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One of Gerhard Forde’s distinctive contributions was his thinking on the work of Christ. His essay by that name appears in Braaten and Jenson’s Christian Dogmatics. He also discusses it in several essays in the collection A More Radical Gospel. His essay “Caught in the Act: Reflections on the Work of Christ” can be found here.

Forde says that the problem with the traditional theories of the atonement (Anselmian satisfaction, Abelardian moral exemplar, and Christus Victor) is that they direct our attention away from the murder of Jesus by making his death an element in a system or theory that purports to show why it was “necessary.” For instance, Jesus’ death was necessary to “satisfy” God’s justice or wrath or honor, or it was necessary to provide us with an example of perfect love, or to defeat the demonic powers that hold us in thrall. But, he says, these explanations always prompt the question why it was necessary for God’s Son to suffer and die to attain these goals. Why couldn’t God just up and forgive sins? Or why couldn’t God simply put the demons out of commission?

Furthermore, all these theories tend to exculpate us from responsibility for Jesus’ death. Satisfaction theories make it look like the problem is on God’s side and that he needs to be changed or have something done to or for him before he can forgive us. In the Christus Victor scheme human responsibility threatens to drop out of the picture altogether since it’s the demonic powers that God needs to defeat. Or in the Abelardian theory Jesus’ death is an edifying example:

How can God possibly be “justified” in sending his Son into this world to be cruelly murdered at our hands just to provide an example of what everybody already knew anyway? If the cross does not actually accomplish anything new, is not the price too great? Is not a God who would do such a thing fully as thoughtless and cruel as the God of vicarious satisfaction? Those who push the “subjective” view rarely entertain such questions. No doubt because of the terror and cruelty of the actual event as well as our implication in it, it has been quietly forgotten. Since it is “necessary” or at least understandable on moral or like grounds, we are (more or less) exonerated. We can sit back and admire the event that took place on Golgotha! It was so impressive!

[…]

In sum, each of the major types of atonement theory tends to obscure the truth of the murder of Jesus in the very attempt to convey its “meaning” and “significance” to us. As a matter of fact and not just coincidentally, the theories seem to defeat their own purpose: they tend to alienate rather than to reconcile. In attempting to explain the “necessity” for the death of Jesus by taking it up in the schemes suggested, God’s “reputation” is endangered, not enhanced. Why should a God who is by nature merciful demand satisfaction? Is a God who consigns his Son to an excruciating death just to provide an example of what everyone already knew really a “loving Father”? If God is God, could not the defeat of demonic powers have been accomplished without the painful death? In other words, “was this trip really necessary?”

So we come back to our original question: Why the murder of the innocent one? What does that accomplish for us—or for God? What is “the word” of Christ? What does he actually do for us that God could not have done with greater ease and economy in some other way? The crucial and persistent question emerging from discussion of the various views seems always to be that of the necessity for the concrete and actual work of Christ among us. It is, of course, ultimately the question of the necessity for Christology at all. Cannot God just up and forgive and/or cast out demons? Or to use another current form of the question: Is there not grace aplenty in the Old Testament? Or in nature? Or in other religions even? Why Jesus? Why the New Testament?

Forde suggests that, rather than trying to show how the Cross was “necessary” according to the dictates of a particular theory, we need to take a closer look at the events themselves to see if an understanding of what God was up to suggests itself. We should start “from below” by asking what did Jesus, concretely, do from our point of view before we ask what the events mean from God’s point of view.

For instance, many atonement theories ask why God couldn’t simply up and forgive sins. But, Forde points out, this is precisely what Jesus did!

Why could not God just up and forgive? Let us start there. If we look at the narrative about Jesus, the actual events themselves, the “brute facts” as they have come down to us, the answer is quite simple. He did! Jesus came preaching repentance and forgiveness, declaring the bounty and mercy of his “Father.” The problem, however, is that we could not buy that. And so we killed him. And just so we are caught in the act. Every mouth is stopped once and for all. All the pious talk about our yearning and desire for reconciliation and forgiveness, etc., all our complaint against God is simply shut up. He came to forgive and we killed him for it; we would not have it. It is as simple as that.

