2   By Eastern Church we mean all those Churches whose heritage is oriental, and who did not recognize the primacy of the Roman pontiff. Later these groups, for political reasons, were organized by the Ottoman Turks under the supervision of the Patriarch of Constantinople.

3   The Augsburg Confession is one of the principal confessions of the Lutheran Church, and was written for the purpose of explaining the Lutheran position to the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V.

4   This phrase, “and the son” was added to the Nicene Creed at the behest of the Western Emperor, Charlemagne. It was added to the third article of the Creed in the phrase concerning the Holy Spirit, “who proceeds from the Father (and the Son).” The Eastern Church never approved of this addition, and it led to the Great Schism of the Church in 1075.

The Most Successful Counter Revolution Ever

by James De Lange

By the time of Luther’s death in 1546, the Reformation that began thirty years earlier had spread through most of Germany, all of Scandinavia and had made significant inroads into the Hapsburg Empire of Hungary and Bohemia and even into Austria itself. In Switzerland, France, and the low countries of Holland, the French priest and scholar, John Calvin, had introduced a slightly different version of reform that won the hearts and minds of the educated classes. In these countries, the followers of reform were called Huguenots -- among whom were my DeLange ancestors who, in the mid-1500’s, fled to Bergen, Norway.

In England, the architect of the English Reformation, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, sent his best seminary students to Wittenberg to study under Luther and Philip Melancthon. By the time of Luther’s death, except for Italy and Spain, the majority of the active bishops and pastors in Europe had traveled to Wittenberg to study under Luther and the reformers.

Although Germany was then divided into over 100 countries and city-states, the German princes had over the centuries operated in a loose federation and elected an emperor whom they delegated certain powers over the whole. Since the time of Charlemagne (800 A.D.), the Emperor had been crowned by the Pope in Rome. The new emperor of Germany, fresh from his coronation in Rome, was Charles V, a staunch Roman Catholic.

In one of his first acts as Holy Roman Emperor, he chaired the Diet of Worms in 1521 where Luther made his famous “Here I Stand” speech. At the end of that gathering, Charles called Luther “a limb cut off from the Church of God, an obstinate schismatic and manifest heretic.” In spite of his opinion of Luther, Charles had, over the ensuing twenty-five years, made several efforts to bring the two sides together and reach a compromise. All of those attempts failed.

With the death of Luther, he undertook to rid his realm of Protestantism, both the Lutheran and Reformed expressions. His grand strategy included getting the Pope to convene an ecumenical council, a gesture which he hoped would foment dissension among the Protestants. If that didn’t work, he planned to foment a war that would clear Protestants from his empire.

The first step in his grand strategy resulted in the Council of Trent, which we will talk about in a moment. The appeal to war was initiated in 1547, a year after Luther’s death, when Charles V declared two of the most prominent Lutheran princes, Philip of Hesse and John Frederick of Saxony, to be “under the ban,” which meant the princes and their subjects were excommunicated and had no chance of heaven. In the ensuing war, the two Lutheran princes were defeated and imprisoned.

However, the populace in the Protestant lands would have none of it, and resisted adopting a compromise creed that Charles V tried to impose on them. The war broke out afresh, and this time the Protestant princes were aided by the King of France. Charles V was defeated in 1552 and nearly captured.

A Diet of the princes of Germany was called in 1555. After months of debate what became known as the Peace of Augsburg was formulated. It was a compromise. By it, those princes who adhered to the Augsburg Confession, namely the Lutherans, were to be allowed to do so and those princes who held to the “old religion”, namely Roman Catholicism, were not to be disturbed. Neither group of princes was to molest the other. (Does this remind you of the meeting of the five Mafia families in The Godfather?) Each prince was, therefore, to determine the kind of religion which was to prevail in his territories. The principle cujus regio, ejus religio, (“Whoever reigns, that is the religion”) was henceforth to govern the religious geography of Germany. No forms of Protestantism other than Lutheranism were to be tolerated.

The Peace of Augsburg provided a temporary lull in the religious conflict, and the Protestant Reformation continued to take hold, as Luther’s writings became even more widely disseminated. Territorially, Protestantism reached its greatest extent in Germany about the year 1566, but then began to lose ground. The grand strategy envisioned by Charles V, correlated with a reform movement within the Roman Catholic Church, was beginning to unfold. The Counter Reformation was on.

A number of nobles and rulers -- the Roman Catholic princes of Germany, all of them prince-bishops who had both civil and spiritual authority in their territories; the Hapsburgs in Vienna, the long-time rulers of central Europe and the Balkans; the Medici family in northern Italy; the King of Spain, Phillip II; and the Pope in Rome, who held secular power in much of Italy -- each sought ways to fend off Protestant teachings and regain the territory lost by a half century of Reform and by the Peace of Augsburg. While they sometimes coordinated their strategies, the successes of what came to be called the Counter Reformation were not the result of political and military victories. What developed was more complex than that.

First of all, the Protestants were divided. Lutherans were not only distancing themselves from the adherents of Reformed theology as articulated by Calvin and Zwingli, they were also arguing among themselves and condemning one another as heretics. With their continued wrangling, Protestants did not present a solid front to the world, nor did they engage in carrying the Gospel to new places.

Secondly, the Roman Catholic princes realized that the vast majority of the people they ruled were illiterate peasants. The peasants were suspicious of the Protestant-dominated merchant class who were educated and striving to assert civic as well as economic power. They were uncomfortable with new ideas like “the priesthood of all believers” and the removal of saints or relics to venerate and cure their ills. They wanted the old order preserved, and the princes accommodated them: They reaffirmed the civil and religious pyramid as it had always been: The Emperor (Pope) on top; next, the Prince (bishop); then the nobles and priests; and finally the people on the bottom. It was God’s order, they said, and the peasants tended to agree.

Thirdly, many of the abuses in the Roman church that the reformers railed against -- such as the sale of indulgences, absentee bishops, nepotism and the purchasing of bishoprics, incompetent and untrained priests -- were already being addressed in Spain and parts of Italy before Luther put up his famous 95 theses. While the Protestant Reformation accelerated those reforms within Roman Catholicism, reform within Roman Catholicism made significant strides with the coming to the papacy of Paul III, who was pope from 1534 to 1549. Paul III curbed some of the worst abuses connected with the sale of indulgences; ordered absentee bishops to go to their sees and attend to their episcopal duties; appointed outstanding reformers as cardinals; reorganized the notorious Spanish Inquisition, bringing its headquarters to Rome; appointed a commission which initiated a notable program for reform; gave papal approval to the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits); and, in 1545, brought about the assembling of the Council of Trent, which was convened in 1545 and completed its work nineteen years later.

