An Atheist and a Minister Walk Into a Bar 3

You may remember that earlier this year, Ecumenical News International carried a story about the prevalence of atheism among clergy Protestant Church in the Netherlands. (I posted on that story here.) Well, it appears that one of said clergy has become a publishing sensation in the land of the dikes, according to ENI:

A Dutch Protestant cleric who describes himself as an “atheist pastor”, saying he does not believe in God’s existence, has become a publishing success in the Netherlands.

The Rev. Klaas Hendrikse published a book at the beginning of November entitled “Believing in a God who does not exist: Manifesto of an atheist pastor”, which by the end of the month had gone into its third printing.

In his book, Hendrikse tells how his conviction that God does not exist has become stronger over time. He suggests, however, that it is still possible to speak of God, but in this case it refers to the quality of a relationship rather than the existence of a divine being.

“It is still possible to speak of God.” Only thing is, you’re referring to a marriage, or a friendship, or a business partnership, or the warm fuzzies that sitting on Santa’s lap gives you, or Grandma’s cookies, or how you feel about your high school math teacher.

“The non-existence of God is for me not an obstacle but a precondition to believing in God. I am an atheist believer,” he states in the book. “God is for me not a being, but a word for what can happen between people. Someone says to you, for example, ‘I will not abandon you’ and then makes those words come true. It would be perfectly alright to call that [relationship] God.”

Rev. Hendrikse’s friends no doubt call him “Humpty Dumpty” for his clever use of language.

The Volkskrant newspaper, a secular daily, compared what it called Hendrikse’s “bizarre outlook on life” to that of a vegetarian working as a butcher.

Or a Christian Scientist working as a doctor. Or a pacifist working as an artillery gunner in the army. Or a Communist working as a lobbyist for Bank of America. Or a Nazi working as a synagogue pastor. Or [fill in the blank]….

The best part is this:

The general secretary of the Protestant Church in the Netherlands, Bas Plaisier, has criticised Hendrikse for treating Christian belief as a “dogma that can be put out with the rubbish”. Still, the denomination is not planning at present legal or disciplinary steps against the pastor, Plaisier said.

“What we as a church, church board and synod can do now above all, is to give personal witness of our faith,” said Plaisier at the church’s general synod in November while reacting to the publication of the book. “We do not need to embark now on legal, organizational lines of action. That does not suit us and is also not very effective.”

In other words, the Protestant Church in the Netherlands is no longer a church. It’s an employment agency for gasbags.

(American mainline Protestants may now pile on….)

(Via MCJ.)

The Culture of Death, Summarized (UPDATED)

There is no more odious an organization at work in the United States today than the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice. Behind the name is a dedication to death, one that implicates many of the major mainline denominations (members include the Episcopal Church, PCUSA Women’s Ministries and Washington Office, United Church of Christ Justice and Witness Ministries, United Methodist Church General Board of Church and Society and Women’s Ministries, and the YWCA). Think the expression “dedication to death” is too strong? Then check out this piece by the Rev. Anne Fowler, c-convener of the “Pro-Choice Religious Leadership Council” of the RCRC:

At another point [after having borne a daughter in 1973 after her husband left her for another women], a few years later, I did have an abortion. I was a single mother, working and pursuing a path to ordination in the Episcopal Church. The potential father was not someone I would have married; he would have been no better a candidate for fatherhood than my daughter’s absent father. The timing was wrong, the man was wrong, and I easily, though not happily, made the decision to terminate the pregnancy.

I have not the slightest regret about either of these decisions, nor the slightest guilt. I felt sorrow and loss at the time of my abortion, but less so than when I’d miscarried some years earlier. Both of my choices, I believe, were right for me and my circumstances: morally correct in their context, practical, and fruitful in their outcomes.

That is, both choices were choices for life: in the first instance, I chose for the life of the unborn child; in the second, I chose for my own vocational life, my economic stability, and my mental and emotional health and wholeness.

To talk theologically about women’s right to choose is to talk about justice, equality, health and wholeness, and respect for the full humanity and autonomy of every woman. Typically, as moral theologians, we discuss the value of potential life (the fetus) as against the value of lived life – the mature and relational life of a woman deciding her capacity to continue or terminate a pregnancy. And we believe that, in general, the value of that actual life outweighs the value of the potential.

I like to talk, as well, in terms of gift and of calling. I believe that all life is a gift–not only potential life, but life developing and ripening with its many challenges, complications, joys and sorrows. When we face difficult reproductive choices we balance many gifts, many goods, and to fail to recognize the gifts of our accomplished lives is to fail to recognize God’s ongoing blessing. I believe as well that God calls us all to particular vocations, and our decisions about whether and when to bear children are part of that larger pattern of our lives’ sacred meanings.

There is so much wrong here that I am left speechless at the arrogance, callousness, self-centeredness, and self-delusion that has been poured out here in the public glorification of the rites of Moloch. That such a person is in the employ of a Christian church says more about the state of the mainline denominations today than I care to think about.

