Unfundamentalist

Above All, Love

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God-Breathed: Questioning Inerrancy

by Daniel Verona in Christian Issues

Growing up, I was taught that the Bible is the Word of God, and that it is therefore inerrant, infallible, and authoritative.

The verse used to support this idea was 2 Timothy 3:16: “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.”

The general assumption was that “God-breathed” meant that God had told human beings what to write down and that the Bible was thus free from error and authoritative because it came straight from the mind of the Creator.

But is this a good reading of that text?

What does it mean for something to be God-breathed? Is this the metaphor that the author would have used if the author had really meant to say that all Scripture is inerrant, infallible, and authoritative? I highly doubt it.

My assumption is that the author was Jewish and would have thus been very familiar with the Hebrew Scriptures. So the question I ask is: do the Hebrew Scriptures have anything to say about the breath of God?

As it turns out, yes they do.

In Genesis 2, God takes the dirt and forms the man and breathes into him the breath of life. In Ezekiel 37, there are four mentions of God restoring the people of Israel and breathing life into them once again.

The Hebrew word for “breath” is the word ruach, and it is also the word for “spirit.” The same is true in Greek, the language of the New Testament, where the Greek word pneuma is the word for both breath and spirit. In the ancient world, people… [Read more…] about God-Breathed: Questioning Inerrancy

​An Open Letter to Anyone Who Has Left a Church

by Alisha Walston in Christian Issues

To anyone who has left a church, especially those who left a church I’ve attended–I understand now my role in your story.

I left a church. It was a church I attended, and very much loved, for nearly a decade.  It didn’t happen the way I planned.
In the time since I attended my last service at that church I’ve had a lot of time to learn, reflect, and get a new perspective. I’d like to extend an olive branch to anyone who has left a church before–because now, I understand what it may have been like.

I apologize for any time I judged your relationship with God based solely by your attendance at my place of worship. 
I understand now that church attendance is not a golden ticket into heaven, and if you choose to worship somewhere besides where I attend Sunday mornings, that’s ok.

I apologize for assuming that you don’t attend church any more.
I understand now that just because you didn’t give me a play by play, doesn’t mean you didn’t find another place to go to church weekly.

I apologize for considering you a “backslider” if your convictions no longer align themselves with mine.
I understand now that my lifestyle isn’t meant to be your moral compass–quite honestly, we would probably be in a heap of trouble if it were.

I apologize for any texts, phone calls, remarks or questions that were judgmental or demeaning.
I understand now just how much… [Read more…] about ​An Open Letter to Anyone Who Has Left a Church

Showing Love

by Jim Gordon in Christian Spirituality

Christians talk a lot about standing up for our beliefs and doctrines. It seems we often feel this is the best way to show our devotion to God and to be a witness for Him.

But I am not so sure we are going about this in the correct way. As Christians, we are getting to be known more for what we are against and for what we condemn instead of for how we show the love of God to others.

Many of us go to a church building on Sunday and sing and smile and listen to a sermon and think we have fulfilled our duties for the week. All day we feel good and close to God and we think everything is good.

Then Monday hits and we go grudgingly off to work with a frown on our face and feeling down. We might even be in a bad mood and snap at our fellow employees and try to make them feel as bad as we do.

We too easily forget that Christianity is not a religion or a one day a week life. As followers of Christ, we are to let Christ live through us in the strength of the Holy Spirit. We are to let his love flow out of us to touch those we come in contact with throughout the day.

Instead of trying to win people over to our way of thinking by pointing out their mistakes and shortcomings, instead of condemning them and making them feel like outsiders, we should be allowing the love of Christ to touch them. We should accept and treat all people like we want to be treated.

While Jesus lived in bodily form on earth, he constantly spent time with those the religious crowd would not even… [Read more…] about Showing Love

When Jesus Said "Love Your Enemies," I Think He Meant "Don't Kill Them."

by Zach Christensen in Christian Issues

I am sometimes asked, “How can you be a Christian and not support the death penalty?” The answer I usually give is quite simple: when Jesus said “Love your enemies,” I think he meant “Don’t kill them.”

I never really understood how important this issue was until I became a Jesus follower, and even then it took me a few years to really get my mind around it. During my time as a sociology and criminology student, I came to find that there really was no evidence to suggest that the death penalty deters murder rates where it is practiced. The death penalty obviously kills people who are not guilty, it is also incredibly expensive, and it is a long and drawn out process that is very painful for anyone involved with trials and hearings.

