“SIN BOLDLY” –MARTIN LUTHER
The fascinating, complex German reformer Martin Luther was many things. One of them was quotable!
Luther’s views were condemned as heretical by Pope Leo X in the bull Exsurge Domine in 1520. He was, consequently, summoned to either renounce or reaffirm them at the Diet of Worms on 17 April 1521. When he appeared before the assembly, Johann von Eck, acting as spokesman for Emperor Charles the Fifth, showed Luther a table filled with copies of his writing. Eck asked if he still believed what these works taught. Luther requested time to think about his answer. Granted an extension, he prayed, consulted with friends and mediators, and presented himself before the Diet the next day.
The counselor put the same question to Luther. Here is Luther’s famous answer, “Unless I am convinced by proofs from Scriptures or by plain and clear reasons and arguments, I can and will not retract, for it is neither safe nor wise to do anything against conscience. Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen.“
On May 25, the Emperor issued his Edict of Worms, declaring Martin Luther an outlaw.
And here is Luther’s famous statement to Philipp Melanchton: “If you are a preacher of mercy, do not preach an imaginary but the true mercy. If the mercy is true, you must therefore bear the true, not an imaginary sin. God does not save those who are only imaginary sinners. Be a sinner, sin boldly, and let your sins be strong, but let your trust in Christ be stronger, and rejoice in Christ who is the victor over sin, death, and the world. We will commit sins while we are here, for this life is not a place where justice resides. We, however, says Peter (2. Peter 3:13) are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth where justice will reign.” [Letter 99.13, To Philipp Melanchthon, 1 August 1521.]
Jake and Us
Roy, I & Jake just went for a lovely moonlight 9 p.m. run down our dirt country lane–access only, no cars.
He says I am just like Jake the Collie, in that I love to curl up all day, and pretend I like runs.
I said HE was like Jake the Collie, in that he loves to curl up all day, the only difference being that Jake loves runs, & Roy loves tea.
Having agreed on this, we both petted Jake, who happily wagged his tail!
BOOK GIVEAWAY: Simon Acland’s “The Waste Land: An Entertainment”
BOOK GIVEAWAY: Simon Acland’s “The Waste Land: An Entertainment”
Simon Acland has very kindly offered readers of this blog a copy of his intriguing new novel. If you would like to be included in the drawing, do leave your name in the comments section, and either some way for me to contact you if you are the winner, or check back on Wednesday, 22nd September when I will hold the drawing.
Here’s some more information about this intriguing novel:
The Waste Land chronicles the adventures of Hugh de Verdon, monk turned knight, during the extraordinary historical events of the First Crusade. He journeys from the great Benedictine Monastery of Cluny to Constantinople, Antioch and Jerusalem. He encounters the Assassins, endures a personal epiphany and discovers the truth behind the Holy Grail.
Hugh de Verdon’s tale is retold by a group of desperate Oxford Professors, who discover his autobiographical manuscript in their College library. Their humorous – and murderous – story also provides a commentary on the Eleventh Century events and shows that they are perhaps not all they seem.
And excerpts from a few reviews,
” It is exciting and thrilling and Simon Acland is steeped in this period of history and really knows his stuff. Hugely enjoyable, engrossing and engaging from start to finish. I loved this book and it will be going on my list of Best Reads of 2010.”
Random Jottings 7th July 2010
“To produce a good piece of historical fiction requirs a delicate balancing act between credible period colour and going gloriously over the top. In The Waste Land, Simon Acland pulls this off brilliantly.”
Pursewarden 29th May 2010
“Whether in the depiction of Hugh’s loneliness at Cluny, or the gory battle scenes of the First Crusade, Mr. Acland excels at showing Hugh’s development. Each scene and location is remarkably detailed, and the historical figures are equally fascinating.”
Historical Novel Review 12th July 2010
“This first installment is terrific and we eagerly await the follow-up.”
Brother Judd 24th July 2010
And here is Simon Acland’s engaging account of the genesis of his novel
“The Waste Land brings together a number of obsessions of mine – or perhaps obsessions is not quite the right word. A better way of putting it would be to say that various bits of reading seemed to coalesce when I was thinking about writing the book.