The Council of Trent proved to be one of the most important and significant in the history of the Christian Church. It gave definitive formulation to the principles of Catholic reform listed above. It rejected as “anathema” almost all of the teachings of the Augsburg Confession, particularly the centerpiece of the Reformation, the doctrine of justification by faith alone. The Council cut off all possibilities of reconciliation with Protestants, a breach that was to last for 400 years.

The Council of Trent also authorized an evangelization effort into territories lost to Protestantism and into new lands opened by the explorations and conquests of the sixteenth century, viz., North and South America. The task of evangelization was taken up by the recently formed Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) who were chartered as “Soldiers of the Pope.” Organized along military lines and armed with a vigorous commitment to the Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, the Jesuits embarked on “missionary journeys” into Protestant lands, where they built churches and established schools to educate the young. In Bohemia and Hungary and in other territories controlled by them, the attempt to reverse Protestant gains turned violent, as Hapsburg armies tried to crush the Protestants, slaughtering them by the thousands.

All of this brought about a great deal of tension throughout Europe. In 1618, hostilities broke out and for the next thirty years nearly all of Europe, particularly Germany, was engulfed in war. When Catholic armies, led by the Hapsburgs, conquered Protestant lands, they immediately reversed the terms of the Peace of Augsburg and declared the newly won territory to be Catholic. Under the Edict of Restitution, all monasteries and church property that had been appropriated since 1552 were once more to be Catholic. Hundreds of parishes, several bishoprics and scores of monasteries were returned to the Roman Catholic Church.

Protestants were given a choice to denounce their faith or be killed, as the Edict of Restitution prohibited Lutheran and non-Lutheran Protestants. With the Protestant cause in crisis, into the war came the king of Sweden, Gustavus Adolphus. A staunch Lutheran, the king landed his armies in northern Germany and drove the Hapsburgs out of Pomerania. Saxony and Brandenburg joined him and the Saxons captured Prague.

From there the war dragged on into a stalemate. The monarchs of Europe became more interested in controlling territory than whether their people were Protestant or Roman Catholic. The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 ended the Thirty Years War. It is significant that the Papacy, while represented at the peace talks, played no part in the negotiations. The time had passed when it could dictate to European Christendom.

In general, the principle of cujus regio ejus religio was reaffirmed. But Catholic princes were required to permit Protestant worship in their realms and Protestant princes were to do likewise with Catholics in their domains. The Edict of Restitution was annulled. The major exception to this toleration was in the regions ruled by the Austrian Hapsburgs. With a couple of exceptions, no Protestants enjoyed the free exercise of their religion. A curb was placed on Catholic missions among the Protestants; this proved a brake on the activity of the Jesuits.

This outcome was not completely satisfactory to either Protestants or Roman Catholics. The Pope condemned it. Yet it proved to be a viable compromise and the religious provisions of the Peace of Westphalia were to hold for 150 years, until Napoleon conquered Europe and the secular powers of the prince bishops were dismantled.

The decisions of the Council of Trent were to guide Roman Catholicism until the reforms of The Second Vatican Council of 1963-65. After 400 years of isolation, it was not until then that the Roman Church considered and adopted some of the reforms advocated by Martin Luther and reached out to the other churches of Christendom. In recent years, there has been great concern that, given the makeup of the College of Cardinals, the next Pope may lead Rome back into its intransigent past.

Meanwhile, the churches of Europe, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, are for the most part empty museums. Few people attend. It may require another Martin Luther to shake things up.

James DeLange is the former senior pastor of St. Francis Lutheran. He retired in 2000.

Anglican, Reformed and Catholic

by Donald Schell

I’m grateful to Mark and to St. Francis Church for this invitation to write on the Reformation from my personal perspective and experience as an Anglican. I’m also eager to hear the other voices in this chorus of experience.

Within a decade the Reformation will be five hundred years old. Though the Reformation seems much closer to us than the earliest Church, five hundred years will mean that fully one fourth of Christian history will be post-Reformation. The Reformation has touched and shaped our whole experience, whether we think about history of not. But as an Anglican priest, I was trained to think about history, our own place in it, and where it’s going.

About a hundred years after the Reformation, the Anglican theologian Richard Hooker first offered the image of a three-legged stool (Bible, Tradition, and Reason) as our understanding of solid authority, suggesting that each is, in fact, interpreted by the others. Tradition, as Anglicans think of it, isn’t a static repository of Apostolic teaching. It’s the church’s experience of Biblical. interpretation emerging as the church faces new circumstances and challenges.

In the past generation, and under the influence of a variety cultural forces, doubtless including C.G. Jung (whom a lot of Anglican clergy really like), Alan Watts (a former Episcopal priest), and David Tracy (a Roman Catholic theologian), what we mean by “reason” has taken on a less rationalistic cast as we’ve begun to find ways to shape reason by experience or test it against experience.

Trying to think about community and faith historically and listening to my own experience both predispose me immediately to welcome the project of putting small pieces of one priest’s story alongside the great events of history and to look for the work of the Spirit in both. My perspective on the amazing, creative, blessed, splintering, reordering, historic crisis we call the Reformation has been shaped by my own journey through the church. In the family I grew up in, relatives were Presbyterian and mostly quite active. My parents served our congregation (where they too had grown up) as officers, lay leaders, and lay teachers. I knew four uncles or great-uncles that were Presbyterian clergy (and there were more further back). About fifteen years after I had become an Episcopalian, and a dozen years after I’d been ordained an Episcopal priest, my mother’s presbytery invited me to help ordain her, so I can make some claim to writing as a clergy kid in the Reformed tradition.

In college, before I settled on becoming an Anglican, I attended an Episcopal Church for a year, then a Lutheran Church (LCA) for a couple of years before going off to seminary still a Presbyterian. I spent my year in Princeton Seminary (Presbyterian) strongly pulled between the Episcopal chaplaincy at the University, where I went to liturgy regularly, and the Orthodox Church, which I first encountered through seminary studies and which quickly captured my heart theologically, liturgically, and musically. That young Presbyterian who was looking for something tangible and sacramental in college continued searching for a synthesis to rejoin the Holy Book of the Reformation and the Holy Tradition (and community and history) of the Counter-Reformation.

And for historical context, my personal ferment, discovery and search began in the early 1960’s when John XXIII convened Vatican II. It continued during those heady days of ecumenical liturgical discovery, a time of reform and rapprochement among liturgical churches. I was attending an LCA church were when the Service Book and Hymnal (the Lutherans’ “Red Book”) was brand new. Regina Fryxll’s Second Communion Service in that hymnal was a revelation to me, revealing the power and intuitive logic of liturgy as I’d never seen it before. The first time I attended a Byzantine Divine Liturgy, my familiarity with the Red Book’s sung litanies helped me feel at home, and I realized how much the Red Book’s form of Divine Service was influenced by Russian and Byzantine sources.

