:I'm a nineteenth-century evangelical born in the wrong century.Evangelicals led the battle against slavery; they fought for women'ssuffrage; they fought for child labor reform; they were revivalists andreformers, evangelists and abolitionists, and people like CharlesFinney (the Billy Graham of his day, the nineteenth-century evangelistwho invented the "altar call" to get the names of his converts to signthem up for the anti-slavery campaign). I like the idea of altar calls.I mean, don't just listen to a talk and clap your hands and go home.Respond. Commit. Make a decision. Join something. That's what it meansto me to be an evangelical.

The word "evangel" means "goodnews." Jesus used that particular word in his first sermon at Nazareth,what I call his "Nazareth Manifesto," his mission statement. He quotedIsaiah and said, "The spirit of the Lord is upon me because He hasanointed me to preach good news"--the evangel--to the poor. Good newsto the poor was at the heart of what it meant to be evangelical. TheReligious Right doesn't take the Bible seriously--or literally. I wantthe Right to take the Bible more seriously, what it says about thepoor, about war and peace, about the environment, and all the rest. So,I'm happy to be an evangelical.

AsJim mentioned last night, I was in jail with Tony Campolo, one of thecountry's most significant evangelical progressives. We were arguingabout religion. We weren't just discussing it. We had a differentunderstanding of the text. We didn't think that the right way to do"interfaith" was to find a lowest common denominator. And that's alsoour approach here--the Network of Spiritual Progressives must encouragepeople to come into our arena with the fullness of their religious orspiritual particularity, and to present it, argue it, even debateperspectives with which they disagree, and to do so respectfully andwithout undermining what we have in common: our commitment to peace,social justice, ecological sanity, and a New Bottom Line for Americansociety.

Now, having said that, I'm going to come in with myown theology, which is different from Jim's. When Jewish traditionsays, "This is the Torah that Moses put before the children of Israel:By the Word of God, by the hand of Moses," it tells us that there's atransaction going on. The source is God, but the receiver is a humanbeing. Moses was a very screwed up human being. We know that. Accordingto the story, God decided not to let him go into the Promised Landbecause he couldn't totally control his anger, and he hit the rockinstead of speaking to the rock, as God had told him to do. He usedviolence when violence wasn't appropriate.

I want to submit toyou that this Torah story is meant to teach that every human being islimited, and that the way that anybody ever received God's message wasthrough their particular psychological, spiritual, intellectualframework--that there was no other way that human beings could get it.When they heard God's voice, they always heard it through the frameworkof who they were and what they were capable of at any given moment.

Sowhen the authors of the Gospels (none of whom knew Jesus) wrote them,if one were to assume that they were divinely inspired, then theyreceived that part of God's message that they could receive, giventheir particular limitations as humans. Of course, that's a particularunderstanding of theology, because there are some people who believethat humans received God's message exactly as God intended, though Idon't know how they would know that.

In the Jewish tradition, wehave a corrective process. On the one hand we have our own study of thetext relying on our own intellectual capacities, and on the other handthere's a community of study and struggle with the text. Finally, ifthere were a third hand, there's prayer, in which each individual triesto access the God-energy of the universe as best they can. Through theinteraction between these three, we seek an outcome of how we shouldunderstand the text. Just as our generation is waking up to the factthat the way the texts were heard before had a certain sexist qualityto it because a great deal of that interpretive process was performedby men, there's a huge amount now to learn from all the women who areopening and rereading those texts.

Thus, future generationswill look back at us and say, "Oh, they were limited in theirunderstanding of God's word by the assumptions that they had in theirhistorical period, living in the United States of America or living inthe Western world, in an extremely individualistic, materialisticsociety of that period."  People will look back five hundred years fromnow and say, "Okay, that was a good attempt for what they could do atthat moment, though luckily now our understanding has evolved."

:I think a similar thing happens on the Christian side, even among themost conservative evangelicals. Very few hold to what to what you mightcall the dictation theory--that the author of the scripture was justsort of a stenographer, God was dictating scripture and they just wroteit down. Almost no one takes that point of view. But my point is to notfall into the trap of letting the Right have the Bible. The propheticBiblical tradition is such a powerful thing: the Hebrew prophets andJesus. You know, that's the most radical stuff. I got converted fromthe radical student movement by reading the gospels. I found theGospels more radical than Karl Marx, Che Guevera, and Ho Chi Minh.

:Father Louis Vitale and I went to jail many times over nuclear weaponsat the Nevada test site. The arms race between two superpowers put theworld in grave danger. Today, nuclear proliferation remains a profounddanger. The world's nuclear materials and warheads are not secure. Thereal security threat of this coming period would be the coming togetherof a terrorist organization and an accessible nuclear weapon. That'snot just made up by the Right wing. That's a real threat. Nuclearproliferation is a huge danger that almost no one is talking about. Andthis administration has totally bungled our policy relationship withNorth Korea. There is a serious nuclear danger right now from NorthKorea. Another one's coming from Iran. And of course, the United Statesmakes the same mistake every time, by saying it makes sense to themthat other people should disarm their weapons of mass destruction whenwe don't believe in leadership by example.

