Monthly Archives: February 2015

The ISIS horror show: what you now need to know

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higher learningSpeaking recently at the National Prayer Breakfast, President Obama called ISIS a “brutal, vicious death cult.” As the atrocities and inhumanity of the ISIS horror show spread and worsen, as air strikes continue, and as more combat troops are inserted, even people who have remained largely uninformed now know that they need at least some understanding of ISIS that goes beyond CNN or Fox News. So I thought it would be useful to gather in one place, for easy access, a number of short but informative articles on this.

Last year, over the space of two or three months on this blog, I posted several threads of well researched background articles that readers found helpful for learning what ISIS is on about. These non-sensationalistic but necessary pieces delve well beyond typical news coverage, talk radio punditry, political newspeak, and the religious hyper-ventilating that leaves far too many important questions untouched. Interested? If so, I have listed the first post of each of those threads here, just below, in the order that they were published, beginning with the first post. (At the end of each of those posts is a link taking you to the next piece in that thread.)

We hope you will take advantage of this opportunity. You can probably get through the complete fabric in an hour or two and take away a good “reader’s digest” version of where ISIS/ISIL is coming from and what its religious, political, and social goals are. This will also help you see what leaders of more than sixty nations understand about ISIS/ISIL and why they recently gathered in Washington for an unprecedented three-day summit on countering ISIS.

This is the only place on the Web, at least that I know of, where you can avail yourself of a detailed collection like this in one place. It may not scratch all of your itches, but you will come away pretty well informed.

Here is the list of threads, in order, beginning with the first one. But they have been written in such a way that you could jump in anywhere. I don’t have all the answers (no one does), but such as I have I give to you. If you find this list useful, send it to a friend or two.

1) RELIGION AND THE POST-9/11 BIG PICTURE part 1 of 2

2) THE RELIGIOUS ROOTS OF AL QAEDA AND ISIS part 1 of 4

3) WHERE ISIS STANDS: US VS. EVERYONE ELSE part 1 of 2

4) ISIS & THE RISE AND FALL OF ISLAM part 1 of 3

5) ISIS & AL QAEDA: THE ROLE OF JIHAD part 1 of 2

6) ISIS AND SOCIAL JUSTICE IN ISLAM part 1 of 2

7) ISIS & JIHAD: INEVITABLE WAR

©2015 by Charles Strohmer

Image by Brian Donovan (permission via Creative Commons)

Islam and Christianity: A Conversation with James Skillen

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The Farthest Mosque JerusalemA leading social and political thinker and practitioner, James Skillen is the author and editor of many books and journal articles, and he is president emeritus of the Center for Public Justice. His new book, The Good of Politics: A Biblical, Historical, and Contemporary Introduction, has been aptly cited as “a call to political repentance.” Having known Jim for a long time, I have greatly benefited from his biblical grounding and generosity of spirit on a staggering array of topics. Since retiring from CPJ, he is sharing his wisdom by writing, speaking, and mentoring more than ever. This conversation took place at the Terminal Brewhouse in Chattanooga and afterward via email.

Charles Strohmer: Jim, let’s begin with what you see as some core differences between a Christian and a Muslim view of religion and politics in the context of the spread of Islam and Christianity.

James Skillen: Islam is basically a religion of law and its scholars are scholars of the law, and there is no imperial authority. The chief authority is God, who has directed his word through the Prophet. And the Qur’an, in Arabic, is not debatable. It’s the law. Of course Islam has become very complex because you’ve now got all sorts of different schools of interpretation. But what gives it its identity as a whole is the Qur’an.

Where I think it makes the most sense to understand Islam politically is in its view of history, that the whole world should become the dar al-Islam (the abode of the people of God in obedience to Allah). The indisputable idea is that God is creator and sovereign over all, so the dar al-Islam has to unfold, but not necessarily by force, although the early Islamic conquests in the Arabian peninsula and across north Africa and into Spain were seen as satisfying this progress of the dar al-Islam. And this created the idea of the umma, the unified community of Muslims.

