While Ryan is away on vacation this July, we are having guest bloggers here at JustOneMore.info. This week’s guest is the founding dean of Beeson Divinity School since its inception in 1988 — Dr. Timothy George. He has been instrumental in shaping its character and mission. He teaches church history and doctrine at Beeson and also serves as executive editor for Christianity Today, and on the editorial advisory boards of The Harvard Theological Review, Christian History and Books & Culture. Dr. George has written more than 20 books and regularly contributes to scholarly journals. An ordained minister, he has been pastor of churches in Tennessee, Alabama and Massachusetts. He and his wife, Denise, have two adult children.

Both Billy Graham and Rick Warren are ordained ministers in the Southern Baptist Convention, but their ecumenical import and stature as worldwide ambassadors for Christ have far exceeded their early success as a brash youth evangelist and a colorful church planter. From his base at Saddleback Church in Orange County, California, Warren has garnered great influence as a bestselling author, a crusader against AIDS, and one of the most winsome representatives of the evangelical community in America today. Rick Warren is the new Billy Graham.

This is why Barack Obama invited Warren to offer the prayer of invocation at his presidential inauguration. By any standard, it was a model prayer extolling the virtues of humility, integrity, and generosity and asking for God’s blessings on our new national leader. But then he spoiled all this, some say, by offering his prayer in Jesus’ name, and in four languages at that—Jesus, Jésus, Yeshua, and Isa. This was not the ceremonially correct thing to do, many said, even though Warren made clear that his invocation of Jesus was an expression of personal witness: “I humbly ask this in the name of the One who changed my life.”

Why do some Christians believe it is important to pray in Jesus’ name in public as well as in private? Several years ago I was invited to offer an invocation at a gathering of Christians, Jews, and Muslims, all concerned about issues in the Middle East. My prayer was “ecumenical” in that I thanked God for the many blessings that have flown into the human community from these three faith traditions, but I did end the prayer, as I always do, in the name of Jesus. The Muslims seemed to be all right with this (after all, they say “Praise be upon him” every time the name of Muhammad is mentioned), but one of the Jewish participants—more toward the secular, humanistic end of the spectrum—objected strongly. He complimented the content of my prayer but said he felt uncomfortable and excluded because I concluded my invocation in a uniquely Christian form.

I told him that I was sorry for his discomfort, for that was certainly not my intention. But in interfaith discussions and in public gatherings where prayers are given, it seems more genuine to offer such prayers according to the distinctive rubrics of one’s own faith tradition. I am not sure what the practice is at Harvard Divinity School these days, but, when I was a student there years ago, we prayed together in accordance with the deeply held convictions we each brought to that moment of worship, without any diminution of respect for one another. This reflected a genuine spirit of pluralism where nearly every tradition imaginable, from Buddhism to the Salvation Army, was represented in the student body.

Of course, there are ways for Christians to get around the awkwardness of praying in Jesus’  name in such settings. We can simply say “Amen,” and breathe “in Jesus’ name” silently, under our breath as it were. We can lamely offer our prayer “in your name,” as though God (or we) were confused about who he really is. Or we can try what Robert Jensen calls “syntactically impossible pronominal neologisms,”  such as “Godself,” or blander still, appeal to the deconstructed deity invoked by the Episcopalian bishop Gene Robinson at the Lincoln Memorial inauguration service: “O God of our many understandings.” Of course, the sovereign Lord can hear and even answer prayers offered in this way, and no doubt he does. It is another question altogether whether Christian ministers should sidestep the scandal of particularity in the interest of making people less uncomfortable.

This has become an issue in the military chaplaincy of late and chaplains are now encouraged “to use the more inclusive language of civic faith” when praying with religiously diverse audiences. Russell Moore points out the difficulty with this approach.

Perhaps it wouldn’t seem too much to ask a Catholic soldier to serve himself and his friends Mass since “bread is bread” and the Muslim chaplain to lead the troops in the rosary because “it’s just a prayer.” But that is too much to ask from the believer’s point of view. A Muslim who would speak of Mary as the Mother of God rejects the Qu’ran, and is just not a Muslim anymore. A Catholic Mass without a priest is just not a Catholic Mass. And a prayer to a “God” who is not clearly the Father of our Lord Jesus is not a Christian prayer.

