From Enemy to Brother II: The Converts

The background of the German Catholic church, which I outlined in the previous post, is critical to understanding just how far the leaders of the Church had to come between the Holocaust and the Second Vatican Council. Indeed, the question one cannot help being haunted by throughout the entire book is just where to draw the line between change in churchmen and change in Church.

Connelly is keep the emphasize that “the times” alone would not have been enough to bring those bishops and theologians who remained silent or even expressed racist views during the Holocaust to a new position. Indeed, for the most part – as he meticulously documents – there was practically no mention of Jews or Jewish issues in the mainstream Catholic discourse of the 1950s and 1960s. 

Bringing the Church to Nostra Aetate, then, took some heavy lifting. The protagonists of Connelly’s are the small group of people who did this lifting – tirelessly, never ceasing to look for new ways to reach minds and hearts.

During the 1930s and 40s, these individuals – John Oesterreicher, Karl Thieme, Dietrich von Hildebrand, and sevearl others, including a number of priests – worked to discredit racism and anti-Semitims in explicitly Biblical and Catholic terms. After the war, they continued to develop ideas about the Jewish people from a Catholic perspective, while also engaging in active dialogue with Jewish intellectuals. Their work put them in physical danger during the Nazi period, and earned them much opprobrium even with the Catholic Church.

Why were these Catholics so committed to the Jewish cause, so unrelenting? Connelly is keen to point out that they had two curious characteristics in common: They were all converts to Catholicism (most from Judaism, some from Protestantism), and they all came from German-speaking borderlands – areas on the border of two or more countries, with disputed heritage and families living on both sides. Connelly writes:

The great majority of Catholics who wrote on the race question were Jewish converts, and virtually every figure of note in the Catholic battle against antisemitism was a convert. But once in the churhc, they were never entirely of the church… Because these Catholics were converts it was difficult to tell them to shun contacts with the outside. The outside, after all, was their homeland…

Showing great insight into the psychology of the convert – the Jewish convert in particular – he adds:

But the irony of conversion, of crossing a border supposedly with no return, is that one never entirely leaves the point of origin. And the scandal of racism was that those expecting security in their new Catholic homes were told that they remained alien, “in fact” racially Jewish.

Much of Connelly’s book is dedicated to documenting the activities and personal relationships of these converts, and the ways in which they ultimately shaped Nostra Aetate. The details are worth reading. In the next and final post in this book review series, I will focus on the major questions they faced in their struggle to redefine the Catholic position on Jews.

From Enemy to Brother I: German Catholics and Nazis

This post will be the first in a three-part review of John Connelly’s book, From Enemy to Brother. The book is as controversial as it is enlightening, and I have no doubt that many Catholic scholars present a very different view of the history Connelly treats. I’d be grateful for reader comments and references to any relevant literature.

Connelly’s focus is Nostra Aetate, the declaration of the Second Vatican Council concerning relations with non-Catholic and non-Christian religions. The bulk of this text is dedicated to the Church’s view of the Jewish people, and its central messages are as follows:

• Acknowledgement of the Church’s spiritual descendancy from “the stock of Abraham”
• Attention to the words of St. Paul in Romans about God’s abiding love for the Jews and fulfillment of His promises to them
• Insistence that the Jews as a people cannot be held responsible for the death of Christ, nor considered to be under a curse due to their role in His crucifixion
• Condemnation of anti-Semitism
• Hope for a day when “all peoples will address the Lord in a single voice and ‘serve him shoulder to shoulder.’”

Both in letter and in spirit, Connelly is keen to point out, Nostra Aetate stands in sharp contrast with the behavior and de facto teaching of the Catholic Church in the 1930s and 1940s. He paints a distressing picture of Nazi-era German Catholicism. Even while Nazis persecuted Catholics because of the Church’s treatment of humanity as universal and equal, Catholic leaders in German-speaking lands failed to articulate a stance against Nazi anti-Semitism and racism.

