Earlier this month the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for the arrest of General Omar Hassan al-Bashir (left), president of the Sudan, on charges that he has orchestrated the killing and widespread pillaging of Darfur. But the general has ignored the warrant and this week travelled to Qatar for a meeting of the Arab League.  There he was warmly greeted by Arab leaders who denounced the action of the International Criminal Court.  Such impudence outrages people in the West, including many of my Christian activist friends.  But in truth, things are not so simple.
          Where were these same Christian activists a month or two ago when Israel was committing what many see as war crimes in Gaza? Failure of the International Criminal Court to act toward Israel strikes the Arab nations as sheer Western hypocrisy. Arabs see the Court's action as another example of the arrogant West's attempt subvert the sovereignty of an Arab nation and inaugurate a new kind of colonialism.
          On the other hand, it is surely true that some Arab heads of state support al-Bashir precisely because they fear similar action by the Court toward themselves at some point in the future.  Further, while understandable as a knee-jerk reaction, al-Bashir's decision to expel international relief agencies from Darful is unjustified.  From where I stand, it seems that the media coverage about the Sudan and Darful is very one-sided.  Little comes to us in the USA that portrays the situation from a non-Western perspective. Some international media offer more nuanced reporting, but their reports are little read here in the States.

          Anticipating a long trip by Amtrak in the near future, I am collecting a bagfull of books to take with me.  One I will surely include is Freeman Dyson's Infinite in All Directions, which I ordered recently from Amazon. Dyson (left) is one of the greatest scientists of the past 50 years. I mention him because he is also a leading opponent of global-warning theories. This puts him at odds with President Obama who, last November declaimed, "Few challenges facing America and the world are more urgent than combating climate change. The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear." But a surprising number of environmental scientists believe that Obama is mistaken. Recently an "open letter" to the President, challenging his views on climate change, has been circulating. It is signed by more than 100 scientists, most of them noted Ph.D.s, and the majority with expertise in earth sciences and associated fields.
          Yesterday was a rather traumatic day for Georgia and me.  Returning home from our weekend joy ride, we found our home flooded from a malfunctioning hot water system.  It took us the rest of the evening to mop up the mess, plus a $350 bill from the plumbing company.
          Some good news, though.  Tiger Woods is back, after nine months off recovering from knee surgery.  He won the Arnold Palmer Invitational by making a birdie on the final hole, thereby defeating his opponent by a single stroke.

            It's a dark and gloomy day here in New Jersey, and I'm feeling a little stir-crazy, so Georgia and I are going to drive down toward Princeton, have a late lunch, and come back home.  But before we leave I'll share a few this-and-thats that have caught my attention this morning.
          First, there's the matter of John Hope Franklin (above left) whose death last week at age 94 did not get the attention it deserved.  Franklin was one of America's formost historians, his most acclaimed book being From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African-Americans. As a child in Oklahoma he used to respond to the question about what he would like to be when he grew up by replying: The first Negro president of the United States.  That, he did not become, but he did live long enough to see one who did.
          Facebook.  I'm getting dozens of requests from friends who want me to confirm them or me as friends.  No problem with that.  But I must confess that I go to Facebook only when I get such requests.  At my age, Facebook seems too complicated.
          I'm greatly impressed with the dedication and cooperative spirit of the citizens of Fargo, North Dakota and Moorhead, Minnesota.  Imagine building a dyke 12 miles long and, at place, 42 feet high.  And in sub-freezing temperatures with snow falling! 
          There is an article circulating on the Internet right now (since last summer, actually) -- a bitter piece of invective against Barack Obama written by an Israeli psychologist turned business consultant.  Anti-Obama articles in principle are just fine, an exercise of the First Amendment guaranteeing free speech.  But pure invective (e. g., Obama is a "pathological narcissistist" who cares nothing for the well being of others unless they contribute in some way to fulfilling his ambitions) is not. Christians in particular should not engage in forwarding this kind of stuff.  I should say that this particular article was sent to me by a missionary friend who wanted my opinion before forwarding it or not. 
          One in five people now resident in the USA are immigrants or related to new immigrants. On the web site nytimes.com/Immigrants you can find a map showing where the various ethnic groups are locating.

