Like Robert Schuller (as we pointed out last week in : Thu 13 May 2010
Age of Aquarius), Dr. Francis A. Schaeffer also had concerns about the church and culture but took a very different stance on how to address the problem. His solution was not to hide from culture in a sort of Christian Ghetto as had been the predominate practice since 1930, nor as Schuller was promoting to simply gather around hand in hand self-actualizing and singing Kum Ba Ya:

Some Christians have supposed that the choice is between a revolutionary stance and some kind of reconciliation. The Christian, it is assumed, is to choose reconciliation. But we cannot have reconciliation in a world like ours unless something happens first. We are headed for the disaster I have described above, and no nice soft talk of reconciliation and the contentless word “love” is going to have any meaning in such a setting. We must have something stronger.(1)

He was clear that there was a difference between being a cobelligerent and an ally. He was also very concerned about the churches abandonment of truth and the Scriptures: (more…)

One of the age old questions that most of us wrestle with is, “Why do I do the things I do?” The worldview one holds will to a large degree answer that question. The Apostle Paul in writing the book of Romans, systematically addressed the plight of man as compared with the holiness of God. For those who think they are pretty good or at least good enough to be acceptable to God on our own, he minced no words when he wrote, “As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one” (Romans 3:10) and to make sure the reader got the idea he followed up a few sentences later with, “For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.” (Romans 3:23). In Romans chapter 7 he wrestles with the question of why he does the things he does and demonstrates that the fundamental problem is our sinful nature. But then again, the only real information Paul had about the nature of man came from postmoderns today consider his uninformed theo-centric worldview developed from Scripture and revelation. In other words, he only knew what God had revealed and we would simply have to wait until the 20th Century to get the “real truth” on these matters. The “real truth” would come from psychology, occultism, Eastern religions and ultimately ourselves.

Pushing the envelope on peak experience through drugs and Eastern religions, Timothy Leary founded his own church in 1966: (more…)

Here is part III of our report from the front lines of the Gay Marriage Debate narrated by my good friend Ben Dyer. Ben is a graduate of Talbot Theological Seminary. He is currently a philosophy graduate student at Bowling Green State University.

Jacob takes the podium for his five minute closing statement, and he does something odd. He doesn’t attack the revised argument directly, but instead appeals to the audience’s intuitions about the value of happiness. Don’t we think it’s a good thing when people get what they want and no one else is hurt? He passionately enjoins the audience to reject our negative case on the basis of consent and inclusiveness. How can we pass negative judgments on people’s happiness? Consent covers all where no harm is done.

I start my own closing statement by pointing out that Jacob’s appealed to people’s emotions, and that’s not an adequate response to our arguments.

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A few weeks ago, I participated in a debate on whether or not we should endorse gay marriage? That debate was an significant experience for me. My partner for that debate was one of my best friends, Ben Dyer. Ben graduated from Talbot School of Theology in 2003 with a degree in philosophy of religion and ethics. He’s a now graduate student at Bowling Green State. I asked him to give a sort of report from the front lines of that debate. The following is part 1 of that report.

The four of us share a car headed for a small community college extension campus in rural Ohio, and we don’t share much else. Mark and Jacob are going to defend their positive answer to the debate’s open question, “should we endorse gay marriage?” Jonathan and I will defend the view that we shouldn’t, and as we drive I’m wondering whether any of the great debaters (Fr. Copleston and Bertrand Russell, or G.K. Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw, for instance) ever shared a cab on the way to their storied debates.

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 In our discussion about the Culture Driven Church, I keep coming back to one major question. You should know how questions affect me. Questions are the hobgoblins that niggle my brain. On more than one occasion my good friends have heard me begin a two hour conversation with the words, “There’s this question that’s been bugging me.” Questions are the launching pads for inspiration. And often I find if we let some questions simmer and bubble without rushing to a judgment, they tend to yield some useful insights. So here’s the question that been crawling up the side of my mind throughout the last year.

“What Christian critiques of the culture are truly scandalous?”

By “scandalous”, I don’t mean which ones fit the Pulitzer Prize nominated National Enquirer’s definition of scandal. I mean those aspects of our proclamation to the culture that are stumbling blocks that non-Christians (more…)

In the 2002 film, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, the main character, Toula, enumerates the primary expectations of a Greek woman:

… nice Greek girls are supposed to do three things in life. Marry Greek boys. Make Greek babies, and feed everyone, until the day we die.

Many of us (particularly those who can laugh at themselves) can chuckle along with the characters in what at first may appear to be a bigoted view of the world. The father states:

There are two kinds of people in the world. Those who are Greek and those who wish they were Greek.

This phenomenon is not limited to the Greek culture but exists in many cultures of first generation immigrants to the United States of America. We would suggest that this is not really designed from evil motives but rather is the result of finding oneself in a foreign culture. It is an attempt to preserve a particular cultural identity or worldview and protect children from abandoning their heritage, adopting beliefs and practices which are considered to be inferior at best and dangerous at worst.

With the dawning of the twentieth century, (more…)