The Crossroads of Christianity and Culture

“Cultural relativism!” “You are saying that blowing up babies and raping children is okay because they have a different culture!” Well of course not, but I’m used to these leaps of illogic from Christians who have been saturated with a toxic mixture of slippery slope theology and breast thumping patriotism found in so much contemporary American Christianity. It goes right back to our revivalist roots in an era of manifest destiny. The accusation came yet again from a well-meaning Christian upset that I’d tried to explain that people in the Palestinian Territories operated out of different motivations and therefore exhibited different behaviors than those in the United States. And it isn’t just islamophobic conservatives. I’ve been taken to task for promoting  patriarchy when I pointed out that not all cultures  evaluate gender, sexuality, and sexual relationships according to contemporary American standards. They don’t all share the fascinating mixture of prudish Victorian sex...

On Highway 45 as you drive into Dallas there is a large billboard with a homey nativity scene. It says “Just Skip Church, Its all Fake News.” It was put up by the American Atheist Association, whose leader says “We all know what you hear in church isn’t true.” Now I’d love to take him on in a debate, but I fear he has a point. Christians seem to be falling out of the habit of seeking the truth. It starts small; a sermon illustration either manufactured for the occasion or borrowed from another source. At one time pastors could buy books of such stories, or get them in newsletters. Now they come straight off the Facebook feed or an email chain. The characters have made-up names and there is no date or specific place mentioned. After all why bother: Its the punchline, the point of the story, that matters. Except its not. Our congregations are already too credulous - believing all kinds of crazy non-truths, half-truths, distorted statistics, and outright lies. In an age when virtually eve...

In which we discuss the new tax policy. Early morning after the big Boxing Day open house. Place looks pretty good for having had nearly 50 guests. In part because the relatives staying with us helped the cleanup. We had a couple of "real" scientists as guests, by which I mean particle physicists (dark matter and the Higgs boson respectively). And visiting with them got me to thinking about economics. You see, economics is "a social science concerned chiefly with description and analysis of the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services." This dictionary definition doesn't make explicit something that should be better understood by theologians. It is a social science . The first tells you that its field of study is humans in society. The second tells you that it studies actual behavior, not how people should behave. This distinction first became clear to me in the 80’s when I was studying Islam. Islamic Universities were being built to promu...

In their appeals to the 8th century prophets Christian activists become complicit our national delusion. Ever since I was a youth, social activist Christians have made the 8th century prophets their go-to option when it comes to condemning American injustice, or indeed any injustice. But I wonder if this perpetuates an American Christian self-image that can itself become a source of injustice. Let’s consider the context of the 8th century. Back then Israel was a nation formed by a covenant between the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and God at Sinai. As a nation it was struggling to understand why its God, about whom it made exorbitant claims of universality, was allowing it to pass through a series of internal divisions and external assaults on its integrity and freedom. The answer of the 8th century prophets was, in essence, that it had failed to keep its side of the covenant with God. It had failed the essential demand of God to do justice and maintain righteousness. At fir...

"History ended at Chalcedon.” These were the words of a Coptic Orthodox priest whose PowerPoint presentation on his church had come to an abrupt but timely end. Because I thought I’d need to cut him off so that our tour group could move on to lunch. He was serious. As far as he was concerned the driving forces of church history were resolved when heresy was finally and fully defined and vanquished by the creeds. As importantly the order of the church set forth by God was fully established. After that all that remained was a faithful reiteration of what had come before. From a comparative standpoint his was exactly the same position held by the Salafi movements in Islam that seek a recovery of and return to the time of the “rightly guided” caliphs. And you hear echoes of this in contemporary Protestant movements. A sure sign is when they see the ordination of women not as a result of progress but as an act of recovery of the practice of the early church. Hindus (think of the modern...

You can only sail to apparent wind, not the real wind. This is one of the hardest things to teach about sailing. As the boat moves, the wind that affects the sail changes. And, although the effect is less, so do the currents flowing past the rudder. Let's say the real wind is directly from north to south at 10 knots speed. A sailboat can't sail directly into the wind, but most boats can easily sail at a 45 degree angle to the wind. So we set our sail and as the wind flows over it we begin to move northeast, maybe at 5 knots "over ground" meaning over an imaginary fixed surface. So just as you feel a breeze if you run or ride a bike on a still day, the moving boat feels a breeze coming from the northeast at 5 knots in addition to the wind from the north at 10 knots. Combined they act like a single breeze of nearly 14 knots from the north-northeast. And it is this wind for which the sailor must trim the sail and set the rudder. The real wind no longer matters except as ...

There has been plenty of discussion in United Methodist circles about the authority of the Bible, with Adam Hamilton’s “Three buckets” explanation of how the Bible applies to the issue of marriage and ordination of LGBTQ persons grabbing center stage. ( http://www.adamhamilton.org/blog/homosexuality-the-bible-and-the-united-methodist-church/#.Widl4LbMyEI ) While Hamilton is a gifted communicator and leader I think he’s got the wrong analogy for explaining how scripture functions as an authority for the church. Adams’ problem, shared with his opponents, is they inderstand the Bible within a modern epistemological framework that sees truth emerging as humans analyze data and place it into theoretical frameworks that are constantly being revised from other data.  In short the Bible is understood, at least in terms of its authority for theology, as a source of information. And like all such sources it must be evaluated to determine its applicability to the problem being solved, it’s re...