D r a g n e t
The Upside of Y2K
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This Rock
Volume 11, Number 1
 January 2000 
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The Mormon church has grounded its 60,000 missionaries the week surrounding New Year's Eve because of possible Y2K computer glitches involving airlines.
The order also affects church leaders and employees, including professors at Brigham Young University, from midnight December 30 through midnight January 5, church spokesman Dale Bills said Wednesday.
"People are waiting to see what happens and that the world is still going," said John Rasmussen, chief financial officer for Murdock Travel, which handles the church's travel arrangements.
Did the Garden of Eden really exist?
Last fall the Boston Globe reported that British archeologist David Rohl claimed he had located the biblical site where Adam and Eve fell from grace in a mountain valley near Tabriz, an industrial city in northern Iran.
The site is a forest of chrome storage tanks and smokestacks that form the central chemical plant of Iran. The small village on the outskirts of the sprawling plant is called Borge Marouf—"famous garden" in Persian.
In 1996 Rohl set out to explore a 5,000-year-old route to Eden described in Sumerian cuneiform clay tablets held by the Museum of the Orient in Istanbul.
Two keys unlocked the secret for Dr. Rohl in this valley outside Tabriz and just east of Lake Urmia in Iranian Kurdistan.
First, the Bible describes Eden as a "walled garden." As Dr. Rohl points out, "The valley is walled in by towering mountain ranges." There is Mount Sahand, a snow-capped mountain of volcanic rock, which Dr. Rohl identifies as the Prophet Ezekiel’s "Mountain of God." On the other side is an ochre-colored range that rises above Lake Urmia.
Second, the Bible places Eden at the headwaters of four rivers. They are referred to as the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Gihon, and the Pishon. The Tigris and Euphrates intersect with Dr. Rohl’s Eden. The Gihon and Pishon rivers are not in any atlas, and herein lies the mystery of trying to locate Eden. Dr. Rohl says they are the Araxes, which flows from north of Lake Urmia to the Caspian Sea, and the Uizhun, rising near Mt. Sahand and also feeding the Caspian.
"We have identified the four rivers, and the topography, as described in the Bible, matches perfectly to Eden," he said.
Few agree with Rohl. Juris Zarins, an archeology professor at Southwest Missouri State University, places the Garden of Eden hundreds of kilometers to the south in a prehistoric plain that now lies underwater at the head of the Persian Gulf. Prof. Zarins is the most respected of the so-called "Edenists," or those archeologists who argue that the Genesis story took place in a real geographical setting between 7000 and 9000 B.C.
But Dr. Rohl, who describes himself as a "non-practicing Catholic," defends his work. He says that the Bible is a valid historical document: "It is absurd to cast the Bible aside, as many archeologists are quick to do these days, just because it’s a religious text."
Forty percent of all Americans believe that the world will end as the Bible predicts, in a battle at Armageddon between Jesus and the Antichrist. According to a Newsweek poll last November, 71 percent of Evangelical Protestants share this view, compared to 18 percent of Catholics. (Princeton Research Associates interviewed 755 adults, 18 and older. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus four percentage points.)
The study also reported that 47 of believers in the biblical prophecy of Armageddon think the Antichrist is on earth now, and 45 percent believe Jesus will return to Earth in their lifetime. But only 15 percent of believers in the Armageddon prophecy—or about six percent of all Americans—think Jesus will return as early as the year 2000.
In the poll, large majorities of believers in the Second Coming believe that current events such as natural disasters, epidemics like AIDS and ebola, and outbreaks of violence like shootings are a sign that it will happen soon. Nnot surprisingly, 95 percent of these believers say that, under such circumstances, it is important to get right with God. Among all of those surveyed, 57 percent expect that people will be divided between heaven and hell after the world ends. An even larger majority (68 percent) expect that they will be going to heaven.
In his remarks at the October 31 Angelus in St. Peter’s Square, Pope John Paul II expressed satisfaction over the signing of the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification between the Catholic Church and the World Lutheran Federation.
The signing, which had taken place that morning in the German city of Augsburg, lifted the mutual condemnations due to theological differences that go back to the time of Martin Luther.
"This is a cornerstone for the complex road in the reconstruction of full unity among Christians," the Pope said. He thanked God for having been able to witness "this intermediary goal in the difficult—but full of joy—road of unity and communion among Christians." John Paul II called the declaration a significant response to Christ’s desire "who, before his passion, prayed to the Father so that all his disciples would be one."
Almost two weeks earlier, on October 18, Dr. A. L. Barry, president of the conservative Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, called the accord "an opportunity for Rome to appear ecumenical without conceding a thing, and it is but the latest example of Lutherans sacrificing God’s truth on the altar of unity."
Barry rightly noted, "The document does not represent a change in the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. It does nothing to repudiate the doctrinal formulations put forth by the Council of Trent.
