Unfundamentalist

Above All, Love

Upon a Midnight

by Jill Crainshaw in Poetry

This guest post was written by Jill Crainshaw and was first shared by Wake Forest University School of Divinity.

Many storekeepers decked their halls weeks ago to prepare the way for Christmas shopping. Congregational leaders have been working for weeks to craft worship scripts for the Advent season of expectation that begins this year the Sunday after Thanksgiving.

Over the next month in our worship, we will wait, anticipate, expect. We will recall ancient Israel’s mournful longing as we sing “O come, O come Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel.” We will imagine Mary expecting the birth of her unexpected child.

During Advent, we wait. We wait in hope, perhaps, but we wait. That is what Advent is and has been for centuries—a season of anticipating Jesus’ arrival.

But right now? All of creation groans in these pre-Advent days, wounded by violence and death in Paris, Beirut, and other places across the globe, and I am restless for good tidings in the midst of despair. I am restless for justice. I am restless for weary refugees to find a place to rest. I am restless for God to rip open the heavens and come down sooner rather than later. I am restless for Jesus to come early this year, because I fear that some people and places in our world cannot wait much longer for help and healing to arrive.

How ironic that in a society where we pipe in Christmas shopping songs almost before the sun has set on Halloween, we struggle to offer concrete gifts of life again in… [Read more…] about Upon a Midnight

There Is No "Judeo-Christian Tradition"

by Don M. Burrows in Christian History

View image | gettyimages.com
 

Ohio Governor John Kasich, whose bid for the presidency appears to be running on fumes, announced earlier this week that the U.S. should develop a federal agency to export “Judeo-Christian values.”

No surprise there. Most Republican candidates have worked to appeal to religious conservatives, and using the buzz phrase “Judeo-Christian” is a tried and true way to do it. But in point of fact, there really is no “Judeo-Christian tradition.” Said tradition is nothing but a Cold War invention that elides thousands of years of history in the service of identity politics.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not suggesting there are no shared values between Christians and Jews. There are. But there are shared values between Christians and people of all religions, between Jews and people of all religions, and between both Christians and Jews and those of no religion. The “Judeo-Christian” religion has only ever existed as a way for some religious people to define themselves against all others.

Lots of people throw around the phrase “Judeo-Christian,” and many do so with good intentions: as a way to acknowledge the shared texts and origins of the two faiths. But nobody spoke of a “Judeo-Christian tradition” until quite recently. Indeed, the word does not even show up in the Oxford English Dictionary until 1899.

If you know any amount of Christian history, or have merely read the New Testament, you know that anti-Jewish animosity has been an unfortunate part… [Read more…] about There Is No "Judeo-Christian Tradition"

Must Christians Believe in a Second Coming?

by Chuck Queen in Christian Issues

The physical, bodily return of Jesus Christ was declared one of the five essential doctrines of Christian belief by the Conference of Conservative Protestants that met in Niagara Falls in 1895 (the other four doctrines were biblical inerrancy, the virgin birth, the divinity of Jesus, and substitutionary atonement). These five beliefs formed the foundation Christian fundamentalism and remain central tenets of modern evangelicalism.

Most Christians today, including many progressive Christians, anticipate some kind of divine intervention to close human history as we know it and to begin something that looks very different from how life on planet earth looks now. Many of the early Christians connected the climax of this present age with the revelation of the resurrected Christ from heaven, which would result in the resurrection of all humanity. Paul called this Christ’s “coming” (see 1 Cor. 15:21-24, 1 Thess. 4:12-18).

These early Christians also confidently believed that this “coming” (Greek, parousia) would happen soon. For example, Paul told the unmarried in the church at Corinth it would be best if they stayed unmarried because the world they knew was about to end (see 1 Cor. 7:25-31). In Jesus’ discourse on the coming of the Son of Man, he said, “Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place” (Mark 13:30). Of course, that generation did indeed pass away and the coming of the Son of Man did not occur — and here we are… [Read more…] about Must Christians Believe in a Second Coming?

Kicking the Samaritan: Christianity and the Anti-Muslim Backlash

by Don M. Burrows in Christian Issues, Current Events, Islam

View image | gettyimages.com

 

By now, the anti-Muslim backlash we witness after every fresh terror attack is not all that surprising. Bigots will be bigots, and they are not known for complexity or nuance in the face of … well, anything.

What makes it more unsettling this time is that while in decades past the top Republican in the country has denounced Islamophobia, this time around Republican candidates for the presidency have fallen over themselves to be ever more hateful toward Muslims.

