With the financial crisis erupting around the 500th anniversary of the birth of the Protestant theologian John Calvin, many people in the Netherlands — where his thinking played an important role in forming the local culture — are looking back at his influence and what he might say of the current crisis and the people involved.

(Photo: Dutch Old Masters used skulls and stubby candles to portray the Calvinist idea of the vanity of greed/Robin van Lonkhuijsen/United Photos)

Several of the issues are described in my feature “Moral rebound finds Dutch exploring Calvin.” One of the most interesting elements was an online survey by the Protestant newspaper Trouw called “C-Factor.”

“Test how Calvinist you are, in your convictions, at work and in your love life,” it said in its challenge to readers. It asks 25 questions (sorry, only in Dutch) such as:

“I should really work harder.”

“Making exceptions to rules weakens the rules.”

” I like to dine in luxury.”

“Other people are more important than me.”

“I borrow money for nice things even when I don’t really need them.”

Tests like this are amusing, but you have to wonder about the results. A Dutch reporter in our Amsterdam bureau, who grew up in the Dutch “Bible Belt” and went to a high school in Kampen named after Calvin, got an unexpected 47 percent. A Catholic colleague with a solid Jesuit education got 58 percent. I’m a Brit with no links to Calvinism in my background, and I ended up scoring 75 percent.

Have you ever taken these “test your religion” tests? Were you surprised?

How much fun — really — can you make of religion?  A U.S. marketer of board games may find out with ”Playing Gods” which it calls “the world’s first satirical board game of religious warfare.” It had its European premier this week at the London Toy Fair and will make a U.S. debut at the New York Toy Fair in February.

Ben Radford, head of the company that put the game together, said in a news release it is designed for two to five players who act as “gods” and …

“Try try to take over the world and make everyone on Earth worship him or her. As a god, you can try to convert other gods’ followers, promising them things like Afterlife, Prosperity, and Miracles. Or you can kill them off with plagues, locusts, earthquakes, floods, and other Acts of Gods.

“Watch out, though, because bad things can happen to good gods—one of your vicars is caught with a prostitute? Too bad, you lose a sect!

“Players can pit Christians against Muslims and Hindus against Jews, or be the mascot, a machine-gun-toting Buddha. Players may choose to be any god from Jesus to Moses, from Cthulu to Zeus, from the Cult of Oprah to the Almighty Dollar. (And yes, there is a Muslim figure.) Though the theme includes religious battles, it is really a satire with an underlying message of peace, encouraging people to think about the tragedy of killing others just because they have different beliefs.”

It costs about $40, and German, French, Spanish and Portuguese versions are available in preparation for the European launch. Information is available at http://www.PlayingGods.com. Radford says the gods seem to be smiling anyway — he’s selling about 10 games a day.

Does being a Christian make you a better banker? Former Bank of England employee John Ellis raised the possibility during a church discussion in London on the financial crisis.

The Treasurer of the United Reformed Church pointed to the relative stability of HSBC -- despite market speculation about its capital adequacy -- compared with the parlous state of some of its rivals.

"It is fairly safe to assert that HSBC is the high street bank that has been the most robust bank during the recent troubles. It seems to have ordered its affairs in a way that has allowed it to be least damaged by turmoil all around it," Ellis said.

"It is absolutely safe to assert that the chairman of HSBC is a committed Christian, indeed an Anglican priest, the Revd. Stephen Green. Do we regard that as a curious coincidence or do we think that having clear Christian values held in an institution like that is actually of significance?

Shares in RBS sank to 11.6p on Monday, their lowest for a quarter of a century, while Lloyds Banking Group lost a third of its value and Barclays saw its share price drop 10 percent despite another government lifeline.

Christians working within the financial sector have the chance to create a new banking model out of the chaos, Ellis told the Churches Together conference.

There is an opportunity to change the nature of the banking system and its recent emphasis on targets, he said.

Bob Goudzwaard, professor emeritus of economics and social philosophy at the Free University in Amsterdam, suggested those in the West had recently been tied to a Faustian relationship with money.

Society had created an idol of money, to be followed devotedly, he said. That idol was now staggering under the impact of the credit crunch.

"We should not forget that money is not the part of God's own good creation," he said. "It is created by man."

