Muslim Fighters

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

In the late twentieth-century certain secularists had to be banned from service in the armed forces. These men and women had committed themselves to communism and their loyalty was incompatible with the oath they swore to defend the United States.

The problem with these secularists was not that they put their individual conscience above loyalty to the state. It is an American tradition to limit the amount of loyalty we owe the government. We love our nation, but not more than anything. Our pledge of allegiance was even given a disqualifier during the Cold War to make this clear. We are one nation, under God.

During the Cold War, a secularist willing to go along with the general rules of the republic was fit to serve even with views most Americans found wrong-headed. Secularism, like any sensible religious or philosophical point of view, limited their loyalty to the state to the demands of reason, but secularism was a disqualifier if the individual secularist had already decided to side with the declared enemies of the United States.

One can marvel at the boldness, though not admire the morality or wisdom, of an American who sides with the Soviet Union, but need not give that man a commission in the Armed Forces of the United States.

In the same way, Christians serve Christ before they bow the knee to Caesar. It is God and then country, but there is nothing new in that. One reason, in fact, that American Christians traditionally have favored small government is that it minimizes the chances of moral conflict.

If there was a group of Christians who hated our republic and decided to undermine the Constitution, then these Christians could not serve. They are citizens still, protected by their freedom of religion and of speech, but they should not be armed by the state. Fortunately, such people have been very rare in more than two hundred years of American history.

All religious and non-religious groups can and must be treated the same way. It would be frightening to have citizen soldiers who placed the fatherland uber alles, but we must not have soldiers who have already decided our present mission is intolerable and who have sided with our foes.

It is not, therefore, un-American or disturbing that our fellow Muslim citizens place loyalty to God before loyalty to the state. In fact, it is a very American thing to do!

The same sensible guidelines must apply, however, to Islamic soldiers as apply to secularists and Christians. The armed forces of the United States should make every effort to accommodate religious or cultural practices when they are compatible with the mission. Failure to do so denies our most basic ideals. It is why the armed forces has chaplains of all faiths and of no faith and should continue this wise practice.

We know the bad results produced by failure to accommodate difference or reacting out of fear and not reason. Sadly, during the Second World War, Americans of Japanese ancestry were treated in a shameful way. Though some were allowed to serve in the armed forces and fought bravely, citizens were also denied civil rights and sent to relocation camps. This wicked overreaction was based on fears of a tiny minority of Japanese-Americans who might have been more loyal to Japanese ideals than to America.

In our present situation it is not irrational to believe that some Muslim-Americans may be hostile to the United States, but we must not overreact. Simultaneously, we must not refuse to deal with clear and present danger out of some over-developed sensitivity. The Fort Hood traitor appears to be an example of a man allowed to serve who should have been expelled.

It is stupid to pretend that there are not millions of Islamic people, including a few in the United States, who have embraced a twisted form of Islam utterly incompatible with the values of our republic. If one believes that Islamic courts, for example, should be imposed on this nation, then his views make him unfit to serve. If he sides with our enemies, the terrorists, in the war in which we are engaged, his views make him unfit to serve.

He may remain a citizen with all the rights to freedom of speech, but it is foolish to give him training in and use of a gun. Of course, even traitors remain human beings and so they must be treated with the dignity that God has given to each man. They cannot be tortured and they must be given a fair trial.

Muslim citizens have been and are loyal members of this nation. They have served capably in the past and will do so in the future. Sadly, just as was the case with secularists during the Cold War, they will have to endure increased scrutiny since a substantial minority of their fellows has turned against American values.

This time will pass, and if the United States has dealt justly with her Islamic citizens we will be able to look back on this period with pride.

Tu Quoque: On Islam and the Crusades

By Ibn Warraq
City Journal

Often, when I am criticizing crimes inspired by Islamic extremism, I am interrupted by the remark that Christianity was once culpable of similar abuses. That Christianity may have been intolerant in the past, however, does not make criticisms of Islam’s present-day intolerance any less valid. Also, Islamic intolerance is an immediate danger, whereas Christian intolerance is generally a historical phenomenon and no longer a threat to civilization. And Christendom’s crimes were recorded by Christians themselves—a stark contrast to our politically correct climate, in which many, especially Muslims, are reluctant to criticize Islam.

