New Wine, New Wineskins

The Empire of the Empty Shrine: American Imperialism and the Church

This essay explores how the kind of emptiness or openness that lies at the heart of liberal capitalism has an unfortunate tendency to lend itself to the kind of constant expansion characteristic of empire. This emptiness and openness furthermore has a way of creating new forms of idolatry. The essay draws on the work of Andrew Bacevich to give an historical analysis of how the strategy of openness has lent itself to American imperial ambitions since the late 19th century. There follows a theological critique of empire based on a reading of Exodus 19-20. The essay concludes with some suggestions for how Christians should think about their primary political allegiance.

Response to William T. Cavanaugh

This article is a response to “The Empire of the Empty Shrine: American Imperialism and the Church” by William T. Cavanaugh. Webb argues that theologians need to be careful about intervening in economic analysis without a sufficient understanding of how capitalism creates wealth. Moreover, he argues that globalization, understood as a process of opening markets and expanding opportunities for freedom, can be interpreted providentially as a means for Christian evangelization. One can believe that the United States is playing a significant role in that plan today without believing that the United States is “the bringer of salvation to the world.” Finally, the essay seeks to illuminate the understanding that the church should, unlike Cavanaugh writes, pressure the political to conform to basic Christian truths, if and when that is possible. The church should use the political to advance Christian virtues, if the process of doing so does not damage those virtues.

Michael Moore Meets Martin Luther: Sacramental Meditation and the Age of the Documentary

Don Giovanni: The Absolute Man and the Patience of God

Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni uses ravishing musical effects to make its listeners take delight in dreadful events. The moral ambiguity of this move has divided critics from Beethoven to Kierkegaard. This essay employs the theology of Karl Barth to achieve a fuller understanding of the opera, especially drawing on Barth’s essay on the absolutist humanism of the eighteenth century in his book Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century. The role which Mozart’s music plays in the opera is analogous to the patience with which God permits his rebellious human creation to have its day, a patience which itself can appear weak and indulgent even though it is the form of God’s almighty providence.

Jesus and the ‘Christian Worldview’: A Comparative Analysis of Abraham Kuyper and Karl Barth

The twentieth-century struggle between Neo-Calvinists and Dialectical Theologians had less to do with disagreement about specific points of doctrine than with conflicting perspectives on the relation between faith and worldview. Whereas Abraham Kuyper, the most significant leader of the Neo-Calvinist movement, adopted the concept of worldview to promote the ecclesial, social, and political emancipation of working class Calvinists, Karl Barth, the innovator of Dialectical Theology, opposed the concept as socially regressive and theologically defective. The debate between Neo-Calvinists and Dialectical Theologians over the right relation between faith and worldview raises still unsettled questions about the way of public theology in the twenty-first century.

The questions raised by this conflict remain still today: Is the Christian worldview involved in life-or-death struggles with other worldviews—the “modern worldview” (or perhaps the “Islamic worldview”)? Or does faith in Jesus Christ cut across such ideological disagreements between human beings? The past illumines the need to carefully study its content so we might not repeat past mistakes thereby losing out in our engagement of culture.

Clashing Worldview Assumptions That Brought Social, Economic, and Spiritual Devastation to Native American Peoples

This article illustrates how the misconception that “gospel communication” is free from the bias of ones cultural underpinnings can be a dangerous and often destructive assumption. Twiss defines what the underlying and clashing worldview assumptions are and how the ethnocentric impulse distorts the gospel of Jesus Christ; the result is a hegemonic and truncated gospel among the First Nations People of the United States.

This essay gives an overview of how American Federal policy and missionary enterprise led to the devastating negative conditions faced by Native North American people today. Great strides are being taken to correct the neo-colonial, ethnocentric, and hegemonic tendencies in the American church. We will do well to heed George Hunter’s exhortation for a return to an earlier period where there was indeed an indigenous movement.