The first ingredient is the Grail. Like the Best-Selling Author in The Waste Land, I was a bad student at Oxford, but one term I did work hard and became enthused by my subject. That was when I was studying the French grail romances of the 12th and 13th Centuries, and Chretien de Troyes in particular. Later, I watched and read with interest and enjoyment the popular Grail books as they emerged – The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Leigh, Baigent and Lincoln, Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, Kate Mosse’s Labyrinth and so on. But it seemed to me that there was something missing – a link back to the original medieval poems. I thought that it would be fun to write a Grail tale that tried to make the connection.
One of the things which obsesses Grail scholars is how the legends originated. Many of the myths that emerge at different times in different cultures have the same roots. After dinner one night I found myself reading The Waste Land out loud to my children – the realWaste Land, the great Waste Land, that is, T.S. Eliot’s, not mine. The blend of Grail imagery with other myths, and with Ovid in particular, drove me back to re-read Jesse Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, and to Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, and then to Metamorphoses itself. Somehow this resulted in the idea of tying the Grail legend together with Ovid in a story set in the First Crusade. Using the same title for my book, and allusions to it in my chapter titles, and in various places in the text, is really a homage to the great poem, as well as adding a little literary joke to the novel. (There are 23 allusions to the poem in the text if you are looking for them).
I wanted the First Crusade tale to read a little like the adventure stories that I was brought up on and still re-read often – Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda, John Buchan’s Greenmantle, Henry Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, for example. If you know those books you may recognise genuflections to each of them in my story. To please my children I also promised them a reference toMonty Python and the Holy Grail. But medieval French is less well known and I did not want to lose the connections to the Grail legends.
That’s why I came up with the device of the Dons’ story. Some of the friends who read the book before I published it liked the Dons. Some did not. If you don’t, just ignore the Saint Lazarus’s College sections and read Hugh’s story. It stands by itself. But I decided to leave the Dons in, because for me they add another dimension. I thought that if they were commenting on some of the literary origins of the story they could talk a little about the history behind it. I have read many historical novels where I have asked myself part way through ‘did it really happen like that?’. Some of the events of the First Crusade are so extraordinary that they are hard to believe and I wanted the Dons to point up some of the background. I also wanted them to inject a bit of humour into the story and dilute some of the blood and battles. In part some of the parallels with Hugh’s story poke gentle fun at the ‘time slip’ novel genre. And in part they are meant to confirm that Hugh’s story should not be taken too seriously.”
If you would like to be included in the drawing, do leave your name in the comments section, and either some way for me to contact you if you are the winner or check back on Wednesday, 22nd September when I will hold the drawing.
If you would like to be included in the drawing, do leave your name in the comments section, and either some way for me to contact you if you are the winner or check back on Wednesday, 22nd September when I will hold the drawing.
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin
It’s so much easier and quicker to watch the movie than read the book I land up watching the film version of many books I have wanted to read. I enjoyed Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, the movie. I knew nothing of the German massacre of the Italian troops, or the Italian occupation of Greece (It’s been decades since A level history!) so I spent an enjoyable half hour on the net afterwards filling in my historical gaps.
The novel sounds really interesting. I love polyphonic novels, likeSound and Fury and piecing together a complete picture from the fragments of things people say, a bit like listening to gossip. I look forward to reading it. Here’s a tantalizing review.
The different sounds of the mandolin
John Mullan on the ironies imbued in the polyphonic voices of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières
On the feast day of St Gerasimos, patron saint of the Greek island of Cephalonia, the mummified remains of the holy man are paraded and the islanders become “outlandishly drunk”. (The first detail from Louis de Bernières’s Captain Corelli’s Mandolin is confirmed by the Greek tourist board; the latter is the novelist’s embellishment.) In the novel, troupes from different towns loudly strike up rival songs, some fishermen from Panago-poula miraculously managing, over the chatter of the crowd and the crashing of a cannon, to weave “a harmony intricate and polyphonic”. “The brotherhood of the sea,” declares the narrator, in imitation of the fishermen’s bibulous self-congratulation, has produced “conclusive proof of their metaphysical unity”.
