Page 1178 – Christianity Today (2024)

Earlier this summer, my daughter came home from Vacation Bible School wearing a thick purple bracelet with bright orange lettering. “Watch for God,” it read. To me, it seemed like an incomplete sentence. Watch for God to what? But my mental sluggishness only revealed a spiritual truth: God seems distant lately, and it’s difficult to see him working.

Overwhelmed with bad news, we tend to view the world through our own small, distorted prisms. Fred Rogers told of how his mother would comfort him as a child when confronted with scary news, “Watch for the helpers,” she’d say. “There’s always someone trying to help.”

But what if we don’t hear about those stories? What if those stories are buried under the rubble of the pessimistic 24-hour news cycle, in which the critical commentator reigns supreme and bad news outweighs the good by 17 to 1?

It’s not just the news’ fault. What really blinds me to the work of God in the world is the troubling public discourse between Christians. We have picked up the cynics’ dialect; we have adopted the tone of negative sensationalism.

Christians too often bury the good and beautiful ways God is working through our constant criticism of one another. Christian bloggers war with one another in battles big and laughably small. Critical articles outweigh positive articles by 3-to-1 on some Christian sites. Almost every viral article or blog post contains a negative component. Out of principle, I’ll refrain from linking to examples, but these headlines should be familiar:

• “What Christians Get Wrong”
• “What Christians Need to Stop Saying”
• “Myths Christians Believe”
• “The Problem with Christians”
• “The Bigoted Christian”
• “Christians Don’t Care About …” (Insert any given cultural issue—war, peace, abortion, women’s rights, marriage equality, traditional marriage, racial reconciliation, the poor, religious freedom.)

And the heart of God is grieved.

Our public discourse drowns out the truth of how he is working in the world and harms our witness. “By this all people will know you are my disciples,” said Jesus in his farewell discourse, “if you have love for one another.” Only this. Scandalously, he does not mention here love for poor or love for disenfranchised, but only love for one another.

What are we saying to unbelievers with all our mud-flinging, with the careless words we toss out to faceless Internet audiences? I’m afraid it may be something like this: “Yes, Jesus is wonderful! Come and join us so you can be as miserable as us, so you can have a community you can count on to bicker with and eventually stab you in the back."

We who have the key to the only hope in the world have contributed to the growing despair by failing to honor God and one another in our public discourse. In our push to correct and critique the Christians who get it wrong, we forget that they are the exception to all the faithful believers we know in real life.

The heart of God is grieved because our negative speech blinds even us to how he is working in us, through us, and in the world. Our words rot our own heart, implanting within it both bitterness and malice. Throughout the Scriptures, the Lord pleads, “do not bear a grudge against the sons of your own people,” “let all bitterness and wrath and anger and slander be put away from you … be kind to one another,” “let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger, for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God,” “anyone who does not love does not know God,” “Why do you pass judgment on your brother?”.

When we slam or denigrate other Christians in the public sphere, we commit the sin of slander. We bear false witness, publicly critiquing only a part. Many of the arguments about cultural issues take place online and outside the context of Christian relationships. Therein lies the trouble. We form judgments about people on the other side of the issue without the incarnational context of how their theory works out in everyday life. The only information we have is a thesis, a position, not information on how that works out in relationships.

But we build our assumptions on the back of our own stereotypes, often for the worse. And thus, people are hurt. Who can bear up under such constant verbal assaults? Warren Wiersbe writes, "It's a painful experience to hear one’s work and ministry maligned, especially when the slander comes from believers who profess to be doing the Lord’s work by exposing the sins of the saints."

It's not that Christians should not argue or should not offer correction or discipline; it's that there is a right way and a right place to do it. When Paul corrected heresy and disputes between Christians, he did so through letters, which would be distributed or shared in the context of that church community. He did not go to the top of Mars Hill and shout about heresy and disputes in front of the Roman public. Much of the critique that clogs the blogosphere can happen offline or not at all, and the critiques we do offer can be graciously offered in a posture of humility, shifting our tone (and our hearts) from negative sensationalism to a tone more suitable to those who have seen God, who are called followers of the Way, children of God, friends of Christ.

There is a time to correct and shepherd the church community towards the way of the Lord, such as the exposing of sexual sin in congregations. The injunction to offer correction and instruction is always governed by the greater commandment to love, and always in the context of a loving Christian community.

Watch for God. Can we learn to watch for God not only in the world, but also in each other? Can we change our tone, offering fewer critiques in a tone of grace, regardless of what it costs in Facebook likes, social media shares, and popularity? I became a believer because someone dared to see in me—me, a doped-up atheist—what God sees in me. I became a believer because someone treated me as if I had value and though imperfect, I was deeply loved.

Can we continue to do that for one another? This world is not an easy place to dwell; it’s hard enough to bear our daily disappointments, heartache, losses, fear, and anxieties with dignity without the negativity we see so often in Christian discourse. May we be kind to one another, and learn again to view each other through the gracious eyes of Christ.

If there’s a theme to this issue, it’s the playfulness of God.

God is serious, says Dylan Demarsico in his piece “In the Beginning Was Laughter”—serious about joy. It was out of Trinitarian delight that the world came forth, he asserts, and he’s got some Bible to prove it.

You have to imagine God’s playfulness when you look at so much of creation. Why else would he create the dapper bar-headed goose (Anser indicus) to be able to fly over Mt. Everest every year? One might imagine he did it, well, for fun.

At this point some will clear their throats. What about the mystery of God, the God who hides himself (Isa. 45:15), the God who dwells in darkness? According to Belden Lane, theology professor at St. Louis University, it’s all part of a delightful game of hide and seek.

Finally, back to flying, which we can only do with the help of some sophisticated technology. It’s a wonder what it takes to get a plane off the ground and landed safely with all those people aboard.

Wishing you a delightful read.

—Mark Galli

One of the advantages of growing older is the perspective it provides. From a vantage point of more than seven decades, I increasingly marvel at the sovereignty and love of God. Only the passage of time enabled me to see that my salvation has been God-initiated.

Two events separated by more than two decades bring into focus an unbroken chain of God’s grace. At the time, they seemed to be singular and unrelated situations coming from a God with whom I had no relationship.

For many years, I believed my initial encounter with God came a few months after my 15th birthday. My parents and I were living in Birmingham, having recently moved there from Kansas City, Missouri. Despite having been baptized and confirmed in a Lutheran church, I never understood why it was important to have a relationship with Jesus. My parents must have had similar thoughts, since we attended church sporadically.

Our family’s relationship with the Lord changed greatly one hot Alabama night. Walking home from a summer job, I took a shortcut through the campus of Howard College (now Samford University) and came upon a sight totally foreign to me. A large tent adorned the football field. Inside, a dynamic preacher paced across an elevated platform.

Later I learned that I had come upon a Baptist revival meeting. The magnetic preacher, Eddie Martin, spoke on the Prodigal Son, applying the parable to the congregation gathered. He declared there were some prodigals inside the tent and that they needed to “come home.”

I was not a particularly errant lad, but I knew I was one of those prodigals. I was not inside the tent, however, and when the invitation came, I was not sure I would be welcome. You see, in the 1950s my family and I were outsiders—Yankees. I feared going forward. But before the preacher closed the meeting, he said there were more prodigals there. And if God gave him one more night to live, he would be back with an invitation to “come home to the Lord.”

The next evening he returned, and so did I. Despite my outsider status, I boldly entered the tent. Ushers seated me near the front. I have no memory of the sermon. I sat waiting for the invitation.

The call came and the evangelist led me through a sinner’s prayer. I confessed my need for forgiveness. While being led in prayer, I strongly felt the presence of Jesus Christ. I sensed his love and forgiveness as well as his call to preach the gospel.