Indeed, many did just the opposite.  Connelly’s book abounds with examples of German Catholic support for the Nazi agenda. For example, the Jesuit Muckermann was an advocate and professor of eugenics, preaching the superiority of the “Nordic race.” Yet he was called upon by the Vatican to help the Church formulate teaching with regard to “race science.” Karl Adam, a widely read and popular Catholic theologian, advocated for a church as “a community that was alive and vital,” not stifled by hierarchy, and sought ties between German Catholic and Protestant communities. At the same time, he “portrayed Nazi-orchestrated boycotts of Jewish business as the fulfillment of Christian charity, acts of ‘Christian-German self-assertion’ aimed at stemming the ‘Jewish deluge.’”

These examples, Connelly argues, stemmed from an unholy alliance between Catholic and Nazi interests.  He writes:

Historians have long recognized an overlap of German Catholicism and Nazi racism that was grounded in joint concerns: anti-Marxism, anti-liberalism, anti-individualism, and the resulting attraction to a communitarian ethos.

These ideas inspired the large German Catholic youth movement, its communal life, and its push for liturgical reform. Furthermore,

The most seductive element of the racist syndrome that took root in German Catholicism, the word Volk, evoked blood kinship dating back to time immemorial, and took on particular resonance during World War I; as the hold of throne and monarchy on the German people waned, Volk became a new locus of political legitimacy. It grew especially dear to German Catholics who for decades were accused of loyalties divided between the Vatican and Berlin…. Volk stirred the Catholic imagination by mixing religious, ethnic, political, and cultural connotations in a radically new way.

At the forefront of this new German Catholic spirit was the idea of Church as a mystical body – a single, unified, sensual body that became identified with nationhood, and the German nation in particular. This focus on the body of the nation led to a peculiar understanding of Christian love. Connelly writes about the prominent Jesuit Provincial Georg Bichlmair:

According to Bichlmair, Christ had presented self-love as love’s highest form, and that was also true for ethnic groups. When Germans started thinking of themselves first, they would see that the Jewish question was a ‘question of right’ – their right…

It’s worth noting that Bichlmair was not, relatively speaking, a serious anti-Semite. Indeed he was persecuted by the Gestapo for assisting Jewish converts to Christianity. Similar views were expressed by other Catholic writers, such as the Swiss Jesuit Mario von Galli, and received little to no criticism from the reading public.

Connelly is clear that, while the Vatican did not propagate such teachings, it did little to disavow them or silence the speakers. He identifies two primary reasons for this. The first was that, in the early decades of the 20^th century, racism and eugenics was widely regarded as a science, not only in Germany, but in much of the Western world – including the USA, where the eugenics movement was gaining influence. (Modern-day treatment of contraception and abortion as scientifically-based “health care” “comes to mind as an easy parallel.) The Church had had its run-ins with science a few centuries prior, Connelly points out, and did not wish once again to be so clumsy. Moreover, the Church’s own scientists, such as Muckermann, promoted the racist view, moderating it just enough to steer clear of the Church’s condemnation of forced sterilization and similar practices.

The second reason for the Vatican’s silence, Connelly argues, was a lack of appropriate language. The Nostra Aetate statement explicitly condemns the centuries-old understandings of the Jews as accursed murderers of Christ. This disavowal was necessary, and controversial: prior to Vatican II, the Church had not spoken about the Jews in any other way. Indeed, an encyclical prepared by Pius XI as late as 1938 (never released) included lines such as this: “Jewry… has frivolously sacrificed its exalted historical calling once and for all… lost the enveloping communal life in race by turning against its own precious blood and calling it in vengeance against itself and its children.”