"Money needs to be our servant not our master," he said.

It all went wrong when we began ignoring the Bible's condemnation of usury, author Ann Pettifor said.

Throughout the Old and New Testaments warnings are given about the use of money to make profit - something the Islamic world has kept heed of on the whole, she said.

"The thing with Islam is it is still considered very unpleasant and very unacceptable if you are engaged in the business of making money from nothing," Pettifor said.

Muslims also say making claims on future prices is sinful because only God can see the future.

Christians used to adhere to non-usury - you could be ex-communicated from the Catholic Church in Britain centuries ago and you were unable to be buried in consecrated ground if you were involved in the practise, and your chances of marriage was reduced.

But that disappeared with the French theologian John Calvin during the Protestant Reformation and later with political economists and moral philosophers such as Adam Smith, who endorsed money-making and then a lack of risk taking on losses, Pettifor said.

"For me this is a profound shift in Christian thinking which then underpins the growth and development of capitalism, and which underpins, in my view, the crisis we face today," she explained.

It gave free rein to lenders and the finance sector, Pettifor said.

She called for the re-assertion of the abhorrence of usury and the re-regulation of finance and credit creation.

Produce is affordable, she quoted an economist as saying, as long as interest rates are low.

"It is only when you have to pay interest to people who are not doing anything that it becomes unaffordable," she said.

(Photo: A surfer reads a ‘Surfers Bible’ at Cronulla beach in south Sydney, 31 Oct 2008/Daniel Munoz)

From Australia, home of the water-proof Surfer’s Bible, comes news of the Maroubra Surfers Church, an Anglican mission launched on a Sydney beach by Rev. Steve Bligh a little over a year ago.

“It’s really unstructured, we don’t have a physical building. We meet on Sunday mornings and teach the men, women and children of our congregation how to surf, then afterwards we have brunch,” Bligh told Reuters. “But I want us to talk God talk as part of our conversations when we are out there on the waves.”

Read Pauline Askin’s feature here.

Steve Bligh talks about Surfers Church:

“Top 10 Stories” lists are a perennial feature,  especially in the United States (which explains a lot of the picks below). Now that they’re all out there, I took a quick look at the “Top 10 Religion Stories 2008″ lists to see if any pattern emerged. Of course one did: “It was the election, stupid.” Even a website dedicated to pagan news found a “pagans and politics” angle to top its list.

The Religion Newswriters Association, which polls member religion reporters, has been drawing up such lists for about 30 years. Election-related stories swept the top three slots last year. They did the same in 2004 as well, but the election shared the top spot back then with Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ movie. The election-dominated lists show some divergences, but the most interesting compilations were the more specialised ones down in the second list below.

Here’s a quick list of the Top 10 lists, first those dominated by the U.S. election and then others I actually found more interesting:

Of all the things to get exercised about, yoga would seem to be an unlikely candidate for controversy. But such has been the case in Malaysia this week.

Malaysia’s prime minister declared on Wednesday that Muslims can after all practice the Indian exercise regime, so long as they avoid the meditation and chantings that reflect Hindu philosophy. This came after Malaysia’s National Fatwa Council told Muslims to roll up their exercise mats and stop contorting their limbs because yoga could destroy the faith of Muslims.

It has been a tough month for the fatwa council chairman, Abdul Shukor Husin, who in late October issued an edict against young women wearing trousers, saying that was a slippery path to
lesbianism. Gay sex is outlawed in Malaysia.

The council’s rulings, and other religious controversies, might at first blush seem to indicate a growing strain of conservative Islam in mostly Muslim Malaysia. But it could also
reflect the growing unease of Islamic authorities in defending the faith in a rapidly modernising Malaysia where non-Muslims constitute 40 percent of the population and are increasingly
asserting their rights.

The yoga fatwa stirred up a hornet’s next, not only in the blogosphere where that could be expected, but in another deeply conservative Malaysian institution — the sultans.  Sultan Sharafuddin Idris Shah, who presides ceremonially over the central state of Selangor, said Abdul’s fatwa council should have consulted the nine hereditary Malay rulers who take turns being Malaysia’s king before announcing the ruling.  The highly unusual comment from one of the sultans on a
policy matter suggests some discord about who speaks for Malaysia’s Muslims on matters of faith. Islam is the official religion in multi-religious Malaysia and the constitution designates the nine sultans as guardians of the faith. The (rotating) king is the head of Islam in Malaysia.

