Chalk one up for God?

Virtually anyone linked to God and cyberspace gets the same letter several times a year as it's copied and forwarded, and copied and forwarded, from one e-mail list to another – World Wide Web without end, amen.

It contains a "true story" about an atheistic philosopher at the University of Southern California, a courageous student, a piece of chalk and a miracle. The letter ends by challenging the reader to pass it on, rather than hitting the delete key. Clearly, readers are supposed to have enough faith to keep this evangelistic chain letter going.

Well, the philosophy faculty at USC doesn't have enough blind faith to let this story keep making the rounds. In a few weeks the department will - after years of calls, letters and email – add a front-page link to its Internet site offering a pack of proof that the story simply isn't true.

"I don't think the people who keep sending this around mean any harm and I can understand why it appeals so much to some people, especially to some Christians, who often feel like they are treated poorly in academia," said Edwin McCann, director of the school of philosophy. "But if people fall for this story because it bolsters their faith, and pass it on, they're spreading around something that isn't true. Serious believers need to base their belief on truth."

The most popular version of this tale describes an event that happened "a few years ago" in a required class that one professor annually dedicated to his belief that God could not exist. For 20 years, no student had dared to answer when he shouted, at the end of the semester: "If there is anyone here who still believes in Jesus, stand up!"

Then the professor would hold up a piece of chalk and challenge God to keep it from hitting the floor. Every year it shattered into tiny pieces. Finally, a freshman - after months of prayer - dared to make a stand. The professor called him a fool and proceeded to perform his famous chalk test. However, this time the chalk slipped, hit his shirt cuff, rolled down his leg and off his shoe - unbroken.

"The professor's jaw dropped as he stared at the chalk," says the story. "He looked up at the young man and then ran out of the lecture hall. The young man ...proceeded to walk to the front of the room and share his faith in Jesus for the next half an hour. Three hundred students stayed and listened as he told of God's love for them and of his power through Jesus."

The story usually arrives in a letter from someone who received it from a friend who knew someone who heard the story from another friend who knew a student who saw it happen.

Meanwhile, McCann freely testifies that this hasn't happened during his 14 years at USC, or during the 32-year tenure of the noted Christian philosopher Dallas Willard. Plus, there is no required course that fits this description and the only class, in this era, that has had the same professor for 20 years doesn't address the issue of God's existence and so forth and so on.

An epistle McCann will soon post online traces the story to a 1977 book called "70 Years of Miracles." In that account, author Richard Harvey shares an anonymous account of an atheistic scientist who performs a similar classroom test of faith with a glass beaker - in the 1920s.

Also, the San Fernando Valley Folklore Society's massive Internet site dedicated to collecting and dissecting "urban legends" (http://www.snopes.com) notes that a similar story appears in a tract from the anti-Catholic scribe Jack Chick. The current story reached the Internet in 1996 and one reader wrote the site to say it already was circulating in California in 1968.

Actually, the true miracle would be if 300 modern students sat in a classroom for more than 60 seconds when they were not required to do so, noted Barbara Mikkelson, a curator of the urban-legend site.

Chalk this one up as a charming parable, one not grounded in the facts as reported," she said. "It's David and Goliath in a classroom."

A new Presbyterian Reformation?

The two men spoke on the same topic, on the same day and at luncheons early in the same gathering – the 211th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

But Harvard University minister Peter Gomes and ex-gay counselor Joe Dallas found radically different messages when they opened their Bibles.

Right now, said Gomes, the forces of biblical literalism are waging a campaign of "textual harassment" against those who want to welcome gays and lesbians into the ministry and bless same-sex unions at church altars. But progressives must not surrender to those who are bound by "fear and ignorance," he told the Covenant Network of Presbyterians.

"The cause is just," said Gomes, an openly gay Baptist who leads Harvard's Memorial Church. "The experience of the gospel is in your direction. You are sailing with the wind of the Holy Spirit. You are on the Lord's side."

The Covenant Network luncheon Monday symbolized one side in what Presbyterian politicos call the "Battle of the Amendments," which continued all this week at the assembly in Fort Worth, Texas. After a year of debate, the church's regional presbyteries in 1997 voted 97 to 74 to add Amendment B to its Book of Order, stating that ministers must "live either in fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman, or chastity in singleness." A year later, the presbyteries voted 59 to 114 to defeat Amendment A, which would have required "fidelity and integrity in all relationships."