This negative theology of the Jews was exacerbated by the German language itself. As Connelly points out, the German word Erbsünde, signifying original sin, “literally means ‘hereditary sin,’ passed from generation to generation.” The effects of this interpretation of original sin are evident in the case of Dr. Albert Niedermeyer, a leading German Catholic gynecologist. Both in his writing and in his medical practice, Nidermeyer staunchly opposed eugenic practices grounded in racism, which ultimately landed him in a concentration camp. Connelly writes:

Niedermeyer’s engagement with “the problem of racial hygiene” has led to a serious examination of the most central elements of Christian morality. In contrast to Karl Adam, Niedermeyer read the Thomist principle of grace presupposing nature in a way that permitted grace some independent power. Even those who were “severely retarded” could prevail over illness with the help of grace. […]

But when it comes to the Jews, Nidermeyer’s tune is rather different:

A Christian had to place Christ at the center of any thoughts on the Jews… If one really believed that Christ was God, then the magnitude of Jewish guilt for his crucifixion was “beyond imagining”… “The sign of Cain marks the awful treachery of this once noble people that is now despised among the peoples… even the most honest efforts cannot deny the basic fact that Jews have become repugnant, indeed frightening and sinister for other peoples.”

Moreover,

Niedermeyer condemned Jews who tried to escape punishment for killing Christ by “dishonestly” becoming Christians, and he demanded special scrutiny for converts. It was a delusion to think that baptism could suddenly erase Jews’ guilt for killing Christ.

The view that conversion to Christianity did not wash away the hereditary sin of killing Christ, Connelly emphasizes, was far from unique to Niedermeyer. Even the Jesuit Bichlmair, who was active in Catholic ministry to Jews and Jewish converts, held to it.

This belief in the Jewish curse, Connelly also points out, prevented Catholics –laymen, priests, and Vatican clerics alike – from taking a stance against Nazi anti-Semitic violence. If the misfortunes of the Jews are visited upon them by God, it cannot be the place of the Church to intervene – apparently, even when God’s will is being embodied by the Nazis, enemies of Catholicism.

How, then, did the Church’s thinking about the Jews change – too late, perhaps, but so significantly? Who changed it, how, and why? More on that in the next installment of this book review.

A Song of Praise

I have written here before about Philip Rosenbaum, an Eastern Catholic author who also happens to be of a Jewish background.

When he is not writing on family and spirituality, Rosenbaum is creating poetry. He has taken up the classic form of the sonnet, and applied it to a purpose (among others) that is simultaneously innovative and even more classic – imaginative exegesis of the Bible.

Rosenbaum’s poetry, which will be published soon in e-book format, is thought-provoking and challenging. I struggled to choose a poem to share – they are very different, each compelling in its own way. Instead, I thought I’d direct you to his website, where you can get a foretaste of the book.

A section of particular interest to those thinking about Jewish-Christian themes, rich in interpretation of the Old Testament, is “The Wedding Party”:

In The Wedding Party the saints in Heaven are answering the Bridegroom’s riddle, “Why do I choose this Woman for My Bride?” (Christ is the Bridegroom; the Church is His Bride.)    

        The Song of Noah’s Wife

         The Song of Caleb

         The Song of Samson

         The Song of Naaman’s Wife

Enjoy, and let me know what you thought!

Do This In Memory Of Me

More this week from Richard Calderon:

‘MEMORIALS IN THE SIGHT OF GOD’ – ANAMNESIS

 The God of Israel is intensely interested in His children, and like all parents He loves to remember milestones in their moral growth, be these moments of covenant surrender, of repentance, or of generosity to the poor and the infirm.  God repeatedly reminds Israel that He is forever mindful of such milestones, which move Him to forgive trespasses.  The technical Israelite term for a vivid and forgiveness-inducing memory in the mind of God is ‘a memorial before the Lord’ or more simply ‘a memorial’—in Hebrew zikkaron.  The Bible provides multiple instances of these ‘memorials’ such as:

• In Exodus 30: 16, God declares that financial contributions towards the construction of the Tabernacle and furnishings constitute ‘a memorial of the donors before the Lord.’
• Ecclesiasticus 35: 8-9 states that ‘the sacrifice of the just is acceptable, and the Lord will not forget the memorial thereof.’
• Generous pagans are also capable of making ‘memorials.’  In Acts 10: 3-31, an angel visits Cornelius and informs him that ‘thy prayers and alms are ascended as a memorial in the sight of God.’