It is also comically analogous to the novel’s narrative method. Its 73 short chapters move rapidly between different characters, historical as well as invented. Dr Iannis, his daughter Pelagia, and Captain Corelli, the Italian soldier billeted in their house during the wartime occupation, may be the central characters, but we hear many different narrative voices, some first-person and some third-person. The former include a chapter of dramatic monologue given to Mussolini, posing in front of a mirror; the interior monologues of Pelagia; and Mandras, the fisherman who is courting her; and chapters headed “L’Omosessuale”, narrated by the secretly homosexual Italian soldier, Carloi Guercio. “Thank God no one reads my mind,” says Pelagia silently, as she reviews her own “sluttish thoughts”. But we do.
Different voices find many forms. There are letters; there are political diatribes; there are speeches and sermons. Equally, the chapters of third-person narrative reflect many different viewpoints. Most often we see events through the eyes of Iannis, or Pelagia, or Corelli, but free indirect style gives us the thoughts of many others, from Mina, the mad girl who is to be “cured” by Saint Gerasimos, to Lieutenant Weber, the “good Nazi”, confused by the habits of his Italian allies. The collection of narratives is made to enact an understanding of human variety.
It is a novel not just of different narrative voices and points of view, but also of different languages. It uses fragments of Italian, French, German (and transliterated Greek), but mostly it has to represent the different languages, and the mutual misunderstandings, of the characters in a language that none of them are using: English. (Though if Iannis and his daughter were not fluent in Italian, a language for which the doctor has always had an inflated regard, and therefore able to have all their disputes with Corelli, the novel would not have been possible.) Incomprehension is invariably comical. An Eton-educated British agent is introduced to Iannis and made to speak a Chaucerian English that is the novel’s equivalent of the classical Greek he employs. “Sire, of youre gentillesse, by the leve of yow wol I speke in pryvetee of certeyn thyng,” is his opening gambit. “What?” replies the bewildered doctor, speaking in a fluent, colloquial English which is the novel’s equivalent of modern Greek. When he and the Englishman agree to converse in English, Iannis’s speech becomes broken and ungrammatical: “You accent terrible-terrible. Not to talk, understand?”
The book’s ebullient varieties of speech and narrative make it tempting to call it a “polyphonic novel”. The term was invented by the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin in the 1920s to describe Dostoevsky’s fiction. Bakhtin praised Dostoevsky for rendering “a plurality of unmerged voices and consciousnesses”. He had in mind the novelist’s willingness to allow his characters’ words and attitudes to predominate over any authorial insights. (Would Captain Corelli’s Mandolin always qualify by this test? De Bernières’s novel includes passages where a narrator tells us things -such as future events – that none of his characters can know.) Bakhtin initially claimed that Dostoevsky had originated “a fundamentally new novelistic genre”, before later deciding that he had instead perfected what had always been a subversive inclination of most interesting fiction.
Bakhtin valued “polyphony” because it seemed a rebellion against the narrative habits of 19th-century fiction (and implicitly the strictures of the socialist realism being recommended in the Soviet Union). Now it hardly seems revolutionary. Indeed, the opening of a single novel to multiple narrators and viewpoints has become relatively common in recent fiction, and “polyphonic” has become a frequent description. The literary novel that narrates in the singular, reliable “voice” of its author (which Bakhtin would have called “monologic”) is nowadays a much rarer thing. Some, like David Lodge, have argued that this reflects the contemporary novel’s lack of trust in its ability to understand the world. Yet the success of De Bernières’s novel is to find in narrative variety not confusion, but comedy and consolation.
Theophanies: St John at Patmos, A Sermon at St. Aldate’s
St John at Patmos,
John’s vision of Patmos (a vision rather than a theophany, incidentally!)
Among the lampstands was someone “like a son of man,” dressed in a robe reaching down to his feet and with a golden sash around his chest.14His head and hair were white like wool, as white as snow, and his eyes were like blazing fire. 15His feet were like bronze glowing in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of rushing waters. 16In his right hand he held seven stars, and out of his mouth came a sharp double-edged sword. His face was like the sun shining in all its brilliance.