         

         Those of you who know me well have already concluded that although I greatly admire Ralph Winter personally and agree with the main conclusion of his thesis as described in the blogs of yesterday and the day before -- that Christian mission involves much more than simply soul-winning -- I agree with little else in his theological argument.  There are two chief, and interrelated, areas of disagreement.  They have to do with the nature of evolution and the role of angels.

          While accepting the age of the universe as being unimaginatively old, and thereby impliciting accepting the concept of evolution, Winter denies the central tenets of the standard theory of evolution -- random mutation and natural selection.  Instead, he sees the universe, and most especially planet earth with its many life forms, including humans, as being the product of intelligent design overseen by angels, good and bad, some of whom are tiny enough to interact directly with genes. Fallen angels, led by Satan, are the cause of evil in our world.

          I, on the other hand, have no difficulty with the standard theory of evolution, assuming it to be the means whereby God -- without any intermediaries, angelic or otherwise -- is creating the universe.  The evil we experience is the inevitable result of the free will (for lack of a better term for what scientists see as random mutation) God has embedded in every atom of matter and energy. 
         God's purpose in designing evolution based in free will and natural selection is to ultimately produce entities (the human race) with whom God can unite with in an eternal community of love, a race that will also share with God in the governance of the universe. The evil that exists in the universe as a consequence of God's evolutionary design will be overcome in due time in "the new heaven and new earth" (Revelation 21:1).  And the horrible effects of evil will be recompensed by "the greater good" that will bless us in eternity (Romans 8:18-27).
         Such a truncated, thumbnail sketch of my own worldview likely raises more questions than answers.  I share it only to demonstrate how two missionaries of the age, both operating largely within the same evangelical community, can reach vastly different conclusions on matters of mutual concern.  Hence the need for respect, tolerance and forebearance in our relations with one another.
         

          Genesis 1 is not the account of the creation of the universe, as most Christians believe.  Rather, it is the story of the restoration of planet earth in the aftermath of an asteroidal collision in the Middle East. So suggests missiologist Ralph Winter (see yesterday's blog), who believes that such a reading of Genesis 1 resolves the conflict between "Old Earth" and "Young Earth" evangelicals.
          But behind this scenario lies another. For sake of argument, he accepts the premise that the universe was created 13.7 billion years ago, and that planet earth came into existence 4.5 billion years ago. Life emerged about 4 billion years ago and life forms slowly evolved during the next 3.5 billion years. That brings us up to a point 500 million years ago when the "Cambrian Explosion" occurred and a wide variety of plants and animals appeared suddenly, most of the animals predatory and carnivorous. What caused this spectacular "explosion" of predatory life?
          Winter suggests that it coincides with the rebellion of the archangel Satan," and that the activity of Satan and his cohorts during the half-billion years since then has distorted the intelligent evolution of the earth, an evolution that previously had been overseen by "good" angels. This accounts for the origin of what we usually term "natural evil," including all the microorganisms that cause disease.          
          During this same half-billion years the earth was bombarded by asteroids which blotted out various life forms such as the dinosaurs. One such asteroid impacted the Middle East, devastating that area. It is at this point that the story of Genesis becomes relevant, recording a "new beginning" with Adam and Eve in the lower Mesopotamian region.
          Nevertheless Satan and his associates continue to oppose God in every way possible. One consequence of this opposition, Winter maintains, is the physical distortion of nature: not only re-wiring animal life to be predatory, but "twisting bacteria into dangeous germs, creating destructive viruses, and inventing extremely destructive viruses and parasites." Malaria, Winter notes, subtracts 45 million people from the work force every single day. 
          Thus Christian mission must be seen as an all-out war against Satan.  In addition to "winning souls," Christians must aim at conquering disease and all other forms of Satanic oppression, including social injustices. Unfortunately, Winter notes, there is not one Christian institution in the world today dedicated to the eradication of disease pathogens.  So Winter himself founded the Institute for the Study of the Origin of Disease.
          I will conclude this extended blog on Winter's ideas tomorrow.