Especially in times of distress, the Israelites will implore God to forgive them for the sake of His beloved prophets and patriarchs.  The word ‘memorial’ in English suggests something past, an event that is preserved by some faded memento, or awakened by a dimly remembered emotion.  But for ancient Israel, ‘memorials’ are vivid and alive to God.  Presenting a ‘memorial’ to God stimulates in Him a willingness to forgive and to bless.

The technical Septuagint Greek term for a ‘memorial in the mind of God’ is anamnesis, a bewildering concept for pagans, who eagerly inscribe their names as patrons on theaters, temples, sculptures and public baths as memorials to fellow citizenry.  But the wind, the waves and other deified forces possess no memory, are mindful of no one and recall nothing.

Nevertheless, anamnesis is the technical term correctly used in the New Testament and in the writings of the first Church Fathers.  The Eucharist service of the Church is an ‘anamnesis’ offered by the Mystical Body of Christ, an ‘anamnesis’ which bestows eternal life, forgiveness of sins and deliverance from the power of Satan.  The earliest surviving Christian liturgy to remind God of His Son’s supreme sacrifice uses the term ‘anamnesis’ explicitly in this sense.

Taking bread and giving thanks to Thee He said:

‘Take eat: This is My Body which is broken for you’.

Likewise the cup saying:

‘This is My Blood which is shed for you

Whenever you do this,

You [will] make My Anamnesis’ [i]

(The Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus IV: 9)

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[i]  Gregory Dix, The Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus, 8

 

Guest Post: Words of Blessing

Today I would like to share with you the work of a fellow parishioner, Richard Calderon. Richard is studying the Hebrew and other early origins of the Catholic liturgy. Below are some of his findings.

BERAKAH – EUCHARIST / EULOGY

The essence of sacrifice is glad surrender to God.  Ancient Israel expresses such surrender repeatedly in prayer.  All creation proceeds from God, all creation belongs to God and men bless a thing – Hebrew berakah – by acknowledging God.  In formally blessing a thing, or recognizing that it comes from and is consecrated to Him, men thereby thank God.

The twin ideas of God’s ultimate ownership of all created things and the gratitude men owe Him are so close in Israelite thought that to ‘bless’ a thing or to ‘thank God’ for a thing is considered the same action.  Saint Paul expresses this mindset well:

Every creature of God is good, and nothing is to be rejected when it is taken with thanksgiving, since it is consecrated by the [creative] word of God, and by prayer. (1 Timothy 4:4-5)

Contrary to the norm, in which Israelite culture develops a larger spiritual vocabulary than that of pagan neighbors, Greek translators of berakah have two options:

• Eulogia = a blessing in which the focus is on the object, or
• Eucharistia = a thanksgiving in which the focus is on God.

A Greek will not confuse these two words, but casual oscillation between Eulogia / Eucharistia in the New Testament are telltale clues about the antiquity of the texts.  Contrary to modernist claims that the New Testament is a compilation of second and third century ‘midrash’ – in plain English the daydreams of depressed Gentile slaves – the New Testament authors are Jews and think in Hebrew rather than in Greek.  In sequential verses, Mark 14: 22-23 notes that Christ successively blesses – eulogesas – the bread and gives thanks – eucharistesas – over the wine, as Saint Mark is actually thinking berakah in both cases.  Then again, Saint Paul in Corinthians 10: 30, 10:16 uses eucharistein or thanksgiving over meat purchased in the market, but eulogein or blessing about the Eucharist itself.  He too is thinking berakah about both.

Ultimately, Eucharistia or Thanksgiving becomes a technical term for a) the prayer of the liturgical officiant b) the Mass as a whole, and c) the consecrated elements.  The reason for selecting eucharistia rather than eulogia has much to do with the celebrant’s invitation to open the Canon:

Celebrant:      The Lord be with you.

Response:       And with your spirit.

Celebrant:      Lift up your hearts.

Response:       We have lifted them up to the Lord.

Celebrant:      Let us give thanks (Eucharistia) to the Lord our God.