(Hat tip: Stand Firm.)

UPDATE: Looking at the Web site of her church, I also found this article about her gay rights advocacy. In the midst of telling a workshop that homosexual practice is OK, she also came out with this whopper:

“Jesus says nothing about homosexuality,” said Fowler. “He doesn’t care about personal salvation, the Bible doesn’t talk about personal salvation. God and Jesus are interested in community salvation of the chosen people. It doesn’t bother him that Jesus is accused of hanging around sinners so much. It’s about how the community treats the person who has sinned?”

“For a huge number of Christians,” she went on to say, “Jesus the Lord is savior for their personal salvation. It’s their personal purity that matters. That’s not what I believe.”

The mind truly boggles.

Headline of the Day

You knew it would come to this:

Anglican Church ’sacrificing traditional worshipers’

The Australian Broadcasting Company does not indicate whether the authorities have been notified.

(Via T19.)

Is Israel Jewish? Is the Pope Catholic?

James Wall, the editor emeritus and senior contributing editor of the Christian Century, is outraged–OUTRAGED, I say!–at the thought that Jews would claim to have a state in the Middle East. In his periodic column in the Century, he compares the double-dealing, “racist colonial power,” Great Britain, that sold out the Arabs right after World War I to the United States in its role at the recent Annapolis conference, and then gets to his main point:

Now in 2007 there are again peace talks. And once again an empire-building colonialist power is pretending that it will be an honest broker between Israelis and the Palestinians.

I’m not sure where the United States has “colonies,” but maybe he’s referring to Guam and Puerto Rico (though the latter’s residents have repeatedly voted to remaina commonwealth of the U.S.). Seems to me that that isn’t much of an empire, but what do I know.

It is possible that the U.S., Israel and the Palestinians could emerge from the negotiations begun at Annapolis and agree, with international law and international opinion, that the 1967 Green Line must be the recognized border between Palestine and Israel.

Wall is clearly one of those who has been reading the misinformation in the newspapers for too long. International law (i.e., U.N. resolutions) do not establish the Green Line as the “recognized border” between Israel and any possible Arab state on the West Bank, though it has become a truism that they do.

No successful peace accord will be reached, however, without the moral and financial force of the U.S., which alone has the power to bring peace to the region. After seven years of inaction there is no reason to believe that President Bush will be able to push both parties toward peace in the final year of his term.

Nor can Bush hide the fact that he is not an honest broker. At Annapolis this became obvious when he declared that Israel has to be a Jewish state, a position that Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat immediately rejected. Erekat knows that officially declaring Israel a Jewish state when 1.5 million Arab Israelis are within its borders is a contradiction in terms. He also knows that by defining the future state as Jewish, Bush signals that he favors the Israeli position in future negotiations on the right of return for Palestinian refugees.

How much is wrong with this? Let me count the ways:

1) Israel is officially a Jewish state, at least if its own definition of its character means anything. The Declaration of Independence, issued on May 14, 1948, states that the authors “HEREBY PROCLAIM the establishment of the Jewish State in Palestine, to be called ISRAEL.” Then there’s U.N. Resolution 181 (which detailed the plan of partition), which says that “Independent Arab and Jewish States…shall come into existence in Palestine two months after the evacuation of the armed forces of the mandatory Power has been completed but in any case not later than 1 October 1948.” The reason that Arab state didn’t come into existence, of course, is because the other Arab states rejected the plan, and Egypt and Jordan took possession of the territories that were supposed to be the new Palestinian state.

2) Saeb Erekat’s rejection of Israel as a Jewish state does nothing more than demonstrate that the Palestinians aren’t interested in a two-state solution. They want the Jewish state liquidated, and replaced by a majority Arab state that can then do exactly what most of the Arab states did after 1948–expel the Jews.

3) The 1.5 million Israeli Arabs live within the Jewish state as full citizens, with far more rights and a far better life than do the citizens of most of the Arab world’s dictatorships and kleptocracies. Those Israeli Arabs do nothing to change the Jewish character of the state, any more than the few thousand Jews allowed to remain the Iran make it any less a Shiite state. And those Arab Israelis have managed to live there for sixty years without causing some kind of internal contradiction in the nature of that state. Remarkable.

4) Again, George Bush has no power to “define” the state of Israel as Jewish–the Israelis, in concert with the United Nations, have already done that. If that predetermines the outcome of negotiations on the “right of return,” so be it. It’s a dead letter, anyway. Israel is not going to let its future be determined by demography, and certainly not by allowing millions of people who harbor decades-old grudges against Jews to flood the country.

5) One final point, and this is what this is really about: why is it that James Wall, and those who think like him in the leadership of the mainline churches, are so insistent that the Palestinians have another state (they already have one, Jordan, whose citizens are more than half Palestinian) in the Levant, and have no problem with various states defining themselves as Islamic, while being so determined that Jews should have no state to call their own and define in terms of its Jewishness? Is it really any wonder that people like Wall are accused of anti-Semitism?