While statistical data as well as more subjective and anecdotal accounts have steered me away from the death penalty in the past, I eventually reached the impasse where I had to ask: How can someone worship a God who dies for his enemies and then proceed to kill their own enemies? This was an idea that I could not harmonize. I also had to face the fact that if human beings are made in the image of God, then that means they possess innate dignity, are intrinsically sacred, and hold irrevocable significance.

What cheapens or increases the value of a human life? Is it what someone does or doesn’t do? Is it what they say? What they believe? What the color of their skin is? What their sexual orientation is? How much they possess materially? What vices… [Read more…] about When Jesus Said "Love Your Enemies," I Think He Meant "Don't Kill Them."

An Underlying Issue with the Letter Signed by Evangelical Leaders

by Rich Rosendahl in Christian Issues

Recently, over 500 Evangelical Christian leaders signed a letter that was sent to the current president and vice president expressing their opposition to the Executive Order effectively banning travel to the United States by many Muslims and refugees. This is great, it really is. Seeing Evangelical leaders rise up and speak out is awesome, necessary, and helpful. Thanks to all who participated in this initiative!

But before we celebrate and move forward, I want to ask you to pause and reflect with me about some of the things that led us to this point. Remember, Evangelical Christians are an incredibly powerful group in America and played a significant role in electing the administration that promised, and then enacted this Muslim ban …

Over the years, my involvement with Muslim refugees through my organization, The Nations, has led to many interactions with Evangelical Christians and pastors. These experiences have taught me a lot, like how much I love our Evangelical Christian neighbors and how I admire their remarkable impact on American culture.

But I have also noticed a common thread that I believe, in part, is why we saw such overwhelming support by Evangelicals for a candidate that consistently campaigned on the promise of implementing a Muslim ban that some now (rightly) reject.

The simplest way I can describe it is this: much of Evangelical Christianity has (often unknowingly) dehumanized Muslims by treating them as a project rather than neighbors. This is… [Read more…] about An Underlying Issue with the Letter Signed by Evangelical Leaders

How I Lost My Salvation

by Alex Camire in Christian Issues

It started in 2013. I got married in January and a month later, in February, my mother got a DUI.

We came from a fundamentalist background where the fact that mom was drinking, which she kept hidden for a year, was more scandalous than her having done it while driving. Because of this, my mother carried a lot of shame. She slowly attended church less and less and eventually stopped coming altogether.

There were other factors at play during this time that are too difficult or too personal to describe. What ended up happening, though, was my parent’s marriage began to deteriorate, and they eventually divorced.

My mother’s alcoholism and her absence from church were the impetus that caused a thirty-year marriage to collapse, and it all started a month after my marriage began. Suffice it to say, this wounded me terribly.

In the fall of 2013, something else happened: I started college. I was twenty-four at the time, and for the first time in my life I became fully immersed in a culture that I had rarely been exposed to.

I started school to become a social worker. This required me to take a lot of humanities and social science courses. I took classes in psychology, sociology, anthropology, and others that taught a contrary message to what I had grown up with in the church. We discussed topics like mental health, sexuality, and evolution that conservative Christians often oppose, dismiss, or ignore.

It became difficult to reconcile the traditional picture of God with the… [Read more…] about How I Lost My Salvation

Biorhythmic Resistance

by Jill Crainshaw in Christian Spirituality

This guest post is by Jill Crainshaw.

“Choose life so that you and your descendants may live.” –Deuteronomy 30:19

Whatever else people of faith make of this week’s Old Testament lectionary reading from Deuteronomy, I hear in these ancient words a call to embrace and embody life as gift, even during messy, difficult, and uncertain times.

My brief encounter with cedar waxwings the other day reminded me of how important this is. Waxwings are wonderful, mysterious birds. Here, where I live, their visits are brief. They come to our backyard for a few hours in February, and then they journey on. If we are lucky, we get to see them. I was lucky–blessed–to get to be near the waxwings this week.

How did the fleeting visit of these beautiful birds remind me of Deuteronomy’s call to embrace life? Political chaos fills my newsfeed and attempts to infiltrate every corner of my heart and head. So many people have so much to say about our current political realities. A colleague shared with me important wisdom about this. The danger, she said, is that we will begin to live by the new administration’s biorhythms instead of our own biorhythms of hope and grace.

