On a recent podcast, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Al Mohler enlisted the research and expertise of Candy Gunther Brown to prove that he is, in fact, right about yoga. And guess what? He is. If you’re shocked that I would say such a thing, on the Patheos Progressive Christian Channel no less, let me make something clear. I have not had a recent conversion experience. I am not switching teams, joining an Acts 29 church, subscribing to The Blaze,... Read more
We’ve all heard the sermon, right? You know, the badly regurgitated version of substitutionary atonement with more than a little bit of an obsession with the eternal hellfire bit of the formula. If you don’t know what I’m talking about come visit me in New Orleans. I’ll take you down to Bourbon Street one night and we’ll invariably find a guy who is quite literally standing on a soapbox and shouting through his microphone to anybody that will listen about the... Read more
I know, I know. If there is anything sacred in the American church today, especially among younger, post-evangelical, and charismatic Christians, it would be the concept of grace. While the neo-Calvinists certainly talk about grace – doctrines of grace, irresistible grace, saving grace, common grace, etc. – they are often not so gracious, you know, to people who don’t agree with them about homosexuality and hell (the latter being the place where those who don’t fit their idea of grace... Read more
We can only find healing if we name what is true. Read more
It’s Good Friday, and lots of Christians are reflecting on the single most defining truth in our faith-story. That Jesus died for our sins according to the Scriptures. Yes, there’s more to the story than just that. But if you were going to pin down one sentence, one phrase, that encapsulates who we are both in our own perception and the perceptions of those outside the church, it would likely be, Jesus died for our sins. Yes, Jesus lived (to inaugurate... Read more
As Trevin Wax at The Gospel Coalition and the excommunication-by-farewell trend have made clear, evangelical has become code for a couple Utterly Important Things: Hell: i.e., totally for it. Homosexuality: i.e., obsessively against it. Sure, there are some underlying principles there like Penal Substitutionary Atonement Is The Gospel Or Else (which supports Hell) and the Bible Read Superficially Without Factoring In Historical Context Is Inerrant Or Else (which wars against Homosexuality); but overall, these two H’s have become the articles upon which... Read more
In my first post on how to be evangelical after World Vision, I admittedly assumed something. Namely, that anyone would actually want to be evangelical after World Vision. I mean, why? Why would we even want to carry on this label, if the loudest voices driving the popular perception of “evangelical” are the conservative gatekeepers who have fully farewelled the centrist/nuanced, progressive, and emergence voices? Why not just adopt the more generalized “progressive Christian” or perhaps simply identify with a denominational... Read more
When several friends had a conference call with World Vision CEO Richard Stearns and found out that 10,000 child sponsorships had been dropped in the course of one week, I wept. I know there are all kinds of counter-arguments out there to the effect that the kids will be fine because money is pooled into one budget and besides there are a million other faith-based NGO’s that do the same thing and it’s all just a bunch of progressive political... Read more
I know that Nicholas Cage is “starring” in a summer blockbuster that relies on an inevitable and immanent rapture to scare viewers into theaters, but I’m afraid this little end times ruse needs to stop. It’s time to cancel the rapture. Really. We’ve milked this biblically suspect, historically bankrupt, literary abomination of a doctrine long enough. Did we really need a remake of the first Left Behind movie in the first place? Did we even need the first Left Behind... Read more
Fred Phelps is dead. And while the Westboro cult itself is refusing to mourn (“We don’t worship the dead”), some counter-protesters at yesterday’s Lorde concert in Kansas City graciously expressed counterintuitive condolences for the hate-group’s loss. When Phelps’s death was announced a few days ago, it didn’t take long for evangelical condemnations to hit my feeds, some of them fierce, some of them kinder and more forgiving. Some Christians were quick to consign Phelps himself to the fiery hatred of... Read more
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