Christian Feminism: Should Derek Penwell Apologize to Women Preachers?

In my new book, How Jesus has Liberated Women (Volume One, Before Christ, is now out), I argue that Jesus was the first and best feminist.  Which implies that those who came after him have not always made par (many turned out to be wolves, as he warned).  In the next volume, I will show that like pagan religion, post-Christian philosophy has an abject record of insanity on the subject of sex.  And yes, that includes misogynistic philosophers like Arthur Schopenhauer, lesbo-normative thinkers like Judith Butler, and people who despise women and blame men, yet write brilliantly -- here's looking at you, Simone De Beauvoir.  

Here is one ingredient in the secret Christian sauce, which Paul stole from Jesus and the prophets: ALL have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.  Red and yellow, black and white, rich and poor, Jews, Gentiles, and pagans to the uttermost part of the Earth, and Adam AND Eve, we're all in the same pickle, called "Sin and Death."  (And great novelists and psychologists have stolen from St Paul, or recognized from scratch.)

And so, as C. S. Lewis warned, Satan sends errors into the world in pairs, that we flee one only to be ensnared by its opposite and equally deadly number.  This is what one finds, reading the history of "enlightened" thought about sex.  

I won't replicate the story, which you can begin reading in Volume I, and by God's grace, next year in Volume II, from ancient times to this day, and how Jesus has brought liberation to billions of women and men.  

But the Church, oft-entwined in the World, trips over the same opposing errors.  

Christ and his followers have liberated billions of women in profound ways.  But Christians, including myself, are subject to the same temptations as other sons of Adam and daughters of Eve: sex, power, pride, greed, self-delusion, self-righteousness.  

So "take heed, lest we fall."  We swerve to avoid the ditch on one side of the road and plunge into the crevasse on the other side.  

Here is an example of the dangerously simplistic thinking that results. 

The author is a preacher and teacher named Derek Penwell.  He seems sincere and well-meaning, and at times can be eloquent.  And the ditch he swerves to avoid is really there: I spend most of Volume One describing it.  But Christian theology demands balance.  

As often with short pieces on important topics, I reproduce most of the essay, respond point by point, then draw conclusions. 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

"Yesterday, I shared this as a Substack essay and got a strong response from women who've been hurt by the church. I'm posting the full piece here for folks who don't spend time on Substack. By reposting it on Facebook, I'm hoping this pastoral letter of apology and solidarity (1) reaches more of the women the church has too often managed instead of trusted (2), diminished instead of believed, warned about instead of listened to, especially those who'd never see it on Substack."

(1) Speaking as a pastor, Penwell should make sure his message is biblically sound and agrees with the facts. First, to whom are you apologizing? "Women who have been hurt by the Church?" How vague both terms are. Does "the Church" mean the Body of Christ? Particular congregations? Denominations? Church leaders? In the full sense, "church" refers to all followers of Christ, male and female.

Most Christians around the world are female. And each and every one of us is a sinner. Every one of us also possesses a quanta of power, as Burke put it. And we have used that power at times to hurt -- and hopefully at times to help -- both men and women.

So you're off to a bad start, Pastor Penwell. You seem to be assuming that Adam sinned while Eve demurely hid in the bushes. Anyone who has lived on Planet Church or on Planet Earth knows that's nonsense, just as it was nonsense when a few church fathers blamed Eve more than Adam. (Not St. Paul: "In ADAM all have sinned!")

I am also leery of this term "solidarity." It is often used as a "popular front" term in Marxist class warfare, nor that everyone who uses it recognizes that link.

This may seem overly subtle or paranoid, but the use of such terms is often telling.

A pastor should not be an "ally" or in "solidarity" with any race, sex, class, or nation. He is a servant of God. Like the prophets of old, he is called to speak God's truth to sinners and saints belonging to every human category. (And if we meet aliens, or angels, maybe to them as well.)

The word "solidarity" assumes a sort of social warfare in which some who do not themselves belong to the revolutionary and long-oppressed class nevertheless join with them to battle the knuckle-dragging ancient regime. (And therefore, by the way, gain power in the revolutionary system, as the intellectuals who led traditional Marxist revolutions tended to do.)

"During Advent this year, I've been writing pastoral letters to people the church has too often wounded instead of welcomed. They aren't arguments or position papers. They're attempts at honest apology, lament, and solidarity. (3)

Today's letter is for women.

My dear ones,

The church taught you that you were dangerous.

We told everyone that your body could make a man stumble, your voice could usurp authority, and your leadership could unravel the natural order. (4) Mostly, I think, because somewhere deep down, the men in charge suspected that was true."

(3) This sounds humble. But it also seems to echo a comment on this pastor's Facebook page, in which he jokes that he charges $1000 an hour for arguing with people on Facebook. This rhetorical approach seems to preclude the possibility of being disputed. "I'm not arguing, I'm just honestly apologizing and expressing solidarity."

If you say something that is out of line with truth, others should call you on it, whether you frame it as a philosophical argument or an apologetic epistle.

(4) Why does Penwell discuss sexual temptation and authority together? And what truth does he suppose men recognize "somewhere deep down?" Is Penwell admitting that female leadership "could unravel the natural order?"

It is certainly true that immodest and / or lascivious behavior tempts many men, and some women. So the Bible does enjoin women to dress modestly. Or should we come to church with lots of flesh showing? Does he wish to quarrel with such New Testament injunctions? Without, perhaps, naming them, or showing why they are wrong?

There is an equivocation at work here, which with the general lack of clarity in these lines, can set us up for error. It is not clear what he think was "true" about what "the men in charge" thought, because the referent includes multiple unrelated elements, and the pronoun "that" could refer to any of them.

But also, he blames men in the church for comments that are actually found in the New Testament. I guess they're an easier target. It doesn't sound good for a pastor to say, "St Paul was a knuckle-dragging misogynist." But that hardly seems fair to Christian leaders who are sincerely trying to follow Scripture, however flawed you may feel their interpretations to be.

St. Paul also does seem to say leadership in the Church should be male. At the same time, he often greeted and praised female leaders. How one is to sort that out, is an exegetical and psychological problem which is much debated, but not my focus in these books -- I have bigger fish to fry. (I'll explain that later.) But it would be more charitable to concede that some who hold the traditional view may do so out of honest desire to obey Scripture, not out of innate misogyny or fear or female power. Some who hold such views are, after all, themselves women.

"So, we made elaborate theological rules to contain you, dressing up our fear in Scriptural finery, and calling it 'God's will.' We built hierarchies that somehow magically ensured we'd land on top, and you always wind up in the 'helpmeet' role.

"We preached (5) about a woman's submission as if it were some kind of key to understanding God's design for creation. Unfortunately, what that really meant was nothing more theologically compelling than: 'Stay in your lane so we don't have to feel threatened.'"

Again, who is "we?"

Women have helped lead many Christian organizations that I have been associated with. Most preachers in China now seem to be female, as was the co-pastor of the church I served in the suburbs of Taipei in the 1980s. In YWAM, where I got my first extended taste of mission experience, women were often leaders and teachers. One gave a teaching in my Discipleship Training School in Hong Kong in 1984 on why that was biblical. I asked about those verses in Paul, and like Penwell, she seemed to take the question as evidence of a sinister motive on my part. In fact, I was seriously wondering how to interpret those verses.

