The Crossroads of Christianity and Culture

I was a young skeptic in 1978 when I took Charles Hartshorn’s Philosophical Theology course at UT. And he turned me into a believer. He demonstrated, at least to my satisfaction, that the concept of God was credible. One could believe in God and still fully embrace a then contemporary understanding of reality. Given that assurance I was happy to go on theology school and join the ranks of the clergy. After all, the church had treated me well and respected my skepticism. The story of the Bible rang true in every important respect; not in the sense of historically verifiable (I was a history major and knew how difficult that was). True with respect to the fact that the claim that Jesus was the Christ now made sense as a claim about the trinitarian nature of a credible God intimately connected to the natural and human world: more sense than either polytheistic or strictly unitarian claims. Relieved of my nagging doubts about God’s existence I could fully embrace ministry.  There was j...

It amazes me that Christians call upon and imitate Israel’s prophetic tradition in the pursuit of social justice and reform. Because the most outstanding characteristic of Israel’s prophets is that they were failures at creating social justice and reform. Despite centuries (particularly the 8th century) of their witness before kings and commoners the nation of Israel ended in failure and exile. And when I say failure I mean that God’s experiment begun at Sinai came to an unsuccessful end and was never revived. The years from the Macabees through the Herods and ending with the Bar Khokba revolt ended up being the nails in the coffin. Yet they did spawn something unexpected, brilliant, and new from God’s hand: The Talmud and Rabbinic Judaism. As Christians we might call that a resurrection, albeit in a very different kind of body. But we have our own resurrection from out of the ruins of Israel to attend to, and we and the Jews must somehow learn to value one another as co-creations of t...

My church, the United Methodist Church, but perhaps more generally American Christians, have been playing anxiety whack’a-mole for many decades now. I was out of the country for a couple of decades, but from what I can see the moles that have popped up in our Christian arcade are: LGBTQ inclusion, Biblical Authority, preserving the orthodox faith, adhering to church law, changing worship styles, mega-churches, millennials, the church growth movement, and many others. These are real issues and challenges. They simply aren’t the real source of our very palpable anxiety. They pop up and dare us to whack them down, but when and if we do that anxiety simply pops up somewhere else. And we haven’t really addressed them either. Seeing this I see a classic problem describe by family systems analysis: Free floating anxiety that settles out on different people and issues. These then become the third corner of a triangle and excuse those who are anxious about their relationship from addressing the...

By far the least interesting characters in the Star Wars sagas are the emperors. With men totally committed to the possession of power there is no place for character development. You know they will never be good or do good, so the only question is whether they can be tricked and thus defeated. Their capacity for strategic thinking rather than moral reasoning is all that is at stake. Obi Wan and Yoda aren’t much better. They aren’t perfect, but they seem to be perfectly good, so again the plot for them doesn’t turn on character development but on whether and how they might make a mistake.  The real characters in these films, and indeed in all films worth watching and stories worth telling, are those who must make real choices about who they are in the midst of a definitive crisis. That is where the real battles are fought: in the complexities of the human person who is neither good nor evil, but is drawn in different directions by the complex variety of competing goods.  A fil...

The unique value of revelation isn’t primarily what it tells us about God. After all, as Paul says and the human study of multiple cultures affirms (Romans 1:20), " For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.”  We can know and speak of God without revelation . Pragmatically this means we Christians don’t have much to offer to the philosophy department when it comes to God. Natural theology or philosophical theology can achieve their goals without us.   Nor is revelation primarily about human beings. The human stories in the Bible are wonderful and dramatic, but they are all ultimately variations of human stories found in many cultures and many books. The Bible frequently attains the status of classic human literature, the more so when it isn’t being mined for moral points. But there are other classics and if the humanit...

The last post outlined one major reason that academics are biased - they remain true to the methods necessary to attain the goal of understanding reality. But that is only part of the story. Another part, and a source of considerable misunderstanding even in academia, is that in the 20th century both the emerging social sciences and the established physical sciences became politicized . This doesn’t mean that they became partisan. Rather scientists recognized that maintaining a stance of neutral objectivity toward the subject of their research and its effects was fundamentally immoral.  Bear in mind that the vast advances in chemistry and physics of the late nineteenth and early 20th century were almost immediately weaponized in two world wars. No scientist could escape the moral dilemmas posed by having their work used for the  destruction of human life on hitherto unimaginable scales - even if the ultimate goal was victory over tyranny or the defense of other human lives....

Of course they, just as pastors are biased, corporate leaders are biased, union organizers are biased and you, dear readers are biased. Any person or organization that is engaged in purposeful activity is biased, because purpose  demands bias. It demands focusing on some things and ignoring or even putting aside other things. A football player or a basketball player who is trying to win is biased against the views of sportswriters, fans in the stands, and possibly even his or her fellow teammates if they discourage him from staying focused on winning. And what about the classroom? Well when I teach about cross-cultural communication in a MA seminar I’m biased against viewpoints that deny the existence of cultural difference or maintain naive views of language. A class focused on preparing leaders for complex cultural organizations isn’t going to waste its time on freshmen linguistics. Or, to use another example, a class on wastewater management engineering isn’t a likely place to r...