c. 1996 Religion News Service

Jesus seminar to discuss its future at upcoming meeting

(RNS) For more than a decade, the Jesus Seminar _ a group of religion and biblical scholars that has popularized the scholarly search for the historical Jesus _ has deconstructed the text of the New Testament Gospels in an attempt to discover what Jesus actually said and did.

Its task largely completed, the controversial Jesus Seminar now must decide its future course. That decision could come at the group’s upcoming fall meeting, set for Oct. 16-20 in Santa Rosa, Calif.

Jesus Seminar participants are considering taking critical looks at the biblical writings attributed to the Apostle Paul, the development of Christian creeds, and the way early church leaders decided what texts should be included in the New Testament.”Subgroups have been laying the ground work. The question is, just how extensively will the Jesus Seminar get into these areas, if indeed that’s what the members want,”spokesman Bob Schwartz said.

Since its inception, the Jesus Seminar has garned media attention _ and the hostility of more traditional Christian scholars _ by applying contemporary standards of historical-critical analysis to Jesus’ words and deeds as stated in the Gospels.

Seminar members have rejected as historically unlikely more than 80 percent of the words attributed to Jesus, as well as his virgin birth and physical resurrection.

Critics have dismissed the Jesus Seminar as a publicity-seeking group hostile to traditional Christianity.”The historical quest for Jesus is not the problem; the subjectivity of the quest is,”wrote one critic, the Rev. George W. Rutler, a Roman Catholic priest in New York. His comments were contained in a biting attack on the Jesus Seminar published in the September issue of Crisis, a conservative Catholic magazine.

At its upcoming meeting _ the group meets twice yearly, in the spring and fall _ Jesus Seminar participants also will deliver”portraits”of a presumed historically accurate Jesus based on the conclusions they have previously reached about his life.

National Life Chain, an anti-abortion event, to be held Sunday

(RNS) Anti-abortion advocates will appear on sidewalks across North America Sunday (Oct. 6) for the annual National Life Chain observance.

Lines of people are expected to gather in more than 800 cities and towns, said Royce Dunn, national director of the Life Chain. They will meet from 2:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. in each time zone across the United States and Canada.

Dunn described the event, which began in California in 1987 and became a national event in 1991, as”a step from the pew to the sidewalk.””It specifically focuses on the abortion holocaust in our nation and the need for us both to earnestly oppose abortion but also to reach out peacefully and compassionately to women who are experiencing troubled pregnancies and to those who have experienced abortion and are struggling with the anguish that follows,”he said.

Dunn is president of the event’s sponsor, Please Let Me Live, a small anti-abortion organization in Yuba City, Calif.

Participants, primarily from Roman Catholic and Protestant churches, will hold signs with messages such as”Abortion Kills Children”and”Jesus Forgives and Heals.” Dunn said demonstrating an anti-abortion stance to passing motorists and pedestrians is a secondary goal of the Life Chain.”The primary purpose of the Life Chain is to minister to the participants themselves about our responsibility to … the unborn child, the mother and to ending the holocaust,”he said.

Dunn said Life Chain coordinators have not counted participants since the 1992 event, which he said included 975,000 people.”We were so concerned with numbers that we felt we were moving away from the purpose of our ministry so we stopped taking attendance after 1992,”he said.

B’nai B’rith, Southern Baptists in new exchange over evangelism

(RNS) A top Southern Baptist official has responded to a Jewish group’s postcard campaign urging the nation’s largest Protestant denomination to repeal its recent resolution calling for renewed emphasis on evangelizing Jews.”The resolution implies no coercion and no rejection, religious or social,”Morris H. Chapman, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s executive committee, said in a return letter sent to those who mailed him cards.”It only affirms the communication of New Testament theology that grows out of Old Testament history and prophecy, in which Baptists have been involved for centuries.” The postcard campaign was launched by B’nai B’rith, an international Jewish defense and social welfare organization with members in 55 nations, after Southern Baptists passed the resolution at their June convention. The card campaign was conducted in conjunction with a fund-raising appeal.

B’nai B’rith spokeswoman Robin Schwartz-Kreger said Wednesday (Oct. 2) that between 5,000 and 6,000 cards had been sent to Chapman. William Merrell, a Southern Baptist spokesman, said”thousands”of cards had been received, but he could not be more exact.

The cards sent to Chapman called the Southern Baptist resolution a”profoundly disrespectful action”that”demonstrates a basic lack of respect for Judaism as a sister religion.”The cards urged the resolution’s”immediate repeal.” Merrell termed the possibility that the resolution might be repealed”infinitesimally small.” Tommy Baer, B’nai B’rith’s international president, said money raised by the”very successful”card campaign would be used to support youth and college programs designed to strengthen Jewish identity.

NCC rejects criticism of burned church campaign

(RNS) The National Council of Churches has rejected a call from the conservative Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD) that two council officials implementing the fund for the rebuilding of burned African-American churches be ousted from their posts.

On Sept. 19, IRD president Diane Knippers, a longtime critic of the NCC, whose members include 33 Protestant and Orthodox churches, called for the ouster of the Rev. Mac Charles Jones, associate general secretary for racial justice, and Don Rojas, a consultant and office manager of the Burned Churches Fund, a joint endeavor of the NCC and a number of Roman Catholic, Jewish and Muslim groups.

