Some Conference on Faith and History Highlights

This last week, on Thursday and Friday, I attended the Conference on Faith an History. Here are a few highlights from the sessions I attended.

Joseph Buck, an undergrad at John Brown University, presented a fascinating paper titled "Heaven with a Twist: The Eastern Orthodox View of Hell." Buck documented how modern Eastern Orthodox theologians tend to see hell as a condition internal to the sinner rather than as an external one that God imposes upon sinners. In short, sinners experience God's love as torment. God loves everyone equally in the afterlife, but since sinners choose to hate God, this love seems to them like agony. Some Orthodox theologians view God's love as remedial, meaning that over time these sinners may be healed and come to experience God as light rather than as fire. Other theologians feel that since the choice to hate God comes out of sinners' deepest selves, there will be no liberation from this condition. Buck also traced the outlines of this view in some of the church fathers, including Gregory of Nyssa, who was a universalist (and who even expected the eventual salvation of Satan). Obviously the Eastern view of Hell as an experience of God's love stands in contradistinction to the Western, Augustinian view of Hell as the absence of God. In the question and answer session I asked Mr. Buck how Eastern Orthodox theologians understand the judgment event described in Revelation. His answer seemed to imply that they understand it in a more metaphorical sense. Certainly they don't seem to understand judgment in terms of the imposition of reward or punishment.

Devin Wilkins, an undergrad at Covenant College, presented a paper titled "Billy Graham and the Fundamentalist-Evangelical Shift." Wilkins' thesis was essentially that in the 40's and 50's there was a shift within Evangelicalism from Fundamentalist hegemony to the prominence of the "New Evangelicals", and that Billy Graham is a microcosm of this shift. While Graham was initially a close friend and ally of Bob Jones and an administrator in an organization of Fundamentalist colleges, his networks began to shift in the 40's and 50's in some new directions, so that he found himself allied with Fuller Theological Seminary and was a major founder of Christianity Today. Although Graham did not deliberately break off his Fundamentalist ties, the Fundamentalists disapproved of the new direction he was taking. Bob Jones declared in the late 50's that Graham was doing "more harm to the Gospel than any other man."

Amber Thomas, a grad student at Wheaton College and a personal friend of mine, presented an excellent paper titled "Patriotism, Premillennialism, and Paranoia: The Misappropriation of Francis Schaeffer's Political Message." Amber's paper argued that the major popularizers of Francis Schaeffer's anti-humanist message, including Jerry Falwell, Tim LaHaye, and Schaeffer's own son, added elements to the message that were not originally part of it and of which Schaeffer privately did not approve. In particular, Falwell was pairing his critique of secular humanism with an unbridled patriotism, which Schaeffer felt ran the danger of wrapping Christianity in the flag. LaHaye mixed Schaeffer's message with a pre-millennial apocalypticism that played no determinative role for Schaeffer himself. While there are ambiguities in Schaeffer's own works and he misguidedly argued for America's Christian founding, Schaeffer was not arguing for Christian dominion over the state. Too often, Amber feels, Schaeffer has been interpreted through the interpretive lenses provided by his friends, whom he was reluctant to publicly disapprove but with whom he also did not entirely agree.

Noah Blan, a Wheaton College undergrad and another good friend of mine, presented a paper titled "The 'Wall of Separation': Thomas Jefferson's Testament to Freedom of Conscience and the Principles of Federalism in the Political Context of the Election of 1800." Noah argued that Thomas Jefferson's famous reference to a "wall of separation" between church and state, though it has been seized upon as dogma by some modern political philosophers, was not intended by Jefferson to be a rote formula or dogma. It was written within a particular political context, in a letter intended to assure the Danbury Baptists that their religious liberties would not be infringed under the government of the new Republic. For British Dissenters, this was a hot issue: they had long lived under the Test and Corporation Acts in Britain, which imposed penalties upon them for refusing to participate in the established Anglican Church. Jefferson hoped to communicate that this absolutely would not be the case under the new Republic. What Jefferson was not trying to say, however, was that religion and government must be hermetically sealed categories of American life. He would not have opposed prayer in the Senate, for example. The phrase "wall of separation", in fact, was not Jefferson's own; it was used in the 17th c. by Roger Williams and again by James Berg in the 18th. If Jefferson borrowed it from Berg, then we should not assume too much reflection on his part as to its implications for the distant future. During the question and answer session, an interesting question was asked by a Canadian in the audience: why do we look to our Founders as though they had all the answers? Is this really a legitimate practice? One audience member suggested that this is our Protestant primitivism influencing our politics. A panelist, however, offered the explanation that the Founders' vision worked, and also makes up an important part of our identity as Americans. It is only natural that we should look to the roots of our society for answers to current questions.

Majida Hicks, a third fellow-student of Wheaton College, offered a paper titled "The Politics of Religion: Tension and Turmoil between Egyptian Copts and Muslims." Ms. Hicks was born and raised in Palestine, and so was uniquely situated to rehearse for the audience the very tumultuous history of Muslim-Coptic relations in Egypt. Modern Copts are, to say the least, in a very precarious position. They remain culturally very Egyptian, but are totally alienated from the Muslim majority. On the other side, they face disapproval from a growing Evangelical minority. Copts are watching with great consternation as their young people convert to both Islam and Evangelicalism.

Kyle Welty, who if I understood correctly is a Ph.D candidate at Baylor University, presented a very interesting paper titled "A Folk Theologian's Forays into Science: John Wesley's Scientific Thought as Revealed in Select Writings." Mr. Welty discussed some of John Wesley's scientific writings, which in fact were mostly compendiums of excerpts. Wesley critiqued the physicians of his day on the basis of a populist epistemology of experience. Instead of scientific remedies, Wesley advocated common-sense, home-grown remedies that had emerged out of the experience of everyday communities. Wesley pointed to Locke's Essay on Human Understanding as evidence that while science can catalogue empirical facts, such as the existence of disease and the efficaciousness of remedies, it cannot access the more remote causes of these observed realities. Along with idealist philosophy and metaphysics, Wesley rejected scientific theories and the inductive method. Interestingly enough, Wesley's catalogue of remedies included "electrification" for a variety of ailments, and he frequently indicated that he had tried this remedy for himself and found it effective!

And finally, there was my own paper, the proposal for which I have posted before.

I heard a number of other papers while I was at the conference, but the above struck me as the most interesting.