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"Gospel of rational hope"?

25 Wednesday Apr 2007

Posted by in christianity, Emergent Conversation, eschatology, Theodicy, Virginia Tech

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Pastor Glenn Parkinson of Severna Park Evangelical Presbyterian Church writes in his blog that he is starting to wonder whether the media is doing more than reporting on a culture in crisis. He suggests they are promoting a “culture OF crisis”. It’s a clever turn of phrase, and reflects, I think, a view that is quite popular among my Christian brothers.

He says,

“day after day, one horror after another works to emotionally tear us down and condition our response. An increasing number of these crises are forced upon us by the larger media and shepherded by a new priesthood of secular institutions…”

I emphatically disagree with Glenn. First, because he severely trivializes the importance and value of the lives of those who are not Christians, and who are not destined for heaven, according to Glenn’s concept of salvation.

In my view Glenn demeaned those lives, by saying that to them grief is merely the process of “getting over” tragedies, “coping” with them so that folks can get back to their personal dreams, which Glenn seems to think is the only real meaning in their lives. It would appear that in Glenn’s view, only those who are predestined toward heaven have a rational basis of hope in their lives. The rest are living on borrowed time, and pursuing a meaningless existence that the media attempts to bestow significance upon.

Glenn suggests that the media should be blamed for “taking on a ‘priestly role'” and “determin[ing] what emotionally stresses us”. He states that

“modern media…assures that selected crises can and will draw the attention of the entire nation. In other words, our own personal trials are no longer enough. Now, we must enter into the personal torment of others — others we do not know, and whose agonies are chosen for us by the whims of the larger media.“

(italics mine)

It’s true that the troubles of people everywhere, people we once could ignore, keep invading our personal space. But is that the media’s fault, or a change in the world around us?

I’m sure that Glenn profoundly feels the pain of the victims and their families. I’m sure he disagrees with Cain, and acknowledges that we are indeed our brothers’ keepers. I’m sure his tears after Virginia Tech were no less heart-felt than mine were. But I think there’s a much better explanation than simply that the media is selecting crises, or choosing these agonies for us to pay attention to. It seems to me that the reason why the world has been drawn together to share each others pain is that God now wants it that way. I think the Biblical phraseology which refers to this is that God has “gathered the nations.”

Appropriate, is it not? Since, like Pastor Parkinson, I believe the Bible is relevant and reliable, and God is sovereign — ruling in the kingdom of men as Nebuchadnezzar came to see it — then could it be that the same God who chose to scatter the nations in Genesis 11 might now be choosing, as he promised he would in Zephaniah 3:8-9, to “gather” them? The scattering involved the introduction of multiple languages. The gathering that seems in evidence now involves mitigating the language differences, is accompanied by a lot of trouble, and finally results in a single-minded recognition of God by all people. Travel, communication, and knowledge are doing that. Computers are doing that, music is doing that, and visual images are doing that. Gathering the nations. From Caesar to George Washington there was one mode of travel, one means of communication. Then, in the blink of an eye, the skills and powers that created the modern age leaped into the human experience.

If God is behind the “global village”, the “time of trouble“, the “distress of nations with perplexity“, the “increase of knowledge“, the “trouble like a woman in labor“, then “the Media” is not what Glenn should be blaming for the gattling-gun of events that grab world attention. These things, in my view, “demonstrated the planet’s relentless march toward equilibrium”, as Greg Mortenson and David Relin write about the interplay of cultures in Three Cups of Tea. We’re seeing something global here, something organic, something bigger than Christianity, bigger than America, bigger than the world Media or all the negative forces on the earth. And though there are paroxysms of pain, the relentless march is making life better for the poor, rougher for the rich, and more egalitarian all around. In spite of the efforts of Christianity to retard it.

As Thomas Friedman and Isaiah put it, the world is flat. As Zephaniah put it, the nations are gathered. At Virginia Tech, a Korean raised in America buys a German gun to randomly-yet-willfully kill an Israeli Holocaust survivor, a French instructor, an Indonesian graduate student, etc. etc. Did the media decide we needed this tragedy, and thus play it up? To suggest this idea is to miss the point of the trouble.

Instead of nostalgically looking backward to a time when Churchianity supposedly had more power, and more people listening to its claims, I suggest that Christians like Glenn, or David Wayne, or other good and devout men and women who trust God, re-examine the hopes and explanations they draw from the Bible.

