Enjoying and Expanding Liberty

Liberty is the fourth of “the 4-Ls,” and this post is the last of the five-part series that I started on March 9—and it is not completely coincidental that I have written this article in Liberty (Mo.) where my wife and I have lived since 2005.**

The school song of Seinan Gakuin, the large school system in Fukuoka City, Japan, where I served for 36 years (1968~2004) as a university professor and the last eight of those years as Chancellor, contains the Japanese words for Life, Love, and Light, the first three of the 4-Ls.

But I thought/think Liberty needed/needs to be emphasized also. 

In my May 10 post on Light, I linked light to truth—and then truth is linked to Jesus’ words about freedom/liberty in John 8:32: “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (CEV). And there are other important words about freedom/liberty in the New Testament.

According to Luke 4:18, in the synagogue of Nazareth, Jesus read these words from Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me…To proclaim liberty to the captives…To set at liberty those who are oppressed.” Then Galatians 5:1 says, “Stand fast therefore in the liberty by which Christ has made us free” (NKJV).

Since I was emphasizing the 4-Ls at Seinan Gakuin where about 98% of the students and more than half of the faculty and staff were not Christians, I didn’t talk/write a lot about these Bible verses. But I did regularly emphasize the close connection of liberty to the light of truth.

Also, I always talked about liberty being accompanied by responsibility, emphasizing that true liberty doesn’t mean freedom to do as one pleases; it is not a license for self-centeredness. Liberty means we are not enslaved by another person or by the power of any ideology (“ism”).

There is both negative and positive liberty, and both are important. Negative liberty means freedom from, but positive liberty means freedom for—and emphasis on the former should include stress on the importance of the latter.

Serious problems arise when only negative liberty is emphasized and liberty is used in inappropriate ways. For example, liberty is misused when it means “free speech for me but not for thee.”*¹ In this connection, consider these limited and inferior uses of liberty/freedom in the U.S. now.

◈ The “Freedom Caucus” in the U.S. Congress. According to Wikipedia, this U.S. House caucus was formed by Republican Representatives in January 2015 and “is generally considered to be the most conservative and furthest-right Congressional bloc.”

◈ “Freedom Summer” in Florida. As part of what Florida Governor DeSantis calls by that name, his Transportation Department has declared that only the colors red, white and blue can be used to light up bridges across the state. (For what that implies, see this May 23 Washington Post article.)

◈ Liberty University in Virginia. Jerry Falwell’s university changed its name to Liberty Baptist College in 1976 and to Liberty University in 1985. A Washington Post March 2015 article was titled, “Virginia’s Liberty University: A mega-college and Republican presidential stage.”

Liberty, nonetheless, is an important traditional value of the USA. The Declaration of Independence speaks of the “unalienable Rights” of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” And since 1831 Americans have sung about their nation being the “sweet land of liberty.”  

Even though the scope of those thought to have the unalienable right of liberty in 1776 or 1831—or even in 1942 when the Pledge of Allegiance was officially adopted—was much too narrow, it has increasingly been recognized as meaning liberty and justice for all.*²

On January 6, 1941, President Roosevelt delivered what is known as the Four Freedoms speech, declaring that people "everywhere in the world" ought to have freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.

These are freedoms that we all should be able to enjoy and seek to expand. And the liberty expressed in those four freedoms is still badly needed in the world today.

Further, we citizens of the USA must work energetically to preserve those (and other) freedoms in the light of the Christian nationalists who are seeking theocracy and of the Republican candidate for President, whose speeches (past and present) evidence racism, xenophobia, and a trend toward authoritarianism (fascism?).

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*¹ My wife and I moved to Liberty about three months after our marriage in 1957 and enrolled as students in William Jewell College, from which we graduated 65 years ago this month. We lived in Liberty again during the 1976-77 academic year. Then we bought our retirement home in Liberty and have never regretted our choice in the least. Somewhat tongue in cheek, I have sometimes said, slightly altering Paul Revere’s famous words, Give me Liberty until my death.

*² These words, harking back to 1798, are the title of the editorial in the March/April 2022 issue of Liberty magazine, a Seventh-day Adventist publication established in 1906. Please take a look at this article if you want to learn more about the context and meaning of those words.

*³ The U.S. Pledge of Allegiance was written by Francis Bellamy in 1892. The original version was later expanded, but from the beginning, it ended with the words “with Liberty and Justice for all.” For more about this, see my August 30, 2021, blog post about Bellamy (here).

Note: It is also problematic when liberty is conflated with libertarianism. That political philosophy, which over-emphasizes negative liberty, strongly values individual freedom and is skeptical about the justified scope of government, especially the federal government. 

On Having and Celebrating Life, Real/Eternal Life

Life ◈ Love ◈ Light ◈ Liberty: These are the “4-Ls” about which I wrote in my March 9 post. Today I am focusing on Life, the first of those four. Over the next few weeks, I will write about the other three.

Real life is more than physical life. As I said in the March 9 post, the foundation of my emphasis on life was Jesus’ words as recorded in the tenth chapter of the Gospel of John: “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly” (v. 10, NRSV).