My parents were supportive of my experience at the revival. Within a few weeks, we were baptized and became members of Ruhama Baptist Church. We seldom missed a service, and my parents’ faith grew enormously there.

Never before had I experienced such peace and joy. I even met two young men from Howard who took me along when they preached in small mining towns. The students involved me in their ministry at every level, including preaching.

Veering

Eighteen months later, everything changed. My father’s work took us back to Kansas City. I never felt comfortable in the church we joined, and I drifted. Although never deliberately turning from God, when I became a college student I sought intellectual respectability and embraced the prevalent materialist worldview. The call to preach sometimes haunted me, but I pursued graduate studies in history and embarked upon an academic career. Soon it became my identity.

Five years after my first academic appointment, Mary and I married. She believed attending church would be good for us. Because her background was Catholic and mine Baptist, we decided that the Lutheran Church might be a good compromise. In Boulder, Colorado, we found a church home where Mary encountered grace, surrendered her life to Christ, and began praying for me.

During the first six years of our marriage, I taught full-time and pursued research. Promotions came quickly, as did publications and grants. But despite the blessings of a lovely wife, two children, and professional success, no rest came to my soul. To fill the void I began to drink heavily. Although most people didn’t know it, I became an alcoholic. I never missed classes and seldom drank during the week, but I often binged on weekends.

Despite the blessings of a lovely wife, two children, and professional success, no rest came to my soul. I began to drink heavily.

Mary continued to pray. And one of my favorite students spent money he couldn’t afford to buy me a copy of G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, then challenged to me read C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. Simul­taneously, my car radio malfunctioned and stuck on a gospel station. I kept the radio on because I needed noise. Gradually the programs began to warm my soul.

Still doubting, I received a year’s leave to write a book. When I finished it early, I rewarded myself with a binge. One evening when Mary implored me not to drink around the children, I stomped out, found a bar, and drank until closing time. I left armed with a six-pack, drove up a winding mountain road, stopped at an overlook, and blacked out. The next morning I found myself on a dirt road next to the old Pioneer Cemetery in Boulder with no memory of the drive down.

Despite the hangover, I realized I had experienced a miracle. In utter desperation I cried out, “Lord, if you are there, please help me.” That same Presence I had met years earlier in Birmingham blessed me again. I knew he was in the car and that he loved me despite my wretchedness. This liberating encounter with Jesus Christ eventually brought healing.

When I sobered up and proclaimed my new birth to our Lutheran pastor, he said, “I think you have finally realized what you were given in your infant baptism and confirmation.” I did not believe him at the time, but sometimes I have flashbacks to the church of my childhood. I can see the choir processioning in; a mural shows Jesus ascending to heaven; I hear the pastor’s call to worship: “The Lord is in his holy temple. Let all the earth be silent before him.” The boy who had been marked with the covenant stayed there long enough to sense that our God is awesome.

Way Out in Front of Me

I moved many times, made countless mistakes, and experienced two encounters with the Lord who never gave up on me. He gradually brought healing and restored the years the locusts had eaten. He opened doors for me to witness in Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and preach in rescue missions, jails, and convalescent centers. He then called me to full-time ministry, ordination in the Anglican Church, and eventually to the Billy Graham Chair of Evangelism at Beeson Divinity School, Samford University, where I had first heard his call to preach.

Over the years God has proved to be a gentle Comforter—like when Mary underwent massive surgery for cancer, and when our 10-year-old daughter died unexpectedly. Occasionally his Spirit illumines Scripture in an amazingly clear way. There are moments during devotions when he brings to mind a person—and the person needed my call and the assurance that it was the Lord’s initiative. Sometimes Mary and I are nudged to give money to a person, and we both “hear” the same amount. The Lord also manifests his Father’s heart by sternly rebuking me for a willful act of disobedience or prideful disregard for his holiness.

Certainly the most humbling and reassuring lesson coming from a three-quarter-century backward glance is his persistence in drawing me to himself. Now I know that God was always way out in front of me, initiating life-giving knowledge of himself. And it was he who pursued me and sustained the relationship when I strayed in ignorant sheeplike fashion, doubted his existence, and then like the Prodigal Son deliberately moved to the far country.

And it is all grace—unearned, un­deserved, unrepayable grace.

Lyle Dorsett is Billy Graham Professor of Evangelism at Beeson Divinity School and serves as pastor of Christ the King Anglican Church in Birmingham.

On September 5, an important voice in academic theology was lost. Wolfhart Pannenberg, one of the most significant theologians of the 20th century, died peacefully at 85 at his home near Munich, Germany.

Born 1928 in Stettin, Germany, Pannenberg was raised as an atheist under the Nazi regime, more fluent in modern criticisms of Christianity than in Christian doctrine itself. “I was nourished on Nietzsche’s philosophy,” he said. Yet at age 16, as World War II was nearing its end, Pannenberg had a life-changing, mystical experience as he walked home from a piano lesson:

The sun was setting, and, though I had experienced many sunsets before, there was a moment when there was no difference between myself and the light surrounding me. This is not easy to describe. It may be the kind of experience that young people at the age of sixteen have otherwise (I don’t claim uniqueness to that experience), but it made me think. It opened me to the mystery of reality.

Shortly thereafter, he and his family became refugees after the Russian invasion, and he was drafted into the Nazi army, to be saved from the front lines only by scabies. As soon as he returned to school, he began studying philosophy and soon became intrigued by Christianity. He said,

I became interested in studying Christianity because our teacher in German literature, though a Christian, did not fit the picture of Christian mentality which I had received from Nietzsche. Contrary to my expectations, this teacher obviously enjoyed and appreciated the fullness of human life in all its forms, which he was not supposed to do, according to Nietzsche’s description of the Christian mind. I decided that I had to find out about this.

Thanks to the witness of this faithful literature teacher, Pannenberg’s wordless, mystical experience led to a lifetime of theological study. Surely, on the lips of one of the most diligent students of Christian doctrine in modern times, “it made me think” is a classic understatement! Pannenberg studied theology in Berlin, Göttingen, Heidelberg, and Basel, and he held several professorships, including a 25-year career at the University of Munich.

Books of Lasting Value

Pannenberg left a legacy of books that are all expansively conceived, exactingly researched, and rigorously argued. For these reasons, Pannenberg has been a theologian’s theologian. He always wrote remarkably clear prose for an academic, with no obfuscation and with an evident desire to clarify every subject. But he wrote about enormous subjects with relentless attention to detail. Theologian Robert Jenson said this “unwillingness to leave anything out” is part of “the chief literary and scholarly characteristic of Pannenberg’s writings—what makes them sometimes so complexly rewarding, and sometimes so utterly exasperating.”

Pannenberg wrote encyclopedically, as Jenson notes: “It is possible to use Pannenberg’s major writings as works of general reference, and I sometimes do.” For example, Jesus: God and Man simultaneously argues a novel approach to Christology (“from below”) while providing a history of the doctrine. Theology and the Philosophy of Science canvases the entire field, and Metaphysics and the Idea of God is a deft narration of the development of Western thought on ontology. Pannenberg’s career-capping Systematic Theology had a tendency to sprawl into longer historical discussions as it grew from the first volume to the third, but the happy result is that the massive work remains highly useful even for theologians who disagree with him on some of his distinctive theological commitments.

The Historical Validity of the Resurrection

Pannenberg’s theological starting point was the conviction that since Christianity’s key truth claims are about historical events, theology must never hide its reasoning away in some “invulnerable area” of subjective truthiness, off limits from historical-critical investigation. If the church claims Jesus Christ rose from the dead and is seated at the right hand of God, then at least the “rose from the dead” part of that claim ought to be verifiable or falsifiable by historians. Accordingly, Pannenberg marshaled the available evidence and argued that the most rational interpretation of it is that Christ actually rose from the dead. That a high-level German theologian would defend Christ’s resurrection as a knowable fact was headline news in the religious press of the 1970s. It’s no surprise, then, that Pannenberg’s emphasis on the historical reliability of the Resurrection attracted students like apologist William Lane Craig.

