The Crossroads of Christianity and Culture

 At this point in US history every single Christian ministry and church is an experiment. Some, by virtue of having existed for centuries, appear successful - but it is notable that none have yet been seriously tested by our emerging social environment. And some of these experiments are already failing. We have seen how the mighty fall.  The experimental nature of ministry fundamentally changes the institution of pastoral ministry. For centuries pastors have been at the center of stable institutions that were a stabilizing influence in society. And many pastors today, and their churches, imagine that they are a kind of safe harbor for those who sail on a storm-tossed sea. But it is pretty obvious that the bulwarks of the church are not strong enough or high enough to keep the tempest out, and in any case maintaining them is an arduous and ultimately futile task. It is worthwhile visiting Caesarea Maritima in Israel to see what happens to even the greatest of human-built harbor...

I have  substantively  revised this post because in its original form it was offensive and hurtful to many people. I apologize and also request that it not be reprinted or posted in the original form.  Traditionalist Christianity was not be fundamentalist, because evangelicals had recognized that fundamentalism was really part of the modern project. Instead, this emerging Christianity would be built on the witness of Scripture read within the authority of the Church and its ongoing life animated by Christ's Spirit. To call it fundamentalism is slanderous.  Like early Christianity the old/new Christianity would create its own world of discourse, its own distinctive culture and worldview. It would neither necessarily reject or affirm the insights into reality of other cultures and worldviews, (or for that matter science) but would judge them by its own knowledge and means of knowing.  Evangelicals, particularly British evangelicals, had been engaged in this p...

There is  a longstanding concern of traditionalist United Methodists who believe that the church had lost its focus on the necessity of doctrine to maintain communion with the "church catholic" and provide the essential basis for church unity. Without doctrine the church supposedly succumbs to lawlessness, anarchy, emotionalism, activism, and even apostasy.  But d octrine as a unifying and stabilizing force in Christian life is an artifact of a particular succession of cultural settings that dominate Christianity in the West, but it was not central to the earliest Christians nor is it necessarily to their successors in other cultures.   The best way to see the extent to which doctrine is culturally located is to examine Christianity's close relative, Judaism. In Judaism we find a religion in which ethnic identity and conformity to Torah, and perhaps not even the latter, is all that is essential to unity across space and time. Reformed Judaism finds its unity with both tra...

 For liberal arts colleges and universities to survive in the future they must learn how to understand the value for students of what they offer, and how to appropriately match cost to value. Simply speaking of the value of a "liberal arts education," or even the value of particular majors and even classes isn't adequate. A modern liberal arts university offers at least six discreet kinds of value to its students: The value of the campus experience; being resident on campus or near campus and experiencing all the kinds of interactions to campus has  available. The formation of new social networks through all the varied campus activities, including but not limited to participation in classes. The classroom experience, whether face to face or digitally mediated. The acquisition of skills and knowledge in class. Affirmation of intelligence and skill in the form of grades. A credential  that is socially recognized, brings prestige, and is a pathway to employment.  Most l...

This past Sunday (Halloween) I gave Sunday school Lesson on the famous hymn, "there is a fountain filled with blood." You know it. "that flows from Emmanuel's veins. And sinners washed beneath the flood lose all their guilty stains."  It took about 45 minutes to unpack how these two lines are actually a mashup of dozens of scripture passages linked by the words "blood" and "fountain." On the positive side it is a poetic expression of a number of inter-related themes running from Genesis 4 to Revelation 7. On the other hand, taken at face value is nasty and barbaric. Or just irrelevant. What is most interesting about the hymn is its mashup quality. The formal basis for this is the idea that the canon, scripture as a whole, is a network of ideas linked not by chronology, but by the theological concepts invented, or recognized, or discovered (as you will) by the Christian church as it lived out its witness to Jesus.  Probably the opposite of thi...