Dallas spoke at a luncheon sponsored by OneByOne, a ministry within the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) created to minister to "those in conflict with their sexuality." He stressed that those backing a pro-homosexual view of ordination and marriage have based their arguments on their feelings and experiences, not on scripture.

"The real question in assessing relationships is not, 'Is it loving?', but, 'Is it right or wrong?'," said Dallas, who lived for years in gay relationships before he got married and became an ex-gay leader. "The scriptures on homosexuality are unambiguous in both testaments. The only relationship considered best is a monogamous relationship between one man and one woman."

That's one way to read the Bible, said Gomes. But as inheritors of the Protestant Reformation, he said Covenant Network supporters could believe in the vitality and authority of the Bible without "bowing down to some inerrant text or to some absolute school of exegesis" from the past.

"God speaks in the present tense," said the Harvard theologian. "Now, it is interesting to know what the Spirit was saying to the churches in Antioch, what the Spirit was saying to the churches in Chalcedon, even what the Spirit was saying to the churches in Geneva. But it is equally important to ask, 'What is the Spirit saying to the churches today, in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), in the last year of the 20th Century?' "

Gomes was preaching to the choir. Covenant Network leaders already have portrayed themselves as the true defenders of a tradition that allows each generation to reform earlier interpretations of scriptures, creeds and confessions. As a touchstone, they cite a 1924 document written when other Presbyterians defeated a conservative attempt to enforce "biblical inerrancy" and literal interpretations of the virgin birth, the atonement and the resurrection.

"With respect to the interpretation of the Scriptures, the position of our church has been that common to Protestants," noted the Auburn Declaration. While Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches stress the authority of centuries of church teachings about the Bible, "our church lays it upon its ministers and others to read and teach the Scriptures as the Spirit of God through His manifold ministries instructs them, and to receive all truth which from time to time He causes to break forth from the Scriptures."

Winning this debate over the Bible and tradition remains crucial for the left in today's battles over sexuality, marriage and ordination, said Barbara Wheeler, president of Auburn Theological Seminary in New York City, in a paper circulated by the Covenant Network.

"We must," she said, "develop a clear, compelling demonstration that our understanding of ordination will make the church more Presbyterian than it is now, or we will not prevail."

Death of a seminary visionar

Early in his first pastorate, the Rev. Clyde McDowell was hit with one crisis after another and none of them seem to have been covered in his seminary textbooks.

The son of a church member got caught up in a bad drug deal. Then a girl ran away from home. Then a boy was tossed out of school for threatening someone with a hunting knife. Then there was a guilty wife and an angry husband and a messy sexual affair. Then McDowell had to climb out on a roof to talk to a suicidal member of the youth group, who was holding at shotgun.

His early sermons and church board meetings were tough, too.

"I felt like I was lost and nobody had given me a set of directions," he told me, a decade ago. "I knew a lot about the Bible, but I didn't know how to be a pastor."

McDowell survived and then thrived. Then, in 1996, the 46-year-old pastor accepted the challenge of being a seminary president. He was emerging as a new voice in a critical debate about the future of seminaries. But doctors discovered he had a brain tumor only 16 months after he became president of Denver Seminary. He died on June 7.

It's crucial to understand that McDowell did not want to "modernize" the process of seminary education, but to embrace an older model. He wanted ministers to do their studies while surrounded by flocks of real believers and the experienced shepherds who lead them.

Today, most seminaries are structured like graduate schools and teach clergy a specialized theological language that often makes it harder to talk to lay people, said the Rev. Leith Anderson, a nationally known author and megachurch pastor who is serving as Denver Seminary's interim president. It helps to contrast this with the approach used in medical schools, in which students are quickly given a white coats and, under the watch-care of mentors, asked to do case studies on real people while continuing classroom work.

"Would you want to go see a doctor who had been to med school and had taken all the right courses, but had never touched a patient the whole time he was there?", asked Anderson. "Would you want to be that first patient? I think not. So, would you want to be in somebody's first church if they had taken all the right seminary courses, but had never had any contact with real people and real pastors? I think not."