With his philosophical training, Pannenberg knew better than to accept the standards of critical investigation indiscriminately. As 19th-century theologian Ernst Troeltsch pointed out, academic historical research often embodies a complete worldview. Pannenberg questioned the dogmatic and absolutizing tendencies of some historical-critical precepts. For example, assumptions of historical hom*ogeneity and argument by analogy practically ruled out the possibility of miracles. Pannenberg wanted theology to recognize its accountability to historical reason, and he always considered subjectivism—whether of the existentialist or pietistic variety—to lack confidence in the truth of the gospel. Often when N. T. Wright elaborates the motivations behind his own historical methodology, he sounds a very Pannenbergian note, especially in his work on the Resurrection.

When the time came for Pannenberg to write a systematic theology, he offered one in which the public demonstration of Christian truth was the central task. He set forth all of his arguments as provisional, welcoming of critique, and to that extent hypothetical. His whole system stands or falls with judgments about historically demonstrable claims, and Pannenberg has earned his right to be heard by offering a trio of supporting arguments: one from human nature’s openness to the transcendent (anthropology), one from our non-thematic awareness of the infinite in which we all exist (metaphysics), and one from the development of the idea of God in all of human history (the history of religions). Each of these arguments takes up a long chapter of the first volume of his Systematic Theology.

Authority and Revelation

Many evangelicals see Pannenberg as a valuable ally and are grateful for both the positions he defended and the bracing manner in which he argued. But there were always signs that he was more of a helpful guest than a permanent resident of the evangelical household. Early in his career, he made the provocative statement that “theology cannot maintain the idea of Jesus’ virgin birth as a miraculous fact to be postulated at the origin of his earthly life.” He considered the Virgin Birth (oddly, it seems to me) to be incompatible with a theology of pre-existence. But he also viewed it as weakly attested in Scripture, a mythological accretion.

It doesn’t take much speculation to deduce what kind of doctrine of Scripture undergirded such judgments—he believed that human writings fallibly interpreted divine actions—and appreciative critics like Carl Henry were quick to note the deficiency in Pannenberg’s thought. Indeed, even in his three-volume Systematic Theology, Pannenberg never developed a doctrine of Scripture robust or traditional enough to stabilize his other positions. He was persuaded that “the Scripture principle” had undergone a total crisis since the Enlightenment and that theology had to move forward on another foundation altogether. Arguments from authority were no longer admissible, and Scripture arguments, in particular, needed to be handled not as givens but as things to be established on other grounds. Behind this position was Pannenberg’s view that divine revelation takes place in history, indirectly. For Pannenberg, God does not make himself known through speaking actual words, or through an interior, existential encounter, or in any other way. We know God because he makes himself known indirectly through historical events which are open to all observers, not just the eyes of faith.

God’s Presence and the Consummation of History

Of course, Pannenberg added, the history in which God is made known is not any isolated little bit of history, but the totality of history. The truth about anything comes out in the end, not along the way, and the truth about God will come out when God’s work is completed at the eschaton—the climax of history.

This insight is the key to all of Pannenberg’s theology. He defined God as “the all-determining power” and declared that as long as all things were not manifestly determined by God, God’s reality and identity were dubious. As he notoriously phrased it in his early book Theology and the Kingdom of God, “It is necessary to say that, in a restricted but important sense, God does not yet exist.” This rather drastic way of making his point was attractive to process thinkers, panentheists, and Hegelians of various kinds, with whom he disagreed but welcomed dialogue. In some ways, he spent the rest of his career either buttressing, nuancing, or—as in at least two cases in the 1990s when I heard him give public lectures and respond to questions—seeming to almost retract his claim that “in a restricted but important sense, God does not yet exist.”

Christians, even academic theologians, can hardly be expected to wait until the end of the world to find out if their God-talk has any warrant. But Pannenberg insisted that “only with the consummation of the world in the kingdom of God does God's love reach its goal and the doctrine of God reach its conclusion.” Picturing all of reality, including its temporal succession, as a unified whole, Pannenberg pointed to its final totality (“the eschatological consummation of history”) as the location of God’s demonstrated reality. Crucially, once that reality and totality are achieved, it will turn out that history not only was always moving toward it but was in fact determined by it all along, though retroactively. And the final “retroactive permanence” of God’s all-determining rule is present to us here in the course of history through Jesus Christ. In Christ, God is truly present and he makes available in advance what will be experienced in the future. This concept, known as prolepsis, is thus the juncture point of Pannenberg’s theology: We have in Christ’s resurrection the reality of God himself acting in history. The theological destiny of the world lives among us now as we make our way to the final resurrection. Pannenberg argued that his account of prolepsis “combines the concept of the kingdom of God with the Platonic idea of the good to the effect that the temporal structure of the latter is emphasized.”

No doubt, Pannenberg’s theology is heady, high-powered, and quite thoroughly worked out. But his thought is strangely isolated today. While Pannenberg has influenced many areas of academic theology, with his passing he leaves behind no identifiable school of Pannenbergians committed to continuing his vision. His quest for universal truth was idiosyncratic in 20th century theology: who else attempted so much? Whether his work continues to be read depends on whether academic theologians ever again undertake something so ambitious, rather than assigning themselves other sorts of tasks. Whenever and wherever theology addresses the task of making its case in the court of public rationality, Pannenberg’s works will be read with instruction.

Fred Sanders is professor of theology at Biola University’s Torrey Honors Institute and author most recently of John Wesley on the Christian Life (Crossway).

The cows, always the cows, hundreds of them, thousands of them. They stand in a pack blocking traffic, take naps in the middle of a busy highway, walk unmolested through a fruit stand, devour the grass and flowers in a public park. Somehow the snarling motorcycles, motorized rickshaws, trucks, and automobiles thread their way through the bovine obstacle course—a good thing, for woe to the Indian driver who injures a sacred cow.

India assaults the senses. Vehicle horns beep out a percussive background rhythm to life in cities and villages both. Women in bright-colored saris squat along the roadside, cutting the grass by hand with knives. An elephant wanders by, gaudily painted for a Hindu festival. A motorcycle zooms past: a young boy no older than two stands on the seat grasping the handlebars while behind him his six-year brother is sandwiched between the father, who is driving, and the mother, who is sitting side-saddle and holding an infant fresh from the hospital (none of them wear helmets). A funeral procession marches down a side street to the beat of a drum, its mourners lighting firecrackers to scare devils from the cemetery.

Some of our best doctors and software engineers have emigrated from India, and when my computer locks up, chances are I'll talk to a support person based there. Yet in this paradoxical nation twice as many people have access to cell phones as to toilets and running water. I visited a high-tech hospital that outsources laundry service to women who use big, heavy irons that flip open to reveal charcoal as the source of their heat. I asked my Indian host about the colorful plastic bags hanging like oversized Christmas ornaments from some banyan trees. "Oh, they contain the placentas of cows," he said, which explained the ever-present odor. "Villagers believe the practice will make their birthing cows more fertile and produce more milk."

Paradoxes abound. A land where temples display carvings of shockingly explicit sexual acts, and the home of Kama Sutra, houses a Bollywood movie industry that rarely portrays anything beyond a demure kiss. Divorce is rare, though a majority of marriages are still arranged by parents, not the product of romance. The caste system has supposedly ended, but everyone's identity card specifies his or her caste, and matrimonial ads in the daily papers stipulate the caste of prospective suitors; lower castes need not apply. While Westerners value a bronze, tanned look, Indians advertise for applicants with "wheatish skin."

