Christianity for the Next 1000 Years: 95 Thesis

In the beginning, God created skies and earth.

    I hope my post today finds you well.  Welcome back.  

In 1517 Martin Luther wrote his 95 Thesis against abuses he saw in the Roman Catholic Church.  He nailed them onto the door of the All Saints Church in Wittenberg, Germany.

    It was a Protestant Declaration of Independence.  Since we Baptists love our independence from the rest of y'all brothers and sisters, and from each other, I thought, just for fun, that I would write my own 95 Thesis.  Below is the first twenty-six.

1.       All Christians are brothers and sisters in Christ. They should love each other as family members.  

2.      The majority of Christians from loners to every imaginable denomination or cult are good, decent people.  The ones who are not, who are mean and violent, are no different than the worst people in the world.

3.      Mean and violent Christians are woefully misguided, yet God loves them.

4.      Christians are commanded to love the worst people in the world. 

5.      Like a family all Christians argue among themselves. 

6.      To grow as a Christian is the responsibility of every individual. 

7.      To grow as a Christian means to grow perfect in love.

8.      To grow as a Christian means to take the responsibility of one’s edification upon one self. 

9.      Modern Biblical scholarship is more honest and ongoing than dogmatic Biblical scholasticism.  The latter perpetuates conclusions reached by less well equipped minds from the past.

10.  It is useful for Christians to learn how the Bible was put together.  It is crucial that Christians who are immersed in dogmatic Biblical scholasticism compare it to what modern Biblical scholarship has discovered.

11.   All Christians should learn church history, the history of theology, and what other faiths believe in order to see how diverse and rich is the massive vault of Christian media and thought. 

12.  Christians who ignore Church History are doomed to repeat it.  They will never enjoy the liberty of making up their own minds about the nature of God.

13.  Just as no child’s relationship with a parent is exactly the same, no Christian’s relationship to God is the same.  That includes perception as well.

14.  Doctrine should be personal and celebrated among like minded Christians. 

15.  Arguments over doctrine are futile like arguments over astrology or poetry.

16.  The study of doctrine is fascinating.  Doctrine is Christian thought.  Not all doctrines are created equal or sensible and some truly are more equal than others without being very sensible at all.

17.  It is more important to love than to have so-called right doctrine.

18.  The trinitarian doctrine is a wonderful symbol for relating God to the soul.  It is not God’s physiological structure.

19.  God is the ground of Being-itself, the power of being, the answer to the question of why there is something and not nothing.  

20.  Squeezing God into a trinity is like squeezing all the wool in the world into three thimbles.

21.  Many Christians relate to God as a parent who is the underlying being of God, a son who is the logic of God, and a spirit who is the presence of God in our lives.

22.  Orthodoxy is someone’s doctrinal presuppositions and statements that have been accepted by enough people willing to use power to enforce it. 

23.  When a doctrine has to be coerced, it is an idol and should be recognized as such.

24.  Orthodoxy relies on literacy to survive.  The fixedness of text makes orthodoxy possible for it creates the illusion of authority.  Having an army to enforce it also helps.

25.  Once orthodox concepts are written down, they can be questioned and eventually discarded.  A text can be a two edged sword that turns upon itself when it is compared with other texts by new generations of scholars.

    26.  Often orthodoxy is based on absurd reasoning.  For example, the father of distinguishing between heresy and orthodoxy, Irenaeus, claimed there should be four gospels because there are four winds.  Apparently, Irenaeus did not know about pressure gradient force. 

Christianity for the Next 1000 Years: Church Changes

In the beginning, God created skies and earth.

Welcome back.  I pray you are well and you return here because this word from me gives you comfort in your life journey.  I have been writing about changes I see in church.

I think it’s gospel, that is, “good news,” that church is changing.  When we see the Pope washing women’s’ feet and declaring God’s love, that is a sign of the coming God-rule. 

An evangelical professor is kicked out of seminary because he does not believe a God of love would create a hell.  That is gospel.  When Marcus Borg says that it is the nature of God that God is more humane to us than we are to each other, that is gospel.  When our country moves away from second class citizenship for any group of Americans, that is gospel.  When Syrians stop killing one another, that is gospel. 

I see intimations of an emerging Christianity for the next one thousand years.  That is the Christianity we should have seen from every single Christian who ever lived in the past.