So who related "a woman's submission" to the order of Creation? Aside from St. Paul himself, when he wasn't warmly greeting and commending, or upbraiding, female colleagues? (Not for taking on leadership roles, but for quarreling?)

Are we to assume that males and females should never take different "lanes"? And that any opposing suggestion is merely a patriarchal power trip? Again, this doesn't seem very charitable or a credible act of psychology. Consider, for example, C. S. Lewis. As I show in The Case for Aslan, and one can see in his Collected Letters, Lewis had numerous deep and respectful relationships with talented female poets, writers, and teachers. But he also argued for complementarian views, based on his understanding (or misunderstanding, if you prefer) of innate gender differences.

Say he was wrong all you like. I do not find his arguments on such topics particularly compelling myself. But he was not angling for patriarchal power, or power of any sort, except that of the sheer persuasive force of words used well -- a power he readily granted to females who matched him in debate, or whose academic or acting careers he promoted, or whose poetry he rhapsodized over while also offering helpful editorial suggestions.

Pace Foucault, it is not always about political power.

"And when you refused to shrink down to a manageable size, we called you divisive. We said you had a spirit of rebellion when what you actually had was a calling that frightened us.

"I'm so sorry.

"I'm sorry for every time you felt the call to preach and were handed a pot holder and a nursery schedule instead.

"I'm sorry for every meeting where you offered an idea that got ignored, only to hear it praised ten minutes later when a man said the same thing.

"I'm sorry for every sermon that made submission sound like a sacrament while maintaining a conspiracy of silence about the men who weaponized it behind closed doors." (6) There's certainly a lot of that going on. Human beings weaponize everything, including love. (As Lewis brilliantly depicts in The Four Loves and The Great Divorce.) Yes, men have sinned greatly. Yes, women have often been their victims. And vice-versa. And there's just as much intra-sex manipulation going on.

Biblical submission is mutual. It is also a necessary part of any civilized society. The police, too, tell us to "stay in your lane." Of course, you can switch lanes. But signal first, watch for other cars, and remember where your exit is. Because in a sense, civilization is all about this dance between vehicles in different lanes. Submission alone -- to marks on the road, to signs, to police, to other drivers -- lends us freedom of the road.

Paul understood that.

As I argue, the Bible has freed women around the world to change lanes -- live longer, leave the home, not get "swapped out" for the younger model, be supported when support is most needed, study, teach, invest, transform nations.

There is nothing in the Bible that tells all women to submit to all men.

The sin Penwell describes is, by many accounts, common. But a careful preacher should recognize that we are all tempted to it, because everyone in society holds power, and most of us gain some measure of authority. Most of us can relate to the centurion's talk about both exercising authority and being under it in different capacities. Yes, Paul's talk about "submission" has been used by power-hungry people to enslave others. Nevertheless, mutual submission is a cornerstone of civilization. Even the president walks around the sign on the floor that says "Wet floor" or on the wall that says "Just painted, do not touch."

"I'm sorry for the way we talked about Mary. We made her a passive vessel, a sweet girl who said yes and then receded into the background. We stripped her of her prophecy, her protest, her full-throated declaration that God was pulling tyrants off thrones and lifting the lowly. We turned a revolutionary into a Hallmark greeting card." (7)

(7) I kind of like this part. Though "we" do it to Jesus, too. And if you read early Christian writings, you find women saying and doing astoundingly gutsy things -- the martyrs were not Hallmark cards, and many of them were women.

"I'm sorry for every woman who reported abuse and was told to pray harder, forgive faster, or think about what she might have done to provoke it.

I'm sorry for the ones who were handed back to their abusers with a blessing and a Bible verse.

I'm sorry the church became the most dangerous place instead of the safest one." (8)

(8) There are no "safe places." Jesus was not safe in the manger. Paul was not safe in the synagogue. Church is not safe, and never will be, for anyone. Jesus warned against wolves, for instance. Power corrupts, in the church as well as everywhere else.

But is the church generally more dangerous than, say, Mohammed's harem? Or the home of a Brahmin on his death bed, when you are expected to burn with him soon? Or brothels in Snake Alley where girls were lined up, a pimp on a chair by their side, to call out to crowds of men as they passed? Or the womb of an expectant mother in ancient Rome, where infanticide was normal, and girls who had been tossed out to die were often picked up and raised for work in brothels?

Churches certainly can be dangerous. A young pastor predated one of the churches we attended growing up, going after girls. Recently I learned that a favorite counsellor at the Bible Camp where I lived when my Mom was cook, went after boys. (Not in camp, fortunately.)

Childhood is often dangerous, which is why Little Red Riding Hood's Mom echoed Jesus in telling her daughter to watch out for wolves. Predatory behavior was accepted in many pre-Christian cultures, as one can see, for instance, by a close reading of Plato's Symposium, as I show in that first volume.

But Church has generally been a happy place to my Grandma, Mom, sister, and wife, whose lives were immeasurably enriched by their time in God's house -- probably one reason most who attend church worldwide are in fact female. Are we to suppose the women who make up the bulk of Christian congregations around the world are fools? Or masochists?

Yes, watch out for the wolves. Everywhere. People in every institution tend to cover up for those with power and money. Followers of a rabbi who was murdered by religious officials in the name of God should not find this too shocking -- especially since he warned it would happen again. But let us not simplify matters, by pretending that oppression is so neatly defined by gender, or by lapsing into melodrama.

"And I'm sorry for the silence. For all the pastors (myself included, God help me) who knew something was wrong and weighed the cost of saying so against the comfort of staying quiet. For all the times we chose peace over truth, and called our cowardice prudence." (8)

(8) A first-person apology is welcome after all the vague 'we's." If this piece had been written in the first-person singular, with concrete details, some of my concerns would evaporate.

"Here's what I need you to know: the dirty secret we’ve tried to keep hidden:

"The God who actually shows up in Scripture isn't the God we described to you.

"The God of the Bible isn't embarrassed by women with power. God spoke through Miriam, Deborah, Huldah. God trusted Rahab with an entire military operation.

"On Easter morning, God had the most important news in human history to deliver. The men were barricaded behind locked doors, terrified. So God entrusted the first sermon of the Christian faith to Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, Salome, and the other women who showed up when the men wouldn’t/couldn’t/didn’t, and sent them to preach the resurrection to disciples who were too afraid to leave the house." (9) (9) This is true, but a bit reactionary and, again, unfair. Jesus' male disciples probably were more vulnerable to arrest, as the Pharaoh in Egypt attempted to kill male babies to control the new Hebrew nation. God did not really say, "Men are such cowards! I guess I'll have to send the good news to women, instead!"

Yes, women participated in the work of the gospel, as did men. God didn't cater to the misogynistic biases of the Greco-Roman world. That doesn't mean it merely echoes the slogans of modern feminism. The Bible flatters no identity group, and has no use for social dualism of any stripe. Penwell is making the same mistake Chairman Mao and the Red Guards made during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. He reverses the biases of the past. He admits, as a pastor, to having been unfair to women in an earlier era. Now he thinks he can fix things by pushing down on the opposite side of the scale.

