The Crossroads of Christianity and Culture

One of my favorite quotes is from Richard Feynman, because it alerts Christians to a fundamental problem they face in light of our changing understandings of the universe: It doesn’t seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all the atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil-which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama. The problem with this quotation is that it perpetuates a myth about religion: that religion is about the struggle between good and evil. Now this is a myth embraced by many religious people, including Christians. But it is wrong, and in our contemporary context is either a caricature targeting religion or an easy acquiescence to the caricature of religion by a contemporary culture unable to think outside the boxes of m...

Where do humans belong in the universe?   The Copernican revolution de-centered humanity in the universe for the purpose of doing away with the increasing bizarre abstractions of the Ptolemaic system. The revolution we need now will bring us back to the center and rescue us from the alienating abstractions of a theology (or cosmology) that seeks to transcend its human origins and represent the mind of God. Matthew Crawford in The World Outside Your Head and Adam Frank in  About Time: Cosmology and Culture at the End of the Big Bang come to remarkably similar conclusions even though one is a philosopher asking about human self-understanding and the other is a physicist trying to understand the beginnings of the universe. Simply stated: they both understand that the Copernican revolution and the Enlightenment project of objective knowledge have led us into vast new realms of knowledge and mis-led us in our understanding of ourselves.  Both Crawford and Frank rightly no...

The going assumption in Facebook world, and the blogs promoted there, is that both the authority of the scripture and the methods for determining its authoritative meaning can be assumed. So disagreements about meaning must come about because one side (the “other” side) has deployed badly constructed arguments. If only they  would be reasonable! But you know what that say about ass u me. Sometimes our public debate sounds more like braying. Because we fail to take into account is that all authority in public discourse is granted by and within the socio-cultural context. In short all authority is determined by political processes, even if those processes are lost in the passage of time, obscured by inattention, or hidden in order to disguise the mechanisms of power. And in the UMC we have at least two different socio-cultural context sharing the same institutional space, and thus confusion. I realize that many of us don’t want to taint God’s word with an association with politics, ...

Before you ask what scripture means you must first ask why we should care. And that is a political question. The meaning of a text is important only in the context that describes what type of meaning it should have. Put another way, ecclesiology is the source of hermeneutical standards for the Bible, because the context in which the Bible has meaning for Christians is the church.  Let’s take a simple example from outside the church: the United States Constitution. In the context of US Supreme Court deliberations the meaning of this text are extremely consequential. It is the primary authority around which deliberations of law take place. And so Americans concerned with Supreme Court decisions get pretty excited about hermeneutical arguments related to judicial restraint and judicial activism. But what about my home for seven years, Austria? Well our American arguments about restraint and activism as hermeneutical principles don’t mean much to Austrians, because the US Constitution ...

United Methodist discourse and disagreement is trapped in secularity. Indeed it is proof of Charles Taylor’s thesis that our secular age is one in which the conditions of belief have perceptibly and irrevocably changed. This does not mean that United Methodists don’t constantly refer to God. But all of those references are mediated by scripture, and scripture as it lies entirely within what Taylor calls the immanent frame.  Once we deploy scripture to prove our point it is no longer God’s word but a human tool; a tool shaped by our immediate needs, whether rational or polemical.  A good example of this are arguments related to the ordination of. . . . women. There are few United Methodists, none I know of, that oppose the ordination of women. But there are plenty of Evangelicals, Catholic, and Orthodox who do. We’ll let John Piper represent the first if you are interested.  https://www.desiringgod.org/interviews/is-there-a-place-for-female-professors-at-seminary . Notewor...

United Methodists are in love with the word love, although in UM political discourse it is deployed to create a patina of sympathy or rebuke rather than to impart information. And of course in some cases its the equivalent of a Texas “bless your heart” that in fact covers up what can’t be politely expressed.  This happens most in the debates about LGBTQ persons. Those arguing for “inclusion” assert that Christians must love LGBTQ persons by fully including them in the life of the church, particularly through participation in the  ritual of marriage and allowing them to be ordained.  And this group frequently asserts that a failure to include is a failure to love. You know the rejoinder from the opponents of LGBTQ full inclusion. They say that they indeed love LBGTQ persons, but that it isn’t loving to encourage and allow what God forbids. The arguments on both sides don’t need to be reviewed here.  Now beneath an argument about what constitute loving acts there must ...