I made my fourth trip to this land of endless fascination in August. I'd been asked to give the Ida Scudder Humanitarian Oration (a fancy word for a speech) at the Christian Medical College in Vellore in honor of Dr. Paul Brand, with whom I wrote three books.

The Healing Place

CMC Vellore, as it's known, has a storied history. In the early 1800s Dr. John Scudder of New Jersey became the first medical missionary to India. Seven of his sons followed in his footsteps, likewise serving as missionary doctors in India. Growing up in such a single-focused family, granddaughter Ida Scudder wanted nothing more than to find a non-medical career, marry, and settle in the U.S. A visit to care for her ailing mother back in India changed her plans.

Late one night during that visit a Hindu Brahmin knocked on the door and asked for help; his 14-year-old wife was in great distress trying to deliver a child. Ida said she knew nothing about medicine but would notify her father. The man shook his head, responded "Our religion does not permit a man to even look at my wife's face," and went away crestfallen. That same evening a Muslim and then another Hindu came with an identical request of help for their wives in childbirth. Each time Ida offered the same solution and each time the men turned it down, saying it was better that their wives die than be seen by a man. The next day all three young women were taken away in coffins.

Convinced that extraordinary night was a sign from God, Ida returned to the U.S. and studied medicine at Cornell, becoming its first female medical graduate. She went on to found a small clinic in Vellore in 1902 and then opened a nursing school for women and ultimately a medical school to train female physicians. At the time, female patients in India faced a Catch-22 situation: although custom prevented male doctors from treating them, few medical schools in India accepted women. Skeptics warned Dr. Scudder that she might get two or three female applicants; 151 women applied to the medical school. Not until thirty years later did the school begin accepting male applicants.

Today CMC Vellore is ranked the number one private hospital in India and one of the most prestigious medical schools in Asia. It has 8500 employees and treats a million patients a year. Recognizing the limited resources of many villagers, the hospital offers three levels of care. The highest level compares to high-tech hospitals in the West. The second level offers quality care but houses patients in village-type accommodations, with relatives providing meals and bedside attention. (At this level a normal childbirth delivery costs only $60, increasing to $100 if a Caesarian section is required.) And community health workers travel to nearby villages in vans to provide free nursing and physician services.

In contrast to many hospitals in the U.S. that still bear words like Baptist, Presbyterian, or Good Shepherd in their names, CMC Vellore retains a strong Christian emphasis. Posters with Bible verses decorate the hallways, doctors and nurses offer to pray with patients, and the hospital funds a large chaplaincy corps. The medical college selects 100 students a year from a pool of 30,000 applicants, giving strong precedence to those who agree to a two-year service with their sponsoring churches and missions.

While working at this institution, the British surgeon Dr. Paul Brand began his pioneering work with leprosy patients. Much as Ida Scudder had learned about women patients, Dr. Brand found that the doors of traditional medicine were closed to those with leprosy. The disease was so feared that hospitals dared not admit them. Eventually he helped establish a leprosy hospital outside the town of Vellore, which became a world-renowned center for leprosy research and treatment.

No one has affected me more than Dr. Paul Brand. He was a brilliant scientist, an avid environmentalist, an astute theologian, and a compassionate physician. In short, Dr. Brand lived life to the full, and his deep faith permeated everything he did. I met him at a time when I was recovering from an unhealthy church and wrestling with doubts and questions. My first book, Where Is God When It Hurts, came directly out of our conversations on pain and suffering. For nearly a decade I worked to present his life and ideas in the books Fearfully and Wonderfully Made, In His Image, and The Gift of Pain. The first two books are based on chapel talks Dr. Brand delivered at CMC Vellore.

Speaking at Dr. Brand's funeral in 2003, I said that we had an unusual exchange. While I was giving words to his faith, he gave faith to my words. Yes, he helped me with some of the intellectual issues. More importantly, though, he lived out the principle articulated by Irenaeus in the second century: "The glory of God is a person fully alive."

As a scientist, humanitarian, adventurer, and explorer of the natural world, Paul Brand was fully alive. He spent his best working years among some of the most abused and neglected people on the planet, leprosy patients from the Untouchable caste, yet I have never met anyone with a deeper sense of gratitude for God's good world. I felt privileged to honor him in the Oration at Vellore, which was attended by three of his six children as well as two grandchildren. Dr. Brand's widow Margaret, a physician who specialized in treating the ophthalmic conditions of leprosy, was unable to make the trip.

The cherished memory of Paul Brand is evident at the hospital: photos on the wall, a hand surgery and rehabilitation center named for him, a building dedicated by him. Both Brands are revered in the best sense of the word: not as a form of hero-worship, but as models of whole-person medicine, with an emphasis on the spiritual core. CMC Vellore works hard to communicate their legacy to future generations.

The Suffering Place

Besides the visit to Vellore, Janet and I made two other stops. We first landed in Mumbai (Bombay), scene of haunting memories from 2008. On the final leg of a book tour that fall, I was scheduled to speak downtown when a murderous assault by Pakistani terrorists made that impossible. Using bombs and AK-47s, two dozen gunmen attacked ten different sites, most notably the Taj Mahal Hotel, killing 164 and wounding at least 308. We were staying at the home of Dr. Stephen Alfred, safely away from the scene of the tragedy—providentially, since in every other city we had stayed in the kind of tourist hotels targeted by the attackers.

Dr. Alfred has since built a modern, eight-story hospital equipped with state-of-the-art technology for procedures such as radiation oncology, dialysis, and MRI and CT scans. The staff takes seriously the motto, "Not to be served, but to serve," plowing back the profits from paying patients to provide treatment for the 50 percent of patients who could not otherwise afford care. Bethany Hospital turned over its former building to JSK, a partner ministry for those affected by HIV/AIDS (CLICK for more about that visit) . In addition to providing in-patient care, this program sends staff and volunteers into homes in order to monitor the antiretroviral medicines and help families cope with the devastating disease.

We also visited the village of Damoh in central India. Like so many missions, the work of Central India Christian Mission expanded to meet the local needs. First the Indian founders, who had studied in the U.S. and developed a donor base, began caring for children abandoned by their parents; then they began assuring women with unwanted pregnancies that if they chose against abortion the mission would care for their babies. That led to a children's home, then a school, a youth center, a vocational training center, a nursing school, and a small hospital.

The mission also sponsors pastors and evangelists throughout India. Several hundred of them gathered for a one-day seminar that I taught. In the final hour before we left to head back to the U.S., the director arranged for interviews with some of the attendees who had been victims of a terror campaign by Hindu fanatics in the state of Orissa (now known as Odisha). In August and September of 2008, rampaging mobs burned around 6000 houses belonging to Christians, killing 400 and displacing 50,000 Christians, who were forced to flee to refugee camps. Even now, six years later, thousands of families in Orissa remain homeless. The mission has established a center of refuge for such trauma victims.

I knew of the earlier murder of Graham Stuart Staines, an Australian missionary who worked with leprosy patients. Along with his two sons Philip (aged 10) and Timothy (aged 6), Staines was burned to death by an ax-wielding gang while sleeping in his station wagon. His widow pleaded for mercy for the perpetrators and stayed five more years until the Staines Memorial Leprosy Hospital was completed. I had also forced myself to watch YouTube videos of mobs beating to death helpless Christians and chasing stripped women through the streets to beat them with clubs. I had read accounts of nuns raped and pastors burned in their churches. But nothing prepared me for the final meeting when I heard firsthand accounts of that dark time.

One man with the saddest expression I have ever seen recounted those days when Hindu fanatics offered a 10,000-Rupee reward for anyone who killed a preacher and 5,000 Rupees for anyone who destroyed a church. They burst into the home of one of the church members, gang-raped a young girl as her parents were forced to watch, then burned the parents alive before the children's eyes. Christians had to pass five tests to avoid martyrdom: shave their heads, drink cow urine and eat dung, pay a 10,000-Rupee temple tax, wear a prominent red mark on their heads, and present a sword dripping in Christian blood.