The Spirit began a great work in the 16th Century Reformation. At the beginning of the Reformation (seeing with all the wisdom of hindsight) we can see the many voices of form and renewal fitting together like pieces of a puzzle. Scholars and theologians and popular leaders who disagreed had much to teach one another.

That didn’t last. What followed instead was the tragedy of a century and a half of religious warfare, heresy trials, persecutions, until Europe enthusiasm for religion collapsed from the killing. Enlightenment and Post-Enlightenment skepticism seemed to offer a way out. But positions had hardened. Protestants and Catholics convinced themselves that their adversaries were barely Christian, if at all. Outside the intellectual circles of Enlightenment, rigid quasi-scholastic interpretations of faith and practice were codified into formalisms.

After rationalism’s devotion to progress and reason failed us in the horrors of World War I and World War II, the Spirit moved again, bringing to fruition scholarship and renewal that had been germinating underground for a century. Vatican II and all the change our non-Roman churches were experiencing in and alongside it were, I believe God moving us to complete the uncompleted work of Reformation. I believe that Vatican II was the Spirit offering the church a second chance.

Where is Anglicanism through these five centuries? It’s a layered sort of tale, full of contradictory impulses. Anglicans make in-jokes about being wishy-washy Christians, but in fact, we take a certain pride in a history that has given us affection for “both-and,” for contradictions. And of course, we’ll tell you, that our history made us that way. We don’t like being told that we were founded so Henry VIII could get a divorce (at least we don’t like it when non-Anglicans say that). We prefer to say that the Anglican branch of the Reformation was precipitated by power politics between Henry VIII and the Vatican.

When the Pope would not grant him permission to divorce and remarry to get himself a male heir, Henry set out to re-establish an arguably ancient earlier pattern of church life, (somewhat like the Greek and Armenian Churches that his scholars told him about). Henry’s claim was that the English Church could be an independent Catholic jurisdiction, gathered around a Christian monarch, and sharing a language and geography but, unlike the Byzantine Churches Henry’s English Church would still have celibate clergy (he thought) and still worship in Latin.

Of course, Henry closed the monasteries and confiscated their lands and endowments. But he still took pride in the title the Pope had once given him, “Defender of the Faith;” he rationalized what he was doing as essentially continuous with Catholic Christians in England since the time of Augustine of Canterbury. When Henry died, his English Church still looked to him very much like the Roman Church he had grown up in.

What Henry didn’t see (because it was going on behind his back and without his knowledge) was a struggle between bishops and clergy who were devout Reformed Christians and devout Catholics. While formally going along with all Henry enacted, these two rival groups tried to guarantee the religious politics to their vision after Henry’s death. In the most obvious way the Reformed faction won (as Henry himself little suspected).

Only after his death did Thomas Cranmer, Henry’s Archbishop of Canterbury and a number of other key bishops (many of whom had been secretly married during his reign) come out as Protestants. For Protestants is essentially what they were. They held the upper hand, issued the first English Prayer Book in 1548 during the brief reign of Edward VI, and then died for it under Queen Mary, who briefly restored the English Church to communion with Rome.

The classic description of Cranmer and his contemporaries is that they were Lutheran in their ecclesiology and liturgy and Reformed (Calvinist) in their theology. Looking back, we’d probably want to say that their theology was more solidly Calvinist than their liturgy was Lutheran. In fact, in the first decade of the English church’s independence from Rome, Catholic ritual, color, action, and text were more completely suppressed in England than in Lutheran duchies. The Puritans were already at work. Candles, colored vestments and hangings, flowers, saints’ days, and a great deal more got labeled superstition and were banished from church.

Elizabeth I was the real mother of the Anglican Church. Unlike Henry VIII, she used her royal power to found something new and religious significant. It was Elizabeth who began a creative, distinctly Anglican tradition in liturgy and theology. After Queen Mary’s brief, bloody reign, Elizabeth inherited a country shaken by an unstable political and theological mix of continental anti-Catholicism, a not terribly Reformed country and church where she (knowingly or not) counted numbers of secret Catholics among her close friends and advisors.

All across Europe, Renaissance theological scholarship was rediscovering the patristic period, and wider-ranging travel and better communication bought the startling recognition that large numbers of Christians had maintained an unbroken continuity of liturgy in the vernacular as well as married clergy, though both had at first appeared to be Reformation breakthroughs in restoring ancient practice. Elizabeth’s liturgists and scholars were also aware that the Church on the other side of the Roman hegemony did continue to use the Septuagint for canonical scriptures or at least lectionary. England chose to follow suit.

So her scholars and theologians, following Continental teachers offered a generally Protestant, non-Roman direction to the English experiment. Elizabeth contributed to this the force of her personality and the power of her office to keep the peace, gathering and holding this wild mix of influences in a coherent civic/religious community, and creating a momentum that became what we know today as Anglicanism.

Elizabeth decided vernacular liturgy was crucial to unity. Lutheran inspiration is evident in continuing Cranmer’s work of translating ancient Latin Collects and Prayers and adapting the structure of old liturgies (unlike the Calvinists in Switzerland). Along with this (and we can wonder whether this was somewhat inspired by the Orthodox) Elizabeth decided doctrinal matters couldn’t really be resolved any better than appealing to ancient precedent in Nicaea. She did not choose to commission theologians to draft a new creed or a confession. What she did was require people to pray together in a book that she gave the force of law. “Nothing matters but faith in Jesus Christ,” she said, “and the rest is trifles.”

People on the Continent were killing one another over these ‘trifles,’ in wars, heresy trials, and autos da fe. Elizabeth wanted peace and unity (which are, in fact, Christian values) but she saw unified action (one liturgy throughout her kingdom) as more essential to the peace than unified theology. In Elizabeth’s day every European ruler was attempting to shape unity around some kind of religious consensus: being a nation implied religious unity.

Elizabeth’s unprecedented center of unity, shared prayer, became what we call “The Elizabeth Settlement.” Elizabeth imposed an English Prayer Book and decreed that everyone use it. It’s still important today that Elizabeth didn’t get her theologians to craft us a new Creed or Confession (though the old Apostles’ Creed and Nicene Creed were given liturgical authority as part of the prayers she mandated all say together). She demanded that people live their faith in faithful practice of worshipping together and staying at peace.

