The Crossroads of Christianity and Culture

There is a new book out advocating an old idea, that humans possess no free will.  Determined  by Robert Sapolsky. I don't wish to engage his arguments directly, but rather quickly review the basis on which those arguments must be assessed. First, the idea that humans do not possess free will is hardly a new idea. It is found in the oldest forms of Buddhism (Therevada) based on careful analysis of the laws of cause and effect in relation to the human mind that creates the  samsara world . Mahayana Buddhism tackled some of the inherit problems in that system and came up with alternative answers.  Another kind of determinism was put forward by Christian and later Muslim theologians who asserted that for God to be omnipotent and omniscient no human volition could exist. It was an argument based in logic that appeared impenetrable unless one considers that the axiomatic assumptions are unproven and contradict human experience.  More modern forms of determinism were ...

The first victim of war is the truth, but only in part because of outright lies and misinformation. In larger part because words, and language more generally, are used for emotional impact, especially fostering outrage, rather than to describe reality. This misuse of language can achieve a short-term impact, but gradually words lose their emotional value as they are overused and misused. To give one example, the so-called F-bomb is now barely an F-splat. It is a punctuation mark rather than an expletive. There are too many examples in the current war in Gaza. Virtually every characterization of every action by either Hamas or Israel serves less to describe than to create outrage and delegitimize the person or people taking action. (For example, is the person who acts a perpetrator? Strictly speaking yes, but because this term comes from the language of crime and punishment just using the word casts the actor in a negative  light.)  Terrorism, genocide, reprisal, revenge, inno...

 Doesn't exist.  As Dr. Bulhof taught us lo those decades ago in our Philosophy of History course, there is  chronology , or the effort to list events sequentially in their proper location, and  history.  which places event, people, and locations in relationship to one another in ways that disclose their meaning  in a particular situation  contemporary to the historian. History itself has a historical context. In theory  chronology   is more factual, but it usually isn’t. The way we label events is already a subjective judgement on them. If a person is shot and dies do we label it murder, or  war, or terrorism, or martyrdom? Every label is a moral judgment. Moreover chronology is inevitably selective. It includes what the chronicler thinks are important events, and leaves out the rest. Chronology cannot escape becoming history. This is why history must constantly be rewritten. I wrote a biography (a particular kind of history) that ...

 This is the cover story and question of Scientific American in October of 2023.  The answer is no. SA treats this question as primarily technological, and secondarily psychological and physiological. But that really misses the important question, one raised by the current revolution in AI, and right behind it in robotics.  What is a human? What does it mean to be human? The conceit of the Enlightenment, which has deeply influenced contemporary culture in the West, is that humans are embodied brains, and that humanity/the self/the soul both arises from the brain-body complex and resides within the brain. This is why from the standpoint of medical science when a person is "brain dead" there is no more human person present and the body can be used for spare parts. On this basis a brain transplant would be a transplantation of human consciousness. And of course it can be imagined that a detailed map of the entire brain could be recreated in a silicone "brain" and still...

  The Way Forward in Mission We now live in a time when the illusions of mono-cultures can be sustained only by voluntary ignorance and political manipulation. The idea that God’s Word crosses cultural boundaries, while it was once a revolutionary improvement in mission theology, now seems naive. The Gospel doesn’t travel, it becomes manifest in the process of evangelization - bearing witness to God’s Reign in constant dialogue with those being invited to take their place in it at the intersections of multiple cultures. So Kerygma  isn’t just dogma and  euangelizomai  isn’t just talking. They are participation in God’s Reign in ways that create the opportunity for Incarnation to be recognized and affirmed by faith. The apostles themselves didn’t know the meaning of Incarnation until they engaged in and were transformed by intercultural mission.  Intercultural dialogue turns out to be the essence of obedient witness, it isn’t the transmission of the gospel, it is...

  God Doesn’t Need to Cross Boundaries In the previous post I showed that incarnation is enculturation, and that changing understandings of what it means to be human demand new understandings of what is meant by incarnation. In the 21st century, can we really regard incarnation as boundary crossing?  Only if we want to buy into a model that valorizes the remnants of empire.    A more positive understanding of incarnation might begin by observing that  in scripture God doesn’t cross boundaries,  because between God and humanity there are no boundaries to cross. God is present everywhere at all times, in all lives and cultures. We too easily forget that the Ptolemaic system that dominated Graeco-Roman and subsequent Western (including Islamic) cosmologies isn’t Biblical, but is built on entirely different set of cultural presuppositions about the ordering of the cosmos. The Bible identifies “high places” and even the sky as the domain of God, but even that re...

I lived most of my life in the 20th century and most of my academic career with 20th century theology. I don't regret leaving both behind if it will help us better serve the gospel in this century, and in the places and times to which we are called.   Psalm 87 Glorious things are said of you,     city of God: 4  “I will record Rahab and Babylon     among those who acknowledge me— Philistia too, and Tyre, along with Cush —     and will say, ‘This one was born in Zion.’” 5  Indeed, of Zion it will be said,     “This one and that one were born in her,     and the Most High himself will establish her.” 6  The Lord will write in the register of the peoples:     “This one was born in Zion.” 7  As they make music they will sing,     “All my fountains are in you.”   Introduction Today I want t...