Having abundant life focuses on the quality of life, not just its quantity. Physical life is something that people either have or don’t have. That is, they are either alive or dead. But living abundantly means living with meaning, purpose, and joy.

The emphasis on life, real life, was prominent in the Christian Studies courses I conducted at Seinan Gakuin University in Japan. In 1975, I taught a required course for second-year Economics Department students. Horiuchi Akira-san was one of the students enrolled in that class.

On his 70^th birthday in January, Horiuchi-san posted the following comments (in Japanese) on Facebook: “When I was a second year university student, a missionary teacher of Christian Studies said, "The purpose of Christianity is to help people to have life and to have it abundantly."

In a personal exchange on Facebook Messenger, Horiuchi-san (whom I should call sensei since he has been a Christian pastor for most of the years since he finished his theological education in 1981) wrote, “I am who I am today because of my encounter with you. Thanks.”

Real life includes valuing and protecting physical life. Even though it is more than physical life, having real life leads to more than just enjoying the richness of one’s own life. It also seeks life for groups of people, robust physical life as well as meaningful societal life.

This generates opposition to war, to violence of all kinds, to capital punishment, to ecological destruction, and to all exploitation and/or degradation of people because of race, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, religion, or anything else.  

Conservative Christians of the present have preserved the important emphasis of evangelicalism on real life for individuals by faith in God through Jesus Christ, but so many have largely failed to emphasize the equally important matter of helping marginalized groups to have vigorous physical life also.

The New Testament term eternal life is basically the same as what I call real life. I have used the latter term because of the misunderstanding or ambiguity of the word eternal, which was long expressed as everlasting in English.

For centuries, the majority of Protestants (including most Anglicans) read the King James Version of the Bible, which dates back to 1611. Many of us older people memorized John 3:16 in the KJV:

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

That was the basis for the widespread belief in unending life, which was generally understood as life after physical death.

But beginning with the American Standard Version, published in 1901, the Greek words previously translated as everlasting life began to be translated as eternal life. This became more widely the case after the Revised Standard Version was published in 1952.

Bible scholars increasingly began to emphasize that eternal, especially in the Gospel of John, primarily refers to the quality of life, not its quantity. Thus, eternal life is the type of life that we can have and enjoy now, not just life after physical death.

Life (real life) is the theme of Easter, which Christians around the world will be celebrating tomorrow.

It is because of the resurrected Jesus that all can receive new life = eternal life through him. That is the life that Horiuchi-san received the year after he heard about real life in my Christian Studies class in 1975.

His kind words of gratitude were primarily for my sharing the Gospel of life with him and his classmates, most of whom never accepted that message. He did and that made all the difference.

Happy Easter!

The 4-Ls: Life ◈ Love ◈ Light ◈ Liberty

The header at the top of all my blog posts contains the words “Reflections about Life, Love, Light, and Liberty.” Those are the 4-Ls that I have emphasized for years and about which I am finally explaining in this blog post. 

Some of you may have wondered why more of my blog articles are not more “religious” or more explicitly “Christian.” Many of you know that I was ordained as a Christian minister at the age of 18 and that I served for 38 years as a missionary in Japan.

True, some of my blog posts are clearly Christian and/or religious. But many could, conceivably, have been written by one who is neither Christian nor religious as that word is generally understood.

But with a few exceptions, most of my blog posts are directly related to life, love, light, and liberty, the 4-Ls, and those words are basic concepts of the Christian faith and at the core of my life and work.

In 1995 after I had been elected as Chancellor of Seinan Gakuin, the large educational institution in Japan where I had been a university faculty member since 1968, a local newspaper reporter asked me what I would be emphasizing as the head of what was widely known as a “Christian school.”

Beginning at least in a 1994 Christmas sermon in a school Chapel service, I talked about four words that began with the letter L in English. (Those words are known by any Japanese person with a high school education.) So that is what I told the reporter I would be emphasizing.

Not long after I was installed as chancellor, Nakamura Kunie-san, one of my supporting staff members, presented me with the following wall hanging that I kept in my office during the eight years I served as chancellor—and have had hanging above my desk here in the States ever since retirement in 2004.

On the back, Nakamura-san pasted an explanation of the simple image, saying they were the four Ls: Life (生命), Love (聖愛), Light (公明), Liberty (自由). (The Japanese words do not begin with an L sound; they are pronounced seimei, seiai, kōmei, and jiyū.*)

Most of my Japanese students were not interested in religion when I began teaching Christian Studies at Seinan Gakuin University (SGU) in 1968—and that remained so during my three decades teaching required courses in what was founded as, and continued as, a Christian school.

Not long after starting my teaching career at SGU, I came across a book titled ABC’s of Christian Faith (1968) by Union Theological Seminary professor James D. Smart (1906~82). I was impressed by that book and its unifying theme: “Life in God.”

After reading Smart’s book which emphasized that Christianity at its core was not about religion but about life, I decided that since I was teaching an introductory course on Christian beliefs, I would relate my lectures to how Jesus came not to start a new religion but to help people live a meaningful life.

The foundation of that emphasis was Jesus’ words as recorded in the tenth chapter of the Gospel of John: “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly” (v. 10, NRSV).**

Later, love became a central theme in the new course on Christian ethics that I developed. While there continued to be considerable disinterest in religion, students were generally interested in learning about people who lived lives exhibiting Christian love.