Still, one might point out Christianity’s historical shortcomings in order to avoid demonizing Islam alone. But this principle should work both ways: we should also avoid demonizing Christianity and be prepared to point out Islam’s shortcomings. In December 2008, Boris Johnson, mayor of London, presented a biased BBC program on the Crusades that laid the blame for them entirely on Christians. The program pointed out that after expelling the Moors from Spain, Christians converted a mosque into a church—an act of “vandalism.” However, it failed to note that the Crusades were a reaction against over 300 years of jihad and persecution of Eastern Christians, during which Muslims destroyed hundreds of churches and converted many others into mosques, including the magnificent Byzantine church Hagia Sophia.

Consider the situation in the Holy Land 100 years before Pope Urban II’s call in 1095 for a crusade to liberate it. It was part of the territory ruled by the Fatimid Caliph al-Hakim, whose cruelties Christian and Muslim historians alike recorded. Fourteenth-century historian Ibn al-Dawadari tells us that al-Hakim destroyed the Church of Saint Mark in al-Fustat, Egypt (on the outskirts of modern-day Cairo), which Christians had built in defiance of a law forbidding new church construction. The al-Rashida mosque arose not only over the ruins of Saint Mark’s but also over Jewish and Christian cemeteries, surely an act of vandalism. But the height of al-Hakim’s cruelties was the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which, according to Muslim sources, began in September 1007. Also known as the Church of the Resurrection, this was possibly the most revered shrine in Christendom—considered not only Golgotha (or Calvary), where the New Testament says that Jesus was crucified, but also the place where he was buried and hence the site of the Resurrection. According to historian Moshe Gil, al-Hakim ordered that the Church of the Resurrection be torn down “to its very foundations, apart from what could not be destroyed or pulled up, and they also destroyed the Golgotha and the Church of Saint Constantine and all that they contained, as well as all the sacred gravestones. They even tried to dig up the graves and wipe out all traces of their existence.”

A new generation of Western medieval scholars has tried to rectify misconceptions about the Crusades. Historian Jonathan Riley-Smith has pointed out that “modern Western public opinion, Arab nationalism, and Pan-Islamism all share perceptions of crusading that have more to do with nineteenth-century European imperialism than with actuality.” Muslims, in particular, have developed what Riley-Smith calls “mythistories” concerning the putative injuries that they received at the crusaders’ hands. This is not to deny, of course, that the crusaders were responsible for outrages, including what is sometimes called the First Holocaust—the massacres of Jews that began in Worms on May 18, 1096, and continued into Mainz, where the Jewish community, one of the largest in Europe, was decimated. It is rather to say that the Crusades are misunderstood on multiple levels.

For one thing, they were not exclusively concerned with combating Islam. Pagan Wends, Balts, and Lithuanians; shamanist Mongols; Orthodox Russians and Greeks; Cathar and Hussite heretics; and those Catholics whom the Church perceived as its enemies—all were targets of the broader mission to extirpate heresy.

Nor were the Crusades “thoughtless explosions of barbarism,” as Riley-Smith accurately characterizes their reputation today. They had a sophisticated underlying rationale, elaborated theologically by Christian nations threatened by Muslim invaders who had managed to reach into the heart of Europe—from central France in the eighth century to Vienna in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They were a response to the desecration of Christian shrines in the Holy Land, the destruction of churches there, and the general persecution of Christians in the Near East. A Crusade had to fulfill strict criteria for the Church to consider it legitimate and just. It had to be waged for purposes of repelling violence or injury, with the goal of imposing justice on wrongdoers. A Crusade was not to be a war of conversion but rather a rightful attempt to recover unjustly seized Christian territory. And only a recognized church authority like the pope could call for one.

Most crusaders would have laughed at the prospect of material gain. In fact, crusading became a financial burden as the costs of warfare increased. The Crusades were far more concerned with saving not only Christendom from Islam, but also the souls of the crusaders themselves. Many believed that, by taking part, they would redeem their sinfulness.