Nevertheless, many faculty members believe the core courses in the archetypal seminary curriculum have been carved in stone. Meanwhile, stressed-out pastors face media-saturated homes, workaholic parents and children who seem mature and frighteningly immature at the same time. When it comes to spiritual answers, their people are as likely to turn to Oprah and "The X-Files" as to church programs.

Many growing churches have responded to all of this by ceasing to hire seminary-educated men and women. Some train their new leaders on their own.

These issues were swirling around Denver Seminary in the early 1990s, when I taught courses there focusing on mass media and popular culture. I led a number of forums with McDowell at the nearby Mission Hills Baptist Church, which grew from 600 to 1,700 members during his 13-year tenure. His vision was already taking shape.

At some point, he said, people needed to know that pastors truly understood the issues they faced in daily life. This would require more than adding a few course titles in the seminary curriculum and increasing the amount of audio-visual equipment on campus. While he didn't what to short-change the study of doctrine, he had decided that seminaries couldn't settle for teaching truth as a list of statements on a test.

Competent, healthy pastors, he said, must be able to live the truth, as well as write academic papers about it.

"They must be truth implementers," stressed McDowell, in one 1997 essay. "They must know how the truth applies to this age whether it's the Age of Aquarius, the Age Wave or the New Age. In this age of unbelief, belief comes hard to those who only hear the words of preaching, but see little evidence in life."

Ignoring the shepherds of Kosovo

It's tricky for anyone to sign a document in Belgrade these days with the word "peace" in the title.

But back on April 19th, while air-raid sirens screamed overhead, an interfaith quartet of shepherds released a gripping statement to their Yugoslavian flocks and to the world.

"Even as evil cannot be overcome by evil, so peace and harmony cannot be attained by war," said the seven-paragraph "Appeal for Peace," released from the Serbian Orthodox Patriarchate. "To be a peacemaker is the greatest duty and most noble obligation of every man. That is why we are not afraid to be the first to extend the hand of peace to one another. In the name of our future and our common life together, we pray to God and appeal to all men of good will to endeavor with maximum effort to end this war and resolve the problems by peaceful means."

The document was signed by Serbian Patriarch Pavle, Catholic Archbishop Franc Perko, Mufti Hamdija Jusufspahic and Rabbi Isak Asiel, all of Belgrade. Together, they called for all bombing and fighting to cease and for the return of refugees to their war-ravaged homes - both the ethnic Albanians fleeing the paramilitary units of Slobodan Milosevic or Serbs fleeing the Kosovo Liberation Army.

This cry for broader negotiations in the Balkans followed a "Kosovo Peace and Tolerance" declaration released on March 18 in Vienna. This longer, more detailed document was signed by a quartet of Orthodox, Catholic, Muslim and Jewish leaders from Kosovo.

Officials in NATO alliance should have the highest possible motivations to support coalitions seeking common ground in the Balkans, said Father Irinej Dobrijevic of Cleveland, who accompanied the Rev. Jesse Jackson during his unofficial mission to Belgrade, leading to the release of three American prisoners of war.

If so, ignoring the Vienna and Belgrade interfaith statements represented "major missed opportunities to support those who wanted to promote democracy" and defeat Milosevic, who is a holdover from the Communist era, said Dobrijevic, during a Capitol Hill forum this week focusing on Kosovo, sponsored by the conservative National Clergy Council. "We missed the boat when we failed to listen to these kinds of mainstream, moderate religious and intellectual leaders."

The panel of clergy and scholars addressed the question "Does might make right?", probing Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant teachings on war and how they might apply to the NATO campaign against Yugoslavia. The forum covered territory from St. Augustine's "City of God" to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and the failed Paris accords, with many stops in between. Some argued that this war is unjust, or even evil, while others said its humanitarian goals were just, but questioned NATO strategies. Everyone agreed that it's hard to evaluate whether a military effort is morally justified when no one can agree on its goal. Was this a war to protect ethnic Albanians, topple Milosevic or cut Kosovo out of Yugoslavia?

Whatever happens next, it's hard to imagine anyone traveling the road to peace without the help of religious leaders in Yugoslavia - the very voices that Milosevic has attempted to silence and that Western diplomats and media have consistently ignored.