The sultans, for their part, have seen what remains of their secular powers eroded over the years, particularly under the two-decade administration of former prime minister Mahathir
Mohamad. They could be defending a last bastion of royal prerogoative in the religious arena.

Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badaw, who has been preaching a moderate brand of Islam called Islam Hadhari, moved to contain the damage saying Muslims can do exercises like the “sun
salutation” so long as they don’t start chanting.

The fatwa council’s rulings, in any case, are not legally binding until they are adopted as national laws or sharia (Islamic) laws in individual states. There seems to be little appetite for that. No laws have been made against young women wearing trousers. The government in May dropped a proposal to restrict women from travelling abroad by themselves after a storm of derision from women activist groups.

But even as the flap over yoga is relaxing, the government is crossing swords with Christian groups.

A Christian federation  claimed Bibles were seized at entry points earlier this year. Malaysian Catholics are having an ontological argument with the authorities about the word “Allah”.
The government banned the Malay-language section of a Catholic weekly newspaper from using the word, saying it creates confusion among Muslims. Catholics say Allah is simply the Arabic word for
“God”, and has long been used in Malay-language Bibles. (A Dutch bishop has stirred debate in Europe with a similar argument)

Non-muslims, who constitute 40 percent of Malaysia’s population, sometimes worry that things such as the fuss over fatwas and words for God, may augur a mini-clash of civilisations in Malaysia, which last year saw a harsh crackdown on Indian rights protesters. It was one year ago that 10,000 ethnic Indians defied tear gas and waterr cannon to voice complaints of racial and religious discrimination in its biggest ever anti-government street protest.

Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, head of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, has made statements in the past that made him sound quite sceptical about the value of a theological dialogue with Muslims.

(Photo: Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran)

That wasn’t what I found when I interviewed him last Saturday at his office on Via della Conciliazione, just down the road from St. Peter’s Basilica. The subject was the Catholic-Muslim Forum he had just hosted on Nov 4-6 between a Muslim delegation from the Common Word group and Catholic delegation of Vatican officials, Catholic Islam scholars and bishops from western and Muslim countries.

The Common Word group, he said, could become a “favoured channel” for Vatican contacts with Muslims, even while it retains other channels of dialogue. While he still had some reservations about the group’s approach because of differences he sees in ways of reading scriptures, he was quite positive about the actual dialogue itself. “In discussing the love of God, we were doing theology unintentionally,” he said. That jibed with a point that Muslim delegates made during the session itself. “I thought they didn’t want to discuss theology but we’ve been doing that from the start,” University of Cambridge Islamic studies lecturer Tim Winter remarked halfway though the conference.

The cardinal said he felt the most important part of the final communique was item number 5: “Genuine love of neighbour implies respect of the person and her or his choices in matters of conscience and religion. It includes the right of individuals and communities to practice their religion in private and public.” The public part is the key, since that could help Christian minorities in Muslim countries. It could also help Muslim minorities in western countries, which is why Muslim delegation head Bosnian Grand Mufti Mustafa Ceric persuaded the doubters in his ranks to accept it. Several Muslim delegates told me they most appreciated the next item, which reads: “Religious minorities are entitled to be respected in their own religious convictions and practices. They are also entitled to their own places of worship, and their founding figures and symbols they consider sacred should not be subject to any form of mockery or ridicule.” Tauran had more to say about this in the interview.

Tauran also said there were now too many different Christian-Muslim dialogues and he saw a risk that they could start tripping over each other. Here’s my news story on the interview.

Edited Q&A of Tauran interview: Due to some software glitches, you need to do the following to get to the second page of this post — click on the headline, then click on the page number “2″ below.  Page 2 includes Tauran’s closing remarks at the end of the conference.

Pages: 1

Today is Reformation Day, the anniversary of the day in 1517 when Martin Luther nailed his famous 95 theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg in eastern Germany and set off the Protestant Reformation. It is a public holiday in the five eastern German states, in Slovenia and — this year for the first time — in Chile.