17When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. Then he placed his right hand on me and said: “Do not be afraid. I am the First and the Last. 18I am the Living One; I was dead, and behold I am alive for ever and ever! And I hold the keys of death and Hades.
John was exiled to Patmos. Ostensibly, the end of influence, the end of his ministry, the end of his life. His life had ended. (I have so often felt like that, that my life as I had envisioned it has come to to a dead end, and failed!).
Yet, because of the word of God, which can be spoken even in the absence of the written Scripture, when you think your influence and ministry is over, it can be the strongest. (Another example is the wonderful, soul-nourishing letters Paul wrote in the desert of prison.)
(Patmos was hot and barren, incidentally. It informed John’ss vision of heaven–Never again will they hunger;
never again will they thirst.
The sun will not beat upon them,
nor any scorching heat.
For the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd;
he will lead them to springs of living water.
And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”)
And in this desert place, in this wilderness season, he received a vision of God, and it made everything different. He saw Christ--pure, passionate, powerful, eternal, beautiful.
And with the the Revelation, the despised, forgotten, powerless prisoner becomes a prophet and a pastor, a pastor for the ages, as the best spiritual writers are.
The most important things happen on the inside.Our spiritual life is the most important dimension of our lives–not the intellectual, not the physical, not even love and friendship.
And these are the words Christ said to John which changed everything
“Do not be afraid.
I am the Alpha and the Omega. I encompass everything.
The alphabet, all human learning, everything that happened, is happening, can happen, and will happen, is in my hands.
I am the Living One.
And I see you. I control your life, and I will control your death.”
John gains strength. The powerless prisoner becomes a writer and a prophet with a gift for 21 centuries.
And everything can change in the desert, for there you have the best possible conditions for seeing God.
“The Precious Garden of my Home needs Tending”
“The Precious Garden of my Home needs Tending”
I have reluctantly decided to no longer blog daily– for a season. In the words of the uncompromising John Piper, in whose church we worshipped when we lived in Minneapolis “the precious garden of my home needs tending.” When I have tended it, I will return to daily blogging. Till then, I will blog in windows of time.
Here is John Piper’s beautifully worded announcement,
“As I have stood back in recent months and looked at my own soul—my own sanctification, my own measures self-denial or self-serving—and my marriage and family and ministry patterns, I have felt an increasing need for a serious assessment—a kind of reality check in the light of God’s word. Am I living in the mindset and the pattern of life that Jesus calls for here in Mark 8:31–38, especially in relation to those I love most?
On the one hand, I love my Lord, Jesus; I love my wife and my five children and their families. These are the supreme treasures of my life—my Lord, my wife, my children. And I love my work of preaching and writing and leading Bethlehem. Indeed, I hope that the Lord gives me at least five more years as the pastor for preaching and vision at Bethlehem. That’s my dream. And that’s my plan, if God wills.
But on the other hand, I see several species of pride in my soul that, even though they may not rise to the level of disqualifying me for ministry, grieve me, and have taken a toll on my relationship with Noël and others who are dear to me. Noël and I are rock solid in our commitment to each other, and there is no whiff of unfaithfulness on either side. But, as I told the elders, “rock solid” is not always an emotionally satisfying metaphor, especially to a woman. A rock is not the best image of a woman’s tender companion.
In other words, the precious garden of my home needs tending. I want to say to Noël that she is precious to me. And I believe that at this point in our 41-year pilgrimage together the best way to say it is by stepping back for a season from virtually all public commitments.
What I have asked for is something very different from a sabbatical or a writing leave. In 30 years, I have never let go—not on writing leaves or on sabbatical or on vacations—of the passion for public productivity—writing and preaching. In this leave, I intend to let go of all of it. No book-writing. No sermon preparation. No preaching. No blogging. No Twitter. No articles. No reports. No papers. And no speaking engagements.
You could view this as a kind of fasting from public ministry. One of the goals in this kind of fasting is to discern levels of addiction. Or, as Paul Tripp or Tim Keller might say, levels of idolatry. The reality check is: What will happen in my soul and in my marriage when, to use the phrase of one precious brother on staff, there will be no “prideful sipping from the poisonous cup of international fame and notoriety”?
