REGINALD FIREHAMMER : Religion and Absolute Moral Values

The Liberal Institute

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ANALYSIS IN DEPTH

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Religion and Absolute Moral Values   by REGINALD FIREMAMMER   Religious people frequently claim religion is necessary because without it there would be no absolute moral values. They explain it by saying things like "without absolute moral values mankind would be morally rudderless," or "without absolute moral values mankind has no fixed direction by which to set their moral compass." While such expressions result in mixed metaphors, there is an important truth in them. Without absolute moral principles mankind truly is morally more mixed up than religion's metaphors. The peculiar thing is, while it is primarily the religious who are clamoring these days for a return to higher moral standards and true moral values, what the religious provide as absolute moral values is neither moral nor absolute.


God's Laws are Arbitrary, not Absolute
When the religious talk about absolute moral principles, they are referring to what they call "God's laws." God's laws are absolute, they say, because God is...well God, and whatever God says is absolute, because He says it. This may seem like a circular argument, but it isn't, because it is not presented as an argument at all. To the religious, it is an autoschediastic asserveration. Since you probably do not know what those words mean, you may be tempted to accept on faith that they are true -- that is how faith usually works. At the risk of endangering your faith, I will tell you autoschediastic asserverations are "self-listing truths," which means truths which are obvious, or what the bad philosophers call a priori knowledge.
(Note: A priori knowledge is the kind of knowledge you have without learning anything. It is the kind of knowledge people have if they receive their education in any modern public (government) school.) 

The problem with "obvious truths" is they are mostly incorrect. They are not the same thing as "common sense" which, as a matter of fact, should make us very suspicious of any so-called "obvious truths," especially those that contradict plain facts. Take, for example, the so called "obvious truth" that whatever God says is absolute. 

Since absolute means always true under all conditions, irrespective of anyone's wish or will nothing that depends on any authority's choice or declaration, whether that authority is a human or a god, is absolute. Anything that depends on anyone's whim, choice, or declaration is arbitrary and contingent. All dictated law is arbitrary because a dictator is not bound by any law or principle (else he could not dictate) and may declare, by fiat, anything he chooses. It is also contingent because it is not determined facts, but the whim or mood of the dictator at the moment the declaration is made and, of course, the dictator is free to change the "law" whenever a new whim or mood strikes him. Anyone who knows much about the history of religion, particular the Judaeo/Christian varieties, knows God frequently changes His mind -- which means His absolute laws are only absolute temporarily. 


True Moral Principles Absolute
True moral principles are neither arbitrary (dictated or pronounced by the fiat) nor contingent (dependent on any agencies, whims, or moods). Moral principles, like all truth, are determined by the nature of reality itself; and, like all truth, are discovered, not decided or chosen by anyone, not even God.

Those who claim there are no objectively discoverable moral values mean they have not discovered any. Human beings have a specific nature and live in a world of a specific nature and it is these facts that determine the moral principles by which human beings must conduct their lives to live successfully and happily in this world. 


Morality Determined by Principles, Not Codes
The moral systems of the religions all consist of moral codes which are nothing more than lists of prescriptions (things we must do) and proscriptions (things we must not do). While many of the things on these lists are things a moral individual would observe, no moral code can possibly be a good ethical system for at least three reasons:

• Moral principles and a moral code are opposites and contradictory. Moral values are not commandments, they are principles which one uses to judge which actions are morally right in any given circumstance. Morality pertains only to choice. A commandment eliminates choice. Those who accept the authority of commandments (or the dictator who issues them) have removed themselves from the sphere of morality; they exchanged choice for obedience, surrendering their choice to the will of the authority.
•  
• A Code of any kind takes the place of judgement. Choices are made by applying principles to circumstances to determine the appropriateness of an action. Principles enable one to determine consequences and to base choices on the reality of which actions will produce which results. A moral code eliminates the very essence of moral choice, judgement, by dictating action in all circumstances without regard to consequences or reason. 
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• A Code that does not cover every possible circumstance (no code can) provides no means of determining behavior in those cases not covered. There will always be more situations in the life of any human being requiring choices with moral consequences than any code, however extensive, will ever cover. With only a moral code and no moral principles, the individual is left with no moral guidance whatsoever in most of the moral issues of life.

When actual moral codes are examined their limitations as moral guides becomes apparent. The most common and well known of religious moral codes is the Ten Commandments of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. The Ten Commandments are presumed to be absolute, at least in the abstract. In practice, however, there is some question about this presumption.


The Ten Commandments
Except for two of the ten commandments, all are prohibitions, that is, "thou shalt nots." Of the two that are not prohibitions, almost no one keeps the first, "remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy,"; and the second, "honour thy father and thy mother," while loosely observed, is not even possible to many people, whose parents have passed away or who, for various reasons, have no idea in the world who their mother and father are. It is odd that an absolute moral code would include a requirement that, at least for some people, is not only impossible to keep, but totally without meaning. 

Another odd thing about the ten commandments is that there are not ten. In addition to the two "thou shalts" there are seven "thou shalt nots" summarized as follows: thou shalt not (1) kill, (2) steal, (3) lie, (4) make up your own religion, (5) fornicate, (6) covet, or (7) swear. But seven "thou shalt nots" plus two "thou shalts" only add up to nine. To get ten you must either turn the "make up your own religion" commandment into two, "have no other gods," and "make no graven images," as the Protestants do, or turn the "covet" commandment into two, "do not covet your neighbors house" and "do not covet your neighbor's wife," as the Catholics do. There really are only nine commandments, but ten seems much more impressive and significant, so why worry about exact truth when we're talking about God and absolute moral principles? 

These nine commandments, passed off as ten, are touted as the source and foundation of all Western civilization and the moral code that made America what it is today. One would expect anything responsible for so much would be very profound. When we examine these "ten" commandments, however, particularly the prohibitive commandments (you shouldn't kill, steal, lie, make up your own religion, fornicate, covet, or swear) there is not one profound thought among them.
They might seem profound to some aboriginal tribe in some backwater third-world nation, but to those who have spent their lives wrestling with moral issues in a modern advanced country like the United States, the assertion that murder, theft, and promiscuity are wrong are hardly earthshaking revelations. They are such simple concepts they are assumed everywhere there is civilization and intelligence. Even though they are regularly violated, their violation is always "justified" by some supposed "political necessity" allowed in the name of some kind of "rights" or excused as some kind of social or psychological "necessity" (they can't help it), and the justification is always vehemently argued. Even in their violation, their validity is admitted, else there would be no attempt to justify their violation. There is really nothing particularly profound about them. 

As for the other two prohibitions, do not covet or swear, far from being profound they are inane. To covet something only means to desire something which belongs to someone else. A desire itself cannot be immoral, even a desire, that if fulfilled, would be immoral. A wrong desire is only a temptation. What virtue is there in not doing wrong if one is never tempted to do wrong in the first place? So long as one only desires what another has, and neither murders them to get it, or steals it in some other way, there is nothing immoral in the desire. There is frequently a perfectly moral way to acquire the desired object anyway. 

Coveting is not only moral it is an absolute necessity to the economy of a free society. If no one ever "coveted" anything there could be no economy as we know it, or any other kind of economy for that matter. The local grocery, hardware, or drug store owners are our neighbors. If none of us ever coveted what is their property we would never go to their stores to purchase anything. It is only because we covet our neighbor's food (in his grocery store) or our neighbor's lawn mower (in his hardware store) or our neighbor's medicine (in his drug store) that we go to their stores and purchase the things we covet. 

Nevertheless, those who accept the ten commandments as an absolute moral code will swear that it is wrong to covet. They will also explain to you that the ten commandments do not prohibit what we normally call "swearing," only taking God's name in vain is prohibited. What they will not explain is what that means, because they are very likely to have a bumper sticker that reads "God is my co-pilot," and see nothing vain in that use of God's name. We are left wondering what in God's name they mean by swearing. 


Some Commandments More Absolute Than Others
Maybe the most peculiar thing of all about the ten commandments is that those who insist most vehemently they are absolute do not themselves regard them as absolute. If the commandments are absolute it would be no more immoral to break one of the commandments than another. 

In the United States this was, at one time, taken quite seriously. It was felt the dictum to observe the Sabbath was just as important as the prohibition against stealing. In most places "blue laws" were passed to prevent Sunday (the Christian substitute for the Sabbath) from being desecrated. Today the blue laws are all but gone, and while some Christians do sincerely believe they ought to be brought back, none of them are seeking laws to put people in jail for working on Saturday or Sunday or whatever the latest change to that absolute unchangeable law is. 


Missing From the Ten Commandments
The point of ethics is to tell us how we ought to live in this world. One of the first things one notices about the ten commandments is, except for the two mentioned, they are all negative. It's fine to tell us what we should not do but the real question of ethics is what should we do? To that question the ten commandments provide no answer. 