It’s commonly believed today that modern Muslims have inherited from their medieval ancestors memories of crusader violence and destruction. But nothing could be further from the truth. By the fourteenth century in the Islamic world, the Crusades had almost passed out of mind. Muslims had lost interest, and, in any case, they saw themselves as the victors. The Muslim world did not renew its interest in the Crusades until the 1890s, but now it saw them through a Western prism. Western imperialist rhetoric, infused with a tendentious reading of crusader history, gave Muslims the false idea of a continuing Western assault, while the novels of Sir Walter Scott encouraged the myth of the culturally inferior crusaders confronting civilized, liberal, and modern-thinking Muslims. Many Arab nationalists believed “their struggle for independence to be a predominantly Arab riposte to a crusade that was being waged against them,” as Riley-Smith notes. “Since the 1970s, however, they have been challenged by a renewed and militant Pan-Islamism, the adherents of which have globalized the Nationalist interpretation of crusade history.”

Thus the spectacle of modern Islamists invoking the Crusades. As Osama bin Laden wrote: “For the first time, the crusaders have managed to achieve their historic ambitions and dreams against our Islamic umma, gaining control over the Islamic holy places and the Holy Sanctuaries, and hegemony over the wealth and riches of our umma.” The battle, according to bin Laden, is between the people of Islam and the global crusaders.

In trying to make sense of their humiliation under Western imperialist powers, aggrieved Muslims have come upon an ingenious but false interpretation of history that sees their nineteenth- and twentieth-century exploitation as a continuation of the medieval Crusades. Such a reworking of history enables them to cast contemporary events, such as the war in Afghanistan and the American presence in Iraq, in an anti-Western light, making the West and the Crusades a convenient scapegoat for the shame and dishonor that Muslims have experienced for decades. Their distorted reading of history gives Islamists both a cause for grievance and a justification for their sense of superiority—since Muslims did, after all, succeed in expelling the infidels from Islamic lands.

Ibn Warraq is a senior fellow at the Center for Inquiry Transnational and the author of five books on Islam and Koranic criticism, including Why I Am Not a Muslim.

On Beauty and Fairy Tales

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

If beauty does exist, then there might be disciplines, learning traditions, which can teach humanity about this aspect of reality. Just as science studies physical truths, it could be that art, poetry, literature, and music describe (in their own terms) aspects of Beauty. Real beauty opens the possibility of taking fairy tales seriously without thinking them “true” in a scientific sense.

What is the reality behind the Cinderella? It turns out that fairy tales are trustworthy guides to reality and what is in popular entertainment has ruined modern vision. The unchanging world in which humans were created resonates with the fairy tales which get at Beauty through the tool of fiction. Fairy tales correspond closely enough to God’s real world that humans created in the image of God can be lead through them to truth. Such myths act as sign-posts to one aspect of his great and complex creation. The stories scientists tell are accurate in different ways and point to different aspects of reality, but both science and fairy tales are incomplete pictures of one great whole.

There is at least as much good description of reality in Lord of the Rings, Hamlet, and Harry Potter as there is in most social studies textbooks. The history text speaks of the Prince of Denmark who lived in space and time. It uses one set of tools to find one aspect of reality: historic truth. The play Hamlet does not speak of this prince, but of an image of that prince created by Shakespeare. This image does not teach the history of Denmark, but about problems a man faces, and does this analysis beautifully. Since men posses both immaterial souls and physical bodies and the cosmos contains spirits and material objects, the whole truth about men and nature must contain a space-time description of what bodies have done and what souls have done. Feelings and beauty are real.

This is the reason the traditional college or university demanded a thorough grounding in both the arts and sciences. Human knowledge is incomplete and fallen. In Utopia, perfect knowledge of a single particle of water could be used to infer the ocean, physics, the pleasure of hearing waves crashing on a beach, and the fears of Odysseus lost on the great wine-dark sea, but Utopia is no place where humans live.

There are not two truths: physical and spiritual. It is simply that there are many ways to come to the one knowable truth for limited human beings. Science works well in coming to one aspect of that reality and poetry is good at another. Simple-minded folk try to reduce everything to what can be shown by one or the other means.

Lewis Bayly and the Practice of Trinitarian Piety

By Fred Sanders
Scriptorium Daily

We don’t know when Lewis Bayly was born, but he died on this day (October 26) in 1631.

Who was Lewis Bayly? It’s a little sad that almost nobody knows anymore. Bayly is an unjustly forgotten spiritual treasure.