You may think: My, a leave of absence is a pretty drastic step in the war against pride and idolatry. That’s true. It is. But I’m not the only one affected. And I hope that you will trust me and the elders that it will be good for my soul, good for my marriage and family, and good for you and for the next five or six years of ministry together, if the Lord wills.”
By the grace of God, “the poisonous cup of international fame” has not offered itself to my lips. However, daily blogging is at the moment, not consistent with tending the precious garden of my home. So I am going to blog sporadically until I have tended this precious garden.
And here is Christianity Today’s good article on Piper’s brave decision.
The Toll of Our Toiling
John Piper takes an eight-month leave of absence.
Collin Hansen | posted 3/30/2010 09:18AM
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Surprise and admiration have characterized the response so far to news that Bethlehem Baptist Church pastor John Piper will take an eight-month leave of absence from public ministry between May 1 and December 31, 2010. Explaining the move to his Minneapolis congregation, Piper said his soul, marriage, family, and ministry pattern “need a reality check from the Holy Spirit.” Piper, widely known for his prodigious book output and intense speaking schedule, will abstain from all such activity during this unexpected sabbatical.
“I see several species of pride in my soul that, while they may not rise to the level of disqualifying me for ministry, grieve me, and have taken a toll on my relationship with [my wife] Noël and others who are dear to me,” Piper wrote. “How do I apologize to you, not for a specific deed, but for ongoing character flaws, and their effects on everybody? I’ll say it now, and no doubt will say it again, I’m sorry. Since I don’t have just one deed to point to, I simply ask for a spirit of forgiveness; and I give you as much assurance as I can that I am not making peace, but war, with my own sins.”
Thousands of ministers who have learned from Piper through his books, sermons, and conference talks will now have opportunity to learn from his silence. Pastors, even if they do not aspire to Piper’s level of influence, easily fall into exhausting patterns of study, counseling, meetings, and visitation that jeopardize time alone with God and with their families. A 2008 Lifeway survey found that 65 percent of pastors work 50 or more hours per week, including 8 percent who work 70 or more hours. E-mail and meetings cut into time for visiting church and family members. Congregational emergencies cut short precious vacations. As soon as one crisis dissipates with the evening mist, another looms over the morning horizon.
But local church ministry is hardly the only vocation prone to overwork. Teachers, farmers, doctors, lawyers, small business owners, and middle managers alike feel the strains of labor that threaten family and spiritual life. Still, the threat becomes that much more dangerous when we work unto the Lord in taxing jobs where the cause seemingly justifies the means. Who has time to read the Bible, pray, listen to our friends, and care for our children when there’s kingdom work to be done?
Billy Graham might be the most recent patron saint of evangelical exhaustion. His preaching schedule kept him away from his family for much of every year for decades. Due to work, Graham missed the birth of his first child, daughter Gigi, in 1945. Meanwhile, his celebrity status grew so intense that his family sometimes crawled around their home in Montreat, North Carolina, just to avoid the curious gaze of tourists who visited by the busload.
“This is a difficult subject for me to write about, but over the years, the [Billy Graham Evangelistic Association] and the Team became my second family without my realizing it,” Graham recalled in his autobiography, Just As I Am. “Ruth says those of us who were off traveling missed the best part of our lives—enjoying the children as they grew. She is probably right. I was too busy preaching all over the world.
“Only Ruth and the children can tell what those extended times of separation meant to them. For myself, as I look back, I now know that I came through all those years much the poorer both psychologically and emotionally. I missed so much by not being home to see the children grow and develop. The children must carry scars of those separations too.”
Graham hoped that the proliferation of Christian evangelists and media would relieve the burden from any one subsequent minister. No particular leader would need to travel without ceasing. But now it seems as though conferences and the internet have spawned a thousand Grahams. Piper alluded to the endless opportunities and demands when he explained that he planned to abstain from book writing, sermon preparation, blogging, Twitter, articles, reports, papers, and speaking engagements. Even ministers without Piper’s prestige and experience may become engrossed in a pattern of overwork, starting at a young age, because new media offers everyone a platform.