This was perfectly symbolized when Orthodox Bishop Artemije of Kosovo stood knee-deep in the snow outside the chateau at Rambouillet – locked out of the tense negotiations between leaders of NATO, the KLA and the Milosevic government. The most radical elements of the Serbian regime have even labeled Artemije a traitor to his country, due to his years of activism on behalf of all refugees and his efforts to force a new government in Belgrade, including five U.S. trips in a year before the bombing began.

"The greatest victim of your NATO bombs is not what is demolished and broken or killed and wounded (however great that number may be), but rather something which you stopped from developing," the bishop of Kosovo later wrote, in a letter to Western leaders.

"Before your bombs, democratic forces existed here, open and with potential; there existed a democratic process, however embryonic. There existed a hope with these people, that with your support the process of democratization would come to life and prevail. All of that is gone now."

Star Wars – the only parable in town

The Rev. Calvin Miller is one Southern Baptist preacher - a seminary professor, no less - who openly admits that he communed with the Star Wars faithful on the opening day of "The Phantom Menace."

He pretty much got what he expected - high tech fantasy and lowest-common-denominator mysticism, stone-faced knights and wisecracking sidekicks ready for toy-store shelves. George Lucas keeps offering a pinch of Freud, a shot of Oedipus and a baptism into Buddhism. Miller grimaced, but wasn't shocked, when the mythmaker even tossed in a virgin birth and a messianic prophecy.

"We have to understand that people are out there hunting for metaphors to help them make sense of their lives," said Miller, who teaches preaching at Samford University's Beeson Divinity School in Birmingham, Ala. He also has written more than 30 works of fiction and nonfiction, including a set of poetic novels entitled "The Singer Trilogy."

"This is what we all do. We pick a metaphor and then we indulge ourselves for 50 or 60 years. Some people change in midstream. ... We need metaphors and narratives that tell us who we are. It shouldn't surprise anyone that millions of people find these big stories at the movies."

In the classroom, Miller tries to convince seminarians that pastors should help people interpret the myths they buy at the mall – to separate the wheat from the chaff. Preachers also can lay claim to a rich Judeo-Christian heritage of storytelling, he said. In the Bible, the doctrine and the drama are intertwined. For centuries, rabbis told dramatic stories and then interpreted them. Priests inspired the young with vivid accounts of the lives of the saints.

In other words, the fires of hell would not consume the sanctuary if a preacher dared to speak the words "a long time ago" and then told a parable in the pulpit.

"No one can deny that art and drama and icons and stories are important parts of human life and have been part of the church's traditions for centuries," said Miller.

But this is a tough sell, these days. In most congregations, the word "sermon" means a verse-by-verse explanation of scripture, perhaps enlivened with occasional illustrations from daily life. Thus, most people hear academic lectures at church, then turn to mass media to find inspiring tales of heroes and villains, triumph and tragedy, sin and redemption, heaven and hell.

Part of the problem, argues Catholic writer Roberto Rivera, is that science has claimed the right to define what is and isn't real. Scientists, of course, insist that truth be found through propositions and hypotheses, not through symbols and stories. In response, the church has tended to ask worshippers to subscribe to a list of propositions about God, rather than offering them sweeping, dramatic narratives about God's work in history.

Yet people still yearn for stories that feed the soul. If traditional religious groups keep offering "arid propositions that leave us cold and bored," people will seek other sanctuaries, said Rivera. The Star Wars series is merely one example of this trend toward stories that are highly commercialized, yet undeniably spiritual.

"If you want to engage people where they really live, you've got to reach for more than their heads or even their hearts," said Rivera, a researcher with the Wilberforce Forum led by evangelical leader Chuck Colson. "You've got to engage their imaginations. ... If you want to teach moral lessons, there's no substitute for a good story."

Thus, legions of Lucas disciples fill their homes with icons and statues and gather on thousands of World Wide Web sites. Many yearn for a personal audience with Lucas. Star Wars has a lot going for it as a spiritual story, noted Rivera. Its devotees don't have to get up on Sunday mornings and there's no moral code to make them uncomfortable.

"The problem," he said, "is that, after you've lined up, memorized the dialog and made the pilgrimage to Skywalker Ranch, what have you got to show for it? And, heaven forbid, what if 'The Phantom Menace' disappoints? What's your fallback position? After all, it's still only a movie."