Knippers said that Rojas”has a disturbing history”of left-wing activism that made him”a fully integrated part of the international propaganda apparatus of the Soviet bloc”and that he has worked with”racist and anti-Semitic”groups in the United States.

Jones’ ouster was necessary, IRD said, because he hired Rojas and has”embarrassed America’s mainline churches by mishandling the story of church burnings in the South.”The group said Jones was wrong in asserting that black churches are targeted disproportionately for arson and that the burnings are perpetrated by whites as an expression of racial hostility that can be blamed on political and religious conservatives who are creating a racist climate.

In an Oct. 1 statement, however, the NCC rejected the IRD’s complaints as”red-baiting”but did not respond directly to the IRD’s complaints against either Rojas or Jones.”The conscience of the nation has been touched by the burning of black churches,”the statement said.”Americans have rallied not only to rebuild the burned churches but to address racism,”the NCC statement said.”Religious groups and local communities have begun to develop strong programs to confront the climate of racism that underlies church burnings, divides too many Americans, and devastates too many communities.” It accused the IRD of using”half-truths, distortions, character assassination, selective quotation of secondary sources without verifying the facts, and citations out of context”in its attacks on NCC officials.

A spokeswoman for the council said there were no plans to remove either Jones or Rojas from their posts.

Campaign puts Bibles in 98 percent of Copenhagen homes

(RNS) A Danish Bible Society campaign to place a Bible in every home in the capital city of Copenhagen has succeeded beyond organizers’ fondest hopes, with a half million New Testaments given away _ one each to 98 percent of the households in the city.

Morten Aagaard, an ordained Lutheran pastor and general secretary of the Danish Bible Society, said preliminary estimates were that as many as 20 percent of the households would refuse to accept the free copy of the Bible.”But in fact we have found that only 1 or 2 percent of the households said `no thanks,'”Aagaard told Ecumenical News International, the Geneva-based religious news agency.

The campaign, carried out the week of Sept. 6-15, was timed to coincide with events celebrating Copenhagen’s role as 1996 European Cultural Capital.

Aagaard said the most encouraging aspect of the campaign was the cooperation between the city’s churches.”Every household received a visit from a local church, and not necessarily their own church, so in some places Lutherans might receive a New Testament from the Methodist,”he said.”In some cases Catholics are distributing in mainly Lutheran areas, elsewhere Baptists are coordinating distribution by Lutherans and Catholics togethers, and in some other cases Pentecostals and Lutherans who have been living in the same area for 10 years are cooperating for the first time.” With its copy of the New Testament, each household also received a letter from the Danish Bible Society listing 600 follow-up events _ from concerts to Bible study groups, Aagaard said.

Aagaard also said that the Swedish Bible Society is planning a similar campaign for Stockholm in 1998.

Ireland’s Cardinal Daly retires

(RNS) Cardinal Cahal Daly, archbishop of Armagh and the leader of Ireland’s 4 million Roman Catholics, stepped down from his post Tuesday (Oct. 1) on his 79th birthday.

The Vatican said the pope accepted Daly’s resignation for reason of age. While bishops are required to submit their resignation when they turn 75, the Vatican frequently allows influential prelates to remain in their post past that time.

Daly, a native of Northern Ireland, has been an outspoken critic of violence by the Irish Republican Army, the largely Catholic underground army seeking to unite the six counties of Northern Ireland which remain under British control with the Irish Republic.

The Associated Press reported that Daly, who was made a cardinal by Pope John Paul II in 1990, is credited with drafting John Paul’s key speech during his 1979 visit to Ireland in which the pontiff implored the IRA:”On my knees I beg of you to turn away from the paths of violence.” Daly has also worked at improving relations with Northern Ireland’s pro-British Protestant majority and in July worked with Protestant leaders in an effort to avoid a sectarian confrontation when Protestants were determined to march through Portadown, Northern Ireland’s main Catholic enclave.

The cardinal also was critical of the church’s slow response to a mounting list of criminal cases brought against priests for sexual abuse of women and children.

Daly will be succeeded as archbishop of Armagh by Bishop Sean Brady, a former rector of the Irish College in Rome.

Quote of the day: Message on Jerusalem: City of Peace

(RNS) On Aug. 25-29, some 40 Christian, Jewish and Muslim religious leaders and international affairs experts met in Salonika, Greece, at a gathering sponsored by the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue and Commission for Religious Relations With the Jews along with World Council of Churches and the Lutheran World Federation.

In a message at the end of the meeting that presaged the current Mideast crisis, the religious leaders said that”Jerusalem is called to be a city of peace, but at the moment there is no peace.” They also spoke of how the religious communities might work for peace:”We encourage our two peoples, Israelis and Palestinians, and the three faith communities to develop a strategy of peace education that is based on justice and reconciliation. Such education should engender respect for the identity, religious tradition and culture of the other. Peace education is effective when it is backed up by acts of concrete peace-making. Not only the formal educational system, but also families, politicians, mass media, synagogues, churches and mosques should give this task of peace education a high priority so that the animosity dividing people in Jerusalem will be overcome and the two peoples may live in reconciled security.”

MJP END RNS