To Glenn, people need and deserve to hear what he calls the Gospel of rational hope. He doesn’t want folks just weeping over the waste of human potential that occurred a few days ago. He wants hope to emerge in the minds of those who somehow conclude that, despite all evidence to the contrary, God really is powerful, and really does love the human race. Glenn seemingly doesn’t want anyone consoling themselves with what he considers to be the false hope that every life has value aside from religious conversion, and that somehow things will work out for everyone. To Pastor Parkinson, things won’t work out for anyone except the authentic true believer… everyone else is in for sadness, separation, torment… for eternity.

[but wait? Don’t the U and L in TULIP say that God is the one who chooses folks for salvation anyway? If so, then why mourn for Cho’s unsaved victims? Oh well, that’s another discussion for another day. After tragedies like this one, most Calvinists find themselves sounding like Arminians in spite of themselves.]

The irrational hope, the liberal or secular-humanist assumption Glenn speaks of is the notion of personal autonomy: self-motivated dreams, earth-bound involvements as the be-all and end-all of life. The concept of self-will is, after all, repugnant to every well-schooled Calvinist. In his view (and I only partially agree) tragedies like this one give the lie to self-will, forcing folks to at least consider the words of Solomon: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity, says the Preacher”. I would argue that this view of life is only valid for those who, like the Christians Paul speaks of in 1 Corinthians 15, are called by God to choose a life that walks away from many of this life’s opportunities in order to participate in a higher resurrection.

Glenn has a different idea. He covets the opportunity to tell people his concept of the Gospel, what he calls a rational hope. Though he admits it would sound “foolish” to the masses if, suddenly, some Christian spokesman were allowed to explain the Gospel (the traditional Gospel that is), to the public…

What would that “good news” be? Let’s suppose that, miraculously, Glenn got his way and the masses didn’t change the channel, Again and again I hear Christians admit that most people turn away in disgust from “The gospel” — the one most of my friends, and Glenn hold to be taught in the Bible. Generally my Christian friends blame these skeptical folks for rejecting what to them is “amazing grace.” While it is indeed amazing that a Creator God would accept, adopt, and pursue a relationship with the likes of Glenn, or David Wayne, or me … but is that all the Good News the Bible has? Is there an additional gospel of grace that covers those who were not chosen from among men by a Sovereign God during the Christian age that is now clearly waning?

Or put another way, might there not be another explanation for the paltry size of this saved family than simply the Arminian “the others have hardened their own hearts?” or the Calvinist, “God in his sovereignty has made atonement limited”?

Here’s the mainstream Good News, put in plain speech as most Christians perceive the Bible to teach: A dark and tortured man just killed 32 people against their will. Of these, a few appear to be authentic Christians, confident that because they placed their faith in Christ as savior, they will next live with God in heaven. But for most of the dead — the Jews, Moslems, and non-believers among the victims — Glenn’s gospel says these folks all lack the thing that they would have needed to gain eternal life in heaven — “saving faith in Christ”.

In this view, they not only lost the rest of a life that Glenn feels is vanity (but which these poor unsaved souls were enjoying up to that moment); they now get to experience a hell created by God himself for those whose names were not written in a book of life before they died.

For Glenn, it would appear that these tragedies were meant as examples, goads, to be a lesson to the rest of the unsaved…. a warning to accept salvation through Christ. I’ll come back to that in a minute… because I think Glenn and the millions of authentic Christians who agree with his perspective are sincere, and are correct in believing that God is indeed loving and gracious toward all people.

If God is using troubles to remind the masses of their own impending loss, then the unsaved among the victims are a sad case indeed. They will be in some God-forsaken place, kept separate from those who “did the good deeds”… forever. Hmmm. I wonder what sorts of torments will they have to endure? Will they have to get shot again and again by multiple Chos? Maybe they’ll have to listen to that hideous Cho laugh.

Now, all of this awful pain — not only the Cho-inflicted pain but the God-inflicted pain that dwarfs it — a Christian commentator apparently would be able to tell us … would have been unnecessary if every one of the victims had first entrusted their life to Christ. If somehow the Jewish Holocaust survivor could have disregarded the religion of his upbringing, disregarded the religion of those who wiped out his family and almost killed him… and embraced Protestantism… well, if he could have done that he wouldn’t have had to go to hell for his unbelief. Yes, he was a hero, and saved the lives of his students by taking bullets for them while they escaped… but as one Christian radio commentator I heard recently said, “There are lots of nice guys in Hell.”

