The Crossroads of Christianity and Culture

“Cultural relativism!” “You are saying that blowing up babies and raping children is okay because they have a different culture!” Well of course not, but I’m used to these leaps of illogic from Christians who have been saturated with a toxic mixture of slippery slope theology and breast thumping patriotism found in so much contemporary American Christianity. It goes right back to our revivalist roots in an era of manifest destiny. The accusation came yet again from a well-meaning Christian upset that I’d tried to explain that people in the Palestinian Territories operated out of different motivations and therefore exhibited different behaviors than those in the United States. And it isn’t just islamophobic conservatives. I’ve been taken to task for promoting  patriarchy when I pointed out that not all cultures  evaluate gender, sexuality, and sexual relationships according to contemporary American standards. They don’t all share the fascinating mixture of prudish Victorian sex...

On Highway 45 as you drive into Dallas there is a large billboard with a homey nativity scene. It says “Just Skip Church, Its all Fake News.” It was put up by the American Atheist Association, whose leader says “We all know what you hear in church isn’t true.” Now I’d love to take him on in a debate, but I fear he has a point. Christians seem to be falling out of the habit of seeking the truth. It starts small; a sermon illustration either manufactured for the occasion or borrowed from another source. At one time pastors could buy books of such stories, or get them in newsletters. Now they come straight off the Facebook feed or an email chain. The characters have made-up names and there is no date or specific place mentioned. After all why bother: Its the punchline, the point of the story, that matters. Except its not. Our congregations are already too credulous - believing all kinds of crazy non-truths, half-truths, distorted statistics, and outright lies. In an age when virtually eve...

In which we discuss the new tax policy. Early morning after the big Boxing Day open house. Place looks pretty good for having had nearly 50 guests. In part because the relatives staying with us helped the cleanup. We had a couple of "real" scientists as guests, by which I mean particle physicists (dark matter and the Higgs boson respectively). And visiting with them got me to thinking about economics. You see, economics is "a social science concerned chiefly with description and analysis of the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services." This dictionary definition doesn't make explicit something that should be better understood by theologians. It is a social science . The first tells you that its field of study is humans in society. The second tells you that it studies actual behavior, not how people should behave. This distinction first became clear to me in the 80’s when I was studying Islam. Islamic Universities were being built to promu...

In their appeals to the 8th century prophets Christian activists become complicit our national delusion. Ever since I was a youth, social activist Christians have made the 8th century prophets their go-to option when it comes to condemning American injustice, or indeed any injustice. But I wonder if this perpetuates an American Christian self-image that can itself become a source of injustice. Let’s consider the context of the 8th century. Back then Israel was a nation formed by a covenant between the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and God at Sinai. As a nation it was struggling to understand why its God, about whom it made exorbitant claims of universality, was allowing it to pass through a series of internal divisions and external assaults on its integrity and freedom. The answer of the 8th century prophets was, in essence, that it had failed to keep its side of the covenant with God. It had failed the essential demand of God to do justice and maintain righteousness. At fir...

"History ended at Chalcedon.” These were the words of a Coptic Orthodox priest whose PowerPoint presentation on his church had come to an abrupt but timely end. Because I thought I’d need to cut him off so that our tour group could move on to lunch. He was serious. As far as he was concerned the driving forces of church history were resolved when heresy was finally and fully defined and vanquished by the creeds. As importantly the order of the church set forth by God was fully established. After that all that remained was a faithful reiteration of what had come before. From a comparative standpoint his was exactly the same position held by the Salafi movements in Islam that seek a recovery of and return to the time of the “rightly guided” caliphs. And you hear echoes of this in contemporary Protestant movements. A sure sign is when they see the ordination of women not as a result of progress but as an act of recovery of the practice of the early church. Hindus (think of the modern...

You can only sail to apparent wind, not the real wind. This is one of the hardest things to teach about sailing. As the boat moves, the wind that affects the sail changes. And, although the effect is less, so do the currents flowing past the rudder. Let's say the real wind is directly from north to south at 10 knots speed. A sailboat can't sail directly into the wind, but most boats can easily sail at a 45 degree angle to the wind. So we set our sail and as the wind flows over it we begin to move northeast, maybe at 5 knots "over ground" meaning over an imaginary fixed surface. So just as you feel a breeze if you run or ride a bike on a still day, the moving boat feels a breeze coming from the northeast at 5 knots in addition to the wind from the north at 10 knots. Combined they act like a single breeze of nearly 14 knots from the north-northeast. And it is this wind for which the sailor must trim the sail and set the rudder. The real wind no longer matters except as ...

