The Crossroads of Christianity and Culture

I've now seen three articles in the RNS and Firebrand, saying that the "UM Center Cannot Hold." I'll just note that all three come to this conclusion by assuming that the "center" is a place on the continuum between two incompatible positions on the far ends of a spectrum. And that in turn assumes a simplistic bifurcation between liberal/progressive and orthodox/traditional Christianity.   I would suggest that both the liberal tradition and its progressive expression, and the anti-liberal/evangelical tradition and its orthodox/traditional expression are inadequate to the mission given the church by Jesus Christ. Each is in its own way dogmatic, staking an ethical claim vis-a-vis human sexuality rooted in either modernist or anti-modernist assumptions about the human person.  A coherent, relevant witness to the gospel cannot be borne by such claims.  Faithful witness to the gospel simply isn't found on a spectrum shaped by modernity and post-modernity. In...

It has become a commonplace to see the Church (presumably the "Church militant" although this is no longer PC) as the center of cosmic contestation. Its members are caught up in a cosmic struggle between good and evil (and related conflicts between liberation and oppression, justice and injustice, order and chaos, truth and falsehood.) Pick your abstract binary and the Church has chosen sides and is thrusting us into the fight.  One problem is that these characterizations  of life within the body of Christ is they don’t seem remotely like good news. The Gospel is Christ’s victory over sin, death, evil, and the world. Who wants to join an organization that remembers this only once a year, or maybe for a few minutes each week, before plunging back into the fray? But it is also because the language of cosmic struggle takes us far from the Bible and its witness. The Bible tends to be concrete; so that evil and good are adjectives rather than an abstract nouns. Even apparently abs...

Let us be clear at the beginning. In our time and culture in the West there are no normative authorities that can authorize one's belief that one is loved by God and that one’s life has eternal meaning. Can we recover a sense that our lives are embraced within the life of God? We can if we see our history in a different light. Incarnation demands inculturation, but does not privilege the culture into which God incarnate came. The New Testament may be understood as the history of the inculturation of the Gospel by the apostles and the church, just as the whole Bible is the history of God with the world leading to incarnation. What the New Testament shows us is a normative process of engaging people within a cultural context under the guidance of the Spirit of Christ . * The identity of that normative process is Church , or more properly the Body in Christ . Like all bodies it is not a static substance but an coherent set of processes engaging an ever-changing cultural, social, and n...

A consistent complaint by UM traditionalists is that UM centrists and progressives do not respect the authority of the Bible, or that they have a "low" view of Biblical authority.  While authority is indeed the key issue, it isn't related to the Bible.  The question of the Bible (and for that matter science) is just a side-show. There is a much bigger problem.   Prior to the Reformation Western Christians lived in and accepted without question an integrated hierarchy of authorities that included those related to family and local tradition, political authority based on noble families, and the church (and ultimately Pope) which held the keys to heaven and hell. And this structure of human authorities was authorized by God, who was assumed to have created the entire social order. “The whole earth round was bound by chains of gold around God’s feet.” As a result Christians (and for that matter all pre-modern people) lived with the assurance that their individual and social li...

I once taught in the theological school where, and I quote an evangelical theological journal from back in the late 80s, “the way in which a person peeled a boiled egg could be seen as a sign of their spiritual maturity.”  Thus at every faculty meeting we reviewed why students were not meeting our exacting standards with regard to behavior or doctrine. And we considered how we could rework the structure of our courses, or our rules, or our overall curriculum to make sure that it never happened again.  We were true nomians, or as we’re also known, Methodists, believing that if we could tweak the order and the rules just one more time we could somehow overcome the problem of human nature. It was really pretty amazing that a group of people who had studied theology and scripture at a high-level couldn’t see that this probably wasn’t going to work. We had all read the Bible, after all. Rules work when they regulate, when they create the orderly expectations that allow humans to li...

In a recent conversation with a European pastor of a small congregation I heard an important distinction. "Because we are not important, we try to be relevant."  It is arguable that American Christians, and American Methodists of all types, have forgotten that our task isn't to be important, it is to be relevant.  If we look at the ministry of Jesus we find that he never sought to be important. Satan gave him that opportunity from the very beginning and he rejected it. He rejected it at the end when he stood before Pilate and said "my kingdom is not of this world." Neither Satan nor Pilate had the insight to understand the difference between relevance and importance, and the always threatened powers and principalities of the world still don't. But Christians following Jesus should be able to see it clearly.  From the beginning of his ministry Jesus' teaching and actions directly addressed the needs of real people in real time. If his actions came in conf...

In the modern era public funding is a poison that destroys religion, even as it makes religion toxic to society at large.  So let’s review how recent Supreme Court decisions related to religion and pubic funding will play out over the long term.  The first amendment of the US Constitution does not mention whether  “The free exercise of religion“ is public or private. For the last 70 years or so the Supreme Court has assumed that the founding fathers meant the  private  exercise of religion was to be free, and that the public exercise of religion could not receive any public support. That is probably what the founding fathers meant.  “No law respecting an establishment of religion,” has also been understood by previous courts to mean that providing any public funding, or a public venue, for religious use was “an establishment of religion” and thus forbidden. The current Supreme Court has taken a much different attitude toward the meaning of the first amendme...