The Gospel calls us to go deeper, to what Alexander Solzhenitsyn called "the line between good and evil" that passes through every human heart.

And again, those other verses are in the Bible, too, which do seem at times to assume some degree of complementarianism. Biology does, too. It is simplistic and uncharitable to ascribe anything short of viewing gender roles in the Church as absolutely and always identical, as arising from mere cowardice or lust for power.

"If you've walked away from church because church was where you learned to hate your body, distrust your voice, and doubt your calling, your leaving isn't a failure of faith. It might be the most faithful thing you've ever done.

"If you can't sing the hymns anymore because the words taste like all the lies they dressed up in sacred language, God isn't angry at you.

"If you flinch when men quote Scripture because you've heard those same verses used as clubs to beat you down and silence you, we ought to be holding you up as an example of wisdom and bravery." (10) 10. This is stirring rhetoric. And it is possible to make the mistakes Penwell warns against. It is also possible that we are neither so wise nor so brave, but are giving in to a new Spirit of the Age promulgated in Hollywood.

Flattery is not the proper office of a preacher.

"You aren't broken. (11) The Jesus who shows up in the Gospels isn't standing with the dudes holding stones, but with you, with every woman who’s been convinced she’s the problem, rather than the knuckle-draggers trying to erase her. (12) That Jesus sees you and calls you by name, saying what he said to that bent-over woman in Luke 13: "You are set free."

(11) Yes, you are broken. So am I. That is the first intuition of the Christian faith. Penwell seems to have forgotten it, and is engaged in patronizing flattery.

(12) Again Penwell simply reverses former stereotypes, and praises the group that had (supposedly) been universally damned, while damning the group that had (supposedly) been universally praised.

In a sense, there is biblical precedent for this: "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven." But Jesus did not ascribe that virtue en masse to any group of people, because he knew what was in man (and woman). Penwell is eloquent, but his simplicity is as heretical as the error he confesses to having fallen into in the past.

Women are never broken? Never "the problem?" After Jesus saved another woman from being stoned, he then told her, "Go and sin no more." Was he out of line?

We need wholistic biblical truth, not careless blame and praise of undifferentiated masses of human beings.

"I don't know how to end this except with the truth.

You deserved a church that celebrated your voice instead of shushing it.

You deserved a theology that honored your body rather than treating it as a threat.

You deserved leaders who protected you, not the men who harmed you.

You deserved better. So. much. better.

You still do . . . And may you know, in whatever part of you still has room to hear it, that your voice matters, your body is holy, and your calling is real.

Be gentle and brave." (13)

(13) I hope most Christian women find this as patronizing and simple-minded, if perhaps well-meaning, as it appears to me.

Of course our bodies should be honored, both as creations of God, and also as the potential Temple of the Holy Spirit. But dust they are, and to dust they shall return. Not all uses of them are equally noble or holy. Does it really honor women to speak to them as if they were holy by definition, unlike those "knuckle-dragging" male louts?

Of course God can speak through women, men, donkeys, or rocks that cry out. But there is a time to be silent, too, and yes, to stay in lanes and submit to one another. Jordan Peterson argues that women more often need to learn to become more assertive. But great novelists, male and female, recognized that many women have always had "voice" down pat, being richly skilled at keeping spouses, children, and everyone else under their thumbs. (Including some of the female characters in the Chinese classic I am presently reading, Dream of Red Mansions, despite the misogynistic customs I describe in Qing-era Chinese culture.)

And what do we "deserve?" All we have, comes by Grace, a doctrine that Penwell seems to have forgotten. Life itself is a "gift of God, lest any man (or woman) should boast." Pastors should not teach us to boast, or to assume collective innocence or permanent victimhood, though we act as both victims and perpetrators at times.

Speaking of victimhood, where in this confession does Penwell refer to the millions of young women who are taught to despise their femininity? To cut off body organs? To mate without commitment? To casually end pregnancies? To help develop weapons and technologies that threaten the future of the human race? To blame the patriarchy for oppressing them, even as girls graduate from college in far greater numbers than boys, live longer, commit suicide less often, and are less addicted to drugs?

So What About Female Preachers? And Speaking Truth to Power?

Samuel Johnson famously said, in response to reports of the Quakers, "Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all."

While I love good rhetoric, of which insults are a sub-genre now sadly in crisis, my experience has been quite different.  I have heard many female preachers do it very well, indeed. The lady pastor at our church is becoming my favorite. The best sermon I heard in China over the past two years, came from a woman in the ancient Shang-era capital of Anyang, where Jonathan Goforth used to preach to the men, while his wife preached to the women.   

But no, I don't think churches with an old-fashioned preference for male sermonizers are the focus of evil in the modern world.

Indeed, having observed some of the horrors which women have experienced in pagan societies, and shown how the Gospel rescued them from those dungeons, where many were sentenced to death, I do tend to regard the question of gender roles behind the pulpit as a "first world problem."

Why are there no women linebackers in the NFL? The league has been 100% male from the beginning. Why has no woman been elected president of the United States yet? I can think of many I would vote for in a heartbeat, and with the 52% of voters who are female, our united ballots should be enough to put them in office.

And why are there so few male graduates in, say, psychology?

Women usually do have, and should have, leadership roles in the Church. It is not my office to determine how particular denominations or churches should sift through the relevant passages of Scripture, and the very real psychological as well as physiological differences between the sexes, which seem to be in part reflected in such statistics, to decide what should be normative. It may sometimes be my job to point out abuse, which does occur in the Church, and bad will, which we are all sometimes guilty of.

But notice that lines of power have now shifted. The evils of the past are not precisely the evils of the present. A revolution has brought new people to power, and they abuse that power as well. Merely attacking the evils of the past, without noticing how power is abused in the present (out of cowardice!), is the sin of the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution.

Call Christian men, and women, out when they oppress. Cover-ups are evil: we see tens of thousands raped, and lives destroyed, boys and girls doomed to go through life lonely, children raised without "Mom" or "Dad," students taught to hate, yet hesitate to speak up. Speak out when you witness evil, including racism, including misogyny, including abuse of power. We do so often lack guts! But let's avoid heavy-handed and over-generalized condemnations and overly sentimental praise. The two often go together, for that is the way of the heresy which I call "social dualism," of which Marxism and some forms of "anti-racism" and feminism are examples.

More Philosophical Concerns about the Resurrection

I have been thinking for a couple years about writing a book arguing that the Resurrection of Jesus actually occurred. You say there are too many books on that subject already? Including from acclaimed specialists in the New Testament like N. T. Wright? Don't worry, if I write such a book, it will break new (maybe alien) ground -- you'll understand when you see the title.

Such is the danger of anti-Christian arguments: they make me write more books. Because whenever I follow the arc of such arguments, they tend to boomerang around and hit the critics on the butt. Along their flight path, they open up new fields of evidence for the Gospel that Christians had generally overlooked.