"Six hundred homes were burned in my village," the man said in a flat monotone, not lifting his head. "I watched them tie up my father, pour kerosene on him and burn him alive. We ran into the mountains to join the other refugees. It was the hardest thing I have ever done, leaving my father like that."

A small, trembling woman wearing a turquoise sari could hardly speak through her sobs as she recalled her ordeal. "I was a pastor's wife. A gang of a thousand men burned our entire colony. Seven of them took turns raping me in front of my husband. And then as they held me down they chopped my husband into pieces. They poured kerosene over me, lit a match, and left. Somehow I managed to crawl to a bucket of water." She showed the scars on her head and the skin grafts and missing fingers on her hands.

Four witnesses told their stories in graphic detail. They spoke through two interpreters in a tribal language that had to be translated first into Hindi, and then English. All four had traveled 24 hours by train to attend the seminar. Choking back tears, a pastor told of a teenage girl in his church who had been forced to watch her parents killed, and then was raped 42 times before being left for dead, with burns over 60 percent of her body. "I am still a pastor," he said. "I have been privileged to introduce 6000 people to Jesus. But every day when I kiss my wife goodbye I tell her I may never see her again."

I left India with furiously mixed emotions. I was inspired by the dedication of Christians who care for AIDS patients, provide free health care for the poor, and help reconstruct the bodies and lives of leprosy patients. Yet I will never forget the horrifying accounts of suffering I heard from the lips of these four witnesses. It is one thing to read about such events in newspapers or on the Internet and quite another to sit in the same room as the people who endured them, their physical and psychological scars still appallingly evident.

"In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind," wrote John in the prologue to his Gospel. "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it." On my trip to India I saw clear evidence of both the darkness and the light.

We left Damoh with heavy hearts. And when we arrived in the Delhi airport later that same day, I picked up an English-language paper and read about the ongoing atrocities against Christians in Iraq and Syria. The U.S. was rightly giving emergency assistance to 40,000 Yazidi refugees whom ISIS had driven from their homes under the threat of genocide. But a few weeks before, ISIS had displaced more than 100,000 Christians from their homes and driven them into the desert—with no such emergency response.

Not only in India, but in many parts of the world Christians are in the line of fire. As Pope Francis stated earlier this summer, Christians suffer perhaps the largest share of religious persecution in the world today:

It causes me great pain to know that Christians in the world submit to the greatest amount of such discrimination. Persecution against Christians today is actually worse than in the first centuries of the Church, and there are more Christian martyrs today than in that era. This is happening more than 1700 years after the edict of Constantine, which gave Christians the freedom to publicly profess their faith.

I went away mindful of a principle Dr. Paul Brand once taught me—he who identified leprosy as a disease of painlessness: "A healthy body is one that feels the pain of the weakest part." The same principle applies to the Body of Christ. May we never forget those who suffer for the light in a darkening world.

Philip Yancey is the author of many books, including Soul Survivor: How Thirteen Unlikely Mentors Helped My Faith Survive the Church. This essay was posted on his blog site in August.

Copyright © 2014 Books & Culture. Click for reprint information.

Welcome to this week's link list . . . to those of you who didn't already have it automatically download to their phone.

• T.D. Jakes has two syndicated television projects in development, one a daily show, the other a weekly.
• At age 14, she was taken from her family and given to an ISIS commander as a bride. Then she and a friend escaped.
• It's called lateral leadership, defined as "leading your peers, those you serve alongside but don’t report to, and they don’t report to you either."
• Pope Francis shook things up last week by performing weddings for couples who had been previously living together, some of whom had children.
• Hillsong made the New York Times, complete with a quotation from the Rev. Dr. Albert Mohler Jr. that they water down the gospel …
• … But one church planter thinks the move by churches back into cities like NYC is somewhat selective when it comes to neighborhoods.
• A few like-minded linkers this week noted this upcoming theology cruise to the Eastern Carribean. Beats a seminary classroom, I suppose. Maybe you were predestined to see this.
• I hope my editor approves this link: Introducing grassroots pastors, "a growing population of Christians—especially young Christians—called and trained for ministry, but, for one reason or another, not in a formal church role."
• What if instead of suppressing belief in God, the 1960s had brought God into the foreground?
• The death of controversial pastor turned politician Rev. Ian Paisley elicits stories from The New York Times and UK Christian media.
• Let's talk about a Rob Bell book before it's released; nobody's ever done that before. The book, coauthored by wife Kristen deals with egalitarian marriage.
• Your mileage may vary: See if you agree with this assessment after the lyrics of modern worship songs are placed under the microscope.
• Maintaining a distinct identity: What distinguished the early Christian community from their surrounding neighbors?
• A Georgia pastor who delivered what he considered an 'educational' message about the middle east temporarily had his YouTube account suspended.
• Planning weekend services: Living between the tension of following the template or starting from scratch.
• The hometown mainstream media continue their coverage of things at Mars Hill Seattle.
• Church Profile of the Week: A look at Christ Redeemer Episcopal in Milwaukee, where community trumps dogma, and former Evangelicals discover Anglican worship.
• Benjamin Corey responds to the trolls: "… if your goal is to help introduce people to Jesus, you’re actually achieving the opposite of your stated goal. …you’re actively harming the efforts of those of us who are purposeful and attempt to use extreme care with how we communicate the message of Jesus." …
• … Taking that to the next level, a guide to having crucial conversations.
• You've seen books like All the Men of the Bible and All the Miracles of the Bible. This blog post looks at all the suicides of the Bible.
• Patriarchy and clergy libraries: Hey, pastor; take a minute to scan your collection and compute the male-female balance of writers on your shelves.
• A Brazilian soccer star is trying to bring visibility in that country regarding the plight of Saeed Abedini, imprisoned in Iran for two years.
• Three book reviews, including Marketing Like Jesus and a revival of the True Love Waits movement.
• An atypical story of domestic abuse: When the husband is physically injured.
• Often voiced: Christian Bible study resources for women tend to be too feeling-based.
• Pope Francis has suggested that the conflicts we're seeing around the world are like puzzle pieces combining to form the picture of a third world war. (My paraphrase.)
• American Pastors looking for a pay raise might want to relocate to The South. (According to the study, they should also avoid Canada.)
• Mathematics Department: Unpacking Baptist attrition rates.
• James MacDonald apologized on the weekend for a church disciplinary action against three former elders that was excessive.
• When Hollywood got it right: Eight reasonably positive portrayals of Christians on broadcast television.
• I think in many respects, the blog platform tumblr is a mission field, so I greatly admire people doing ministry there.
• When it comes to understanding the Christian publishing market in Canada there's one guy you might want to know.
• Song of the Week: Unspoken's Start A Fire. (Thanks, Diane.)
• Advertising by a faith-based preschool is refused by Groupon.
• Cartoonist David Hayward's cartoons can make your head explode.
• Worship Leader Trauma Center: Dealing with your church's OPH problem.
• After its first hiatus in eleven years, The Drew Marshall Show Canada's "most listened-to spiritual talk program" returns to the air on Saturday. Join listeners from around the world live between 1:00 and 5:00 EDT.
• Calminianism: Harmonizing predestination and free will with God's sovereignty.
• A cross symbol on the helmets of a college football team meant to memorialize a former player and a former equipment manager violate the United States Constitution. Excerpt: "These young men were simply trying to do a good deed. They were standing up for their fallen teammates. It's really too bad the university could not stand up for the team."
• Journalistic curiosity: Calling last Thursday "9/11's Bar Mitzvah."
• Not serious: Peter Enns guests at Huffington with 10 Signs You Take The Bible Too Literally. (And does an AMA at Reddit today (9/17) at 3:00 EST.)
• The Gaithers Claim Another Victim: The founder of the Christian rock band Starfield turns bluegrass.
• Did you get your free U2 album? Did you want to get the new U2 album? Some people were unwilling recipients. At Rolling Stone, a track-by-track guide to all eleven songs.
• Prosperity Gospel? Yes, people still teach that. If I'm not wealthy, I must be doing something wrong.
• Finally, this may or may not be a true story: A church decides to shut down its ministry to focus on the success of its coffee shop. (Website name is a clue.)

