Marginal Christianity

Is Paul, then, condoning slavery as an acceptable societal institution? Of course not! But raising the question does give the opportunity to look at a basic principle of biblical interpretation. Briefly stated, this principle is that the cultural context which the gospel encounters is descriptive not prescriptive. The gospel makes a home for itself in all cultures but is captive to none. What we have in the New Testament are descriptions of how it made a home for itself in the various cultures it encountered in the Greco-Roman world of the first century. Our task is not to replicate the way the gospel took shape then and there but to carefully observe the intention and direction the gospel reshaped those relationships and discern how it can reshape ours in the same direction and with the same intention in the changed and changing situations we find ourselves in. Far, then, from accepting or condoning slavery, Paul objects vigorously to the way it forms relationships betwee...

  http://www.faithstreet.com/onfaith/2015/01/28/5-things-everyone-should-know-about-americas-religious-history/35990 January 28, 2015 Why we need to retell the American story. by Peter Manseau   Peter Manseau is a journalist, historian, and novelist. His most recent book,  One Nation, Under Gods: A New American History ,  is a deeply researched account that challenges standard Christian perspectives of the country’s story. Here, he offers a list of counter-intuitive facts about religion in America. 1. Islam was here from the beginning. Far from a twenty-first century problem, the fraught relationship between Islam and Christianity shaped the earliest interactions between the Old World and the New. In the shadow of the Reconquista — the reconquering of the Iberian Peninsula from the Moors — the Spanish established laws to prevent Islamic influence from reaching the Americas, yet made use of enslaved Muslim convert...