He was the author of a book called The Practice of Piety, one of the best-selling and most influential devotional books of all time. Its sub-title is Directing a Christian How to Walk That He May Please God. An eminently practical book that gave believers counsel for various phases of life and various parts of the day, Bayly’s Practice of Piety was immensely popular. Two examples show that it was one those “standard works” you could expect to find everywhere: When John Bunyan married his wife, she brought two books with her into the marriage, and one of them was Bayly. And when John Eliot finished translating the Bible into Algonquin for the Native Americans, his next project was to translate Bayly.

Bayly was Oxford educated (Exeter college) and later served as chaplain to the prince of Wales and to James I. He was a bishop, but his book was popular with the Puritans. It was sometimes published anonymously for audiences that didn’t want to read books by bishops.

The Practice of Piety (third edition 1613; I’m not sure when the first edition was) is available for reading online. You can jump in anywhere for the practical wisdom and fervent devotion that made it a handbook relied on by generations of believers.

But the genius of the work comes out best in the opening, I think. Bayly speaks from a tradition that views all our wisdom as consisting in either knowledge of God or knowledge of self. The proximate source for this distinction is likely Calvin, who opens his Institutes that way. Bayly has an interesting take on it, however: His book is about practice and about piety, and he explains how the two are related:

Forasmuch as there can be no true piety without the knowledge of God; nor any good practice without the knowledge of a man’s own self; we will therefore lay down the knowledge of God’s majesty, and man’s misery, as the first and chiefest grounds of the Practice of Piety.

What is so striking in Bayly is that he has an exalted notion of what this “knowledge of God” is. He lists the elements of the knowledge of God thus:

The Practice of Piety consists— First, In knowing the essence of God, and that in respect of, (I.) The diverse manner of being therein, which are three persons—Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. (II.) The Attributes thereof; which are either Nominal or Real,—(1.) Absolute, as, Simpleness, Infiniteness,—(2.) Relative, as, Life, Understanding, Will, Power, Majesty.

Remember that this is a handbook on devotion, a practical work. Apparently Bayly saw no reason to rush past the doctrine of God in a hurry to get to the practical tips and pointers. In fact, he settles down and does several pages of pretty serious trinitarian theology. Obviously at home with the pagan classics, the church fathers, and the best medieval theology, Bayly teaches his practical-minded readers all about “the diverse manner” of God’s being as “three persons –Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.”

What Bayly’s after is personal knowledge of God in three persons. And he knows that if you’re going to come to know the three persons, you have to recognize them in their trinitarian depth. So he introduces the three persons not by how we experience them, but first by their eternal trinitarian being:

The first Person is named the Father; first, in respect of his natural son, Christ (Matt. 11:27; 3:17;) secondly, in respect of the elect, his adopted sons (Isa. 63:16; Eph. 3:14, 15;) that is, those who, being not his sons by nature, are made his sons by grace.

The second Person is named the Son, because he is begotten of his Father’s substance, or nature (Prov. 30:4; Psal. ii. 7; Heb. i. 3; Phil. ii. 6;) and he is called the Word—First, because the conception of a word in man’s mind is the nearest thing that, in some sort, can shadow to us the manner how he is eternally begotten of his Father’s substance; and in this respect he is also called the Wisdom of his Father (Prov. viii. 12.) Secondly, because that by him the Father has from the beginning declared his will for our salvation (John i. 18); hence he is called logos quasi legon, the person speaking with or by the Father. Thirdly, because he is the chief argument of all the word of God (Acts x. 43; Heb. i. 1; Luke xxiv. 27; John v. 45; Acts iii. 22, 23, 24), or that Word whereof God spake when he promised the blessed seed to the fathers under the Old Testament.

The third Person is named the Holy Ghost (Isa. lxiii. 10; 2 Cor. xiii. 14)—First, because he is spiritual, without a body (1 John iv. 13; 2 Cor. iii. 17.) Secondly, because he is spired, and as it were breathed from both the Father and the Son (John xx. 21, 22; Gal. iv. 6), that is, proceedeth from them both; and he is called Holy, both because he is holy in his own nature (1 Pet. i. 15, 16), and also the immediate sanctifier of all God’s elect people (2 Cor. iii. 18; 1 Thess. v. 23; 1 Pet. i. 2.)

This is a profound grasp of trinitarian theology in its biblical and practical import. If you think ordinary Christians never hear very much about the Trinity and wonder when that started, you’ll have to look more nearer to your own doorstep than to Bayly. This teacher, who had a special talent for writing about piety in a way that made people want to own his book and carry it with them, also knew that there was no shortcut to getting those practical results: If you want knowledge of God, you’re going to have to study the Trinity. Mrs. John Bunyan and the Algonquin tribes of North America came along for the ride, as did numerous simple believers with Bayly’s trinitarianism on their bookshelves.

