Marginal Christianity

We didn’t get far into the 21 st century before America joined the rest of the world. Almost before the confetti stopped falling on our new cente4nnial parades and parties 9/11/01 happened. For the for time we were attacked by foreign hostiles on our own land. They used jet planes to do it and attacked chief symbols of our power and strength. Americans have been afraid and wary ever since that day. We can no longer afford to think it can’t or won’t happen here. It has and continues to do so on smaller scales. We now know how the rest of the world lives, fearful and vulnerable to assaults and attacks from ana untold number of directions. America is not invulnerable any longer! Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005 with horrific force devastating the Golf Coast and overwhelming our best (and not so good) efforts to deal with it. Parts of the area have still not and may not ever recover. A Superdome filled with sick and scared peoples unsure what tragedy would next befall them is an endur...

On November 1933, on the 450 th  anniversary of Martin Luther’s birth, 20,000 German Christians held a mass rally celebrating four distinctive beliefs. I find parallels to what is happening under Donald Trump (in bolded italics) : ·          Adolf Hitler is the completion of the Protestant Reformation  started by Martin Luther ·          Donald Trump is the Protector of the Christian Faith in America ·          Baptized Jews are to be dismissed from the Church ·          Immigrants are not welcome in our country or churches (“Send them back where they came from” ·          The Old Testament is to be excluded from Sacred Scriptures ·          Neither the Old or New Testaments “trump” America’s needs or in...

REDISCOVERING AMERICA Mark 3:31-35 A distinguished professor of American Church History once expressed the relationship of the church to the nation in the following slogan. America, he wrote, was "a nation with the soul of a church." If we asked about the American church, though, we’d have to say, in my view, we have a "church with the soul of a nation." These two slogans mark the parameters of the dilemma American Christians face when they gather for worship on the Fourth of July weekend. For on this weekend in particular, the "church with the soul of a nation" lionizes the nation presumed to have "the soul of a church."  Unfortunately, truth - the truth about this nation - and integrity - the integrity of the church - are almost completely obscured. Illusion and expediency are the primary hosts at this bash! "The nation with the soul of a church" is a fiction. (That is, unless you have a pretty debased notion of what a chur...

christiancentury.org /article/publisher/guns-are-americans-golden-calf Ancient Assyrian mosaic (Thinkstock) The death-by-gun crisis in America is not just a political issue. It’s a spiritual issue of the highest order. Having all but enshrined the divinity of guns, our culture has created an elaborate public liturgy for every mass shooting. Flags go to half-staff. Counselors turn out. Thoughts and prayers pour forth. We continue to make a sorry mess of the distinction between loving God and being charmed by idols that seek to thwart the glory of God. Our national infatuation with firearms has reached crisis proportions that should trouble every believer. All of us get sad, of course, when bullets eviscerate the joy in innocent victims’ families. If our eyes don’t water up when a tearful dad on the evening news alternatingly weeps and screams because a gunman senselessl...

THE FOUR SIRITUAL FLAWS: WHY CHRISTIANITY DIED IN AMERICA Spiritual Flaw #1: The Jesus We Never Knew                                                              The American Jesus looks something like this: Jesus as a 1 st century Middle Eastern peasant probably looked something like this: American Christianity forgets that Jesus is a Jew through and through. He cannot be understood apart from that Jewishness. To forget this and to try and read Jesus as an American is to misunderstand the New Testament almost completely. Americans also forget that Jesus is cross-eyed. He sees everything from the perspective of the cross which turns everything in our prude...

the fall of babylon (Revelation (18) Rev.17 details the “mystery” of the harlot, the beast, Rome. Only to eyes of faith does the true reality of this figure disclose itself. If you take the blue pill the glitz and glamor, power and prosperity will be what you see. If you take the red pill, however, you will see what John shows you, for Revelation is the red pill par excellence. This illustration from the movie “The Matrix” is a perfect example of how this book works. It unveils, or x-rays, the surface of things so the community of faith can carry on with a sure sense of the deep truth of God and the world it has been called to bear witness in. Rev.18 details in horrible detail the demise of this figure. A great angel announces Rom’s fall, declaring it a wilderness, a haunt of every foul thing, who has polluted and deceived the earth with it oppression, injustice, and cruelty (18:2-3. Another heavenly voice calls God’s people out of Rome. This is not a physical retrea...