Paul Wilkinson failed to find a suitable Christian media link related to tomorrow's historic separation vote in Scotland, but you can read him the rest of the week at Thinking Out Loud or devotionally at Christianity 201.

According to their critics, private Christian schools foster an attitude of isolation and withdrawal from society. And according to their boosters, public schools provide a unique and essential preparation for citizenship in a diverse nation. For the past five years, my colleagues and I at Cardus have been studying these claims, and last week, we released a new study that shows just how little data exists to support them.

Do private schools (whether religious or not) foster social isolation? Do public schools uniquely help to create the “social capital” that comes from diverse friendships and working relationships? Based on the data we released last week, the answer seems to be no on both counts. Adult graduates of Evangelical Protestant, Catholic, non-religious private, and public schools were all as likely to have a close friend who was an atheist or of a different race. The only statistically significant difference we found was that Evangelical Protestants were marginally less likely to have a close gay or lesbian friend—about 57 percent of evangelical Protestant graduates, compared to 69 percent of public school graduates, report a friend or relative who is gay or lesbian.

The Cardus survey, collected in March 2014 and analyzed by the team at the Cardus Religious Schools Initiative at the University of Notre Dame, was designed to give a comprehensive account of how different kinds of high schools contribute to the academic achievement, cultural engagement, and spiritual formation of their graduates.

The results of this survey were mostly consistent with a similar survey we conducted in 2011. While it’s inevitably most interesting to look at the differences among graduates of these different kinds of schools—more about those in a moment—one of the most striking results is the similarities. On more than half of the over 500 slides of results (available for free download along with the report at www.carduseducationsurvey.com), there are no statistically significant differences between the various schooling types.

Some will find these similarities comforting, while others will find them disconcerting. Within the educational establishment policy and research community, they are at the very least surprising, not least because of the implications for public funding of private alternatives to government-run schools. In a panel discussion at Roosevelt House in New York City on September 10th after the results were released, former New York State Commissioner of Education David Steiner asked: “If the results are the same, is there any justification for not publicly funding private schools?”

There are differences between the graduates of different kinds of schools, to be sure. Evangelical Protestant graduates marry younger, have more children, divorce less, and are more active in their church communities than other graduates—although, confounding rumors of evangelical isolation, they are more active in their broader communities as well. Academically, Evangelical Protestant school graduates look quite similar to public school graduates. Evangelical Protestant male graduates are more likely than others not to go beyond high school, representing a greater occupational involvement in the trades, but (confounding still more rumors, this time of evangelical sexism) Evangelical Protestant female graduates are as equally likely as those from other sectors to pursue tertiary education.

Another significant difference between Evangelical Protestant graduates and others is that they are less likely than others to pursue majors and careers in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math)–related occupations. They are more likely to be employed in education, health, and other social science-related occupations (the “caring professions”). When it comes to choosing a career, financial reward seems to have a lower priority in their decision-making process. They are much more likely to pursue a career based on a sense of “calling from God” or vocation than their counterparts from other school types.

Catholic school graduates, on the other hand, tend to look more like graduates of non-religious private schools—for these graduates, the various measures of academic attainment are consistently higher than other sectors. Catholic graduates tend to be employed in STEM occupations as well as disproportionately in managerial and professional occupations, especially in fields related to finance. At the same time, our study confirmed the 2011 finding that Catholic schools do not seem to be producing the spiritual formation results that most Catholic parents would presumably aspire to when choosing Catholic education for their children.

There was one other intriguing result among the graduates of private schools that are not religious (neither Evangelical nor Catholic)—they gave relatively positive evaluations of the contribution of their schools to their religious and spiritual formation. (As with all these findings, the sample here was controlled for socioeconomic and religious backgrounds in order to enable “apples to apples” comparisons.) Although non-religious schools are by definition officially secular just like public schools, it would seem that non-religious private schools are much more open and supportive of the religious expression of their students. Perhaps this is because many non-religious schools originated as religious schools; perhaps it reflects the public schools’ hypersensitivity to any religious expression. Whatever the cause, the results are striking.

One final finding should not be overlooked: the “satisfaction” results in which respondents were asked to evaluate how well their high school prepared them for various dimensions of adult life. Every one of the private school types have significantly more positive evaluations in this domain, in almost every measure, than public schools. One might argue this is to be expected, given that tuition was paid for the private school experience, but that alone can hardly explain the dramatic gap.

Our project isn’t intended to be the last word. Rather, we seek to bring reliable data into the discussion, so that those interested in the pros and cons of the various school sectors can make more informed choices. And we hope those involved in education will take an opportunity to look in the mirror this survey provides. Ultimately these results matter for all of us—most of all because they debunk the myth that religious schools are somehow deficient in creating the social capital necessary for a vibrant democratic society. As it turns out, that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Ray Pennings is a co-founder and Executive Vice-President of Cardus. He chaired the research team that oversaw, evaluated, and reported on this research.

The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), like most festivals, tends to be an auteur-focused affair. In the weeks leading up to the event, press releases fly, reminding critics which directors have new films dropping.

But crowds rarely line up on the street across the screening venue hoping to catch a glimpse of Bennett Miller, Jessica Hausner, or Olivier Assayas. Directors’ names carry prestige, but we are still a star-driven culture. People have their favorite directors, but they are in love with their favorite stars.

And, truth to tell, TIFF offered a plethora of great performances. Looking back over the festival, here are six of my favorite.

Aleksey Serebryakov plays Kolya in Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan. The TIFF catalog compares Zvyagintsev’s work to Tarkovsky’s. While I see some obvious thematic resemblances, particularly in the use of religious language as a frame, I don’t recall Tarkovsky’s work works eliciting the sorts of memorable performances we get here. Kolya might be a bit of a stock figure for American viewers; he is a stern, Russian patriarch. Serebryakov makes him seem real, though, and that holds are interest until we start to see more to the character than what appeared at first glance.

When I mentioned on Twitter that Kristen Stewart was having a good festival, one of her many fans replied asking if I was being sarcastic. Those who love the actress for her turn as Bella in Twilight are apparently not used to her being treated with much esteem. Stewart shared the spotlight with Juliette Binoche in The Clouds of Sils Maria and Julianne Moore in Still Alice. Both films were vehicles designed to feature the talents of the lead actress, but both needed—and got—strong support from Stewart in understated but important roles.

It is hard to pick just one performance to highlight from Bennett Miller’s ensemble drama, Foxcatcher. Steve Carrell will get a lot of buzz for playing against type, and Mark Ruffalo shines in a role that is more substantive and important than it initially appears. But Channing Tatum anchors the whole thing with a brooding, hulking performance as Olympic wrestler Mark Schultz. Tatum’s character isn’t dumb, but he knows other people think of him in that way, and his frustration builds as events challenge his athletic faith that life is a meritocracy. In an early scene he holds his gold medal out defiantly—towards a group of indifferent school children! Mark’s relationship with John DuPont (Carrell) begins in suspicion, but the film only really works if you believe that Mark buys into what DuPont is preaching. Once he does, even before he does, the film takes Schultz on a rollercoaster of peaks and valleys. One joy of Tatum’s performance is how much he conveys physically. This isn’t a sports film, but it is a film about sports. Mark is only ever really comfortable when he is in movement. When he sits, his body seems too big for himself. When he is quiet, Mark appears not quite comfortable with his own thoughts.