Then through the years, I also began to emphasize the Christian emphasis on light as well as liberty, so by the mid-1990s, the 4-Ls were prominent enough in my mind to make them the focal point of my work as head of Seinan Gakuin, the educational institution with around 10,000 students and pupils.

I wanted then to speak meaningfully to the mostly non-Christian students, staff, and faculty at Seinan Gakuin in Japan. And now I want to write these blog articles so that those who are not, or no longer, active Christians will also find them thought-provoking and relevant for the living of these days.

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 * The image at the top of this post is the center of a large hanging scroll which I received as a gift at the end of my term as Chancellor. The Japanese words for the 4-Ls are written by stylized brush strokes and are read from top to bottom and from right to left.

** I plan to write more about Life in my March 30 blog post and about Love, Light, and Liberty over the next several weeks. 

Celebrating Milestones

“Milestone,” as most words, can be defined/described in various ways, but I am using that word here to indicate a significant point in a person’s life. In particular, I am using “milestone” to refer to wedding anniversaries and birthdays that are divisible by the number five. 

Celebrating anniversary milestones

Recently there have been three milestone wedding anniversaries in my immediate family.

65th anniversary photo

June and I celebrated our 65^th anniversary on May 26. Today (June 4) is our son Keith’s and his wife Brenda’s 45^th anniversary. Then, May 26 was also the 20^th anniversary of our daughter Karen and her husband Rob Daoust.

We didn’t do much to celebrate our milestone anniversary this year, unlike the previous three. 

With the encouragement of our children, we made a trip to Europe for our 50^th anniversary, celebrating the very day on Mt. Planalp near Brienz, Switzerland, near where some of my ancestors had been born.

Five years later we had an extended car trip, mostly in the Dakotas, and it was on that trip I was finally able to visit the last of the 50 states (N.D.). Then in 2017, June and Kathy, our oldest daughter, organized a family cruise in celebration of our 60^th anniversary (and June’s 80^th birthday).

Celebrating birthday milestones

Yesterday and today were milestone birthdays for two dear family members. Ken, our fourth and last child, celebrated his 50^th birthday! (You realize you must be getting up in years when your youngest child turns fifty!) 

And then today is the 25^th birthday of David Laffoon, our oldest grandson (and fourth grandchild).

Yesterday evening we had a family birthday party by Zoom, mainly in celebration of Ken's big 5 0.

And then on the last day of this month, June will be celebrating a notable milestone, her 85^th birthday.

June’s milestone birthday fundraiser

Institutions celebrate milestones as well as individuals. In May 2016, Seinan Gakuin, where I served as a professor from 1968~2004 and as chancellor from 1996~2004, celebrated its centennial. June and I made a trip back to Japan for that joyous occasion.

The speaker at the main celebration service was Dr. Tetsu Nakamura, who had gone to Seinan Gakuin Junior High School. After becoming a medical doctor, he spent decades helping people in Afghanistan. (See my blog post mostly about him here.)

In December 2019, Dr. Nakamura (b. 1946) was assassinated near Jalalabad, Afghanistan, as he was going to work. That was less than two months after he had been granted honorary Afghan citizenship.

Early in 2020 through posts about Dr. Nakamura, June became Facebook friends with Musa Anwari, a young man (b. 1999) who lives in Jalalabad, the fifth largest city in Afghanistan. Musa was a great admirer of Dr. Nakamura.

June and Musa have interacted repeatedly on Facebook during these past two and a half years.

Musa is now starting free, four-month schools around Afghanistan for the children who have become orphans because of the wars and for girls and other students whose schools were closed by the Taliban after they came to power again last year.

Each new school costs US$300, and June and I have sent him that amount, which he soon put to use. You can read about what he did with our donation and see the pictures he posted by clicking on his Facebook account (here) and scrolling down to May 21.

For her (milestone) birthday fundraiser this year, June has set up a GoFundMe site to raise money for Musa’s schools. Please read about her “Let’s Start an Afghan Class” project here—and both she and I would be delighted if you would click on the “Donate now” button there.

In Fond Memory of Luther Copeland

His obituary begins, “Dr. Edwin Luther Copeland, missionary, educator, scholar, beloved husband and father, died on November 19, 2011, in Raleigh, North Carolina.” Today on the tenth anniversary of his passing, I am posting this blog article in fond memory of Dr. Copeland, who was my much-respected colleague, good personal friend, and meritorious mentor. 

Getting to Know Luther Copeland

Even though I don’t remember any details, I probably first heard about Dr. Copeland when I was a graduate student at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He was a professor of Christian Missions and World Religions at Southeastern Seminary in North Carolina at that time.

It is also quite likely that I read his small “study course” book Christianity and World Religions not long after it was published in 1963. But I first saw Dr. Copeland at the 1965 Baptist World Congress, which met in Miami Beach. I was impressed with his ideas articulated in opposition to those of Dr. Cal Guy, the Missions professor at Southwestern Seminary in Texas.

