How Do You Know You’re Not Brainwashed? First, let’s define two words. What do I mean by “know?” Well, really just the usual sense of the word except I exclude absolute, total, incorrigible certainty. I don’t think that’s humanly possible. The mind can always possibly be shaken by new experiences. So by “know” I mean have “proper confidence”—knowledge beyond a reasonable doubt. Second, what do I mean by “brainwashed?” It’s a word with a large element of subjectivity. Here, however,... Read more

The Upside-Down Kingdom, Chapter 12: Successful Failure There’s much in this chapter to “talk” about. But I’d like to focus on one main point: the meaning of “bearing one’s cross.” As I read Kraybill’s explanation, I was reminded of John Howard Yoder’s discussion of this in The Politics of Jesus. According to both Kraybill and Yoder, “bearing one’s cross” does NOT mean putting up with suffering, mental or physical. Bearing one’s cross is about sacrificing one’s own pleasure and personal... Read more

Does God Save Everyone He Can? This is a question for Christians and evangelical Christians in particular. A friend recently asked me a theological question. He knows I am a Christian theologian in the evangelical tradition. His question was “Does God save everyone he can?” I don’t recall ever being asked that before, so I reflected on it in the light of scripture, tradition, reason, and experience (the so-called “Wesleyan Quadrilateral”). Many questions must be parsed out and examined in... Read more

The Upside-Down Kingdom: Chapter 11: Low Is High According to Donald Kraybill, an Anabaptist theologian, Jesus abolished hierarchy among his followers. And his followers today, the church (the body of Christ and its faithful congregations and organizations) ought to follow his teachings and example about status and power. Kraybill more than amply demonstrates this in Chapter 11. For those of you who read it, I don’t need to quote from it. For those of you who did not read it,... Read more

Should Christians Practice Yoga? The question came to my mind when I saw that a pre-school operated by a Methodist church is teaching “Yoga for Children.” Of course, I’ve thought about yoga many time before. I have never practiced yoga and would not. I believe yoga is intrinsically linked with Hindu beliefs—no matter how hard some might try to secularize or even Christianize it. Here I find myself uncomfortably in agreement with many fundamentalist and conservative evangelical Christians with whom... Read more

Evangelical Thoughts about Pope Francis As an Anabaptist, ecclesiologically I’m about as far from the Catholic Church (and here I mean the Roman Catholic Church) as possible. (There are other Catholic Churches such as the Old Catholic Church and the Polish National Catholic Church that do not recognize the primacy or infallibility of the bishop of Rome.) Over the years of my academic life in evangelical circles I have known or known of many evangelicals who joined the Catholic Church.... Read more

The Upside-Down Kingdom Chapter 10: Inside Outsiders Here, in this chapter, Donald Kraybill argues from the New Testament that Jesus defiled himself, knowingly and deliberately, by associated himself closely with people many Jews of his time and place considered impure—at least for close, personal interactions. I don’t think there can be any serious doubt about that. Then Kraybill extrapolates from that to a stringent criticism of the “birds of a feather flock together” paradigm of church growth today. Those old... Read more

Desensitizing Young Males to Female Nudity Recently, again, I heard (here) that the solution to the problem of having nude models in Christian college’s and universities’ art classes is to “desensitize” boys and young men to female nudity. Not very long ago a female student told me that the solution to the problem of modesty (or lack of it) in Christian contexts is to teach boys not to objective women’s bodies. I make no secret of the fact that I... Read more

The Upside-Down Kingdom, Chapter 9: Lovable Enemies Whenever I read a chapter of any non-fiction book I look for “the paragraph” that most clearly spells out its thesis. And I often look for the one that takes the argument of the chapter to its natural conclusion. Tear away all the factoids and tangents, however important they may be, and find the paragraph that shocks and really makes the chapter come alive and gives me something to think about and wrestle... Read more

Is the New Testament Message Unique? I have readers of this blog who love to criticize our evangelical Christian belief in the “sacred book” the Bible because 1) it is not inerrant like a modern science textbook (is any science textbook inerrant?), and 2) it is not always easy to understand (what book or document of any real importance is easy to understand?). One direction in which my mind goes is what I believe is unique about the Bible, especially... Read more