Biological and technological evolution “is a spiritual process,” says this leading futurist. “Entities become more godlike, never reaching that ideal but moving in that direction exponentially.” Watch excerpts from our interview with Ray Kurzweil.
Author Archives: Fred Yi
Christian Brugger Extended Interview
Purposefulness and self-sacrifice in human life “can never be reduced to a machine,” according to this bioethicist. Watch more of our interview with Professor Christian Brugger.
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The New Roman Missal
LORIE CREPEAU (Director of Faith Formation, St. Edna’s Church): My name is Lorie Crepeau. I’m the director of faith formation here.
JUDY VALENTE, correspondent: These parishioners at St. Edna’s Church in suburban Chicago got a crash course on the changes in the Catholic Mass.
CREPEAU: I don’t want you to think of this as, “Oh great, come Advent I’m going to walk into church and the communion rail’s going to be back and ladies are going to have to wear Kleenex on their head and oh me, oh my.” That is not what is happening here.
VALENTE: What has happened is that the words to some of the prayers and music these people have known for the past 40 years have changed. It’s the most significant retooling of the Mass since 1973, when it went from Latin to English.
CREPEAU: We wanted to make it simple for the people to understand, so we didn’t stay true to the actual Latin translation. We wanted to find words that people felt comfortable with. Well, now you’re comfortable. Forty years later you’re comfortable. Now we’re going to try to make you uncomfortable by going back to where it should have been, alright?
VALENTE: The Vatican says the Mass is now more authentic, more accurately reflecting the meaning of the original Latin.
ARCHDIOCESAN DVD: Will the changing of this frequently used dialogue be easy? Certainly not.
CREPEAU: In the current translation we say that “I have sinned through my own fault.” Now I’m going to say, “I have greatly sinned,” but then they want to reinforce this, obviously, because now they’ve added “through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault,” and you say, “I get it! It’s my fault! I get it!”
VALENTE: Some of the changes don’t fall trippingly off the tongue. In the Creed, for example, the part about Jesus being one with the Father becomes “consubstantial with the Father.”
CREPEAU: It is a $50 word. Now imagine a third-grader trying to do this, because third grade is where they teach the creed.
ARCHDIOCESAN DVD: “Dominus vobiscum,” and the response, “Et cum spiritu tuo,” presently translated as: “The Lord be with you.” “And also with you.”
VALENTE: “And also with you” becomes “and with your spirit.” Other changes are more extensive.
ARCHDIOCESAN DVD: Indeed, as you can see, the entire hymn is reimagined and restructured…
VALENTE: For priests, the Mass becomes quite different.
ARCHDIOCESAN DVD: The new translations of the Roman Missal involve a new way of speaking for the priest at Mass.
VALENTE: But many priests are not happy with the changes. They’ve criticized the new translation as archaic, ugly — even wrong.
REV. LARRY JANOWSKI: I haven’t met a priest yet who feels that this is a good thing, that this is an improvement in the liturgy.
VALENTE: Father Larry Janowski is a Franciscan priest in the Chicago diocese who objects to the literal translation of words from the original Latin.
JANOWSKI: From what I’ve seen they’re like sawdust in the mouth. They’re difficult to say.
VALENTE: For example, this prayer:
JANOWSKI: (reading) “Therefore, Lord, we pray, graciously accept this oblation of our service, that of your whole family, which we make to you also for those to whom you have been pleased to give the new birth of water and the Holy Spirit, granting them forgiveness of all their sins. Order our days in your peace and commend that we be delivered from eternal damnation and counted among the flock of those you have chosen.” That’s quite a mouthful.
VALENTE: Janowski was so concerned that he wrote a letter to Chicago’s Cardinal Francis George, which said in part:
JANOWSKI: (reading from letter) English has the greatest vocabulary of any living language on earth, yet the prescription is that we not only adhere to a stiff, ugly, nonvernacular translation, but actually delights in convoluted sentence structure and anachronistic language, and then calls it reverence.
VALENTE: The retranslation process began in the 1980s with a group of theologians working in concert with linguists, writers, even poets. But the Vatican rejected that translation and instead decided to rewrite the entire Roman Missal or prayer book, of which the Mass is only a part.
REV. EDWARD FOLEY: Then, in 2000, Pope John Paul II announced there would be a new missal, and if there was going to be a new missal you had to start the entire translation process all over again. So it began again.
VALENTE: Father Edward Foley is a professor of liturgy and music.
FOLEY: I think the most problematic part of the whole thing has been the process. I think it was much more secretive than the previous translation process. We knew who the translators were in the previous process. Here, we did not.
VALENTE: In an open letter to the US bishops, Father Anthony Ruff, a liturgist who had been heavily involved in the new translation, refused to promote it, saying “The Holy See allowed a small group to hijack the translation at the final stage, how unsatisfactory the final text is….how much deception and mischief have marked this process—and then when I think of our Lord’s teachings on service and love and unity…I weep.”
Eucharistic Prayer: “When supper was ended, he took the cup…”
VALENTE: The consecration is the holiest part of the Mass. Even a small change here—from the word “all” to the word “many”—has proven controversial.