CS: Where do militant groups today, such as ISIS/ISIL and al Qaeda, fit in? They are seeking to spread the dar al-Islam through force and violence.

JS: For some Muslims, the big crisis since the end of World War One and the collapse of the Ottoman empire is the shrinkage of Islam. I just heard it again today on the radio: Why isn’t the umma increasing like it should, where is the progress of the dar al-Islam? So there has arisen a radical fringe element that believes you can take up arms to advance the spread of the dar al-Islam, and people like Osama bin Laden and the leader of ISIS [Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi] have found legitimacy for that militancy in the Qur’an, whether against non-Muslims or even against Muslims, such as those who support democracy and other things of the West.

So there’s this crisis in Islam in which, on the one had, you have those who, like ISIS, want to see rise of a new caliphate that rules the dar al-Islam through sharia law, and on the other hand you have those who have accepted much about the West.

CS: This doesn’t sound unlike the Christian hope for Christianity to spread around the world, for everything to come under the lordship of Christ.

JS: I would say it is very parallel to a Christian view of the kingdom of God that will someday be fulfilled. It can’t be stopped. The gates of hell will not prevail against God’s progress of this. But the Christian community is not called to conquer all nations but to preach the gospel. Christianity itself cannot be brought by force. With Islam, the nations need to come under rule and everybody needs to submit.

I think the parallel that ought to exist in Christianity is to say, and you see this in Isaiah and other biblical prophets, that to come to church regularly but not to live a life of holiness and justice, that’s mocking God. I mean, you can’t have the God who is the sovereign of all just as a Sunday activity. So to bring all things under the lordship of Christ has to be understood as each thing in its God-ordained sphere of activity. So the radical difference from the radical Muslim and the radical Christian, I would say, is that Christians do not see force as their means for bringing in God’s kingdom. God will do that in his own good time.

Wheat and Tares iconCS: Someone once said to me something like: Christianity is a kind of voluntary society and arose as such, but Islam arose as political religion. Would you say that’s an accurate way to describe a radical difference between the two faiths?

JS: I think Christianity is as much a political religion as Islam, but the view of the political is different. In Christianity, Christ is confessed as king and lord of all. All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to him. But the political task of Christians is one of following Christ as disciples, and Christ did not call them to try to clean up this world of all the weeds that fell into the field of good plants (Matthew 13). God will decide when that should be done. In the meantime we are to live as those seeking justice and loving our neighbors in the world that God is upholding in Christ with the same rain and sunshine falling on the just and unjust alike. The Muslim view of human responsibility under God’s law on earth is very different.

CS: This idea about bringing all things under Christ’s lordship within their God-ordained spheres – many university students and graduates are struggling with this. You often call this “sphere sovereignty,” which is quite different than the Islamic view of sovereignty.

JS: I think Abraham Kuyper’s phrase about “sphere sovereignty” places too great an emphasis on the kind of authority the “sovereign” should have. This is understandable in his context, but his main point was that only God is truly sovereign. And he delegates that sovereignty in differentiated measure to the different arenas of human responsibility. No single human authority, whether church or state, can subsume all human responsibilities under its ultimate sovereignty.

The better way for us to think about this today, I think, is for us to emphasize different kinds of responsibility God has given us, most of which exist by the very nature of what God created us to be: friends, spouses, parents and children, gardeners and farmers and shepherds, priests and governors, and so on. What is required is that we learn how to serve God in every sphere of responsibility in accord with what is required of that responsibility.

In our sin we go crooked, backwards, destructively, violently with our responsibilities, such as by dishonoring our friends, rejecting our parent’s responsibility, destroying the earth, and killing each other. In the new life of Christ into which we have been called, the whole of our identity as human beings – the image of God – is called to repentance and to the renewal of all creational responsibilities. And since these responsibilities are diverse, it is a mistake (historically demonstrated) to ask governments to rule families, or to treat a farm like an engineering corporation, or to expect church leaders to tell us how to vote or how to run a business or how to do chemistry.

