Holy Christmas, Batman … they’re thinking, talking and writing about Christianity

Several times a year (today being one of those times) I’ll see a post on my Facebook timeline from some old friend or colleague, who I haven’t seen for years, saying something to the effect, “Heard you(‘re) pretty religious.” Actually, that’s a verbatim quote from today on Facebook. But similar sentiments crop up several times a year, sometimes seemingly out of the blue, sometimes in relation to something I’ve recently written and posted on Facebook, or perhaps just re-posted from somewhere else. Usually it is framed more as a statement with a dangling question mark rather than a direct question.

The questioner in this case was a former roommate, who last I checked in with him on the matter about 30 years ago, was himself a committed atheist. And also a good guy, as we might say, principled and ethical. A good friend. A third member of our university roommate trio, who visited me after more than 20 years last summer, had also heard I was “pretty religious,” he told me. His wife, who I haven’t met yet, had suggested that before he visited, after reading some of my Facebook posts. My friend isn’t actually on Facebook himself but trolls his wife’s account from time to time, as do most Facebook objectors I know. A non-committal agonistic, he told me his response was sort of to shrug and say not to worry, “John’s always been a Catholic.”

When I hear or read this kind of thing, several things occur to me. One is the sobering fact that people I consider friends or former colleagues, who I worked with years ago, apparently in many cases find any connection between religion and me surprising and noteworthy enough to comment on. What, I wonder, does this say about how I lived my life in the years that I worked with or lived near them? As I said, sobering. And a bit rhetorical, as I’m not sure that I’d want them all to answer that, at least not on my timeline on Facebook.

As for their question, which might be paraphrased as, “When did you get religion?” how exactly does one answer that? I suppose Protestant evangelicals might point to their “born again” experience as that moment. Catholics …. well, infant baptism.

I can almost picture Pope Francis reminding me about the Sadducees, Pharisees and clericalism, should I start boasting about how religious I am. Pope Francis really is not a fan of legalism or legalists. He sees the Church as a big field hospital for sinners, of which he includes himself.

Given that I work 18 hours on Saturdays and Sundays, my parish priest might be surprised to hear how religious I am, too, given my mass attendance for the one mass I might attend weekly on Saturday nights at 6:30 p.m., after working 10 of those 18 hours, is pretty abysmal. No excuse. Sadly, “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak” many times and an after-work nap beckons.

But when I am awake, I do write about religion with some frequency. I also read about it, think about it and think it matters far more than most journalists understand. However, that’s not exactly a new realization that I’ve come to. Almost 18 years ago, I was among the 270 participants on both sides of that great divide, interested in the intersection of religion and politics in the public square, when I attended the first-ever Faith in the Media conference at the Carleton University School of Journalism in Ottawa for three days from June 7-9, 1998. The Peterborough Examiner, while it didn’t have a religion beat in 1998, graciously picked up the tab for their city hall reporter to go.

Toronto’s Roman Catholic archbishop at the time, Aloysius Cardinal Ambrozic, noted that the Church makes truth claims and demands, which are absolute, while the media tends to be liberal, and, as such, opposed to absolutes. “(The) media are adept at showing the ills of society, but not the remedies … Most of our media are not interested in Christ’s self-emptying death, only in sweating and weeping Madonnas. The media love religious kitsch.” But Ambrozic quickly added, “We, the religious professionals, are not very forthcoming sometimes, perhaps out of a fear of sensationalism. Nor do we always explain ourselves well. At other times we kowtow to the media when we should question its mindset.”

I had also been able to write about religion some during the early to mid-1990s at the Kingston Whig-Standard, where religious coverage was quite possible on weekends, especially if you initiated it. One of my more surreal moments of religion coverage came in June 1995, less than two months after Timothy McVeigh, radicalized after the Waco Siege and Ruby Ridge incident, killed 168 people when he bombed the Oklahoma City federal building, and I covered a conference in Kingston called “Take A Stand ’95: Defending Your Faith in the New World Order.”

Gary Kah, of Indiana, and Eric Barger, of Texas, two of the rising stars of the televised Bible prophecy circuit, told me it was tough going in the immediate wake of Oklahoma City to deliver their message. I imagined it would be.

McVeigh himself was a baptized Roman Catholic but self-professed agnostic, who would later receive the Roman Catholic Sacrament of Anointing of the Sick, formerly known as Last Rites or Extreme Unction, administered through a federal Bureau of Prisons chaplain, minutes before his execution in the federal death chamber at Terre Haute, Indiana on June 11, 2001.