Tolerance also gradually opened up a broadening ecumenical interest and inspiration within Anglicanism. Since the time of Elizabeth, the Anglican Church has slowly become more Catholic, more Orthodox, and more liberal. In the mid-Nineteenth Century, the American Episcopal Church was the first Christian body to consider that evolution would be consistent with Christian theology if it proved to be good science. At the same time, the American church commended historical-critical scholarship on the Bible. Early in the Twentieth Century, the Church of England was one of the first Christian bodies (maybe the first) to endorse the use of birth control.

I have a personal hero from that Nineteenth Century period in Anglicanism in John Mason Neale. He was for reviving Catholic practice, aesthetic, and a disciplined means of formation. Like John and Charles Wesley two generations before, Neale wanted faith that was intellectually rich but also lively, heartfelt, and affective. In a way, he wanted the church to be a folk movement. He knew color and movement and hymns appealed to people across educational and social barriers.

He restored the practice of candles in church, a cross at the altar, colored vestments and hangings, most of what we’d identify as looking typically Anglican from a visit to Grace Cathedral. He also tried to revive guilds of literate craftsmen, founding a religious order for women (patterned partly on active nursing orders for women in France, and partly on Lutheran sisterhoods). He translated a huge number of early Christian and Byzantine hymns, and a large number of hymns of his own. I like Neale because he was both innovator and borrower, and I like Neale because he tried to find a larger Christian frame than his own local version of Anglicanism.

For reasons like this, I’ve recently I’ve enjoyed re-reading Archbishop Rowan Williams’ writings on Luther, John of the Cross, and Teresa of Avila. Williams argues powerfully that Luther and these two great Spanish mystics were in deep agreement about Christian life and what it would take to make Christian community vital for conversion and Christian growth. (Williams also acknowledges that in their lifetimes, they’d hardly have imagined anyone ever saying such a thing.)

I see Luther and John of the Cross as intellectual and spiritual heirs of Erasmus, the renaissance teacher and ordinary mystic. A generation before Luther, Erasmus pushed to renew the church through fresh reading of scripture, an open ear to new science and new historical scholarship. He encouraged others to follow him doing all this questioning and discussion for the church’s health in the open. Erasmus’s writings and his example inspired leaders of both the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation. (Subsequently, the conservative backlash on both sides tried to distance themselves from him. The Spanish Inquisition used “Erasmian” and “Lutheran” as virtually interchangeable terms of condemnation for new and independent Christian thinking.)

I think of it as thoroughly Anglican to invite us to embrace both teachers -- both Luther and John of the Cross: a great Lutheran theologian, liturgist and pastor, and a great Catholic poet, teacher, and mystic. I know in fact that Archbishop Williams’ gesture is also in the spirit of St. Francis Church. So while I hear Williams’ observation as very Anglican, I joyfully acknowledge that his desire to be true to hear and follow how God accomplishes Christian growth and Christian transformation is at the center of our Anglican Reformation heritage.

Rev. Donald Schell is co-rector of St. Gregory Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco.

Choosing Renewal, Choosing Change

by Robin Ressler

It is autumn. Of course, as a New Yorker to whom Bay Area weather is perpetual springtime, I need clues like the sun setting earlier and the calendar on my computer and the new academic year (my last in the classroom, I hope!) to convey this information to me. Eventually I catch on. People who have interrupted their usual routine with vacation, travel, and in the case of our own Prs. Frost and Zillhart, sabbatical, have been reappearing in my life. It is a time of renewal for me, a time for renewal of relationship.

My dear Katarina, the young Slovak woman with whom I lived, worshipped, studied, trained for a marathon, and traveled around the world, reconnected with me after spending the summer at Holden Village, the Lutheran retreat center. Then she went back to Slovakia to begin her career in the Lutheran church there. Our all-too-brief reunion included emotional retrospective and prospective ruminations, and we planned to stay in touch by e-mail. We are moving into a new phase of our relationship, and we took the time to break bread, drink wine, and make pledges to one another. We have renewed our relationship.

At the same time, another young Slovak friend, also named Katarina, has arrived in the U.S. for graduate school. This Katarina was a great friend to me during my recent residence in Slovakia. She previously had earned her bachelor’s degree in the U.S., so when she felt lonely for the U.S., we could be “Americans” together. We spent a lot of time together during the terribly protracted aftermath of the 2000 American presidential election, and she was a great support to me through the whole ordeal. Katarina also frequently interpreted for me -- not only the language, but the culture as well.

This fall, Katarina is in Nebraska -- not nearby, but nearer. We can supplement our e-mail messages with telephone calls. When she gets homesick and overwhelmed, we can talk about Slovakia. I support her as she supported me in the past. We renew our relationship with humor and a little bit of role reversal.

If there is one thing we can count on in life, it is change. God creates us, and sustains us, and recreates us. Phil Hefner, professor emeritus at the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago, is well known in the field of science and theology. In his theological anthropology he introduced the term “created co-creator” to characterize human beings. It is part of what Martin Luther called the freedom of being a Christian that we can make choices, we can participate in the ongoing project of our lives. All of us can, at least to a limited degree (and most of us here at St. Francis can to a large degree), participate in creating our careers, our families, our physical and psychological well-being. We may choose to let our lives become stale. We can also choose to renew them.

Here at St. Francis, we have the grace to partake of the sacred body and blood of Jesus Christ. We can come to God’s table for refreshment, forgiveness, healing, and renewal. As we move through our interim period, we have an opportunity, as a community, to review and renew our mission: to look at our corporate life and to recreate it, with God and in God. We can choose what to discard. We can choose new directions in which to venture.

We can choose, as well, to renew what we have, and what we have had.

These past few months, with the able guidance of Jessica Prentice and Grant Burger, our corporate worship has been most wonderfully renewed, as many more people have volunteered (sometimes with a little help from their friends!) to participate in worship leadership, most notably as assisting ministers, crucifers, and lectors. Although there has long been a circle of willing and able participants in this role, the widening of this circle has been a real experience of renewal, I say. What a joy to listen to new voices, to see folks whom we normally see sitting in a pew all wrapped up in an alb, looking radiant, nervous, devout, or just plain beautiful. How wonderful it is to see our friends and pew-mates, brothers and sisters in Christ, up front taking her or his turn.

This past week how much fun the first lesson was when Barbara Kling read it, and what a new dimension her reading gave the story for me. Her eyes twinkled as Abraham bargained with God, and I could imagine the patriarch as a little kid, about three or four years old, playfully yet seriously asking his parent the same question over and over again, each time modifying it just a bit. Wei Haur’s reading of the gospel in his accented English -- his voice clear, his words deliberate -- reminded me of the many opportunities I have had to hear scripture read in different accents of my native tongue, and what a gift it is to be forced to listen a bit more carefully: to be brought more mindfully into the moment, into renewed relationship with, renewed understanding of our Holy Scripture.