          Back in the mid-1970s Dr. Ralph Winter (left) was one of my most valued mentors.  At that time he was the chief promoter of the unreached peoples movement. Soon after, he founded William Carey International University, which he now serves as Chancellor. But of late he has been promoting a new concept of Christian mission, evolved from what he admits is "The Embarrassingly Delayed Education of Ralph D. Winter." This is also the title of a paper circulating through the Internet as I write.
          The scope of the Christian mission, he says, is to seek constantly what is the maximum contribution we can make to glorifying God and fighting evil. This requires us to engage meaningfully in the global battle against human slavery, corruption in government and private enterprise, family breakdown and so forth.  On the surface, this understanding of Christian mission is not all that different from what I proposed in my 1980 book, Bring Forth Justice. The difference lies in how Ralph and I arrived at similar conclusions. In tomorrow's blog I will briefly describe Ralph's "delayed education."  I realize this will not be of interest to all my readers, but those who know Ralph or who are aware of his influence on evangelical mission during the past 40 years will find it fascinating.

          About once a month I hear from someone out of the blue, and usually out of my past, and almost always because of the reach of the world wide web.  Yesterday it was Martin Fischer (left), president of High Five Entertainment in Nashville, Tennessee.  He and his music production company have won numerous awards. Martin’s father, Gerhard Fischer, was the German ambassador to Malaysia during the years our family lived in Malaysia. Martin attended the International School of Kuala Lumpur (ISKL) with two of my children, Cheryl and Greg.  After retiring from diplomatic service, the elder Fischer devoted the final 20 years of his life serving leprosy patients in India.  (His first diplomatic posting had been to Madras – now Chennai – India.)  While doing some research about his father's leprosy work on the Internet, I suspect, Martin came across my name and recognized it. I’ve reconnected him with Cheryl and Greg, as well as with Hayes Shelton, who was my administrative assistant in those Malaysia days and ministered to Martin and other ISKL students.  Hayes now lives in West Virginia and is very active in the National Association of Evangelicals, heading up West Virginia for Christ.

                   
          Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner finally announced his long-awaited plan. The main feature seems to be offering incentives to private investors to buy toxic assets (mostly bad home mortgage loans) from banks, thereby improving the banks’ balance sheets, and thereby enabling banks to resume lending to ordinary citizens and small business owners. Following the announcement, the stock market rallied significantly – although a one-day rally isn’t anything to get too excited about, to be sure. But will the plan work?
          The President’s chief economic adviser, Larry Summer, endorses it enthusiastically. Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, of whom I wrote yesterday, continues to be pessimistic.  His main point seems to be that removing toxic assets is not getting at the real problem.  The real problem, he says, is not toxic assets but toxic banks. That is, even after removing the toxic assets, many of the largest banks have lost so much money, they will still be financially strapped and therefore unable and unwilling to resume lending. The answer, he believes is to temporarily nationalize the banks.  This will enable the government to shut down those that are not viable and re-capitalize those that are. Krugman has lost this battle, for even temporary nationalization is not appealing to either the President or Congress.  Now we shall have to wait a few months to see if the Geithner-Summers plan proves successful.

          

          Paul Krugman (left) is a Nobel Prize-winning economist and Princeton professor.  He also writes a regular column in the New York Times.  Last fall I assumed that if Barack Obama won the presidency, Krugman would be a prominent part of Obama's inner circle.  But such is not the case.  Instead, the president turned to people such as Larry Summers and Tim Geithner, both of whom are long-time members of the financial crowd that precipitated the current crisis.  Well, I thought, Obama is consulting Krugman on the side.  But that has turned out falsely as well.  Certainly the Obama economic team keeps track of Krugman's ideas, but apparently are not giving them much weight.  And this puzzles me, for I respect Krugman a great deal.  This morning Krugman writes that he is "in despair" over the plan the Secretary of the Treasury is expected to announce today, details of which have leaked out over the past few days.  If Krugman despairs, I have reason to worry. 
And this in spite of the fact that the President continually reassures the public about Geithner's competence.  Can any of my readers tell why the President has excluded Paul Krugman from his inner circle of advisors?  Have you heard or read anything that would throw light on this? 

