I don’t have time to write a real blog post since I’m leaving for Wild Goose tomorrow morning. But Eugene Peterson is the most established evangelical leader to date to go public with his support for same sex marriage in an interview that dropped yesterday. He wrote a translation of the Bible called the Message that hundreds of evangelical megachurch pastors use in their sermons every week. Needless to say, #GospelBro Twitter was not amused. So I wanted to share the seven... Read more
I’ve been traveling for the past week so I’ve only had internet access on my phone. I recently got back into twitter again after being dormant for a while. One difference this time is posting in feed chains rather than just stand-alone tweets. I’ve made five different theology feeds over the past several days which I’m sharing below. So click on a thread (or several) and tell me what you think. 1. The gospel as I understand it This is... Read more
The signers of the Declaration of Independence were not biblical inerrantists. If they had been, they would have had to contend with Romans 13:1 which says “all authorities that exist have been instituted by God.” And they would have been forced to frame the grievances of their Declaration to justify their disobedience of Romans 13. For John Calvin and his inerrantist minions, there was only one reason that rebelling against an established government was permissible: if obeying God required disobeying... Read more
I was planning to go off on the evangelicals in this blog post. After First Baptist Church of Dallas went all-in on their nationalist idolatry, releasing an official CCLI Christian praise song called “Make America Great Again.” After I heard about an angry white man shooting a black girl with his concealed handgun out of road rage. After Donald Trump released his wrestlemania tweet. I was debating about whether to call them “God and country evangelicals” or “white evangelicals.” If... Read more
Google is filled with legalistic, fundamentalist explanations of what a false prophet is. Usually it has something to do with supporting homosexuality or questioning whether non-Christians go to hell. Unsurprisingly, none of these explanations engage Jesus' statement that "you will know them by their fruits." Read more
One of the most bizarre phenomena of the Trump era is the reintroduction of a quaint Shakespearian insult into the English language: “cuckold” or usually “cuck” for short. In Shakespearian English, cuckold was the word used for a man who knows that his wife is sleeping around but doesn’t do anything about it. It reentered the English parlance officially in 2007 with an entry in the Urban Dictionary, and its use took off explosively during the 2016 presidential election campaign.... Read more
Atonement is the centerpiece of Christian theology. It’s a compound word that literally means what God does through Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross to rescue humans from our self-alienation and make us “at one” with him. In other words, atonement describes how God removes our fear and shame so that we can face him with peace and integrity despite being sinners in a sinful world. There’s been a lot of argument about atonement in recent years, particularly around descriptions of... Read more
I would not call myself a liberal Christian. I self-identify as a progressive evangelical, which is to say that I fall on the progressive end of a narrower spectrum whose boundaries I take seriously even if I dispute where they ought to be drawn. Many United Methodists share my origin as a progressive evangelical refugee from toxic culture war Christianity. Since too many conservative United Methodists project a caricature of theological liberalism onto progressive evangelical refugees like me, I thought... Read more
In the United Methodist Church sexuality debate, one way to talk about the various constituencies is in terms of compatibilism. There are progressive non-compatibilists, progressive compatibilists, traditional compatibilists, and traditional non-compatibilists. Non-compatibilists are people whose convictions mean that they are unwilling to remain affiliated with a church that allows others to violate their convictions. Progressive non-compatibilists want every United Methodist congregation to hold same-sex marriages and allow openly queer clergy to serve, and they will agitate and push the envelope... Read more
I just got back from my home annual conference of Virginia. We’ve got a new bishop named Sharma Lewis. She’s black and she whoops when she preaches. She runs around the room and she stands on chairs. She makes us repeat words back to her. She tells the youth to shout to her from the crowd. I don’t know what to do with it. I imagine that many other white United Methodists in Virginia don’t know what to do with it... Read more
Mercy Not Sacrifice
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