Unfundamentalist

Above All, Love

Christian Issues

Unfundamentalist Charities?

by in Christian Issues

I recently received this email from a reader:
I’m a college student who has become an unfundamentalist just this last week. You guys were everything I was looking for, and I’m so glad I found you. I had a question, though, that I was hoping you could answer. Now that I’m aware that many of the Christian organizations I supported push through values that I cannot condone, I’m looking for some unfundamentalist approved charities I can send my 10% to. I was hoping that maybe you could post an article with a list of approved charities or simply send me a list of your favorites. Thanks in advance! 🙂
Since it’s the time of year that many of us make charitable contributions, I thought it might be helpful to respond publicly with my thoughts, as well as solicit charity recommendations from our readers.

First, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that the requirement to give 10% of our money to charity is decidedly fundamentalist. It’s a notion borne out of legalism and control, and there’s certainly no Christian mandate to do so. Rather, we should seek to be generous and loving with our money (and other resources), giving freely and not trying to meet a specific number. For some people, 10% is likely too much to be reasonably affordable; for others, it’s probably far too little.

Second, it’s a good idea to vet any charity you’re not familiar with using one (or all) of these sites: Charity Navigator, CharityWatch, GreatNonprofits, and GuideStar. Keep in mind that… [Read more…] about Unfundamentalist Charities?

Evangelicals: Belief and Politics Today

by Marcia Pally and David Gushee in Christian Issues

A conversation with David Gushee and Marcia Pally

Professor Marcia Pally and Christian ethicist David Gushee discuss the meaning of “evangelical” and how that identification intersects with other social, political, and religious ideologies.

MP: During the early rounds of my field research for The New Evangelicals, we spoke about the range of evangelical belief and activism, from right to centrist to progressive. In 2007, Frank Page, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, said, “I have cautioned our denomination to be very careful not to be seen as in lock step with any political party.”

Yet today, roughly 80% of evangelicals declare themselves on the right of Christian belief and the right of the Republican party. On key issues, the breakdown looks like this:

61% of white evangelicals say there is not substantial discrimination against African-Americas; there is no other religious group (except Mormons) where that is the majority view.
61% of white evangelical Protestants oppose same-sex marriage; while 63% of white mainline Protestants, 62% of Catholics, 59% of Orthodox Christians, and 73% of Jews support same-sex marriage.
50% of white evangelicals support religiously-based service refusal to gays and lesbians; there is no other religious group where that is the majority view.
28% of white evangelicals say the earth is warming because of human activity; among all other religious groups and the religiously… [Read more…] about Evangelicals: Belief and Politics Today

God’s Will for My Family

by Bette Moore in Christian Issues

In March, 1971, I had a second trimester saline solution injection abortion. I was a Christian, married, and 24 years old.

Four months earlier, on Thanksgiving Day, my husband and I had celebrated my pregnancy with friends and, although it was a bit of a surprise, we were delighted to be expecting a child.

I was teaching fifth grade at the time and will never forget the moment when a student walked up to my desk and said he didn’t feel very well. When I saw the rash on his face, I flashed back to a terrible photograph I had seen in a magazine in my obstetrician’s office the week before. It was of a “Rubella baby,” and the caption said, “Bobby’s mother recovered from German measles in 3 days. Bobby wasn’t so lucky.”

I didn’t know exactly what that meant, but I later found out. I learned that the reason they finally connected Rubella with birth defects was that delivery room personnel were coming down with German measles two to three weeks after the birth of a baby with severe birth defects. Although the mother recovers in three days, sadly, the baby stays sick throughout the remaining time of gestation and is still contagious at birth.

I had almost forgotten about that student and the magazine picture, when, a couple of weeks later, I saw a very slight rash on my own face. I covered it up with make-up as best I could and drove thirty miles to school, feeling worse and worse the whole way. Halfway through the morning, I couldn’t deny what was happening to me and I… [Read more…] about God’s Will for My Family

Christian: Is Your Bible an Idol?

by Darrell Lackey in Christian Issues

The Bible is not God, nor do symbols on a page contain God. God is not hiding in the ink or paper molecules/atoms of the Bible. God existed before the Bible. Every time we read or quote a passage of Scripture in an authoritative way, it doesn’t mean God is speaking either to us or through us. It simply means we are reading symbols on a page that represent meanings, which we then interpret. Whether or not we truly understand the meaning or purpose of those symbols is something else entirely. It’s possible I am idolizing my understanding of those symbols, rather than worshipping (or even interpreting correctly) what they may be pointing toward.

