The Crossroads of Christianity and Culture

Perhaps the greatest Christian fallacy in the modern era is the belief that because the world is getting better in measurable ways it is progressing toward redemption. It is a fallacy incorporated in the United Methodist slogan “Making Disciples of Christ for the Transformation of the World.”  If we United Methodists had said, “making disciples of Christ who could then make the world a more habitable/decent/prosperous place to live” it wouldn’t have been so dramatic, but it would have been within our grasp. But to  transform , to change the basic  form  of the world is a nonsensical goal. Scripture is clear that this is something that happened in one sense with the death and resurrection and Christ, and in the full sense will happen only when Christ returns. Until the latter happens the only  form  the human heart, human communities, or indeed the world will manifest is the mal formations caused by Sin.  The calling of the Church is  not  to ...

The problem with staking a claim is that in the end you are staked to that claim. Perhaps the greatest characteristic of the age we live in is the primacy of doubt and the admission of limits to knowledge as the key markers of credibility. Nowhere is this more marked that in the intellectual enterprise called science, which is built on questioning every assertion, seeking evidence, and always assuming that knowledge is incomplete. Nowhere is this less evident than in theology, which seems to be based not on theories but on doctrines, not on the expansion of knowledge but on defending doctrinal borders. In our time this is most evident in Christian evangelical theology, which has confidently advanced doctrines of human personhood, and the origin, purpose, and end of the natural order with no basis other than shifting interpretations of supposedly inerrant scripture.  The result has been what would be, if dogmaticians were capable of embarrassment, a series of embarrassing drawbacks ...

It seems to me that a major characteristic of American Christianity has been its aggressiveness, it love of conflict. This is  true of the Evangelical tradition in what became the battleground where the Evangelical empire of the Spirit has fought the empire of Science. The central complaint since the birth cries of evangelicalism first broke into the world has been that liberalism in the tradition of Schleiermacher gave away too much in satisfying the demands of the cultured despisers of religion. He, and all the liberals that followed, surrendered too easily to the dominant culture. So from Barth’s  Dogmatics  through Newbigin's  The Foolishness of the Greeks,  the battle has been joined in a culture that revels in conflict and believes that truth most likely emerges in an adversarial encounter between competing claims. Not, by the way, that the predilection for conflict is found only among Evangelical Christians. It is simply the domain in which it is exercise...

“We hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues.” “There is neither Jew nor Gentile . .” Those present at Pentecost were all Jews, and yet hearing their native languages at the Temple was clearly remarkable. It affirmed a real diversity, anticipated in prophecy, but obscured by the dominance of Hebrew as a unifying liturgical language. Paul’s letters dating from little more than a decade later attest to the diversity of the Christian community even as they seek to define a transcultural unity in Christ. But note the negative in the quote above from Galatians. Being one in Christ means giving up an identity, specifically a Jewish identity tied to being part of a people created by the Covenant at Sinai. The word Gentile (sometimes mistranslated as “Greek”) isn’t ethnic, it's simply a generic term for non-Jews. “Neither Gentile” doesn’t negate anything anybody cared about. “Neither Jew” does. Being Gentile wasn't intimately bound up in idolatry or immorality, the onl...