If you tried to live strictly by the ten commandments the only thing you would be required to do is honor your parents and spend Saturday doing nothing (to keep it holy). The ten commandments do not require you to do anything else, and so long as you never kill anyone, steal, lie, make up your own religion, fornicate, covet, or swear, you are perfectly moral. Of course, you won't be worth a blessed thing to yourself or anyone else in the world and will starve to death if someone else does not undertake to feed you but, according to the ten commandments, those, apparently, are not moral issues. 

Perhaps the most blatant contradiction of the absoluteness of the ten commandments is the way Jews and Christians, especially those who truly understand and practice their religions faithfully, live their lives. I do not mean they "break" the commandments, although they observe some more loosely than others. On the contrary, in their day-to-day lives they exhibit a decency, reasonableness, and moral rectitude that is much higher than simply observing the ten commandments would produce. Most are productive, self-supporting, honest, ambitious, responsible, and reasonable people who seek to excel and achieve the highest levels of virtue and accomplishment that they are able. In spite of their outward declaration of a belief in an absolute code they live by an absolute principle that "to do less than your best is a sin." 

This is not to be taken as an endorsement of Christianity or any other religion. With extremely few exceptions almost all religionists embrace and promote some form of superstition. Nevertheless, there are degrees of dangerousness in superstition. 

A Christian of the Reformed branch is much to be preferred to that anti-religious movement called Humanism for example. The Reformed Christians believe their God predestines the majority of mankind to eternal torment in hell but that hell, at least, is in the next world. In this world these same Reformed Christians are great defenders of individual liberty and moral values. The collectivist, statist, altruist, anti-moral, pseudo-intellectual ideology of the Humanists, however, if actually put into practice, would make a hell out of this world, here and now. 


REGINALD FIREHAMMER is the founder
and editor of The Autonomist

http://www.liberalinstitute.com/ReligionAndAbsoluteMoralValues.html

Nima Gholam Ali Pour : Sweden: Who Do Christian Leaders Serve?

Sweden: Who Do Christian Leaders Serve?

by Nima Gholam Ali Pour
September 13, 2016 at 5:30 am

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/8920/sweden-church-immigration

• In Swedish Christianity, Jesus has been reduced from being the son of God, to an activist fighting for multiculturalism and open borders. According to Archbishop Antje Jackelén of the Church of Sweden, Jesus has clear political positions on both migration and integration policies.
• According to a senior official in the Church of Sweden, the call to wear a cross to show solidarity with persecuted Christians is "un-Christian".
• One might describe the Swedish Christianity as a new religion that worships multiculturalism and leftist values in general.
• "The leadership of the Church of Sweden no longer wants to lead a Christian community; they want to lead a general ethical association for humanistic values." — Ann Heberlein, doctor of theology and lecturer at Lund University.
• One can have different interpretations of what Jesus did or what opinions he had, but we can all agree that he did not serve the Emperor or other earthly rulers. Too many Christian leaders in Sweden have become the servants of earthly rulers by conveying the message of the political establishment in Sweden.

Christianity is a universal religion, therefore Christianity in Sweden should have many similarities with Christianity in other countries.

If Christianity in Sweden begins to embrace a doctrine that has nothing to do with the universal world religion of Christianity, Sweden has then invented a new religion.

If you look at how Christianity has developed in Sweden today, it seems that this is what Sweden is about to get.

Stefan Swärd is an influential Christian pastor in Sweden with a background in the Evangelical Free Church in Sweden. In an op-ed from September 2014, Swärd describes Christianity the following way:

"When congregations in Sweden meet in diversity and integration and integrate Africans, Chinese and Latin Americans, they express the very essence of the Christian community's being."

He continues,

"As Christians, we should work for a generous refugee policy. We will work so our churches and congregations become good examples of functioning integration, where people of different backgrounds can come together in a common life."

In December 2014, he gathered 380 Swedish ministers from the Pentecostal movement, the Evangelical Free Church in Sweden, the Uniting Church in Sweden, the Salvation Army, Word of Faith Movement and the Swedish Alliance Mission, as well as several other churches, to sign a petition, which declared, among other things, that these denominations do not believe that Sweden applies a refugee policy that is too generous. This was written before the migration crisis in 2015, when Sweden already had the most liberal immigration policy in Europe and gave all Syrians permanent residence in Sweden.

To those concerned about the future of Sweden, where many new migrants might not be able to be assimilated or might not want to be assimilated, Swärd is regarded as misusing Christianity to argue for a liberal immigration policy.
In his recent book, Jesus Was Also a Refugee (Jesus var också flykting), Swärd and his co-author, Micael Grenholm, try to answer the following question: "What does God think about the global refugee crisis and Swedish migration policy?" The answer that the book gives is that there should be no immigration restrictions at all and that rich countries have to open their borders simply because they are rich countries.

Swärd and his coalition of ministers are not an anomaly in Swedish Christianity. They represent the norm for what much of Swedish Christianity preaches nowadays. Antje Jackelén, the archbishop of Sweden's largest denomination, the Church of Sweden, said in an interview from January 9, 2016 that Jesus would not approve of the Swedish government's new restrictive migration policies, which the government was forced to implement because of the migration crisis. Archbishop Jackelén stated:

"The Bible is full of stories of refugees. Jesus himself was a refugee in his infancy. To protect the stranger, the one who is not protected, runs like a thread through the Old and New Testament. There would probably be no approval from Jesus for the government policy."

On the basis of what many Christian leaders in Sweden say, Jesus seems to have been interested in migration policies, and he seems to have thought that they should be liberal.

According to the Church of Sweden, there are even clear political positions that God has on how immigrants should integrate into a new country. Archbishop Antje Jackelén, for instance, said in an interview from September 2014 that if one requires that immigrants assimilate into the country after their arrival, it is contrary to a Christian view of humanity.
Is that statement based on the Bible, or is it based on the political agenda of the Swedish liberal establishment?
Antje Jackelén leads the church in which 63% of Sweden's population are members. Her message is that Jesus has clear political positions on both migration and integration policies.

Christian leaders in Sweden have re-made Christianity into a religion that serves the political agenda of an establishment whose extreme liberal ideology lacks popular support. Left: Sweden's Crown Princess, King, Archbishop Antje Jackelén, and the Queen pose after the archiepiscopal ordination of Jackelén on June 15, 2014 (Image source: Church of Sweden). Right: Influential Swedish Christian pastor Stefan Swärd co-wrote the book Jesus Was Also a Refugee, which advocates for a policy of no immigration restrictions; rich countries have to open their borders simply because they are rich countries.

After the June 2016 terrorist attack in Orlando, Florida, in which ISIS sympathizer Omar Mateen murdered 49 people at a gay nightclub, another influential Christian pastor in Sweden, Stanley Sjöberg, wrote on his Facebook page that homosexuals should be more low-key, not to provoke Muslims. After his statement about the Orlando massacre, Sjöberg told a Christian magazine:

"But I believe that we must adapt to the multicultural way when we've brought several hundred thousand Muslims here. I believe that politicians and serious thinkers agree with me that we cannot just continue with our culture, with Pride festivals, or to drink in public. We in Europe are forced to step back to show a little more considerate attitude to the environment."

The Church of Sweden has actively tried to influence Swedish politicians to support a liberal immigration policy. When the Swedish parliament was going to vote on restrictive migration policies in June 2016, a bishop of the Church of Sweden in the Diocese of Västerås pleaded with MPs to vote against the proposal. When the media asked him why he should interfere in political matters he responded:

"It is obvious to me. Otherwise I would not carry out my duties as bishop unless I committed myself to the vulnerable."

There are lot of vulnerable people in Sweden. 225,000 retirees in Sweden lived in poverty in 2014, and all estimates shows that this number is going to grow rapidly. So why is the Church of Sweden obsessed with vulnerable people who come from other countries?

It seems to have become part of Church of Sweden's mission -- and Christianity in Sweden generally -- to make the country implement a liberal immigration policy.
But is this really the mission of the Church and Christianity? What happened with spreading the Word and letting people know that Jesus is the truth, the way and the life?

It is not even certain that Christian leaders in Sweden care so much about Jesus and his opinions.
After a French priest, Jacques Hamel, was murdered by ISIS sympathizers in Rouen, France, on July 26, 2016, an initiative started in Sweden where Swedish Christians took "selfies" with a cross to show solidarity with persecuted Christians.
The initiative, called "Mitt kors"("My cross"), was started by three priests from the Church of Sweden. The Church of Sweden, however, criticized it. Gunnar Sjöberg, Head of Communications for the Church of Sweden, wrote on his Facebook page:

"I really do not know about that. This thing about Christians suddenly wearing a cross as a sign for or against something. It is actually nothing new, but the call seems seditious and un-Christian in the conflicts that already exist."

So now, according to a senior official in the Church of Sweden, the call to wear a cross to show solidarity with persecuted Christians is "un-Christian".