Jesus healing the blind manCS: What about the secular / sacred split that afflicts Christianity? It has been severely attacked by Muslim intellectuals such as the Egyptian political activist, the late Sayyid Qutb, who taught that the secular / sacred dichotomy is at the root of the world’s ills. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and Osama bin Laden before him, and other radicalized Muslim leaders, are absolutely opposed to the split. And the caliphate that al-Baghdadi is trying to create through ISIS/ISIL seeks to rid the world of it.

JS: Christians should not be accepting any sacred / secular dualism, which in a sense goes back to the Middle Ages, when the Catholic church established a distinction between the religious and the secular. The “secular” didn’t mean “not related to God.” It meant related to God via the Catholic church, the sacraments. Then after Christendom fell apart and the church could no longer command politically with moral authority, the secularists said: Thank goodness we’re getting rid of God and the priests and the hierarchy. We don’t need priests for the things of this world. And so they have what’s before them: a secular world.

All that remains is for that to be radicalized by saying: There is nothing else that exists but this world. There is nothing transcendent that can lead to faith in the radical secularity of this world, in which humans are totally in charge and the idea of God is dispensed with. In Islam generally and in radical Islam as well, there is no recognition of such a secular reality. There is only what God created and God himself, who calls us to rule everything under God. So ISIS would say: We’re not going to get anywhere just by blowing people up. We need a political entity not only to replace the Ottoman empire but to do better than that by establishing a domain, a territory, in which all who live there submit to shari’a in submission to Allah, who will bless this effort and pretty soon the whole world will be submitted to Allah. And the idea of the “secular” will disappear.

What the Christian would say is that there is no secular if what you mean by it is something separated from God and is on its own. Instead, every vocation should be seen as one of the aspects of human dedication to God, in which you love God with all you heart and your neighbor as yourself. And within that framework we would not accept any duality of life. You can and should accept distinctions, such as between churches and states or schools and families, and between this age and the coming age, but this age is not a secular age as compared to the coming age as sacred. It’s all part of God’s one creation.

CS: So where do we go from here? What do you see as a gospel-shaped-wisdom response to Christian – Muslim relations and to U.S. policy toward Muslim majority countries in the Middle East? The problems can seem so overwhelming that one may be forgiven for throwing his or her hands up in despair.

JS: There is no easy answer, because what is really required of Christians is that we show we agree with Muslims in rejecting any acceptance of the “radical secular.” Christians need to show what this means by living it out in every arena of their responsibility as disciples of Christ. In many cases this requires more than churches and Christian publishing companies, more than Christian colleges and some evangelistic organizations on university campuses. It will mean Christians finding appropriate ways to organize themselves in their responsibilities as attorneys, doctors, engineers, bankers, broadcasters, and much more. We have to learn how to quit treating any part of our lives as “secular” and not part of our Christian walk.

At the same time we need to gain a deep understanding of what Muslims believe and how they live in many different countries and settings. And then we must learn to engage them wherever possible in friendship and conversation – where we work, where we study, and where we vote and pay taxes. And in all of that we need to be bold to contend with them about our disagreements as to what the Bible teaches and as to why we ought to live to obey God.

©2015 by Charles Strohmer

For interested readers, this site will help you start discovering the wealth of Jim’s wisdom, much of which is being made available on the Web.

Images by Mohammad Usaid Abbasi, Ted, and Fr Lawrence Lew, O.P., respectively (permissions via Creative Commons)

Shalom, the Grace of God, and You

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giftI have posted a number of times on this blog about the vision of shalom as “well-being,” or “flourishing,” and the vital role that the wisdom of God plays in our activities to make that vision real in this world, in small or large ways. See this post, for instance. Having looked at this a great deal, I am coming to the conclusion that there is an ontological inseparableness between God’s wisdom and his shalom, and that a lack of grasping this results in strivings after well-being that resemble worldly patterns more consistently than they do God-envisioned ones. Here I want to consider an equally inseparable relationship, that of shalom to the biblical theme of grace as “well-being.”