A full 23 governors (most of them Republicans) announced on Monday that they would not welcome Syrian refugees into their borders, while Jeb Bush noticeably departed from his brother’s more measured words and declared that we should screen people by religion – accepting only Christian refugees and not Muslim ones into America.

As if that weren’t bad enough, the Republican front-runner, Donald Trump, then mused on national television that we should look at shutting down mosques.

All of this from the party of “religious freedom.”

We could wax on about how hypocritical they are for thinking religious freedom means actively discriminating against gays or denying your employees birth control, as opposed to, you know, shutting down houses of worship. But their mentality seems far darker than mere hypocrisy.

Need it even be said in this day and age? To turn one’s back on refugees is the epitome of anti-Christian action.

When Jesus was asked what one must do to attain eternal life… [Read more…] about Kicking the Samaritan: Christianity and the Anti-Muslim Backlash

How the Traditional Doctrine of Hell Undermines Christian Character

by Randal Rauser in Christian Issues

Last year I interviewed Robin Parry, author of the book The Evangelical Universalist (which he wrote under the pseudonym “Gregory MacDonald”). During the interview, Robin observed that Christians should want universalism to be true. Indeed, he put the point rather provocatively when he declared,
“You’d have to be a psychopath not to want [universalism] to be true.”
Psychopath?! That’s mighty strong language, isn’t it? But as provocative as that statement might sound, Parry pointed out that Calvinist philosopher Paul Helm agrees on the main point: Christians should want universalism to be true.

If you want to see folk damned, there is something wrong with you

Nor is Helm the only defender of eternal conscious torment to make this point. With the publication of Knowing God in 1973, J.I. Packer quickly established himself as one of the foremost conservative Calvinist theologians and a staunch defender of doctrines like penal substitution and eternal conscious torment. As conservative as he is, even Packer makes the following declaration: “If you want to see folk damned, there is something wrong with you!” (Revelations of the Cross (Hendrickson, 1998), 163).

If, as Packer suggests, you shouldn’t want to see anybody damned, then it logically follows that you should want to see them all saved. And wanting to see all people saved entails wanting universalism to be true.

This leaves us with an interesting… [Read more…] about How the Traditional Doctrine of Hell Undermines Christian Character

It's All About How We See

by Chuck Queen in Christian Spirituality

See what you see. This is the meaning of a Jesus saying in the Gospel of Thomas,
Jesus said, “Know what is in front of your face, and what is hidden from you will be disclosed to you. For there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed” (Logion 5, trans. by Marvin Meyer).
Not long ago I went into the kitchen to fix a piece of toast for breakfast. I opened the pantry door and looked in the basket where we keep the bread. No bread. So I looked around in the pantry. Couldn’t find it. I opened the cabinet where we keep the cereal. It wasn’t there. So I did what many people do. I blamed someone. I’m thinking, “Ok, where did my wife put the bread?” In the meanwhile I cracked my boiled egg, peeled it, and as I tossed the last piece of shell in the trash, I glanced around in the pantry one more time and guess what? There was the bread. Guess where it was? In the basket where it was supposed to be. So how did I miss it? How did I not see what I was obviously looking at it?

While this may be a rare kind of experience in the physical world, in the spiritual world it happens all the time. We tend to see reality as we are, not as it really is.

Consider how two Christians can read the same biblical text and interpret it not only in different ways, but opposite ways. We all know how the Bible has been used to support slavery, violence, patriarchy, oppression, elitism, nationalism, bigotry, etc.

In the hands of an unenlightened, unloving person even the most… [Read more…] about It's All About How We See

God Still Wishes He Were Dead: A Scene-By-Scene Analysis of the God's Not Dead 2 Trailer

by Don M. Burrows in Movie Reviews

I’ve been avidly consuming any and all speculation and analysis of the trailers for the upcoming “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” and it struck me that we should do our own scene-by-scene analysis of the latest trailer to drop for another blockbuster sequel. I’m referring, of course, to the no-doubt highly anticipated sequel to 2014’s “God’s Not Dead.”

As I wrote in my review of that horrid film, “God’s Not Dead” was a narrative fantasy of conservative evangelical projection. Non-Christians were bad. Academics and universities were bad. But atheists were especially bad. And good Christians have to rise up to defend their faith when they are confronted with a philosophy professor who seems more interested in science than philosophy (I have to agree there – that would definitely go on my student evaluation).