Eucharistic Prayer: “He gave the cup to his disciples and said, take this all of you and drink from it. This is the cup of my blood, the blood of the new and everlasting covenant. It will be shed for you and for all so that sins may be forgiven.”
JANOWSKI: Our understanding of the sacrifice of Christ in the world today is that it is for all people, and to say “for many” is a very difficult thing for a priest to even get out. I know priests who say it violates their conscience to say that.
THERESA WATKINS (Parishioner): Change is always hard. So I think there will be some pushback from some people, especially because we’ve been doing it for so long.
KATHY KEMNETZ (Parishioner): I think they’re good, I think they’re good. Some will take getting used to.
ERNIE KEMNETZ (Parishioner): I lived through Vatican II and all of that change, and that was something else, and like she was saying, there were a number of pastors who were not fully involved. They fought it.
VALENTE: Despite the controversy, the Mass remains the heart of their faith to most Catholics.
CREPEAU: Remember, the Eucharist is who we are. It is everything that we do. It’s the center of what we are, and everything else comes out from that.
FOLEY: The Roman Catholic Church is not a democracy, and we do have a pope and we do have bishops, and they are the arbiters. The Mass does not belong to me. The liturgy belongs to, the Mass belongs to the church, and I have been called to be an official representative of the church, and it’s not for me to change. It’s for me to do it as effectively and as well as possible.
VALENTE: In a statement, the US bishops said there is “an openness and readiness to receive the new text.” Some priests clearly aren’t ready yet.
JANOWSKI: At some point, I will be required to teach the congregation about what is coming, and I cannot lie to the people. I cannot pretend to be enthusiastic about a translation that I don’t believe in. I will say what needs to be said, but I will have to say to those people whom I love that my heart isn’t in it, and I dread saying that.
VALENTE: But for now, it seems, Catholics will have to learn to live with the changes, whether they like them or not.
For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Judy Valente in Chicago.
Rev. Edward Foley Extended Interview
Watch more of correspondent Judy Valente’s interview on the new Roman Missal with Rev. Edward Foley, professor of liturgy and music at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago.
Heaven and Hell
KIM LAWTON, correspondent: For millennia, people have being trying to imagine what happens after death. Is there a heaven? Who gets in? And what happens to those who don’t?
LISA MILLER: Everybody dies. And we want to hope that the people we love we’ll see again, and we want to hope that our own identities and our own consciousness and maybe even our own bodies exist in some other realm after we’re gone from this earth.
LAWTON: Books trying to provide answers to these age-old questions continue to be bestsellers. One of them—Love Wins by Michigan megachurch pastor Rob Bell—has ignited an intense new debate, particularly among evangelical Christians.
REV. ROB BELL: A lot of people, the conception they were handed of the Christian faith is that you go around making judgments: So-and-so we know for sure is burning forever in that place. You don’t know that. That’s speculation.
PROFESSOR MARY VANDEN BERG (Assistant Professor of Christian Theology, Calvin Theological Seminary): If you reject the kingdom of God, it doesn’t really look all that good for you.
LAWTON: According to the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, an overwhelming majority of Americans believe in life after death. Seventy-four percent believe in heaven, and almost 60 percent believe in hell. A majority of Americans also believe that many religions can lead to eternal life. The exception: Evangelicals, who are more likely to say that theirs is the one true faith that leads to eternal life.
Journalist Lisa Miller is author of the book Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife.
MILLER: It’s a mistake to think you can even talk about God in the Western tradition without talking about heaven, right? How you get to heaven, the question of salvation is central to Judaism, Islam, and Christianity.
LAWTON: Evangelicals have been especially certain about their answers, with many saying that people must accept Jesus as their personal savior.
REV. BILLY GRAHAM: Jesus said there are two roads in life. One is the broad road that leads to destruction and judgment and hell. The other is a narrow road that leads to heaven and paradise.
LAWTON: Mary Vanden Berg is assistant professor of systematic theology at Calvin Seminary in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
VANDEN BERG: There is one sure way to know that you will spend eternal life with God, in the presence of God, and that is through faith in Jesus Christ.
BELL: Gandhi is in hell? He is? And somebody knows this for sure? Will only a few select people make it to heaven, and will billions and billions of people burn forever in hell?
LAWTON: Bell offers a more expansive view. He’s pastor of the nondenominational Mars Hill Bible Church just outside Grand Rapids, which has some 10,000 weekly attenders. He’s also a popular speaker whose videos have a huge international following among younger evangelicals.
BELL: For me, interacting with countless people over the years who literally are carrying around an image, God is not good and God is not good because my grandmother died and at the funeral the pastor wanted us all to know for sure that my grandma was burning in torment forever.
LAWTON: Bell points to Scriptures where Jesus says he is restoring all things and drawing all people to himself.
BELL: And Jesus tells stories in which the key character doesn’t give up on whatever is lost, and I think we should take that seriously. I don’t know what God has in mind, but I do know that this story that Jesus tells causes us to pause before we make any of those sorts of judgments. Be very careful, because God may be up to something way, way bigger than you’ve ever been able to comprehend.