For my Christian friends who believe in a burning Hell because the Bible seems to teach it, please stay with me a little longer. I’ll stop insulting you now.

Let me suggest that you have missed something. That there is great value even in the un-Christian life of this age, strange as it may seem to you. Let me suggest that the Bible itself offers a better outcome than this, a truly good Good News, a truly rational Gospel of hope.

Here it is: the Judgment day is not for sentencing, but for teaching and correction. It is a time of learning righteousness. It is a second age of hope, with much broader results and a complete absence of the confusion and deception that has marked the Christian age. It is a time when all people learn who the true God is. It is a time when all people discover that God really is kind and loving and just. It is a time when the hereditary curses will melt away, and folks’ll be able to sort through what they did wrong to themselves and others, and learn from those mistakes. The Chos of the world will not be question-marks any more, and will discover what it’s like to feel love and to give love. Love from God, which most people NEVER knowingly experience now. And love from other people, which most people crave more of.

Think of all the victims of the Chos and the Hitlers and the Saddams. Yes, and the victims of the Christian nations and the Christian crusaders and the Christian popes and emperors. Think of the recent past and near future — the victims who suffer from man-made environmental disasters caused by the misuse of world resources… they’ll come back and join in a process of restoring the earth into a global paradise.

Think of the victims of “acts of God” — those who died in tornadoes and earthquakes and tsunamis and blizzards and lightning strikes. All of the dead, the Bible says again and again, will come back. If they were in the earth, or the sea, it doesn’t matter. They are coming back from their graves. And in every case, they will find a new government, made up of merciful, fairminded peers who know what they feel, understand their struggles, and can enforce the high standards of love and justice with mercy, patience, and kindness.

In this view, Christians and Jews alike have been learning precise principles of right and wrong throughout the past two ages. Many of these have actually been prepared for servant-leadership and teacher-priesthood among their fellowmen. The folks God has been working with — the relatively small handfull who experienced and responded to God’s grace up till now … will have the heart of a mediator, and the skills of a wonderful counselor.

And the rest of the world, whom God has barely touched at all in a personal way, nevertheless have many, many lessons of life engraved in their characters. Think Ghandi, Einstein, Gorbachev, Sagan; God will not throw away these souls, or the billions of anonymous people who have lived and died in the shadow of God’s hereditary “wrath” on the human race. (Notice, Christian believer, that “wrath” is something revealed to all people already — not something for the future. We’re children of wrath — born into it. But the wrath will one day be past, and then God’s mercy will endure forever.)

When brought back from the grave, everyone — everyone — will be able to pick up right where they left off, learning more about God and unlearning the negative things that habit and custom have led them into. No more deceptions will be allowed. Each will become productive, and spontaneous expressions of joy will sweep across the planet.

Glenn, I think that Christianity… following in Jesus’ footsteps — is indeed a rational hope for those of us whom God has called — revealed His grace to. It starts in our hearts and guides us toward heaven. It bends upward what inclines to grow downward.

But there is a rational hope for all the rest of the human race, too. It is a hope that is broad enough to allow for the random vicissitudes we see the groaning creation struggling under. If they were aborted before they were born, they have a hope of resurrection and life upon this earth. If they died in a Blacksburg classroom without Christ, they have a hope of resurrection and life upon this earth. If they will die next week from a car wreck in Boston, or a car bomb in Baghdad, they have a hope of resurrection that is as sure as the grace of God toward believers now.

Glenn, I urge you to consider the many texts of scripture which are so much broader, so much deeper, so much more hopeful, than the traditional Gospel which leaves the masses of mankind outside the family of God for all time.

