Protestants aren’t very good at dealing with difficult social/ethical issues. Roman Catholics, while they have their own problems, are much better at this. Why? They have an extensive body of theological and ethical teaching produced for the church and adopted by the church. In my own Methodist world, we have nothing really like this. We…
I see this more and more often. Faith is no longer something we share among a community of believers, but a possession in the hands of an individual who will shape it to his or her liking. Perhaps this is the religious outworking of “liquid modernity,” a culture in which structures change so quickly that…
Many Christians today simply have no functional doctrine of Scripture. We may affirm that Scripture is “inspired” or “the word of God,” but we don’t fill these terms up with very much content. Some Protestant traditions affirm biblical inerrancy. Roman Catholics have a well-developed set of doctrinal statements on Scripture. For many of us in…
I was recently invited to participate in a dialogue on the authority of Scripture at United Theological Seminary with friend, Rev. Dr. Mike Slaughter. We were each given fifteen minutes to talk about how we conceive of Scripture’s authority. The following is the basic text of my presentation. I’ve edited it a bit to make…
Easter is less than a week away, and in this new podcast, Scott, Maggie, and I talk about what it means to say that Christ is risen. We also get into what it means to talk about our own resurrection. After all, that is the Christian hope: the resurrection of the body, as part of…
I really have had no desire to re-enter public debate regarding the UMC. In fact, I have had a great desire not to do so. For the most part, I think the die has been cast. The 2019 General Conference will bring some form of “restructuring” that will allow parties with divergent views to live…
Lately I have been thinking a lot about the matter of “alternative facts.” While it hasn’t been named in exactly this way before, the phenomenon of “alternative facts” is nothing new. People have always attempted to shape the interpretation of the world around them to their own advantage. The rise of postmodernity and deconstructionism has…
When properly interpreted, the General Rules of the United Societies provide helpful guidance for the Christian life. According to these rules, one should: Do no harm. Do good. Attend upon all the ordinances of God. The first two of these are fairly self-explanatory. By the last, Wesley meant: The public worship of God The ministry of the…
The fundamentalist reader and the modern biblical scholar using historico-critical methods are the obverse and reverse of the same coin. They are concerned with the Bible as fact, as real history; so the focus is on the truth behind the text, the exact reference of the words and narratives. Compared with early Christian interpretation, this…
How do we reckon with passages of the Bible that seem inconsistent with the way Christ wishes us to behave and think? In what ways does the Bible reflect the divine will, and in what ways does it bear the marks of fallen humanity? What are we to think when the Bible offers us two…