Nobody gets on my nerves like sanctimonious moderates. You know, the kind who are religiously committed to maintaining an absolutely mathematical balance on their facebook wall between criticisms of Republicans and Democrats. One of my seminary friends has a blog where she describes herself as “the opposite of moderate.” I just think it’s intellectually lazy to assume that the average of opinion must be right. I believe there are times to be measured and times to be radical and no... Read more
It seems like in United Methodism as with many things, there are unspoken rules about which things we say for nicety sake and which things actually have teeth. One of the things that sounds pretty to say but doesn’t actually have any covenantal teeth to it is the second question of our baptismal vows, “Do you accept the freedom and power God gives you to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever form they present themselves?” If this question had... Read more
I know you’re not supposed to read the manifesto of a mass murderer, but that’s what I’ve been doing this morning. Elliot Rodger, the kid who stabbed and shot a bunch of people in Santa Barbara, California, this past weekend lived a very sad and lonely life. Please forgive me if it seems disrespectful to the victims of Elliot’s horrible crime to express my empathy for him, but there were many things he described about his thought process as a... Read more
In a recent post, Peter Enns writes about a certain type of Christian who doesn’t feel right unless they are “contending for the gospel.” Though Enns was talking specifically about the neo-reformed movement and the Gospel Coalition in particular, I think there is a type of Christian found throughout different theological traditions whose zeal for doctrinal correctness is their most defining attribute. Since it’s not just the Calvinists who are like this, I wanted to propose Klingon Christian as a... Read more
The United Methodist blogosphere has been fired up after a recent announcement that 80 prominent pastors and theologians have called for planning a split in the United Methodist Church on account of our differences over the homosexuality issue. Differing perspectives on this announcement have included David Watson, Joel Watts, Kenneth Pruitt, Steve Manskar, Chad Holtz, Drew McIntyre, Tom Lambrecht, and Jeremy Smith. I think that the United Methodist Church should help facilitate the departure of those who do not feel... Read more
Yesterday morning at our church staff meeting, we read the story of Jesus’ double-healing of the blind man at Bethsaida in Mark 8:22-26. Jesus has to rub his spit on the man’s eyes twice, because the first time that he does it, the man says, “I can see people but they look like trees walking.” In the context of another week of evangelical Christian blogosphere drama, God confronted me with this realization. Like the blind man at Bethsaida, my vision... Read more
I’ll pray for you. How many of you have tweeted or commented that on facebook when you were in a huff over something somebody else said and you wanted to stick it to them in a way that would show that you’re rising above it like a good Christian? I’ve done it before. And it’s time for us to stop doing it, because it mocks God to turn “prayer” into a retort on social media. As Dianna Anderson very astutely... Read more
The evangelical twittersphere has been reverberating over the past few days with the hashtag #IStandWithSGMVictims. Last Thursday, Nathaniel Morales, a former youth leader at Covenant Life Church in Gaithersburg, Maryland, was convicted of sexual abusing three boys between 1983 and 1991. Covenant Life Church was the founding church of the Sovereign Grace Ministries network. Prominent national neo-Calvinist leader and very recently removed Gospel Coalition council member CJ Mahaney was senior pastor at the time of the abuse. Another pastor within... Read more
If there’s one thing that progressive and fundamentalist Christians demonstrate their enthusiastic agreement upon, it’s to take Jesus with a grain of salt when he says not to judge other people. Judging is the oxygen of postmodernity for all parties involved. It’s how we define ourselves: by who we ridicule and take down. God gave me a passage about not judging from the gospel of Luke to say over and over again as a prayer practice during Lent. It’s largely... Read more
Today I stumbled across a blog post written by a Malaysian Muslim named Farouk defending the concept of “human rights” which Malaysian prime minster Najib Razak accused of being “against Islam” in a recent speech. One of the reasons that the Islamic fundamentalists condemn “human rights” is because the actual phrase for “human rights,” huquq an-naas in Arabic, doesn’t appear in the Koran. So Farouk’s argument in defense of human rights involves making a derivative case from overarching themes in... Read more
Mercy Not Sacrifice
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