William Sloane Coffin

William Sloane Coffin died last week. The former Yale chaplain and pastor at Riverside Church in New York City was a leader in two major social movements during the 1960s, the fight for civil rights by African-Americans, and the anti-Vietnam War actions later in the same decade.

Certainly, he was more than just a man who translated belief into social action. He was also a theologian who encouraged his followers to discuss their beliefs, to study and ask questions about faith, to treat it as a journey, not a set of inflexible dogma.

Here’s an excerpt from Letters to a Young Doubter, one of his last books, published in 2005:

I think self-righteousness is the bane of human relations, of all of them – interpersonal, international, and interfaith. I’m sure it was self-righteousness that prompted Pascal to say, “Human beings never do evil so cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.” Self-righteousness blocks out our capacity for self-criticism, destroys humility, and undermines the sense of oneness that should bind us all.
Self-righteousness inspired the Christian Crusades against Muslims and, centuries later, the Easter pogroms of Eastern Europe, the sermon-induced slaughter of Jews after the morning celebration of the resurrected rabbi. Today this same self-righteousness encourages some American Christians to cheer President Bush’s messianic militarism, a divinely ordained form of cleansing violence, and all in the name of a Jesus Christ who is the mirror opposite of the Jesus of the four Gospels.
Self-righteousness makes believers of all faiths doctrinaire, dogmatic, and mindlessly militant.

Abe Lincoln on Good Friday

Good Friday. Abraham Lincoln was shot at Ford’s Theatre on Good Friday. Lincoln had told his wife that he considered that day the end of the War Between the States, although Robert E. Lee had surrendered a few days before. Lincoln’s nightmare had ended, but for some reason, his role on this earth ended with it.

Do we need to know why such events are connected? We barely know how these events occur. Historians argue over the causes of the Civil War. Generals debate the reasons for success and failure in five years of military battles. Sociologists theorize on the clash between social and economic classes before, during, and after the war that shaped the future of this country. There are even variations to the story of the actual assassination that night: how Booth escaped, what he said to the audience when he jumped to the stage, where he went, how he was caught.

When we try to identify the why, we are probably crossing the line from history into spirituality, religion, and faith. A much longer discussion.

April 14, 1865 was just another day on the Julian calendar. Centuries ago, someone picked it to commemorate the death of a Savior for a large community of Christians. John Wilkes Booth picked it to end the life of the country’s leader.

Gospel of Judas

A copy of the Gospel of Judas has been translated and released. The Gnostic text claims that in the week prior to his crucifixion, Jesus told Judas that he was the only disciple who understood the true nature of Christ, and asked him to betray him to the authorities. Thus, in this week before Easter, Christians face a new interpretation of the death and resurrection of Jesus, and the potential rehabilitation of a loathed figure in history.

The document dates from about 180-250AD. No one knows for sure if that is when the actual ‘gospel’ was first written, or who wrote it. One observer noted that, if those dates are original, it is as if someone wrote an eye-witness account of George Washington’s inaugural in 1940 and passed it off as history.

But no matter. This gospel, when combined with other texts discovered in the last 50 years, add to the historical record of the time period, skimpy as it is. These documents bring real people to life. They describe conversations and daily life that separates them from the tainted versions we have created in movies or television. That is the most fascinating part of this discovery: history, the recorded actions and words of real people, explained in the written word. From this history, we have derived a religious faith in something that cannot always be explained through the written word: God, Yahwe, the word that cannot be spoken because it cannot be fully comprehended in human terms.