From this point of view it seems that Jesus was not killed because of God’s wrath but because of our wrath! The offer of unconditional forgiveness and grace is a threat to us. Why? Because, says Forde, it upsets the order by which we have learned to run things in this world. Our life is run according to certain rules, what you might call a law of karma, you get what’s coming to you. You play by the rules and you succeed, but if not you’re a loser, a bad apple. By offering unconditional mercy Jesus threatens the foundation of that order.

But why did we kill him? It was, I expect we must say, a matter of “self-defense.” Jesus came not just to teach about the mercy and forgiveness of God but actually to do it, to have mercy and to forgive unconditionally. It is an act, not an idea. That is his “work.” That is the New Testament. He came to do “what he sees the Father doing” (John 5:19). Now we are, no doubt, quite open, generally, to the idea of mercy and forgiveness in God and his “heaven,” but actually doing it here for God is quite another matter—especially if it is the absolutely free and unconditional having mercy and forgiving of the sovereign God who ups and has mercy on whom he will have mercy! How can one actually do that here? How can this world survive, how can we survive if mercy and forgiveness are just given unconditionally? The idea is nice, but what shall we do with one who actually eats with traitors, whores, outcasts, and riff-raff of every sort and just blows away our protests by saying, “They that are whole need not a physician. but they that are sick”? Actually doing it, giving it unconditionally just seems to us terribly reckless and dangerous. It shatters the “order” by which we must run things here.

This shows why it is we who are the obstacle to reconciliation, not God. Our way of doing things is threatened by Christ coming and having mercy on sinnners in his rather reckless fashion. Forde doesn’t make the connection, but this reminds me of Simone Weil’s meditations on gravity and grace. For Weil, “gravity” names the forces that operate in this fallen world – everything that exists operates by a kind of compulsion to expand and dominate other things. “Grace” on the other hand, is the power of self-restraint, of allowing other beings to be themselves, respecting their freedom. According to Weil, the cross is where the forces of gravity come together to crush an agent of grace.

Diogenes Allen explains Weil’s view of the Cross:

With this conception of gravity and grace, we can now present Weil’s conception of the Cross. Creation is an act of love because it involves God’s voluntary renunciation as the only existent. The Cross is the great act of Jesus’ renunciation of himself. He is the victim of the forces of gravity-the forces of self-expansion, the forces of self- aggrandizement which moved the empire of the Romans and moved the various aspirations of the Jewish people. These forces, of gravity, which make a complex pattern of interlocking, conflicting systems, catch him up within their workings and crush him. He does not know why he must feel the presence of his Father leave him as he is crushed by them. Although feeling forsaken, he remains obedient to the order of grace. He lays his life down humbly instead of following the route of selfassertion.

That his death was understood by his disciples to have been humbly accepted by him is indicated by the verse, “No one takes it [my life] from me. I lay it down of my own accord” (Jn. 10: 18). It was caused by the actions of gravity, but in the grip of gravity’s vise, he yields himself up voluntarily. He accepts his vulnerability to the forces of gravity and to this event in particular which is brought on by their action, because he believes they are under the power, wisdom, and love of his Father. He therefore dies as a member of the order of grace, not as a slave to gravity. The love of the Creator- the love which restrained itself for the sake of the world’s existence-is answered from the Cross by the Son. The Son restrains his own will by yielding it to the forces of a created universe that operates by gravity. In that crushing vise, he yields himself in faith that all this came from the Father for our sakes.

Weil’s “gravity,” it seems to me, is very similar to Forde’s “the ‘order’ by which we must run things here.” For someone to come into that order offering grace is to surrender any levers he might have for manipulating or controlling others. This, according to Forde, gives us a clue as to why God couldn’t have had mercy on us any other way:

If what we have been saying about the murder of Jesus by us is at all the case, then God’s “problem” comes more immediately into view. God’s “problem” is not that he can’t be merciful until he has been satisfied but rather that he won’t be satisfied until he succeeds in actually having mercy on whom he will have mercy. God, that is, won’t be satisfied until he succeeds in actually giving the concrete, unconditional forgiving he intends. As we can see from Jesus, God’s problem is how actually to have mercy on a world which will not have it. The question for God is whether he can really succeed in getting through to a people which likes the idea of forgiveness but doesn’t want an actual forgiver, a world which turns everything God purposes to do into a theory with which to protect itself from him. God’s problem is just how actually to have mercy, how to get through to us.

