It's warm here - warm being a relative term. A few degrees above normal for this time of year, into the mid-90's. But what's striking is the humidity levels. Today it's 4%. Yesterday it was 2%. I think tomorrow Elijah climbs Mt. Carmel to confront the prophets of Baal.Somebody in China figured out that the "Free Tibet" flags showing up all over the world were being made in a factory in...you guessed it...China. Oops.
Whatever else you do, go watch this! Now!
Nick Jujicic
I'm glad my parenting years are behind me. That's a job best left to the young. But I miss having kids in the neighborhood. Some of the old people here in Sun City rant against any presence of a person under the age of dirt. We chose to live here because it made obvious economic sense, not because we wanted to live in an age-restricted community. I miss children laughing, zooming down the street on their bikes and playing catch out in the street.
No wonder so many of these old people are grumpy. They can't move without prunes and they've isolated themselves from the energy of children.
BTW, that's one of my favorite things about Pathway - little kids all over the place!
At the turn of the last century several of the major denominations looked over the landscape of American Christianity and observed that while there was lots of debate about theology there was virtually no interest in the real needs of people. Many Americans lived in poverty and oppression but the church ignored them. These denominations became vocal critics of what they saw as a hypocritical Christianity and committed themselves to social action - soup kitchens, shelters, thrift stores and the like. In some cases they also got involved in political action to effect change on behalf of those on the margins of society.
Human nature being what it is, one of the results was a polarization within American Christianity. On the one side you had what was criticized as the "social gospel" which ignored the need for spiritual reformation and seemed to focus solely on the physical needs of mankind. On the other side was what was deemed an elitist, self-obsessed and smug "fundamentalism" (that word taking on a very negative connotation). The middle, where spiritual and physical needs were both addressed, was pretty much empty.
NOTE: this polarization in many ways replayed the division between the Calvinists and the Methodists from a century earlier.
Jump ahead 70 years or so and this same bifurcation happened again, this time in Latin America and with the Roman Catholic Church. Latin American priests looked at the poverty of the masses and the enormous wealth of the Church. They also noticed that Rome was typically in bed with the political regimes that kept the poor oppressed. These priests preached sermons and published tracts that demanded freedom for the people as the only true expression of the teachings of Christ. This became known as "liberation theology." The poor must be liberated from political, social and economic oppression. One outcome was a kind of symbiotic relationship between these "liberal" priests and self-proclaimed Marxists in many of these countries.
Roman Catholic dogma is not evangelical; the Church teaches a salvation that requires not just faith in the substitutionary death of Christ, but the need to fulfill the sacraments of the Church. However, the split between the "orthodox" wing and the "social action" wing in Latin American Catholicism of the 1970's and beyond paralleled what happened within Protestant Christianity in the first decades of the 20th century.
In today's speech before the Press Club in D.C. Rev. Wright described the theology of the Black American church as a theology of "liberation, transformation and reconciliation." Two things should be noted about his comments. First, he presumes to speak for all Black American churches, something a lot of Black theologians and pastors would take exception to.
Secondly, one has to ask the question, how is he using those terms? Does he speak of liberation, transformation and reconciliation in the spiritual sense? They are each terms used in the NT. "The truth will set you free," "be transformed by the renewing of your minds" and "be reconciled to God." In each of these cases the context makes it clear the point at issue is our relationship with God.
But that spiritual dimension is not Rev. Wright's focus. For him, liberation is political freedom for African Americans, transformation is the change that needs to happen within society in order for justice to prevail, and reconciliation is between people who have lived in hostility because one segment enslaved the other for 100+ years.
This is not the shared focus of all Black American churches. It is, however, not at all uncommon. Rev. Wright does speak for a large segment of Black churches. Spend much time at all in or near inner-city churches and you'll hear a lot of this kind of preaching. But it may help to see this as not a wholly racial divide. It is what has happened in the past - the social gospel and liberation theology - when a great gap exists between two social classes in the context of religion.
And when it happens both sides lose. The result will always be further polarization with an empty middle. White Christians need to make work of social justice and racial reconciliation. But the most important need of everyone of any color is the repair of the relationship with God, and that can only happen by faith in the death of Christ for our sins.
Perhaps the bottom line is that what Rev. Wright has to say can help raise awareness within the white community of the feelings and needs of the Black community. I think the problem is that he does this as Rev. White, in the framework of a minister of the gospel and the venue of the church. If, in his speech to the Press Club (yes, I watched all of it on CNN), he had made even a passing reference to spiritual issues I would feel better about someone whom I instead see as an angry, bitter and combative social activist.
IMHO!
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