The Awkward Silence in the Church

Between Athens and Jerusalem: On Putting the ‘Christian’ Back into Christian

This article advances an argument for an explicitly Christian approach to higher education in general, and to the teaching of Communication in particular. The author argues that the relationship between secular learning and Christian vocation, hammered out over long centuries by the early Fathers of the Church, has been transposed in the early 21st century by Christians who fail to grasp the intellectual and spiritual necessity of integrating all learning within a framework of Christian truth. Ideas for integrating Christian faith with the subject of Communication, especially in the teaching of public speaking, are offered.

Thinking Theologically About Religious Diversity in the West

Societies in the West are increasingly religiously diverse, and awareness of this diversity prompts some fresh questions for Christian faith and practice. This essay argues that the Church in the West must become intentionally missiological in its approach to surrounding cultures, and that doing so involves developing an appropriate theology of religions that enables Christians to understand religious diversity properly in light of Christian themes and to respond to religious others appropriately as followers of Jesus. Some distinctives of a Christian theology of religions are explored, with brief attention given to some Biblical themes that help to explain religious phenomena; the relation between religion and culture; the place of apologetics in a Christian response to religious diversity; and some issues related to Christian presence in the public sector.

Christus Victor, Postmodernism, and the Shaping of Atonement Theology

Integrated into every theological investigation ought to be a culture question like, “What characteristics of my culture may be shaping my perspective on this particular theological issue?” Moreover, theologians ought always to be posing this question most circumspectly when working on a theological issue considered an essential of historic Christian orthodoxy. Of particular note should be any time when an essential area of theology experiences attempts at significant revision. All too often, conservative Evangelical Christians have viewed Christ’s atoning work exclusively through the lens of penal substitution. The thesis of this article is that postmodern culture has created an environment amenable to the reconsideration of the Christus Victor model; a model which has its roots in the ancient church and connects well with the postmodern sensibilities of many today. Wary of the tenuousness of making historical causal connections, the point is not to prove that postmodernism has resurrected Christus Victor but simply to demonstrate how some of the key categories of postmodern culture make it an attractive option. Finally, this article argues that evangelicals can embrace the long-discarded theology of Christus Victor without capsizing the boat of evangelical orthodoxy.

Green Christianity: A Response to ‘The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis’

The environmental movement and world of evangelical Christianity often seem to be at odds. The article attempts to respond to some of the complaints against Christianity by the environmental movement by presenting a theological framework based on the Triune God and the Biblical story. The starting point is exploring the argument put forth by Lynn White Jr., in his article, “The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis,” through which he traces historic Christian thought and how it led to the ways of thinking and behaving that have contributed to the current ecological crisis. Then, in response to White’s critique, the rest of the paper develops a theology that seeks to place God, man, and the creation in their proper relationships. When taken seriously, this theology of creation requires that Christians care for the earth as part of their testimony and witness to the world. It is argued that ultimately, the only proper response to the ecological crisis is found within the context of Christian theology and the Biblical story because these are the places of true hope and redemption.

Facts & Fictions About Homosexuality: Debunking the Socio-Biblical Myths

Of all the challenges that we face as evangelicals in today’s society, the same-sex challenge is surely one of the most daunting. In part, this is because the gay community has been meticulously implementing a 35 year-old agenda largely unknown both to the average academic and the person in the pew. Gay rights groups have their highly trained lobbyists, frequent gay awareness celebrations, widely circulating educational materials, and nationwide reconciling facilitators. Of all the myths that need debunking today, the one that poses the most urgent challenge for evangelicals is the myth that homosexuality is genetic and that change is impossible. What makes the task particularly difficult is the legitimizing presence of evangelical associations such as Evangelicals Concerned, Other Sheep and the Metropolitan Community Churches and prominent speakers such as Mel White, Ralph Blair, David Frenchak and Bill Wylie-Kellermann. The intent of this essay is provide a socio-political update, to respond to the biblical fictions that are most commonly put forward by the religious gay community and to propose effective academic and pastoral strategies and resources for tackling the same-sex challenge today.

Living in the Space Between