Marginal Christianity

LEE CAMP I tend, on occasion, to get bored with Christianity. And I wonder sometimes whether Christianity really, after all, has any relevance to the unfolding of social history, with all its violence and hostility. Then Palm Sunday rolls around. Let me ask you to think that Palm Sunday exhibits two “disciplines” too seldom considered as fundamental to being human in the world: satire  |ˈsaˌtīr|  noun the use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize stupidity, particularly in the context of politics civil disobedience  |ˈsɪvɪl ˈˌdɪsəˈbidiəns|  noun the refusal to comply with certain laws or to pay taxes and fines, as a peaceful form of political protest The context for Jesus’ so-called “Triumphal Entry” into Jerusalem, remembered on Palm Sunday, was the celebration of the Passover. Jesus and his disciples were preparing to participate in this annual feast, and this annual feast was a sort of paradigmatic anti-imperia...

Reclaiming Jesus A Confession of Faith in a Time of Crisis We are living through perilous and polarizing times as a nation, with a dangerous crisis of moral and political leadership at the highest levels of our government and in our churches. We believe the soul of the nation and the integrity of faith are now at stake. It is time to be followers of Jesus before anything else—nationality, political party, race, ethnicity, gender, geography—our identity in Christ precedes every other identity. We pray that our nation will see Jesus’ words in us. “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35). When politics undermines our theology, we must examine that politics. The church’s role is to change the world through the life and love of Jesus Christ. The government’s role is to serve the common good by protecting justice and peace, rewarding good behavior while restraining bad behavior (Romans 13). When that role is under...

Jesus, God in human flesh, is the ultimate expression of God’s BHAG – his B ig H airy A udacious G oal. Such a goal is “ clear and compelling and serves as a unifying focal point of effort” that engages people in their “innards” and is “tangible, energizing, highly focused.  People ‘get it’ right away; it takes little or no explanation” (Collins, https://www.jimcollins.com/article_topics/articles/BHAG.html). The thing God wanted from forever, the divine BHAG, is for God and humanity to live together in friendship and love on this world he created for it. God desired this so much, to be so close to us, as close as he could possibly be, in fact, that he decided to become one of us!   His coming as one of us was always God’s plan. That was enormously complicated after humanity sinned and rejected friendship with him, to be sure. It now included the necessity to deal with sin and its effects in order to reclaim and restore humanity and creation to God’s intention for them. Do yo...

America , american Jesus , being biblical , Discipleship , Jesus , patriotism For most of my Christian life, I never questioned it. Even in the last 5 years, I did it without reservation. As I reflect on why I used to do it, my reasons were always social, political, and cultural. They were never theological or ethical. So as of a year ago, I stopped doing it. I no longer pledge my allegiance to the nation that I’m living in. And, to be consistent, I no longer look down upon my African, Asian, European, and Middle Eastern brothers and sisters in Christ who also find it hard to pledge their allegiance to the nation they are living in. We're all citizens of another kingdom which is fundamentally at odds with other kingdoms seeking to rule the world, or part of it. We are outposts of heaven living as strangers and foreigners among the nations. And we need to be reminded of that identity every single day. Christians too often ignore questions related to national allegiance...

By Andrew Sullivan Earlier this week, I went to a lecture given by Steven Pinker on his latest book, Enlightenment Now . I’m a huge and longtime fan of Pinker’s, and his book The Blank Slate was, for me, a revelation. He’s become a deep and important critic of the visceral hostility to nature and science now so sadly prevalent on the left and right, a defender of reason and the Enlightenment against the “social justice” movements on campus, and his new book is a near-relentless defense of modernity. I sat there for an hour slowly being buried in a fast-accumulating snowdrift of irrefutable statistics showing human progress: the decline of violence and war, the rise and rise of democracy, the astonishing gains against poverty of the last couple of decades, the rise of tolerance and erosion of cruelty, lengthening lifespans, revolutions in health, huge increases in safety, and on and on. It was one emphatic graph after another that bludgeoned my current depression into a kind of ...