If history had been filled with such Christians, that is, men and women who love, then our species could have turned its attention to science instead of war and healing instead of power. 

We could have gone to Mars instead of Vietnam.  We might have cured Alzheimer’s Disease instead of manufacturing napalm.  We could have waged a war on poverty instead of people.

If there had been such Christians who love, there would be no argument from adherents of other religions about bloody Christians entering their lands in order to conquer, or worse, wipe them out.  We would be welcomed for where ever we are lives are nurtured.

If there had been such Christians who love, doctrine would have bowed to service.  God’s rule would have created a more just and civilized world.  Christians would not have murdered each other. 

Catholics and Protestants who murdered each other would have lived.  Thomas More could have died a natural death.  Joan of Arc could have led a church instead of an army.  

      Servetus would not have been burned at the stake.  Copernicus could have published his writings while he was alive.  Galileo would never have been under house arrest.  Darwin could have loved God and explained natural selection.  

      The only crusades would have been mass attempts to reach out to Muslims in their time of need.  The only conversion for Muslims and any other adherent of any other religion would be to a loving God by any other name.  

If bread and fish had been the weapons of the church, the theological conversation among men and women that clamored in the past would not have resulted in death and hatred.

I see signs that the Christianity that endures is coming.  It is all good.  I would love to live a thousand years just to learn what becomes of it.

Thanks for visiting.  I hope to see you here tomorrow.  Blessings…

Christianity for the Next 1000 Years: Church Changes

In the beginning, God created skies and earth.

         Welcome.  Greetings.  I hope you are well today.  I hope my words help you celebrate what is wondrous about our lives as God people.

          I want to share about the time I first heard a woman preach from the pulpit. 

          I, of course, already knew it happened.  I had attended my church for a few weeks over a ten month period. I knew the church’s associate pastor was a woman who preached from time to time.

          Two years earlier, I had heard a January Adventure compact disc recording of Barbara Brown Taylor preaching.  I wish I had been among the two other Baptists who attended that service.  She was introduced as one of the ten best preachers in the world.  I marveled if that were true then preaching had vastly improved over the decades. 

          I met a woman who presided over a wedding.  She was an Episcopalian priest.  We chatted about theology and how the church was changing.  That was in Alabama about five years ago.

          I had heard a Pentecostal woman preach on the radio for a little while.  I did not listen very long.  I find emotionalism utterly unconvincing and not edifying.

          So I knew women were preachers.  I just had never actually sat in a church and heard a sister deliver a sermon.  

          The first time I heard a woman preach happened a few weeks ago.  I sat on a cushioned pew (another wonderful change by the way) and reveled in the epiphany. 

          During her sermon, as I listened, and heard not a thundering emotional male voice or a trickling reasonable male voice, but a woman’s quiet loving voice, I thought church was truly changing into what it was intended to be.

         The preacher was a petite young woman with short blonde hair and eyes bluer than any European portrait of Christ.  Her Southern dialect lent a musical lilt to her speech.  She preached about serving the god whom we want God to be or serving the God who is God.  It was good.

         During the Passport mission trip, I heard a woman preach every day.  Again, I did not hear the homiletic roar or drone my ear had been accustomed to hear.  She preached more like a river, than a storm.  Her sermons were fascinating, and I enjoyed each one.

         However, if I had been her professor, I would have urged her to brush up on her pluperfect tenses.  I say this for anyone who preaches.  Bad grammar is as distracting as sloppy thinking. 

          Of course, I understand that some preachers parade their bad grammar as if to say that sounding as illiterate as the fishermen Jesus called to discipleship makes them a special messenger of god. 

          That may be true or not.  I can accept any brother or sister who believes just about anything.  Indeed, at times vernacular language juices up a sermon, but I imagine Jesus spoke perfect English.  Doesn't everybody?

          The preacher at Passport always began her homily with a personal story that tied into the theme of her message.  In twenty minutes her message unfolded like a perfect day.  It was truly moving, each one, and had what a church-goer would identify as being the Spirit of Christ filling her message to overflowing.  With my near perfect grammar, I would have to work very hard to preach as well as she.  It was good.

          I think about Jonathan Edwards’ dreadful sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” with its blunt doctrine about a god who hates us.  His homily was the antipode of the sermons I heard at PassPort. 

          At least his grammar was impeccable. 