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Two Flawed Prophets

25 Monday Dec 2006

Posted by in Brian McLaren, revolutionconference

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The Bible is full of material which challenges simplistic interpretations and this is one of them. It is a tale of two prophets: “the prophet from Judah” delivers a true prophecy that was fulfilled with accuracy more than three centuries later. The “old prophet from Bethel” transmits a lie that trips up the prophet of Judah, and then delivers a judgment message from God himself because of the younger prophet’s disobedience. It is a most unsettling story — almost reading like a divine sting operation in which the Almighty seeks to trick a faithful man, and then gives him a harsher penalty than the evil king he was sent to correct. (see 1 Kings 13)

I’ve been thinking about this one a long time, and as I was preparing some remarks about “listening to God” it finally dawned on me that this story is like a theatrical piece or screenplay illustrating the fact that all of God’s spokesmen are flawed characters. Except for Jesus, everyone who has ever spoken for God has had deep, fatal flaws that deserve God’s judgment, and no pronouncement or claim from anyone who teaches the Word can be relied upon withhout careful checking. No wonder James warns that teachers will have a severer judgment.

The prophet of Judah was brave and true, confronting king Jeroboam, who had introduced idolatry to the 10-tribe kingdom of Israel. When God gave him the message he was to present to Jeroboam, He also instructed the prophet of Judah (I’ll call him PJ) to go home a different direction, and not to eat food or water before he got home. PJ passed the first test when Jeroboam asked him to stay and dine. He also demonstrated one of the hallmarks of a true man of God, in that moments after he condemned Jeroboam for the most serious types of sins, and the wicked king had actually commanded his soldiers to seize the prophet for punishment, PJ became an intercessor on Jeoboam’s behalf, praying to God to release Jeroboam’s withered hand after God had frozen it in position. What a merciful man he was… instead of laughing at the King’s predicament and walking away from his misfortune, he used his close relationship with God to gain a reprieve for Jeroboam as soon as the king showed the slightest hint of repentance.

The old prophet — I’ll call him OP, heard of these remarkable acts of virtue and followed PJ until he overtook him as he rested in the shade of a mighty oak. No doubt PJ was famished — that’s a long journey to take without food and water — and the old man extended kindness to PJ, offering him some refreshment and a place to rest. At first PJ remained loyal to the instructions God had given him, but then, when OP told him he was a prophet too, and that an angel of the Lord had told him that he should indeed come home for a meal with him, PJ succumbed to the temptation and went home with OP. While they dined, the word of the Lord came to the Old Prophet, that PJ would die away from his father’s house, and be unburied. Sure enough, a lion came and killed him on the way home. OP heard of it and made the journey to the site, becoming a witness to a bizarre scene in which the lion stood there by the corpse, not eating the man or his donkey. In sorrow OP took PJ’s corpse to Bethel, and put him in his own grave, where not many years later he joined him in death. Their bones were mingled in death, according to the account.

Most of the commentaries I have read on this strange tale draw from it the idea that God is extremely intolerant of even the slightest deviation from His word … that if we are unfaithful in the least little detail, God will judge us harshly.

Here’s my take. Every spokesman for God is flawed. God knows this. So God has arranged that while we live, we must be each accountable to Him for what we see and know. If we see and know something to be true, a word from God, we are accountable to Him and no one else for our faithfulness to that revealed principle. On the other hand, we will constantly coexist with other brothers and sisters who are also prophets of God. They will have things they see and know that call attention to other truths, other dimensions of God’s plans and dealings that we are unaware of. We need to test what they say against the word of God.

I can hear one school of thought right now, saying “The point is, we dare not depart from the truths we have learned — we must be faithful to God!” From this perspective, the post=protestant initiative is like the lie of the Old Prophet, theatening to lead the “orthodox” into judgment. But that’s not what I see going on here. As I see it, the real problem in the church today is not that the emergent church is questioning and contradicting the word of God (although that does occur in places) but that what has been accepted as the word of God — the systematic theology of orthodox Christianity — has within it elements that never were part of the word of God and have always needed to be reexamined. Looking back at history, there have always been dissenting voices, challenging this or that orthodox position. And since the 4th century, the way those voices has been dealt with has been both ecclesiastical and political violence. Today the monopoly of orthodoxy is being undone by the shear volume of dissent and the ease with which dissenters can now communicate.

By flipping the script, as Brian put it at the Revolution conference, we can start to get a more complex, but more productive view of this process. God is speaking through multiple voices, each of which are flawed and as Pope put it, partial evils that make up together a universal good.