What is called for, not only by chaplains but all believers who dare to express their faith outside the confines of their mosque, synagogue, or church, is sensitivity without compromise. A few years ago a prominent church leader made a stupid and arrogant statement when he declared, “Almighty God does not hear the prayer of a Jew!” Taken at face value, this statement raises all kinds of questions: What is wrong with the Lord’s auditory capacities? Has God gone partially deaf? Could he not hear the prayers of the Jewish Messiah Jesus? The ugly tone of this statement led to religious sloganeering—a divisive pitting of “us good guys” against “them others.”

But there is another danger equally perilous, though more subtle, in our pluralistic postmodern culture: We may be seduced by a false ecumenism that relativizes all differences among faith perspectives and world religions. In reaction to the violence and distemper we see displayed in so-called fundamentalism (of whatever religious brand), many people are touting a kind of uncritical pluralism that would amalgamate divergent faith traditions into one homogenized whole.

Praying in Jesus’ name at a presidential inauguration is an expression of the free exercise of religion guaranteed to every American in the First Amendment. It no more violates the establishment clause than the fact of the president’s taking his oath of office on the Holy Bible (Abraham Lincoln’s King James Version, in Obama’s case), or the president’s concluding his oath with the words “so help me God.” The doctrine of nonpreferential accommodationism requires, of course, that Jews may invoke the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and Muslims the words of Muhammad. It also means that an atheist president can be sworn in on The Humanist Manifesto, and that a Wiccan president can use a Ouija board. But it does not mean that Christians must hide their faith in the inner reserve of their private consciousness. Indeed, they must not do so. For Christians, religious faith is more than what one does with one’s solitude. It is a public declaration to all the world that Jesus Christ is Lord. The one who said “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life” was not crucified in private.

This article originally appeared as a January 30, 2009, entry of “On the Square” on the website of First Things (www.firstthings.com).

So what did you think of President Obama’s inauguration?  It was quite an affair, wasn’t it?

There was a lot to admire.

We are reminded, once again, of the visionary forethought of our Founding Fathers.  The transition of power is one part of the brilliance behind a democracy like ours.

The pomp and circumstance was inspiring.

What about the crowd?  Many started arriving at 4 o’clock in the morning.  Estimates of 2 million or more were present to witness the moment.

I understand there was more security in D.C. than there is presently in Iraq.  That is not surprising.

Rick Warren did a first-rate job with the invocation.  Did you hear him quote the first line of the Shema?

Sing, Aretha, sing!

President Bush looked weary, yet relieved.

John Williams’ “Air and Simple Gifts” performed by Yo-Yo Ma, Anthony McGill, Gabriela Montero and Itzhak Perlman was striking.  It was a worthy touch to the ceremony.

President Obama’s speech was persuasive.  He is a very articulate man.

Did you see President Obama’s daughter’s using her digital camera to video her father giving his speech?  That was a cute.

Even though I cannot support much of his platform, I am starting to like Barack Obama.  Let that be a good reminder for all of us, however.  His policies, not his personality, must be the judge of his leadership.

Whose idea was it to have someone read an anti-climatic poem after the president addressed the people?  Perhaps her words were inspiring, yet the timing stunk.

Joseph Lowery’s final citation in the closing prayer owned me:

“….help us work for that day when black will not be asked to give back, when brown can stick around, when yellow will be mellow, when the red man can get ahead, man, and when white will embrace what is right.”

And finally, even though the 44th President delivered an eloquent speech, I thought it lacked anything particularly memorable, the real zinger that will be replayed in the decades to come.

I remember Reagan’s line “Government is not the solution to our problems; government is the source of our problems.”  And who can forget Kennedy’s “Man on the Moon” address or FDR’s statement, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”?

Later in the day I imagined myself as a presidential speech writer.  This would have been my recommendation:

“Fifty years ago a man of vision stood on these very steps and said he had a dream.  Today, that dream is a reality.”
After the crowd went nuts, he would add:
It is time to dream again, America.  It is time for a new dream.  A new dream where (fill in the blank).  A new dream where… A new dream where…”

Now that is memorable.  Of course no one asked my opinion, now did they?

Yesterday was one of those rare days when it does not matter whether you are a Republican or a Democrat, conservative or liberal.  Yesterday was a good day for America.

God bless America, and God bless President Barack Obama.