Of course, our critics also help us weed out bad arguments for the faith -- God bless them! So many of my books begin as rebuttals of people like Richard Dawkins, John Crossan, Elaine Pagels, Bart Ehrman, Richard Carrier, and Reza Aslan. But following the flight of the boomerang, they ultimately wind up in distant lands -- Upper Egypt, Polynesia, 19th Century India, Narnia, exoplanets -- where they turn up new evidence for the Christian faith. That is especially true of How Jesus Passes the Outsider Test: The Inside Story, and my new book, How Jesus has Liberated Women, both of which were superficially inspired by attacks on the Gospel by John Loftus, but end up offering sweeping historical arguments for the truth and value of the Good News that, in effect, tell the story of the human race in two new ways.

Last month, I responded to arguments against the Resurrection of Christ from a young philosopher named Eric Van Evans. Yesterday morning he offered more reasons for rejecting this central Christian doctrine as an historical fact.

Again, such challenges are a chance to brainstorm, and look at life, along with life from the dead, from fresh perspectives. So let's cautiously dip our toes in, and see how the swimming might be. I'll quote Van Evans' comments, then offer ten preliminary considerations:

"The primary reason (for rejecting Christianity) is that I don’t find the resurrection particularly plausible. How could I possibly ground my entire identity in a historical claim made thousands of years ago? Does God truly expect humanity to believe that he entered history as a human being, was executed, rose bodily from the dead, ascended into heaven, and will one day return? God must understand how extraordinary, opaque, and even absurd such a claim appears to us. (1) If God exists, surely he knows how difficult this is to believe. Why doesn’t he perform a resurrection now? Maybe God should enter history, say, every 2,000 years or so to let us know that he’s here. In fact, some Christian apologists argue that God has some sort of special obligation to become incarcerate. Well, why not do it again? (2)

(1) Doesn't God see how hard ("extraordinary, opaque, absurd") it is to believe in the Resurrection? 

The problem with this objection is that billions of people HAVE believed in the Resurrection, and not found it absurd.  Evans uses the phrase "to us," as if he were speaking for people in general, or modern people in general, who find Easter ridiculous.  But he is not.  He is speaking for himself, in a peculiar way, because he grants that God exists, and that miracles may happen, yet rejects one that is particularly well-established.  (So well established, that it is marked on the calendar as a Holy Day.)  

So the answer to this argument is simple.  If billions of people have believed that God raised Jesus from the dead, and Eric says he believes in God and is open to miracles, why does he find it so hard?  If something IS done, then it must be possible to do it.  If it is done billions of times, then it can't be that hard.  But perhaps he explains his own difficulties below.    

(2) Why doesn't God do resurrections more than once, to press home his point? 

I find this objection question-begging and (to be frank) aesthetically vulgar.  

Question-begging, because there are in fact records of other people coming back from the dead -- even in the New Testament, and yes, in modern times as well.  Read Craig Keener on the latter.    

Vulgar, because as Jesus himself said, "They have Moses and the prophets.  If they will not listen to Moses and the prophets, why would they listen even if someone came back from the dead?"

Now we have Jesus come back from the dead.  If some still refuse to listen, or recognize the extraordinary evidence for that event, the demand for more, yet more miracles -- greater than Easter itself -- does seem vulgar, like a child throwing his quiche on the floor and demanding scrambled eggs with ketchup instead.     

For Evans is ruining the story arc.  It is vulgar to ask for a story to simply repeat.  The universe began in a moment of Creation, a counter-entropic explosion of space itself, then participles that congealed into atoms, and into stars and planets over billions of years. The Resurrection was a similar and parallel counter-entropic event on our planet.  By it, all Nature is brought up.  It is the hinge of history, even in the crude sense that we date history around the pivot of Jesus' life.  

Others may be healed, and it seems sometimes are.  Others may even be raised again to life.  But asking for a second Resurrection is like asking the stars to be made anew.  What we have in the gospels already is vastly more than those for whom "Moses and prophets" were the sum total of the Scriptures: we can see how the Old Testament, and in How Jesus Passes the Outsider Test I argue even Chinese, Indian, Greek and Norse cultures, were fulfilled.

The Resurrection is to human history what Creation is to cosmic history.  Asking for it twice, shows poor taste.  It is like insisting that because the scene where Gollum falls into the Cracks of Doom was so cool, he crawl back up, snatch the ring again, and plunge into the magma a few times extra, as a kind of curtain call  

Eric insists:   

"If salvation, truth, or a relationship with God hinges on believing an extraordinary historical claim from 2,000 years ago, then God seems to be asking humanity to carry an unreasonable burden. One standard Christian answer is that the incarnation is a “once-for-all event,” that is, decisive, complete, and final. But that answer assumes what it’s meant to prove. It presupposes that God’s self-disclosure must take the form of a single rupture, rather than an ongoing, recurring presence. (3) From the outside, that looks totally arbitrary. (4) If God has an obligation to reveal himself, then repeating the act would seem to strengthen the case, not weaken it. (5) (3) In part such a criticism seems a false dichotomy or straw man. Christianity describes both a "once for all" event, and an "ongoing, recurrence presence." What else can one say? Read the Book of Acts, and see the "ongoing, recurring" work of God happening before your eyes. Or read a modern missionary account like Peace Child or Lords of the Earth, or my new How Jesus has Liberated Women.

Analogously, what is marriage? A one-time event? Or a recurring commitment? Yes, and yes. The romance would seep out without both: without an initial public disclosure of love, and then an ongoing working out of that love in practical, real-world, often difficult, conditions.

What Eric is really getting at here is his objection to exclusive religion. He doesn't want one religion to be wholly true, and other religions to be mere errors. I object to exclusivism too, because I think both it and Eric's own pluralism are alike unbiblical and simplistic.

The Resurrection is the fulfillment of many hints and promises throughout the Old Testament. But it is also the fulfillment of hints and promises in Chinese culture, as I show in True Son of Heaven: How Jesus Fulfills the Chinese Culture, and Nordic tradition, as I show in How Jesus Passes the Outsider Test. (C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien were keenly aware of this latter.)

The Resurrection, I would further argue, is the fulfillment of Nature itself, as it manifests itself in Spring. And it points forward to some greater Spring.

That is artistic. That is a beautiful outline of history. But truth must also recognize and account for areas of darkness -- the crucifixion before Easter. To simply say all is light, is to falsify reality and again, to ruin the plot, which needs the darkness and then the dawn.

"I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life." So Christianity has a standard. It is well that this is so, or the gurus of the world - many of whom are the wolves and false prophets that Jesus warned against -- would break down boundaries and consume our souls.

This is, frankly, one reason I also disagree with Eric's repeated affirmations of Karl Marx and socialism. I think he was a ravenous wolf. And any model of religion that fails to take the darkness fully into account, is both inartistic, and crude. The Gulag cannot be swept under the rug: the blood of millions cries out. Neither, of course, can "Christian" sins.

(4) Again, Eric takes his opinion as objective, ignoring the fact that billions have found "Jesus is Lord" anything but arbitrary.

(5) Why should we agree with those unquoted "apologists" who say God had an "obligation" to reveal himself? The traditional Christian doctrine is that revelation is an act of Grace.