:I'm a t-ball coach on Friday nights. I've got fifteen first gradersincluding my son, Luke. Which is to say my kids, six years old and twoyears old, are my principal source of anchoring in my life and therenewal that I need, day-to-day and week-to-week. At Sojourners, wehave a daily liturgy and monthly chapel services. For us, it'simportant to somehow be what we say we believe. We try to be aprayerful community day-by-day, week-by-week and try to support eachother as a community.

Sothat means taking time for recreation. And this is where I have toreally admire my Jewish friends. Christians don't do nearly as wellwith the Sabbath as our Jewish friends do. Just to stop. Stop, stop,stop. And that's why I sometimes like going to jail: there are no cellphones, no meetings, no phone calls, no schedule. And to admit it,sadly I'm sometimes in better shape when I come out of jail. That sayssomething about how we live the rest of our lives, outside of jail.We've got to build in discipline: prayer, reflection, family, and kids.We have to take care of ourselves and each other. You can't change theworld just by protesting the bad stuff, and think you've really solvedthings. People who want to be activists for the long term had betterbecome contemplatives at the same time.

: If you go homeand create a local chapter of the Network of Spiritual Progressivesit's really important to have a spiritual practice, or to encouragemembers to develop an inner-life. It's so critical.

My path isShabbat, the Sabbath. From about forty minutes before dark on Fridaynight until three stars appear on Saturday night, I stop doing whateverelse I'm doing in the world of work. I literally do not touch money, donot shop, do not watch television, do not answer emails, do not go neara computer. And for that roughly twenty-five-hour period, at mysynagogue, Beyt Tikkun, we observe this incredible spiritualcelebration.

Itwas only when I entered the Orthodox world that I began to encounterthe Sabbath as an actual celebration of the universe. It was only whenI followed the strict rules of Sabbath observance that I discoveredthat it is incredibly renewing to be able to take the time away fromthe tasks of making things happen, to say, "No, I'm not fixing things,I'm not doing my laundry, I'm not catching up on my housework, I'm notdoing all the things I didn't get done in the rest of week. I havetwenty-five hours just to celebrate the grandeur of the universe."That's what I do for renewal, and I invite anybody who happens to be inthe Bay Area to join us at Beyt Tikkun.

:Absolutely, the culture is at risk of emptying the word of meaning. YetI don't want to give up that word. People have taken almost every wordand transformed it into its opposites. Any ideal that people have canbe used and misused. Socialism and communism were taken by EastEuropean and Chinese totalitarians and transformed into the exactopposites of what those terms were supposed to mean, and that was tothe detriment of many peoples of the world. The word "love," preciselybecause it speaks to something that is so deep in people, has beencommercialized and so often emptied of its meaning, and yet I don'twant to give it up. There are some words that have a historicallyimportant resonance that should not be given up to the commercializersor those who try to empty them. I believe that God and spirit are twoof those words. We need to reconnect to the deepest meanings of thosewords and not let them be manipulated.

: Shouldn't wein the Network of Spiritual Progressives also be talking about"responsibility"--defined as a combination of social responsibility,righteous action, and the Jewish idea of being a mensch?

:I actually think that's a good idea. Responsibility is a word thattranscends the categories of Left and Right. And personal and socialresponsibility together make up the Catholic notion of the common good.On the poverty question for example, there are too many people on theLeft who just talk about social responsibility. Then the Right says,"Well, there are also issues here of personal responsibility." Andanybody who's ever lived and worked in a poor neighborhood knows that,yes, there are issues of personal and social responsibility. You don'ttell kids at our neighborhood center, "The world's stacked against you,there's nothing you can do." You say, "There are choices you have tomake about drugs, about your schoolwork, about your sexual activity,about conflict over a jacket or running shoes, that could be lethal.There are choices you've gotta make." I think personal and socialresponsibility are deeply embedded in most of our religious traditionsand these really transcend the categories of Left and Right. It makesfor a very balanced and good theology.

: So much ofWestern culture is formed and shaped by the Christian concept oforiginal sin--human beings born broken and incomplete. This has coloredso much of how people feel about themselves and others and has been thebasis of so much that might be wrong in our society. How do we reframethe Christian message without damaging the power of Jesus' message:that people are relieved of the terrible burden of being born in sin?

A movement like thishas to be careful not to gloss over the reality of evil in the world,in the nation, in our own lives. The best theology knows there's achoice that is always being made between good and evil. So we shouldn'tmake the mistake of thinking that evil is just some sociologicalcategory, and that if we're just loving, caring, generous, andresponsible, that evil goes away.

 Jesus says, why do you see thesplinter in your adversary's eye but not the one in your own eye? Ithink the notion that there is real evil in the world that we need toconfront realistically should be part of any serious social movement,including in our own hearts and in our own lives.

: Well, Jews also believe in "original blessing," and I thank Matthew Foxfor his wonderful book by that title. Our creation story in Torah saysabout God that  "He saw the world and behold it was very good." So westart with initial blessing, that God's take on this world was itsfundamental goodness--and that included human beings. And so eventhough in the historical world in which we live we have to take evilvery seriously, I don't want to ontologize that evil; I don't want usto act as though there's a dualistic universe in which there is anequal amount of power to the evil as to the good. In my theology, theuniverse as a whole recognizes evil but tilts towards the good. Becausethe God of this universe is a good God who saw this universe andaffirmed it as good. That vision makes me want to say to people that"Yes, there's real evil here, but, yes, it can ultimately be overcomeand transformed."

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