While it may have been tough going at the time in 1995, Kah and Barger are still going – strong, or at least, so it seems.

And the interesting thing is that much of what they talked about that June day more than 21 years ago has come to pass.

A “cashless” society, biometrics, including palm geometry and retinal scanning;  these things are no longer the stuff exclusively of the religious right and tin foil hat meme.

Or how about Implanted  RFID (radio frequency identification) chips? … hmm … sounds kinda like something from the pages of a script for one of the late Iowa filmmaker Russ Doughten’s movies, such as his 1972 film, A Thief in the Night, followed by its three sequels – A Distant Thunder in 1978, Image of the Beast in 1980 and The Prodigal Planet in 1983. Doughten, who earned his master’s degree from Yale Drama School in 1954, died at the age of 86 in August 2013.

While one friend on Facebook today was musing, “Heard you(‘re) pretty religious” another a few hours later sent me a link to Laurie Goodstein’s keynote address at the symposium on religious literacy in journalism earlier this month at Harvard Divinity School for the Religious Literacy Project.

I had read part of her speech last week. “I’m glad that we’re all here because we now have urgent work to do,” Goodstein said in her keynote speech Dec. 8. “Religious literacy has probably never been more important, or more of a challenge. The grounds are shaking, the fissures are cracking open all around us, and the faultlines all seem to intersect. Race, class, gender and underneath it all like molten lava: religion.”

Goodstein is the national religion correspondent for The New York Times. After earning a B.A. from University of California Berkeley and an M.A. from the Columbia School of Journalism, she began her journalism career in 1989 at The Washington Post.

She started as news assistant before becoming a metro reporter and then national reporter. While at the Post in both 1995 and 1996, she won two major awards for religion newswriting, The Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year and the Supple Religion Writing Award.

She joined The New York Times in 1997. “Her work for the Times has covered a wide range of topics and religious traditions, offering a nuanced rather than monolithic view of American Catholics, evangelicals, and Muslims, among others,” said Harvard Divinity School. “In 2004, she won the American Academy of Religion’s award for best in-depth news reporting on religion, an award she won again in 2009. In 2015, she also won the Religion Newswriters Association’s award for excellence in religion reporting. Her recent work has covered American evangelicals’ support for Donald Trump, the possibility of female deacons in the Catholic Church, and Muslim opposition to ISIS.”

I grew up Roman Catholic in an extended family of mainly Protestants (primarily United Church, but with a smattering of Anglicans) with a few Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses also added to the mix. I still have my dad’s 1927 United Church certificate for perfect Sunday school attendance. He was a member of the United Church when he married my mother in June 1942 – an era when “mixed marriages,” as they were quaintly called, were still rather uncommon and somewhat frowned upon by both Protestants and Catholics.

Eventually my dad converted to Catholicism of his own accord. But it was strongly suggested to me by my parents during my childhood that religion wasn’t a particularly suitable topic for discussion at large extended family events given the plurality of beliefs and the conviction with which they were held. I thought religion and politics were about the two most interesting topics one could talk about at the dinner table, so this imposed considerable restraint on me. Still, if my Uncle Morley and Aunt Dot weren’t bringing The Watchtower or Awake! around to the house on visits (and they weren’t), it seemed a reasonable accommodation. My dad and Uncle Morley found their common ground in a boat fishing. All in all, my parent’s live-and-let-live theology has struck me as increasingly wise as I get older.

Christmas dinner next week for many means travelling long miles only to be thrust together in close quarters with other annually seasonally-close family members and friends who hold somewhat different cultural, political, sports or even religious beliefs than you do.

In terms of the latter, this happens even among Christians, hard as that may be to believe, marking the birth of the saviour some 2,000-plus years ago in Bethlehem – or is it Nazareth? Take your pick.

The Gospels of Saint Matthew and Saint Luke opt for Bethlehem, while Saint Mark and Saint John seem to lean more toward Nazareth.

As for the year, month or day of Jesus’ birth, you can likely rule out Dec. 25 for the latter two and settle on sometime between 7BC and 4BC for the year. Pope–emeritus Benedict XVI in his book, Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives wrote that Jesus was born several years earlier than commonly believed because the entire Christian calendar is based on a miscalculation by a sixth century monk known as Dionysius Exiguus, or in English, Dennis the Small.