It’s hard to imagine a story even more divorced from reality than “God’s Not Dead” — hard, that is, until one sees the new trailer for “God’s Not Dead 2”:

https://youtu.be/Fq6lG4GeEMI

First off, what’s with the lame title? Most sequels nowadays don’t just go with numbers. Why not the obvious “God’s Still Not Dead” with maybe an editing caret adding “still”? Or better yet – “God’s Not Deader” or maybe “God’s Not Dead – Not Dead Harder”?

Whatever the title, the sequel appears to be connected to the first film only by way of sharing a (purely) fictional universe. But this time, the hero is a school teacher in a plot so impossible it should really be classed as speculative… [Read more…] about God Still Wishes He Were Dead: A Scene-By-Scene Analysis of the God's Not Dead 2 Trailer

A Progressive Baptism on the Banks of the Chicago River

by Christian Chiakulas in Christian Spirituality

Recently, on an almost unreasonably beautiful November day, I baptized my daughter in the Chicago River. Certain elements of my extended family had been nagging me throughout my daughter’s first year on planet Earth to do so, despite my lack of a formal denomination, “In case anything happens.”

What they meant could not be clearer. They were afraid that if some terrible accident befell my daughter and she passed away, she would be consigned to hell or purgatory because of her lack of baptism.

Growing up and into my teens I had thought of baptism as a sort of insurance policy; babies are too young to accept Jesus as their savior, so baptism is a way to do it for them – just in case.

I no longer think of baptism this way, mostly because I refuse to accept the notion of a God who would damn babies to hell (or purgatory) because they never had the chance for an old man to sprinkle water over their head. Consequently I did not plan at first to even bother with baptizing my daughter.

But still, something about it nagged at me. One of the things we can be most sure of about Jesus is that he was baptized by John before the beginning of his own ministry. If it was good enough for Jesus, who am I to argue?

Of course, all the doctrine about hell and purgatory is post-Biblical, post-Jesus. What did baptism actually mean to Jesus, to John?

Mark (the earliest gospel) says, almost at the very beginning of his story, “John appeared baptizing in the wilderness and proclaiming a baptism… [Read more…] about A Progressive Baptism on the Banks of the Chicago River

Jesus-Deniers Still Don’t Get It

by Don M. Burrows in Christian Issues

Despite what New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman calls a “cottage industry” promoting the claim that Jesus of Nazareth never existed, the existence of a guy by that name in first century Palestine who was crucified by the Romans remains a matter of historical consensus among ancient historians and philologists.

That is a fact. The consensus remains, because no evidence has surfaced to make the academy question the existence of Jesus any more than the many other minor figures of ancient history, despite the fact that like many of those other figures of history, Jesus’ biographers ascribed to him quasi-divine status and asserted that he performed a host of miracles.

Why does the mention of miracles and divine intervention fail to give us pause with respect to Jesus? Because the existence of the supernatural is taken for granted in antiquity, so source material lacking any mention of it at all is in fact quite scarce.

True, there are a few famous skeptics among the ancients, like the Greek elegist Xenophanes (sixth century BCE), the Latin poet Lucretius (first century BCE), and the Greek satirist Lucian (second century CE), but they are far from the majority, even among the educated elite who give us the written material from that epoch. Even outside of written sources, the art, architecture, and archaeology of the ancients (especially the sheer number of defixiones, or magical curse tablets) point to a world in which the supernatural was an everyday part of… [Read more…] about Jesus-Deniers Still Don’t Get It

Why I Pray

by in Christian Spirituality

I pray. I pray a lot, my first words upon waking as my feet touch down on the gray wool carpet. If I forget, I lift them up again, in a do-over of gratitude. Thank you. Thank you, God. At 50, I take no day for granted. Then I stumble into the hushed temple of morning where I worship alone, in silence, while my husband and two teens sleep, more devoted to the gods of the midnight hours.

Sometimes I pray while the hot water flows over earthy grounds in that first communion with coffee each day, my prayers held up like a shield against worry for my son and his math test, (let him do well); for my daughter in her evening soccer game, (keep her safe); for my husband’s therapy client whose name I can’t know, only that she didn’t want to live yesterday, on an autumn day as glorious as God.

I push the plunger on the French press, the resistance of water as familiar as my own around religion. Then I turn to look out the kitchen window at the silhouette of the tamarack tree, branches joined in the sky in a perpetual stance of prayer. I hold myself in stillness, in the fading vapors of my wishes turned words turned breath again before it goes, where? Where does it go, this improvised poetry of spirit that asks nothing of me, beyond belief?

Growing up, my sister and I were taught belief through the weekly mass, mostly tedious except when we stood and solemnly spoke, “Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name.” Words so easy that I felt a flicker of belonging to that… [Read more…] about Why I Pray