A person could memorize the entire Bible. They could quote a Scripture verse for every problem, argument, or issue at hand. One could study the Bible deeply every day, for a lifetime. One could do all this and never know the God of whom it speaks. One could do this and be a mean, angry, and selfish person. One could do this and never lift a finger for another human being. One could do this and be nothing more than a judgment machine, handing out judgments, opinions, and confident assertions about the world and everyone else.

How do I know this? Because I’ve experienced it. I know some of these people. I stopped being impressed by people who’ve memorized a lot of Scripture a long time ago. Why? Because I knew too many of them who were awful people.

Bible knowledge will never substitute for a relationship with the subject of that… [Read more…] about Christian: Is Your Bible an Idol?

If God wants us to be saved, why is grace so confusing?

by Randal Rauser in Christian Issues

It’s a daunting question. If God wants all human beings to be saved — and surely he does — then why aren’t the requirements of that salvation clearer? This is a central theme woven through my book What’s So Confusing About Grace? (reviewed on this blog here), a theological memoir spanning a forty year journey trying to understand the nature of God’s grace.

I started off that journey assuming that salvation was simply a matter of right belief. But over time I began to face a growing list of nagging questions that challenged that paradigm. In this article I briefly consider three of them.
What must you believe if you are to be saved?
In my conservative upbringing, conversion and faith were first of all about belief. You needed to believe particular doctrines about God and his Son, Jesus. But which statements of doctrine do you need to believe in order to be saved? The disturbing fact, as I soon discovered, is that Christians don’t agree on how to answer this question.

It is hard to convey just how disturbing this fact of disagreement was, but consider this analogy. Imagine that a deadly plague is spreading across the landscape. Fortunately, medical personnel have identified a vaccine to protect people from this terrible plague. Great news, right?

So you think. But then you discover that there is extensive disagreement among those health professionals on how the vaccine should be administered in order to make it effective. Some say… [Read more…] about If God wants us to be saved, why is grace so confusing?

Hearts Without God

by Alex Camire in Christian Issues

A self-fulfilling prophecy is when people blame a circumstance on a vague but seemingly objective evil in the world and use it to justify a narrative when the situation occurs (as was claimed or prophesied).

Example: in America, we don’t have a “gun” problem, we have a “sin” problem. When someone commits mass murder, and happens to use a gun to do so, the issue is never about his weapon of choice and access to it. It’s about his heart. Making the argument about sin, or the poor hearts of people in our country, positions the conversation away from gun control and into a state of learned helplessness where the rest of us are just supposed to accept the outcomes of these atrocities as normative.

And then we all sit back and watch as gun violence and mass shootings wreak havoc. And we watch everyone argue about what they think the problem is and their solutions that the prophets claim will never work. Meanwhile, nothing is done, and the condition persists. And the prophecy is fulfilled time and again while the prophets get to claim that they were right all along—that the evil in the world can’t be solved by laws or regulations, so why bother attempting to change anything? The true problem in America isn’t gun violence, it’s hearts without God, right?

Hearts without God has been the “end times” battle cry of many fundamentalists, and it’s becoming very costly. Not just relating to gun violence in America and the 30 thousand lives that guns claim annually, but even… [Read more…] about Hearts Without God

Beyond the Letter of the Law

by Bruce H. Joffe in Christian Issues

Chief Justice Roberts, one of the four justices who voted against expanding marriage rights to all people, expressed in his dissent that, while he thought marriage equality might be a good thing for society, he didn’t see any Constitutional right to it.

A few days later, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, writing in Time magazine, rejected the Chief Justice’s assertion, saying that Roberts was wrong, that the Constitution “had everything to do with it.”

I guess it all depends on one’s perspective.

Some on the Supreme Court believe it’s their responsibility to uphold the words of the Constitution al pie de la letra—according to the letter of the law, ensuring that what was written centuries ago doesn’t change with the times.

Others, however, believe that the words written when our Constitution was ratified are meant to be signposts and guidelines; it’s not the words that are important, but their meaning and intent.

