Unfundamentalist

Above All, Love

Southern Baptists, Racism, and Biblical Inerrancy

by Chuck Queen in Christian Issues

Writing in The Atlantic, Emma Green attempts (and does so quite admirably) to navigate the turbulent history of Southern Baptists’ previous support of racism to their now vocal opposition. She notes that since 1995 the SBC has been publicly repenting of its history of racial discrimination, which marks a decisive turn from the denomination’s beginnings when it “helped define the history of American racism.”

Southern Baptists who defended slavery and then later segregation appealed to an inerrant scripture for their justification. Ironically, when Green spoke with pastors and church leaders in Nashville, most cited scripture as their justification for opposing racism.

While Southern Baptists believe that scripture is “truth without any mixture of error” it is obvious that Southern Baptists do not read the Bible without any mixture of error. Southern Baptists, along with everyone else, read the Bible as fallible, error-prone human beings who are about as likely to get things wrong as right.

Green also observes how Southern Baptists read the text with an emphasis on the individual. She spoke with SBC African American pastor Thabiti Anyabwile, who said,

Most of my African American brothers and sisters, we’ve had a group experience. Our experience in this country has been defined first and foremost by this pigment that we share. So when we have these conversations about how to make progress, African Americans go to group experience pretty quickly. We speak in “we”.… [Read more…] about Southern Baptists, Racism, and Biblical Inerrancy

To Christians who support RFRA laws: Grow Up!

by Chuck Queen in Christian Issues

Are you as weary as I am in hearing all these well-to-do, materially prosperous and secure American Christians whining about being religiously persecuted because they cannot act on their exclusive theology in the marketplace and deny services to our LGBT sisters and brothers?

To all my financially secure, well-off persecuted Christian friends: Please, let it go. Give it up!

It doesn’t matter what your worldview is, or what your religious beliefs are: in the public arena, you have to treat everyone equally. This is not rocket science. It’s the best of our democracy.

Everyone seems to know this except sexists, racists, and conservative Christians (and maybe a few Supreme Court judges).

Besides, even if you do think same-sex marriage or partnership is wrong, shouldn’t you still welcome and accept everyone, the way Jesus did? He didn’t require prostitutes and tax collectors to stop doing what they were doing before he fed them and accepted them at the table.

“Come one and all,” said Jesus.

Shouldn’t Christians be saying, “Serve one and serve all”?

When the disciples argued with one another about who was the greatest, Jesus told them to stop acting like persons of power and prominence who liked to “lord” it over others; rather, they were to be servants of all (Mark 10:42-44).  

A contemporary application of Jesus’ teaching might be: “Certain persons in the world like to assert their power over those they do not like – denying them… [Read more…] about To Christians who support RFRA laws: Grow Up!

Last year's nest

by Jill Crainshaw in Christian Spirituality

I rescued an empty nest the other day. In the rain. I don’t know why I rescued the nest. No bird lives in it. It was last year’s nest.

I was in my car, pulling out of the driveway to head somewhere, when I saw the nest in the middle of the road in front of my house. Instead of driving by or driving over it, I stopped the car, stepped out into the springtime deluge, and hurried over to it, looking up and down the street for other cars (and for the eyes of curious neighbors) as I went.

The nest was beautiful, perfect in its construction, with a singular strand of sapphire yarn woven into its middle. I picked it up. It was fragile and soggy. And since I was now dripping from the rain and late for where I was headed, I laid the nest at the base of a tree in the sidewalk buffer and dashed back to my car.

Sometimes I think I spend far too much time rescuing last year’s nests. Perhaps we all do. How do we decide, after all, how much energy to give to preserving last year’s architectural delights, and how much to use building for this year and the future?

There is something to be said, I think, for the intricate magnificence of some of last year’s nests. Those nests held and hold precious, life-shaping memories. They nurtured possibilities and provided launching pads for nestlings’ first flights.

The nest reminded me of how, in Christian traditions, we are discovering again the ways in which early believers became community and worshiped together. Some of these discoveries serve… [Read more…] about Last year's nest

One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America

by in Book Reviews

Princeton history professor Kevin Kruse’s new book, One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (Basic Books, $29.99), engagingly traces the rise of the Christian Right as a political force in America.

Kruse explores how business interests of the 1930s fought back against the New Deal and, in an attempt to counteract government regulation and oversight, enlisted the aid of religion. This Christian libertarianism “linked capitalism and Christianity and, at the same time, likened the welfare state to godless paganism.”