In the early 1980s, I was playing around with some ideas about the grace of God that ended up in a little book on the subject, first published in 1993. The book was not so much a theological treatment but an attempt to look at grace as a practical dynamic for living a faithful Christian life, day after day: the life of grace. The very personal question I had been struggling with was: after “saving grace” gets us up and running in the Life of God, what then? How could that Life be lived in full bloom day after day? I had been taught that the Christian’s life was a life of grace, but what did that mean, what would it look like, whether in church on Sunday but especially from Monday through Saturday? I wasn’t finding much help with that.

Mind you, this was back in the days before everybody and his brother was writing books on grace. There was Bunyan’s Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, which is worth reading for sure, but during the 1980s and 1990s, the big emphases in contemporary Christian teaching and publishing lay elsewhere, such as with books on family, the end times, worldview, and Moral Majority politics. Whatever books one could find on grace were, like Bunyan’s, focused on theological aspects of “saving grace,” such as its relation to sin, and to Christ’s work of redemption, and to the individual’s response. If you should happen to hear a sermon on grace, it was typically enclosed with the frame of “unmerited favor” or “free gift” and centered on getting sinners saved. But such language wasn’t answering the question I was asking.

I’m not in the least disparaging theological understandings of grace. I have benefitted greatly from them. But for me it left “grace” too abstract, which the cross of Christ is anything but. “Unmerited favor” seemed a bit of a lazy answer, and the tautological “free gift” merely drew a joke about “What gift isn’t free?” In short, my own deep itches about the grace of God for daily life remained unscratched.

human eyeThey began to get scratched when I plunged into the biblical text myself, along with assistance from some good study aids and the especially blessed help of my tutor those years, the British theologian John Peck, who also teaches Hebrew and Greek. So I plunged in at the beginning of the Bible, with the first two statements where “grace” is overtly disclosed. (The following two texts are from the King James Version because the more contemporary ones – unfortunately, in my view – typically translate the Hebrew chên as “favor” instead of as “grace.”)

“Noah found grace [chên] in the eyes of the Lord.” And Lot “found grace [chên]” in the sight of the Lord (Genesis 6:8 & 19:19).

These two short statements about the grace (chên) of God can seem oddly out-of-place because the narratives in which they appear emphasize the judgment of God and the widespread destruction that resulted. But God’s grace can be found hidden amid distress and suffering.

“Grace” in Genesis, and in every other Old Testament (OT) narrative where God is the initiator of grace (chên), carries two main thoughts. One is that of “God coming down, which is a bit of an awkward-sounding way to put it today. But think of it anthropomorphically. Many times, the OT speaks of God “coming down” into human history to have a look around, so to speak, as if he were spying out the land before deciding on just what sort of intervention he should take.

One time, for instance, God came down to bring judgment during the building of the tower of Babel (Genesis 11:5-8):

The Lord came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building. The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will he impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not be able to understand each other.” So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city.”

Another time, God came down upon Mount Sinai to bring the Ten Commandments to Moses (Exodus 19:10-11):

The Lord said to Moses, “Go to the people and consecrate them today and tomorrow. Make them wash their clothes and he ready by the third day, because on that day the Lord will come down on Mount Sinai in the sight of all the people.”

In another incident, God comes down to wage war (Isaiah 31:4):

The Lord Almighty will come down to do battle on Mount Zion and on its heights.

A central theme of these OT narratives (many others too) is that God actively engages in human history. In the above texts, God came down in three different ways: to bring the Law, to execute judgment, or to wage war. Now this idea of “God coming down” to engage with human life is also inherent in the chên narratives of Noah and Lot. This brings us to our second main thought about chên, which is “well-being.” So chên, then, is not about God coming down to wage war, or to execute judgment, or to bring law. Instead, God is “coming down to move people to places of well-being.”