"That being said," his statement continued, "Lutherans not participating in the Joint Declaration continue to pray for true, God-given unity in the confession of the Christian faith. . . . However, it is a great tragedy when those who claim to be the leaders of Lutheranism depart from the very essence of the Gospel of Jesus Christ through their participation in, and support for, the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification. These leaders, in their quest to achieve unity, fail to see the declaration for what it truly is: a woefully inadequate and misleading document and a betrayal of the Gospel of Jesus Christ."
For a thorough explanation of the document, see James Akin’s "Justification: Setting the Record Straight" (This Rock, November/December 1999, 10-17).
The Roman Catholic archbishop of Monrovia, Liberia, Michael Kpakala Francis, was awarded the 1999 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award for his courage and leadership during a civil war in the African nation. Archbishop Francis founded schools, churches, and health centers in Liberia throughout a brutal conflict from 1990 to 1996. He is the founder of the Catholic Justice and Peace Commission, a Liberian human rights organization. Since the war, he has continued to speak out against oppression in the African country, which was founded in 1847 by freed American slaves.
The $30,000 award is given annually to individuals who fight oppression and protect human rights. Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and Robert Kennedy’s widow, Ethel, presented the award in Washington, D.C. on November 22.
God is described as a mother in a prayer overwhelming approved by the Church of England General Synod last fall. The words are included in one of eight new prayers for the Eucharist that are said at the most sacred part of the Church service. The prayer reads: "As a mother tenderly gathers her children, you embraced a people as your own."
The inclusion of a prayer comparing God to a mother was a victory for the Bishop of Oxford, the Right Reverend Richard Harries, who had a similar proposal rejected by the synod in 1996.
The Bishop of Portsmouth, the Right Reverend Kenneth Stevenson, said, "This allusion to motherhood in the Godhead is not a creation of strident late twentieth-century feminism." He pointed to Isaiah 49:15—"Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb?"—and to Matthew 23:37, where Jesus said, "How often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings."
Sir Patrick Cormack, MP, representing the Lichfield diocese, maintained that eight God-as-Mother prayers were too many. He pleaded for churchgoers to have a common bond of literature to unite them, instead of not knowing what they would be confronted with when they went to church. "The great thing about Cranmer’s Prayer Book is that it created phrases and concepts which resonated in our people for centuries," Sir Patrick said.
More language woes for the Anglicans: A new psalm book ridiculed by the British press for being filled with "howlers and double entendres" (The Times, London) was endorsed by the Church of England in November.
Among the translations under fire is the lachrymose Psalm 6, which in translation states, "Every night I drench my bedding and flood my bedding." This sounded like a severe case of bed-wetting, according to two Hebrew scholars and an English language expert who were consulted about the translations but denounced the draft psalter in a strongly worded pamphlet, A Daft Text.
Other translations under criticism include Psalm 41—"Lord, remake their bed in their sickness"—which critics say makes God sound like a hospital worker.
Faith Hanson, a lay reader of the Norwich diocese, told the Church of England’s General Synod that she did not relish leading the congregation in the translated Psalm 107, which now reads, "Those who go down to the sea in ships and do their business in great waters."
"I believe I’m not alone in finding this a most unfortunate rendering of that text," she said. "I can imagine, for instance, the reaction of young choirboys or choirgirls." Hanson said that the Book of Common Prayer version was preferable: "They that go down to the sea in ships and occupy their business in great waters."
The three academics also derided the use of the expression "bow of bronze" in Psalm 18, pointing out that such a weapon would never bend to fire an arrow. But the Bishop of Hereford, the Right Reverend John Oliver, accused the critics of a lack of imagination. He said the draft psalms have been recited every morning by the congregation in Hereford Cathedral and have been praised for their "poetic musicality."
Be that as it may, the Liturgical Commission, which is finalizing the text, assured the Synod that the double meanings would be corrected.
Be of good cheer: the U.S. bishops did several positive things during their biennial meeting in November. They approved, by a 223-31 vote, guidelines to bring Catholic universities in line with Church teaching. The vote sent the guidelines on to the Vatican for final approval. (The Vatican rejected an earlier version of the rules in 1996 as not strong enough.) The guidelines, based on Pope John Paul II’s 1990 letter Ex Corde Ecclesia, require theologians to receive a mandate from the local bishop to teach at Catholic colleges. They also state that university presidents should be practicing Catholics and that a majority of faculty and board members, where possible, should also be Catholic.
The bishops also debated an upcoming document on church architecture, noting in particular the effect of the design and decoration of church buildings on the beliefs of individual Catholics. Bishop Sean O’Malley of Fall River, Massachusetts, said, "You hear comments: ‘This place does not look like a church,’" referring to the trend as the "suburbanization of the heavenly Jerusalem." Among the recommendations of many bishops was that the tabernacle must be central and visible to all and that images of the Virgin Mary and saints should be brought into the main body of the churches.
The bishops also did well on the practical level, voting to streamline their episcopal conference. The National Conference of Catholic Bishops, which deals with church matters, will be combined with the U.S. Catholic Conference, which deals with civil matters, forming one body to be called the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
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