That the Church of Sweden distances itself from people who carry the cross caused Ann Heberlein, a doctor of theology and lecturer at Lund University, to write,

"The leadership of the Church of Sweden no longer wants to lead a Christian community; they want to lead a general ethical association for humanistic values of the most vulgar kind."

The Church of Sweden's attacks on the "My cross" initiative continued until one of the priests who had started it publicly left the Church of Sweden. In an article, Johanna Andersson, the priest who is resigning, writes:

"Church leadership has for several weeks been running a campaign against us who started the group 'My cross.' In this campaign, I have been discredited, called 'questionable', 'unclean', 'agitator', 'un-Christian' and attributed xenophobic hidden agendas."

The question, therefore, is whether some Christian leaders in Sweden really care about Jesus and Christianity or whether they are using Jesus to convey a political agenda which includes a liberal immigration policy and multiculturalism.

While the Church of Sweden opposed a campaign that tried to use the cross to show solidarity with the persecuted Christians, Archbishop Antje Jackelén co-authored an op-ed in one of Sweden's largest newspapers with four other Swedish religious leaders, including Mahmoud Khalfi, chairman of the Swedish Imam Council, who has connections to the Muslim Brotherhood.

There are many examples of how Christianity in Sweden has gone astray and become something else.
One might describe Swedish Christianity as a new religion that worships multiculturalism and leftist values in general. In Swedish Christianity, Jesus has been reduced from being the son of God, to an activist fighting for multiculturalism and open borders.

In 2013, the Swedish Social Democratic Youth League had an advertisement for elections in the Church of Sweden, in which they declared that "Jesus was a Social Democrat." Meanwhile, there are Christian leaders who claim to know exactly what Jesus thought about the current government's immigration policy.

This is the state of Swedish Christianity today, and it is not certain that Christians around the world would recognize the religion in Sweden called Christianity.

Christian leaders in Sweden have taken Christianity and made it into a religion that serves the political agenda of an establishment whose extreme liberal ideology lacks popular support among the Swedish people.

If the Swedish establishment wants multiculturalism, then Christian leaders will declare that God says multiculturalism is good. If the Swedish establishment wants a liberal immigration policy, Jesus says that he has always been for a liberal immigration policy, despite the fact that he was born more than 2000 years ago. 

Swedish Christianity has become a mixture of madness and deception.
In Malmö the Church of Sweden publishes a local magazine called Trovärdigt. In the latest issue, you can read that a priest, who serves at St. Peters church in Malmö, said,

"The rainbow in the Pride Flag is also a sign of the promise between God and man".

Really? Not even the most radical gay activists believe that the rainbow in the gay pride flag is a sign of the promise between God and man.
For many influential Christian leaders in Sweden, it does not matter what it says in the Bible anymore.
In fact, if you take a step back and look at the overall picture, it is clear that many Christian leaders in Sweden do not worship God; they worship the romanticized, multicultural utopia they want Sweden to become. 
These Christian leaders betray not only the Swedish people, but they also betray the God that they promised to serve, by making Christianity into a bullhorn for the liberal elite who hold political power in Sweden.

One can have different interpretations of what Jesus did or what opinions he had, but we can all agree that he did not serve the Emperor or other earthly rulers. Too many Christian leaders in Sweden have become the servants of earthly rulers by conveying the message of the political establishment in Sweden.

Nima Gholam Ali Pour is a member of the board of education in the Swedish city of Malmö and is engaged in several Swedish think tanks concerned with the Middle East. He is also editor for the social conservative website Situation Malmö. Gholam Ali Pour is the author of the Swedish book "Därför är mångkultur förtryck"("Why multiculturalism is oppression").

• Follow Nima Gholam Ali Pour on Twitter and Facebook

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Giulio Meotti : Christianity is Rattling: "Lights Out" in Germany

Christianity is Rattling: "Lights Out" in Germany

by Giulio Meotti
October 12, 2016 at 5:00 am

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/9072/germany-christianity

• The fall of German Christianity leaves an emptiness that seems likely to be filled by a more multicultural and Islamic society. Germany today houses Europe's largest Muslim community.
• Christians in Germany, Die Welt reports, will become a minority in 20 years.
• The falling birth rate will remove a piece of Germany larger than the former communist East Germany. It will result in a demographic loss equivalent to the population of Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Cologne and Frankfurt combined.
• The German army just spent 428 million euros on various operations relating to migrants during the past year. It has been the costliest mission within German borders that the army of the Federal Republic of Germany has ever undertaken.
• In the decades after WWII, Germans have turned into hard-core pacifists, enjoying their role on the sidelines of global conflicts. The army was then turned into a humanitarian organization.

"Contemporary historians ... right now, have failed to find a single historical example of a society that became secularised and maintained its birth rate over subsequent centuries," 
the former UK chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, recently argued.

"Falling fertility has coincided so closely with massive secularization that we must at least ask whether the two phenomena are related, even if not in a neat one-to-one relationship", the scholar Philip Jenkins also said.

This is also true apparently for Germany.
The Ratzinger-Schülerkreis is the circle made up of 41 former alumni of Pope Benedict XVI (born Joseph Ratzinger), who meet once a year with their former professor to discuss a specific topic. This year Pope Benedict has chosen the "spiritual crisis of Europe." The guest of honor was the American jurist Joseph Weiler, who coined the expression "Christophobia" and defended the crucifix in Italian schools at the EU's highest tribunal.

As Pope, Benedict understood the cultural and religious crisis of Europe, and the former German professor sees his native country as a litmus test for the future of Europe's Christianity.

In Germany, where President Joachim Gauck was a Protestant pastor and Chancellor Angela Merkel is the daughter of a clergyman, in the country of liberal theologians -- such as Hans Küng, Uta Ranke-Heinemann and Eugen Drewermann, who have fueled intense criticism of the Vatican hierarchy regarding ecclesiastical celibacy, birth control, the role of women, and sacraments for the divorced -- Christianity is rattling.

In 1963, there were 400 new priests ordained in Germany. In 1993, there were 238 new priests ordained. In 2013, the number fell to 98. In 2015, the number fell to a historic low of 58.
This was revealed by the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Germany's largest national subscription daily newspaper, published in majority-Catholic Bavaria: "The Catholic Church in Germany is facing a dramatic shortage of priests. Never before as today have so few men in Germany become Catholic priests."

The German dioceses plan to respond to this crisis by merging parishes, closing churches and hiring priests from Africa.
The Catholic Church in Germany has already closed 515 churches in the past decade, while the Evangelical Church closed 340. The number of parishes has decreased from 13,300 in 1995 to 10,800 in 2015.

What was once the Catholic St. Peter's Church in Mönchengladbach, Germany, is now an indoor rock-climbing facility -- one of several known as a "climbing church" (Kletterkirche). Image source: Wikimedia Commons.

The agony of German Catholicism is also demonstrated by the faithful who "escape."
Germans have been leaving the Catholic Church in droves. In 2015, 181,925 Germans formally chose apostasy. By comparison, only 2,685 people have converted to Catholicism. The number of baby baptisms has also decreased by one third, from 260,000 baptized in 1995 to 167,000 in 2015. The situation is even more dismal for weddings. Twenty years ago, 86,456 couples married in a church. Last year, the number dropped by almost half: in a nation of 80 million people, only 44,298 couples sworn eternal love in a church. The proportion of people who attend church has declined from 18.6% in 1995 to 10.4% in 2015.

This trend is called "the New Atheism" ("der neue Atheismus"). According to Detlef Pollack, a professor of religious sociology at the University of Münster, only 4% of east German Protestants regularly attend church today, compared to 15% in the 1950s. A recent study conducted by University of Chicago professor Tom W. Smith revealed that citizens of the former German Democratic Republic have, by far, "the world's highest rate of atheism."

This tendency is becoming the norm in Germany. Andreas Püttmann, a researcher at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, called it "Gesellschaft ohne Gott" ("society without God") in his book by the same title. "The long-term trend shows an epochal implosion," Püttmann writes in the book.

A few weeks ago, in the Marienkirche Church, in the middle of Alexanderplatz in Berlin, an evangelical pastor celebrated Germany's first gay wedding before an altar.
 The author Peter Hahne, in his book "Enough Amusement! The End of the Fun Society" ("Schluss mit lustig! Das Ende der Spaßgesellschaft") wondered if Germany "can still be called a Christian country, or whether it would not be more accurate to say that Germany is a predominantly atheist country with religious minorities."
The fall of German Christianity leaves an emptiness that seems likely to be filled by a more multicultural and Islamic society. That is why Germany's finance minister,

Wolfgang Schäuble, just called for the creation of a "German Islam." Merkel's powerful ally linked the rise of a German Islam with the national demographic disaster. "Demographic change is one of our great challenges," said Schäuble. Germany today houses Europe's largest Muslim community.

The latest annual report of the Expert Council of German Foundations on Integration and Migration explains that, due to the decline in the number of Christians in a period of mass immigration from Islamic countries, "Germany has become demographically a multi-religious country." Christians in Germany, Die Welt reports, will become a minority in 20 years.