Let us give thanks to our God who makes all things new, and who gives us opportunities to renew and be renewed!

Robin Ressler is a mother, a licensed social worker in New York, a former ELCA missionary to Slovakia and a seminarian who aspires to ordained Christian ministry in a Lutheran church.

Communing with the Saints

by Rachel Hoobing

Murphy is a black Labrador retriever who lives for morning walks. These daily morning walks is the first thing he loves to do in the morning, and I do mean first thing. When I was taking care of him for several days this summer, we would wake up and pound the sidewalk as early as possible. Fortunately, Murphy knew his way around and would more or less walk me while the cool morning air woke me up more fully. Murphy knew the way -- the places to turn, the patches of bare earth, the sweet scented spots -- as we headed toward the end of Piedmont Avenue and into the hillside cemetery.

It is an old cemetery, a historical landmark, tucked away in the Oakland hills but almost hidden from the hustle and bustle of life. At first, Murphy and I went to the cemetery out of curiosity and fascination, but our visits soon became a habit. I found I had questions -- how old is this cemetery, what was this person like who is buried here, what was their life like, what was their worldview, what kind of person were they, what was their personality, and so on. I went with many questions, knowing they would not be answered. I went with my questions and Murphy came for his walk.

The day that Martin Luther posted his 95 Theses on the door of the Wittenberg Church was October 31st, 1517 -- Oct. 31, a date we call All Hallows Eve or Halloween. The next day, November 1, has been celebrated by the church for over a thousand years as All Saints Day. This feast day commemorates the saints -- all the saints, everyone -- ordinary people like you and me. At St. Francis, it has become an occasion to remember and name the people we know who have died.

San Franciscans still celebrate Halloween with costumes, decorations, jack-o-lanterns, and an evening (or for some, nearly a week) of fun, while residents of the Mission District mark a traditional Mexican holiday, the Day of the Dead (Nov. 2). In New Orleans, residents traditionally go to cemeteries to clean the graves (which are above ground due to the below-sea level geography). Meanwhile, All Saints Day itself is marked only by those who observe a liturgical calendar.

Perhaps we as a society do not celebrate All Saints Day so much because of a cultural fear death. We live in a society that would rather push death, and those who are dying, to the outskirts, so that death can go unseen and be ignored. Death in this society is spoken in code. Rather than hearing or saying that someone died, people instead say, passed away, gone, passed, lost, and etc. People, today, have rarely ever been present when a friend, loved one, or relative dies. People are sent off to die and most of the time they are sent to a nursing home or hospital and are usually left there and forgotten. Death is kept at bay so that our society may continue to obsess about beauty and youth.

Counter to society, we Christians are called not to fear death because we are baptized into Christ. We say in the Nicene and Apostles Creed that “we believe in the resurrection of the dead and the life everlasting.” We believe that death may still be an end - and is not the end. As Christians we know that death is a part of life. We know that death may come in many forms be it physical, emotional, mental, spiritual. We know that death may lead into new life with God, self and neighbor. We know that without death there can be no resurrection.

While walking in the Oakland cemetery one morning, I thought about my grandmother’s death a couple of years ago. I had arrived at her home only hours before she died, and had the opportunity to sit with her for a short time and say my final words to her. Some hours later, her children -- my mom, my aunt and my uncle -- gathered around and shared last words together, before she died in the early morning hours in her home surrounded by family. A day or two later, for my own need for closure, I went to the cemetery where she was buried. I found the place where my grandfather was buried and saw her name on the stone, next to his.

My morning walk among the graves in Oakland helped me to be reminded of the persons that I have loved and who have helped form me and my Christian faith. When I walked with Murphy I felt my grandmother -- a woman whom I had known all my life -- walking with me, as well as several other saints.

At the end of our walk, Murphy and I head to his home and we begin the day refreshed and focused on what really matters in life -- relationships with God, self and neighbor -- even the furry kind.

Rachel Hoobing, a graduate of Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary, is working toward becoming an elementary school teacher.

Reflections of Summer

by Ruth Frost

Pr. Frost and her partner Pr. Phyllis Zillhart took leaves of absence this summer from their work at St. Francis. We asked Ruth to reflect on this time of renewal. -- Ed.

The opportunity to take a three-month leave of absence from my work has yielded a summer rich in meaning, if not always in rest. For me, the time away was many things: a change of scenery, time to show our daughter over six thousand miles of this great country, an opportunity to use my talents in the arts, the chance to care for my mother in these last months of her life, and to reflect on what it means to live a balanced life so that it can be a life which contributes positively to those we touch.

I haven’t come back with any earth-shattering keys to the mystery of life, but I have come back convinced that I want to know that I am using my talents and my energy to make a contribution to my family, my friends and the communities in which I work, serve and play. I want to know what the people of St. Francis know when they volunteer their time -- which is that they freely choose to give of themselves in this place which they call their spiritual home. For those of us who are pastors here, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish what we freely choose to volunteer and what we give because we must take seriously the responsibilities which come with our call.

I regard this interim time at St. Francis as an opportunity to examine to what extent my ministry at St. Francis is making a real contribution which is both satisfying to me and meets the needs of this community. As we focus together on what are the changing needs of St. Francis, I look forward to searching out how I can continue to make a contribution here from the best of who I am for however long that truly serves this community.

Reading and listening was one of the great pleasures of this summer. We listened to “talking books” in the car as we traveled; Phyllis and I listened to the call of the loons as we read to one another on the dock at my family’s lake cabin. Noelle wrote her own stories and read them to us.

Reading an interview with the actress Jane Fonda, I was struck by an analogy she used. She compared human life to a play in three acts, commenting that she saw own life as being in its third act. She spoke of the third act of a play as the one which synthesizes the first two acts, that puts all the acts together and brings home the meanings of the play to the audience. I resonate to this analogy for my own life and work in ministry. My activist younger years are turning into more reflective older years. I am more interested in learning how to listen better, abide with others more fully, speak more kindly, and take time for ordinary blessings. I don’t want to simply age as the years pass -- I want to “sage.” I’m sure watching the older generation of my family pass away is giving me pause.

St. Francis has been such a wonderfully activist community; I wouldn’t want to see that disappear. But I do wonder if there may be a way to do less better and more thoroughly, while taking more time for spiritual nurture. I think, as a community, and as staff, we are often caught in trying to do too many things all at once and get stretched pretty thin. I’m hoping that the cottage meetings and the visioning going on in the V-Team, and our upcoming retreats can be a time to focus our energies and staff needs on what we truly regard as essential for a good and faithful life together so that we have room to abide more fully together and time to reach out more profoundly to others.