I first met Dr. Copeland in person early in 1976 when he became Chancellor of Seinan Gakuin, the school system in Japan where I had been teaching since 1968. Because of our missionary “furlough” in 1976-77, it was mainly from the summer of 1977 to the spring of 1980 that I really got to know him—and to become very fond of him.

Early in 1979, he nominated me to be Dean of Religious Activities at Seinan Gakuin University, so we had extensive contact during the academic year that began on April 1. During that busy year, I came to admire him greatly and profited much from his wisdom and mature expression of the Christian faith.

Learning More about Luther Copeland

By the time he and his talented wife Louise left Japan in 1980, I had learned much about Dr. Copeland. I learned much more about him over 20 years later after he published his memoirs.

Early on, I learned that Dr. Copeland was born in 1916 in West Virginia, and I knew that he worked in the logging business with his father before starting to college. In 1944 at the age of 28, he graduated from Furman University. Two years later he graduated from Southern Seminary and then earned his Ph.D. degree at Yale University in 1949.

In 1946, Luther and Louise Tadlock were married, and they became the parents of five children. They were appointed Southern Baptist missionaries to Japan in 1948. In November 1952, he became the fifth chancellor of Seinan Gakuin, the school system that was established in the year of his birth.

The Copelands returned to the U.S. in 1956 when Luther was employed to teach at Southeastern Seminary. But then he was elected as the 12^th Chancellor of Seinan Gakuin in 1975, succeeding his (and my) friend Max Garrott for the second time.**

After completing that term of service, Luther moved out of the Chancellor’s office on March 31, 1980. Sixteen years and one day later, I had the great privilege and challenge of moving into that office.

In 2001, Dr. Copeland self-published a book titled Memoirs of a Geezer: From the Timber Woods and Back. It is 375 pages long and contains 48 “illustrations.” I found it noteworthy that on the last page of that book, published just before his 85^th birthday, Luther wrote,

I am convinced that for most of us, our God is too small. If God has created everything that is, surely God is interested in all the creation. I often pray that God will make my interests as broad as God’s interests.

Holding Fond Memories of Luther Copeland

Though there is so much more I could write here, I will briefly mention just three reasons I was and remain fond of Luther Copeland.

* He was a man with both intellectual curiosity and intellectual honesty.

* He was a man who never “put on airs” but related to everyone as a human being of equal worth.

* He was a committed Christian who embraced the breadth of God’s love over the narrowness often seen in historical Christianity.

Knowing Luther Copeland helped me to strive for those same characteristics.

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** On June 20, 2020, the 110^th anniversary of his birth, I posted a blog article titled “In Fond Memory of Max Garrott.” 

Remembering 9/12

September 11, 2001, was what many have called “the day that changed America, ” and tomorrow, as you know, is the 20^th anniversary of those horrendous terrorist attacks. But I don’t remember 9/11/01, for I was living in Japan and didn’t know about the attacks until September 12. 

(A 9/12/01 photo by Frank Becerra Jr., The Journal News)

Speaking in Chapel on 9/12

While it was still Sept. 11 in Japan when the Twin Towers were hit and destroyed, it was after my bedtime and so it was only early the next morning that I heard that almost unbelievable news.

I got up early, as usual, with the intention of spending time on my final preparation for speaking at the regular Seinan Gakuin High School chapel service that morning. Upon hearing the horrible news from the U.S., though, I knew I would have to change my planned talk completely.

Even though I had been in Japan for many years, it still took a lot longer to prepare a talk/sermon in Japanese than in English—and there certainly wasn’t time that morning of 9/12 to make adequate preparation.

I haven’t been able to find the notes for my chapel talk that morning—and I might be embarrassed to see what I said, or didn’t say. But I did the best I could at the time.

After the chapel service was over, I chatted a few minutes with Manabe-sensei, the high school principal. I remember him saying that what he was most afraid of now were acts of revenge by the U.S.—and I agreed with him.

Seeking Revenge after 9/12

On 9/14, Pres. Bush vowed that the U.S. would take military action in retaliation for the terrorist attacks. Then on 9/18, he signed a congressional resolution authorizing the use of force against those responsible for the attacks.

Before a month had passed, on October 7 U.S. forces begin bombing the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Retaliation had begun—and Principle Manabe was right: the acts of revenge have been far, far worse than the horrible events of 9/11.

The total number of people killed in the attacks of 9/11/01 is given as 2,997. The total number of people killed in Afghanistan since 10/7/01 is said (here) to be over 240,000. Retaliation ended with roughly 80 times (!) the death toll from the 9/11 attacks.

Leaving Afghanistan in 8/2021

Just a few days more than 238 months after the U.S. began military actions against the “enemy” in Afghanistan, the U.S. withdrew all military service members, other USAmericans, and tens of thousands of Afghan “friends.”

This has widely been called a “defeat” for the U.S.—and Pres. Biden has been strongly criticized for the hectic withdrawal not only by Republicans but by many in his own Party.

The war in Afghanistan might have been considered a success if it had ended in 2002. The major goal had been reached. But the war didn’t end then. It dragged on for 19 more years, perhaps partly (or largely?) because of the military-industrial complex. Some people profited handsomely from the war.  

