Is there anything that God asks us to do for no other reason than because he’s God and he said so? I suspect that how you answer this question reflects whether or not you are a conservative evangelical. Because I believe that God is perfectly benevolent, I presume that everything God asks us to do is for our own good, whether collectively or individually. My hunch is that this makes God sound too “humanistic” for a conservative evangelical, whose main... Read more
Today my son Matthew and I participated in a walk with the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). According to Matthew, it was technically a “parade” instead of just a “walk” because a brass band led the march. Mental illness has had a decisive role in shaping my vocation as a pastor. Many of my insights into the human condition come from my experience of severe depression and anxiety throughout most of my twenties. So I wanted to share some... Read more
When Martin Luther King, Jr. and his entourage descended on Birmingham, Alabama in early 1963, a group of well-intentioned white clergy leaders including moderate Methodist bishops Paul Hardin and Norman Bailey Harmon published an open letter titled “A Call for Unity” pleading for racial conflicts to be negotiated in in private conversations between community leaders rather than through confrontational street protests. Shouldn’t Christians be able to sit down and have a charitable, civil conversation instead of staging dramatic provocations and... Read more
“Against you alone have I sinned.” These words from Psalm 51:4 are attributed to the Israelite king David speaking to God after he knocked up another man’s wife and had that man betrayed and murdered on the battlefield. Many evangelical pastors have praised this verse for how it names sin, but I consider it to be one of the most morally problematic verses in the Bible. It does do a very good job of encapsulating the solipsistic morality that I... Read more
It’s one of those phrases you know not to use in mixed company. But there’s a code of honor among heterosexual young adult men at bars and parties. To use nineties parlance, when another man is “busting a move” or “getting his mack on” with a woman, you don’t interfere. Because that’s “cock-blocking.” And I have no idea why it wasn’t completely obvious to me before that this unspoken law of young adult male sexual “ethics” is a cornerstone of... Read more
One of the most important books I read in seminary was evangelical Old Testament scholar Peter Enns’ Incarnation and Inspiration, which offers a way of understanding the Bible in which its authority can be respected even if some of the stories it tells are not historical events. Peter Enns just released another book called The Bible Tells Me So that has the Biblical inerrantists in a tizzy. For a long time, I’ve been wanting to name and repudiate three of the... Read more
This past week, Brian Zahnd and Michael Brown held a debate on the penal substitution atonement theory. While I tend to be on Brian’s side of the debate, I’m not willing to throw penal substitution completely out of the window. The concept of penal substitution has a whole lot of slippage within it. There’s a stark difference between saying that the cross was in one aspect a punishment that Jesus suffered for the sake of humanity’s salvation and saying that Jesus suffered... Read more
A book title about Jesus called Undiluted can make you roll your eyes at first if you come from the evangelical world. Because it trots out a long-standing trope that’s endemic to evangelical identity: “Those nominal mainline Christians have a ‘watered-down’ gospel, but we’ve got the undiluted, fully potent, Jesus plus nothing version that’s been stripped of all those religious traditions and worldly values that get in the way, etc.” Every evangelical has been told from day one that we’re the... Read more
Yes, I know, it’s a woefully contrived analogy. Hateful Christians with “God hates fags” signs are a completely different phenomenon than terrorists who massacre a whole countryside of people. But it’s a wishful thought that I want to have. Because I think Westboro Baptist has played an important role in turning the tide against the religious right in our country. Could it be that the absolute awfulness of ISIS will turn the tide against the religious right in the Islamic... Read more
In my first job out of college, I was the program coordinator of the Nicaragua Network, a solidarity organization founded in the 1980’s to support Nicaraguans when our country was trying to overthrow their government. I learned that being in solidarity with people means that they dictate the terms of your support for them. When you engage in activism on behalf of other people without submitting to their leadership, you are not in solidarity with them. So what does it mean... Read more
Mercy Not Sacrifice
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