The Crossroads of Christianity and Culture

The miracle of incarnation is in its particularity. God is most exalted when we recognize and preach the real depth to which the God humbled God’s self: just to save a single world of the countless worlds in the domain of the Divine.  By contrast our efforts to exalt the event of Jesus' birth to universal significance reveals how diminutive our Christian concept of God really is: the tribal deity of a single species imprisoned by its puerile imperial claims. The authors of scripture had no concept of the cosmos as we know it, and clearly saw the incarnation as a human event in human history for the salvation of humankind. Only when we recognize this can we realize what it means to worship a Transcendent God whose love is so great that he takes human form and suffers death on the cross to save just a microscopic portion of the uncountable creatures in God's boundless creation. And only when we recognize this can we preach a credible gospel to humans whose self-understanding is s...

Ἐγὼ γὰρ παρέλαβον ἀπὸ τοῦ κυρίου, ὃ καὶ παρέδωκα ὑμῖν, . . . Παρέδωκα γὰρ ὑμῖν ἐν πρώτοις, ὃ καὶ παρέλαβον, . . . (from I Corinthians) I'll be honest, I could be very happy in a very conventional church. I still remember weeping when, after more than 9 years abroad, I heard "For all the Saints" sung with the huge congregation, massed choir, and rich pipe organ at first church. This was my tradition. These were my people. After years of worshipping daily and weekly in other languages, in rented rooms, in re-worked theaters, I was home. The rest had been exciting, challenging, bracing, and growth inducing. But it wasn't home.  That was 1991. I went back to Asia and then Europe before returning to the US again in 2004. And I realized that no click of the red slippers or intercontinental flight was going to take me back to that home now. First church was still there of course. Ranks of clergy in impressive robes and stoles, the massed choir, the organ, the hymns. But the ...