.
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A Time to Tear, A Time to Speak

Friday, May 5, 2006
“There is a time for everything, / and a season for every activity under heaven...a time to tear and a time to mend, / a time to be silent and a time to speak” (Ecclesiastes 3:1,7 NIV).

On April 19, 1963, writing from the jail in Birmingham, Martin Luther King, Jr. penned the following words:
We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”

King was responding to what he called the “white moderate” who “paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a ‘more convenient season.’” King concluded that “shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”

This reminds me of an exchange that took place in 1933 between theologians Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Karl Barth. Earlier in the year, the Nazis had passed the “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service,” (Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums), which contained the so-called Aryan clauses.

This section of the law required that any civil servant of non-Aryan descent be “retired” or “dismissed.” That summer, the German Christian (or Deutsche Christen [DC]) party of the state church would go on to win a huge victory in the church elections.

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