God does reveal Himself, through Christ, and through those who follow Him, explicitly or implicitly. The act is repeated in that sense. Read Lords of the Earth, for instance, and see how Stan Dale dies in a flight of arrows by a stream in New Guinea, as Jesus died on the cross. Many have followed Christ to the cross. But there is nothing irrational about setting up an ultimate standard for human life, or in seeing Jesus as its fulfillment, rather than putting every hero or saint on the same level.

The greatest saints recognize their limits. Thus Confucius, whom Mencius described as a "phoenix among chickens," the greatest of the sages, himself said he did not even hope to meet a true sage. Socrates, too, recognized that his greatest wisdom lay in his ability to admit the limits of his knowledge. This is their glory, not their weakness.

Here, my essay on the Prior Probability of the Resurrection might be helpful. I have studied world religions for decades, feel great respect for thinkers like Lao Zi and Confucius, but find no one comparable to Jesus of Nazareth. As the great Chinese man of letters Lin Yutang put it, after a lifetime of searching, and reviewing Chinese philosophy, "Blow out the candles, the sun is risen!" But in a sense Lin's metaphor is misleading, because in his eyes, the life of Jesus deepened the value and meaning of these other great sages, as he does with Isaiah and David.

This is the fundamental error of both exclusivism and pluralism: they assume that the Messianic character of Christ is a Zero-Sum Game: that Jesus being Lord, that negates the prophets and sages. No, he comes to fulfill, not abolish. (But as the Good Shepherd, he does set wolves out of the pasture.)

"Another response is that repeated incarnations would undermine faith. In other words, belief must involve risk, trust, or distance to be genuine. But this raises an uncomfortable implication for me: Does God really value epistemic insecurity? (6) Why should ambiguity be preferable to clarity? If God is perfectly loving, why design a world where salvation depends on navigating ancient testimony, translation disputes, and historical uncertainty?" (7)

(6) I don't think "epistemic insecurity" is a proper definition of "Christian faith." Tim McGrew and I defined it, rather, as something like "Holding firmly to, and acting on, what you have good reason to believe is true, in the face of difficulty."

What does God value? Certainly, if he created this world, ambiguity and uncertainty must be a useful part of life -- and any relationship. What good is your love for your wife if it is never tested? Trials not only prove, but strengthen, bonds. Trees that grow by the ocean develop tough roots, because the wind blows stiffly on their boughs.

So yes, if Christianity is true, faith must be tested. But that fits with everything else we know about the world. And it is consistent with the view that our object of faith is objectively reasonable. One marries hopefully in part because one has found a partner worthy of one's trust. Faith means trusting a worthy partner even when under stress, not marrying a fool or a cheat.

(7) What salvation depends on is a separate question. I do not claim to see into the afterlife. Nor am I the judge of souls.

Translation disputes need not concern us. I read the New Testament in Greek, and have read it in Chinese, English, and some in Japanese, and a few verses in Russian and French. The translators of the main English versions of the NT seem quite competent. The main sense of the NT is not confused by translation, IMO.

You may believe the testimony of the apostles or deny it. I have argued, in several books, that you should believe it, because it is strongly evidenced on dozens of levels.

"Now, even if I did find the resurrection plausible, I still don’t think I would be a 'Christian' in the conventional sense. (8) Why does one have to *be* anything at all? Belief in God does not require allegiance to a particular religious identity, nor does it require anchoring one’s moral and spiritual life to a single tradition. (9) What ultimately matters is how you live. Strive for virtue. Pursue the good, the true, and the beautiful. In my view, you move infinitely closer to God through such pursuits than through merely affirming the correct doctrines or identifying with the correct tradition." (10)

(8) I'm not much for convention myself.

(9) Because Jesus is Lord.

I expected we'd come more explicitly to the question of World Religions before we got to the end of Eric's remarks. It's a question that he cares a lot about. It's also the central topic of four of my books, including my doctoral dissertation.

I love the Chinese tradition, and often take fire for that these days, when America and China are at odds.

But in a sense, I would argue that all modern traditions are in fact "anchored" to the life of Jesus. Neither modern society, nor our consciousness of what is right, can be explained apart from the teachings and example of Jesus. You can't escape his impact, even in rebellion. Marx was a Christian heretic, and so are the New Atheists.

And as Bob Dylan put: "It might be the devil, or it might be the Lord, but you gotta serve somebody."

Setting oneself as the judge of Right and Wrong is both historically naive, because we are all contingent beings, and psychologically damaging, because it makes us little gods, knowing good and evil for ourselves. Lordship does not suit us. It damages us, and makes us demons in practice. That is, in fact, what happened to Marx.

(10) This is a bit of a false dichotomy, and also ignores the fact that our conceptions of what is "good" or "true" cannot be anchored in ourselves. Because that deifies our souls, which ensnares them more profoundly.

C. S. Lewis and I would agree that the Stoics were the most noble of ancient Greeks and Romans.

If we could return to theistic Stoicism, that would indeed be a giant leap forward for mankind.

But can we? How did Stoicism actually play out in the ancient world? I would argue that it found its fulfillment when it met St. Paul in the market of Athens, and then heard his message about the Resurrection of one whom God had chosen to bring sense to the human story, on Mars Hill. Before that, even the greatest ancient moralists were a people walking in darkness. Now they had seen a great light, and that made all the difference -- historically and psychologically.

Genocide in Nigeria? Wheelchairs, Wildebeests, and Christian-Muslim Tensions

David Marshall: Welcome to Wind of the Tao Podcast. Today we have a special guest, Ron Rice, a pastor at Westside Presbyterian Church in West Seattle. He's also an authority on the country of Nigeria. A lot's been going on in that largest of African countries in the last few years, which has mostly Muslims in the north and mostly Christians in the south.

Ron Rice is an old friend of my parents. Ron, could you please introduce yourself?

Ron Rice: Yes.  I'm a retired Presbyterian pastor. I'm 88 years old. I've been to Nigeria 31 times and I have a major ministry there.  I live in West Seattle.  My wife has been with me 16 times to Nigeria. I've actually traveled in 33 of Nigeria's 36 states. I have yet to meet a Nigerian who has seen as much of Nigeria as I have.

 

Wheelchairs for Nigeria

There's more polio in Nigeria than anywhere in the world. There are uncounted tens of thousands of polio survivors and basically no one is helping them. Now huge efforts have been made at polio eradication.  Rotary started this over 40 years ago. They've raised over a billion dollars from Rotary clubs around the world. Gates Foundation has given five billion.

So the good news is that the World Health Organization declared that Nigeria was polio free maybe six or seven years ago.

I have a partner (in Nigeria) who walks on his hands on wooden blocks. He's a graduate of the law faculty of the University of Joss. And we have a shop in Joss, Nigeria with 46 employees.  And we build a tricycle made of bicycle parts.  We build them for $150.

I first my met my partner 26 years ago. This started very slowly. I had a wheelchair or tricycle built for him and it's grown and grown and now we have last month we topped 40,000 of these tricycle wheelchairs that we have built and donated. No one else in that huge country. You know, Nigeria has 230 million people. It's two-thirds the population in the United States. And no one else is doing what we're doing for polio survivors. But we've just scratched the surface.