I confess that I have never understood Miss Julie. I don’t get Strindberg’s play, nor can I fathom its title character. Based on its title and the film’s early publicity, I suspect Liv Ullmann’s adaptation was meant as a showcase for Jessica Chastain. She is fine as far as I can tell, but Colin Farrell is electric as Miss Julie’s servant, John. One of the difficulties of Strindberg’s play is that it contains some sudden, drastic emotional shifts. Farrell has to show desire and contempt in short proximity. Binding those emotions together is a white hot rage that is just barely kept in check by a well-trained class consciousness. When John finally gives in to his emotions, whether they are love or hate, there is only momentary release. Almost immediately the pressures start to build again, only this time with a layer of guilt over everything. Farrell’s turn as Marty in Seven Psychopaths was one of the great underrated performances of 2012. He is gradually turning into one of those actors I will get in line to see regardless of the project he is working on.

Christian Petzold told audiences at TIFF that he had been wanting to film Phoenix for a long time, but sensed that even a half century after the close of World War II might be “too soon” for a film that mashes Vertigo, Pygmalion, and the holocaust. Nina Hoss plays Nelly, a camp survivor who has been so badly disfigured she needs surgery. Her spirit is even more badly scarred than her body, particularly when she comes to suspect that her husband, Johnny, might have betrayed her to the Nazis in order to save his own skin. Nelly is presumed dead, but no body has been found, meaning Johnny can’t inherit property that was in Nelly’s name. He does not recognize his wife after her surgery—or perhaps he does but is afraid to acknowledge her. Instead he devises a plan where this apparent stranger will pretend to be Nelly so that they can split the inheritance he believes is now legally his own. The summary makes Phoenix sound like a soap opera, and in many ways it is. But Hoss’s performance keeps the film from sliding into the realm of farce. As Hoss plays her, Nelly is buried under layers of grief, but she is buried alive. She longs to understand, needs to understand, the inexplicable. Here, too, there is a danger. Using Nazism as a metaphor for any kind of betrayal risks trivializing the scope of the atrocities perpetuated in the Shoah. Yet Hoss and Petzold do not simply use the war as a backdrop for domestic betrayal so much as a catalyst for it. As Nelly gives more and more of herself over to Johnny’s plan, we can’t quite tell if she is healing her deepest psychic wounds or allowing them to fester.

Love & Mercy is being billed as a Brian Wilson biopic, but its best performance comes not from Paul Dano (as the young Wilson) or John Cusack (as the older Wilson) but Elizabeth Banks. As much a story about how Melinda Ledbetter came into Wilson’s life as it is a story about how Wilson penned songs for The Beach Boys, Love & Mercy takes its sweet time allowing the conflict to develop between Melinda and Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti). Want to know when I suspect I am watching a good performance? When scenes start subverting my expectations and I realize the reason is because a performer has made choices that look beyond the script’s conventions. As Melinda, Banks has to maintain a credible external appearance of accepting Landy’s treatment of Brian while still communicating to the audience that she, like us, is mortified. The performance does not show a hint of omniscient knowledge. Melinda is no dummy; she knows how fragile are the cords that tie her to Brian are and how much the deck Landy has dealt is stacked against her. Through it all, Banks show a surprising and credible mix of emotions: shock anger, frustration, indignation, love and mercy. It’s a great performance.

These were my favorites, though other stars did some stellar work: Jennifer Aniston (Cake), Kate Beckinsale and Daniel Brühl (The Face of an Angel), Gemma Arterton (Gemma Bovery), Benicio del Toro (Escobar: Paradise Lost), and Lou Taylor Pucci (Spring) all did stellar work for films that weren’t quite as good as their performances. And I haven’t even mentioned Marion Cotillard, James Franco, Alec Baldwin, and Willem Dafoe.

So if you love to see great actors take on challenging roles, the coming months at the multiplex should not disappoint.

Kenneth R. Morefield is an Associate Professor of English at Campbell University. He is the editor of Faith and Spirituality in Masters of World Cinema, Volumes I & II, and the founder of 1More Film Blog.

No, Demand Oversight

Keith Pavlischek

First, we need to understand the difference between internal communications content, and the bulk collection and analysis of telecommunication data. When we do, it becomes clear why the National Security Administration's (NSA) use of this data does not necessarily violate our privacy rights under the Fourth Amendment.

The debate over the proposed USA Freedom Act has little to do with whether the government is spying on Americans by listening to their phone calls or reading their e-mails. This legislation, simply stated, would restrict the bulk collection and analysis of data about data (known as metadata—numbers dialed, length of call, billing records) in the fight against terrorism. It has long been settled that the Fourth Amendment doesn't protect a conversation that merely has taken place. The Supreme Court ruled in Smith v. Maryland (1979), "While the guarantees of the Fourth Amendment are broad, they are not boundless."

The bulk collection of this kind of data is constitutional, yet informed debate on this issue is as difficult for Christians as anyone else. Too often, the debate is reduced to a simplistic choice between good (the right to privacy) and evil (government surveillance). Scholar Benjamin Wittes summarizes this polarized view in his review of No Place to Hide, journalist Glenn Greenwald's book about Edward Snowden: "NSA is unrelentingly evil, its appetite voracious, its purpose political control and the suppression of dissent. Terrorism and other national security interests are mere smokescreens and pretexts for collection that is, in fact, just a repressive instrument."

When privacy advocates don't embrace such hysterical nonsense outright, they tend to stress the potential for abuse. Of course the bulk collection of phone and Internet data could be abused. If the information gleaned from bulk collection did not have the potential for abuse, it would not be such an indispensable tool in our counterterrorist toolbox. But that simply highlights the need to vigorously monitor the program through compliance protocols and legislative and judicial oversight, not to abandon the program altogether. Oversight and use of the least intrusive methods are what Christians should advocate for in the public arena.

My views are based on my direct experience working at the NSA and in the intelligence community as a military intelligence officer. The prevailing suspicion that NSA "spies" are cavalier about the privacy rights of citizens couldn't be further from the truth. The culture of the nsa, from its leadership to entry-level analysts, tilts radically in the opposite direction, toward an almost fanatical obligation to protect Americans' privacy rights.

Christians should support the legitimate use of counterterrorism surveillance under classic just-war reasoning, historically based on Romans 13. There is no justice in terrorism, only injustice. I said that in September 2001, and it's still true.

KEITH PAVLISCHEK, a U.S. Marine Corps colonel (ret.), is vice president of operations at Veteran Solutions Inc.

Yes, It May Be Necessary

David Lyon

Has a threshold of government surveillance been reached beyond which Christians should actively push back? Did it take former NSA contractor Edward Snowden's 2013 disclosures to wake us up to surveillance?

Almost all surveillance today is massive computer-based monitoring of phone call records, e-mails, and Internet use. The days of defining surveillance as the targeting of specific suspects (think Frog One in The French Connection) are long gone. Now surveillance organizations seek to suck up as much data on individuals as possible. An individual's online choices, Facebook views, durations of phone calls, and food fads and fancies all help to tag him or her for police, marketers, and the NSA. The government claims to use this data, merged on a massive scale with other information, to foil terrorism.

The era of Big Data raises important questions for Christians. The biblical account shows us the proper aims of surveillance. The God of Scripture practices surveillance: "Unless the Lord watches over [surveils] the city, the guards stand watch in vain" (Ps. 127:1). This God is especially vigilant for the vulnerable, as Hagar found, calling him "the God who sees me" (Gen. 16:13). As a foreigner, a female, and a fugitive, Hagar was at a triple disadvantage. So watching over (which is what the French verb, surveiller, means) should always be judged by a criterion of care, with human flourishing as its aim and ultimate purpose.