Religious decline is usually followed by a demographic one. The London-based think tank, the Institute of Economic Affairs, just shed light on the "Europe's demographic timebomb." In the report, "From empty pews to empty cradles," three American scholars, Eli Berman, Laurence Iannaccone, Giuseppe Ragusa, explain that in many European countries, the sudden drop in religious practice has determined a demographic suicide.

It is not only a question of religious faith, but also of optimism about the future.

If the current fertility rates persist, Germany is set to decline from a 2002 peak of 82 million people, to 74.5 million by 2050. Greece, with a loss of 29% of its the population, would decrease from 11 million to fewer than 7 million inhabitants. Poland, suffering a decline of 25%, would pass from 38 million to 29 million.
The projections indicate that Germany will experience more than 64 million deaths during the next half century, and fewer than 40 million births. The falling birth rate will remove a piece of Germany larger than the former communist East Germany. It will result in a demographic loss which would be the equivalent to the population of Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Cologne and Frankfurt combined.

It is a new situation. Since 1972, Germany has not seen a single year in which the number of newborns has exceeded the number of deaths. It was then that families began to go out of fashion in West Germany.
Now there is a talk of many small communities in Germany that could become ghost towns.
In 2003, at the peak of the US war against Iraq, then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld criticized the German and French opposition to the military campaign as a symptom of "old Europe". Rumsfeld would later say:

"Some people were sensitive about my comment because they thought it was a pejorative way of highlighting demographic realities. Apparently they felt it pointed a white light at a weakness in Europe -- an aging population. Europe has come some distance since World War II in becoming Europe."

Germany's decline today is, in fact, also a military one. The German military (Bundeswehr) during the Cold War was the first line of defense against a Soviet invasion; now the army is decaying. The German army just spent 428 million euros on various operations relating to migrants during the past year. It has been the costliest mission within German borders that the army of the Federal Republic of Germany has ever undertaken.
While Ukrainian troops were battling pro-Russian separatists on the eastern borders of Europe, a German battalion took part in a NATO exercise in Norway. The Germans had no weapons and used broomsticks as simulated guns. The Bundeswehr today has helicopters that cannot fly and tanks that cannot shoot. This is a cultural decision.

In the decades after World War II, the Germans have turned into hard-core pacifists, enjoying their role on the sidelines of global conflicts. The Bundeswehr was then turned into a humanitarian organization. To quote journalist and author Henryk Broder, "pacifism has become a German lifestyle" -- not only for Germany's leadership but for the society as well.

Already today, one in 20 Germans -- 5% of the population -- is over 80 years old. By 2050, it will be one in six. Europe's largest and richest nation is becoming a country for old men. A quarter of German men said "no" to children.

 It is such a terrible irony that Nazi Germany, which devastated the continent in its search of Lebensraum ("living space"), is now a nation for decrepit, disarmed and secularized men. And soon, Islamized as well.

To quote Ursula von der Leyen, Germany's Minister of Defense (and a mother of seven): if Germany does not reverse its plummeting birthrate, "we will have to turn out the light."

Giulio Meotti, Cultural Editor for Il Foglio, is an Italian journalist and author.

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Building a Church is a 'Sin' Against God, Says Egyptian Muslim Council

AINA News

Building a Church is a 'Sin' Against God, Says Egyptian Muslim Council

Posted 2009-08-31 

 

 http://www.aina.org/news/20090831182120.htm

 

Cairo (AINA) -- A controversial Fatwa (Islamic edict) prohibiting the construction of new churches in Egypt has provoked considerable discussion and spiraled into a crisis, involving the Fatwa Council, Al-Azhar Grand Sheikh, Christian and Muslim religious personalities, and the media. It was also reported on 8/26/2009 that the jurists who issued the Fatwa are under investigation on orders of the Grand Mufti and the Justice Minister.

The Fatwa (Arabic) in question was issued by the Al-Azhar affiliated "Dar el-Eftta" -- Fatwa Council for Islamic interpretations of laws in Islam. It stated "the will of a Muslim towards building a Church is a sin against God, just as if he left his inheritance towards building a nightclub, a gambling casino, or building a barn for rearing pigs, cats or dogs."

It was issued in response to an inquiry sent to the Fatwa Council by Dr. Naguib Gabraeel, President of the Egyptian Union Human Rights Organization (EUHRO), asking its opinion as to what he read in an article written by a prominent writer about what was stated in a textbook taught to third year students, Muslims and Christians, at the Faculty of Law, Cairo University, on Inheritance and execution of wills.

Gabraeel's inquiry pertained specifically to a quotation from the textbook "it is forbidden for a person to donate money for what would lead to sin, such as donating in his will money towards build a church, a nightclub, a gambling casino, towards promoting the alcohol industry or for building a barn for rearing pigs, cats or dogs."

He went on to inquire "So what is the Shari'a position to what was mentioned especially concerning the will of a Muslim to donate for the building of a church or a monk's cell? If the answer is prohibition, aren't these houses where the name of God is mentioned? Is not Christianity a recognized religion according to the Egyptian constitution? There are also a lot of wealthy Copts and Coptic businessmen who donate towards the building of mosques."

The Fatwa Council replied affirming the correctness of what came in the textbook and issued a Fatwa on September 10, 2008 (document number 1809), which is also published on its official website.

To highlight the reason for this "sin" the Fatwa went on to state: "Salvation in the Christian religion is the belief in Jesus as Lord, where Muslims fundamentally disagree on it. Muslims believe that Issa [Jesus in Arabic] peace be upon him, is a slave of Allah and His Messenger, and that Allah is one. He begets not and He is not begotten and there is none like unto Him. So if it is seen that one sect has deviated from this absolute Monotheism, then according to that person's own religion he is forbidden to donate for the erection of buildings where Allah is not worshiped alone."

According to Mohammed el-Maghrabbi, deputy chief of the Faculty of Law, and author of the controversial textbook, what he wrote is a principle agreed upon by all Islamic jurists. He added that a will, if devoted by a Christian for building a Church, is forbidden and sinful and is considered in Islam as separation from God. So it is also illegal if a non-Muslim wills his inheritance towards building a Church or a Synagogue.

This Fatwa has shocked many as it classified churches with nightclub, gambling casinos, and places for rearing pigs and dogs, which are considered 'unclean' animals according to Islam and Muslims.

Christians were angered and considered it a clear and explicit insult to all Christians. The renowned theologian Reverend Abdelmassih Bassit, Professor at the Coptic Orthodox Clerical Institute, called it "a shocking Fatwa."

Gabraeel called on the government and Al-Azhar to state their position clearly on the building of churches, as well as prayer meetings held in premises even if they were 'unlicensed' as churches.

On August 19, 2009, a delegation from EUHRO, headed by Dr. Gabraeel, paid a visit to Al-Azhar Grand Sheikh Mohamed Sayed Tantawi, who said that the Fatwa was wrong and untrue and that Muslims can make voluntary contributions to build churches, as a church is a house for "worshiping and tolerance" and that "Shari'a does not prevent Muslims from donating to the building of a church, as it is his free money. He also affirmed that Al-Azhar does not object to the "unified law for building places of worship."

Tantawi added that building churches should be left to the Christians and Muslims are not allowed according to Shari'a to interfere in other faiths, "because religion, faith and what a person believes in is a relationship between him and his God." He also called on the Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa to hold the five jurists who issued the Fatwa accountable.

Reactions to Tantawi's statements resulted in a crisis in the Islamic circles. Most Muslim leaders criticized him publicly and supported the Fatwa "as being issued by people qualified in Islamic Shari'a law" or "a Muslim should not donate to the building of a church when Christians do not believe in the religion of Mohammed, or him being a prophet."

Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa gave the excuse that he never ratified the Fatwa. Nevertheless, his answer was not convincing as it was an official Fatwa issued by the authority headed by him, stamped and signed by five of the Council's jurists. He failed to give an opinion about it.

Less than 24 hours after the EUHRO visit, Grand Sheikh Tantawi backtracked on his statements saying it was a misunderstanding on the part of the EUHRO delegation and the newspapers. He commented that what he meant was for non-Muslims to donate in their wills for church building and reaffirmed that it is forbidden for a person to donate money for the construction of "sinful" places, such as bars and nightclubs.

The reason for his change of heart, according to the Egyptian independent newspaper Al-Destour, was that 'high sources' contacted the Al-Azhar Grand Sheikh and the Grand Mufti to resolve the crisis raised over the Fatwa "in order to avoid any sectarian strife or an inconsistency between Al-Azhar and the Fatwa Council."

On his part EUHRO chief Dr. Gabraeel answered the Grand Sheikh saying that it is his right to change his mind but he cannot deny what he said during the visit, and that his statements were caught on the video recording of their meeting. He added that when Grand Sheikh Tantawi was asked by the delegation if a Muslim can donate from his own funds towards building a church, he answered that he is free to do so, and when asked if this was his personal opinion or the Shari'a stand on this issue, Tantawi answered that it was according to Shari'a Law. The video was sent to the media and was uploaded on all Coptic advocacy websites.

