The Crossroads of Christianity and Culture

Who is more righteous? The US Army that accepts same-sex marriage or the United Methodist Church that does not?  Its a fruit-asymmetrical question. In other words worthless.  Many Christians, and thus their non-Christian critics have a profound misunderstanding of the difference between sin and immorality, as they do the difference between righteousness and morality. This makes for bad theology, bad dialogue, and worse behavior.  In scripture the word “sin” is invariably associated with the relationship of persons and nations to God. That brokenness may be observable through lawbreaking, but this is only because the laws broken are the laws of God. Similarly righteousness as it refers to humans refers to living within God’s covenant, and thus being in the correct relationship with God. Such a relationship is observable through obedience specifically to God’s law.  Now when I looked up the word “moral” in the Bible I found it occurred only once, in the book of James, ...

The accusation was like many others: "You’ve quoted an Islamophobic author." Another matching accusation: "You’ve cited a homophobic theologian." And: "So you fear immigrants too?" If there is a national disease for our time it is certainly the epidemic of phobias. Although that isn’t quite correct. It is the epidemic of accusations of phobia. Most of the time the accusation is simply a form of intellectual laziness or its flip side, arrogance. It allows dismissal of any argument by waving it away as a neurosis, an emotion; a phobia. It is the modern equivalent of accusing women of “hysteria," but this game is open to all sexes, and is usually followed by the academic or ecclesial equivalent of “mansplaining” available to professors and pastors of any gender. The accusation that a person or group is “phobic” comes from the work of Sigmund Freud, who brought the word into common usage. It is an accusation based on a faux-Freudian diagnosis of emotiona...