The Crossroads of Christianity and Culture

There is a ritual, a unifying sacrament in which every Christian, regardless of the limitations of their ability to understand and articulate the Christian experience of faith, can participate. It is a sacrament from the roots of Christian community; from the beginning the disciples of Christ ask one another who it was they were following. And it was ratified Jesus own question: "who do you say that I am." This sacrament of dialogue over the meaning of the shared experience of Christ was formally embedded in Christian life by the decision to hold a council at Jerusalem Council to discuss the grown of faith among the Gentiles (Acts 15). The apostolic dialogue became foundational to the creation of a Christian church for both Jews and Gentile.  Dialogue was further ratified as an essential element to Christian community when the Epistles were accepted as part of the canon of apostolic witness to Christ, for far from being a singular decisive statement of faith they are a record...

 Christians need community. We don't need a common mind. More to the point, we'll never have one. Like all humans we need the satisfaction (and even security) of having fellowship with others. In particular we are drawn together with those who share a common hope for the future. And this community is clearly what Christ intended to create - a fellowship, a new family, a new people whose lives centered on the Gospel as both the source and purpose of their lives together.  Over the long reach of history the greater Christian community has been difficult to achieve and maintain, and in the last half century has become incredibly fragile. The same is true of individual communities. The major practical source of Christian unity no longer exists. There is no longer a shared culture within a single geographical region encompassing the entirety of human reality as known by most Christians. And the source of unity found in shared creeds and ritual was always bounded by such a culture r...

We just don't agree on how to articulate the gospel in contemporary culture. Because we live in  different cultures.  The classic UM Good News/traditionalist complaint about United Methodists in the liberal/progressive tradition is that our theology has inevitably made us universalists, and that we therefore have no interest in evangelism. There are many missing links in this reasoning. Theological liberalism doesn't imply universalism for example. But the key problem is that this assertion fails to recognize that the liberal theological tradition is in fundamentally evangelistic.  Schleiermacher's  Speeches on Religion to its Cultured Despisers, the root work of theological liberalism   is intended to be evangelistic and apologetic. It seeks to render the Gospel both comprehensible and credible in the context of the emerging 18th century  Enlightenment culture. It is no different in this regard than Augustine's  City of God  or Anselm's...