Many Christians believe that this Fatwa has exposed the true stance of the religious authorities and the government towards churches, and the reason why it refrains from passing the long awaited bill on the "unified law for building places of worship," which would put an end to all problems related to building and restoring places of worship. It is also believed that since Islam views church building as a sin, passing this bill would therefore be in conflict with Shari'a Law -- which is the main source of legislation as stipulated in the Constitution -- and this would be something that the government would avoid at all costs.

By Mary Abdelmassih

Robert M. Price : Bultmannism and Buddhism

Bultmannism and Buddhism

 

 Protestant theologian and New Testament scholar Rudolf Bultmann made quite a splash — make that, bomb crater — with his 1941 essay, “New Testament and Mythology.”¹ And though whole schools of subsequent theologians have taken Bultmann’s words in stride and moved on to their own new and, in some cases, equally shocking projects, one still finds most Protestants both in Germany and in America either blissfully ignorant of Bultmann’s bombshell or desperately trying to forget it.

Bultmann was far from the first to blow the whistle on the mythic, nonhistorical character of the New Testament. Both enemies of Christianity and Liberal Modernist theologians had already done that. Bultmann’s novelty and wisdom lay in his recognition that myth is the irreplaceable language of religion and that, to retain the powerful message of the myth, one must demythologize — or, as his colleague Paul Tillich put it, “deliteralize” — the New Testament. Liberal theologians, like Adolf Harnack and Albrecht Ritschl, saw fit simply to subtract the myth and focus on what was left: ethics, piety, morality. But Bultmann knew there was more to the New Testament message than that.

What is the purpose of myth, at least in general? Bultmann focused on the role of myth as enshrining, or at least presupposing, the particular self-understanding of the community that told and cherished the myth. Thus, myths could be decoded, or demythologized, to reveal the society’s perception of its own place in the world. Many myths are about the comforting, dependable cyclical continuation of the familiar: the gods recreate the world and give it new stability every year, etc. But myths attached to rituals of rebirth and salvation — myths of grace, not myths of nature, one might say — tell at once of a consciousness of oppression and the thrill of new freedom and maturity. This is true equally of puberty rite myths and mystery religion sacraments, like those of ancient Mithraism, the Isis and Osiris cult, and the Attis religion. Finally, the kernel of myth is the existential self-understanding of those who tell and live the myth.

It is not as if Bultmann thought the actual mythic narratives were henceforth negligible. No, he knew what modern Unitarians do not seem to know: myth is the language of religion, though the religion will be immature as long as it fails to interpret the language. He shared the conviction of Friedrich Schleiermacher, that one cannot practice some sort of distilled “religion in general.” Rather, one must choose a particular religious path, even if they all reach the same destination.

Christianity, Bultmann thought, had reached its present crisis of interpretation because of modernity, particularly science and its disclosures. Most of us, no matter what we think or say we believe, simply do not occupy the world of the ancients. We do not count on miracles or reckon with invasive spirits and demons. We do not readily look up exorcists in the Yellow Pages. We even have clever dispensationalist theologies to explain why miracles do not happen anymore. Or, if we are Pentecostals and charismatics, we try our best to live as if the ancient, mythic miracle-world is real, but the tepid results of the typical Assemblies of God congregation and the aberrant fanaticism of the Deliverance Ministry both amply attest to the failure of the experiment.

So, according to Bultmann, we face two choices: either we can abandon the New Testament proclamation as a product of ancient superstition that does not transcend its origins or we can ask whether the existential self-understanding presupposed in the preaching of the first Christians may still be valid, detachable from the mythic and prescientific worldview of the first century. Bultmann chose and advocated the latter option. He rejected all supernaturalism as superstition. But he did not reject God. Indeed, the major problem he had with myth is that it depicts the Transcendent in objectified, this-worldly terms, as if God might reach down and temporarily suspend the normal process of cause and effect. Insofar as myth makes God do that, myth is superstitious. God is no mere object, no mere person. Nor would that have come as any news to Anselm, Aquinas, or the orthodox theologians of the East. So God is no superstition, but supernaturalism depicts him in a superstitious manner.

Jesus Christ, on the other hand, was certainly a person, a historical individual, though we can know precious little about him. But we do know he preached that the individual stands naked before the keen eyes of divine judgment in every moment. We know of his willingness to place his fate in the hands of his Father, something we might generalize as a bearing of radical openness toward and faith in the future. The resurrection? Bultmann knew good and well that the resurrection of Jesus was a myth borrowed from contemporary mystery religions. It functions, first, as metaphor for the fact that the death/cross of Christ always remains etched against the horizon, re-presented in Christian preaching, to challenge us to abandon faith in all but God. Second, it stands for and catalyzes the transformation one undergoes by casting one’s lot with God. Borrowing the terms of his colleague Martin Heidegger, Bultmann called such Godward living “authentic existence,” the renunciation of the illusion of self-sufficiency. Anything short of it he named “inauthentic existence” — equivalent, I think, to what Tillich called “idolatrous faith.”

This Christian gospel, Bultmann maintained, is independent of the mythic prescientific world picture amid which it entered history. As a result, no one, to be a Christian, need accept the existence of angels, demons, a future apocalypse, or a future life — though here again, since surviving the death of the body is not exactly a mythical notion, just a scientific unknown, Bultmann did not reject it. Indeed, insofar as churches do make such beliefs prerequisites for salvation, they are requiring cognitive “works,” no matter their hypocritical prattle about “faith alone.”

One can be an equally good Christian whether one believes in a round earth and disease germs, or in a flat earth and demons. But to require belief in the furniture of an ancient worldview, against all knowledge and better judgment, is bad Christianity, as it requires the sacrifice of the intellect. And that, for Bultmann, is the mirror-image of the futile attempt of the Liberal Modernist to sacrifice the mythology of the Bible instead of listening to it.

    

Buddhism

What might it look like if a world religion — not just a small group of ivory-tower academics — were to embrace the Bultmannian perspective? What if some major faith placed demythologizing at the forefront of its missionary efforts? Take a look at Buddhism. Buddhism seems from the first to have been able to make Bultmann’s distinction between the genuine stumbling-block of the gospel (or of the dharma) and the false stumbling-block of parochial worldviews. Buddhism promoted a saving message of self-reliance, of altering one’s self-understanding. The result would be an amazing new freedom, a cutting of the bands that tie one to the delusive world of samsara. To be sure, early Buddhism, surviving today as Theravada, was more optimistic than Bultmann on this sufficiency of self-effort; later Buddhism, Mahayana, came to parallel Bultmann, insisting that one must rely upon Other-power — the saving grace of Amitabha Buddha — to be saved.

But in either case, Buddhists clearly understood that traditional faith, in their case Vedic Hinduism, was irrelevant, whether true or false. That is, if Indra, Vishnu, and Siva did indeed inhabit Lotus-palaces in heavens of bliss, and even if they actually did deign to answer prayers — so what? How did that get anybody liberated from this sinful world, and from endless bondage to its false desires and its sufferings? It simply did not matter if the traditional map of the cosmos or pantheon of gods was accurate. Early Buddhists took for granted that it was all true, albeit irrelevant. And here is the key: later Buddhists, as they entered new cultural zones, did not require converts to believe in the symbolic universe of Hinduism. If one believed in Taoist deities or aboriginal spirits, even if one bargained with them on a day-to-day basis, it was all the same. The message of salvation, of self-understanding, of quenching desire and abandoning false belief in an ego-self (atman), was seen as fully compatible with anyone’s inherited mythology. Or, as with many Buddhists in today’s West, with no mythology at all.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Buddhism has its own stubborn fundamentalists who insist on literal belief in the twenty-five various Buddhas of Buddhist “history.” These devout folks are fully as scandalized at scholarly debunking of the myths of Dipankara, Amitabha, and others as the detractors of the Jesus Seminar are. But it is safe to say that Buddhism as a whole has a much larger place for those, say, Zen masters, who minimize the importance, à la Bultmann, of a historical Buddha. On The Long Search, a BBC television series surveying world religions, host Ronald Eyre inquired of a Zen abbot, “Does the Buddha exist?” The answer was, “For those who need the Buddha to exist, he exists. For those who do not need him to exist, he does not exist.” The real and relevant Buddha is the Buddha-nature latent in all sentient beings. Can we imagine a Christianity willing to make the same admission about Christ? “If you meet the Christ on the road to Emmaus — kill him.”

                             

     1See the most recent reprinting and translation, Rudolf Bultmann, “New Testament and Mythology,” New Testament and Mythology and Other Basic Writings, ed. and trans. Schubert M. Ogden (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1989), pp. 1-43.