          Thanks for visiting.  I hope to see you here again. Blessings…

         

Christianity for the Next 1000 Years: Another Rip Rant

In the beginning, God created skies and earth.

Greetings.  Welcome back.  Let me share some more remarkable changes that I see now that I’m back in church.

I am a lot like Rip van Winkle.  Comparing me to Rip van Winkle is no exercise in bombastic arrogance.  Rip despised manual labor.  Although Rip was well liked by just about everyone in town, his wife fussed at him a lot.  More a dreamer than a doer was good old Rip van Winkle. 

Church, such as it has been in my life, seems like a dream from which I awakened.  I have returned older, indeed; wiser, I hope; unchanged in wanting a world where love, justice, peace, and knowledge reign; and always wishing I had the time for taking naps.

Such marvelous changes, I have noted.  I heard a sister preach from the pulpit a few weeks ago.  She preached as well as any man.  She was an ordained Baptist minister.  When I went to seminary in 1982 women were earning their MDivs while many of their classmates were arguing against their ordination—myself being one of the people arguing for women’s ordination. 

I was the only Tennessee Baptist at Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary.  Most of the others were from Texas and other Western States.  With few exceptions among my Texas brothers, they were fundamentalists.  Did they feel besieged within a different kind of Alamo? 

They grumbled when they had to read Perrin’s Introduction to the New Testament.  Many did not like to hear that Paul never mentioned Miriam’s virgin birth even though he wrote about Jesus forty years before the writer called Mark wrote the first gospel.

The walls of orthodoxy have always been hard pressed by science.  Modern Biblical scholarship undercuts the superstitious arrogance of fundamentalism and makes us humble. 

For many of my seminary siblings, it was their first exposure to the primacy of Mark and Quelle in synoptic gospel studies.  I had already taken Jewish and Christian Bible in the religion department of a secular university.  I had already worked through much of the pain that comes from having a bastion besieged and broken.

Probably not as bad as all that.  Everyone I met in seminary could have been a good friend had we stayed in the same town.  The Baptist church had changed already, and we didn't know it.  A lot of women, some divorced and some looking for husbands among the men there looking for wives, were earning degrees and were eager to say they wanted to be ordained and to be pastors.

I wondered if the men who resisted the idea of a woman being ordained did so because some women were better preachers or because every one woman who is a pastor means one man who is not. 

The objection based on Bible verses seemed silly to me.  By the time I attended seminary I was well past the enchanting idea that the Bible was one magical book without a single error. 

Thirty years later, I heard a woman preach for the very first time from a pulpit.  It was an epiphany for me.  Next time, I want to share what I saw.

Thanks for visiting.  I hope your day is peaceful and joyful.  Please come back.  Blessings…

           

Christianity for the Next 1000 Years: Rip Returns

                        In the beginning, God created skies and earth.

          Welcome back.  Below is some more new stuff I have seen in church since returning from my thirty year hiatus.

         When Rip Van Winkle awakened his old flintlock laid beside him.  It had rusted over twenty years.  Surely, in two decades, there were new technologies that he would discover.

          I see many changes after three decades.   My church has a web site.  I can go there for announcements.  I remember church bulletins from the sixties and seventies were created with a printing device not much more advanced than the one Guttenberg used.  It was called mimeograph.  It was not that good, but the web site is great.

          To be honest, I joined my church twice:  once after the service last week and then today on Facebook.  There is also Twitter.  Those changes are huge.  They are good. 

          When I attended church, the Great Commission was the big event.  God just wanted to save souls so they would go to heaven so witnessing was vastly more important than helping people.  

          Churches today really want to help poor people.  Since so many Americans prefer a government that no longer cares to give its citizens a fair deal, a helping hand, and a safety net, it has become more imperative for churches to step it up to minister to those among us who need help.

          That’s another change too.  The mood of the country has changed from electing a government that helps poor people to electing a government that does not.  There was a time when our government did something that ancient Christians could only dream about:  they fed, clothed, and housed more people than any large aggregate of churches combined. 

        In thirty years, that one change is not good.

       Thanks for visiting me.  I hope my words are meaningful.  Tomorrow I will write about more changes.  It will be nice to share with you.  Blessings…

Christianity for the Next 1000 Years: Cha...Cha...Cha... Changes...

In the beginning, God created skies and earth.