That movement eventually mutated into something far more powerful. Kruse summarizes this development:

In their struggle against the New Deal, the business lobbies of the Depression era had allied themselves with conservative religious and cultural leaders and, in so doing, set in motion a new dynamic in American politics. The activism of Christian libertarians such as James Fifield and Abraham Vereide had sought to provide the right with its own brand of public religion that could challenge the Social Gospel of the left. But the rhetoric and rituals they created to topple the New Deal lived on long after their heyday, becoming a constant in American political life in the Eisenhower era and beyond.

Much of Kruse’s book centers around the “twin pillars of ceremonial deism,” embodied in the phrases “one nation under God” and “in God we trust.” Kruse traces the history of these mottos as they became central tenets of American… [Read more…] about One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America

This Is How Bigotry Dies (To Thunderous Tantrums)

by Don M. Burrows in Christian Issues

What is with conservatives quoting Star Wars so often in their political discourse?

I’m referring, of course, to the line in Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, where Natalie Portman’s character utters, in response to dictatorial powers being given to Chancellor Palpatine (the erstwhile Sith Lord), that “this is how liberty dies … to thunderous applause.”

I can’t tell you how often I’ve seen this applied with a straight face to President Obama’s democratic election, or his congressionally passed health-care mandate. Conservatives everywhere seem to think active-state liberalism is analogous to an intergalactic weakening of the representational monarchies of the Old Republic.

The latest to do so is (our favorite!) Albert Mohler, the Southern Baptist Convention’s resident pseudo-intellectual. I’ve written about Mohler before. Many times. So I’ve been anxiously awaiting his response to the kerfuffle in Indiana over that state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and this week, he didn’t disappoint.

Mohler, in a post titled “This is How Religious Liberty Dies,” complains about the “secular left,” a frequent boogeyman of right-wing nightmares, which sunk Indiana’s RFRA after it was revealed that it could be used to green-light discrimination against LGBT folks.

Mohler indicts the law’s detractors for misconstruing it, all the while leaving his readers under the mistaken impression that the Indiana law is simply a mirror to the federal one signed by Bill… [Read more…] about This Is How Bigotry Dies (To Thunderous Tantrums)

Jesus, Executed Terrorist

by Don M. Burrows in Christian History

Today is Good Friday, the day on which Christians mark the occasion of Jesus’ crucifixion. The precise day and time varies depending on which Gospel you read, but according to the historical methodologies accepted by scholars of the ancient world, there is perhaps no event that more certainly occurred in antiquity.

It is hard to emphasize just how striking a situation early Christians were in, owing to the crucifixion of their founder. The cross today is almost universally recognized as a symbol for Christianity, but that was certainly not the case in the first century, nor even in the first few centuries after Jesus died.

Scholars have long seen the crucifixion of Jesus as highly probable historically, because crucifixion was such a public, shameful, and politically charged method of execution. This is not, as the “criterion of embarrassment” sees it, something that a group of people would make up. As a scholar of ancient Rome, I have to agree: I cannot imagine a scenario more fraught with problems than one in which your chief figurehead had been crucified, and it seems clear from much of Christian literature, from the Gospels themselves onward, that Christians were very concerned about the image this portrayed and significantly invested in making Jesus appear not at all worthy of any such execution.

Whether one thinks he was, in fact, worthy of execution – from the standpoint of the Romans, of course – typically has more to do with one’s politics and theology.… [Read more…] about Jesus, Executed Terrorist

Longing for Grace

by in Christian Spirituality

I won’t be in church on Easter, but I wish I could be.

If you’d asked what I was doing inside a megachurch that sunny Sunday morning, I wouldn’t have had a clue. I’d left my children with their dad, intending to go home and work, maybe take a walk. But after a few minutes alone in the car a familiar ache returned, the one that took over whenever busyness yielded to the backdrop of my impending divorce.

I’d driven past suburban Boston’s Grace Chapel a hundred times. That day, I stopped. Inside, a band played and a woman sang lyrics of yearning and forgiveness. People were swaying, arms upstretched. A man near the front was crying and soon so was I, unsure what I was witnessing, much less feeling. Was it grief or joy, or something else? In my loss, I felt a sense of comfort, but more: awe and encompassing love, unlike anything I’d experienced in other spiritual contexts.