 

 By Robert M. Price

=====================

http://www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com/art_bult_budd.htm

Robert M. Price : Dynamics of Messianism

Dynamics of Messianism

by  Robert M. Price

I am currently working on a comparative paradigm for messianism, a conceptual scheme drawn from the study of various messianic movements throughout world history. Such a typology may help us understand new messianic movements as they arise. What is a messiah? What is the difference between a true and a false messiah? And what can be expected to happen when a messiah comes, as well as when he goes? I would like to set forth the rudiments of my theory, now, in this time of messianic expectation.

Usually such synthetic studies as this one have the character of "post-game wrap-ups." They are of interest, mostly, to scholarly outsiders, not to members of the type of movements they discuss. This is perhaps because followers of messianic movements prefer to regard their movements and their progress as the result of pure, unmediated miracle and providence; thus, they are indifferent to the explanations of unbelievers offered in the spirit of scientific naturalism. And this is why, in the case of messianic movements, people so often ignore and repeat the lessons of history. A significant exception is a uniquely modern messianic movement, the one sponsoring this very journal, the one at whose seminary I began working on the present study: the Unification Church of Sun Myung Moon. This movement seems to have embarked on its historic course with an unusually acute awareness of its position in the modern world. As a result it stands an excellent chance of learning the lessons of the past and so of avoiding the repetition of the sad ones. Thus I will begin with typological generalities, then apply them to the specific case of the Unification movement.
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First, let us remind ourselves of Clifford Geertz’s description of religion as a cultural system of symbols for managing the three great negativities of life: adversity, ignorance and injustice. Life is filled with these three things, and yet we cannot grow inured to them. We seek their resolution by appealing to an imagined, unseen realm outside and adjacent to the visible world. We posit that the sad facts of death, ignorance, suffering, and oppression will be avenged, reversed, justified, explained or alleviated up there, out there, in heaven or in the future. The murderer may seem to get away scot free as far as we can see, but rest assured, he will get what's coming to him in hell, or when he's reincarnated as a flatworm. Why did tragedy strike? We don't know, but we will when we get to heaven.
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As Peter Berger notes,[1]  messianism is one such rationalization strategy. Note how it works: messianism does not do what some theodicies do. It does not pretend to answer the question of how God can be good and yet allow all the evils of the world. It is more pragmatic than that. It knows that mere theories are cold comfort at best. Messianism focuses not on the beginning, the source of the problem; it focuses instead on the end of it, which it says is coming soon. The Savior, the Redeemer, will come to wipe away every tear. He will finally destroy evil. And when it is gone, who will think to reproach God? Who will care why everything went wrong once it has been made right?

Berger calls this a “future, this-worldly theodicy.” By contrast, an “otherworldly theodicy” would abandon hope for the messiah bringing justice into this world or “peace on earth.” Instead it would promise relief from the ills of this world by giving you a ticket to heaven. In the latter case, you would be leaving the visible, factual world of ills, this veil of tears, and embarking for the farther shores of Geertz’s unseen larger world on the margins of this one [2]  
 In Mircea Eliade’s terms, this world that needs redemption would be profane space, while the unseen world of imagined answers would correspond to sacred space. 
Messianism envisions that a savior is presently waiting in the wings of unseen sacred space. This may be understood as his already existing in heaven; or his waiting in concealment somewhere on earth, as a leper outside the walls of Rome; or it may be simply the prophesied certainty of his coming. In other words, he is “waiting” in the future. The messiah’s place is off-stage. He is always “the one who is to come.” The trouble starts when one day he appears.
 

When someone announces himself to be the messiah, he is claiming to have brought sacred space into profane space, transforming the one into the other. "The kingdom of this world [that is, profane space] has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ [i.e., sacred space]." People are excited, because they have been convinced that all evils will cease. The world will be changed. But history stubbornly goes on, even after the supposed coming of the end of history. How is the impression maintained that redemption has dawned?

First, a bulwark is erected against the profane world. Of course, the profane world does not cease to exist, but the messiah and his followers create and retreat into a bubble of messianic, eschatological existence. Berger and Luckmann [3]  call it a “finite province of meaning,” a willing suspension of disbelief, a retreat, usually temporary, into a carefully circumscribed and fortified subworld in which the kingdom of God will seem to have come.

The boundaries of this island reality are laid down by behavioral rules, inner-circle jargon, special clothing, and distinctive beliefs. Contact with outsiders is strictly regulated: believers spend all their time with each other and interact with outsiders only by token of evangelism. An example of this is the Jehovah’s Witness sect. As John Lofland explains, in an early study of the Unification movement,[4]  the evangelist sets the terms for interaction with the unbeliever. By offering him the gospel, the evangelist shapes the unbeliever's response: he will either reject the gospel, playing the role of worldling, rejecter, Satan-deceived persecutor, or he will accept the gospel and join the group, another welcome vote for the beliefs of the beleaguered sect. Either way, the evangelist wins!

Within the magic circle of the mustard-seed kingdom, the fires of supernatural redemption are stoked by charismatic prophecy, speaking in tongues, and reports of miracles. Soon, the believers assure one another, this beachhead of salvation will spread abroad to the ends of the earth. But redemption does not come, not according to the original, Technicolor expectation. The most successful it can be is eventually to become a new worldwide religion or the ideology of an empire. But even this will fall short of the once-imagined glories of the millennium. (Rest assured, though, its hierarchy will still claim the absoluteness of eschatological truth to authorize its dictates and dogmas!)

The process of adjusting to the delay of the end already begins within the reign/ministry of the messiah if it lasts long enough. Otherwise it may occur at his death. Either way, there are various ways of adjusting to the failure of the eschaton, coping with the ongoing of history. 

One is ritual anticipation/evocation of the future. Eliade[5]  understands ritual as the process of cyclical return to the sacred time of origins, as nature is renewed and rejuvenated each year when spring comes. But in the case of a messianic sect, ritual is the calling into the present of the future. (Not that this is much of a difference from Eliade's paradigm, since in most eschatological schemas, Erdzeit=Urzeit anyway. The future state of bliss is a return to Eden, a re-creation.) For concrete examples, take the Lord’s Supper and the Dead Sea Scrolls messianic banquet. Both are "dry-runs" for the real thing, and at the same time stop-gap substitutes for the real thing. In precisely the same way, watching low-budget Rapture movies (Distant Thunder, Years of the Beast, Image of the Beast, etc.) provide fundamentalist church audiences with a kind of cathartic vicarious experience of the eagerly-awaited eschatological events.
 The believer hopes to see the events predicted by Hal Lindsay happening soon, being covered on CNN. But it never comes. So in the meantime, one can watch theatrical simulations of the events. It's not the apocalypse, but it's better than nothing. John Gager is surely correct inseeing this as the function of the drama-like Book of Revelation.[6]  It is a powerful psychodrama supplying at least a measure of the eschatological excitement with which mundane reality is so stingy. 

A second historic strategy for managing the delay of the predicted End is to "realize," i.e., demythologize, eschatology. Though Lutheran existentialist Rudolf Bultmann is the best known exponent of this approach, it is, as he himself pointed out, quite old. The Gospel of John already seem to have abandoned hope of the second advent of Jesus and says it has happened in an unfalsifiable, invisible form as the coming of the Paraclete. The predicted resurrection? It will not happen literally; rather, the resurrection is the rebirth from the Spirit of those who believe in the word of Jesus.[7]  Similarly, in the Gospel of Thomas, the disciples ask Jesus when the repose (i.e., resurrection and final rest) of the dead will come. His answer: "What you expect has come to pass, only you do not recognize it" (saying 51). Ali Muhammad ("the Bab," or Gate) and Hussein Ali ("Baha'ullah," the Glory of God), founders of the Babi and Baha'i Faiths in nineteenth-century Iran, likewise preached that the End-Time events were to be realized figuratively--in their own ministry.[8]
 

A third tried-and-true approach (and no doubt the most controversial) is transcendence (of the present) by transgression (of the present order). In the seventeenth century, messiah Sabbatai Sevi convinced much of Eurasian Jewry that the messianic utopia would soon arrive, that he would persuade the Ottoman sultan to convert to Judaism. Instead, the sultan threatened him with death if he did not convert to Islam. His response? Allah-o-Akbar! If a crucified messiah was a bitter pill to swallow (1 Corinthians 1:23) how much more an apostate messiah! Most left the fold in disgust, but many did not, clinging rather to various theological rationalizations for the infamous act, many of which bore a startling analogy to the atonement theories attached to the crucifixion in early Christianity. For these believers, the question arose as to whether the messianic age had dawned or not. Outwardly, things appeared stubbornly the same. But the messiah had come, had he not? His messianic kingdom, then, was for the time being a secret, a mustard seed kingdom. One day soon it should burst forth in its Technicolor fullness, but in the meantime believers must live out the kingdom in secret, living by the standards not of the old age but of the new. And what were these? Some mystics had dared to posit that in the redeemed, sinless age, there would be no need for the many prohibitions of the Torah, so on that glorious day the Torah would show a new face: all its prohibitions would turn to positive commands. Among one radical sect of Sabbatians, the Dönmeh, [9]  the piety of the secret conventicle was to joyfully perform every act that the Torah had forbidden! Needless to say, their liturgical orgies had to be kept secret. The strange world they lived in was antipodal to that of their fellow Jews (and Gentiles). It was so different from evertything else in the world, one might well believe it to be the kingdom of God. 
      

