Every week now, there’s news about gay marriage. Today it’s that Oregon is allowing same sex marriages. Last week it was the Religious Broadcasters Association forcing Multnomah Publishers to resign from the trade group. It strikes close to home for many of us as well. I regularly hear from readers who wither A) are gay and can’t get married in their state, or B) have recently gotten married and are overjoyed. In my own personal case, last month I lost... Read more
First, Fred tells us that Steve Chalke’s fantastic and robust Oasis ministry has been kicked out of the UK evangelical alliance. Now CT reports that longtime evangelical publisher Multnomah has been forced out of the National Religious Broadcasters Association because it allowed some of its employees to work on Matthew Vines’s book for sister publisher, Convergent. That’s right, if you allow your employees to work on a book that doesn’t fit your ideology, you are no longer evangelical. On the... Read more
I don’t think so — at least not yet — and I’ll try to make my case on a live webcast on Wednesday: Join us by registering here. Read more
In the video above, the realities of seminary today are explicating, and it should be a chilling watch for most anyone involved in the business. It is for me, teaching as I do at one mainline seminary and one evangelical seminary. And I’ve watched the ponderous process of curriculum change at both of those seminaries, overseen by the Association of Theological Schools, an organization not known for its flexibility. These are hard times. Change will need to come a lot... Read more
Kirk says the threat to marriage isn’t outside the church, it’s inside the church: When people get too focused on redefining marriage, you’re distracted from the bigger problem – fornicators and adulterers… If the people sitting in the pews are fornicators and adulterers, the church will destroy marriages much more quickly than those outside the church. When God’s people mock marriage, God doesn’t take that lightly…I think the greatest threat to marriage is not other people’s definition of marriage.... Read more
Patheos turns 5 years old today, and I say, Huzzah! As a blogger, I’ve been both on my own and with a host organization, and Patheos has been nothing but good to me. My traffic has grown, I’ve been given great ideas of what to blog about, and I’ve had a ready in my editor, Deb Arca. Since I came to Patheos in 2011, this blog has had nearly a million visitors and over 2.6 million pageviews. That’s been awesome!... Read more
This post is by my dear friend, Rabbi Joseph Edelheit, in which he reflects from a Jewish perspective on the Jews for Jesus video about which I posted last week. He wrote it for Yom HaShoah, which is today’s commemoration of the Holocaust. I sometimes wonder how much murder, hatred and contempt it takes to provoke a collective expression of utter disgust—a shared communal gag reflex. The Kansas City murders of three innocent Christians by a known White Supremacist anti-Semite... Read more
The always-offensive evangelistic group, Jews for Jesus, released the above video just in time for Easter last week. It is, quite honestly, one of the most blatantly offensive and disgusting pieces of Christian propaganda that I’ve ever seen. In fact, I’m not going to link to it, because I don’t want you to watch it, and I don’t want them to receive any more permanent inbound links. The video is called “That Jew Died for You.” It’s a cheaply produced... Read more
It’s Passover until this evening, and lots of Christians — especially evangelicals — are attending Passover Seder dinners. But they’re not traditional Seder dinners, with Jews. No, they’re a co-opted rite, sometimes hosted by a “messianic” Jew, and sometimes just by Christians who’ve read a Wikipedia entry. I’ve been to a Seder for the past couple years. My family and I have been hosted by Rabbi Joseph Edelheit, a sometime contributor to this blog, and a dear friend. In his... Read more
As you may know, I’m completing a book on the atonement. It’s called Did God Kill Jesus?, and it will be released on March 17, 2015. The first draft of the book is off to the publisher and a few friends for reading. Edits will happen over the next couple months, as will decisions about subtitle, cover, interior design, endorsements, etc. All pretty exciting stuff. I’m currently teaching a reading seminar, “Theologies of Atonement,” at United Theological Seminary, and still reading... Read more
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