I find myself searching for more ways to use my artistic talents in ministry and my desire for deeper spiritual and community connections. It is too early to posit just what this will mean, but it is the subject of much thought these days. One of my creative ventures this summer was to design two stained glass windows for a church in Sacramento. Part of what made this rewarding was the opportunity to help the congregation identify the meanings they hold dear and wish to communicate through these windows. The artwork became a point of community nurture and development.

I should also add that much of my thought flies back home to my mother, who lies in hospice and is determined not to yield up her life yet. She is dying as she has lived- very much in charge of the process and highly engaged in the life around her. Her years of struggling for breath have acclimated her to struggle for life. None of us, including her hospice nurses, thought she would make it to September, but my mother seems to have her own timing. She is not going “gently into that good night” as my father did, and hard as it is, I have to accept that it needs to be her way and her timing. She has always been exceedingly strong-willed and very much in control. This process must be so hard on such a will. I have great respect for her.

Again, thank you to the council and to the people of St. Francis for offering us the gift of time. I think it was Jim DeLange who once remarked, “It’s forgivable to waste people’s money, but it is unforgivable to waste their time.” I believe he wasted very little of either, but I have to say, of all the treasures God has given us, the gift of time is by far the most precious. Every now and then it’s important to have the time to be conscious of its passage.

Pr. Ruth Frost is Associate Pastor for Outreach and Evangelism at St. Francis.

LGBT in the ELCA -- an update

by Mari Irvin

While events and decisions coming out of this year’s Churchwide Assembly of the ELCA -- the biennial national convention of the nation’s largest Lutheran church body -- were overshadowed by the raging controversies taking place in the Episcopal Church, lgbt Lutherans are making perceptible progress toward full inclusion in the church.

In preparation for this year’s Assembly, the ELCA’s Sexuality Task Force met early in the year to listen to representatives of both sides of the gay ordination issue. Jeanine Janson wrote in the Lent issue of Instrument of testimony presented to the panel by members of the five Alliance organizations (see sidebar) representing lgbt Lutherans. The task force is beginning the third year of a four-year study period, at the end of which it will make a report and recommendations to the 2005 national convention -- a timeline that was established by an action of the 2001 Churchwide Assembly (CWA).

After that meeting, Alliance member organizations turned their attention to the proposals and resolutions -- “memorials,” as they are referred to in the CWA -- that were being circulated prior to this year’s convention. Some memorials recommended that the report on the study of homosexuality be put off until the 2007 assembly, supposedly so that more time could be given to this study by church leaders and congregations. Others recommended that the task force’s report and recommendations be deferred until after the position paper on sexuality was accepted by the assembly -- an action that could take years, if ever, to accomplish. These conservative proposals were nothing more than attempts to derail progress toward full inclusion for lgbt persons. So our legislative goal for this year’s convention became the defeat of these proposals, so that the ELCA’s task force could make its report on schedule.

During the spring and summer, the Alliance worked with Soulforce, an interdenominational liberal group which uses nonviolent tactics to bring attention to justice issues, to develop plans to leaflet and demonstrate at the August convention. A smaller team of Alliance leadership worked with Soulforce leadership in developing plans for civil disobedience should the voting members of CWA accept the conservative proposals.

As a theme for our presence in Milwaukee, we emphasized our inclusion in the Christian family through baptism. To develop conversations and relationships with assembly delegates, we made poster-size photographs of Lutheran lgbt persons, their friends and families and displayed them as delegates entered and left the assembly hall. Other vigilers distributed leaflets, each day with a different message written by Greg Egertson, Mari Irvin, or Pastor Jeff Johnson, on why any delay in bringing the Sexuality Task Force’s report would be wrong.

We also distributed rainbow-printed scarves to delegates and visitors. It was an inspiring sight to look out over the assembly floor and see this multitude of scarves colorfully displayed and worn in a variety of ways by voting members, visitors, and vigilers day after day; this became the most visible sign of support for us. Large banners were displayed with the passage from I Corinthians 12:13a: “We are all baptized into one body.” Hundreds of pins with the same verse were also distributed, and a similar number of ceramic crosses made by a Soulforce volunteer were distributed to voting members and visitors during the week-long event.

While the vigiling and leafleting continued throughout the week of the Assembly, the less visible but tireless work of the legislative team -- led by Ellen Maxon, an attorney on the ELCA Council who is an out lesbian -- was outstanding. Delegates supportive of the lgbt cause came to nightly strategy caucuses, where Ellen’s extensive knowledge of parliamentary procedure gave these delegates tools to counter conservative tactics.

In the end, we succeeded. It would take many more words than can be put into this article to chronicle the series of events which led to the vote, but in the end the CWA decided not to change the timeline set in 2001. Ironically, what we “won” at this assembly was what we opposed in 2001 when the timeline was first promulgated. Though we continue to object to the notion of a “study of homosexuality” which tends to view lgbt persons as objects to be studied, and which we expect to uncover little new information that has not been already discussed at the national church level, this is the reality of our current struggle.

Yet the experience of those of us who participated in this year’s CWA has left us with a new sense of hope for policy change in 2005. Unlike past conventions, the tone of this year’s CWA was more Biblical than legislative. Midway through each day of the assembly, all action stopped for an hour and a half as the Eucharist was celebrated. The theme of baptism, unknowingly paralleled by The Alliance’s theme for the week of our visible presence, permeated these services and other non-parliamentary events. ELCA Presiding Bishop Mark Hanson spoke repeatedly of the fact that we are all, through baptism, named as “beloved,” as we are all “marked with the cross of Christ forever.”
 

Looking toward the future

The next two years are critical to the lives of lgbt persons in the Lutheran church. As part of the Sexuality Task Force timeline, the ELCA strongly urged local congregations to study what it means to be homosexual in our time. The Sexuality Task Force circulated study materials to every congregation for this purpose. Although there is much anxiety in many congregations and pastors about talking about sex and relationships, I and other Alliance leaders feel the mood among the ELCA leadership is shifting. It is becoming increasing difficult for them to deny that there are hundreds of lgbt pastors serving congregations, many of whom are out of compliance with the denomination’s requirement of celibacy for gay pastors. Although most of these pastors are at least publicly closeted, many bishops are struggling with their knowledge of the irrational policies they are expected to enforce.

Remarks made by Presiding Bishop Mark Hanson in both the opening and closing services of the 2003 Churchwide Assembly provide a reason to hope:

We [the ELCA] know whose we are… God has named us ‘beloved’ in baptism….Unity is not achieved or maintained by human effort…but given to us by virtue of our baptism into Jesus Christ. May we be known as…a people of faith absolutely astounded by and rejoicing in the diversity that comes to the body of Christ through the Spirit.
 
