The Crossroads of Christianity and Culture

In 1989, my fifth year in Malaysia, there was a telling confluence of events.  The German Ambassador held a party on the occasion of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunion of East and West Germany. At that party he gave a speech in which he said, in English and I quote exactly, “Nationalism is the greatest evil of the 20th century.” At the same time you could still see the Malaysian national slogan on billboards and handbills: “Nasionalisme Teras Perpaduan.” Nationalism is the core of unity. The use of the English loan word was intentional. The other Malay word translated nationalism is kebangsaan, a contested word that can call to mind ethnicity.  So how is it that the greatest evil of the 20th century becomes the national slogan for Malaysia?  Because the word has different meanings in different historical contexts .  What the German ambassador meant by nationalism was  ethic nationalism,  the belief in the intrinsic rights of one ethnic group agains...

What if instead of asking what we have to say we also asked what we have to learn ? What if instead of defending the truth we attack our own ignorance?   I was struck by a recent article in Scientific American reporting on the latest findings in astronomy based on the coordination of individual experiments designed to measure gravity waves, neutrinos, X-rays, gamma rays, and visible light. This coordination has led to the observation of never-before seen astronomical events of consequence in testing certain theories of the nature of reality and the origins of the universe.  The excitement in the article, and in the responses of literally 10’s of thousands of scientists to these observations, is palpable. Indeed, hundreds of academic articles are the result of each observation.  That excitement seems to stem from a sense of limitless possibilities for continuing discovery about a universe whose unbounded complexity and infinite reach gives humans never ending possibilities...

I’m writing from Newport R.I., where the story of Mary Dyer intersects my family’s history. My earliest known ancestor in the Americas, Jacob Hunt, was a “freethinker” booted out of the Massachusetts Bay colony to Pennsylvania. His children were subsequently raised by a Quaker aunt in Newport. The family moved westward for generations, pressed by an intolerance for pacifists and non-conformists endemic to American Protestant Christianity.  What interests me about Mary Dyer is that she was executed in Boston along with other Quakers. The charges against her, in addition to what was essentially heresy, was  antinomianism.  What that meant, and the term was then relatively new in English usage, wasn’t merely that she broke the law. It asserted that in the realm of conscience and religion she advocated  against having laws.  This was, of course, fundamental to the teaching of Quakers and many other religious groups. They saw the teaching of Christ as fundamentally o...

If we can't see what happens, its because we've blinded ourself to cultural difference. Let’s start with a short quote from Rev. Dr. Jerry Kulah P. Kulah, Dean of the UMC’s Gbanga School of Theology in Liberia. Referencing the first of five recent amendments to the UM Book of Discipline he affirms the intention of equality, but  "we strongly opposed the reference that “it is contrary to Scripture and to logic” to acknowledge or claim the maleness or fatherhood of God. The Scripture is replete with references to God as Father. When Jesus taught his disciples, (and, by implication, us) how to pray, he taught them to call God “Our Father” (Matt. 6:9; Luke 11:2); throughout his teaching and preaching ministry, Jesus often referred to God as “Father” (Matt. 5:16; 6:9,26; 11:27; Luke 2:9; John 2:16; 4:21; 10:17,30; 14:6-11; 15:9). When he prayed, while carrying the sin of the entire world on the cross, he addressed God as his Father (Luke 23:34). After Jesus’ resurrection, he in...

When considering the relationship between science and religion we must recognize that the fundamental question is not about the existence of God.  It is the question of how we know anything at all about reality. From the beginning of the Enlightenment until the present day we have been trying to distinguish between what constitutes  physics  and what constitutes  metaphysics  and which is credible or whether both are credible. For much of the 19 th and early 20 th  centuries it seemed that physics, or science more generally, was gradually excluding metaphysics and thus religion as a serious approach to knowing reality.  There was, however, a shift in the middle of the last century when it became clear that the universe we know of had begun with a “Big Bang.” At that time the astronomer Robert Jastrow famously said “At this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation. For the scientist who has liv...

Our discussions in the UMC need to focus on the kinds of marriage in which clergy can be a partner, over which clergy can preside, and for which congregations can host as representatives of the United Methodist Church.  Discussions of how people behave sexually are a fruitless waste of time. Unfortunately we have too often focused on “homosexual practice,” which is singled out in both the Book of Discipline generally and the Social Principles Creed specifically. This focus on “practice” inevitably means that debates about homosexuality become debates about personal behavior, with the attendant nit picking and hypocrisy that attend all efforts to regulate Christian behavior. If we go down the road of listing practices, sexual or otherwise that United Methodists don’t condone, and ostracizing or excommunicating those who engage in those behaviors we’ll empty the ranks of clergy and laity pretty quickly. And checking up on repentance? We’ll have an inquisitorial bureaucracy to rival t...

At the foundation of Christianity is a simple but revolutionary idea: humans should be free to choose  who  they are and  whose  they are. And they  can  be free because Christ sets us free. From the baptisms of John the Baptist to Jesus’ call to faith the assumption is that there is more to being human than one’s birthright identity. The conscious encounter with the living Christ, in whatever form it takes, becomes the occasion on which the pre-conscious working of the Spirit of Christ that makes us aware of our bondage to sin and death leads us to freely choose our selves, our God, and our destiny.  So of course non-Jews could join Jesus’ movement. It wasn’t based on parentage or ethnicity but choice.  It is this possibility of freedom to choose, long suppressed by the institutional churches of Christendom, that Martin Luther and the reformers re-discovered in its religious form. It is no accident that this understanding of human freedom would c...