The Crossroads of Christianity and Culture

For the last couple of weeks my wife and I have been in Vienna. Every day we take the 57A bus from our AirB&B at one end of the line (Amschutzgasse) to our daughter’s apartment 3/4ths of the way to the city center. (Burgring)  As we travel in we pass a lot of what makes Vienna a European city. Both sides of the street are a solid wall of 4 and 5 story apartment buildings with shops on the ground floor. The majority were built 100 years ago when the city entered a phase of rapid expansion. But closer in you see the odd two story building from the early 19th or late 18th century. Sometimes a new building jumps out, almost always the replacement of one hit by a bomb in WWII.  Where we are staying could be called an immigrant district, with close to a majority being Turkish, followed by Serbs, Koreans, Arabs, and Chinese. When we lived here (a few blocks from where we stay now) I used to joke that German was our common language and none of us spoke it well. That’s less true now, as the

A Sermon Yesterday we took our granddaughters to church. At ages 3 and 5 they weren’t exactly attentive to the service of lessons and carols. Maybe today on the Christmas Eve they will be more engaged in the worship. But I think that baby Jesus aside (and he’s omnipresent here in Vienna, along with his mother Mary) the focus for them is the possibility of endless chocolate and hidden gifts.  Which is as it should be. For children birth is a mystery not far in the past, and worthy of contemplation. We show them old pictures on the computer and explain that this is when they were in their mommy’s tummy, or when their mommy was in Nana’s tummy. The old pregnancy photos are good for establishing a chronology for the girls. They can see there is something hidden in the tummy.  And what can birth mean for them about the future? We’re still explaining that Christmas will come when they sleep one more time. They understand the span of 5 years past because they see it in their friends from the

I’m in a studio apartment in the 15th district of Vienna. This is near the old home for me, a place I was in ministry for 7 years more than a decade ago. And a place I’m back to a couple of times a year. Where cultural differences once again leap out - particularly in regard to concepts of freedom. From an American perspective Austrians lack some essential freedoms. You cannot, for example, own a gun or even buy ammunition without a license and a good deal of vetting. You can’t hunt on your own land without a game warden to tell you which animal to shoot. And fishing? You need a license for the country and one for each stream or lake. Which you can’t just buy. You have to take a course that costs nearly $1,000. How about freedom from “search and seizure?” Well here the police can go through your car to make sure you have the mandatory safety equipment with or without a warrant.  Overall the Austrians don’t particularly value freedom  from  the intrusion of the government. At some level

The UMC has become two different churches bound by a single, inadequate, Discipline.  We have fundamentally different understandings of the purpose of theology (and not just its content) and fundamentally different ecclesiologies (and not just practices of ministry.) Those of us who teach theology students to  think critically  often forget that the modern concept of critical thinking arose for the purpose of political independence. The early modern and Enlightenment political philosophers believed that people would have to think for themselves if they were to be independent political actors. For this reason the ability to think critically was meaningless unless it was coupled with the ability to act independently.  That would require a change in the political systems of the day because this freedom to act independently was meaningless unless the actor could remain free within the nation/state. The mere freedom to be jailed, or to be exiled for one’s views, is no freedom at all. So the

Occurred on the day we celebrate as Christmas. On that day God revealed to us that we do not in fact travel a path from ashes to ashes, dust to dust, but from eternal life to eternal life. In his book  The Anticipatory Corpse  Jeffrey Bishop (MD PhD) offers a brilliant history and analysis of how modern medicine, and modern society, came to understand the human person as a living machine that began dead and inevitably becomes dead. Medical science, and indeed science generally, is bounded on what Marcelo Gleiser (physicist and philosopher of science) calls  The Island of Knowledge,  an island that can neither see transcendence nor grasp life as anything more than a self-reproducing machine.  In the eyes of science the human body is a wonderful machine to be sure; one whose fantastic origins through a combination of matter, energy, chance, and natural law are fascinating. And the way it creates the human person who inhabits it is equally wonderful if still not understood process. But  v

I’ll  offer a prediction. The upcoming split in the UMC over same-sex marriage and ordination will be the first of many to follow.  What has drawn and held the UMC together for the last 150 years hasn’t been doctrinal unity, but the mutual advantages of growing social power for Christian witness. Now UM social influence is waning to the point that groups within the UMC see internal cohesion and external alliances as more advantageous than the current UM unity; unity that has little to commend itself to either the most ideologically committed or the most individually powerful.  For the WCA and related United Methodists an alignment with conservative Christians in a broader evangelical coalition gives far more direct access to political and social influence than continued association with a socially liberal and politically impotent UMC. And a close alliance with African United Methodists insures the appearance of vitality and relevance on a global scale.  Meanwhile progressive United Met

Often a lot of theology seems to me to be basically angels on the head of a pin stuff - an effort at self-justification by an academic elite (of which I'm part) barely interested in serving the church. Why not just keep it simple?  And then suddenly I remember really clear-cut, simple, theological ideas that are an absolute disaster.  Let’s take what I was taught growing up in an evangelical milieu: Every soul  has infinite worth, and every soul is utterly sinful in relation to God’s infinite holiness and thus faces God’s infinite wrath. Pretty simple.  This idea was used in my church to justify vast expenditures of energy and time “to save one soul.” In particular our pastor and choir director, having hauled 45 young people cross country in a couple of busses, would assure us before we kicked into the first strains of a Kurt Kaiser musical number that “it is all worth it if one person is saved.”  I confess that at age 16 I was less concerned for the souls of the invisible people h