All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee;
All chance, direction, which thou canst not see
All discord, harmony not understood,
All partial evil, universal good:

How will we find out what is true, whether it be in eschatology or in our current practice? By remaining kind and diligent in pursuing dialog, study, testing, and conversation. By avoiding what Pope called “pride, reasoning pride”, — by listening to each other and rigorously retesting what we thought the Bible said, we can do better than merely tolerating paradox — we can arrive at broader, more kind and inclusive truths.

The old prophet was used by God to expose the weakness in the prophet of Judah. That’s the hard pill to swallow. Both were faithful men, though both had flaws. OP could have been talked to by a lying angel, the way we are warned that Satan will speak to all God’s people — as an Angel of Light. So whether what he said was a malicious lie, a “white lie” or fib to get him to be sensible and eat some food, or a case of unfortunate gullibility by the Old Prophet (believing a lying angel), his words became the occasion of stumbling which exposed the weakness of the prophet from Judah. One man’s flaw exposed another man’s flaw — just as iron sharpens iron. And OP loved PJ — he was saddened to have to be the agency which taught him a very hard lesson.

OP was a stone of stumbling to PJ. And by turns each of us in a Christian community is a stone of stumbling to the others. The bitter fact of our life in Christ, even with our closest friends and co-workers, is that we trip each other up. We have flawed friends whose flaws bring out our weaknesses, and yet which reveal to us either by precept or example, our own areas of sin.

Viewed in that way, I think the story of the two flawed prophets is a beautiful and realistic story — in the best Hollywood traditions of complicated characters whose interplay creates drama, struggle, and eventual resolution. What is the resolution here? Not some sort of frightful judgment of an angry and legalistic God, but a warm and loving picture of two men who struggled to accomplish God’s word in their lives, were partially successful and partially failures, but whose bones ended up together in death, awaiting a resurrection together by the kind Judge of all.

The principle of kindness over judgment is what all of us must use to get our eschatalogy into line with God’s love and fairness. To me, that’s the main goal of the emergent conversation, and I appreciate the efforts of Brian McLaren, Jim Henderson, Donald Miller, Geeorge Barna, and others who are contributing to this dialog today.

The Murky Marriage of Love and Truth

23 Saturday Dec 2006

Posted by in Brian McLaren, Emergent Conversation, Generous Orthodoxy

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In an interview by Next Wave, Brian McLaren defines the purpose of his book, A Generous Orthodoxy (which I am enjoying and have been responding to over the last few days):

In a sentence, A Generous Orthodoxy is an attempt to remarry two things that never should have been divorced — truth and love….

This reminds me of an old “Father Knows Best” episode in which the teenage daughter is trying to change her boyfriend’s character, and Robert Young says,”why don’t you try something easy, like moving the Rocky Mountains.”

Truth and beauty, even, would be a lot easier, as they do not require us to bend our minds to embrace what repulses us.

For all my adult life I have pursued Truth with a capital T. Sometime in my late 20s I started adding Love to that quest. This dual pursuit became for me the impossible dream, because Truth took me beyond the boundaries of my Christian upbringing, and began to make my concept of Love grow broader than was normal in my denomination. Truth and Love were at war, and the more I was able to reconcile them in my own mind and philosophy of Christian fellowship, the less my longtime brothers and sisters could handle it.

Initially, love seems to take the lead, arguing in defense of those who seem nice but don’t fit our “truth” definitions. For example, as a young man I learned this Joaquin Miller verse and kept it with me as a tolerance builder:

“In men whom men condemn as ill
I find so much of goodness still.
In men whom men pronounce divine
I find so much of sin and blot.
I do not dare to draw a line
Between the two, where God has not.”

It has only been in recent years that I have begun to discover how the Bible resolves its own seeming flip-flops in preference between Truth and Love..

It is indeed a murky area, where the ability to embrace paradoxes and to have a healthy degree of self-doubt seem to be pre-requisites for making progress.

Tomorrow I will explore the story of the Prophet from Judah who was killed by a lion for not obeying every detail of God’s word to him. Within that story, I believe, are some important clues as to why love and truth must learn to coexist within the emergent, unfinished, presently-divided Christian community.

My McLaren Colloquy: 4. The Faithful Remnant

23 Saturday Dec 2006

Posted by in Brian McLaren, Emergent Conversation, eschatology, orthodoxy, remnant

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Conversing with his friend Samir Vesna on pp 129-130 of A Generous Orthodoxy, Brian McLaren writes,

Restorationists… often refer to themselves, Samir says, as a remnant…. “We’re not small because we’re ineffective, or lazy, or ingrown, or otherwise unattractive; we’re small because we’re a faithful remnant! Everone else has compromised…. We’re the few, the committed, the faithful, the proud. (Oops.)…Samir has seen a lot of this remnant thinking in restorationist territory; he sees how destructive it is.”