(These wheelchairs) transform lives because (the recipients) have been crawling on the ground.  Imagine if you could never get further from your house and you crawl on your hands and knees all your life. You're not going to go out in public. Nobody's going to know about you except your family and they're ashamed.  It's an honor-shame culture. And there's a lot of shame connected with having a disabled person in your family. And so mobility absolutely transforms their lives. Kids can go to school, adults can go to the market or to church or to the mosque.  And our of course our goal is that they can be self-supporting and many of them do become self-supporting.

A couple years ago we did a distribution in at an emir's palace. You know an emir is a king and traditional ruler. And here was a man on one of our wheelchairs that he had gotten 10 years before and he has a little business selling fruit. He has someone that goes into Joss and buys fruit and brings it back and he sells it and he's supporting his family.  So (for) many it absolutely changes their life.

We're a Christian organization. Our name is Beautiful Gate, taken from the book of Acts in the Bible. Peter and John going to the temple to pray at the gate called beautiful. And (they meet) a crippled beggar there.  Peter says, “Silver and gold have I none, but I'll give you what I do have. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, stand up and walk.” And this man who had never walked jumped to his feet and went in temple praising God.

We tell that story wherever we go, wherever we give out wheelchairs.  We can't do what Peter did, but we're doing the next best thing by giving mobility to these who cannot walk.  Of our 46 employees, probably maybe 15 or 20 of them are Muslim.

Marshall: That reminds me of the ministry that Christian missionaries did in China when they helped uh overthrow foot-binding in the 19th century in the early 20th century.

So some of your employees are Muslim and some are Christian and your ministry is obviously to both Muslims and Christians and also anybody else who may belong to other religions as well.

Rice: It’s in the city of Joss, a city maybe about the size of Seattle, in the middle belt of the country.  It’s about half Christian half Muslim -- actually Plateau State where Joss is located is maybe 70% Christian.

Christian-Muslim Violence

Marshall:  So do you see any hostility between Muslims and Christians in a place like that or is it more confined to particular regions of Nigeria?

Rice: Oh yes yes yes we've had what they call crises. The first one was in 2001 – it started five days before 911, but had nothing to do with 911 here.  But you never know what triggers it.

On Friday afternoons the Muslims block off the main roads for parking for people going to the mosque to pray. And the story was – you never know the details – that some lady went through the parking lot or something. Anyway, it triggered hostility and and there were probably several thousand people that were killed, both Christians and Muslims.  (You know, when you talk about Christians and Muslims, these are people from Christian tribes or Muslim tribes. It doesn't mean when you say they're Christian that they all go to church, although many do.)

There have been several other crises that were triggered by who knows what and there were maybe several thousand killed.  That doesn't really have anything to do with the current killing across the country.

Our old shop which we started in 2004 was in a Christian area on a back road, very hard to find. And after one of these crises, some of the ladies came from the community to tell my partner Yuba, you better not allow any of your Muslim workers to come through the neighborhood because it won't be safe for them. You know, back then, I mean, it was awful. They'd stop a motorcycle – and back in those days the taxis in town were motorcycles. They don't have those anymore in Joss – they have the three-wheeled jimny from India.

But the motorcycle would be going through the wrong part of town and a gang of young guys would stop the motorcycle and find out if the if the passenger was a Christian or Muslim and if they were in the wrong area, maybe they'd make them quote the Lord's Prayer or something to find out, but they tell them to pull out your phone and call your family and tell them that they won't be seeing you anymore and they kill them right there on the spot. And so there has been that that kind of killing.

But that's been quite a while I think since we've had a crisis like that, at least 10 years.

Marshall: In a large country with 230 million, people, you've got three kinds of interreligious violence.  You've got this sort of community upwelling of violence and you've got the Fulani herders who are in conflict with the farmers and then you have the – what's the name of that terrorist organization up in the north?

Rice: Boko Haram.

Marshall: They've also split into different groups as well  . . .

Rice: Let me talk about those three groups.

Boko Haram started in the northeast maybe 15, 20 years ago.  Boko means “book” and they're trying to reestablish the Islamic caliphate and destroy all western education. Most high schools in Nigeria are boarding schools. the government would try to send have families send students from the southwest or the southeast to a school in the north and vice versa to try to break down tribal animosities. and Boko Haram would come to a school in the night, a boarding school, high school, and they would light fire to the boy’s hostel and shoot all the boys as they came out and then they'd go to the girls’ dormitories and bring the girls out and tell them to go home and get married.

Well, you didn't have to do that more than a few times and no families were ever going to send their students to a boarding school in the north.

And the estimates now that I've gotten from my colleague, Professor Danny McCain at the University of Joss, who heads up their Peace Department. So, he's really on top of things. The latest research is that the Boko Haram has killed between 300,000 and 350,000: 60% Muslim, 40% Christian. Of course, remember they're in the north and the north is mostly Muslim. So when they're going into villages and killing school kids or whatever the majority of the victims are going to be Muslim certainly killed plenty of Christian

Marshall: From what I understand Boko Haram has split into different factions and is fighting itself nowadays.

Rice: Probably.  You know some have lined up with ISIS uh up in the Middle East and the army has killed thousands.  The army of course they don't make very good soldiers. They come in and shoot them up when they can’t capture them. They don't mostly they don't take prisoners and of course a lot of soldiers have been killed by Boko Haram. They're ambushed and Boko Ram has a lot of weapons from up north and so it has been very tragic.

Marshall: So that sounds a little bit more complicated than what we usually hear about Nigeria.

Rice: It's all very complicated.

So the next group would be the bandits. This is in the Northwest. And from the news we get there's no religious connotation.

Marshall: I've heard that they shout Allahu Akbar when they attack. 

Rice:  These would be Muslim bandits attacking Muslim villages

A lot of Ibos from the south and people in the southeast and southwest are predominantly Christian. They're much more entrepreneurial than in the north, more educated.  So during that period (20 years ago) there were many Ibos that came to set up little shops and do business. And there was one main street in Joss that had a whole bunch of Ibo shops. And of course when this crisis started, the army moved in within a day or so.  But a gang of young Muslim men –  probably not educated. you know, very devout Muslim families don't send their kids to school, or send them to a school run by an emir who may have 50 boys and can't feed them. They're out begging on the streets.

Anyway, they were they were attacking these some of these shops uh shouting Allah Akbar, God is great. And the army, they had a machine gun set up there and they just mowed them down. And the these Muslim young guys thought they were bulletproof. And you never know. Of course the government and the army buried these bodies very quickly and they never reported any details (because that would) just escalate retaliation back and forth.

Marshall: But what is the government's position on all this? They just trying to calm everything down or they take a definite side for one side or the other?

Rice: Yeah, let me come to that. Let me talk first about the Fulani.

The Fulani are nomadic cattle herders.  There are 30 to 40 million Fulani in west Africa, probably fifteen to twenty million in Nigeria. They have a lot of cows. They have big families. They have multiple wives. And in the past there wasn't really such a big problem. And I should add that the farmers have traditionally no fences. We have never seen a fence around a farm in Nigeria. And so as the population has grown, as the desert has moved south, there's less and less pasture for the cows. And so the conflict as the as the cows invade a farmer's field, of course he's going to get angry and maybe shoot a cow and then the Fulani are going to way over retaliate.