The bombing in Kabul on August 26 which killed 13 U.S. soldiers and more than 170 Afghans was tragic indeed. And the current danger facing the few USAmericans and many Afghan friends of the U.S. left in Afghanistan is certainly distressing.

But undoubtedly, many more U.S. military personnel and Afghans would be killed in the months/years ahead had the U.S. troops remained.

It is remarkable that there seems to be more outrage over the fewer than 200 who were killed in Afghanistan the last week in August this year than over the average of more than 1,000 a month for the last 238 months!

We do need to be concerned about the oppressed people, especially women—and Christians—in Afghanistan as well as in North Korea, Syria, and many more countries with harsh governments. But one thing is certain: war is not the answer to the problems in Afghanistan or any other country.  

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** Here are some of the helpful opinion pieces I read with profit and recommend to those who are interested in thinking more about this matter.

“Yes, the Kabul withdrawal is a disaster. But Biden made the right decision on Afghanistan” by Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart on 8/22.

This opinion piece by David Leonhardt in The New York Times on 8/25.

Biden Deserves Credit, Not Blame, for Afghanistan by David Rothkopf in The Atlantic, 8/30.

Across the Pacific, and Asia, with Love

May 2006 was a special time for my wife June and me. We made our first visit back to Japan, where we had lived from 1966 to 2004. One of the many special events that month was the release of a new book planned and published by Japanese friends in our honor. It was a wonderful tribute.

Across the Pacific with Love

Kimura Koichi was a former seminary student of mine and my successor as pastor of Fukuoka International Church. After our retirement as missionaries in Japan for 38 years, it was his idea to produce a sort of bilingual Festschrift for me. It was financed largely by a very beneficent church member.

Fourteen Japanese colleagues, former students, friends, and scholarly acquaintances wrote essays for the book. One was by Murasaka Masatoshi (Japanese names are written with the family name first), my long-time friend and colleague at Seinan Gakuin.

Murasaka-sensei’s essay was titled “A Man Who Crossed the Pacific Ocean with Love.” The title of the book, Across the Pacific with Love, was adapted from the title of that essay.

In addition to Kimura-sensei, two of my good friends served as co-editors: Yamanaka Sakiyo, a professor at Seinan Gakuin University with whom I had worked closely in the Department of Religious Activities, and Kanamaru Eiko, one of my outstanding former students.

The book was completely bilingual. The Japanese part, printed from right to left, was 201 pages long and the English part was 182 pages. The essays were all written in Japanese. Several Japanese friends translated them into English, which was polished up by some ex-pat American friends.

The first two essays in the book were by the last two people on my chronological list of “top ten” influential personal acquaintances: Kaneko Sumio, our former pastor and friend since 1968, and Otsuka Kumiko, also our friend since 1968 and for several years my Japanese teacher and translator, office assistant, and advisor.

There are also essays by Hoshuyama Teruto, a university student of mine in 1974 who became a leader of the Toishikai, a discussion group I had started a couple of years earlier, and by Fukuoka Kikuko, who in 1985 was the first person I baptized as pastor of Fukuoka International Church.

I wish I could tell you more about these friends and the others who kindly wrote essays for Across the Pacific with Love.

Across Asia with Love

In May 2016, June and I made our last trip to Japan. That visit was one anticipated for decades. Long before retiring from Seinan Gakuin, I had said several times that if at all possible, I would come back for the centennial celebration in 2016. I was delighted we were able to do that.

Here is a picture of former Toishikai members that June and I had a delightful time with during our visit in Fukuoka. Next to me on the right is Hoshuyama-san, whom I mentioned above. 

During that time in Japan, I posted a blog article about Seinan Gakuin’s centennial Founder’s Day ceremonies on May 14. It was largely about Nakamura Tetsu, the featured speaker at that festive occasion.

Nakamura-sensei was a 1962 Seinan Gakuin Junior High School graduate, who years later after finishing medical school spent decades as a doctor and humanitarian aid worker in and around Peshawar, Pakistan, and then mostly across the border in Afghanistan.

As June and I had gone across the Pacific with love for the people of Japan, Nakamura-sensei flew across Asia with love for the people of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Tragically, Nakamura-sensei was killed by terrorists in December 2019. Earlier this year, Afghanistan issued a postage stamp honoring him. (Click here to see a short video clip about that.)

Nakamura-sensei became a Christian largely because prior to June and me, other missionaries had also gone across the Pacific with love, taught at Seinan Gakuin and witnessed to Christ’s love there.

Please join me in prayer for Seinan Gakuin as on this Saturday it celebrates its 105th Founder’s Day. 

An Apology for Apologetics

Communication is hard—for many reasons, one being that the same word sometimes has quite different meanings. Apology is one such word, and I invite you to think with me a bit about the meaning, and value, of apology and apologetics.

My Lifelong Interest in Apologetics

An apology often means an expression of regret or remorse for something a person has said or done. But there is another, technical meaning of that same word. Apology can also be legitimately used to mean the verbal or written defense of one’s basic beliefs.

There is a long history of apology being used in the latter sense with regards to the Christian faith, beginning with these New Testament words: “Always be ready to make your defense [ἀπολογίαν, apologian] to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you” (1 Peter 3:15).