[…]

if this is the problem, God can do nothing about it in the abstract. Here is at least the beginning of the answer, it would seem, to why God could not do it in any other way. He cannot have mercy on us in the abstract. As abstraction he is always a terror to us, hidden, wrathful. The idea that he has mercy on whom he will have mercy is, as idea, the most frightening thing of all. We may twist and turn to change the idea, but all we will come up with then is that he has mercy on those who fulfill the necessary requirements. We just go out of the frying pan into the fire. The problem is simply that as abstraction God is absent from us and we are inexorably “under wrath.” Even God can do nothing about that—except to come to us. If the problem is absence, the only solution is presence. The only solution to the terror of the idea of one who has mercy on whom he will have mercy is actually to come and have mercy. The act must actually be done. The only solution to the problem of the absolute, we might say, is actual absolution!

For Jesus to come as the agent who does God’s mercy (rather than just to teach about it) makes him vulnerable to the sinful human beings who rebel at such a thing. This suggest why God allows Jesus to be killed by us:

Why does God abandon Jesus to be murdered by us? The answer, it would seem, must lie in that very unconditional love and mercy he intends to carry out in act. God, I would think we can assume, knows full well that he is a problem for us. He knows that unconditional love and mercy is “the end” of us, our conditional world. He knows that to have mercy on whom he will have mercy can only appear as frightening, as wrath, to such a world. He knows we would have to die to all we are before we could accept it. But he also knows that that is our only hope, our only salvation. So he refuses to be wrath for us. He refuses to be the wrath that is resident in all our conditionalism. He can indeed be that, and is that apart from the work of Christ. But he refuses ultimately to be that. Thus, precisely so as not to be the wrathful God we seem bent on having, he dies for us, “gets out of the way” for us. Unconditional love has no levers in a conditional world. He is obedient unto death, the last barrier, the last condition we cannot avoid, “that the scriptures might be fulfilled”—that God will have mercy on whom he will have mercy. As “God of wrath” he submits to death for us; he knows he must die for us. That is the only way he can be for us absolutely, unconditionally. But then, of course, there must be resurrection to defeat that death, lest our conditionalism have the last word.

Or we can put it another way. Jesus came to forgive sin unconditionally for God. Our sin, our unbelief, consists precisely in the fact that we cannot and will not tolerate such forgiveness. So we move to kill him. There is nothing for him to do then but to die “for our sins,” “on our behalf,” “give his life a ransom for many.” For him to stop and ask us to “shape up” would be to deny the forgiveness he came to give, to put conditions on the unconditional. Thus he must “bear our sins in his body”—not theoretically in some fashion, but actually. He is beaten, spit upon, mocked, wasted. That is, perhaps we can say, the only way for him to “catch us in the act.” The resurrection is, therefore, the vindication of Jesus’ life and proclamation of forgiveness, God’s insistence that unconditional forgiveness be actually given “in Jesus’ name.” To accept such forgiveness is to die to the old and be made new in him. His death is, therefore, our death. As Paul put it, Christ “has died for all; therefore, all have died” (2 Cor 5:14). One should not mistake this for a “subjective” view of the atonement. We are speaking of the death of the old, not a mere alteration of the continuously existing subject. Christ’s work is to realize the will of God to have mercy unconditionally, and thus to make new beings and bring in the new age. The “New Testament” is that since Jesus has been raised, this will is now to be proclaimed to all, actually done, delivered, given, to the end that faith be created, new beings created. Christ has died “once for all,” all people, all time. To be sure, it is a dangerous message in this age. Either we kill it by our endless qualifications and conditionalisms (and thus crucify Christ again) or it kills us and makes us new in faith and hope and love. But having died once to sin, he dies no more! The deed is done!