I know that these next two years are going to be extremely difficult for this church...because most of the five million members of this church don’t know how, in their own primary relationships, to talk openly and faithfully about [their] own human sexuality, to say nothing about finding a way to talk about the sexuality of one another….[but] I think we as a church body are saying to the culture that we are going to take back the gift that God gives all of us in creation: the gift of sexuality -- mysterious, powerful, wonderful gift that it is. We are going to find a way -- sometimes fumbling, sometimes with clarity -- in the context of Scripture and our confessions -- to talk about what it means to be faithful stewards of this gift.

Against this backdrop, upcoming elections in synods around the country will choose voting members for the 2005 CWA. Nominations for these positions have already been submitted by many local conferences. These soon-to-be elected delegates to the 2005 CWA are likely to decide what the ordination and blessing of relationships policies of ELCA will be in the future.

We who are members of St. Francis Lutheran Church -- in exile from the ELCA and thus unable to serve as voting members at an ELCA Churchwide Assembly -- can encourage ELCA members whom we know to be supportive of policy change to put themselves forward as candidates for voting member status in 2005. Now is the time for such action on our part.

The leadership of The Lutheran Alliance for Full Participation is already beginning to plan for action in 2005 through periodic conference calls. We hope 1000 persons will come to Orlando, the site of the 2005 CWA, to stand as voting members, vigilers and witnesses. If you can, consider coming to Orlando in August, 2005 to join with us as we move toward justice and full inclusion of lgbt persons in the Lutheran Church. If you can’t come, consider providing a gift of financial support to this effort.

Dr. Mari Irvin is co-chair of Lutheran Lesbian and Gay Ministries.

What is the Lutheran Alliance for Full Participation?

The Lutheran Alliance for Full Participation? What are we talking about here? Many of us are much better acquainted with Lutheran Lesbian and Gay Ministries (LLGM), a national organization committed to the tangible support of LGBT persons called to ordained ministry but denied such recognition by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). LLGM has early roots in the St. Francis congregation as Pastors Phyllis Zillhart and Ruth Frost were called and ordained in 1990 by the congregation when LLGM was a local ministry of outreach to LGBT persons. (Remember, it was their calls and ordinations that got St. Francis in trouble with the ELCA resulting first in suspension in 1990 and then expulsion in 1996 from the ELCA.) Greg Egertson and Mari Irvin now serve as the national co-chairs of LLGM. In addition, Jim Kowalski is treasurer and Jim DeLange is director of placement for the organization.

And many of us are also well acquainted with the history and actions of Lutherans Concerned/North America (LC/NA) another Lutheran LGBT advocacy organization that Jim Lokken helped found over 30 years ago. Some of us in the congregation are members of LC/NA, and several serve actively in the local chapter. Jeannine Janson is now one of the national co-chairs for LC/NA. Pastor Phyllis Zillhart serves a chaplain for the national organization.

LLGM and LC/NA are two of the five organizations that comprise the informal coalition referred to as The Lutheran Alliance for Full Participation (The Alliance) which advocate for LGBT persons in the Lutheran church and wider society in various ways. The Extraordinary Candidacy Project (ECP), a certification body for LGBT persons called to Lutheran ministry who as a matter of conscience will not pledge to life-long celibacy as a condition for ordination, is another member organization. Greg Egertson was one of the founders of the ECP in the early nineties and served on the national board until last year. Mari Irvin, Marilyn Jackson, and Pastor Michael Hiller currently serve on the board, and Pastor Ruth Frost is a member of the Bay Area regional candidacy panels, one of three such panels throughout the United States.

The remaining two organizations involved in The Alliance are The Network for Inclusive Vision, a voluntary public roster of ELCA congregational leaders throughout the United States that works largely “within the system” for change in ELCA policies affecting LGBT persons, and Wingspan Ministry, an outreach program of St. Paul-Reformation Lutheran Church to LGBT persons in the greater St. Paul, MN area.

Some folks have asked why there are five organizations devoted to advocacy for LGBT persons in the Lutheran church. Why not just one? Each organization has its own history and particular mission for focused action. To date it has been felt that the unique focus of each organization contributes to the strength of what each of the organizations can do.

But there are times when all of The Alliance groups have come together as a witness and collective force for action. For example, in 2001 the Alliance organizations partnered with Soulforce -- an interfaith movement committed to ending spiritual violence perpetuated by religious policies and teachings against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people, applying the nonviolent principles of M. K. Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Together we protested the refusal of the ELCA by the action of its voting members at Churchwide Assembly (CWA) in Indianapolis to lift the ban against non-celibate sexual minority pastors. This joint witness, documented in the film This Obedience, served to bring national attention to the injustice perpetuated by ELCA policies of discrimination.

The five Alliance organizations worked together again to prepare a presentation that was made in February 2003 to the Task Force for ELCA Studies on Sexuality, a study group established by the CWA in 2001 as a compromise to the effort to remove immediately the ordination ban. This newly formed task force has as its first responsibility a “study of homosexuality” (yet another in a long line of such studies) with a report to be brought to the 2005 CWA for action on the yet-to-be developed recommendations regarding LGBT ordinations and the blessing of same-gender relationships. The task force was also directed by the 2001 CWA to develop a position paper on sexuality to be brought before the 2007 CWA.

-- Mari Irvin

Review:
The Book Against God
by James Wood
 
New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2003.

by Mark Pritchard

A Frontline program broadcast on PBS in September, titled Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero, tackled a basic question head-on: Where was God on Sept. 11, 2001? Rabbis, priests and pastors attempted to answer. One minister, Rabbi Brad Hirschfield, said his first impulse was to wish for a “very personal, very nurturing” God who simply took suffering away, but:

If that God exists, that God was dethroned a long time ago. Whether that God was dethroned at Ground Zero or in Rwanda or in Auschwitz, I don't know. But that God was dethroned a long time ago. So I guess for me, when I think about images of God, it's mostly the image of wrestling -- the God that's the projection of all the nurturing and caring that I think we want, and the God that is this often inexplicable, intense force for life that motivates us to have the struggle. It's the second God who I think does less damage. And it's the second God that I -- when I think about it -- think is the more mature and appropriate God to turn to. Yet I also know there are moments I feel like I want that other God. I guess mostly what I want is to be able to always have it so I have access to wrestling with both of them. Right?

People have had all too many opportunities, Hirschfield points out, to wonder where the hell God was while this or that catastrophe was taking place. We try to reconcile the God who, as Psalm 91 says, has promised to send guardian angels to “bear you up, lest you dash your foot against a stone,” with the God who seems absent or uncaring as people tear each other apart. It’s a conflict that can drive people to despair. As Jesus’ own experience shows, even the devil can quote Psalm 91.