In one of his sermons Tim Keller listed eight characteristics of early Christians, living under a Roman government far less congenial to Christianity than the United States today.  1.     Opposed bloodthirsty sports and violent entertainment, such as gladiator games 2.     Opposed serving in the military 3.     Opposed abortion and infanticide 4.     Empowered women 5.     Opposed sex outside of marriage and homosexual activity (pederasty was common in the empire 6.     Encouraged radical support for the poor 7.     Encouraged the mixing of races and classes 8.     Insisted that Jesus is the only way to salvation http://www.patheos.com/blogs/evangelicalpulpit/2017/01/evangelical-vote-donald-trump/ In contemporary America the church does or should oppose 1, 2, 3, 5 (sex outside of marriage part) and support 4, 6, 7, 8 (imho). The church doe...

04/21/2016 10:09 am ET Lee C. Camp Host of TokensShow.com, Professor of Theology, Lipscomb Univ. Love of Country I do love America. How could one not love the forests of Maine; the gorges of the Cumberland plateau in Tennessee; the mesquite trees of west Texas; the ragged coastline of California? All of it like a hymn of praise, a song of thanksgiving for so much abundance and goodness. And being a grateful citizen of Music City, I must stop there a moment: how could one not love the prophetic consciousness of Johnny Cash, the mesmerizing cadences of Don Williams, the angelic strains of Alison Krauss? Or considering socio-political greats: how could one not admire the virtues of industry and wit in Benjamin Franklin; the democratic impulses of the nineteenth-century religious reformers; the cry for justice in the words of Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Martin Luther King, Jr.; the humility suffusing Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address; or the persi...

Will the U.S. accept responsibility for the humanitarian consequences of Washington-manufactured wars? By Philip Giraldi • September 11, 2015       Procyk Radek / Shutterstock.com On April 29th, 2008 I had a Saul on the Road to Damascus moment. I had flipped open the Washington Post and there, on the front page, was a color photo of a two year old Iraqi boy named Ali Hussein being pulled from the rubble of a house that had been destroyed by American missiles. The little boy was wearing shorts and a t-shirt and had on his feet flip-flops. His head was hanging back at an angle that told the viewer immediately that he was dead. Four days later on May 3rd a letter by a Dunn Loring Virginia woman named Valerie Murphy was printed by the Post . Murphy complained that the Iraqi child victim photo should not have been run in the paper because it would “stir up...

The creator of The Wire, David Simon, delivered an impromptu speech about the divide between rich and poor in America at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney, and how capitalism has lost sight of its social compact. This is an edited extract • David Simon, creator of The Wire, near his office in Baltimore. Photograph: Stephen Voss/Redux / eyevine A merica is a country that is now utterly divided when it comes to its society, its economy, its politics. There are definitely two Americas. I live in one, on one block in Baltimore that is part of the viable America, the America that is connected to its own economy, where there is a plausible future for the people born into it. About 20 blocks away is another America entirely. It's astonishing how little we have to do with each other, and yet we are living in such proximity. There's no barbed wire around West Baltimore or around East Baltimore, around Pimlico, the areas in my city that have been utterly divo...

https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/duplicity-ideologues Andrew J. Bacevich June 4, 2014 - 3:19pm “Almost 70 years ago, a new world order was born from the rubble of World War II, built by and around the power of the United States.” Yet today, Robert Kagan laments, “that world order shows signs of cracking, and perhaps even collapsing.” Wherever he looks, Kagan sees evidence that “something is changing, and perhaps more quickly than we may imagine,” he writes in the New Republic ( “Superpowers Don’t Get to Retire” ). Indeed, “the signs of the global order breaking down are all around us.” These changes “signal a transition into a different world order,” one bearing troubling similarities to the 1930s. The origins of this prospective calamity are plain to see. Don’t bother to look for material explanations. “If a breakdown in the world order that America made is occurring,” Kagan writes, “it is not because America’s power is declining.” The United States has power...