The temptation was bad enough when a relative few media gatekeepers controlled the major means of evangelical influence. Christianity Today‘s first editor, Carl Henry, worked 15-hour days for seven years. During a visit to Mayo Clinic in 1959, doctors advised him to lighten an untenable workload that led to migraines and vertigo. But he continued to work full days even as he endured physical exhaustion. Before Henry finally took a sabbatical, CT board chairman Harold John Ockenga encouraged him to find a relaxing place to rest for three months. Instead, Henry and his wife traveled around the world for speaking engagements as he continued to write. An intense work regimen was ingrained in several evangelical leaders of the post-war era. Henry’s colleague and Graham’s father-in-law, L. Nelson Bell, suffered stress-related pain, too. But according to Henry, Bell declined to visit a cardiologist for fear of landing in the hospital.
Evangelical leaders serve out of their personal relationship with Christ, modeling the life of faith for others. Yet it is exceedingly difficult to tend to this most important relationship, not to mention our friends and family, when work consumes every day. To be sure, we’re called to toil for Christ, “struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works” within us (Col. 1:29). Even during the busyness of this Lenten season, though, we might follow Piper’s example and pause to examine the toll of our toiling and the state of our souls. Does our work truly point others to the power of Christ? If not, it may draw attention to the one who plants and waters, not the God who gives the growth (1 Cor. 3:7). Ministers who lose this perspective are in danger of losing their congregations, not to mention their families.
Instead, let us live up to our belief in the God who holds out the promise of Sabbath rest for his people. If God rested from his works, so can we (Heb. 4:9-10)”
Sara Suleri. Meatless Days. An engaging post-colonial memoir
SARA SULERI, MEATLESS DAYS:
An engaging post-colonial memoir
I have read this memoir twice, and really enjoyed it.
Sara grew up in Lahore, Pakistan, the daughter of a gentle Welshwoman, and an irascible Pakistani father (who had left his first wife, and first cousin, to marry her).
Her mother taught English, and presumably Sara grew up immersed in literature. I like her style, and twisted, contorted, almost Shakespearean diction.
Her memoir is elegiac, and imbued with sadness. Her beautiful and beloved sister Ifat was murdered (rumour said she was run over by her husband), her mother was also run over and killed. Her father was imprisoned. Tragedy stalked the family much as it did the Bhuttos.
But, through it all, runs vivid memories of a vivid childhood, her camera lovingly focusing on gol-guppas, the long wait to see the first sliver of moon at Ramadan, or the obscenities of Pakistani cuisine–she discovers a favourite dish is actually the balls of goats!! Her father, gently mocked, rebelled against, but loved and admired is the most vivid figure in the book.
Her memoir loving renders a third world childhood in a prose of her own, which owes much to the stylists of the English Renaissance, Thomas Browne, John Donne, and Mr. Shakespeare, of course. It is not an easy read, since she deliberately opts for a strange, pretzel like style–but it is a delicious and rewarding read. It is one of my favourite subcontinental memoirs.
Bookmark this on Delicious
Thoughts on Women and Islam
A A policeman gives a woman a public whipping for wearing trousers underneath her Islamic clothing in Sudan (YouTube) Woman publicly whipped for wearing trousers in Sudannderneath her Islamic clothing in Sudan (YouTube)
I
Women in Afghanistan, even doctors, not allowed to work. Male doctors not allowed to examine women. Single female doctors forced to beg. Acid thrown in the faces of young girls who go to school.
http://articles.sfgate.com/2010-07-21/news/21991344_1_afghan-women-women-s-rights-troop-withdrawal
Unbelievably high rates of depression among women in Afghanistan.
“At one of the rare hospitals for women, a reporter found still, nearly lifeless bodies lying motionless on top of beds, wrapped in their burqua, unwilling to speak, eat or do anything, but are slowly wasting away. Others have gone mad and were seen crouched in corners, perpetually rocking or crying, most of them in fear”
Women in Afghanistan, even doctors, not allowed to work. Male doctors not allowed to examine women. Single female doctors forced to beg. Acid thrown in the faces of young girls who go to school.
http://articles.sfgate.com/2010-07-21/news/21991344_1_afghan-women-women-s-rights-troop-withdrawal
Unbelievably high rates of depression among women in Afghanistan.