Response:       It is fitting and right to do so. [i]

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[i] Gregory Dix, The Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus, 7 and Shape of the Liturgy, 78-79.  Dix has fun with these Greek words, noting how narrowly Christians escaped having to ‘attend Eulogy at 8’ or ‘receive Eulogy at 10.’

Ecumenics

Those of you reading this blog regularly know that Orthodox-Catholic ecumenism is my other big interest. A good article on that topic by Father Laurent Cleenewerck, courtesy of Orthocath blog.

Eery Reminders of Evils Past

Is Germany sure – I mean, are they really sure – that it has learned its lesson about racial superiority and anti-Semitism?

This most recent ruling by a German judge suggests that many Germans might be ready for a re-play of the early twentieth century.

A court in Germany has sparked outrage among both Jewish and Muslim communities in that country and elsewhere in Europe after it ruled earlier this week that circumcision is illegal. The ruling has been a source of encouragement, however, among growing numbers of opponents of circumcision.

The district court in Cologne ruled that circumcision inflicted physical harm against newborn babies and what it ruled to be “irreversible damage against the body.” The court also determined that freedom of religion and the rights of parents cannot justify the practice.

Not only that, but apparently 60% of Germans equate circumcision with genital mutilation.

As with Nazi anti-Semitism, so with this, it is clear that the repressive attitudes (in Germany, but also in places like San Francisco) are not just about the Jews – and not even just about Muslims, which is an even more tempting explanation in German’s case –  but ultimately about faith, and about God Himself:

“This ruling has enormous significance for doctors,” Professor Holm Putzke, an expert on law from Passau University in Germany told the newspaper. “For years there has been a call to ban circumcision for religious reasons. The court, as opposed to many politicians, was not afraid of criticism that its ruling was anti-Semitic or harmful to religion,” he said. Putzke added that the decision “may not only influence future rulings, but also bring about a change in the worldview of religious people regarding basic rights of children.”

Which is a good reminder that much of the world had drawn all the wrong conclusions from the Holocaust. The Nazis’ crimes against man and God have been equated with religiously motivated persecution (“weren’t the Nazis Christians?”, my mother asked me recently), and the cause of their victims with secularism. No wonder that, as evidenced by this ruling, the real evil has not been eradicated.

John Connelly Preview

I just found out about a book I am very excited to read! Please expect reviews of “From Enemy to Brother: the Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933–1965” to appear shortly on this blog.

In the meantime, here is an article by the author to whet your appetite:

When we look at those who carried forth this revolution in Catholic teaching, we see few if any high clerics, few men “in red capes.” But we do see a rather remarkable coincidence: virtually every one of the thinkers and activists involved in bettering Catholic-Jewish relations was a convert, either from Judaism or Protestantism. In the 1930s, Oesterreicher, Thieme, and Dietrich von Hildebrand had taken inspiration for their polemics against Nazi racism from Christian intellectuals Erik Peterson, Annie Kraus, Alfred Fuchs, Rudolf Lämmel, Walter Berger, and Theodor Haecker—all converts. In October 1964, the two priests who joined Oesterreicher to write what would become the final draft of the decree on the Jews—Gregory Baum and Bruno Hussar—were also of Jewish heritage. And several years earlier, just before the council, when an international symposium took place in the Netherlands to draft theses that would guide De Judaeis, most of the participants—Thieme and Oesterreicher, along with Paul Démann, Gertrud Luckner, Jean-Roger Hené, and Irene Marinoff—were converts. Démann, a converted Hungarian Jew, had been publishing the review Cahiers Sioniens from Paris since 1947, and, with the help of fellow converts Geza Vermes and Renée Bloch, he refuted the anti-Judaism in French Catholic school catechisms. In Germany Thieme and Luckner printed the Freiburger Rundbrief, which exposed Central European audiences to the emerging Christian understanding of the Jews based in St. Paul.