It was powerful enough to bring me back again and again and again. For years, I found Grace a place of deep caring and hope—and yet a place where I don’t fit. It wasn’t for lack of trying. For months after that first visit, I went there almost every Sunday. I attended a divorce support group, and read the Bible at night after my kids were asleep. Grace was a gentler place than I’d imagined from stereotypes I’d absorbed as a left-leaning New Englander. I met mostly whole and happy people there, people who seemed remarkably free to focus on the world beyond themselves. Belief in Jesus did… [Read more…] about Longing for Grace

The Political Punch Behind Christianity’s Favorite Prayer

by Don M. Burrows in Christian History

I love the Lord’s Prayer.

The translation of it now universally recited in the English-speaking world holds a poetic, lilting quality that makes its recitation a cathartic ritual even if one holds sincere doubts about its specific words.

But what exactly are those words?

Many Christians, if not most, have experienced the embarrassment of rehearsing aloud – and it always feels super loud, right? – the wrong choice of “debts” or “trespasses” when the service at a new church turns to the Lord’s Prayer, as it so often does. It always feels as though – even if you managed to discreetly escape the Visitor’s Sticker they wanted to put on your lapel – you have just declared in no uncertain terms that you are an outsider.

Yet despite this common experience, few perhaps realize that this confusion between debts and trespasses reflects an inconsistency in the New Testament itself. It’s Luke – and Luke alone – who records that Jesus instructed us to pray to God to “forgive us our sins,” or ἁμαρτίαι (hamartiai), the word we translate as “trespasses.” Yet he does not use the same word for what we are to do for others. That word remains “debtors” (ὀφείλοντι, opheilonti) in much the same way Matthew records that we are to forgive the “debts” (ὀφειλέταις, opheiletais) owed to us.

So why do so many churches use “trespasses” in both cases? Clearly it’s more poetic for them to be in parallel, even if they never appear that way in the New Testament, and… [Read more…] about The Political Punch Behind Christianity’s Favorite Prayer

How (and why) Adam and Eve evolved

by in Book Reviews

Adam, Eve, a garden, a snake, an apple. Images that pervade Western culture. Images viewed by many as mere myth and by others as absolute truth.

What really happened at the dawn of human existence? Were Adam and Eve real people? Was there really a Garden of Eden? Did sin really enter the world through a piece of fruit?

Do Christians really have to believe all this stuff, even when science seems to point in a different direction?

In his forthcoming book The Lost World of Adam and Eve: Genesis 2-3 and the Human Origins Debate (IVP Academic, $17) Wheaton College Old Testament Professor John Walton sets out to address these questions by exploring what the Bible says (and doesn’t say) about the origins of humanity.

Walton rejects the idea that there is “an essential, inherent conflict between the claims of the Bible and the current scientific consensus about human origins.” From his perspective,
The perceived threat posed by the current consensus about human origins is overblown. That consensus accepts the principles of common ancestry and evolutionary theory as the explanation for the existence of all life. … regardless of whether the scientific conclusions stand the test of time or not, they pose no threat to biblical belief.
Walton’s understanding of Genesis includes these core propositions:

That Genesis 1 is an account of functional, not material origins. It describes God ordering the cosmos into a sacred space, but has virtually nothing to say about the… [Read more…] about How (and why) Adam and Eve evolved

Can gentleness save evangelical apologetics?

by in Book Reviews

“Apologetics itself has become a problem. It has become a problem in both its content and its spirit.” So says the late Dallas Willard in a new book about apologetics, The Allure of Gentleness: Defending the Faith in the Manner of Jesus, (HarperOne, $26.99).

In a series of talks that were compiled and edited by Willard’s daughter Rebecca Willard Heatley, Willard argues for an approach to Christian apologetics that isn’t solely based on argument, evidence and reason, but also is characterized by gentleness.

He seeks to temper the often combative and acerbic nature of apologetic discourse with a humble, generous, open and loving approach, wisely realizing that apologetic arguments “will all be wasted unless the allure of gentleness pervades all that we do.”

Willard covers much of the usual apologetic ground, discussing knowledge, truth, reason, faith, doubt, God’s existence, divine hiddenness, hell, cosmology and the problems of pain and evil. But, though framed by a good intent, Willard’s arguments are often cut from the same well-worn cloth of most modern evangelical apologetics.

Despite setting out to correct Christian apologetic’s problems of content and spirit, Willard’s approach often perpetuates them. For example, while discussing Christian ethics, Willard says that

Richard Robinson was one of the leading atheist philosophers during the latter part of the twentieth century. He died in 1996, and he knows better now … [emphasis… [Read more…] about Can gentleness save evangelical apologetics?