         Greetings.  Welcome back.  Let me share some changes that I see now that I’m back in church.

          Such marvelous changes, indeed.  

          In church the past few weeks, I saw women greeting morning arrivals in the vestibule and handing out the order of service.  Three decades ago, old guys in polyester suits greeted entrants.  Now, women, old and young, along with old guys and young guys greet those who come to worship.  It was good.

          I saw women taking up the offering.  They were deacons.  It was good.

         A sister lead the quarterly business meeting after church today.  There was a luncheon before the meeting.  A brother washed dishes after the meeting adjourned.   Sisters and brothers cleaned off the tables.  It was good.

          The message from today’s homily was about Mary and Martha in Luke 10.  For centuries women have been forced to see themselves through stories told by men, told about men, and set in a male matrix with God being the ultimate man. 

          My brother washing dishes I likened to Martha in the same way a sister might hear another sister's doubts and liken her to Thomas or a mother might welcome a daughter home from rehab and liken her to the son who came home to his father.  

          I thought how well I washed dishes when I attended seminary and worked in the cafeteria.  It was all good.

         When I attended seminary feminist theology proliferated in the classes, not as primary assigned texts, but as being mentioned by professors.  When for a million years half of a sentient species is virtually silenced by the other half, a correction seems necessary to me…you know…just for the sake of good old fashioned fairness.  So, feminist theology is good…sometimes…just like male theology can be good…sometimes.

          Thanks for visiting.  I hope your day is peaceful and joyful.  Please come back.  Blessings…

           

Christianity for the Next 1000 Years: Rip Van Winkle Redux

                                              In the beginning God created skies and earth.  

                   Welcome back.  I pray my post today finds you well and happy.  I just

returned from vacation, so I 'm eager to get started anew.  

                   I've been thinking about good old Rip Van Winkle.  He met some magical men in the Catskill Mountains in New York, watched them bowl with lightening force, drank their liquor, and fell asleep for twenty years.  He was an Englishman, but he awoke an American.  

                   I joined Dolores Street Baptist Church in San Francisco in 1982.  I attended seminary at Golden Gate Baptist Church at the time.  I began home churching after I left San Francisco.  Eventually, I ended up in Atlanta.

                   Occasionally, I attended Oakhurst Baptist and Virginia Highlands Baptist, but I never joined.  I visited Mass and an Episcopalian church from time to time. 

However, I had established a new routine of watching political

talk shows like Meet the Press and Face the Nation on Sunday morning.  It suddenly became important for me to be informed about the issues of the time since for most of my life I had not paid particular attention to what was going on in the world.

                   So for a little over thirty years I home churched.  Last Sunday, I joined a Baptist Church.  The pastor, my friend, said something really neat when he took my hand and accepted my membership. 

                   He said, “Welcome home.”

                   My pastor stands above me by over a foot.  I feel like a Hobbit standing next to him.  He has silvery hair and a kind face with a ruddy complexion.  Because of his height, he seemed closer to heaven than to me for that moment he welcomed me.  His voice, deep and resonate, fell upon me, sounding more godlike than Charlton Heston’s burning bush.  But when he said, “Welcome home,” a rush of emotion swept over me.  I had not expected that.

                   The Baptist church, for all of its weird history and bizarre present, its charlatans and chimeras and segregationists and fools and young earth creationists is my home. 

For I was raised in a Baptist church, and it has always been a Baptist

church that I carried with me.  My home churching occurred in the context of "what brung" me, and though I left the church physically, I took it with me in my brain, that splendid purveyor of all things poetic and metaphorical, and it caused me to feel a Baptist church in my chest wherever I went.

                   When people asked me, “Do you go to church?”  I would reply, “I am a church.”  And thus was I one, at least metaphorically, and a Baptist one to boot. 

                   So for all practical purposes, I have been Rip Van Winkle, asleep, for thirty years.  I like to tell people I stepped out of a cryogenic tube.  What marvelous changes God hath wrought in all that time!

                   One last thing:  I heard in church this morning that on this day, Buzz Aldrin took communion before the LEM landed on the moon 44 years ago.  I thought that was neat.  How cool would it be to wake up after thirty years and learn that Baptists walked on the moon… at least…uh…Baptists who believe Apollo 11 really happened. 

Thanks for visiting.  I hope to see you here next time.  I want to share

some changes that I see after thirty years.  Blessings…