The Crossroads of Christianity and Culture

To the extent that the current leadership of the United Methodist Church was trained in American theological seminaries, then those of us in theological education must admit that we have failed.  We have failed to train leaders capable of engaging in fruitful dialogue across complex cultural and theological divides. Indeed their skill level appears to be just a little lower than that of our current US president and his North Korean counterpart.  I expect one reason for this is that while Enlightenment paradigms still dominate our construction of theological knowledge (objective, rational, historically conscious, and divided into theory and practice) we have actually lost touch with the most important shift in human consciousness of the Enlightenment. That shift was to recognize that knowing, while it may begin with the work of the individual mind, is inevitably social. It is democracy, not science, that is the greatest fruit of the Enlightenment. Indeed the bedrock of science ...

Inside my house everything looks great today. Everything is in order.  I have just thrown out all trash, rearranged the furniture and made it all just fine for me. Outside it is cold and wet and unpleasant. And full of such unpleasant people. It is a good day to stay inside. Of course living indoors all the time one has to make adjustments. Especially if it is a very old house. For example, the floors are not very level. So my furniture is propped up on newspapers or wooden blocks to keep it stable. There are cracks in the ceiling and the walls, so I have to constantly plaster them up or cover them with wall paper. The roof leaks, but this is easily enough cured with a bucket. Or two.  And why would I want to do anything else? Understanding the cause of these problems would require that I go outside into the rain and the cold. I’d have to go outside to see why the earth is shifting and my foundation is cracking. Did I mention the unpleasant people outside? Of course, sometimes...

You’ll like irrelevance even less.  The greatest challenge humanity will face in the next 50 years is a challenge that Christian theologians have barely begun to consider, and which Christian preaching appears to not address at all. That challenge will be the removal by artificial intelligence of many realms in which humans find unique self-worth.  The term “artificial intelligence” really says it all in this regard. Up to today Christians have understood that their unique value within the order of creation is precisely  intelligence . Traditionally the divine image in us, what sets us apart from the other creatures, is our intelligence. This neatly avoids anthropomorphizing God while setting us apart from the beasts. Indeed, when analytic philosophy is used as a means of apologetics it is through the assertion, simply put, that our minds are uniquely shaped to resonate with the existence of God and even the specifics of the Christian gospel.  Of course we make room ...

In a recent edition of Scientific American, Dec, 2018, there is an article on “how to fix science.” An important component of that article, which follows up on the work of Adam Frank and others, is the idea that  knowledge in the broadest sense must be public.  Descriptions of reality that are un-communicated and therefore untested by those outside the scientific community can hardly be taken seriously as knowledge. The scientific method, which demands results that can be reproduced by more than one investigator, must be expanded to include communicating  to  and testing those results  with  those outside the guild.  Scientific American  itself is part of this process as its authors seek to explain current scientific knowledge to the general public.  But it is only part, and that is what the article recognized. The real test of scientific knowledge isn’t that it can be communicated by professionals for comprehension by amateurs. The real test...

One of the courses I teach is a doctoral seminar about what it means to be human society. In this seminar we imagine conversations between people of different cultures and religions. We look for intersections and differences. And we look for ways that different thinkers may illuminate one another and expand our understanding. David Watson has given us an excellent opportunity to do that in a conversation about the authority of Scripture with his excellent short account of the understanding of the authority of scripture found among United Methodist traditionalists.  https://davidfwatson.me/2019/01/28/on-the-authority-of-scripture/ What might be enlightening is to put David Watson in conversation with Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther, also theologians interested in both tradition and authority In David Watson‘s understanding " The central revelation of our faith is the incarnate Word of God, Jesus Christ. And that central revelation is disclosed to us through two additional sources ...