But do we necessarily flourish when we are seen? Are we meant to live totally transparent lives? It depends. Sometimes we reveal ourselves, and sometimes we hold back.

Complete self-exposure is not automatically the best choice. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says that when giving alms, don't let your left hand know what your right hand is doing (Matt. 6:2–4). One day, we'll know God and be known face to face (1 Cor. 13:12). But until then we need to take great care because surveillance has become an unavoidable aspect of all our lives.

We must be alert not only to the excesses of the nsa, but also to the surveillance society that we have created—of which the NSA is only one part. Today, democracy is threatened by the chilling effects of surveillance. Resisting may have its moment, and we may be called to courageous action. But what's needed on a daily basis is steady and digitally informed engagement based on values that have marked robust Christian involvement in the past—such as democratic participation, social justice, and human dignity.

So, should we resist greater government surveillance? Yes, if it is uncaring, and if it makes certain groups and individuals more vulnerable. We should be concerned about all kinds of surveillance—in schools, churches, neighborhoods, marketing, policing, and management—as well as in the nsa. As we seek to hold them accountable, we remember we're all accountable to the One before whom all creation is laid bare (Heb. 4:13).

DAVID LYON is director of the Surveillance Studies Centre, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario.

No, It's the Wrong Fight

Rachael Jackson

My heartbeat is that of a soldier. I enlisted in the Army at age 18 and graduated from West Point six years later. In Iraq, I served as a captain and Apache helicopter pilot. After a medical discharge and difficult transition to civilian life, I can say God wanted me to be a soldier—just not for the reasons I originally thought.

I know the value of intelligence. There are no clear frontlines in the war on terrorism. Intelligence is the greatest weapon we have to equalize the battlefield and neutralize potential threats. As an American citizen, I understand the idea that big government can be scary. As a Christian, I feel it can be invasive and may infringe on our religious freedom.

In The Christian Century, Daniel Schultz contends that we should resist negotiating for our perceived safety and security in exchange for freedom. He invites Christians to scrutinize this promise of security from our government, claiming, "History shows how easily national security becomes conflated with maintaining the political status quo. Jesus, after all, was executed as a threat to the Roman government of Palestine."

The battle between freedom and security persists. But is it a battle we should be fighting? When U.S. Christians engage in this fight, we likely overestimate our perceived freedom and focus our efforts in the wrong place: our safety. Should our safety be what we are seeking in the first place? Biblically speaking, shouldn't we as Christ followers welcome the same fate that befell Jesus? "Do you remember what I told you? 'A slave isn't greater than his master!' So since they persecuted me, naturally they will persecute you" (John 15:20, TLB).

As American Christians, where does this leave us? Let me suggest the following: pray for our leaders (1 Tim. 2:1–4); give unto Caesar what is Caesar's (Matt. 22:21); and educate ourselves to vote wisely for Christian leaders and their oversight in our government (Prov. 28:12).

As long as we are not mandated to do something that contradicts the teachings of Christ, we are free to quit battling the government. Then, together, we can go about the business of making disciples and sharing the gospel.

When we are tempted to fight the government on issues with little eternal impact, we need to remember what matters in God's eyes. It is highly doubtful that anyone will ever be saved because of a battle waged against government surveillance. Jesus converts hearts. The struggle for hearts is our true battlefield. That is why God invited me (and you) to put on his whole armor as a soldier for Christ.

RACHAEL JACKSON is the founding editor of Shattered magazine.

A couple years ago, a video about Ian and Larissa Murphy’s marriage went viral. In some ways, they exhibit a conventional story of young love. They met in college and wanted to get married. But Ian suffered a traumatic brain injury after a car accident. Their plans were tenuous at best as Ian lay in a coma in a hospital bed.

The accident came 10 months into their relationship. For the next two years, Ian worked to regain his ability to talk, then the couple began talking about marriage. Two years after that, they married on Ian’s late father’s birthday, 8-28-2010—a date referenced in the title of their new book, Eight Twenty Eight. The number also refers to a favorite Bible passage, Romans 8:28: “And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to His purpose” (ESV).

Although both Ian and Larissa contributed to the book, most of the narrative takes place during the years of Ian’s coma and recovery. With graceful prose and fluid storytelling, Larissa explains the factors that led her to remain so intimately connected to Ian even though they were not yet engaged and his prognosis was grim.

At 29, Larissa still sounds at times like a young wife, learning to serve her husband and grow her faith as best she can. She is not a trained theologian, but she does not shy away from the theological questions posed by a traumatic brain injury. She writes honestly about the blessings they have experienced amidst, and even because of, the hardship of Ian’s long recovery and his different life with a disability.

Hers is a testimony to God’s faithfulness amidst woundedness, a testimony to the truth of Romans 8:28, even when all things do not yet look as though they have worked together for good.

After reading Eight Twenty Eight, I interviewed Larissa and Ian by email about God's miracles in their lives as well as the prayers that have gone unanswered. A version of their marriage video, updated earlier this year, appears at the end of the post.

What made you decide to write a book?

Larissa: I’ve always wanted to write a book. Ian’s dad and I tried to start a book a few times over the years, because he had the same desire. But we didn’t know the ending of Ian’s story yet. And not that we do now, but our marriage provided some closure on the chapter of our life that we wrote of in Eight Twenty Eight.

Ian: My wifey. She asked me, and I said yes. Because if my wifey wants to do it, it must be good.

How did the writing process work? You both contributed as authors, but the story is a first-person narrative from Larissa’s perspective. Ian, what was your role as an author?

Ian: I sat and listened and provided commentary and feedback.

Larissa: Ian is a much better writer than me, so I needed his brain to critique my words.

Two words that could be used to describe aspects of your story are “accident” and “miracle.” How do you understand God’s role in Ian’s car accident?

Ian: He’s sovereign. Say no more.

Larissa: Agreed with Ian. It’s so easy to get caught up on whether God causes suffering. Or if he simply allows it. I’ve decided that I’d rather rest in knowing that, as Ian said, no matter what we face, God is over all. “Before me, as behind, God is, and all is well.”

Do you think of Ian’s recovery as a miracle?

Ian: Heck yeah. I was gonna die but God saved me. That is the miracle.

In what ways has God healed both of you?

Ian: My body. And spiritually, I’m stronger. I now know that God is a big God, and I’m a little human.

Larissa: God has healed me in the sense that I long for him more than for this world, which is much different than (I felt) before September 30 (the day of Ian’s accident). That is healing to me.

What prayers have gone unanswered?

Larissa: Prayers for complete healing for Ian. Prayers that his dad would not have died from cancer. But yet, we’re ok. God has not left us.

Before Ian is able to communicate much as he recovers from a lengthy coma, you realize that he can read. What did this discovery do for you both? What are you each reading now?

Larissa: Realizing that he could read meant that his vocabulary was still intact—a huge miracle. We discovered he could read before he started talking, and the discovery gave us a ton of hope.

Ian still relies on someone to read to him, as his vision is fairly poor. It would take a giant typeface to work for him. I’m reading Les Miserables -so good!

One of my favorite parts of the book comes when Larissa asks Ian to show her “the old you.” Ian responds, “News flash…there’s only one Ian.” Larissa, do you still think of Ian in terms of old and new? Are you still longing for the old?

Larissa: I feel like I’m in love with two Ians. On one hand, the old Ian I miss a ton, because he had all of his abilities. But on the other, this Ian that I now know is so much happier, sweeter, and more grateful. At the core of his being, though, he’s the same. He’s just required to show it in different ways. I often wonder what “version” of Ian I’ll have in heaven. I like to think it will be a perfect combination of both.