Given these antecedents it perhaps should come as no surprise then that Roman Catholics and their Protestant brethren some five centuries almost after the Reformation still don’t see eye-to-eye on some of the theological fine points of Christianity. In fact some evangelicals are pretty sure Catholics aren’t really Christians when it come right down to it and remain “unsaved” if they’re not “born again.”

The Catholic response is often a dismissive exercise in pulling rank and saying, in essence, “we were here first” and we are therefore synonymous with being “the Church.” As in one and the same in an unbroken line from Saint Peter to Pope Francis.

How this might play out at a Catholic-Protestant Christmas dinner has been nicely illustrated by Chris Castaldo, lead pastor at New Covenant Church of Naperville in Naperville, Illinois. Castaldo, who was raised as a Catholic and who had an uncle who was a cardinal,  several years ago did a 4:38-video promo for his book, Holy Ground: Walking with Jesus as a Former Catholic, where he plays the role of the Catholic brother, “Vito” at the Christmas dinner because, he says, he was a natural as a former Catholic – and “a Long Island Guido” – to play the role.

“Pastor Dave,” Castaldo’s good friend, Lon Allison, pastor of teaching and evangelism and missions at Wheaton Bible Church in West Chicago, Illinois, plays the Protestant minister.

The video, which can be seen at http://vimeo.com/2702601, is based on a true incident that happened to Castaldo as a minister at College Church in Wheaton, but whereas the actual incident happened right in the church, the fictional video setting has been moved to the family Christmas dinner. To say more about it here would make me a spoiler.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

 

 

 

Billy Graham, Jack Van Impe, G.K. Chesterton and Saint Paul the Apostle and the human enigma

It has taken me months, but yesterday I was able to finally finish watching the last 18 minutes of a slightly more than 26-minute TED conference talk titled “On technology and faith” that a then 79-year-old Billy Graham gave in California in February 1998. If you are interested, you can watch it here at: http://www.ted.com/talks/billy_graham_on_technology_faith_and_suffering#t-399663

The talk, like many Graham has given over his long life, is remarkable for any number of reasons, and delivered with his usual homespun, folksy North Carolina wisdom. If it’s not too much of a stretch, I’ve long considered the Southern Baptist preacher with a worldwide appeal transcending Christian denominationalism, and even extending to non-Christian religions, as somewhat analogous to a living saint (Catholics don’t have living saints, much less Protestant ones, but grant me a moment of literary licence.)

Graham, of course, would never think of himself that way either because he well recognizes the sinful and depraved nature of man, something we Catholics also recognize, although not as total depravity in the Calvinist sense. Interestingly, Graham in that talk more than 17 years ago, was talking about end of life issues and getting ready to go home and meet his maker. Apparently God still isn’t quite ready for Billy since he’s now 96. While he’s not well enough these days to be giving a TED or any other public talk in all likelihood, methinks God leaves people like Billy Graham and Mother Angelica, a similar age to Billy, and founder of the worldwide Catholic Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN) among us longer than we might expect as a reminder of what a shining witness is, even long after they can make public appearances. The very fact of their lives is their Christian witness.

Saint Paul the Apostle, describing the human enigma in his Letter to the Romans, wrote:  “My own actions bewilder me; what I do is not what I wish to do, but something which I hate. Why then, if what I do is something I have no wish to do, I thereby admit that the Law [of God] is worthy of all honor; meanwhile, my action does not come from me, but from the sinful principle that dwells in me.

“Of this I am certain, that no principle of good dwells in me, that is, in my natural self; praiseworthy intentions are always ready at hand, but I cannot find my way to perform them; it is not the good my will prefers, but the evil my will disapproves that I find myself doing.

“And if what I do is something I have not the will to do, it cannot be I that bring it about; it must be the sinful principle that dwells in me. This, then, is what I find about the Law [of God], that evil is close at my side, when my will is to do what is praiseworthy. Inwardly, I applaud God’s disposition, but I observe another disposition in my lower self, which raises war against the disposition of my [heart], and so I am handed over as a captive to that disposition towards sin which my lower self contains.”

G.K. Chesterton, one of the four greats, at least to my mind, of Edwardian letters (the others on my Dead White European Males – or DWEM – literary canon shortlist being Hilaire Belloc, H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw) was asked in 1907 by The Times of London to write an article on the theme, “What’s Wrong with the World?” Chesterton’s pithy reply was: “Dear Sirs, I am. Sincerely yours, G. K. Chesterton.”

