The Crossroads of Christianity and Culture

Doctrine is the shadow cast by the light of Christ as it falls across a culture. It is an indicator but not a manifestation of the nature of that light. I was confirmed as a member of the Methodist Church in 5th grade. My instruction came from an old fashioned fire breathing Texas pastor amd I confess I remember little of the doctrinal content. I said my vows at age 10 and became a full member of the Methodist Church. If It had been 30 years earlier there would not have been a confirmation class at all - just stand up at the revival like my parents had and give your life to Jesus. That was the normal process of catechism until the middle of the 20th century.   Less than 20 years after being confirmed I was examined by the North Texas Annual Conference BOM and went on to become a pastor in the now United Methodist Church. I don't recall the much about the process, but satisfying the BOM with regard to the orthodoxy of beliefs was far easier than satisfying Schubert Ogden and John De...

A couple of three years ago at a conference I was sitting at lunch with a group of scholars, missiologists I respect. They were generally more conservative than I am, and so when the topic of same-sex marriage came up I decided to be more an observer than participant.  Speaking of his church members, one said, “they don’t want to live in a world where men marry men.”  And they all nodded. These scholars speak other languages fluently. They have lived years in other cultural settings. They read the Bible and are dedicated to following Jesus. They teach students of many races and many have married into other cultures and ethnicities. They are themselves Latino and African American and  Asian as well as White American, men and women. They cannot be easily dismissed as bigots.  But they can be located in a global evangelical meta-culture which, to cite Clifford Geertz, creates a structuring of human experience that, being perceived of as uniquely real, offers a deep sen...

Is marriage between a man and a woman an essential part of God’s Reign, and thus Christian witness to Jesus Christ as Lord of that Reign?  The most distinctly Christian understanding of marriage comes from Jesus' declaration that, "But those who are considered worthy of taking part in the age to come and in the resurrection from the dead will neither marry nor be given in marriage. "  (Luke 20:35)  In the eschatological dimension marriage simply isn't a thing. Marriage is bound to the times and spaces of the current human ordering of creation. The teachers of the law want to show the foolishness of believing in the resurrection. Jesus shows them the folly of taking the things of this world and projecting them into the next.  This explains why Jesus speaks of marriage and divorce only in terms of their inner, relational meaning. These are the principled aspects of human relationships related to God's Reign. The foundations of God‘s reign as taught by Jesus Christ...

The United Methodist church has, over several decades now, spent an excessive amount of time and energy in conflicts over marriage. We need to drop it and move on to witnesses to Jesus Christ and carrying out the ministry of Christ. Part 1 Christians have traditionally believed that God has created an orderly natural world and desires orderly human relationships as well. But does God mandate a particular social order? Too often Christians confuse their human task of ordering the social world with the Divine provision of the principles on which such a human ordering of the social world can take place. But what about the nuclear family consisting of a man and a woman? Is that not a foundational ordering of the social world by God? No. Normal isn't normative. Scripture tells us that the original family consisted of a male and a female, each drawn from the same primal human. "Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion ...

After the umpteenth political attack ad interrupted the World Series I decided to take a long walk. The air was cool and still, the night sky bright with a waxing moon. And I thought about anxiety.  Family systems theory tells us that a system of relationships can be overwhelmed by free-floating anxiety. Such anxiety almost always arises out of unpredicted and unwanted change in the system. But because such change is complex, it is difficult if not impossible to pinpoint why it is happening. Thus the anxiety floats freely through the consciousness of those who are part of the system.  The way in which those who are part of the system deal with this free floating anxiety is to try and pin it down. Specifically we anxious people, say the American people, try to place the blame for our anxiety on someone or something. The its not free-floating and we think we can deal with it. So we blame the markets, the immigrants, the terrorists, the Muslims, the Christians, or the Jews. But b...