They've probably got AK-47s from payments from kidnapping and they come in and shoot up the village and houses. 

Marshall: Of the 10 or 15 million or so Fulani in Nigeria, how many do you think are participating in these sorts of activities?

Rice: I have no idea, but it would be it would be a small minority and it would be regional.

I'm on the board of Phyllis Sortor Schools for Africa. She's a tremendous missionary in Nigeria. She was Seattle Pacific Alumni of the Year a couple years ago.  An amazing lady – she has 20 Christian schools for Fulani children.  Up in Niger state where the bandits came, nobody knows kidnapped these 300 students just a week or so ago from a Catholic school in Niger state.  Phyllis has six primary schools and one new high school for Fulani children in a huge grazing reserve where thousands of Fulani live. They are very peaceful and uh but now she's had to shut down her schools there and also in couple other states. The governor of Niger state has closed all schools because of this kidnapping.

Why did they pick a Catholic school? Well, probably they figured that these families that could for afford to send their student to a private school would have more money than families that sent their students to a public school. And of course, I'm sure this is all for ransom. Anyway, that's what's currently in the news.

My guess is that those are the bandits. I don't know that Boko Haram has been operating that far west in Nigeria. It could be but if it were Boko Haram, the girls would probably be forced into marrying

Marshall:  The notion that some people have been bantering around in the US is that this is a sort of genocide against Christians. Obviously you don't see it as something so simple as that.

Rice: No. I I have here in front of me an article (from) my colleague Danny McCain. This is written by a Muslim and his figures (show that) in Benway State, which is just south of Plateau State where we're located, probably 90% Christian, some sources suggested as many as 2,000 villages have been sacked over the years, Zamfara State in the far north, 95% Muslim and there's been 481 villages sacked.  The April report noted 100 deserted villages and 300,000 displaced people. Those would be 95% Muslim. Plateau State is 70% Christian. That's where we're located. Armed herders have sacked at least 43 villages between 2018  and 2023. Then Katina state again in the far north probably 95% Muslim (according to a) 2024 report, 200 villages and towns were destroyed.

So you can see it's a mixed it's a mixed deal.  Some states that are predominantly Christian farmers have been heavily attacked by the Fulani, but up in the north it's Muslim villages that have been.

Marshall: But the state that you mentioned that had 2,000 villages was a mostly Christian state though so (Christians) would still probably constitute the bulk of the number (of victims).  But you don't really think there's a very large religious component to that. They're just out for either vengeance or for, like you said, sacking. They're trying to get some money, take people hostage and things like that.

Rice: Well no, they're after land for their cows.  People in that village and in surrounding areas are going to flee in fear to a refugee camp and so now the Fulani have pasture for their cows. You know this was a problem in the United States in the west what 150 years ago something like that between herders and farmers.

Marshall:  “Oh, the farmer and the cowman should be friends.” Like that musical from Oklahoma?

Rice: Yeah. And historians have said that the solution to that problem was the invention of barbed wire.

Marshall: Even if you go back to ancient Sumer or China this dynamic between settled farming peoples and the nomadic herders . . .  the Mongolians too, who conquered China. This has been going on since the dawn of time.

Rice:  When the Fulani come and shoot up a village and burn the houses. If it's a Christian village, they're going to burn the church. They may seek out the pastor. Not because necessarily he's a Christian pastor, maybe, but maybe because he's a leader of the village. He's highly respected. And so in these reports here in the US when they talk about burning churches, maybe many of those have been when they've burned a village.

Marshall: So, your colleague, the woman who has started schools for Fulani children, I guess she's hoping that (her work) will help the Fulani adjust and allow the two cultures to live side by side.  It sounds like things are not really going that well, though.  Is there hope?   Is there a solution to this problem besides barbed wire?

Rice: Let me back up and say that she learned some years maybe 15 years ago about a scientist in Zimbabwe.  The conventional wisdom is that as the desert moves south desertification occurs because of over-grazing.  But this scientist has said, “No!  Let us look at the big national park in the north of Tanzania and Marara Park in Kenya the Masara park.  You’ve all seen on TV the migration of the wildebeest.  Thousands of of wildebeest. And as they cross the rivers, the crocs are having a a big feast."

What you find in these two national parks that straddle a country border is that the wildebeests are chewing up the ground and fertilizing it. And then as the rains move, they're moving around following the rains in a big circle. And eventually when they come back, of course, now the grass is growing great because it's been fertilized and been plowed by their hooves.

And so what he what he proposed was what's called rotational grazing. You take a big plot of ground. You put a deep well in the center. You divide it up into separate paddocks and you move the cows around so that by the time they come around in the course of a year, the grass is growing and there's good pasture.

And so she has gotten the governor of Niger State and a couple other states to (donate) a great big piece of land. And they dug or drilled several deep wells and as I say there are tens of thousands of Fulani there. She's established six primary schools and now a new high school, and a number of clinics.  She's had some of the women in the village trained as health workers and employs both Muslims and Christians teachers. They have to be very well qualified and pass the national teaching certificate.

And part of the solution is giving land to the Fulanis so that they have pastures for their cows and of course the schools. She tries to establish these schools so that some of the farmer kids can go to school with the Fulani and build friendships.

Marshall:  So what role does the government play in all of this?

Rice:  Let me back up and say the previous president was a Fulani himself. There are royal Fulani and then you have nomadic herders who are not educated. Kids don't go to school. They're sent out to watch over the cows.  The former president was Fulani himself and probably at least half of the army are Fulani. So there's some suspicion that the government was going easy on the Fulani.  I doubt that.  Maybe the soldiers in in the local barracks.

The current president is a Muslim and he talks a good game and called a national emergency recently and is trying to get the army to try to track down these militant Fulanis. Sometimes they attack during the day, but lots of times at night.  Poor villagers, you don't call 911 and the and the authorities are going to come quickly. No, the army is in their barrack barracks. It may be 20 miles away and the Fulani out-gun them anyway.  And by the time the army would ever come, they're probably afraid of being ambushed.  There's a lot of incompetence.

My colleague Dr. McCain attributes a lot of this to the incompetence of the authorities of the army and so on. 

Marshall: So how should Christians in America look at this? Is there anything that we can do or how should we think about this?  Many Christians are concerned about these brothers and sisters who are being killed in one way or the other by militants or Boko Haram or by Fulani raiders.  How should we see this?

Rice: Well, I think number one is to pray.  Christians have been killed down through the centuries and partly I think (we need) to understand the complexity of the situation.  Nigeria is very concerned about (their country’s) reputation.  If you were a Nigerian American – there are many doctors and professionals (here) – they understand that it's more complex and that it is not a genocide.

Marshall: On the ground level, you mentioned however that it's getting dangerous. What was the name of your friend who runs the schools, the lady from SPU?