That converts to Catholicism would oppose racism and anti-Semitism makes sense. After all, they had personal reasons to hold the church to its claims. Still, the efforts of converts like Oesterreicher and his contemporaries bring into sharp relief the nearly negligible numbers of “cradle Catholics” who gave themselves to this struggle for the church’s soul. Why this was so remains an important question. What seems certain is that without converts to Catholicism, the church in Europe would never have “thought its way” out of the challenges of racist anti-Judaism. If Providence remains visibly active for the Catholic Church in history, it can surely be seen in how the church has absorbed light from outsiders—persons originally beyond its visible membership, who devoted their lives to a religion based on love of neighbor, and in doing so reminded us that the church is, as Jacques Maritain’s friend Charles Journet wrote in 1951, at once “purer and vaster than we know.”

 

Jews Vote Liberal, Evangelicals Vote Israel?

Jonathan Tobin has an interesting article up at the Commentary magazine website. He argues that Israel is rapidly becoming a critical election issue not – as one might expect – for Jews, but for evangelical Christians.

Jewish organizations and media outlets, Tobin points out, occasionally make an effort to argue that Obama is a friend of Israel. But largely they seem to be operating on the assumption that Democratic Jews – that is, most of America’s Jews, with the general exception of those on the conservative end of the religious spectrum – are going to vote for Obama regardless of whether Israel stands to win or lose from his election. Romney, on the other hand, has placed Israel square in the middle of many campaign speeches, knowing that taking the “right”stance – unquestionable support for Israel – will help garner him the much-needed evangelical vote.

The irony that American Christians (and not only American – see my earlier interview with Marie-Aude Tardivo) are more eager to protect the Jewish state than American Jews is perhaps not so ironic after all. It simply highlights a realignment of the alliances among four groups: religious Jews, secular Jews, religious Christians, and nominal/secular Christians.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Jews were united by their concern for the sheer physical survival of the Jewish people. Israel was seen as an opportunity to protect the Jews and ensure their safety and religious freedom. Religious Christians were generally perceived by Jews as uniformly adhering to a replacement theology, and therefore either indifferent or outright hostile to Jewish survival. Under this narrative, there was not much need to distinguish between religious and secular Jews, nor religious and secular Christians.

Many Jews retain this basic mental map today, which leads to suspicion of the evangelical pro-Israel phenomenon. The motives of Christians who wish to defend Israel, not in spite but because of their Christianity, are viewed as ultimately anti-Jewish – for example, wanting Israel to exist merely so that the Apocalypse may be fulfilled, with the result that Judaism would be finally discredited.

But the truth is that the traditional alliances no longer hold. Many American secular Jews seem to have decided that world anti-Semitism is no longer a threat – and hence that Israel is neither essential as a protection against it, nor at any real danger of being destroyed at its hands. They also seem to have recognized that, with its endlessly precarious military situation, Israel is unlikely to become a paradise for socialism, gay marriage, and environmentalism anytime soon, and moved on to focus on these issues in more promising, safer places – like the United States.

The new relevant groupings with respect to Israel, then, are religious Jews and religious Christians, on one hand, and secular Jews and secular “Christians,” on the other. The first of these groups is driven, it seems to me, by two beliefs: first, that both the Jews and the Holy Land are a living testament to God’s promise; and second – not unrelated – that neither God, nor the devil and his anti-Semitic associates, are finished with the Jews quite yet. Both these beliefs spell out support for Israel as a Jewish state – a state whose mission it is to preserve the Jewish people, both physically and spiritually, in the face of adversity. The second group, naturally, holds the opposite view – that being Jewish is one of many largely equivalent religious preferences, which can be effectively protected in any country.

What does this mean for Jewish Christians? I’d love to hear what you think. Personally, I suspect there might be cause for tentative rejoicing. Christian support for Israel may finally signal to religious and other right-wing Jews that – unlike many liberal Jews – Christians believe in the Jewish people, even if not in Judaism. From there, it may become easier for us to explain ourselves.

Living on the Offensive

My mother is vacationing with a somewhat observant Jewish friend from Israel. I invited them to come visit us on their way back home. “We could go out to dinner,” she said, “but there’s no way I can bring her to your house.”