“At one of the rare hospitals for women, a reporter found still, nearly lifeless bodies lying motionless on top of beds, wrapped in their burqua, unwilling to speak, eat or do anything, but are slowly wasting away. Others have gone mad and were seen crouched in corners, perpetually rocking or crying, most of them in fear”
http://www.breakthechain.org/exclusives/womenwar.html
Forced kidnappings of women, including university students on the way home, to become 3rd or 4th wives in Chechnya and Kazakhstan. If they don’t settle down happily to do the housework in their in-laws’ houses, they are taken to an Islamic Medical Centre to be exorcised.
Observe this 17 year old woman, flogged and whipped on her buttocks 34 times surrounded by a group of silent men. She screams and begs for mercy. To no avail. She had a boyfriend.
Honour killings in Turkey. A 16 year old buried alive for talking to boys.
Lifelong pain while urinating or during intercourse after female genital mutilation. Lasting psychological trauma.
Twelve women on death row in Iran, awaiting death by stoning for adultery. How does one commit adultery alone?
Women forced to wear a burkha in the stifling heat of summer in Asia, the Middle East and Africa.
Billy Graham’s son Franklin took a lot of flak for his statement, Islam is a “very evil and wicked religion”. Then in an interview with CNN’s Campbell Brown in December 2009, he said: “True Islam cannot be practiced in this country. You can’t beat your wife. You cannot murder your children if you think they’ve committed adultery or something like that, which they do practice in these other countries.” (Verse 34 in the fourth Surah (chapter) in the Quran which says that if a man’s wife is not obedient, he is allowed to beat her.)
II
Because of its regrettable and reprehensible role in slavery and colonialization, the West, understandably, is hesitant to criticize those with darker skins from the formerly colonized nations, not wanting to be accused of ethnocentricity, paternalism, racial superiority and racism, which have come to be associated with the uneducated and ignorant.
But, let’s say that in Great Britain, Ireland or France, women were flogged, stoned, mutilated, buried alive, forced to wear heavy black burqas, forbidden to get an education or to work. What outrage would there be!
In my opinion, the West should be equally outraged about what is happening to women in Pakistan, Iran, Chechnya, Kazakhstan, Somalia, Afghanistan–I could go through the World Book and add dozens of Islamic nations.
III
One should never hate. As Christians, we should aspire to follow Jesus, who taught that “God is Love” and told us God loved the world.
But we do need to take arms against a system which degrades many women, while of course, of course, not hating the victims.
For instance, it would be right for Christians to do everything they could to oppose Hitler, or Stalin, or Kim Jong of North Korea or Pol Pot or Mao while, of course, not hating Germany’s Jews or Germans, ordinary Russians, or North Koreans, or Cambodians or Chinese.
IV
If you see something evil in a social system or religion, it takes courage to point it out, even if when doing so is uncool and unfashionable.
However, one needs to keep a cool head, and point out the evil in the system you are opposing, while not encouraging hatred of its adherents.
Both Christianity and Islam are exclusive religions, unlike, say, Hinduism which is wide and all-encompassing. “There is One God and Muhammed is His Prophet” Islam claims. “Jesus is the Way, the Truth and the Life. No one come to the Father except through Him,” Christians believe. Insofar, as their claims are irreconcilable, the two belief-systems are natural opponents.
So if Christians truly believe they have a more excellent way, it is honourable and kind to engage Islam, and share their truth with Muslims. While, however, never, ever inciting hatred for the ordinary adherents of Islam, the “tired, poor, wretched, huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
Christian activists should point out and protest and see if they do anything to ameliorate the sufferings of many women in many Islamic nations.
However, the inflammatory way Terry Jones of Dove World Outreach Centre has chosen to go about it–burning an object as precious to Muslims, presumably, as the Bible is precious to us Christians–could incite hatred of ordinary Muslims in ordinary Christians.
And that would be a tragedy because Christians are called to dwell in God, and God is love.
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