For Forde, then, the “why” of the Cross is rooted firmly in God’s determination to have mercy on us, to forgive our sins, and to re-create us anew. As he says, Christ “actualizes” God’s will to come to us and to concretely have mercy unconditionally. This work is carried on by the Church where it offers pardon and healing to sinners by Christ’s authority in its proclamation of the Gospel and administration of the Sacraments. This understanding of the atonement is consistent with Forde’s conviction that the Gospel is a radical message, one that is scandalous to a world build on “conditionalism.”

Prolific Lutheran theologian Gerhard O. Forde has died. Forde’s signature theme was to call for a return to the “radical gospel” of the Reformation, especially as found in Luther – that is, the Gospel proclaimed as an unconditional promise of pardon for sinners. Prof. Forde taught for many years at Luther Seminary in St. Paul.

I only recently discovered Forde’s work, but can heartily recommend his Where God Meets Man, which is a kind of primer on theology from a Lutheran perspective, as well as the collection A More Radical Gospel: Essays on Eschatology, Authority, Atonement, and Ecumenism.

Several of Forde’s essays are available online at the archives of Word & World.

Christianity Today has launched a new weblog written by bioethicist Nigel M. de S. Cameron that will focus on “issues of life: creating it, ending it, enhancing it, and treating it properly.”

To say that religion and science can’t come into conflict should not, in my view, be taken to mean that there are “two truths” or that science deals with the world of “facts” while religion deals with “values” or “meaning.” Both purport to give us information about the world; that is, both make truth claims. The difference, I think, is that science limits its scope to the investigation of natural phenomena using a certain method and set of assumptions which, by definition exclude God and the supernatural.

Science investigates reality insofar as it is measurable, quantifiable, and subject to prediction (and ultimately control). Necessarily, then, it excludes from its purview anything not measurable, quantifiable, and subject to prediction. And surely that includes things like God, the soul, angels, demons, and any other supernatural entities that may or may not exist. Science, qua science, simply tells us nothing about whether these things exist, unless they have effects in the phenomenal world that are subject to its methods of investigation.

The problem arises, it seems to me, when this methodological limitation is taken to outline the limits of reality itself. Then you get scientism, which says that only that which science investigates is really real and that science, at least ideally, gives us an exhaustive account of reality. The method has become an epistemology and a metaphysics. On its own terms, though, science seems to be compatible with a variety of metaphysical outlooks. One can be a theist, a materialist, or a Berkeleyean idealist and still accept all the established findings of science. As Huston Smith, I think, once said, taking science to be an exhaustive account of reality is like mistaking an increasingly detailed map of Illinois for a map of the entire United States.

Which is not to say that there might not be interesting “border disputes” where it isn’t clear what the best method of investigation is. It has, for instance, long been supposed that there is something transcendent about the human mind, that it isn’t entirely enmeshed in the nexus of cause and effect that science studies. However, science has made some fairly impressive inroads into the study of the mind, though hardly to the same degree as in its study of the physical world. I doubt there is anyone who would argue that we are even close to offering an exhaustive scientific account of the mind. Notably, John Paul II, while accepting evolution in broad outline, still thought that direct divine intervention was necessary to account for the existence of the human soul. And atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel has recently argued that rationality itself cannot be accounted for in purely naturalistic terms (in a way that harks back to C.S. Lewis’ “argument from reason.”). It seems the jury is still out on that one.

But God, at least as Christianity and other monotheistic faiths conceive of God, belongs to a different order of being altogether. He is not a phenomena among other phenomena that can be investigated with the methods of science. Or, to put it in the language of ontology, he is not a being among beings, but being-itself. The web of phenomena that science studies owes its existence to him. This suggests that, if we’re to know God at all, it will be by a very different means than the methods of science.

Salon has an interview with philosopher Michael Ruse, an agnostic with a keen interest in the evolutionism-creationism debate. While thinking the creationism (and Intelligent Design) is bunk, Ruse nevertheless thinks that “evolutionism” (the materialistic worldview, as distinct from evolution or scientific theories about evolution) has become a kind of psuedo-religion in its own right.