So, interpreting an age-old document in the light of changing norms and realities becomes paramount in the Supreme Court’s responsibilities.

For those of us reared in Judeo-Christian traditions, it’s a familiar dilemma, since we must ask ourselves the same questions about what’s written in the Bible.

Do we follow the letter of the law or the spirit of the law?

“Of all the things that grieve us, perhaps what’s been most difficult is seeing some of our friends, family members and folks we’ve sat next to in church giving their hearty… [Read more…] about Beyond the Letter of the Law

Inerrancy: Still Hazy After All These Years

by Randal Rauser in Christian Issues

I grew up in a Pentecostal fundagelical church where we prided ourselves on taking Scripture seriously. That meant, among other things, a commitment to literal interpretation. From a literal six days of creation to a literal thousand year millennium, we took Scripture in what we believed to be the natural sense. And that meant reading it, ahem, like a newspaper.

Literal interpretation aside, if there was one doctrine that demonstrated our commitment to Scripture, it was biblical inerrancy. We thought of the Bible as a repository of propositions describing God and our relationship with him. And inerrancy promised that every one of those propositions was a fact. Since we imagined doctrine to consist of simple deduction from the Bible, inerrancy thereby provided confidence in the facts of Christian doctrine from creation to new creation.

Our bold and clear doctrine of inerrancy contrasted with the weak and woolly liberal descriptions of biblical authority. More than once I heard my fellow fundagelical Christians joke that trying to get a liberal clear on the inspiration and authority of the Bible was about as easy as nailing Jell-O to a wall.

That’s the way I used to see things. However, today I view matters very differently. Indeed, it now seems to me that if any view of Scripture is liable to the charge of Jell-O nailed to the wall, it is—ironically enough—that of inerrancy itself. Indeed, once we… [Read more…] about Inerrancy: Still Hazy After All These Years

Aren’t people just atheists because they don’t want to obey God?

by Tim Burns in Christian Issues

“A man or woman rejects God neither because of intellectual demands nor because of the paucity of evidence. One rejects God because of a moral resistance that refuses to admit one’s need for God.”—Ravi Zacharias, The Real Face of Atheism, page 155

I see three fundamental problems with this argument. The first is the use of generalized language. When Christians make this argument, I almost never hear them saying, “some atheists just reject God because they want an excuse to sin.” If they did say that, I don’t think I would have any major problem with this. After all, every position or stance has its share of people who believe in it for irrational reasons. I’m not familiar with any atheists who only reject God because they want to avoid moral accountability, but I don’t doubt that there are a few out there. So if the claim was just that “some atheists” do this, I wouldn’t be able to disagree.

But that’s not the claim. The accusation is universally applied, without any exceptions being offered. The way I parse the wording in that Ravi Zacharias quote, the tacit implication is that every single atheist in the entire history of the world only rejected God out of moral resistance. Rationally speaking, that’s a fairly untenable position to hold, because it would only take a single example to prove that proposition false. Personally, I know myself to be just such an example.

Not only do I know that I didn’t reject God out of moral resistance,… [Read more…] about Aren’t people just atheists because they don’t want to obey God?

On Love and Bakeries

by Maxwell Grant in Christian Issues

What is it with love and bakeries right now?

According to the Washington Post, earlier this month the Food and Drug Administration sent a formal letter of warning to a Massachusetts bakery about a series of violations, one of which was with regard to the labeling of the bakery’s famous granola.

Apparently, if you look at the side label of the ingredients, in addition to oats and almonds and brown sugar and stuff, the folks at the bakery have also listed “love.”

According to the Post, “the ‘ingredient’ was a nod to the passion bakers put into their product and a wink to the fans of the snack.”

Well, that was all a little too cute to the FDA, which apparently has regulations about such things, and so they warned the bakery that “love” was considered “intervening material” on a list of ingredients, and needs to go.

From now on, if “love” is going to be an ingredient, it’s going to have to be a secret one.

So that has to qualify as the other big story about love and bakeries this season.

You’ve probably already heard of the biggest one.

This term, the US Supreme Court has agreed to hear Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, a case that is also, in its own way, about love—specifically, the right of a bakery to deny a customer service for religious reasons, namely, the baker’s faith-based objections to same-sex marriage.

The baker argues that his cakes are a form of expression, and that… [Read more…] about On Love and Bakeries