President Bush is scheduled to speak at the commencement ceremony of Calvin College tomorrow. It'll be interesting to see how that goes, and whether it gets any press coverage. I heard a lot of people saying they thought he'd cancel it after word got around that there might be protests of some kind, since he and his team seem to dislike opposing voices. Good for him for going through with it--and hopefully he doesn't try to use it as a political platform. (Also hopefully the protests come off well).
One-third of the professors at an evangelical Christian college in Grand Rapids, Mich., are taking out a large ad in a local newspaper Saturday to protest President Bush's commencement speech.
"As Christians, we are called to be peacemakers and to initiate war only as a last resort," the ad will say. "We believe your administration has launched an unjust and unjustified war in Iraq."
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"No single political position should be identified with God's will," says the ad, which also chastises the president for "actions that favor the wealthy of our society and burden the poor."
Christians are to be characterized by love and gentleness, it adds, but "we believe that your administration has fostered intolerance and divisiveness and has often failed to listen to those with whom it disagrees."
Moreover, says the letter, set to run in the Grand Rapids Press, the Bush administration's environmental policies "have harmed creation," and it asks the president "to re-examine your policies in light of our God-given duty to pursue justice with mercy."
"When I was a student at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich., in the early 1980s, there was a fairly widespread notion that being a Christian in a culture that embraced greed and militarism meant never having to go along with the program.
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All along, we struggled to integrate faith and politics in a way that honored God without resorting to a culturally inauthentic witness. In the "greed is good" era, even the campus Republicans understood the necessity of maintaining a respectful distance from the powers-that-be."
"Bush's visit has added new fuel to the already raging debates at Calvin over the relationship of Reformed Christianity to contemporary American politics and even evangelicalism. Carpenter said the Christian Reformed Church, Calvin's denomination, has remained loyal to the politics of Abraham Kuyper, who served as Dutch prime minister from 1901 to 1905. Kuyper created the first Christian Democratic party, which shares much in common with Roman Catholic political teaching in its commitment to peacemaking and alleviating poverty.
Calvin College remains devoted to doctrinal orthodoxy, and most faculty oppose abortion and gay marriage. But significant historical and theological factors at Calvin cut against the grain of popular evangelicalism. In particular, the high-church tradition of the Christian Reformed Church looks skeptically on revivalism and independent congregationalism. "This community, in regard to evangelicals," Carpenter said, "has always been 'Yes, but ? '""
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