The Crossroads of Christianity and Culture

Many people are unaware that almost all wine producing grapes are produced from vines grafted to a root stock originating in the United States, originally from Texas. Now there is an entire science of matching root stocks that survive well in different climates with the types of vine that can produce grapes in those same climates. But there is more to wine than root and vine. The soil, air, and variations in temperature and altitude make a difference. They are what is known as terroir; all the environmental factors that affect the final flavor of the grape and thus wine.  But it isn't just grape wine that depends on roots, vines, and terroir. The wine of the gospel likewise depends on these things, and indeed requires new wine skins if it is to come of age.   When I first arrived in Malaysia in 1985 I was almost immediately challenged by my students with a question: Do you have to move  through  modernity to arrive at a contemporary theological perspective? Is the in...

Three years ago I bought my granddaughters a new game called Turing Tumble ( https://upperstory.com/turingtumble .) In it blue or red metal marbles fall through a succession of plastic "gates" and end up on either the left or right side of the game board at the bottom. These gates can move a marble from one side to the other side, they can change so that sometimes they move a marble from left to right and sometimes right to left, they can stop a marble from falling, or mimic the basic logic gates in a computer.  These gates are: AND, OR, XOR, NOT, NAND, NOR, XNOR, ( https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/logic-gate-AND-OR-XOR-NOT-NAND-NOR-and-XNOR ) All of these gates receive an electrical signal to either one or two electrical inputs and have a single output signal. Together, along with a master clock that synchronizes the signals going into the gates they constitute the entirety of even the most complex of all contemporary computers.  Put another way, all modern compu...

How do we experience our own humanity in contemporary cultural contexts? The answers are contextual and therefore they are varied, but there are themes that emerge. It is no longer comprehensible for rising generations to imagine being human apart from our interconnectedness with all of creation; from entangled life of fungi and plants to the ecosystems that we depend on for food and nurture, to the rapidly changing climate that threats the entirety of earthly life. What was once a perspective associated with primal cultures is now both available to, and demanded of all cultures.  A theological anthropology that privileges humans in its understanding of soteriology, that cannot comprehend in a new way that all creation groans for the revealing of the children of God, has become  worthless.  It has nothing meaningful to say to contemporary humans whose lives are intimately entangled with all living creatures and immediately threatened by global warming.  It is no long...

The greatest challenge facing Christian theological education today is the growing irrelevance of the common theological anthropology based in a claim to know human nature without reference to either cultural context or human experience. Typically these are claims around the universality of sin, the universality of salvation, and thus the universal end of humanity in either God's Reign or eternal perdition.    On the surface such universal claims about human nature appear to rise naturally from the Biblical witness, which begins with a description of the creation and "fall" of humanity and ends with a description of the New Jerusalem into which redeemed humanity flows. Yet the Bible itself bears witness that it's accounts of human nature arise as products of contextualization. In the Bible God's revelation comes to specific people and peoples in specific circumstances for specific purposes.  While it speaks to the universality of God's  providence,  the Bible ...

Of human life, as the Bible makes clear.  I was sitting in the bar of the hotel overlooking the park somewhere in the UK. The sun had come out and I escaped the darkened conference room that was my supposed  raison d'etre  for having crossed the Atlantic. I was instead pursuing my  raison d'etre  for being a living human person: making connections with my fellow humans.  As I engaged the barkeep I learned that he was born in Borneo, a place I know pretty well. We talked about the food specialties of his dialect group and the difficulties he had getting the ingredients in the UK. He wanted his husband to experience this food, but couldn't really take him back home. A dilemma for many a migrant seeking a place where they can live out their full humanity.  Now you may have already choked on my assertion above that the reason for being human is to make connections with my fellow humans. Surely as a good Christian I should have asserted that the purpose of ...