One of the important Christian books of the second century CE is First Apology of Justin Martyr (c.156), and his Second Apology was written shortly after the first one.

As a third-year college student, I became deeply interested in Christian apologetics, the religious discipline of defending Christian beliefs through rational discourse.

Philosophers/theologians such as Pascal and Kierkegaard were the Christian “apologists” I was most interested in at first and through graduate school, although I also read and wrote papers by lesser-known thinkers such as German theologian Karl Heim and Hungarian philosopher Michael Polanyi.**

A Good Book on Apologetics

This article was prompted by my recent reading of Randal Rauser’s 2020 book, Conversations with My Inner Atheist: A Christian Apologist Explores Questions that Keep People Up at Night.

Rather than writing more about that book in this article, I invite you to see here for a brief review of that intriguing work by Rauser (b. 1973), a Canadian Baptist seminary professor. 

A Different Type of Apologetics

Even though I maintained my initial interest in apologetics, long ago I began to shift my emphasis from apologetics by rational argument to what I sometimes refer to as “apology by life.”^##

That shift was prompted by my growing awareness that the main reason so many Japanese students in my classes at Seinan Gakuin University rejected Christianity was not because of intellectual issues but because of ethical problems.

The bulk of the students in my Christian Studies classes did not have as much problem, I gradually began to see, with Christian doctrines as with Christian actions.

Rejection of Christianity was based far more on what they had learned in high school world history classes about the Crusades, for example, or what they had seen on television about racism in the United States, which they generally thought was a “Christian nation.”

With that awareness, I began to read and think less about traditional apologetics and more and more about Christian social ethics. Thus, I began thinking more about apology by life rather than apology by rational discourse.

Rauser hardly deals with this matter in his book, although the 20^th chapter begins with Mia saying, “It’s often been said that the biggest objection to Christianity is the life of Christians.” That is probably true.

Although I was unable to find the source, I have often heard these or similar words that Nietzsche reportedly said to Christians: “Show me that you are redeemed, and I will believe in your Redeemer.”

For a long time now, Christians have needed to say less about their beliefs and to act much more deliberately and lovingly for peace and justice, that is, for the basic well-being of all people.

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** My last essay published by The Seinan Theological Review in Japan was in March 2004, and it was largely on the thought of Karl Heim. It is available for viewing/reading here.

^## In footnote 16 of the above article, I wrote, “I have long wanted to write an essay on ‘Apology by Life.’ Apologetics has long been one of my strongest interests, but long ago I realized that the best apologetics may well be done by loving action rather than by words.”

Disclosure: The review I wrote of Rauser’s book and my mentioning of Rauser and his book in this blog article is partly because of receiving the book for review from Mike Morrell and his Speakeasy book review network.

In Fond Memory of Mrs. King

 Coretta Scott King died fifteen years ago today, on January 30, 2006. Thirty-five years ago, we at Seinan Gakuin University in Japan had the privilege of having Mrs. King on our campus and in our city. I am writing this in fond memory of Mrs. King. 

Coretta Scott King in 2003

Coretta Scott

In central Alabama on April 27, 1927, Obadiah (“Obie”) and Bernice Scott became parents of a baby girl whom they maned Coretta. Just two and a half years later the Great Depression began, and life was hard for many Americans and especially for a Black family in Alabama.

As a young girl, Coretta started tending the family garden, and by the age of ten she was working in the cotton fields. When she was 12, though, she enrolled as a seventh grader in Lincoln School in Marion,  ten miles from home. She graduated from high school in 1945, the top student in her class.

After graduating in 1951 from Antioch College in Ohio, Coretta continued her studies at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston.

Mrs. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Kings in 1964

It was in Boston that Coretta met Martin Luther King, Jr., who was usually called M.L., and they married in June 1953. (Currently, Boston is moving forward with a major effort commemorating the Kings with a large 22-foot-high monument of intertwined bronze arms.) 

In the fall of 1954, Coretta and M.L. moved to Montgomery, Alabama, where he became pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. A year later their first child, Yolanda, was born. Three more children were added to the King family, the last two being born in Atlanta in 1961 and 1963.

M.L.’s involvement in the civil rights movement led to the bombing of the King home in 1956, the year between the birth of Yolanda and MLK, III.

Widow Coretta Scott King

After years of anxiety about what might happen to M.L. and/or to her family, her worst fears were realized on that April 1968 evening in Memphis when MLK was fatally shot.

It was, of course, a time of great grief for her and her family, but also for the nation, except for the bigots and racists who had long railed against King and his clarion calls for equality for “colored people.”

After M.L.’s assassination, Mrs. King took on the leadership of the struggle for racial equality in the U.S. Among other things, in 1968 she founded the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, commonly known as The King Center,” which now hosts over one million visitors a year.

In 1985, Seinan Gakuin, the school system that included the university where I was a full-time faculty member, began to consider who to invite as a prominent speaker for the school’s 70^th anniversary to be held in May 1986.

As a member of the planning committee, I suggested we try to get Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa to be our speaker, and some preliminary contacts were made in that regard. But then someone came up with the idea of inviting Mrs. King. I thought that was a brilliant suggestion.

