Honor and Insult

Today the following piece that I wrote is available on the Urbana.org website. You ought to read that website regularly because many fine articles, contemporary and historical, appear there every week.


All of your Muslim friends are upset. Many of your Christian and secular friends are scornful. How do you respond? The on-going unrest that stretches from one end of the Muslim world to the other in wake of the Danish political cartoons picturing Muhammad as a terrorist has provided you an opportunity for interaction with both that can either heal rifts or exacerbate them.

The facts of the matter almost don’t matter any longer. That the small Danish Newspaper Jyllands-Posten wanted to test whether today’s global realities demanded that the media censor itself about Islamic issues and that no one reacted to the cartoons for several months until some Danish imams brought them to the attention of their counterparts in the Middle East and that offensive cartoons simultaneously were reprinted across Europe in act of solidarity with the Danish press, these have been swallowed up in the ensuing worldwide protests. Now the language surrounding the incident has inflated as well to call for death to the infidels and to point to Western hypocrisy and to the inevitable clash of civilizations. Our TV screens are filled with burning flags, angry mobs, and Danish diplomats making their exits from their posts. William Kristol, writing in the Weekly Standard, claims that “this is a moment of truth in the global struggle against Islamic extremism.”

What can you do? You can do two things, both small but hopefully significant. The first is to listen, especially to our Muslim friends. What exactly upsets them so much? Do they believe that the Qur’an forbids making images of Muhammad? (It does not, but many—not all—interpret the hadith, a collection of narratives by and about Muhammad, to do so.) Does their respect for their religious leader imply that others must respect him too? Does the manner of respect vary from culture to culture? Do they feel disrespected themselves, especially in the West or by Westerners? How has the war in Iraq factored into their feelings? As for your non-Muslim friends, does the secular environment that we take for granted mean the freedom to be disrespectful of religion (the notion that the larger group of media is now flaunting)? What does it mean to be disrespectful of another person’s faith? If you ask, they may give us answers to these questions or others even more pressing to them.

Secondly, we can speak the truth in love. In all the commentary I have read and heard about these last sad days, two stand out in their wisdom. If we can echo these, we may gain a hearing ourselves. The first comes from Paul Marshall, who is the senior fellow at Center for Religious Freedom. He carefully makes the distinction between religious toleration and religious freedom. “Religious toleration means not insulting somebody else’s religion, and it is a good thing,” he writes in another issue of the Weekly Standard. “But religious freedom means being free to reject somebody else’s religion and even to insult it. Government should want and encourage its citizens to be tolerant of one another, but its primary responsibility is to protect its citizens’ rights and freedoms. The fact that some people are insulted is one cost of freedom.”

Freedom, to mean anything, negatively means the opportunity to be wrong. Religious conviction cannot be coerced. Not just Muhammad in his famous surah, “There is no compulsion in religion,” but Jesus also taught this. When he sadly watched the rich young ruler walk away from him, he showed that a free response to truth cannot be compelled even by God himself. A love compelled is not truly love.

However, in the same breath, we should affirm to all our friends that freedom, to mean something, positively means an opportunity to act responsibly. Sure, in the West, we have the freedom to say what we want, however insulting. But in God’s Kingdom, “’Everything is permissible’—but not everything is beneficial. ‘Everything is permissible’—but not everything is constructive. Nobody should seek his own good, but the good of others” I Cor. 10: 23-24. This goes for inflammatory words as well as inflammatory deeds. (Not that many of your Muslim friends will be supporting violent protests no matter how hurt they are.)

John Piper points out an even deeper reality that you may get an opportunity to share. This missiologist focuses on one of the most telling differences between the leaders of the two world religions, not that one promoted violence and the other decried it. Rather, that the “world of Muhammad is based on being honored and the world of Christ is based on being insulted.” (desiringGod.org February 8, 2006). Muslims’ understanding of honor, which of course takes such offense at insult, extends even to their understanding of Jesus. They cannot accept the crucifixion, believing that the Qur’an teaches God rescued Jesus from the cross, because they cannot fathom that God would allow his Son to be so insulted and dishonored. Opening himself to insults and mockery was at the heart of Jesus’ mission to save us that took him into and through the deepest suffering. Piper goes on to explain that “…a religion with no insulted Savior will not endure insults to win the scoffers. It means that this religion is destined to bear the impossible load of upholding the honor of one who did not die and rise again to make that possible.”

Jesus’ followers ought to expect scorn; we should not stand with the scoffers. Rather, if you have the opportunity to listen and to speak the truth in love, perhaps you will have the opportunity to stand with the scorned and thereby share Jesus’ sufferings with him (Phil. 3:10). The InterVarsity chapter at the University of West Virginia had this opportunity last week when their friends in the Muslim Student Association, with whom they have built relationships through social activites and interfaith dialogue, asked them to co-sign a letter to the student newspaper explaining why the issue is so sensitive to Muslims around the world and to condemn violence enacted in the name of religion.

Insults and scorn hurt; sharing that hurt with the scorned can be Jesus’ medicine to heal that hurt.

Wholistic Wooster Weekend

Friday night we had the privilege of attending the Academic Awards banquet in place of the math dept. chair and his wife who were taking some much needed respite from the intense responsibilities of foster parenting two pre-schoolers. We enjoyed good conversation with the math students at whose table we were placed and I was pleased to see my own FYS student receive an award for most-improved first year writer (due to her own hard work, the splendid guidance of my TA and a bit of help from me). That was the academic....