Chile? Isn’t that traditionally a Catholic country? Even the Catholic parts of Germany don’t celebrate Reformation Day.

Yes, Chile is traditionally Catholic, but now only about 70% so. Like elsewhere in Latin America, Protestant churches — especially evangelicals and Pentecostals — have spread rapidly in recent decades. They now make up just over 15% of the Chilean population, up from 7% in 1970. It’s not a new story, but creating a holiday especially for Protestants is a symbolic step towards recognising the changes in the religious landscape in Latin America.

The holiday is not officially called Reformation Day but Día Nacional de las Iglesias Evangélicas y Protestantes — National Day of the Evangelical and Protestant Churches. President Michelle Bachelet mentioned the Luther link in a speech (here in Spanish) about the new holiday, which she stressed was a sign of equality of faiths in Chile’s secular state. She also called it a form of recognition of the contribution made by the evangelical churches to national progress in all fields, of their preaching of values that enrich our existence and strengthen the culture of tolerance and respect.”

Do you think if other Latin American countries will follow Santiago’s example? Should they?

Apropos Luther, Der Spiegel has an interesting article in English about how Wittenberg — whose population is only 10% Protestant — may be in for a remake to turn it into “a true Protestant Rome” . This is part of the preparations for the 500th anniversary of Reformation Day in 2017. But Calvin Year (“Calvin09″), the 500th anniversary of John Calvin’s birth, is coming up soon and Geneva will certainly play up its claim to that title.

Christian churches have been taking stock of where they stand on dialogue with Islam. With so much interfaith discussion going on, they’re not all singing from the same sheet and wonder whether they should (or even could). So about 50 church leaders and experts got together near Geneva last weekend to exchange information on their approach to, and experiences concerning, dialogue with Muslims. “With such a succession of meetings where we get together with Muslims, we wanted to have a meeting among ourselves and ask whether we have 2,000 different answers and what that might say about us,” said Thomas Schirrmacher of the World Evangelical Alliance (WEA).

The World Council of Churches (WCC) said the idea for the meeting“emerged from an ecumenical process of response to the Common Word”  initiative on Christian-Muslim dialogue. Held outside Geneva, it brought together representatives from the WCC, World Evangelical Alliance, Roman Catholic Church, Anglican Communion, Lutheran World Federation, World Alliance of Reformed Churches, World Methodist Council, several Orthodox churches and other Christian groups. I have spoken to a few of the participants and received some texts since the meeting to get an idea of how their exchange shaped up.

“The idea was that we come together to share our different experiences with Islam and our different theological approaches to Islam to seek an ecumenical understanding,” said Rima Barsoum, the WCC’s person responsible for relations with Muslims. An “ecumenical understanding” does not mean a common understanding, as became clear at the meeting. Participants described various points of view that no two-day meeting could overcome. Orthodox and eastern churches that live as minorities in Muslim countries have a different perspective from those in the West that know Muslims as a minority. The Vatican’s approach is to focus more on the theological questions while the World Evangelical Alliance has stressed the issue of living together peacefully. “My feeling after Geneva is that there is such a wide spectrum of representation that a common stand would be very difficult indeed,” said David Thomas, professor of Christianity and Islam at the University of Birmingham in Britain.

Catholicos Aram I, the Beirut-based head of the Armenian Apostolic Church(See of Cilicia), displayed that view of minority Christians in the Middle East in his opening speech. “The prevailing misperceptions, ambiguities, polarisations, tensions and collision (of values between Muslims and Christians), hijacked and sharpened by politico-ideological agendas and geo-political strategies, can be transformed only through a shared life in community,”he said. Josiah Atkins Idowu-Fearon, former Anglican bishop of Kaduna, gave a run-down on the often tense relations between Christians and Muslims in Nigeria: “Our biggest problem is that of ignorance: both communities are ignorant of their religion and that of their neighbour.”

Rev. Dan Madigan S.J.warned in his presentation against trying to fit the Abrahamic religions into a standard schema with pre-determined categories. This often leads to parallels between the Koran and the Bible or Mohammad and Jesus, he said, but this was a category mistake. “The most important common belief our traditions share is that the Word of God has been spoken in our world — the eternal divine word that is the essence of God,” he said. However, Jews hear the word of God in the Torah and rabbinic reflection and study. Muslims hear it in the Koran. “For Christians, on the other hand, God’s word is spoken primarily, not in words, but in the flesh … What Jesus is for the Christian, the Koran (not Mohammad) is for Muslims. What Mohammad is for Muslims (the human channel through which the word of God entered the world), Mary could be said to be for Christians. Of course, that Mary role does not exhaust the reality of who Mohammad is for Muslims.”

