Parker Palmer on “Christian Nation”

December 1, 2011 By scotmcknight 16 Comments

By Parker Palmer:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
–The Declaration of Independence

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…
–First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

These foundation stones of American democracy were laid a century too late to save Mary Dyer’s life. Dyer, a middle-aged mother of six, was hanged in 1660 for defying a Puritan law that banned Quakers from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Christians who cruelly deprived this woman of Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness were dead certain (so to speak) that they were on a mission from God, protecting their “divinely ordained” civic order against Mary Dyer’s seditious belief in the Inner Light.

As a spiritual descendant of Mary Dyer, I’m profoundly grateful that America is not a Christian nation. If it were, my Quaker convictions might get me into very deep oatmeal. And as a Christian who does his best to take reason as seriously as I take faith, I find impossible to understand America as a “Christian nation” — and I believe that there are vibrant possibilities in the fact that it is not.

Filed Under: Public Issues 16 Comments

How Old is that Western Wall in Jerusalem?

December 1, 2011 By scotmcknight 13 Comments

From Rob Waugh:

The history of one of the world’s holiest sites – sacred to both Jews and Muslims – is set to be rewritten, following a surprise discovery in a ritual bath beneath the complex.

It proves that the Wall – supposedly built by Herod, the Jewish king who features prominently in the Gospels, was in fact built much later.

Newly found coins underneath Jerusalem’s Western Wall could change the accepted belief about the construction of one of the world’s most sacred sites two millennia ago, Israeli archaeologists said Wednesday.

The man usually credited with building the compound known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary is Herod, a Jewish ruler who died in 4 B.C.

Herod’s monumental compound replaced and expanded a much older Jewish temple complex on the same site.

But archaeologists with the Israel Antiquities Authority now say diggers have found coins underneath the massive foundation stones of the compound’s Western Wall that were stamped by a Roman proconsul 20 years after Herod’s death.

That indicates that Herod did not build the wall – part of which is venerated as Judaism’s holiest prayer site – and that construction was not close to being complete when he died.

‘The find changes the way we see the construction, and shows it lasted for longer than we originally thought,’ said the dig’s co-director, Eli Shukron.

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Anointed? 6 … Is Moving Left Always Right? (RJS)

December 1, 2011 By RJS 14 Comments

I recently received, courtesy of the publisher, a copy of the new book The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age by Randall Stephens, an associate professor of history at Eastern Nazarene College and Karl Giberson, formerly a professor of Physics at Eastern Nazarene. Giberson has now moved on to concentrate on a number of writing projects.

In this book Stephens and Giberson examine several different facets of American evangelicalism to explore the manner in which “America’s populist ideals, anti-intellectualism, and religious free market, along with the concept of anointing – being chosen by God to speak for him like the biblical prophets” influence a broad range of evangelical and fundamentalist beliefs and practices.

Chapter five, A Carnival of Christians, discusses the evangelical subculture and the way Christians grow up and live within this culture, separated to an extent from the broader western culture. The presentation is shaped around the experience of a young Christian – Paul – who grew up embedded in this culture in the southeastern United States. The post today will consider aspects of higher education and what is termed the “carnival of Christians“, the diversity of Christians views that deviate from any individual’s stereotyped expectation.

After describing the community structure of the local church, Stephens and Giberson go on in this chapter to explore Paul’s journey through college and into adult life. He went to a Christian college, Bryan College in Tennessee, where he experienced something of a crisis of faith; spent some time at L’Abri in England, returned to Gordon College in Massachusetts. Using Paul’s journey as a framework Stephens and Giberson describe the impact that education and engagement with the broader world has on individuals and institutions.

Education, however, liberalizes and secularizes, and in the evangelical world there is widespread discussion of Christian students abandoning their religious traditions in college and university. (p. 211)

The statistics often quoted for those abandoning faith range from 90% (the most alarmist) to 40% (a somewhat more realistic number).

This post is particularly timely as it follows Scot’s post earlier this morning, Moving Right is Never Wrong (in fact I’ve edited it a bit this morning to better make that connection).  Stephens and Giberson counter the view that moving right is never wrong with the opposite. There is an implicit assumption that those who move furthest to the left are generally the most correct.

This is worth some serious discussion. There are slippery slopes in both directions.

When does moving left become wrong?

How can we engage with the issues faithfully?

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Evangelicalism, Science and Faith Tagged With: 14 Comments

Moving Right is Never Wrong

December 1, 2011 By scotmcknight 80 Comments

A friend and I, after the Clark Pinnock tribute at AAR/SBL, were chatting about how the Evangelical Theological Society and conservative evangelicalism in general seem to have a special radar for folks who in their view are moving to the left theologically. A set of expressions came to my mind and I want to flesh them out here:

Among conservative evangelicals moving to the right seems never to be wrong.

Moving to the left, however, is either on the way to being wrong or is in fact already wrong (for the right).

To the left is a slippery slope, to the right is faithfulness (even if it is extreme).

I wish to challenge the very notion that going to the right is never wrong, and I want to contend that going left is sometimes the right thing to do. I have three witnesses.

Question: Do you think the above theories are accurate? Why or why not?

First, Jesus. The singular folks who were most opposed to Jesus were the Pharisees. Though today the Pharisees are often misunderstood as religious bigots and miserable legalists and anal-retentive religious folks, and each of those stereotypes has no bearing on what they were actually like (so we should equating “hypocrite” and “Pharisee”)… though they are misunderstood, their central platform was faithfulness to Scripture and scrupulous attention to detail and constant vigilance in observing Torah. In other words, they were zealots for the Torah and if they wanted to add to Scripture, as long as it was founded in Scripture, they were right. Anyone who looked left was in trouble. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Evangelicalism 80 Comments