LAWTON: Heaven, Bell says, is not a far-away place but a renewal of the earth that begins here and now. Bell believes the spectrum of people who will be part of it is “wide and expansive.” Hell, he says, is the consequence of choosing not to be part of God’s massive embrace.
BELL: God is throwing a party and everybody’s invited, but if you don’t want to come, you are given that option.
LAWTON: And in one of the most controversial parts of his book, Bell takes issue with the traditional Christian teaching that death ends any opportunity to make that choice.
BELL: So a seventeen-year-old atheist dies. God will punish this seventeen-year-old atheist forever? Yup. So 17 million years from now God will be tormenting and punishing this seventeen-year-old atheist? Yup. And this is okay with God? Yup, that’s how it is. And for me it just seems like, I don’t know, that doesn’t—it’s not compelling. That doesn’t seem to be what Jesus was talking about.
VANDEN BERG: Maybe we can think about those things, and maybe we can wonder about those things, but the Bible’s pretty clear that when the end comes that’s the end. You don’t have a second chance. Now might there be? Could God do that? I don’t know of any theologian that would say God couldn’t. God can do whatever God wants to do, but what does the Bible say? The biblical text doesn’t indicate this at all.
LAWTON: Vanden Berg says while she believes Bell raises some interesting questions, she is concerned that he is lifting out a few particular verses without taking the full biblical narrative into account.
VANDEN BERG: I’m uncomfortable with the way he frames things in the book that make it sound like sort of like don’t worry about it because it’s just going to be okay, and I’m not convinced that the Bible says that. I’m fairly convinced that the Bible says if you reject me, I’ll reject you.
LAWTON: Some evangelicals say Bell doesn’t give enough importance to the passages where biblical authors describe God’s judgment toward sin.
JUSTIN TAYLOR (The Gospel Coalition): When they talk about God’s great love, it’s always set against the backdrop of God’s righteousness, God’s wrath, God’s holiness.
BELL: I think what happens for many people is they heard about the judgment before the love. But if you start with the love and the judgment flows out of that, God’s love is for us to flourish in God’s good world. For us to flourish in God’s good world, judgments have to be made. Well, that then… now that puts judgment in its proper place.
LAWTON: Many evangelicals have been severe in their condemnation of Bell. Some even called him a heretic.
TAYLOR: We care about people, and people who have grown up in the church, who have sung these same songs, who are being won over by somebody who has produced great videos and is a good communicator but is ultimately teaching a false Gospel.
MILLER: What made people mad about Rob Bell was that he calls himself a conservative evangelical, and he believes in a much looser idea of heaven and salvation than conservative evangelicals traditionally believe in. So if he had called himself an Episcopalian, for example, nobody would have batted an eye.
LAWTON: Miller says the conversation itself isn’t new, but the fact that it’s taking place so openly within evangelicalism is.
MILLER: This is a radical upheaval of that entire worldview. Then what does that do to your doctrine, to your creeds, to your world view, to your, to your mission for evangelism? What do you need to teach people if they’re going to get in anyway? It’s a real theological struggle.
LAWTON: Miller says Bell has particular resonance among young evangelicals who increasingly have friends from different faith traditions, and that’s precisely what troubles conservatives.
REV. ALBERT MOHLER JR (President, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary): And I think that’s why we have to talk about this, because we’re very concerned about the loss of the Gospel. Not just getting a doctrine wrong, but the loss of the Gospel in this.
LAWTON: In June, the Southern Baptist Convention voted to reaffirm its belief in the reality of hell as an “eternal, conscious punishment” for those who don’t accept Jesus.
Bell says he wants people to see that Jesus’ ultimate message was about love, not just avoiding hell.
BELL: Jesus didn’t come along and say, “You don’t want to be a part of that thing, do you?” No, he came along and said, “Trust me. Something big is going down. Here, here’s a taste.” Ah. People thought it was amazing.
LAWTON: He says he’s not bothered by those who accuse him of inciting a dangerous conversation.
BELL: It seems to me like the church would be the place that would lead the way in having dangerous conversations. I mean, isn’t that what faith is?
LAWTON: And the conversation isn’t ending anytime soon. Several more books about heaven and hell are being released over the next few weeks.
I’m Kim Lawton in Grand Rapids.
Pastor Rob Bell Extended Interview
“Is there a point at which a change of heart no longer means anything to God?” Watch more of our interview with pastor and author Rob Bell.
Lisa Miller Extended Interview
“Nothing Rob Bell has said is new,” says author and columnist Lisa Miller. “There has been this long conversation for twenty-five hundred years about what heaven is and who gets to go.” Watch more of our interview with her about heaven and megachurch pastor Rob Bell’s book “Love Wins: A Book about Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived.”
Mary Vanden Berg Extended Interview
“I thought he raised some really interesting questions,” says Mary Vanden Berg, assistant professor of theology at Calvin Seminary, when asked about Rob Bell’s book on heaven and God’s judgement. “But I think Christian tradition has answered them.” Watch more of our discussion with her.
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