Prayer discrimination

I opened my email this morning to discover an 'urgent prayer request'. A significant leader in world missions was passing on to me a request he had received from Japan to pray for the serior manager leading the team restoring electrical supply to the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. "As it turns out", so the message ran, "the project head is a Christian. His name is xxxx xxxx, believed to be a member of the First Baptist Church of Fukushima." I was then encouraged to "get this message out to all your networks so that they can pray for this man".

If our Faith2Share website had been running I would probably have written this up as a short news story and posted it by 9.30am this morning, but as it happens the website is off line today for an upgrade. Instead I shared the prayer request with office staff, planning to upload the story tomorrow. Wow, that was a narrow escape! By 2.00pm. other "urgent messages" were arriving. "Please don't mention his name." "Please take down any web items." "Mentioning him could put him at risk." What a blessing a delay can be sometimes!

Having reflected on this during the rest of the day, however, the real issue for me is not the carelessness of someone in Japan not checking whether a story should be public, but rather ... why it suddenly became more important to pray for this guy when it was discovered that he "is a Christian". What if he had been a Buddhist, or an outright atheist, or simply didn't take religion very seriously? Does that excuse us from praying for him? Is praying urgently for Christians whenever they find themselves in a tough spot not rather discriminatory?

I'm beginning to think that it might be more urgent to pray for the guy with his thumb in the Japanese nuclear dyke if he has no faith at all - surely the Christian in that situation already has a head start. Or am I confused?

Bibles released from prison

I just got the news I had been waiting for - 35,000 Bibles have been released from prison (well customs custody actually) in Malaysia. Praise God.

It was in the home of Iban friends in Subu (in Sarawak, East Malysia), over a kitchen table loaded with empty bear cans and chicken bones, that I heard the story last month. As a result of a long runing dispute within Malaysia as to whether Christians can be allowed to call God "Allah", the port authorities in East Malaysia first impounded 5,000 Bibles and then another 30,000 which Christians were trying to bring to their, quite substantial, communities in Sabah and Sarawak. The post authorities threatened to destroy the 'illegal' books. Last week I heard from another friend in West Malaysia, Bishop Ng Moon Hing, that a group of church leaders were mounting a high profile, and internationally publicised, protest. Fortunately Pakatan Rakyat (opposition) politicians picked up the case and today the government ordered port officials in Kuching and Klang to release the Bibles.

So why do Christians in Malaysia want to call God "Allah" in the first place. Very simply because "Allah" is the natural translation of the English "God" and Hebrew "El" in their language, Bahasa Malaysian. They are not alone - many Christians across the Middle East, who speak Arabic and related languages also call God "Allah". Perhaps a more sensible question would be, "Why do British Christians want to call Allah "God", and in so doing adopt an old word from northern Europe with pagan origins!

Language is fascinating and can lead to heated debates. I also heard tonight of another debate raging in certain mission circles about whether we should, or should not, avoid talking of Jesus as the "son" of God when sharing our faith with Muslims - because they find this so offensive. For most Muslims "son" implies a biological (yes, sexual) relationship and so in saying Jesus was the "son" of God we are affirming that God had sexual intercourse with Mary - that's the only possible interpretation. Some missiologists however are now pointing out that even the Qu'ran uses "ibn" (son) in ways that are not biological or literal. Sura 2:177 talks of a traveller as being a "son of the road" for example. So, the arguement goes, we should not give up on the use of "Son of God" but rather help our Muslim friends to see the deeper meanings of "sonship".

Isn't language complicated! But tonight my thoughts are with Iban friends in Sarawak who can once again buy a Bible in their own language - and worship "Allah".

Cosmic Soup

Whilst tsunami waves were consuming whole communities on the east coast of Japan I was proof reading a short document for a Romanian colleague. Nicu, who is professor of theology at the University of Oradea, had sent me the extract of his work on Basil the Great and his understanding of the relationship between science and religion. Nicu sugguests that Basil's "pneumatological vision of creation" and his understanding of the "transfiguration of humanity in Christ" provide us not with an alternative to our scientific understanding of reality but rather the firmest of foundations for such an understanding. Science and religion do not stand in opposition but rather cannot stand at all without each other!

But how does that enable me to make sense of the tsunami, the 'careless' destruction of life I am witnessing on my TV screen?

Allow me one more digression. Earlier this week I watched Professor Brian Cox as he took us through billions of years of the history (and future) of our solar system to explain the second law of thermodynamics - in other words everything always goes from order to disorder (as anyone who watched by desk during the day will already know!). Time is a one way process. Our universe is steadily moving from simplicity, through complexity, to a final state which will be so complex, so mixed up, so disordered that it will actually be very simple - one universal 'soup'. Sadly the content of the tsunami wave as it crossed previously ordered agricultural land in Sendai began to resemble that 'universal soup'.

So where does God fit into all of this? - Romanian theology, tsunami waves and Brian Cox. As a saviour? As the one to whom we cry out in lamentation? Perhaps 'fit in' is the wrong question. As Basil the Great (an accomplished scientist as well as theologian) understood well, the purposes of God do not 'fit in' to science or 'rescue us from' the outworkings of science. In fact it is the purposes of God that give science its meaning. Tsunamis are one small part of the second law of thermodynamics (order to disorder) and that law is just one tiny part of the 'transfiguration of all things in Christ' which is the love and purpose of God.

But don't ask me to understand all that! I'm not God.