Influenced by his wife Frances, he first became an  Anglican and later converted to Roman Catholicism in 1922. Chesterton lived from 1874 to 1936. This is the convert to Catholicism after all who wrote: “[W]e should thank God for beer and Burgundy by not drinking too much of them.” Privately, he joked, “One pint is enough, two pints is one too many, three pints isn’t half enough.” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/03/24/catholicism-is-a-big-tent-with-an-eclectic-communion-of-saints-will-there-be-room-for-g-k-chesterton-some-day/)

In September 2013, Bishop Peter Doyle, bishop of the Diocese of Northampton, appointed Canon John Udris, a priest of the diocese and currently spiritual director at St Mary’s College, Oscott, to undertake a fact-finding exercise on his behalf into whether a cause for Chesterton’s canonization should be opened. Udris in due course will submit a dossier to the bishop on whether to open the cause for Chesterton’s canonization.

As Udris told the Catholic Herald in an interview in March 2014, Chesterton, one of the most important Catholic writers and apologists for the faith of the 20th century, is “potentially a huge model” for the Church who “breaks the mould of conventional holiness.”

Udris noted Chesterton, a married layman, was not conventionally devout and could show Catholics “you don’t have to say your rosary every five minutes to be holy.” The first stages of a canonization cause include collecting evidence of heroic virtue.

Instead, Udris suggested, “Chesterton’s holiness could be found in his humour, his charity and his humility.” His defence of the faith in particular, Udris said, “was a model for Catholics.”

Dale Ahlquist, president of the American Chesterton Society, and a former Baptist who converted to Catholicism, said in 2013 the idea that someone like Chesterton could be a saint attracted him to the Catholic Church: “The fact that a 300-pound, cigar-smoking journalist might be a saint of the Catholic Church made me understand what the communion of saints is all about. They’re not just one particular type of person.”

Exactly so. Did Chesterton lead a perfect life? Hardly.  His excessive enjoyment of food and drink exhibited a distinct lack of temperance, the cardinal moral virtue “that moderates the attraction of pleasures and provides balance in the use of created goods,” as the Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it. As well, some of his utterances, contemporaneous with his times, clearly sound anti-Semitic to the modern ear. There should be no whitewashing of Chesterton’s life.

Saints, we are reminded time and again, lead holy, but not always conventionally holy, and never perfect lives. They were human beings before they were saints.

Another who has lived a life of Christian witness, in my opinion, although many Catholics may not share it, is Jack Van Impe, who at 84 is a bit of a youngster compared to Billy Graham, where Van Impe got his start at the age of 17 playing the accordion before he started preaching.

Van Impe, an American televangelist best known for his long-running half-hour weekly television show Jack Van Impe Presents, an eschatological commentary on the news of the week, is a premillennial dispensationalist in his interpretation of Bible prophecy, positing a pretribulation secret Rapture – the belief that Christians will be taken up from earth in a sudden, silent removal of true believers by God prior to a time of tribulation and the Second Coming. For this Pre-Tribbers rely heavily on Saint Paul and 1 Thessalonians: “For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first; then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord.”

That, to be clear, is not a Catholic reading of 1 Thessalonians or Catholic theology, as the passage describes a very loud and public event, not a secret Rapture. We do, however, believe in a future Antichrist, and a coming trial and time of apostasy before the Second Coming. While some of the Apostolic Fathers of the early church, including Papias, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Hippolytus, Methodius, Commodianus and Lactanitus – were premillennialists who believed that Christ’s Second Coming would lead to a visible, earthly reign – the pretribulational Rapture espoused by Van Impe, which is premised on the notion that Christ sought to establish a material and earthly kingdom, but the Jews rejected him, so the Church by necessity is a parenthetical insert into history, created as a result of Jews rejecting Christ, resulting in the existence of two people of God: the Jews, the “earthly” people, and the Christians, the “heavenly” people, is all alien to both Catholic theology and even the premillennialist views of some of the early Apostolic Fathers.

The premillennial dispensationalism that Van Impe adheres to is of much more recent vintage and is for the most part the creation of John Nelson Darby, an Anglo-Irish curate with of the Anglican  Church of Ireland, who would eventually leave that church and in the early 1830s with a small group of men form what would come to be known as the Plymouth Brethren. It was Darby who postulated the secret Rapture and much of what premillennial dispensationalism today teaches about 190 years ago.

