The Crossroads of Christianity and Culture

Really? In response to a recent blog by Dr. Stan Copeland of Lovers Lane UMC (https://um-insight.net/general-conference/general-conference-2024/who-really-speaks-for-african-united-methodists-–-r-hetoric/ )  one person wrote that "Africa will not accept the regionalization of the Bible." It would be interesting to know exactly where the idea of "regionalization of the Bible" came from, but a good guess is that it came from Good News Movement propaganda based on recent writings by Rob Renfroe and others.  So it needs to be stated that the regionalization amendments to the UM Constitution do not regionalize the Bible. They place certain types of decisions in the hands of regional and local church leaders in order for those decisions to be made in culturally sensitive and socially appropriate fashion. Specifically regionalization gives to the regions the following types of decisions: 1. Criteria for ordained and licensed ministry:  Regional conferences would set the mi

In a recent editorial Rob Renfroe stated, “ Our friends in Africa with whom we work closely have told us they cannot remain in a church that allows for a contradictory, “contextualized” sexual ethic.” (for the whole piece see  https://www.umnews.org/en/news/traditionalist-caucus-president-speaks-to-criticism_ ) This provides his rational for remaining politically active in the UM General Conference. He's working to guarantee the rights of these "friends" to disaffiliate. Renfroe doesn't tell us exactly who these friends are, the basic idea here is  that by allowing regional decisions on same sex marriage and ordination of LGBTQ persons the UMC is saying that sexual ethics are a matter of cultural context rather than universal divine mandate . And this gets to the core of the Good News and WCA critique of the UMC. They maintain that there is a universal, biblical mandate for human sexual relations that is not subject to historical change and cultural evaluation. Renfro

What does it mean to be human? Western, largely Christian understandings of what it means to be human were deeply challenged by the Enlightenment. That challenge is written into the founding documents of modern nation states like the United States, and is reflected everywhere in popular drama, literature, film, and television.  The classical Christian understanding of what it means to be human has been defined in terms of a relationship to a transcendent creator of humanity and the world, and of kinship relationships within clans, tribes, or ethnic nations, and of an inherited status, class, or gender. In the modern era what it means to be human is defined in terms of the immanent frame, citizenship in a nation state, and the responsibility to create one self, one’s social world, and even the natural world in the company of fellow humans, fellow citizens, and fellow creatures. People who might once be called nomads are now defined in terms of citizenship, and become migrants, immigrant

The Alabama Supreme Court recently ruled that frozen embryos (with between 6 and 10 cells)  created through in-vitro fertilization had the same protection under the law as living humans. The head of that court gave an unreservedly religious rational for the ruling. (Read here for details:  https://religionnews.com/2024/02/27/the-alabama-ruling-on-embryos-claimed-to-be-christian-christians-arent-so-sure/ ) As the Religious News article points out, this ruling is closely related to religious reasons for banning abortion based on the idea that life begins at conception. Yet beneath questions of fetal personhood is a more fundamental issue. Traditionalist Christians believe that there is   a moral order to the way in which humans should reproduce. This isn't limited to confining sexual intercourse to a marriage between a man and a woman.   It includes everything related to the uniting of a human sperm and a human egg and the subsequent nourishing of the embryo in the womb.  Thus the cu

There is a new book out advocating an old idea, that humans possess no free will.  Determined  by Robert Sapolsky. I don't wish to engage his arguments directly, but rather quickly review the basis on which those arguments must be assessed. First, the idea that humans do not possess free will is hardly a new idea. It is found in the oldest forms of Buddhism (Therevada) based on careful analysis of the laws of cause and effect in relation to the human mind that creates the  samsara world . Mahayana Buddhism tackled some of the inherit problems in that system and came up with alternative answers.  Another kind of determinism was put forward by Christian and later Muslim theologians who asserted that for God to be omnipotent and omniscient no human volition could exist. It was an argument based in logic that appeared impenetrable unless one considers that the axiomatic assumptions are unproven and contradict human experience.  More modern forms of determinism were put forward by Bertr

The first victim of war is the truth, but only in part because of outright lies and misinformation. In larger part because words, and language more generally, are used for emotional impact, especially fostering outrage, rather than to describe reality. This misuse of language can achieve a short-term impact, but gradually words lose their emotional value as they are overused and misused. To give one example, the so-called F-bomb is now barely an F-splat. It is a punctuation mark rather than an expletive. There are too many examples in the current war in Gaza. Virtually every characterization of every action by either Hamas or Israel serves less to describe than to create outrage and delegitimize the person or people taking action. (For example, is the person who acts a perpetrator? Strictly speaking yes, but because this term comes from the language of crime and punishment just using the word casts the actor in a negative  light.)  Terrorism, genocide, reprisal, revenge, innocent,  an