McLaren goes on to mention how Samir preached about Moses, who was essentially offered the status of remnant by God when the nation of Israel lapsed into idolatry. Moses didn’t take the bait, but pleaded with God to preserve and continue investing in Israel, rather than starting over with Moses as a new patriarch. Moses, who really was a faithful remnant kind of guy, set an example for all who wish to be similarly faithful by showing a willingness to be sacrificial in his love, and eager to bless even the errant members of God’s heritage. McLaren concludes:

Samir asked his friends with a remnant mentality: what is a truly faithful remnant like? Its members do not turn inward in elite self-congratulation…. No, the faithful remnant “after God’s own heart” turns its heart others-wise, outward, toward the unfaithful, in loyalty and love. True faithfulness bonds the hearts of the faithful to their unfaithful neighbors.

If Christ’s faithful church is a “remnant”, it has been learning not to subscribe to the destructive, oppressive orthodoxy of earlier times. It has been “a generous orthodoxy” which is patient under injustice, hopeful that in due time God would bring justice; like Jesus, encouraging the bruised reeds and smoking flaxes of the world; — and pre-occupied with trying to get its own actions brought into harmony with God’s word and spirit.

My McLaren Colloquy: 3. New fields of opportunity

21 Thursday Dec 2006

Posted by in Brian McLaren, Generous Orthodoxy, orthodoxy

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On page 140 of A Generous Orthodoxy Brian McLaren writes:

When I imagine what a generous orthodoxy can become, I realize I must seek to honor both conservative and liberal heroism. And when I do, I want to consider myself both liberal and conservative. I must learn from their mistakes, and when I do, I don’t want to be boxed in either category. Instead they can look up for a higher way and look ahead to the new fields of opportunity and challenge that stretch from here to the horizon….

In my own journey I was once characterized as a liberal, and my response was that I am only liberal if one takes a rather narrow slice of conservatism.
That is the trouble with labels — they are snapshots taken by someone else, usually with a macro lens and with a specific point of view. And yet labels are the stuff that Protestantism consists of.

So I greatly appreciate, and strive to copy in my own ministry, the inclusive, kind, non-polemical, post-protestant spirit I observe in Brian, in Jim Henderson, and in other “Revolutionaries” I am meeting.

Where are these attitudes taking us? As Brian put it, into new fields of opportunity. New fields that were anticipated, as usual, by the Master himself.

Matthew records a most amazing promise, a signed blank check that empowers all followers of Jesus, whatever label they answer to:

And Jesus said to them, “Therefore every scribe who has become a disciple of the kingdom of heaven is like a head of a household, who brings out of his treasure things new and old

To me this means that any scribe or writer/teacher of the Word — (greek, grammateus) — is like a steward who is empowered to bring from the storehouse both old things and new. The old things, it seems to me, are what the Bible says directly, what we learn from the text itself … things that all disciples of Christ have seen more or less clearly. The new things, to my way of thinking, could be realizations about spiritual truths, about the fulfillment of prophecy in our own time, and insights into the character of God that come from our personal walk — meditations, interactions with others, etc. There is room here for the rational as well as the mystical/poetical insights that Brian writes about in the next chapter of AGO.

Knowing God is the very fountain and purpose of eternal life, and all who have experience with God, as students of his word, are enriched and empowered to record meaningful insights along their way. These are the sources of one type of the heroisms, plural, that Brian refers to (it seems to me), coming from both sides of the spiritual aisle.
Think of all the scribes, past and present, who have recorded their insights and yet whose works are lost to us because they were not part of our particular ism.

It is for this reason that I feel called to disregard sectarian fences and to pray to God for the strength to make the assembly and compilation and comparison of all these different heroic threads — writings from every Christian stream of thought — for the edification of the present and future generations of disciples. That is what my dream of the Grammateus Institute is all about.

For me, this is one of the great, new, fields of opportunity created by the convergence of Web 2.0 technology and an Emergent, Revolutionary ethos among Christian brothers and sisters.