Van Impe, who co-hosts Jack Van Impe Presents with his wife, Rexella Van Impe, has been hospitalized since May and missed several recent broadcasts of his show. The couple have been married since 1954.

Van Impe is widely known as “The Walking Bible.” He says he has spent about 35,000 hours in memorizing 14,000 verses through two hours of daily memorization, including virtually the entire New Testament. Divine gift? Photographic memory? Neither, Van Impe says, chalking it up to simple hard work and study.

David Allen was his role model. His ability to quote the scriptures in his work as a successful pastor and teacher convinced Van Impe of the value of memorization in giving authority to one’s ministry.

The actual method using index cards, he picked up fortuitously from his father, Oscar, who on a return trip home to Belgium left his “Bible memory cards” behind inadvertently in Michigan, and Jack found them.

Van Impe graduated from Detroit Bible College, as it was then known (later William Tyndale College) in 1952 as an undergraduate, but he calls himself “Dr. Van Impe” in that annoying habit some have of  using honorary, or even worse, somewhat sketchy doctorates, to self-justify the honorific before their name. Call me elitist, but if it isn’t an earned PhD from a properly accredited graduate university program, you shouldn’t be using the title doctor before your name in an academic sense.

Van Impe was known in his early years of ministry as being anti-Catholic, but to his credit, that changed by the early 1980s, so much so that he’s taken much heat over the issue from some of his fellow Protestant evangelical brethren.  While he doesn’t like Pope Francis, perceiving him as too liberal, and rants about him on air from time to time, Van Impe has only good things to say about his two immediate conservative predecessors, Pope-emeritus Benedict XVI and Saint Pope John Paul II. He just doesn’t trust Pope Francis and occasionally alludes to the possibility Pope Francis may be the last pope by a somewhat specious use of the Prophecy of St. Malachy or Prophecy of the Popes from 1139, which is a sequence of 112 cryptic Latin oracles or mottoes ending with the 112th and final Pope, Petrus Romanus, who in Malachy’s vision, is said to be on the Throne of the Apostle as history’s 112th and last pope (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/04/the-prophecy-of-malachy/)

Jack Van Impe Presents works as good television not because of Jack’s bombastic jeremiads, but because of the chemistry between him and his wife, Rexella, 82, who calls herself “Dr. Rexella Van Impe,” although she didn’t complete her undergraduate music and Bible history studies at Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina before Jack swept her off her feet.

There’s something transcendent about how they look at each other several times each show and speak to each other. Rexella in some ways is still the blushing bride she must have been on their wedding day in 1954. And Jack clearly has eyes only for her. Here’s this crusty old televangelist, who actually is well named as Impe as he acts like an impish boy around her at times. He simply unabashedly melts in her presence after six decades of marriage. For that kind of authenticity, I can put up with some sketchy, in my view anyway, theology, and questionable academic credentials. Besides, at the end of the day, how can you not like a couple who do a VHS video and DVD called Animals in Heaven? and, along with Billy Graham, believe we will see our pets in heaven one day? Sadly for those of us of Catholic persuasion, early sensational media reports of Pope Francis reportedly saying animals go to heaven during his weekly Wednesday general audience at St. Peter’s Square last Nov. 26, which would have contradicted centuries of common Catholic theological opinion that the souls of animals do not survive death, turned out to be premature, the result mainly of some garbled translation of an interpretation of Pope Francis’ remarks by the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera.

Jack Van Impe Ministries in Troy, Michigan reported in the November-December 1998 issue of their Perhaps Today magazine that people from the largest denomination ordering their materials were Baptists, followed by Roman Catholics, then the so-called “unchurched” in third spot, and then Presbyterians, Lutherans and Methodists – in that order.

Most recently, Carl Baugh stood in as guest co-host of Jack Van Impe Presents with Rexella. Baugh is 78 and a young earth creationist. To be fair to Baugh, he had an impossible task. The show may ostensibly be about Bible prophecy, but in reality it works because of the chemistry between Jack and Rexella.

While I think he’s wrong or misguided about some things (who isn’t?), I can’t help admiring his steadfastness and thinking when Jack arrives at the Pearly Gates he’ll hear, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant … enter thou into the joy of thy lord.”

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22