Ruse is drawing a crucial distinction between evolutionary science, narrowly considered — which need not have any religious or spiritual consequences — and evolutionism, the secular, atheistic religion he says often accompanies and enfolds Darwinism. Leading evolutionists like Dawkins, Ruse believes, have failed to draw clear distinctions between the two, and have led many to believe that Darwinian science is fatally allied to an arrogant atheism and a hostile caricature of religious belief. In essence, Ruse believes that fundamentalist evolutionists like Dawkins and W.D. Hamilton hold similar beliefs to fundamentalist creationists — both sides would agree that Darwinism is a “dark theology” that removes ultimate meaning and purpose from the universe and augurs the death of God.

You might say that, in this new book, Ruse is calling for a Reformation within the church of evolutionism. He himself honors the truth claims of science and is “a hell of a lot closer” to atheism than to religious belief. But he thinks evolutionists must purge themselves of reflexive anti-religious fervor, and acknowledge at least the potential validity of the classic Augustinian position that science and theology can never directly contradict one another, since science can only consider nature and God, by definition, is outside nature. Without this consciousness, Ruse suggests, evolutionism is in fact a secular religion, a church without Christ.

I like this bit:

Creationists will describe evolution as a “dark theology,” a view of life as a meaningless process driven by death and extinction. To what extent do evolutionists themselves agree with that?

There are those who think just that. It’s not just Dawkins. The idea that life is driven basically by chance and necessity is a fairly popular refrain. Not all of them come across that way. Someone like Edward O. Wilson, who has no more theological belief than Dawkins, nevertheless sets out to present a very optimistic, humanist position. It’s like Christians: You know, Calvinists present one hell of a dark picture. On the other hand, you have a few drinks with Martin Luther and you go home pissed as a newt and with a lot of funny, dirty stories.

Interesting analysis from Michael Lind:

Can the Democratic Party regain the kind of majority enjoyed by the New Deal Democrats between the 1930s and the 1960s? Not an occasional bare majority, but the kind of solid, enduring majority that permits the passage of major legislation?

The answer is yes–but only if the Democratic Party ceases to be defined by social liberalism. As a social liberal party with economic liberal and economic conservative wings, the Democrats are doomed to perpetual minority status. As an economic liberal party with social conservative and social liberal wings, the Democrats might have a chance–but only if the social conservative Democrats outnumber the social liberal Democrats in the Democratic Party itself.

This is the conclusion Lind comes to after crunching the numbers on where the American electorate is. Basically, he says, the American people are center-right on social & cultural issues and center-left on economic issues.

Read the rest here.

Interesting piece from the Miami Herald (via Hit & Run):

Today marks the 60th anniversary of the atomic destruction of the Japanese city of Hiroshima during World War II.

Americans reflect on this event in sharply differing ways. Some Americans recall the event with shame and express their hope that nuclear weapons never be used again. Others firmly believe that the use of atomic bombs saved American lives by ending the war prior to a bloody American invasion of Japan.

More challenging to consider is whether it was an unjustifiable act in a fully justified war.

Those who believe that the bomb’s use was justified often label their opponents ”pacifists,” ”1960s radicals,” ”bleeding-heart liberals” or ”revisionists.” These epithets merely delay the day when Americans will consider the import of having used nuclear weapons.

Our failure to grapple fully with the ethical questions stemming from our use of mass violence against civilians has meant that we unwittingly endorse an act that some would consider state terror.

We rightly expect Germany and Japan to confront painful episodes from their participation in World War II. Now it’s our turn.

Conservatives today are the natural candidates to take the lead in confronting our most painful episode from the war, because they were once among the most vocal critics of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Consider the following: On Aug. 8, 1945, two days after the bombing, former Republican President Herbert Hoover wrote to a friend that “the use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul.”

Days later, David Lawrence, the conservative owner and editor of U.S. News (now U.S. News & World Report), argued that Japan’s surrender had been inevitable without the atomic bomb. He added that justifications of ”military necessity” will “never erase from our minds the simple truth that we, of all civilized nations . . . did not hesitate to employ the most destructive weapon of all times indiscriminately against men, women and children.”

