The Crossroads of Christianity and Culture

In the ongoing debates about the safety of opening universities a lot of focus has been on the necessity in some fields of having laboratories. As a result many schools and education experts have sought to distinguish between students who need to live on campus where they have access to labs, and students who can as easily “learn online.”  This is a false distinction that demonstrates how little some people (not least some faculty and administrators) understand what a private liberal arts university really is.  We are not vocational schools, whether at the undergraduate or graduate level. We don’t hand out knowledge and skills, test on them, and then hand out certificates so new workers can enter some professional world. There are plenty of universities that do this and many are already online.  The liberal arts university only produces skilled workers as a byproduct. Its real job is to prepare men and women  to be leaders,  in their professions to be sure, but ...

More than 2000 years ago in China there lived political philosopher named Han Fei Zi.  His work gave rise to a school of Chinese political thought called legalism.   The idea was quite simple. If the laws are clear enough and the punishments harsh enough everybody will behave and order will ensue.   The classic legalist story has the philosopher leading a young disciple to the edge of a cliff. It was clear that to step over the cliff would lead to certain death.  And so the emperor asks his young disciple whether an animal ever stepped over the side of the cliff?  Had a child or an insane person ever stepped over the side of the cliff, or even approached it?  When the young disciples answered “no“ the philosopher had made his point. This philosophy actually fit nicely with the earlier Confucian ideal of the "rectification of names." In an ideal society the title of an official, or even the name of a profession, indicates exactly what the person does. No one...

It is past time to completely rethink Christian theological education; starting from the most basic principle that it is to serve the mission of the Christian church. I have been involved in theological education continuously since I was student in the late 1970's. Most of my teaching has been outside the US, but while the schools in Asia and Eastern Europe in which I taught were more conscious of contextualization and cultural diversity than is typical in the US, they still fell under the long shadow of Western European and US models of theological education. That tradition, in its context, had much to offer the church. But the context in which Western models of theological education were formed is gone, and those models must go as well.  Hence an outline of the kind of reflection we need: The sole purpose of the church is the evangelization of the world. It is  to witness to the truth of God’s love as revealed in Jesus Christ so that all humans and human societies may accep...

The job of government is, in large part, to restrain personal behavior for the good of the larger society. Indeed that is why we have government: it is to: " establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty . .  .” Thus we have the thousands and thousands of laws that impose everything from speed limits to restaurant cleanliness standards. And that’s why we have law enforcement to make sure people follow those laws.  We know, as the founders of this country knew, that you cannot leave public safety up to a sense of personal  responsibility, although having a sense of personal responsibility for the welfare of others is also important because there isn’t enough law enforcement in the world for a nation of selfish antinomians.  While Texas Governor Abbott no doubt recognizes this,  he also believes that if people’s behavior is restrained then they will no...

In recent Christian  discourse a clear theological divide has emerged. On one side are those who assert that the social order  is fundamentally structured by God or God’s law. On the other side are those who assert that humans are responsible creating social structures that express divinely revealed principles of love and justice.  The first of these assertions is older in Christian history. Until the Enlightenment, Christians believed that almost their entire social order was based on divine mandate. To deny the divine right of kings was both heresy  and  treason. Romans 13:1-7 seems to confirm this.  However, some 300 or more years ago a new consensus emerged in Europe that the people  were the divinely appointed ruling authorities. Political systems began to emerge that recognized their right to rule themselves. As a result Christians have slowly and often grudgingly surrendered claim after claim that some aspect of the social order is based on a di...

Part 1 The concept of civil society in the West begins in Greece and Rome over 2000 years ago. But it really takes on meaning in the Enlightenment as political philosophers try to reimagine how a society can be organized.  They recognize that businesses in general, whether in the form of guilds or emerging corporations and companies, represent one aspect of every society. They recognize that government, meaning kings and associated parliaments, nobles and etc were another aspect of every society.  But what about everyone else? At one time the church had been considered a third critical part of society, but in England and later the US the church was officially “disestablished.” For practical purposes it dis-integrated into competing sects. Religion was theoretically moved to the realm of private belief rather than being a public institution.  Civil society  then becomes the name for all those individuals and organizations in a democratic society whose political b...

I think it worth noting that our attitudes toward others are more shaped by our habitual actions than our actions are determined by our attitudes. We can conform our behavior to personal and social standards regardless of our attitudes. And as we do our attitudes will change, shaped to conform to the social and personal habits we are creating.  The great myth of the revivalist Christianity that shapes so much of American culture is that you need an emotional or intellectual conversion before you can be a better person and have a better society. In reality you/we just need to start behaving differently in a systematic fashion.   This is why opposition to standards of speech and behavior that are exclusionary, misogynist, racist, and etc. in the name of freedom actually supports the perpetuation of exclusion, racism, misogyny, and etc.  Long history demonstrates that a state which restricts by law self-expression becomes totalitarian and anti-human. Long history also shows ...