“God coming down to move people to places of well-being” became the working definition for “grace” developed in my little book on grace for everyday Christians living. I see it as the hidden narrative in the lives of Noah and Lot and their families during eras when, and for reasons not entirely clear, human “wickedness” had increased so greatly that “every inclination of the thoughts of [everyone’s] heart was only evil all the time,” and the earth was “corrupt in God’s sight and was full of violence” (Genesis 6:5, 11). That’s Noah’s day. In Lot’s, the “sin” of Sodom and Gomorrah was “so grievous,” the even God seemed surprised by it: “I will go down and see if what they have done is as bad as the outcry that has reached me. If not, I will know” (Genesis 18:20).

But even in these darkest of times, with injustice and violence having become organizing principles of society, God came down to Noah and Lot to move them to places of well-being. God’s grace for Noah and his family was a large wooden boat to ride out the storm. For Lot and his family it was the helping hands of angels to lead them out of the city. They did not earn this, they could not have provided it for themselves, and apparently they did not even ask for it. It was initiated by another party, God, to those who were in mortal distress.

SunsetIt is just here that we can find the nexus of God’s grace and his shalom, for both are gifts, both seek to rescue and restore, both seek to provide degrees of well-being that previously did not exist for the objects of the intervention. A dramatic OT example is the Exodus narrative, when the people of Israel “groaned” under punishing abuse and “cried out” for help. God “heard” their cry, “saw their misery,” and told Moses, “I’ve come down to rescue them” (Exodus chapters 2-3). It was the grace of God moving people out of their misery and into what for them would be a place of shalom.

Everything I have just spoken of is grace straight from God to human beings. Now here’s the rub. Having modeled for us Person-to-person grace giving, so to speak, God then puts the onus on us. We mere mortals are called to move one another to places of well-being, or shalom. This, too, is the witness of the OT. I call it “person-to-person” grace giving. Many OT Narratives bear this out, such as the grace Potiphar gives to Joseph (Genesis 39:40), or that Jonathan gives to David (1 Samuel 20:3), or that Boaz gives to Ruth (Ruth 2;13), and that even the pagan king Ahasuerus gives to Esther (Esther 2:17). There are many such stories. I recommend reflecting on them.

These many and diverse person-to-person chên narratives of the OT describe beneficent actions of human beings freely given. They contribute to the well-being of the recipient, an active generosity, particularly toward those in need. And certainly with the coming of the various and diverse gifts of the Spirit to the body of Christ, person-to-person grace giving, with Christ as our example, is not meant to mean sporadic actions but an ongoing shape of our lives.

So the question for us becomes: “Who has found grace, and therefore some degree of shalom, in our eyes lately?”

©2015 by Charles Strohmer

For interested readers, the theme of person-to-person grace giving is the subject of my little book Explaining the Grace of God. (I was never a fan of that title, which was chosen by the publisher.) If you can’t find a reasonably priced copy on the Web, let me know. I may have a spare copy.)

Top image by Sarah McKagen, middle image by Cesar Cabrera (permissions via Creative Commons)

The Cradle Fund: A Bridge for Shalom in the Middle East

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Stirling bridgeA few months ago in Capital Commentary, I shared some ideas from the biblical wisdom tradition about shalom and the vital work of repairing damaged and broken lives and relationships, socially, economically, and politically, whether domestically or internationally. I want to extend that thinking here. (The following was published in a recent issue of Capital Commentary.)

Many Christian and Jewish circles today talk about shalom as God’s vision for a future of peace and harmony for all of creation, including, of course, collective human life. And to give that vision legs in the here and now, shalom is also advanced as social, economic, and political “flourishing” or “well-being” in this world.

Those of us in the West already blessed with goodly degrees of well-being typically maintain the latter idea . But there seems to be a kind of relativity to shalom. We would see that the near-future goals of a Chinese peasant farmer, for instance, or an Indian woman seeking a micro-loan would most likely entail visions of flourishing that are much more modest than our own. And there are countless others whose lives can only be described as precariously lived – consider the refugee families who have fled ISIL for whom shalom in this world would be different still.