         When Dr. Nancy Eiesland (left) thought about dying, she hoped that when she went to heaven she would still be disabled. Why such a hope?  Because her identity and character were so formed by the various challenges of her disability, she suspected that without her disability she would be "absolutely unknown to myself and perhaps to God."  Nancy Eiesland died a couple of weeks ago, at the early age of 44, having taught at Emory University's Candler School of Theology for the past decade and a half.
          She is best known for her book, The Disabled God. Pointing to Luke 24, where the risen Jesus invites his disciples to touch his wounds, Eiesland writes: The resurrected Jesus is revealed as the disabled God.  He is not cured and made whole; his injury is part of him, neither a divine punishment nor an opportunity for healing. Thus God remains a God the disabled can identify with.
          Born and raised in North Dakota, she became an ordained Assemblies of God minister, but gradually drifted away from that denomination. According to reporter Douglas Martin, as she strove to suggest new metaphors and symbols, she became increasingly incisive.  In one instance she envisioned God puttering about in a "puff" wheelchair, the kind quadriplegics drive with their breath.

     

               Last Sunday Georgia and I drove to upstate New York to visit our good friends, Rev. Dan Groh and his wife, Terri -- both of whom used to colabor with us in Paterson.  On our way home we stopped off at a small restaurant in picturesque Beacon, New York.  The food was simple, ample, inexpensive, and tasty.  Beacon is an old town of 15,000 located on the Hudson River.  It was so named to commemorate the fires that residents lit on the summit of nearby Fishkill Mountain during the Revolutionary War to alert George Washington's forces about British troop movements.  Later it became a flourishing manufacturing center, known for a time as the hat capital of the USA. As we supped, Georgia wondered aloud about how Beacon was doing during the current economic recession.
          As one might expect, not too well. As we drove down Main Street, boarded up storefronts testified that many small businesses have failed. An article in this morning's New York Times confirms this. Recently a developer planning a 133-room eco-hotel in Beacon had lost his financing.  The city government has had to borrow from its reserves to make up for missing sales tax revenues. The owner of Back Room Gallery says that between Thanksgiving and Christmas she sold "three pairs of earrings, two on layaway." But the trattoria at which we dined seemed to be doing well.  And the Artisan Wine Shop has sold ten percent more bottles so far in 2009 than at this point last year.  "People do continue to pruchase alcohol in a downturn," says the owner.

 
          Today is the first day of spring, at least here in the northern hemisphere.  Of course for those of you who live around the equator, spring and fall and winter are rather meaningless concepts. Here in New Jersey, for the first couple of hours today the sun shone; but now it is overcast and gloomy. My own mood is a bit gloomy as I contemplate the hulabaloo my fellow citizens are raising over the payout of bonuses to AIG executives, and which culminated yesterday in Congress passing a punitive bill to tax those bonuses 90%.  What a waste of congressional time and energy! Those bonuses amount to less than one-one thousandth of one percent (!) of the money taxpayers have invested so far to bail out AIG.  This is a perfect example of what has been called "perverse cosmic myopia" (David Brooks) -- our inability to focus atention on the most perilous mattera at hand, which at this moment is not the payment of outrageous bonuses but repairing the collapsing world financial system.