Rev. Peter Colwell of Churches Together in Britain and Ireland told me Madigan’s comments were “quite a revelatory observation for many participants. I think you’ve got to come out of the Catholic or Orthodox tradition to actually see that.” BTW Colwell has produced a short guide to the Common Word as “a resource for churches and individuals who wish to explore these issues more deeply and who wish take the opportunity the letter affords to develop local inter-faith relations.”

Schirrmacher said several church representatives asked him why the World Evangelical Alliance gave such a quick and positive reply to the Common Word invitation to dialogue while issuing quite a critical note analysing the content of the Common Word statement. “There’s a simple answer,” he said. “The WEA was founded in 1854 on the issue of freedom of religion. For us, agreeing on content and sitting down under the roof of religious freedom to live together peacefully are two different issues. We could sign on immediately to this peace offer — which is what it is, they’re saying they want to live peacefully with Christians in the world –- without taking much time to think about which consequences that may have for the Trinity or whatever. This is tougher for the Catholic Church because they have not conducted the dialogue politically, but from the basis of having the same God and wanting to talk about theological issues. The Orthodox churches, which have always been minority churches and persecuted, had no problem with the evangelical approach because the theological and political issues are separate for them.”

A second meetingwas held in Mechelen near Brussels in mid-week, this time with Muslims. Some church delegates went directly from one meeting to the other. This one was less focused on interfaith dialogue as such, but did mention in its final statement: “As Muslims and Christians we call for mutual learning through opening up of mosques and churches to visitors from other communities and also to learning through engagement of people. This includes scholarly encounter and academic interaction. We need to get into the spirit of religions, as well as their outer clothing. We pledge ourselves to avoid generalisations about the other.”

“We need to get into the spirit of religions, as well as their outer clothing…” – that’s an interesting way of putting it.

The Christian-Muslim dialogue trains continues to roll. The next stop is the Vatican on November 4 and 5, when about 25 signatories of the Common Word will meet Pope Benedict, Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran and other interfaith experts of the Roman Catholic Church.

The Bible has gone green.

HarperOne has published a Green Bible that highlights with green ink over 1,000 references to the earth and what the publishers say is a scriptural mandate to care for it. The inks are soy-based on recycled paper (of course!).

“The Green Bible will equip and encourage people to see God’s vision for creation and help them engage in the work of healing and sustaining it. With over 1,000 references to the earth in the Bible, compared to 490 references to heaven and 530 references to love, the Bible carries a powerful message for the earth,” HarperOne says on its web site about the publication.

The Green Bible is one new piece in the chain connecting the “creation care” movement, which has linked U.S. evangelicals across the political spectrum, Catholics who stress the social teachings of their church and Orthodox leaders, among others.

The movement has been galvanized by the challenge of climate change and other pressing environmental issues and their impact of the poor — and “God’s creation.”

“The poor and the vulnerable are members of God’s family and are the most severely affected by droughts, high temperatures, the flooding of coastal cities, and more severe and unpredictable weather events resulting from climate change,” Archbishop Desmond Tutu says in a brief foreword to “The Green Bible.”

Highlighted lines in The Green Bible include the opening passages of Genesis and this one from Leviticus that says “You shall not strip your vineyard bare.”

But many environmentalists and scientists will no doubt question the ecological utility of some of the highlighted passages.

Take this one highlighted from Deuteronomy: “If you come on a bird’s nest, in any tree or on the ground, with fledglings or eggs, with the mother sitting on the fledglings or on the eggs, you shall not take the mother with the young. Let the mother go, taking only the young for yourself…”

I doubt if you will find a single modern biologist who would support the removal of chicks from their nests as a conservation strategy.

“The Lord bless you and keep you” is highlighted under the Priestly benediction in Numbers. One wonders what explicit ecological message is contained in that passage?

Will The Green Bible make some readers see red?