Beyond that, however, lies a blind spot. After a decade or more of Christians like me giving airplay to shalom in America, we haven’t been able to prevent the word from becoming equivalent to “getting ahead,” “succeeding,” or “moving up in the world.”

It seems that shalom is becoming synonymous with pulling oneself up by one’s own bootstraps. If so, the biblical sense of shalom as “gift” has been lost.

The contradiction between shalom as “gift” and “trying to improve one’s lot in life” hit me hard last autumn as I learned about the Cradle of Christianity Fund,  which has been implemented by the Institute for Global Engagement (IGE) to supply immediate- and long-term aid and support to thousands of displaced and refugee families who have fled ISIL/ISIS. At the time, I had been talking with friends about the staggering changes of life that have been forced on these families. We wanted to help alleviate their misery, but were got stuck. We were here. They were there. And we knew of no bridge. But with the Cradle Fund we had not only a bridge but an inspiring this-world reminder of biblical shalom.

Policies by Western governments to address the crisis have been slow in developing, and in November, 2014 the UN reported that a huge shortfall in funding meant that winter aid from the UNHCR would reach only 240,000 of the 600,000 displaced Iraqis and Syrians. The Cradle Fund and other NGOs, such as World Vision, Samaritan’s Purse, and Heart for Lebanon, have stepped into the gap with manna: food and water, insulation kits and boards, heaters and kerosene, and other essentials needed by families to survive the winter while holed up in small tents, abandoned buildings, and other makeshift shelters

In the Exodus narrative, the people of Israel “groaned” under punishing abuse and “cried out” for help. God “heard” their cry, “saw their misery,” and told Moses, I’ve “come down to rescue them.” That rescue was a poignant example of the gift of shalom.

“For the precarious,” writes Walter Brueggemann, “shalom can be understood as the assurance that there is a hearer for our cries, an intervener who comes to transform our lives.”

Today, the cry of despair and the hope of an intervener coming from persecuted Christian, Yazidi, and even Muslim families in Iraq and Syria is analogous to the Exodus narrative, when the only thing that matters is survival and the form that faith takes is one that cries out for deliverance. Brueggemann notes that because the Exodus generation lived their lives amid the acute precariousness of their situation, they “were interested in the question of survival – either actual physical, historical survival or at least the survival of faith and meaning.” Similarly, the crisis among Christians in Iraq evoked this cry last year from Patriarch Louis Sako of Iraq’s Chaldean Catholic Church: “We feel forgotten and isolated” and wonder about the reaction of the world.

Neither the giving of shalom nor its receipt must wait for the bullets to stop flying.

For me, the Cradle of Christianity initiative has brought a necessary corrective in my thinking, bringing me back to the biblical meaning of shalom as gift to the most helpless. This fund enables churches and people of faith here in the United States to join with the indigenous efforts already underway by local churches and organizations in the countries of conflict and the countries that have received the overwhelming numbers of refugees.

The current exodus may not be over. But the vital work of rescuing and repairing damaged and broken lives has begun, but only just.

©2015 by Charles Strohmer

Images by Neil Howard (permission via Creative Commons)

For more information. Like a growing number of people who are now following and supporting the Cradle Fund, here you can find many more moving stories and pictures about how the people are living in these stopgap conditions (from Chris’s blogs among the displaced families). Also check out IGE’s Facebook page and the above links as well.

Here are some FAQs about the Cradle Fund. Also Chris is providing personal updates from the region, including photos, on the IGE website and Twitter. Coverage of the Fund is also found at Christianity Today, CBN, and MPAC and Fox News.

Other posts and updates on this blog about the Cradle Fund: The Cradle Fund: Helpless No More /// Snapshots: A Day-in-the-Life of Iraq’s Religious Refugees /// This Bad Weather Is No Joke /// The Cradle Fund: Getting Thousands Safely Through a Middle East Winter.

Charles Strohmer is the author of several books, founding director of The Wisdom Project, and a visiting research fellow of the Center for Public Justice.