The Crossroads of Christianity and Culture

I was recently forwarded the following question from a Muslim living in the DFW area, and clearly conversant with Christian theology and scripture. Looking at it might help us clarify some of the  issues that are part of interfaith dialogue at that level of theology.  "Now the question: James in his Epistle mentions "the Father of Lights" with whom there is no shadow of change. This is a clear statement on the Eternal, Absolute, and Perfect nature and attributes of God. If one agrees with this how can one maintain that Jesus is one of Trinity. Becoming human means change which is impossible with God. It also means a degradation of his Perfect attributes. Jesus himself is a witness to this degradtion, when he says only the Father knows the coming of the Hour (recorded by both Matthew and Mark, I believe). Theoretically, this does not add up. Could you please comment. ” It’s useful to begin with what is least obvious in this question, that we find here a Muslim in...

Our impulse to purity, to wall building, to securing an unchanging identity isn’t going to be destroyed by “external” enemies. I t will be destroyed from within by God’s own hand. Those of you who aren’t obsessing about the president’s bizarre waffling on his relationship with the Russians may have heard that Israel passed a new “Basic Law,” essentially a change in its constitution. Here is the text.  https://www.timesofisrael.com/final-text-of-jewish-nation-state-bill-set-to-become-law/ . And the AJC here in the US has issued a statement about this law.  https://www.ajc.org/news/ajc-criticizes-knesset-adoption-of-nation-state-bill .  You’ll find plenty of commentary online. But this isn’t just a Jewish issue, and it isn’t something that arose in the last few weeks. Christians need to also consider what it tells us about ourselves, recognizing that the Jewish community will have to face its issues within the integrity of its own tradition of a distinctive calling and iden...

That’s what our choir director said before each performance of the youth choir annual tour. Any effort to save a single soul was justified.  After all we were talking about Jesus who died in the cross for me! Very motivating but a moronic moral calculation. To save one soul we spent enough money to save 100 people from starving to death? To save one soul we put thousands of hours that could have cared for a child with severe disabilities, or worked the suicide hotline? Because you see what the evangelical discourse forgot is that in our actual behavior we cannot distinguish the human soul from the embodied human life. A single soul has infinite worth to God, but only God has the capacity to pay an infinite price, and that has already been done. Every human effort on behalf of the gospel is a series of compromises forced by our limited human ability to know ourselves and God’s will. Compromises imposed by the reality that  we aren’t dealing with human souls, we’re dealing with ...

Who decides who you will be?  The other day I needed to find some documents, so I delved into the family file with all the legal stuff. There I found both my birth certificate and that of my wife Lilian. Mine is a pretty standard official copy of a Texas birth certificate, detailing where I was born, when, sex, parents names, etc.  My wife’s was a very different document. Long and narrow, with a coat of arms and a note that it is created according to the 1951 ordinance for registration of births and deaths. It shows she was born in Sarikei, Sarawak and gives the names of her parents (both born in China), as well as the registrar of births and deaths. The country in which she was born, Sarawak, appears in no official US government database. She was born in end times of the last "white raja" of Borneo, Viner Brooke. It wasn’t modern Malaysia. And it wasn’t a British colony, and strictly speaking it wasn’t quite a country, since Raja Brooke was sort of under the Sultan or Brunei...

Get their raw materials from you and me. We all have psychological pain within us. It is part of the human condition - what the Buddha called  dukkha .  Dukkha  is often translated “suffering,” but I think a better definition is  the condition of permanent dissatisfaction with the world , arising from the fact that it is transient. It is our abiding sense that happiness is fleeting while disease, decrepitude, and death are inevitable. It is suffering in the sense that suffering is the anticipation that pain will not end. Now one would think that  dukkha  is something we all want to escape, and that anyone with a conscience would want to help us escape it. But we don’t and they won’t help. Because this permanent state of dissatisfaction is an itch we love to scratch, and a terrific resource for those seeking power and wealth. We’ll buy almost any thing or any idea, we’ll follow almost any course of action that promises us some relief from  dukkha ....

May break my bones, but words will never hurt me.  I was taught as a small boy to say this in answer to the inevitable bullying and insults that are part of growing up. I suppose it was a kind of psychological defense if you were too scrawny (or in my case fat) to mount a more physical defense.  Once I was older I realized it is complete BS, a bizarre post-Enlightenment gnosticism in which the mind is totally under the control of the will, and the body is irrelevant. It works, but at a high cost in self-dehumanization.  Actually, as the Bible makes clear, words cause plenty of good and plenty of real harm. Some of it is direct, damaging permanently people’s minds and hearts. Much of it is indirect, providing the emotional and even intellectual rational for actual physical violence against others.  Unfortunately the current core of American political ethics can be summed up in two words:  plausible deniability.  You can say anything you want, however hateful...