Just weeks after Japan’s surrender, an article published in the conservative magazine Human Events contended that America’s atomic destruction of Hiroshima might be morally ”more shameful” and ”more degrading” than Japan’s ”indefensible and infamous act of aggression” at Pearl Harbor.

Such scathing criticism on the part of leading American conservatives continued well after 1945. A 1947 editorial in the Chicago Tribune, at the time a leading conservative voice, claimed that President Truman and his advisors were guilty of ”crimes against humanity” for “the utterly unnecessary killing of uncounted Japanese.”

In 1948, Henry Luce, the conservative owner of Time, Life and Fortune, stated that ‘if, instead of our doctrine of `unconditional surrender,’ we had all along made our conditions clear, I have little doubt that the war with Japan would have ended soon without the bomb explosion which so jarred the Christian conscience.”

A steady drumbeat of conservative criticism continued throughout the 1950s. A 1958 editorial in William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review took former President Truman to task for his then-current explanation of why he had decided to drop an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima. The editors asked the question that ‘ought to haunt Harry Truman: `Was it really necessary?’ ”

Could a demonstration of the bomb and an ultimatum have ended the war? The editors challenged Truman to provide a satisfactory answer. Six weeks later the magazine published an article harshly critical of Truman’s atomic bomb decision.

Two years later, David Lawrence informed his magazine’s readers that it was ”not too late to confess our guilt and to ask God and all the world to forgive our error” of having used atomic weapons against civilians. As a 1959 National Review article matter-of-factly stated: “The indefensibility of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima is becoming a part of the national conservative creed.”

But times change. In recent decades most American conservatives have become uncritical of America’s use of atomic weapons and dismissive of anyone who holds a contrary view.

Conservative publications now routinely defend Truman’s atomic bomb decision. Critics of his decision, to quote from a representative National Review editorial from 1987, are “wrong, and profoundly offensive to all Americans and Japanese who died in that war, and to those Americans who still possess the ability to think.”

Sixty years after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, we have an opportunity to grapple anew with the questions surrounding that event. American conservatives should renew their earlier, deeply held ethical criticism of the Hiroshima bombing instead of promoting the inaccurate but politically convenient view that criticism of the atomic bombing can come only from the Left. Their response will not only tell us much about contemporary American conservatism; it will also determine whether we finally can have an honest debate about Hiroshima’s destruction.

Relatedly, Brandon at Siris had an interesting post on Catholic philosopher G.E.M. Anscombe, who protested Oxford’s granting of an honorary degree to President Truman on the grounds that the bombings constituted mass murder. Anscombe, who criticized pacifism and engaged in Operation Rescue-style sit-ins at abortion clinics, was certainly no bleeding-heart liberal, but a strict adherent to just war theory.

Doug Bandow writes:

I don’t think it is Clinton bashing to point out that President Clinton side-stepped the UN because he knew he could not win Security Council approval. I opposed both the Kosovo and Iraq wars, but in my view at least the latter arguably involved fundamental U.S. security interests, and could be solved by no one else. Kosovo was a tragic civil war, not unlike dozens elsewhere around the globe, but Milosevic was a bit player with no capacity to harm America. And the Europeans were capable of acting if they desired to do so. So the argument for acting without international sanction there was far weaker than in Iraq. (Of course, the ultimate consequences of the Iraq war are proving to be far more deleterious.)

Moreover, I believe that Kosovo was more important than Iraq in encouraging countries like India, Iran, and North Korea to develop or expand nuclear arsenals. It was Kosovo that dramatically demonstrated there were two categories of countries: those which bomb and those which get bombed. If you wanted to get into the first category, developing nukes was your best strategy. The Bush administration’s attack on Iraq has reinforced this lesson for any state that might have missed it the first time around.