As I say, these processes may begin already within the lifetime of the messiah, but they will surely get underway once the messiah dies. And then his status of finality (i.e., his futurity, his eschatological character) is relativized. He remains “the Seal of the Prophets,” God’s final messenger, in name only. 
His community, which had anticipated no further need for revelation (since God, after all, would shortly be making his dwelling among men) still requires divine guidance. So other revealers will follow the ­­­­"last prophet." This may happen in either of two ways: charisma is either routinized or inherited. All this, of course, is familiar from the great sociologist of religion Max Weber.[10]  Charisma (the status and personal influence of the messiah) is routinized when the charismatic prophet is replaced by theologians and managers, caretakers and interpreters. Concurrently, the messianic sect is being socially and religiously mainstreamed on the way to accommodating itself to society. The sect and society will begin to permeate each other: the church in the world, the world in the church. Things become more comfortable, less exciting. As Abraham Maslow sees it,[11]  the founder, the messiah, had visionary "peak experiences" and invited others to share them, whereas after his death, managers, notorious for their lack of inspiring vision and charisma, take over to build institutions, tombs for the prophets.

Why does this evolution/devolution occur? A messianic movement cannot remain a radical sect and succeed demographically, since sects cater to the elite; they want only "hundred percenters." Catholic Christianity and Sunni Islam, by contrast, are mainstreamed messianic sects. They are no longer "the camp of the saints" but, as Saint Cyprian said, a "school for sinners." 

If, on the other hand, the movement remains a sect at the margins of society, content with “a few good men,” the charismatic prophet will have been replaced by successors in kind. His charisma is inherited, as from Elijah to Elisha. The successors are vicars of the Christ who will return, while he is temporarily unavailable. (The Pope is an exception that proves the rule: he is really an institutional caretaker and only claims to speak with the messiah’s absolute authority very rarely.) Bearers of inherited charisma would include the Shi'ite Imams descended from Muhammad through Ali. These Imams are not prophets (God forbid! Muhammad was the last of those!), but they are divinely inspired interpreters of the Koran, unlike the mere caretakers of Sunni Islam, the Caliphs. Shi'a Islam remained sectarian; Sunni Islam mainstreamed and continually persecuted new Shi'ite messianisms. In early Christianity, the charisma of Jesus was inherited by the wandering prophets and apostles whose activities are attested in Matthew 25:34-40; 3 John vv. 5-8, the Didache, and other texts.[12]   These Jesus-prophets, brethren of the exalted Son of Man, would speak new revelations in his name, with his authority ("Whoever hears you hears me"--Luke 10:16. "Whoever in this sinful and adulterous generation is ashamed of me and my words, of him will the Son of Man be ashamed when he comes"--Mark 8:38). Bultmann and other form critics attribute much of the sayings-tradition of the Synoptic Gospels to these itinerant charismatics. As 3 John and the Didache make clear, these "loose canons" (pardon the expression) eventually came into conflict with the consolidating authority of the bishops, those who also claimed to be successors of Jesus, but through "apostolic succession," i.e., routinization of charisma. 

Let me mention one more interesting development once the messiah dies and history continues. Very often the believers go into denial: they say he did not die, but only seemed to! Invisibly to mortal eyes, he really escaped! (Note how we are again appealing to an imaginary unseen realm to soften the blows of adversity.) He is waiting in seclusion to return; or he rose and went to heaven, whence he will soon return; or his spirit is with God in heaven, whence it will return by means of the soon-coming resurrection of the dead. By these expedients, the terrible event which seems to debunk the messianic faith instead reenergizes it, since the death is now taken to betoken the final stage, the eleventh hour. Time to get cracking!

The eschaton, the end, has been deferred, but only to the immediate future. In the meantime, however, the vanished messiah is represented by divinely inspired spokesmen, such as the Bab or the Paraclete, till he should reappear. The longer this “interim” lasts, the more likely it is that the sect will remain messianic in name only, or will return to traditional future expectation: the vanished messiah, or a new messiah, will come someday. In fact, one of the interim spokesmen likely will claim to be the returned messiah, and the cycle will begin again.

The major alternative to having the messianic tension slacken and go limp is for the sect to perish together in a this-worldly Armageddon. Jim Jones and David Koresh took this alternative. In this way, and only in this way, can the messiah actually and literally lead the faithful into the promised land of Geertz’s imagined unseen realm of final rectification.

But short of this, every messiah must become a false messiah the minute he sets foot on the stage of history, because history will continue. He will either be discarded by disillusioned believers or he will later be reinterpreted as a “new Moses,” a founder figure, a figure of a receding past (e.g., Jesus in Matthew's Gospel; Muhammad as the provider of the Koran). Or he may be assigned to a kind of messianic Valhalla with the honorary status of a preliminary messiah, as was Simon bar-Kochba, hailed as King Messiah by no less a personage than Rabbi Aqiba. Simon briefly achieved Jewish independence, only to be overwhelmed by Rome. But he was not then retroactively made a false messiah. As Geza Vermes argues,[13]  it was Simon bar-Kochba's noble failure that prompted some sages to split the office of messiah into two: that of Messiah ben Joseph, an Ephraimite messiah doomed to die heroically in battle to atone for Israel's sins, and a victorious Messiah ben-David, to carry the banner to victory. 
This way, Simon could be venerated as a messiah despite his failure, and eschatological expectation could begin again, only momentarily deferred. A similar strategy is to understand a messiah who died without bringing in the kingdom of God as the first coming of a messiah who will come again, this time in glory. This, of course, is the Christian option. Again, only a deferral.

No messiah ever manages to bring the unseen sacred space down to the profane world, so that we may walk henceforth by sight and no longer merely by faith. He may pretend to, in which case provisional opinions are given the unimpeachable status of absolute truth, and one dare not question it. Accordingly, though he anticipated distant-future revelations supplanting his own new dispensation,  the Bab commanded book-burnings of all uninspired books in his own day. 

At best, a clever messiah can “stall” and remain with one foot in the future by being cagey about his messianic identity. Jesus is asked if he is the messiah, and he leaves 'em guessing: "You say that I am." 
Reverend Moon used to be asked the same question, and his nimble reply topped even Jesus: "I'd have to give the same answer Jesus did." Beautiful! If he gives Jesus' answer, he must be the messiah like Jesus, no? But, then, strictly speaking, Jesus' answer was elusive! So close, but so far! Or recall Rabbi Schneerson's caginess: he would neither confirm nor deny his avidly believed messiahship. 
The uncertainty kept people on edge: they thought the messiah was present, but strictly speaking his explicit messianic claim was still at least a few minutes in the future!

When the messiah dies, he will have returned to Geertz’s unseen realm. He will be “back” in heaven, “hidden,” like the Mahdi, somewhere on earth, or “he” will return to the merely virtual existence of a second prophesied messiah. Heaven, earthly seclusion, or futurity — all are in the imaginary realm.

As I have anticipated, the Unification Church of Sun Myung Moon has already managed to learn a number of the lessons described here, having progressed with unprecedented rapidity through several stages that take most sectarian movements many generations. The result is that now, while the Messiah himself is alive and in active charge of the movement, the Unification Church has already sloughed off much of its sectarian alienation from nonmembers, its disdain of "worldly wisdom," and it's fear of institutionalism.[14]  It has not only assimilated the element of "realized eschatology;" rather, realized eschatology and demythologizing are at the heart of its theology. Though Unification theology is unabashedly supernatural, even spiritualistic, realized eschatology is primary to it, and not merely, as usual in messianic movements, a fall-back position. This is because of the unique Christology. Reverend Moon claims to be the Lord of the Second Advent, the fulfillment of the prophecy of the Parousia of Jesus Christ, not an independent messianic figure in his own right, like Rabbi Schneerson. Short of contriving to descend from the sky in celestial glory, how else could Reverend Moon justify this claim without demythologizing the Parousia? He was a man among men, a man born of woman, not an apocalyptic angel. If he were to heed the charge of Jesus on Easter morning 1936 to fulfill his mission, demythologization was inevitable. (Ali Muhammad, the Bab, had been forced to draw the same conclusion once he realized he himself was the Mahdi whose advent he had been heralding.)

When Unification theology demythologizes the advent of the Christ, reconceptualizing it as a birth (of Reverend Moon, plus, of course, his accomplishments), it transmutes the prophesied "end" into a new beginning instead. In the same way, the messianic fulfillment brought by Sun Myung Moon must be that of establishing a new dispensation, defining the threshold of a new age stretching into the future. History will continue. It is supposed to continue, unlike the expectation of most messianic sects. 