Mrs. King accepted our invitation. So, she came to Fukuoka City, spoke at Seinan Gakuin’s 70^th anniversary service, and also gave an address at a rented hall downtown. There were around 4,000 people who attended that gala event.

I was also one of a small group of Seinan people who hosted Mrs. King to a dinner one of the evenings she was in our city, and I was impressed by what a warm, genuine person she was.

Among the many university students I taught, many had negative views of Christianity partly because of the racism they knew was deeply rooted in the United States, even though it was, they thought, a Christian nation.

Mrs. King’s talks at Seinan Gakuin and in downtown Fukuoka City, widely covered by the press, were warmly received, and her unassuming Christian witness was highly beneficial to those of us serving as Christian missionaries in Japan.

So, today I am fondly remembering Coretta Scott King and thanking God for her lifelong commitment to peace and social justice.

In Fond Memory of Max Garrott

Last month I wrote (here) about my father-in-law, who was born 110 years ago in May. This post is about Max Garrott, an esteemed friend and missionary colleague, who was born on June 20, 1910.

Previously, I have made blog posts about two good missionary friends and colleagues at Seinan Gakuin University, Calvin Parker (1926~2010) and Bob Culpepper (1924~2012). This article is about the man I always called Dr. Garrott, a man I respected greatly from the time I first met him until his death less than nine years later. 

Meeting Max

June and I had the privilege of attending the Eleventh Baptist World Congress, which met in Miami Beach, Florida, in June 1965, just a year before we were appointed missionaries to Japan. Dr. Garrott, his wife Dorothy, and his youngest son Jack were there, back from Japan for a missionary furlough, as it was called then.

I was impressed with Dr. Garrott at that first meeting. Then we saw him and Dorothy again in 1967, the year after we arrived in Japan. On our way from Tokyo, where we were in language school, to Fukuoka, where we were planning to move the following year, we spent a night with the Garrotts in their home in Kokura.

Contact with Dr. Garrott was then quite limited until he became the Chancellor of Seinan Gakuin in April 1973, where I had been a university faculty member since September 1968.

Max’s Brief Bio

William Maxfield Garrott was born in northeast Arkansas, the son of a Baptist minister. A precocious child, he graduated from high school at the age of 14 and Hendrix College in 1929 when he was 19. Five years later he had finished his undergraduate and doctoral studies at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Dr. Garrott arrived in Japan as a missionary on 9/9/9. The year was Showa 9 according to the Japanese calendar, the ninth year of Emperor Showa, known in the West as Hirohito. It was 1934 by the Western calendar. Before long he began his work as an educational missionary, mainly teaching New Testament and Greek.

Just before Christmas 1938, Max and Dorothy Carver, who had served as a Southern Baptist missionary to Japan since 1935, were married.

After April 1941, Dr. Garrott was the only SB missionary remaining in Japan, and soon after the Pacific War began he was interned until he was able to leave Japan in June 1942. In October 1947, Max and Dorothy arrived back in Japan with their three children at that time.

Seinan Gakuin, founded in Fukuoka City by Southern Baptist missionaries as a boys’ school in 1916, elected Dr. Garrott as the sixth Chancellor in 1948. Seinan Gakuin University was established the following year, and Dr. Garrott was chosen to be the first president. He held both offices until 1952.

Then after ten years as Chancellor of Seinan Jo Gakuin (1962~72), the girls’ school started in Kokura by Southern Baptist missionaries in 1922, Dr. Garrott was elected in 1973 as the 11^th Chancellor of Seinan Gakuin. He served in that position until his untimely death in June 1974, just a few days after his 64^th birthday.

My Fondness for Max

Since Dr. Garrott was 28 years older than I, and five years older than my father, I thought he was a rather old man in 1973~74 when I was 35. I remember saying that year that when I got to be an old man in my 60s, I hoped I would be like Dr. Garrott.

I admired him in many ways: he was a devout disciple of Jesus Christ; he was a scholar; he had a sharp and inquisitive mind; and he was deeply interested in the physical as well as the spiritual needs of individual people and of society as a whole.

Indeed, I hope that to some degree I did become, and am, the sort of “old man” such as I thought Dr. Garrott was. At any rate, even though it has been 46 years since his death, I remember him with great fondness today on the 110^th anniversary of his birth.

Is Religion a Good Thing?

So, how would you respond to the question posed as the title of this article? Perhaps some of you would quickly answer in the affirmative and a few of you would likely answer in the negative. However, maybe many of you, like me, would want to respond, “It depends.” Or, in keeping with my 6/15 posting, perhaps we would want to say, “Yes and No.” 

The Affirmative Position

Most religious people, no doubt, are convinced that their religion is a good thing. Obviously, people would not choose to identify with a religion if they thought that, overall, it was not a good thing. But other religions have often been seen as definitely not so good.

Thus, in the past there have been plenty of people who basically thought, “My religion is good, but other religions are bad”—and that idea has been particularly strong in Christianity, and more particularly in conservative Protestantism.

In the name of religious tolerance, though, there are now many who emphasize that all religions are basically the same—and that they are all basically good, for they all teach things like the Golden Rule, for example.