Saturday night we invited the new young math prof for dinner and his first experiece at a Wooster basketball game. Having beaten Wittenberg twice, we knew that a third victory would be hard coming. Was such a belief prophetic? The hordes of fans on both sides made the experience a deafening one (6th man? 3000th man!), but Wooster was cold for much of the game. Nevertheless, we came within a point of forcing the game into overtime though for most of the time we were rarely within 5 points. We didn't win, but we will get a bid to the tournament. (We understand Calvin lost to Hope, so I guess a Calvin/Wooster match isn't in the cards, though that would have been fun.) That was the athletic....

This afternoon/evening I spent five hours with the committee charged with bringing the proposed Honor Code (that we call the Wooster Ethic) to the campus. We're nearing the end of (for some) four years of work. We wanted to create a document that, unlike the Scots' Key, didn't deaden the minds of its readers with legalese, and so **by committee** we wrote eight paragraphs of spirit/rationale/philosophy to undergird the brief statement of the Ethic and to lead the students and others (ultimately by hyperlinks) into the codes and judicial processes. We wanted this one-pager to communicate clearly and compellingly. Hard work but challenging in a good way. That was the moral....

Add to that the painting Chuck did and the frenzy of cleaning that is still possessing me and the normal Sunday morning responsibilities at church, and you have two tired people going into a new week.

CROSSculture 2006

I'm back from CROSSculture 2006, the 16th Ohio (Western PA, WV) IVCF winter conference at which I have had the (exhausting) joy of working. This year I co-led a seminar called "X-Files: What about Other Religions?" looking at one aspect of this year's overall theme of "Kingdom Counter Culture." I pulled from various resources and talks/classes I had done before on comparative religion and on truth, and J, my co-leader, took the group through the Aeropagus passage in Acts 17 to ground us. Most of the students seemed very responsive, and those from Oberlin even asked if I could come up to give a talk that expanded on what we could only do briefly--how cool, my second-favorite college :) Secondhand, I heard that one student wondered if we had even tackled "relativism" (the answer is yes, quite directly), but others loved that they went to a seminar where the leader used "big words." I laughed to hear this (loving the implicit compliment) because I didn't think I had used particularly big words. Then I remembered that I had quoted from Strange Virtues, the book of my old friend Berney Adeney, in which he outlines a stance for Christians to take in any kind of inter-religious conversation: "Ontological certainty but epistemological humility." They're pretty big words, I guess, but good for any college student's vocabulary.

CROSSculture is an opportunity not only to give to students but to receive. For years, worshipping there was my oasis in a very dry (church) dessert. This year the worship style, while welcoming to the wonderful multicultural mix of students, being led by a worship team from the historically black Ohio college, Central State University, stretched me far beyond my comfort zone. Maybe getting older means being less stretchable but such excruciatingly high decible levels interfere with my ability to understand what I am doing. Nevertheless, one piece intrigued and challenged me: a jazz setting of the Amos text of "Let Justice Roll Down" written by a friend of an Oberlin grad (who had overlapped with Jenny there) who had joined the worship team.

More in tune with my "learning style" were Bob Hunter's three expositions on Acts 4 and 5. I have learned so much from Bob over the years--adjunct prof at Earlham College, IVCF staff in Indiana, father of a Wooster alum who wrote a play for her senior I.S. called "Jesus in Harlem," frequent speaker on justice issues. This weekend was no exception. I'd like to tease you a bit with the main thrusts of his messages. He analyzed Peter and John's conflict with the Sanhedrin over the healing of the cripple as a conflict with the principalities and powers, Peter's quoting of Psalm 2 as evidence of this. The Sanhedrin was looking out for its own interests and resisting a challenge to its powers; everything that resists Jesus' claims urges us to look only to our own self interests. "Me first" is writ large in culture. They could not rejoice in the man's healing because he was just a commodity to them, someone at this moment whose healing had put a dent in their own power. Bob went on to talk about how throughout American history, the principalities and powers urge us to do the same. Even the worst sin of slavery was only a symptom of this buying and selling of others for a price, continuing today in overwhelming consumerism and materialism that appeals to our fears, insecurities and lusts.

Looking at the next verses and chapters in Acts, Bob helped us not to romanticize the community of sharing there that often attracts us. If only our communities are like that, we think. However, seeds of its failure were already implicit in their experience, not only personally as the Ananias and Sapphira incident showed, but communally as the divisions between the Greek and Hebrew Jews made apparent. The deacons were chosen to deal with a breakdown in community which was no longer monocultural. Each incident in the next several chapters represents a turning point away from a small homogeneous group existing in the shadow of the principalities and powers (Stephen, one of those deacons, challenged them verbally and was murdered; Paul was converted from within their structures; Peter was moved from his closed position by a dream; Barnabas was able to minister as a bi-cultural man) until finally in Acts 11 a multicultural people who share One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism are (able to be) called Christians.

Lots to chew on ....

Only a Mathematician...

...would surprise his wife (after all, we'd already gone out to dinner to help me survive my long day-into-evening work schedule) with a card and two red roses accompanied by the following message:

"Two red roses for 2 score minus 2 and 1/2, minus 2 weeks, plus 2x2 days of life with you" He had circled all the 2's :) He said that he had figured it out on the way to the store to get the roses, but that this particular configuration would only work for Feb. 13. Something else would work for Feb. 14, just not this particular set of numbers.

Thanks, Chuck! I love you 2.

Super BowlS

Sign outside a Wooster church: Love Your Enemies. Go Steelers!

We expect tons of students here tonight for the annual WCF Super Bowl party (and some of our church small group who are helping to provide the food). We're going to miss the usual hosts, the Steiners, but are carrying on the tradition. The bathroom remodel has been finished in time.

More importantly, in the matchup between d3hoops' # 1 Wittenberg and #2 Wooster last night in Springfield OH, Wooster 86-Witt 77.

'Nuf said.