A lot of the criticisms of the Bush administration have focused on the “neocons” or “the Christian Right” or some other nefarious cabal that has allegedly “hijacked” U.S. foreign policy and altered it in some fundamental or radical sense. However, it was Madeline Albright, recall, who referred to the U.S. as the world’s “indispensable nation” and asked Colin Powell “What’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” And any Democrat who is likely to be nominated in 2008 will almost certainly be from the “hawkish” wing of the party (this most certainly includes Sen. Clinton, who has long favored the judicious use of the cluster bomb).

Uh oh, if this gets out it could really wreak havoc with political fundraising:

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the rate of family violence in this country has dropped by more than half since 1993. I’ve been trying to figure out why.
A lot of the credit has to go to the people who have been quietly working in this field: to social workers who provide victims with counseling and support; to women’s crisis centers, which help women trapped in violent relationships find other places to live; to police forces and prosecutors, who are arresting more spouse-beaters and putting them away.

The Violence Against Women Act, which was passed in 1994, must have also played a role, focusing federal money and attention.

But all of these efforts are part of a larger story. The decline in family violence is part of a whole web of positive, mutually reinforcing social trends. To put it in old-fashioned terms, America is becoming more virtuous. Americans today hurt each other less than they did 13 years ago. They are more likely to resist selfish and shortsighted impulses. They are leading more responsible, more organized lives. A result is an improvement in social order across a range of behaviors.

The decline in domestic violence is of a piece with the decline in violent crime over all. Violent crime over all is down by 55 percent since 1993 and violence by teenagers has dropped an astonishing 71 percent, according to the Department of Justice.

The number of drunken driving fatalities has declined by 38 percent since 1982, according to the Department of Transportation, even though the number of vehicle miles traveled is up 81 percent. The total consumption of hard liquor by Americans over that time has declined by over 30 percent.

Teenage pregnancy has declined by 28 percent since its peak in 1990. Teenage births are down significantly and, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, the number of abortions performed in the country has also been declining since the early 1990’s.

Fewer children are living in poverty, even allowing for an uptick during the last recession. There’s even evidence that divorce rates are declining, albeit at a much more gradual pace. People with college degrees are seeing a sharp decline in divorce, especially if they were born after 1955.

I could go on. Teenage suicide is down. Elementary school test scores are rising (a sign than more kids are living in homes conducive to learning). Teenagers are losing their virginity later in life and having fewer sex partners. In short, many of the indicators of social breakdown, which shot upward in the late 1960’s and 1970’s, and which plateaued at high levels in the 1980’s, have been declining since the early 1990’s.

More…

I freely admit to not knowing that much about the whole “emergent” church phenomenon, but if this article is at all accurate, it really is starting to sound like a re-hash of liberal Protestantism. Or liberal Protestantism with jangly rock guitars, a more casual dress code, and some faux-medieval trappings.

The two elements that stand out are an emphasis on “social activism” over a narrow focus on individual salvation (it’s interesting how the evangelical Right gets criticized both for not being concerned enough about politics and for being too concerned about politics!), and a focus on “following Jesus” rather than the “rules and doctrines” of the institutional church. But isn’t this just liberal Protestantism in a nutshell? Though it styles itself as a movement “that rejects what it sees as the rigidity of the religious right and the timidity of liberal mainline churches,” it’s hard to see anything radically new here.

And despite all the postmodern mumbo-jumbo, the idea of peeling away “doctrine and rules and just loving people” in order to uncover the essential kernel of Christianity is the quintessential modern project. Will emergent leaders start writing books about how the “simple faith” of Jesus was obscured by the theological chicanery of Paul who excessively Hellenized (or Judaized, depending on the critic) Jesus’ message of brotherly love?

(Also, from a Lutheran point of view it’s worth pointing out that simply telling people to “follow Jesus” is a classic confusion of Law and Gospel. If you keep telling people they should be like Jesus without preaching the Gospel you threaten to simply terrify consciences and leave people in their sins. As Luther liked to say, Christ must be received as a gift before he can be followed as an example.)

It’s hard not to see the notorious American evangelical penchant for ignoring history at work here. Will this just be an evangelical recapitulation of the history of liberal Protestantism, or will it result in a genuinely new form of Christianity for the 21st century? And do we need such a thing?