I would love to think that the problem with my house is that it’s too small or too messy. But unfortunately that’s not a convincing lie. The reason our house is off-limits is that our bookcases prominently display images of a certain Jewish carpenter, his mother and friends.

Even with years of conversations like this under my belt, it still hurts. Moreover, I still don’t know how to respond in practice. When I’ve offered to put away my icons to accommodate visitors, it felt like being ashamed of Christ. When I’ve insisted on keeping them in place, it felt like sacrificing family and friendships to religious self-righteousness. Both “solutions” made me feel rotten – and failed to make my parents feel comfortable.

So many of us converts find that, for our family and friends, our lifestyle is not merely baffling or disagreeable, but offensive. The offense may be that we’ve betrayed the heritage our parents strove mightily (or thought they did) to pass on to us, or that we’ve embraced that which they find abhorrent (I’m thinking of my Catholic friend whose parents are abortion advocates), or that we’ve aligned ourselves with a group our parents perceive as “enemy” or “other” – or all of the above. The way my family feels upon seeing my icons is, I would imagine, similar to the way some evangelical Christian parents feel upon discovering paraphernalia of a homosexual lifestyle and gay-marriage advocacy in their child’s bedroom. It is a surge of pain, which quickly leads to irrationality.

And, six years in, I can say with bitter conviction that there truly is nothing that I, on my own strength, can do about it.

Here is something to consider. When God was offended by the sins of the Amorites and other inhabitants of Canaan, he sent the Israelites to destroy them and build a holy nation over their ruins. But had the Israelites brutalized the Canaanite population of their own initiative, surely they would have suffered a terrible fate at God’s hands.

In other words, we are not the ones to decide how to deal with the offense given by those living on (what appears to be) the opposite side of God’s law. Some of our decisions may be of the violent variety (like bullying gay teenagers), while others, just the opposite, may legitimize and cover up offense which must not be abided (like ordaining gay bishops). Too many of them, of either kind, are myopic and poor.

Instead, we must wait – patiently, and seemingly forever – for God Himself to give judgment. In the meantime, while I don’t know how to deal with my own personal little crisis of offensiveness, here are some things that have NOT worked out well:

Lashing out. My first reaction to my mother’s comment was the desire to say something like, “If my house is not good enough for you and your friends, please don’t ever come here.”  Glad I kept my mouth shut.

Telling them what to think. I am frequently tempted to philosophize about how it is sinful blindness and intolerance that leads my parents to condemn my Christianity; if only they were more enlightened and more loving, everything would be honky-dory. Then I imagine myself in their position.

Turning to worldliness. It is helpful to stay away from the source of disagreement or offense and focus on what you have in common. That works for me, up to a point – the point where I discover that, in my constant efforts to keep things friendly with my family, I become more and more focused on the worldly things that they and I have in common, and less and less focused on my life in Christ.

Pretending there’s no problem. I’ve often concluded that the fights my family and I have had about religion were really fueled by something else – personalities, old conflicts, etc. That is true to a significant degree, and addressing those other problems will help. But at the end of the day, God is bigger than our petty conflicts. Once we can see through them, we see Him – and He stands either alongside us or between us.

Carrying the burden of solving the problem. You’re choosing your words carefully, controlling your anger, doing your best to show the love of God, and coming down hard on yourself when you fail to do all those things. But by focusing too hard on what you can do, it’s easy to ignore the agency and dignity of the other party – and above all, the fact that this is really God’s problem to solve.

 Shutting down. Not talking is easier than talking – or so it seems. Half the time I avoid mentioning to my parents what I did Sunday morning, where I volunteered last week, what I wrote on this blog. It prevents unpleasant conversations, but it is also a way of giving up on the relationship, and on the souls of the people on the other side.

Take away all these tempting “solutions,” and what you’re left with is a raw and painful mess, right in the place where human beings are supposed to encounter one another.  Perhaps the lesson is simply this: Can’t go over it, can’t go around it, gotta go through it – every day, year in and year out, until God brings about His resolution.