Why I Believe in God

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

In one comment thread on this blog, someone asked why I believe. Here is a short answer.

It is an odd thing to be called on to defend something you think you know. It is disturbing at first, because it makes you simultaneously wonder about your own mental clarity and that of your questioner. Why would he ask such a question? Isn’t the truth of the matter obvious?

Unfortunately, there are few things we believe that some other person, seemingly rational, cannot doubt. After a bit of reflection, the doubts of others about my beliefs are less disturbing, because it is a chance to exercise wonder. Not surprisingly it is wonderful to wonder and a chance to wonder why I think God exists has proven an excellent opportunity for healthy Socratic doubt leading to a sense of His presence.

I am thankful for the process.

God exists, but what God? I mean the God that is all-powerful, all knowing, the God who is the Creator of the cosmos. By definition if such a God exists, there is only one God, because only one being could logically be omnipotent.

Some of my atheist friends assert that since I don’t believe in many gods, I am just an atheist who has refused to go all the way. After all, having given up on the worship of Zeus why do I cling to the worship of the God of the Bible?

My friends are mistaken, however. I don’t reject Zeus, because he does not exist, but because he is evil. The Zeus revealed to me in Homer is not worthy of worship, because he uses his power for evil. Now my friends who are atheists might immediately reply that the God of the Old Testament also commands or does things that appear evil to us, but this is different. The God of the Old Testament is presented as good and some of His reported actions are difficult to square with that goodness. At the worst a believer need only doubt the report, but the gods of the Greeks are presented as intentionally acting for our harm.

There is no giving Zeus the benefit of the doubt, because he and his worshipers do not ask for it!

Of course, in any case Christians do not deny that Zeus might exist as a spirit, though he clearly does not (at present) physically dwell on the top of Mount Olympus! We do not claim to know every supernatural being that exists and for all I know the supernatural world is very complex place indeed. I have it on good authority that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in Richard Dawkins and my philosophy.

So why do I know God exists?

Given the limits of a short essay, I will only be able to point in the direction of my favorite reasons, but there are many books that provide deeper justification and further explication of these reasons. On a popular level favorite books that were helpful to me include J.P. Moreland’s Scaling the Secular City and A.E. Taylor’s Does God Exist? Readers looking for something more difficult would do well to check out the work of Richard Swinburne of Oxford University.

Of course, I don’t believe in God at first because I sat and thought about Him. I believe in God, because I encountered Him. I prayed and had an experience of Him from a very early age. He has answered my prayers and forced me to change my behavior. This every day direct mental experience of His existence is fundamentally why I know God is real.

If I did not have it, I would have little motivation to wonder about Him, but I sought Him and I found Him . . . or better He found me! Of course, despite my apparent sanity (from my own biased point of view!), I might be mad or deceived. God might be an illusion in my head, despite the sense that there is a different mental texture to what His voice is saying.

Once challenged in his beliefs by reasonable questions, only a fool or a saint would be sure that he was not deluding himself. I know I am no saint and I hope not to be a fool, so I had to ask if my experiences were real and if I had correctly interpreted them.

It is important, therefore, that I have every day indirect experience of His existence. The community of believers around me matters. I am not alone in thinking God is real or speaks to people. This does not prove that God exist, but the billions of people over long periods of time who have believed in God does suggest that at the very least I am not the victim of some private delusion!

So I speak to God and He speaks to me and millions of living and otherwise rational human beings share this experience. It is what I would anticipate if God is out there. Why do some people fail to share that experience?

I don’t know, but absence of evidence in a few does not suggest the problem is in those who believe.

Third, there are philosophical arguments that suggest the existence of God is either necessary or reasonable. For example, the existence and nature of the cosmos suggests the existence of a rational God. The universe appears to have order and design and I am not persuaded that merely naturalistic processes can account for this order and design. Whatever the process God used to create, and only the arrogant believe they have this all worked out, the fundamental nature of that creation suggests a plan.

Fourth, morality persuades me that God exists. The long trajectory of human history demonstrates a common morality behind the blind spots of any particular culture. There is a common way that most people in most places and most times have followed. This law suggests a lawgiver.