          The NCAA championship series starts tonight. I don't follow basketball as closely as our athletic President does, but even I can predict that North Carolina will defeat 16th-seeded Radford, and will do so without the services of NC's star Ty Lawson (in white at left).  Lawson probably won't play tonight because of a problem with an injured toe.  But you can be sure he'll be playing a little further on in the series. President Obama picks Memphis to win the Western division.  Perhaps.  But I'll stick with Connecticut, not merely because it's seeded #1 in the division (Memphis is seeded #2), but because Connecticut is our neighbor.  When people speak of the Tri-State area here, they mean New York/Connecticut/New Jersey.

          One of my near neighbors, retired Air Force Major General Jonathan Scott Gration, has just been appointed special envoy to the Sudan by President Obama.  I don't know the general personally, but I knew his father very well, and wrote of him in my autobiography.  Gration's father, John, was a missionary to Kenya who later in life became the chairman of the world mission department at Wheaton College's graduate school. 
          Being a missionary kid, General Gration grew up speaking Swahili, which is one of the reasons he was chosen to accompany Senator Obama on his well-documented trip to Kenya a couple of years ago.  On this trip, the General was so impressed with Obama that he switched his party allegiance from Republican to Democrat and campaigned for Obama during the election cycle.  
          The assignment to the Sudan is a serious one.  The international criminal court in The Hague, Netherlands, has indicted the President of Sudan, Hassan al-Bashir, with war crimes stemming from the slaughter of 300,000 people in the Darfur region of Sudan.  In turn, Bashir expelled 13 non-government relief organizations.  Today more than a million people in Darfur are without adequate food, clean water and health care. It will be General Gration's job to persuade Bashir to re-admit the agencies. 

     On another front, responding to yesterday's blog, missionary Bill Swan emails me: "The existence of the veiled reality seems to be the absolute theme of biblical letters such as Ephesians and Colossians.  We are invited to explore, luxuriiate and live in this veiled reality.  It's fabulous but also a new way of perceiving/living.  Amazing that this kind of concept is found in the fabric of creation. Thanks for this stimulating tidbit."

          One of my daughters, Melody, is convinced of the strong correlation between quantum mechanics and spirituality.  She has good company, for today it was announced that Bernard d'Espagnat (left) has won this year's Templeton Prize, worth $1.4 million.  d'Espagnat, considered one of world's leading authorities on quantum mechanics, is also known for his writings on the philosophy of science. His most recent book, in fact, is entitled Physics and Philosophy.
          d'Espagnat argues that quantum physics -- with its Uncertainly Principle and related concepts -- implies that scientific knowldge will never truly be able to describe reality in strictly rational terms. That reality -- which he calls "veiled reality" -- nevertheless remains conceptually necessary.  And this in turn leaves great space for religious and spiritual explorations of reality.  One of my own favorite writers, John Polkinghorne, a devout Christian and also an expert in quantum physics, makes the same point. See his Quantum Physics and Theology.

         
          For decades (from Harry Truman to George W. Bush) Billy Graham was known as the pastor to presidents. Under normal circumstances Jeremiah Wright might have been Barack Obama's pastor, but that was not to be. Instead, we are told that President Obama looks to a circle of five noted clergymen (no women). They include Jim Wallis (above), an evangelical with an enduring reputation as a social justice activist; Joel Hunter, a relatively moderate conservative megachurch pastor; T. D. Jakes, pastor of The Potter's House in Dallas, Texas; Otis Moss, Jr. who was an associate of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Kirbyjon Caldwell (who also advised George W. Bush on occasion). The New York Times reports that Obama consults with these men by telephone and not infrequently initiates phone-prayer with them.
          Given the current economic crisis, two ongoing wars, and an ambitious domestic agenda, it is encouraging to know that our new president values spiritual support. I and most of my friends wish him well and wish him success. However, we should not to read too much into this. Previous presidents -- Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, and the aforementioned George W., for example -- also made much of their spirituality, but led the country into the morasses of Watergate, White House sex, and Iraq respectively. Some presidents of my generation, like Eisenhower and Reagan, were not ostentatiously religious, but served us well. Ultimately, what presidents are judged on is not their character but their policies, and whether these policies promoted the general welfare and were at least moderately successful.