I wrote this poem as a prayerful imagining of what kind of internal spiritual resistance is needed if we are to reclaim healthy heart and head space so that we can do our part to “choose life,” to cultivate communities of Gospel hospitality, healing, and hope.

 

The waxwings visited today.… [Read more…] about Biorhythmic Resistance

Post-Evangelical Life

by Holly Love in Christian Issues

Back in December, I wrote here and on my blog about how I was having a hard time attending my evangelical church after the election. That piece struck a nerve. To date it has almost 7,500 Facebook shares, making it the most read post that I have ever written, by far. This tells me that lots of other people are feeling the same way and struggling with the same things that I was in the wake of November 8th.

I want to tell the rest of the story–what happened after we left that evangelical church and started going to a “mainline” one. It’s not the story of theologically weak/watered down preaching that I thought it would be. For my fellow dissatisfied evangelicals who aren’t sure about leaving: there is light at the end of the tunnel.

My family is now attending a Presbyterian church (USA) about five minutes from our house. I had always thought of the PCUSAs as the “liberal” Presbyterians, and they are, in a sense. This is the first mainline church that I have personally ever attended, and I wasn’t sure what to expect. I was probably not alone in having a mental picture of mainline churches as being kind of like this: wishy-washy, unfamiliar, lukewarm.

But … surprise: that’s not what I found at all. Our new church feels surprisingly similar to the traditional Baptist church of my early childhood: pews, hymnals, a full choir. All the children coming to the front for a children’s message.

There are some welcome differences, however–the associate pastor, music minister, and… [Read more…] about Post-Evangelical Life

How Evangelical Kids Can Get Their Faith Shaken on the First Day of University

by Randal Rauser in Christian Issues

Let’s consider the first morning at university for one hypothetical 18 year old raised in a typical evangelical church subculture. His name is David.
Getting ready for university
David’s Christian leaders were seeking to grow his faith strong. And so, as he grew up in the church he was taught a deep suspicion of many views contrary to his evangelical Christian convictions. For example, he was taught that the Neo-Darwinian theory of biological evolution is wrong. But not simply that it is wrong: he was taught that it is a lie, that it is a theory on its last legs which is sustained by little more than the anti-Christian animus of those who propagate it. He still remembers the sober words of his youth pastor: “Don’t let the evolutionist make a monkey out of you.”

David was also warned about atheism. Atheists, he was taught, are godless people who hate God and repress a deep anger toward him. They don’t want to live in accord with God’s law and that’s why they reject belief in him. So they are merely fools, as it says in Psalm 14:1.

With that background, David faces his first morning as a new student at a large public university, a school with more first year students than people living in his home town. When he arrives David encounters a bewildering number of cultures and languages, to say nothing of the staggering number of life philosophies on other. The Christian subculture in which he was raised is now inundated by a tsunami of alternative perspectives he hardly… [Read more…] about How Evangelical Kids Can Get Their Faith Shaken on the First Day of University

Trump’s Travel Ban Hurts American Children

by Sana Khatib in Current Events

Embed from Getty Images

[Editor’s note: though this piece was written in response to Trump’s first travel ban, the issues still apply to the subsequent new travel bans.]

My son is eleven and my daughter is nine. They have only ever known a black president; that is as far back as their memory will take them. When President Obama was elected to be our 44th president, my son was attending a majority-African American preschool. The students celebrated by making paper crowns with an image of their president in the center. The celebrations continued as my husband and I joined President Obama at Grant Park, in Chicago, to listen to his acceptance speech. People were cheering, crying, and hugging strangers. The crowd was overwhelmed with emotion and a sense of pride for how far our country had come. We were a part of history.

Eight years later, we are now living under a Trump presidency. The night the election results were clearly falling in Trump’s favor, I could not sleep. I awoke at 3 a.m. to check the results yet again, at which point it was clear that Trump would become our next president. My heart sank from fear of what this would mean for me and my loved ones, as Muslim Americans with Syrian heritage. I hoped for the best–that Trump would not fulfill his promises to surveil, register, and ban Muslims. I hoped he wouldn’t continue to encourage a re-emergence of white supremacy, an irrational fear of African Americans, Hispanics, and other minorities, and a… [Read more…] about Trump’s Travel Ban Hurts American Children