Fifth, the existence of gratuitous beauty convinces me God exists. When I traveled above the clouds for the first time with my oldest son, he told me that it was beautiful and neither of us was surprised. Wherever we looked, we saw beauty and this was not a beauty that could have been hardwired into us by any natural process. Wherever we look as human even to the furthest reaches of the cosmos beauty is there waiting for us.

Sixth, the world of Ideas points in the direction of the existence of the Mind of God. As a Platonist, I am convinced that numbers and ideas are real. There is a metaphysical world that cannot be reduced to the material. This does not prove God exists, but makes His existence more plausible to me.

Finally, love suggests to me that God is real. As Plato points out in his masterful dialogue Symposium love is surely of something. Humanity possesses a love for the Good, the True, and the Beautiful that demands a proper object. Only God is great enough to be a sufficient end for all the longing in the human heart. It might be that the universe is perverse and has given us this great longing without any means of fulfilling it, but there is no good reason to take this withering view. The sensible, indeed the hopeful response, is to assume that like hunger or thirst this longing too can be find satisfaction in reality.

My friends who don’t believe in God might claim that I believe in God, partly, because I want to do so. This is true. The existence of a good God is such an awesome, exciting, and hopeful idea that I am rooting for it. There is nothing irrational with giving good news the benefit of the doubt, if you don’t sacrifice your mind to do so.

You ask me how I know He lives? He lives within my heart.

The Christian Religion

By Fred Sanders
Scriptorium Daily

Last week I spoke at the annual Religious Diversity Forum at the University of California at Irvine. Most of my time there was spent in open discussion with a small group of people, including a rabbi and a nice Muslim woman who was fascinated by the idea of Baptist foot-washing services. But here are my opening remarks on the subject of what the religion called Christianity is. They are geared for a religiously diverse audience of intellectual students.

Christianity begins with Jesus. It is the religion, among the religions of the world, which starts with Jesus Christ. As religions go, Christianity is one that begins with its founder in a sense that is unique among the major religions, because it starts with him, ends with him, and never leaves him. It does not just view Jesus as a symbol of values that are greater than him, or as an instantiation of truths about something other than him, or as a conduit of a message that is about anything higher than him. Christianity recognizes Jesus as the alpha and the omega, the unavoidable and unsurpassable, the beginning and the end of the relationship between God and humanity.

A Christian is somebody who never gets over Jesus.

The habit of taking Jesus as the inescapable starting-point is not one that was made up by Paul the Apostle, the early church, the dark ages, or the fundamentalists. It is a habit that Christians learned from Jesus himself, who knew what he was about, and who offered himself as the starting point, as the necessary site for salvation.

In the shortest and probably earliest of the four gospels, the Gospel According to Mark, Jesus did something so surprising that the church has never gotten over it. He had already been healing people of various diseases; that’s not the surprising part. Four friends carried their paralyzed friend to Jesus, and lowered him down through the roof to get him close enough for Jesus to heal him.

And when Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, “Son, your sins are forgiven.” Now some of the scribes were sitting there, questioning in their hearts, “Why does this man speak like that? He is blaspheming! Who can forgive sins but God alone?” And immediately Jesus, perceiving in his spirit that they thus questioned within themselves, said to them, “Why do you question these things in your hearts? Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Rise, take up your bed and walk’? But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins” — he said to the paralytic — “I say to you, rise, pick up your bed, and go home.” And he rose and immediately picked up his bed and went out before them all, so that they were all amazed and glorified God, saying, “We never saw anything like this!” (Mark 2:5-12)

Why is it more amazing for Jesus to forgive somebody’s sins than for him to heal their paralysis? Because sin is a personal offense against God, and since it is personal, nobody can forgive “but God alone” as the scribes rightly noted. An almighty God can send somebody else to bring physical healing. An angel will suffice for the delegation of such a task, or even a good and obedient man. But for “the Son of Man” to have “authority on earth to forgive sins,” he must be, in person, the offended party. He must be the righteous God, the one against whose holiness each of us directs our rebellion (whatever collateral damage we may inflict on others). Standing there in Capernaum, Jesus was the Son of God who has authority to forgive.