The protagonist of James Wood’s The Book Against God is stuck in this conflict, wrestling not only with the two-faced God who promises omnipresence while remaining out of sight, but also with his own father, a small-town Anglican vicar. Thomas Bunting, the son, is a diffident philosophy lecturer in London who can’t manage to finish his Ph.D., but to keep up appearances continually lies to family and friends that it’s almost finished.

In fact, unable to face his research, he’s putting all his energy into a memoir-cum-screed also titled “The Book Against God” -- or bag for short. In contrast to his disorganized but empirical Ph.D. work, the bag is a repository for feverish rants against religion in general and his father’s God in particular. Filled with sarcastic anecdotes about his own father’s approach to life and spirituality, Tom’s bag is not the philosophical treatise he imagines it to be, but a journal that reflects mostly anger at parental smugness and absence -- of both his earthly and heavenly fathers.

Tom’s emotional and spiritual unease is reflected not only in his foundering academic career but in his increasingly distant relationship with his wife Jane, an ambitious concert pianist who seems much too good for him. One of a novelist’s sharpest tools is to depict relationships and characters through a protagonist’s first-person viewpoint while simultaneously using dialogue and action to give the reader a fuller picture than the narrator himself is able to see. Wood is brilliant in his ability to present this contrast between his narrator’s impressions and what is actually happening. In a telling scene, Jane puts on a recording of a Beethoven sonata, and Tom listens intently, trying to discern what it is that she wants him to hear. And typically missing the point, he believes he hears, underneath the piano’s notes, the recorded sound of the pianist’s own breath. This moves him, and his wife (they are, by the time this scene plays out, separated) asks him if those are tears in his eyes.

“It’s the pianist breathing,” I said simply. “That’s what you wanted me to hear.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I can hear Richter breathing, the struggle of it…” I wanted to be as truthful as possible with Jane.

“I didn’t hear that,” said Jane. Sadly, she looked at me and said: “All I wanted you to hear was the simplicity of the tune.”

This knack for missing the point by being too clever, by looking for hidden meanings in what is simple and apparent, is one of the symptoms of Tom’s spiritual malaise. Another is the sarcasm and over-intellectualizing he uses to fend off his family and friends. The chief target of this misdirected rage is his father Peter, whose main failing -- in the eyes of his son, that is -- is his failure to understand or appreciate his son’s restless intelligence. The only time he tried, as a teenager, to address the question of God’s existence with his clergyman father, he can’t get a straight answer:

“Oh, dear [his father replies] You are melancholy at the moment. ‘Shades of the prison-house begin to close upon the growing boy,’ eh? Why should anything exist at all? Don’t tell me you don’t want to exist, Tommy! Or are you sitting up there in that locked bedroom of yours reading Mr. Beckett?”
 
Peter turned somewhat to my mother, and said, brightly, “Actually, the wages of sin are death, and I can illustrate this quite well…”

Giving up being understood or taken seriously by his father, Tom’s been carrying on the argument ever since, with everyone else. His wife, his friend from boyhood Max, his Jewish “uncle” Karl, his father’s religious friends, his bag -- all get the dubious benefit of Tom’s passionate struggle with the question of God’s existence, while Tom never directly addresses the question with the only ones who can really resolve it for him: Peter, and God.

The other main symptom of Tom’s malaise, other than his depression and the increasingly dire condition of his finances -- he sabotages all well-meaning attempts by friends to help him, such as when he blows a short-lived gig writing obituaries for not-yet-dead people, and winds up in thrall to a shady bill-consolidation finance company -- is that he lies all the time. He lies to everyone that his Ph.D. is almost finished; he lies to Jane about his desire for children; he lies to his friends about how happy he is; he lies to himself about how much he’s drinking; most of all, he never manages to actually confide his loss of faith to his father (either one). Paradoxically, the more he lies, the more he feels he is engaged in a struggle for truth, a struggle symbolized by his bag, where he attacks the fatuous verities handed down to him by his father and the church. He envisions his scribblings as a sort of moral neutron bomb:

If only they knew, I thought, of the existence of my parallel work, my Book Against God. Then they would be sorry, then they would be surprised, they might be shocked, menaced, threatened, challenged, all this would be good for them, it would shake them up a bit, they would see it as a work of genius, of moral indignation but intellectual composure, with the most delicate and refined transits of language.

But when he finally confesses to Jane and his friends that he’s been spending all his time working on the bag and not his dissertation, instead of the crisis he imagines, they merely shrug and suggest that if he really doesn’t want to do the Ph.D., perhaps all that work on the bag may turn into a book after all. But that’s not what he wants to hear. He doesn’t want his secret book to be turned into something positive; he wants it to be destructive.

By the end of the novel he’s about as far up this blind alley as he can get. He rejects a friend’s obvious suggestion that, by constantly assailing religion he is just as surely making God a presence in his life as any pious worshipper. And he blows one last chance for real communication with his father by letting the dying man jump to the conclusion that all his anti-theological churning may simply be a form of “seeking God.” This final lie makes him instantly ashamed, but still leaves him without insight into his futile struggle.

All this is leavened by a great deal of insight and compassion -- by the author, not his narrator -- for the characters, on the one hand, and by generous helpings of humor on the other. These provide frequent relief from the narrator’s oppressive, even lugubrious, viewpoint.

We’ve all known people like Tom, who outdoes Woody Allen in his neurotic insistence that the core of existence is hollow; most of us have had dark nights when we share his bleak outlook. We want to reach out to Tom, or those like him, and without sounding superior let him know that there’s an escape from his intellectual, spiritual trap, that faith is not as hard as it seems. But it is hard, for him. That’s what we’re left with.
 

For further reading

The publisher’s webpage for The Book Against God includes an excerpt and interview with the author at http://www.fsgbooks.com/fsg/bookagainstgod.htm.

The author James Wood is a former literary critic at The Guardian (U.K.). That paper’s review by Galen Strawson of Wood’s book is at http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,934103,00.html.

The interview about Sept. 11 with Rabbi Brad Hirschfield and others can be found at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/faith/interviews/.

We raise $55K to fight AIDS

instrument
a newsletter of St. Francis Lutheran Church

Editor: Mark Pritchard

This Fall 2003 issue was completed on 23 October 2003.

Produced on something like a quarterly schedule. Submissions in MS Word format to mark94110 at yahoo.com, or on paper to Mark c/o the church office, 152 Church St., San Francisco, Calif. 94114. Submissions may be on any topic related to spirituality or the work of the people.

Opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and not necessarily of St. Francis Church, its staff or members.

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