The Crossroads of Christianity and Culture

In the last post I suggested that United Methodists, and indeed Christians generally are locked in conflict because they have at least two fundamentally different understandings of the structure of reality. Current dialogue is at an impasse because these understandings are totalizing: the claim of each to account for reality as a whole excludes the validity of other such understandings. In the light of such a claim dialogue isn't merely pointless, it is a dangerous retreat from upholding the truth - saving truth - before a misguided world.  The problem of dialogue between different understandings of reality isn't new, and came to be fully recognized in 20th century efforts at inter-religious dialogue. As such dialogue became more common the depth of the problem became clearer. In 1992 Schubert Ogden published his Is There One True Religion or Are There Many to address this problem. In 1995 Mark Heim published Salvations  addressing the same problem with a different approach. A...

In a recent article in UMInsight (https://um-insight.net/perspectives/love-and-the-christian-way-of-being-in-the-world/) Don Manning-Miller comments on the juxtaposition (by David Scott) of an article I wrote entitled "Moral Convictions - The Wrong Start in Human Relations" with one by Tom Lambrecht. (https://um-insight.net/perspectives/love-and-the-christian-way-of-being-in-the-world/.)  Manning-Miller posits the priority of an "ethic of love" over ethics, and then the need to exercise judgment with regard to those with whom we can have fellowship. Two short quotes are essential to his approach. " A line in a progressive prayer said, “Grant me the grace to learn to love the enemies I’ve had the integrity to make.”   And " The reality of those being hurt or oppressed must be the context of discernment and takes priority over tolerance and acceptance for their own sake."  Along with an ethic of love these two lines seem to encapsulate for Manning-Mille...

 In the Chinese tradition the burial of ancestors has a long term effects on their descendants. Elaborate grave sites are developed to insure that the remains of the deceased are properly located through “Fung Shui,” the art of necromancy, so that “chi” forces flowing around the decomposing corpse pool and flow onward to the benefit of future generations.  In some traditions when the body has decomposed the bones are put in ceramic jars and relocated on mountain tops to gain an even greater effect. In the case of families that have migrated to other countries the bones are actually removed from the grave and taken along to the new family home. In Malaysia I’ve seen the opened, and now abandoned tombs of the migrant dead myself.  In the past these traditions resulted, at least in the region around Hong Kong, in numerous lawsuits. Different branches of the same family claimed that the location and orientation of the bones was advantaging one side of the family and disadvant...

Who marks the boundaries between those who are in a church and outside it? And what do the boundary markers look like?  An incessant part of the ongoing conflict within not only the UMC, but virtually every US or US influenced denomination has been over boundaries, determining who is in and who is out.  But this an old story, and one that is inevitably both theological and political  To understand this we need some quick history.  In the New Testament we can see that the early church struggled to define its boundaries. Were Ananias and Saphira in or out? Where did they step over the line? What about the Gentiles, could they be in? What was the line they could not cross?  Paul struggles with these kinds of boundaries in writing the first churches. What are the rules all must obey? What are the rules for leaders, and are they different? Are they different for men and women? How can the body of Christ be free from the Law and yet not be antinomian? What gives the c...

A transition took place in Christianity sometime during its first century, a transition solidified over the centuries with the creation of Christendom. What had initially been a gathering of those faithful to Christ as their Lord became a community of shared faith expressed in common creeds and liturgies. The Church evolved from gatherings of individuals who had made the same choice to follow Christ to become a global community with a common culture that insured its members, initiated in infancy, would always share a common orientation within their social world toward the Transcendent.  Another way to put this is to say that Christianity became a religion as defined by Clifford Geertz: " a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long - lasting moods and motivations in people formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic. ”...

". . . the world, which seems, To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;” It has been more than a century since Matthew Arnold's  Dover Beach,  mourned the demise of the old Christendom and the slow withdrawing of the tide of faith. But there seem to be a lot of Christians still dressed in sackcloth and tossing ashes in the air while they long for the return of that lost certitude and all that goes with it.  This Good Friday my church’s choir will sing another one of those modern settings of the passion narrative, with a subtle and inaccurate rewriting that gets to the root of this morning for certitude. As Jesus faces the cross the song-writers assure us that “he knew redemption’s hour had come.”  This is exactly the kind of nostalgia for certitude that infects modern Christianity with nonsense. A quick read of the gospels tell us that Jesus, b...

I was watching one of those pop-science shows and the breathless announcer said, “and look what we can see when we use the infra-red images.” Later it would be “and here is what X-rays reveal.” Exciting, but hopefully humbling. Because its a reminder that the best human eyes are blind to 99% of what is going on around them. We only see a pretty narrow range of light waves. Only in the 19th and 20th centuries have both scientific theories, discoveries, and instrutments mad the rest available to us.  All the tools we humans have at our disposal to perceive and understand God and God’s revelation in Jesus Christ are as limited as our eyes are in perceiving the physical world. This is why the current back and forth about the so-called “Wesleyan Quadralateral” is so fruitless. Scripture, Tradition, Reason, and Experierence are both the windows through which we can understand the things of God, and the window frames that keep us from seeing more than a tiny fraction of what there is to k...