What is salvation? There are a lot of different ideas of salvation on the market. The paralyzed man and his friends, understandably, thought of physical healing as salvation. Jesus knew that the salvation he needed was something else: reconciliation with God. Christians are people who agree with Jesus that our problem is sin, and that salvation is personal forgiveness.

Think how many details of the Christian religion flow directly from that starting point. What Jesus announced on that day for the paralyzed man, he went on to enact through his own death and resurrection. That is the Christian doctrine of atonement. And it only works because of who Jesus is: the Son of Man who has authority to forgive sins, and to make atonement for sins. He is fully human and fully divine, which is the Christian doctrine of the incarnation.

So, like the paralyzed man rising from his bed and taking his first few steps, we have stepped from forgiveness, to atonement, to the incarnation. But there is another step. If Jesus is divine, then who must God be? If we said that Jesus is God, then we have to admit that the definition of “God” must somehow include Jesus. The eternal Son, who in the fullness of time became incarnate for us and our salvation, belongs essentially to the definition of the true God. Of course we will have to come to understand what the Bible says about the Holy Spirit, but there is time for that later. Recognizing that Jesus belongs to the identity of God is the big step to take. After that, the logic of the doctrine of the Trinity is as easy as it is inevitable. One theologian has called the doctrine of the Trinity “the change in the conception of God which followed, as it was necessitated by, the New Testament conception of Christ and His work.”

A Christian is somebody who never gets over Jesus, and the church has never gotten over that surprising testimony that Jesus bore about himself: He has authority to forgive sins, so he is God, and God is Father, Son, and Spirit. We start with Jesus, and get to the three biggest doctrines of the Christian religion: atonement, incarnation, Trinity. No wonder the picture of the paralyzed man carrying his own bed away was one of the most popular images in the ancient catacombs. In fact, it is a painting of the story of that forgiven man with his own bed on his back that is the oldest depiction of Jesus to have survived in Christian art. It has been found from the year 235, painted on the wall of the House-church at Dura Europos.

The theme of this year’s Religious Diversity Forum is community service, and having described the three biggest doctrines of Christianity, I should also say something about Christian motivation for service. I could point to the paralyzed man again and notice how Jesus cared for his physical needs as a sign of his spiritual deliverance. I could even point out that the newly-healed man was so community-minded that he cleaned up his own bedding!

But it would be better to show another way that Jesus surprised us in a way that we have never gotten over. Ten chapters later in Mark, a scribe asks Jesus, “Which commandment is the most important of all?” Notice that he asks for one commandment. Jesus, however, answers with two:

The most important is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.(see Mark 12:28-31)

The first part of that answer is surely the certified right answer for any observant Jew: The Shema from Deuteronomy 6. But the second part is the surprise: “Love your neighbor as yourself” is not from Deuteronomy, but from Leviticus 19:17. Asked for one command, Jesus gives two, and yokes them by saying “There is no other commandment greater than these.” Do you see something in common between this surprising answer, and the surprising forgiveness he gave in the first story? In both cases, he established right relation with God the Father, and in both cases he also threw in the more earth-bound concerns. The paralyzed man had his sins forgiven, and then rose up unparalyzed, to carry away his own bed. The greatest commandment is to love God with all you’ve got, and then to love others as yourself. Jesus never let the vertical relationship with God be disconnected from the horizontal connections to others.

So Christian motivation to service also begins with Jesus. It begins with him and never gets over him, because it does not just see him as an example for imitation. It sees him as the Son of God, living out in person among us the truth that he taught. The Gospel According to John reports the most dramatic enactment of this serving:

Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going back to God, rose from supper. He laid aside his outer garments, and taking a towel, tied it around his waist. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was wrapped around him. … When he had washed their feet and put on his outer garments and resumed his place, he said to them, “Do you understand what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord, and you are right, for so I am. If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have given you an example, that you also should do just as I have done to you. Truly, truly, I say to you, a servant is not greater than his master, nor is a messenger greater than the one who sent him. (John 13)

He said this, of course, on the night when he was betrayed. He did this on his way to the cross where he provided the basis for the free forgiveness and reconciliation that only he, the Son of God, can give. There is a lot more to say about the Christian religion, the beliefs of its adherents, and the actions of Jesus’ followers. But the inescapable and unsurpassable beginning point is Jesus himself, in his surprising teaching, his unity with the Father and the Spirit, and his power to forgive and heal.

That’s the Christian religion.