Daily Archives: June 1, 2011

It’s summer in the city: No parking, no access, nobody in church

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Getting to church on Sunday was an adventure. We knew that we would not have access to the parking spaces in our alley because of the Madison Marathon. I decided to take the bus. It became clear to me after a lengthy detour through the UW hospitals and several calls to the dispatcher, that the bus driver wasn’t clear on how she would get over to the eastside of Madison. When she came to a stop, forced by the advancing marathoners, I asked to be let out. It was the corner of Marion St. and W. Johnson. I too had to deal with the marathon course, but by the time I made it to W. Washington, the vast majority of runners had passed me and I was able to pick my way through the stragglers.

Attendance was awful, about a third of what we usually get on a Sunday. Most people didn’t try to make it, and those who did arrived quite late. It was the second of three consecutive Sundays on which parts of Capitol Sq. would be closed. This coming Sunday, June 5, is “Ride the Drive.” Street closures, parades, art fairs, are all part of the price of being located on the Square, but all of that means that our worshiping community shrinks on such occasions. But as one parishioner said to me, he felt rather sheepish complaining about a few blocks’ walk to church when he thought of what Christians in previous centuries had to do to worship together, and what they suffered for the faith.

On one level, such difficulties are another sign of the peripheral role played in culture by religion. We are not consulted about street closures or asked whether we are inconvenienced. Some years and with some events, it is impossible to learn before the day of the event itself, whether or how we will be impacted.

So I received the news that Madison’s new mayor, Paul Soglin, has cancelled the second “Ride the Drive” event with mixed feelings. I’m all for getting people downtown, especially on a Sunday, and I am eager to think creatively about how we might engage people who have come for such events. But at the same time, they create enormous inconvenience for many of our members, especially the elderly, who need to park in close proximity to the church, and are in special need of the relationships and human contact that they find in church each week.

My issue is not with the events themselves, but with the organizers who do not seem interested in how those who live, work, and worship in the downtown might be affected by their events, and especially the cumulative effect on morale and quality of life of week after week filled with such activities.

 

 

The Search for the Historical Adam

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Now that the dust has settled over universal salvation, it seems Evangelicals are going to war over “the historical Adam.” Here’s Christianity Today’s cover story on the matter. It seems faculty at Calvin College are under investigation for having publicly questioned whether Adam ever existed; scholars elsewhere have lost their jobs. For those of us on the outside, the question whether Adam and Eve once lived and were the progenitors of all of humanity may seem a bit silly. The scientific evidence is clear–the human genome is virtually identical with the genome of Chimpanzees and it seems that we are descended from a community of at least several thousand hominids, not two.

But it’s not just the historical (and scientific) accuracy of Genesis at stake. If Adam never existed then Pauline theology is in trouble, and if Pauline theology goes, then what remains of the whole Reformed edifice? If Adam never existed, then humans didn’t inherit sin from him, and our shared fallenness can’t be redeemed, needn’t be redeemed by Jesus Christ

Much of the work trying to flesh out the theological implications of contemporary science for Evangelicalism is followed on the BioLogos website, founded by Francis Collins. Their take on this controversy is here:  http://biologos.org/blog/biologos-and-the-june-2011-christianity-today-cover-story/.

We might be tempted to laugh at this controversy, just as many of us laughed at the Rapture theology of Harold Camping, but there are significant implications for traditional theology and to the extent that contemporary Christian theology, and churches, like the Episcopal Church, claim continuity with the past, there are implications for us as well.

One of the reasons I am so fascinated by scientific advances in the understanding human beings, especially neuroscience, is that it challenges traditional notions of human nature-the body/soul dichotomy, for example. It is incumbent on us to develop a robust theology that remains faithful to the tradition, but also takes into account these scientific discoveries. If we can’t make our imagery and symbolism meaningful for the twenty-first century, we will no longer be able to help people orient themselves in the world and in their own lives. We will sound like we are speaking in a foreign language, describing a fantasy world.