Category: Guest Column
Early Christianity
For a guy that doesn’t like to read it seems that I do a lot of it. In my Saturday and Sunday morning reading I ran across this article on The Christian Century, website that reports on scholarship looking into the global nature of early Christianity and the possible influence of Buddhism, and other religions, on Christian communities and writings. A couple of paragraphs posted here. Click the title to read more.
Jesus Meets the Buddha
by Phillip Jenkins | “Notes from the Global Church” / The Christian Century | Aug. 30, 2012A proverb that circulated in the former Soviet Union held that the future stays much the same but the past changes from day to day. Less cynically, we might say that as a society develops, people naturally develop interests in new historical topics, and academics turn their attention to these emerging issues. In the case of Christianity, the growth of churches outside the traditional West has led to an upsurge of scholarship about the early histories of African and Asian Christianity, and these histories are being written with the fresh eyes of writers from those regions.
The whole Epistle of James has attracted Asian thinkers. In his classic Water Buffalo Theology, Kosuke Koyama cited James as the most promising means of introducing Christianity to Southeast Asians, especially to Buddhists, who would feel immediately at home with its style of writing as much as its teachings. This is, he notes, just what popular Buddhist scriptures look and sound like. Asian wisdom literature sounds a lot like Judeo-Christian wisdom literature, including James but also Thomas. The Dalai Lama himself is no less enthusiastic about James, praising James’s declaration that human beings are a mist, a vapor that rises and vanishes away. What a wonderful image, he says, for the transience of human life!
From Religion Dispatches
Here is a good article interview that touches on what the Church is and is not doing in our culture. A few paragraphs reposted here. Click the title to read more.
Money, Technology, and the Silence of Churches: A Conversation with Susan Thistlethwaite
by Candace Chellew-Hodge | July 25, 2012 | Religion DispatchesHow do we occupy the Bible?
There are several steps to take. First, read the book, the whole Bible. I quote studies that show if you actually read the Bible outside of the church it turns you liberal. Also, get a New Revised Standard version. There is a conservative Bible project that is cutting out passages considered too liberal, so get a whole Bible.The thing about human nature is you don’t think your way out of temptation. That’s the value of the recent decade, where we’ve realized that these systemic problems need systemic solutions; they need structures and regulations. We learned that lesson in the Great Depression and put Glass-Steagall into effect. But we believed it couldn’t happen today, so the act was repealed. The drive from the Reagan years of anti-government individualism is going to be the death of the economy. Everything that the Great Depression taught us has gone away, and it’s not just in the financial sector, it’s the labor sector as well, in the attack on unions. No CEO is going to give up their money; you have to have labor solidarity in order to adjust that.
These are theological problems: what the internet does is put it on steroids.
The key to internet-driven culture is having people become more savvy, recognizing how this stuff is coming at them at 90 miles per hour. I also advocate public activism; I do what I preach. Every week I write a theological piece for the Washington Post on topics like JP Morgan Chase, which is really about hubris. I point out that this is sin. It’s not the gay people sinning, it’s these people over here who are sinning. In this way, I take back sin for what it really is.