Since now for many “progressive” people little is more intolerable than intolerance, exclusive views of religion have largely been rejected and replaced with the universal acceptance (for the most part) of all religions as true (at least for the adherents of those religions) and good.

But tolerance should never become a barrier to critical thinking.

The Negative Position

There is a growing number of people, especially in the Western world, who think that religion is, definitely, not good. But that has been a common idea in some places in the world, like Japan for example, for quite some time.

My first realization about religion perhaps not being good came from listening to my students in Japan, where I began teaching at Seinan Gakuin University (SGU) in 1968. Most of my students had a negative attitude toward religion partly because in high school history classes they had learned undesirable things about Christianity, such as the Crusades.

Moreover, most of them had been brought up by parents who remembered how the Shinto religion was used by Japanese militarists to spur the nation toward aggressive military action in China and then later at Pearl Harbor.

Warlike activity was done in the name of Emperor Hirohito, who was considered by most Japanese in the 1930s and early 1940s as the earthly manifestation of the Shinto gods.

The vast majority of my students in the required Christian Studies classes I taught were not just negative toward Christianity, they were negative to all religions.

After a year or so at SGU, “Is Religion a Good Thing?” was the title (in Japanese) of the first article I wrote for a faculty and staff publication.

My conclusion was, “Not necessarily.”

The Both/And Position

In one of his numerous potent statements, Pascal declared, “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction” (Pensées, Trotter trans., #894).

That certainly seems to be true when thinking of the 12th and 13th century Crusaders, the Japanese militarist leaders of the 1930s and ’40s, or the radical Islamists of the 21st century.

But isn’t the opposite also true? People never do good so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. Just the Christian examples here are legion: Francis of Assisi, Mother Teresa, Kagawa Toyohiko, M.L. King Jr., etc. etc.

These latter individuals, though, perhaps could be more correctly described as spiritual rather than religious. In the end, it is faith rather than religion, spirituality more than religiosity, that is good.

Thus, it is faith and spirituality rather than religion that needs to be accentuated.

Don't Grieve, Give Thanks

Even though I had another article ready to post today, I decided to postpone it and instead to post the following reflections about my brief trip to Japan, which ends today. (I am scheduled to arrive back in Kansas City just after noon today.)

Grieving What Is No More

During my first and last full days in Japan, October 3 and 8, I experienced considerable sadness at the strong likelihood that this would be my last time in Japan. Especially on Monday evening, I walked around familiar places with tears in my eyes because the next morning I was going to be leaving the place I have loved so much.

As I was jogging early Tuesday morning, though, I started thinking about the words that I had called to mind last week after visiting my good friend Otsuka Kumiko-san, who has terminal cancer: Don’t grieve over what is no more; rather, give thanks for what once was.

I began to apply those words to myself and my grieving because of leaving Japan for the last time.

Giving Thanks for What Once Was

So, yesterday morning I began to give thanks for each thing I had been feeling sad about, including the following:

** I am thankful for the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board, as it was called then, for appointing June and me as missionaries to Japan in 1966 and for supporting us throughout our 38 years there. The Southern Baptist Convention has changed through the years and I am no longer able to be a Southern Baptist; nevertheless, I am deeply grateful for what once was.

** I am thankful for Seinan Gakuin, the school system in Fukuoka City that Southern Baptist missionaries founded in 1916, and for the trustees electing me to the university faculty 50 years ago. I am deeply grateful for the privilege of being able to teach there for 36 years and to serve as chancellor during my final eight years in Japan.

** I am thankful for Hirao Baptist Church, which June and I joined 50 years ago and which was our church home for twelve years. I am also thankful Hirao Church sponsored us in starting the Fukuoka International Church (FIC) and that I was able to serve for 24 years as part-time pastor of that church.

** I am thankful for many Japanese friends, mentors, and co-workers--especially Otsuka Kumiko-san (about whom I wrote, here, on Sept. 5) and Kaneko Sumio-sensei, who was the pastor of Hirao Church for most of the years we attended there. I am thankful for the good visits I had with Otsuka-san on Oct. 3-4  and with Kaneko-sensei on Oct. 4.

** I am thankful for the many former FIC congregants whom I fondly remember--and especially those I was able to visit with over a delicious meal on Oct. 6. That gathering was organized by Fukuoka Kikuko-san, who was the first person I had the privilege of baptizing as pastor of FIC.

** I am thankful for the many students that I had the privilege of teaching at Seinan Gakuin University and especially those with whom I still have contact--such as those I met with on the afternoon of Oct. 8 for a delightful two hours.

What a Difference It Makes!

At dusk on Monday when I left the gathering of former students just mentioned, I walked around familiar places for about two hours, grieving at having to leave Japan for the last time the next day. It was a sad time of thinking of what will be no more, at least of direct experience in Japan.

But Tuesday morning each time I began to have sad thoughts, I would give thanks for what has been--and what a difference that made in how I felt!

Thank you for allowing me to share some of my thoughts / experiences of the past week. In spite of this article being mostly about me, I hope many of you will remember, and profit from, the main point:

Don’t grieve over what is no more; rather, give thanks for what once was.