Rice: Her name is Phyllis Sortor.  A marvelous lady.  Her website is Phyllis Sortor Schools for Africa.  I'm on her board and a few years ago we split the cost of an armored vehicle, a 2006 Lexus SUV that we would both use. She also has a second vehicle, an extended cab pickup. She employs two policemen full-time. They ride in the passenger seat of the two vehicles with their gun between their knees and their rifle, and they don't fasten their seat belt. They need to be ready to go.

Two years ago in October we linked up with Phyllis and their security team and we did eight or nine big distributions. We gave out I think almost a thousand wheelchairs in these distributions.

Kidnapping now is a risk for me why I can't go back.  The kidnapping isn't in the cities. It's out on the lonely highways and it's strictly commercial. And if they ever caught an American, it'd be a huge ransom. And my colleague wrote to me a couple years ago when we were considering coming and he said, "Well, you might be able to survive in the bush for a week or a month or however long it would take uh your friends in the US to raise your ransom. But think about your wife.  You wouldn't have your medications, maybe not your glasses. You'd be barefoot probably. And they'd be moving you around the bush.”

So to be kidnapped there is a risk and several missionaries have been kidnapped. They've all been released.  But nobody knows how many thousands of dollars were paid in for their ransom.  That's why after 31 trips I can't go anymore.

Although we have wonderful people running our Beautiful Gate workshop and in November they had I think already built 3,700 wheelchairs this year. They're on schedule to build 4,000 wheelchairs in 2025.

My big job is raising money. I've got to raise about $25,000 a month in order to maintain our production.

Marshall: And how are you doing? 

Rice; Well, we've been doing quite well except the last few months. I don't know why, but donations have been going down quite drastically.

Marshall: Okay, I'll put a link up to your organization so people can look into that.  

Aside from that, on a personal level, you’ve taken your wheelchairs into Muslim villages as well as Christian villages. So, it seems like there must be on a ground level, there's often some good relationships between Christians and Muslims in Nigeria as well. We're talk concentrating on the on the negative side, but there's must be some positive relations as well.

Rice: Absolutely. You know, you know, I was turbaned as a chief by a Muslim tribe.  That's the highest honor they can give. And they gave me this beautiful black robe with all this gold embroidery. And then of course a turban, which is a a fabric about 25 ft long.  The protocol is that I have to wear my chief road my turban and so yes we've had wonderful and many times when we have done distributions in Muslim areas the local leader or the local imam or the leader of the community maybe the government leader will praise us and say, “Look at what these Christians are doing for us and we don't do anything for them.”   And just go on and on. So, it's been quite a witness and we've never had an issue of bad relationships with the Muslims.

Europe vs. America

 

Everyone seems to be at war with everyone these days.  Certainly this is true in the United States, where conservatives have divided into a million factions and battle daily.  Our president seldom seems happier than when taking a piece out of an old ally.  He is much like Mao Zedong, author of On Contradictions, in that regard. 

America and its old allies in NATO also keep up a feud, or a number of feuds, even as they partly support Ukraine against Russia.  (And North Korea!)  

Charles Cooke, a British immigrant to the United States and an American citizen, just attacked his home continent with great zest in a National Review article entitled "Europe is Delusional."  To be fair, he didn't start this argument.  But he tried to finish it with a beautiful burst of bombast: 

"As a former Brit who enjoys spending time in both France and Italy, I take no particular pleasure in unloading in this manner, but honesty compels it: In its current incarnation, Europe is a poor, corrupt, sclerotic, vampiric open-air museum, and its leadership class is full of priggish, dishonest, supercilious, rent-seeking parasites, whose boundless sense of superiority ought by rights to have vanished in 1901. Europe, in the year 2025, is what a continent would look like if it were run by NPR. It is a librarian in a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles, snobbishly shushing the workers outside. It is a faculty meeting, a Sierra Club protest, a forum for those who believe that words create reality. There is no reason that we in the United States should consent to be lectured by the apologists for such a silly place."

Bravo!  That's the way to roast a continent.  

Much of Cooke's rebuttal to this alleged European attitude has to do with relative wealth: 

"Criticize a European from America and you will immediately be hit with a wall of undeservedly self-righteous disdain . . . At Least We’re Not American — . . .  What about the massive gap in GDP that has opened up between the U.S. and Europe since 2008? At least we’re not American. What about the anemic performance of European companies relative to those in the United States? At least we’re not American. What about the gulf between GDP per capita in Europe and GDP per capita in the United States, or about the U.S.’s great advantages in biotech and energy and advanced semiconductors, or the fact that, if most European countries were to join the U.S., they’d have a lower standard of living than people do in Mississippi, or that the average European is six times more likely to die from a lack of heating or air conditioning than an American is from a gun, or that most European countries are unable to usefully project military power? At least we’re not American."

Let me emphasize the distinction here between rhetoric and reasoning, between Aristotle's Logos and his Pathos, which I often bring up with my students.  

Cookes' essay sizzles.  It burns the grill and everything on it -- from Iberia to the Baltic.  It is smoking hot.  His rant is even better than Richard Dawkins' famous attack on God: "misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, megalomaniacal, maliciously malevolent bully."

Bully, indeed. Two cheers for Charles, one and a half for Richard. (I explained why Dawkins' arguments deserve no more in The Truth Behind the New Atheism.)

Charles gets the extra half star for even better rhetoric, and arguably more truth.

But don't let those stars dazzle your eyes.

He says "I take no pleasure in saying this." Hogwash, Charlie. No one could write with such zest and not enjoy it, as we enjoy reading it.

But it is not rationally convincing:

"If most European countries were to join the U.S., they’d have a lower standard of living than people do in Mississippi, or that the average European is six times more likely to die from a lack of heating or air conditioning than an American is from a gun . . . "

And yet Italians, whom he mentions, live 14 years longer than the residents of Mississippi. Despite all that lack of heating or air conditioning.

Isn't a lifespan that includes fourteen extra years worth mentioning?  

Comparisons, they say, are odious. Comparisons that cherry-pick vital facts and ignore those that tell against one's argument -- a common flaw at National Review, and in modern rhetoric in general -- should not be called rationally persuasive. Cooke hits a home run on rhetoric, but weakly grounds to second with logic and cherry-picked factoids.

Life expectancy? Advantage, western Europe, by a mile.

Domestic peace? Low murder rates? Advantage, western Europe, by two miles.

Long vacations? Advantage, again, Europe.

Healthy food? Beautiful architecture? Yes, the latter must be credited to earlier generations, except for a few buildings in Barcelona.

Fighting off the Russian army? Advantage, Ukraine, which last I checked, was a country in Europe.

Who has the less awful politicians? That's a hard one. But see who is in charge in Italy and Poland before you give his Orangeness the nod.

Yes, you can work the data around to the opposite conclusion. Yes, I am also irritated by the common European assumption that America is a racist, half-barbaric nation. And by American liberal sycophants who make the same assumption, backed up with even weaker facts and worse logic.  

The sweetest revenge, though, is to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God.

Cooke's rhetoric is sweet. But on logic and evidence, I can't give his essay very high marks.

And I bet, when he goes to bed tonight, he'll admit that to himself.

Ours is an age of sentimental rhetoric.  The art of reasoning seems almost to have been lost.  This may be why ours is becoming an increasingly fractious age as well.