There has been plenty of discussion in United Methodist circles about the authority of the Bible, with Adam Hamilton’s “Three buckets” explanation of how the Bible applies to the issue of marriage and ordination of LGBTQ persons grabbing center stage. ( http://www.adamhamilton.org/blog/homosexuality-the-bible-and-the-united-methodist-church/#.Widl4LbMyEI ) While Hamilton is a gifted communicator and leader I think he’s got the wrong analogy for explaining how scripture functions as an authority for the church. Adams’ problem, shared with his opponents, is they inderstand the Bible within a modern epistemological framework that sees truth emerging as humans analyze data and place it into theoretical frameworks that are constantly being revised from other data.  In short the Bible is understood, at least in terms of its authority for theology, as a source of information. And like all such sources it must be evaluated to determine its applicability to the problem being solved, it’s re...

I feel like we have a little too much bumper sticker theology going round when it comes to the concept of “inclusion.” It might be useful to establish some facts. First. Jesus does not preach a gospel of inclusion. He also preaches exclusion. Matthew 25:31-46 is precisely about exclusion from God’s Reign. Or Matthew 8:12, 22:13, 25:30. And I’ve only scratched the surface. Rev. 21:8. Jesus preaches for decision, and decisions are meaningless if they don’t have consequences. It may be possible for a rich man to enter the Reign of God, because for God all things are possible (Mark 8:17-26), but in the short run the man cannot be a follower of Jesus. And of course in the end it turns out the terms of inclusion for following Jesus that all but a few self-exclude from being his disciples. Indeed this is a common theme in the New Testament, how many self-exclude when the going gets tough. Quite frankly, if Jesus wanted to include everyone he wouldn’t have set such tough conditions on being ...

First, I hope we can agree that the mission of the UMC is non-different from that given by Christ to the apostles: to proclaim the good news that that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”  The second half of the sentence suggests, the necessity of creation care not withstanding, that the focus is on human individuals. They are the ones God loves, as is aptly demonstrated in the intensely personal nature of Jesus own ministry and that of his successors. Still, a declaration of God’s love is not the entirety of the gospel. The purpose of that declaration is to elicit faith in Jesus Christ and thus gain eternal life. And this aspect of the gospel is elucidated in Luke 24:46 "and he said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.”  In Acts 1 when Jesus speaks of bap...

As I read among the blogs and facebook postings from United Methodists I can see two  different ecclesiologies being expressed. They are based on different, although not contradictory, understandings of the human condition; different theological anthropologies.  One theological anthropology understands humans primarily as broken, marginalized, and excluded from God’s reign. Thus the task of the church and the basis of all its ministries is to invite, welcome, include, and heal in the name of Christ. The church is a gathering of those who have been brought back into God’s Reign. In this anthropology the language of sin and sinner is understood primarily as another language of exclusion, a way of marginalizing people are pushing them away from God’s Reign. A rather different theological anthropology understands humans primarily as rebels who reject God’s rule and reign. The task of the church is to place before these rebellious people Jesus Christ, who demands faith and submissi...

I have the privilege most mornings of walking as the sun rises, and in this a chance to see the vastness of the universe folded slowly into the into the intimate relationship of earth and sun.  Which always brings to mind the title of JB Phillips’ book, “Your God Is Too Small.” It is worth thinking about two spacecraft in this regard: Voyager and Cassini. Voyager was sent on a grand tour of the outer planets. After decades it completed its mission and slipped into interstellar space, beyond the last reaches of that sun which so dominates our days. It’s future is utterly unknown. Cassini’s fate was sealed just a few weeks ago after an equally fantastic voyage of discovery. Its creators intentionally guided it into an encounter with Saturn that would assuredly reduce it to a diffuse collection of molecules and atoms.  Aboard Voyager was a message, inscribed on a gold disk, telling whoever might find it a little bit about the humans who created it and their planet and solar syste...