Notice the contrast between Paul's reference to Jesus as "the last Adam" (1 Cor. 15:45) and Unification theology's understanding of Reverend Moon as "the Third Adam."  Paul sees his messiah as ringing down the curtain of history. He calls Jesus an Adam just to make him the capper of history, the opposite number of the first man, the other book end. The Third Adam, on the other hand, is a parallel to the Edenic Adam, not an antitype. The Third Adam raises the curtain on a new era of history. He is an inaugurator.
         

 And this means, in turn, that Reverend Moon's messianic identity already includes and indeed demands the transition, described above, from messiah figure to founder figure. Since it is supposed to happen, it will be no shock or disappointment when it does happen. Still, certain problems may remain, even if they are seen clearly ahead. For instance, there is the problem of succession. Even though no one will be taken aback at the very fact of Reverend Moon's eventual passing, succession disputes tend to emerge only at the moment of succession itself, since the moment unleashes certain tensions that could not come out into open negotiating space earlier on. The situation and its outcome will be even more unpredictable if someone suddenly feels the impulse of prophecy. It would be very surprising if a movement like Unificationism, a surprising hybrid of businesslike administrative organization on the one hand and of shamanistic spiritualism on the other, did not eventually find itself forced to decide, as early Christianity eventually had to, between "ecclesiastical authority and spiritual power."[15]  
The Church has already felt something of the turbulence that can erupt between office and charisma, even during the founder's lifetime, when, for a while, Reverend Moon himself took seriously the claims of a radical Zairean youth who claimed to be channeling the spirit of a deceased son of Reverend Moon. Events revealed the channeler to be a charlatan, and the storm passed, but it should remain a living warning of what might happen following the founder's death: what if someone should step forward claiming to be the prophetic voice of Sung Myung Moon from the spirit world? For speculation's sake one might suggest that such an eventuality might be ruled out in advance by the founder's own prescriptive stipulation. But then we would simply be moving one notch over to a slightly different version of the dilemma of religious authority, that between canonical scripture (the founder's bequest) and the living voice of prophecy (the claim of a self-appointed successor). 

In any case, the two models of authority seldom peacefully coexist. For instance, the Taiping messiah, Hong Xiuquan, who understood himself to be Melchizedek and the younger brother of the ascended Jesus Christ, was able to brook the sometimes intrusive revelations of Xiao Chaogui, an early compatriot who was believed to channel revelations from the ascended Jesus himself, not to mention the utterances of Yang Xiuqing, who spoke with the very accents of God the Father. But eventually, Xiao Chaogui lost out to Yang Xiuqing in what appears to have been a prophetic power struggle.[16]  The Younger Brother of Jesus still had to put up with the sometimes humiliating oracles of the Father, but his Elder Brother fell conveniently silent.

Another problem, usually met with after a founder's death, but already occurring within the Reverend Moon's lifetime, is the painful evolution from a "camp of the saints" sect to a "school for sinners" church. Stevan L. Davies has mapped out the social dynamics between factions of an evolving movement of this type in his The Revolt of the Widows: The Social World of the Apocryphal Acts.[17]  He shows how the itinerant prophets, those who had heeded the gospel counsels to leave home and family to preach the News of the kingdom of God, conducted a circuit-riding ministry among sympathetic house-churches and Christian communities, to whom, however, these prophets had less and less to say. As Christianity took root among communal entities, families, homes, settlements, the old commands to sell one's possessions and give to the poor fell increasingly on deaf, or at least puzzled ears. Notoriously, such dominical commands have found no welcome in increasingly bourgeoisie Christian social settings such as eventually produced the Pastoral Epistles. Settled, domestic life represented a mainstreaming of the originally radical apocalyptic preaching. A sect was becoming a church, and the spokesmen for the old order became increasingly irrelevant fossils as things changed. 
 

I see something similar already happening among the ranks of Unificationism. Unificationists who began, precisely in the fashion of early apostolic workers, street witnessing and fund-raising, passed through the sacramental portal of the Blessing, a hieros gamos whereby they officially became grafted into the True Family of the True Parents. The very notion of Perfect Families, models of stability and matrices for the production of Perfect Children, immediately clashed with the continued obligation to perform apostolic ministries suitable for the celibate and unattached. These tensions are still being worked out. The felt contradiction seems to be the result of an attempt to keep the Unification movement a sect even while it is marrying its way into a church. 

The transition from the camp of the saints to the school for sinners has been accelerated even more by the decision to open up the sacramental Blessing of couples to those who are not believing Unificationists. In this way, the influence of the True Parents is believed to be increased like leaven in the lump, permeating society in a broader way. But some veterans of the movement fear that what is happening is theological inflation: a wider extension of the influence of the True Parents, but at the cost of being shallower. What we have, apparently, is an analogy to the controversy over the Halfway Covenant in American Puritanism. Puritan congregations required an "experience of grace," a datable moment of conversion to faith in Christ, or one could not be a full member. Otherwise, one soon has a school for sinners, not a "visible church." And they didn't want that. But that is what they got, in the form of Solomon Stoddard's Halfway Covenant, which allowed the children of converts to take communion in church even though, having been raised as perfect children (pardon the borrowed  terminology), they lacked the opportunity to convert to Christ from a previous life of sin.[18]  
If non-Unificationist sympathizers are able to be united with the True Family without conversion, then one must ask whether the movement is not only compromising its original sectarian zeal but even blurring the borders of the Unification Church as a movement at all. It might appear to be rapidly evolving into something of a para-church movement like the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association or the Christian Broadcasting Company. The support thus sought and gained is proverbially a mile wide and an inch deep. 
There is nothing necessarily wrong with such a change. But we seem to be passing from one New Testament analogy, that of the seed growing secretly, to another, the salt of the earth. That is, the hope is no longer that the messianic movement will gestate unobtrusively till the Great Hour be come at last, but rather that it will quietly and subtly savor the general stew. It is a more modest goal, and a more realistic one, from a demythologized point of view.

Like Lao-tse, who emerged from the womb already an old sage, Unificationism seems to have been born with a mature historical consciousness. Like the adolescent Jesus in the apocryphal Infancy Gospels, who irritated his tutors because he already possessed an adult's knowledge, Unificationism is uncannily shrewd in its self-understanding. Only history will show how this unique perspective will affect the survival, success, and further evolution of the Unification Church.                 

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[1]  The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Approach to Religion (Garden City: Doubleday Anchor, 1969, pp. 69-70.

[2]  "Religion as a Cultural System" in Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, NY: Basic Books, 1973, pp. 87-125. 

[3]  The Social Construction of Reality" A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Garden City: Doubleday Anchor, 1967, p. 25.

[4]  Doomsday Cult: A Study of Conversion, Proselytization, and Maintenance of Faith (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1966., pp. 208-209.

[5]  The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. NY: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1959, pp. 68-161.

[6]  Kingdom and Community: The Social World of Early Christianity. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1975, pp. 50-57.

[7]  Bultmann, The Gospel of John: A Commentary. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1975, e.g, p. 261; see also Robert T. Fortna, The Fourth Gospel and Its Predecessor: From Narrative Source to Present Gospel. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1988, pp. 284-293.

[8]  Baha' Ullah. The Kitab-I-Iqan, The Book of Certitude. Wilmette: Baha'i Publishing Trust, 1950, passim.

[9]  Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism. NY: Schocken Books 1971, pp. 142-166.

[10]  The Sociology of Religion. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969, pp.60-79. 

[11] Religions, Values, and Peak Experiences. NY: Viking, 1974, pp. 23-29.

[12] Gerd  Theissen, "The Wandering Radicals," in Theissen, Social Reality and the Earliest Christians (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992, 33-59;  M. Eugene Boring, Sayings of the Risen Jesus: Christian Prophecy in the Synoptic Tradition. Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series 46. NY: Cambridge University Press, 1982

[13] Geza Vermes, Jesus the Jew: A Historian's Review of the Gospels (London: Fontana/Collins, 1973), 139-140. See also Leibel Reznick, The Mystery of Bar Kochba: An Historical and Theological Investigation of the Last King of the Jews. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson Inc., 1996, 130-131; 145-146.

[14]  Michael L. Mickler, "When the Prophet Is Yet Living: A Case Study of the Unification Church," in  Timothy Miller (ed.), When Prophets Die: The Postcharismatic Fate of New Religious Movements. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991, 183-194.

[15] Hans von Campenhausen, Ecclesiastical Authority and Spiritual Power in the Church of the First Three Centuries. Translated by J.A. Baker. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1981.

[16] Jonathan D. Spence, God's Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan. W.W. Norton & Company, 1997, 147.

[17] Carbondale: Southern University Press, 1981.

[18] See Stoddard's "The Inexcusableness of Neglecting the Worship of God," together with Robert L. Ferm's introduction, in Ferm, ed., Issues in American Protestantism: A Documentary History from the Puritans to the Present. Doubleday Anchor, 1969, pp. 41-48.  

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