The Crossroads of Christianity and Culture

The central message of the gospel is that God incarnate in Jesus Christ makes possible the restoration of our humanity. How that message is received, understood, and articulated within each culture will depend upon that culture’s understanding of what it means to be human. While the understanding of what it means to be human may be placed in religious context, understanding a culture’s anthropology as more important that understandings its theology for communicating the gospel message.  As importantly, it is in the anthropology of a culture that we will find God revealing God’s self within the culture. In the order of creation narrated in scripture God reveals to the first humans the natural order that includes themselves, their relation to that order, and their relationship to one another before God reveals God's own nature. Natural revelation, both in relation to the non-human and social orders precedes the special revelation by which God reveals specifically what it means to be...

United Methodist theological schools have traditionally worked within a cultural system that assumed the value, and indeed necessity, of institutional engagement with the larger society both as a form of institutional responsibility and as a critical part of the pedagogy of preparing people for ministry in a socially engaged church. While this commitment remains unchanging, the modes of engagement must change in response to the changing cultural environments in which schools find themselves as well as the changing cultures within the churches their students will serve.  As I suggested in the previous post, this first requires using the concept of culture as a key framework for analyzing the social situation in which a school finds itself. This doesn't displace other frameworks for social analysis, but it can help identify how to most effectively proclaim the gospel in its social context. After all, it is primarily culture that determines how societies understand themselves and adap...

In an earlier blog I spoke of how the paradigm for higher education was shifting from "school" to "LMS," from place to system. One way to explore this change is to use various forms of systems theory that capture the complexity and dynamism characteristic of the larger cultural environment.  One such approach is to understand the theological school as a cultural system in the midst of other cultural systems that make up its larger environment. This allows us to bring both methods of cultural analysis and cultural intelligence to bear on understanding and relating to these systems. And in considering the school itself as a culture system we also gain new means of understanding the dynamism of its relationships with these systems and use new analytical tools to address its inevitably internal frictions. This is particularly important in the 21st century if we are to avoid adopting static solutions to dynamic challenges. I'll offer one example as a beginning for fu...

Culture The apparently inevitable separation of the WCA from the United Methodist Church seems entirely appropriate. The Wesley Covenant Association is arguably Wesleyan. It is probably not United Methodist. The distinction between Wesleyans and United Methodists was formed by over 200 years of cultural changes in the United States. These changes led Methodists and then United Methodists to adopt an understanding of the ordering of the church which has a different cultural basis than the ordering of the church by Wesley and his early pastors.  John Wesley's movement consisted of a group of like-minded pastors who were accountable to one another and no one else but God. They served and were supported by like-minded laypersons who understood themselves to be part of disciplined movement for revival.  Over a period of 200 years in the United States this changed. First, membership in the Methodist church became far more open. The laity were no longer a disciplined movement. Inste...