Meanderings, 7 May 2022
We have yet to break into Spring weather, but the story being told is that the break will occur today. We are officially tired of cold, rainy weather. But the buds on the trees and flowers are now appearing, yea!
Photo by Nikhil kumar on Unsplash
This is a wonderful interview with Kristin Kobes Du Mez, and sign up for her Substack while you’re at it.
Jemar Tisby is not alone in comprehending the history this way:
When most people think about the Religious Right, the matter of abortion comes to mind. Like no other issue, the rejection of legalized abortion has come to define the Religious Right.
Repealing Roe v. Wade stands as a perennial high-priority issue for conservative Christian voters, so much so that today it is hard to imagine a time when that was not the case.
But in the early 1970s, abortion was not the primary issue that catalyzed the Religious Right, as it would in later years. Initially, the Christian response to Roe v. Wade was mixed. Instead, conservative voters coalesced around the issue of racial integration in schools.
Abortion has not always been the defining issue for evangelicals. In 1971, the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, passed a resolution on abortion that called upon Southern Baptists
“to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.”1
W. A. Criswell, pastor of the largest SBC congregation, stated after the Roe v. Wade decision that “I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had life separate from its mother . . . that it became an individual person.”
He further explained, “It has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.”2
A poll in 1970 discovered that 70 percent of Southern Baptist pastors “supported abortion to protect the mental or physical health of the mother, 64 percent supported abortion in cases of fetal deformity and 71 percent in cases of rape.”3
Like the Southern Baptists, many other conservative Christians were not uniformly against abortion in the early 1970s.
Good book notice and interview:
Scholars have long described the global ambitions of White Protestant American as rooted in a sense of exceptionalism animated by notions of racial and religious ascendancy. But as Stanford historian Kathryn Gin Lum argues, we cannot limit our attention to understanding how “a White American Christian superiority complex” has driven Americans to see themselves as set apart and called to be saviors of the world. We also need to understand how they viewed the people whom they endeavored to save and transform–in other words, the “heathens” of the world.
This topic is the subject of Gin Lum’s new book, Heathen: Religion and Race in American History, published by Harvard University Press later this month. In Heathen, Gin Lum builds on some of the ideas she presented in her first book, Damned Nation: Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction (Oxford University Press), a history of ideas of damnation. This time, though, she focuses not on hell, but on the people believed to be destined for it. In so doing, she tells a much larger story about the durability of cultural categories, the meaning of history, and the emergence of ideas of about racial difference, which she sees as intertwined with religious difference. As Gin Lum persuasively and provocatively argues in this book, “racial othering has been a ‘heathen inheritance.'”
Mike Bird on “render unto Caesar”:
Second, notice that Jesus does not try to worm his way out of it by offering an answer full of ambiguous rhetoric. Instead, he requests a denarius from his interlocutors, and holding it up he asks, “Whose image and inscription are on it?” Now various coins were minted in Palestine, mostly without imperial images, usually with floral designs, only Pontius Pilate with his characteristic contempt for Jewish scruples printed coins depicting pagan cultic utensils. But this denarius is probably a Tiberian tribute penny which has on one side an “image” of Tiberius’ bust with an inscription that reads, “Son of the Divine Augustus,” then on the other side it reads, “High priest” accompanied with a depiction of Tiberius’ mother Livia posing as the goddess Roma. The rub is that if Caesar is “divine,” and if this is his image, then it is a violation of the second commandment (see Exod 20:4; Deut 5:8). In other words, Jesus is saying, you guys are carrying around pagan money which is an affront to our religion, so you might as well give the pagan king back his pagan money. And when Jesus says “give back to God what is God’s,” he might well be suggesting that Israel, who was God’s own special possession (see Exod 19:5; Deut 7:6), should be returned to God. In which case, Jesus’ words are not so much about how our individual selves belong to God, but stressing that Israel as God’s chosen people must be released from pagan oppression, much like Moses told Pharaoh, “Let my people God” (see Exod 4:18, etc.).
Wendy Deichman considers the UMC division from a historical angle:
Both Methodist history and Wesleyan theology teach us that to fill the role of either reformer or separatist does not necessarily solve anything with finality because we live in an economy of human free will. The choice of either direction carries with it specific challenges. For those who separate, there is a burden to do so with humility rather than self-righteousness, and to keep a heart and mind of love toward God and the community of faith from which one has chosen to exit. There is a burden to demonstrate in both the near and long term the faithfulness and integrity ostensibly found lacking in the previous association. This is a tall order given the facts of history and the propensity of human nature toward sin and of power to corrupt persons, institutions, and mission.
The challenges facing reformers from within are similarly steep. It is the lot of the reformer to maintain a prophetic voice toward those in places of power while also cultivating holiness and a faithful witness to God with a heart and mind of love toward those in charge and those who have exited. In making the choice to remain within an errant institution, reformers carry the dangerous burden of possibly crossing the line over to complicity with the corruption or evil they disdain.
As everyone knows, The United Methodist Church (UMC) is on the brink of yet another Methodist division. Some argue the impending split is over sexuality and others contend it is about how to interpret Scripture. While these are important theological considerations that certainly need attention, the past half-century of UMC history demonstrates this is fundamentally another division over discipline. Failure to cultivate or at least maintain institutional discipline makes it impossible for a denomination to address successfully the ongoing theological task (related to scriptural interpretation or human relationship, for example) or to communicate the spiritual outcomes of this process within the larger community of faith. Lack of discipline inevitably leads to confusion and loss of trust. In extreme cases, it leads to dissolution.
Centuries of Methodist history and Wesleyan theology have demonstrated a sturdy capacity by those in this tradition, God helping us, to weather differences of opinion over things not necessary to salvation. This has been the case so much so that, in the past several centuries, this heritage has been able to play an important, if imperfect, role in spreading the gospel and scriptural holiness across the globe. Even though we have not always been faithful, I trust and pray God will remain faithful and graceful toward us, and not forsake us now for either our lack of discipline or our divisiveness.
Mark Tooley on why evangelicals should not disdain the mainline churches:
Some evangelicals disdain Mainline Protestants but have not fully considered their own plight and future. Non-racially diverse evangelical denominations are not growing. Denominational loyalties for both conservatives and liberals are dramatically receding. Growing churches tend to be nondenominational, their growth led by dynamic founding pastors, whose successors often cannot sustain the growth. Without the ballast of denominational ties, such churches often divide, decline or implode, sometimes stuck with large and expensive properties. Absent the connectional accountability of denominations, nondenominational congregations sometimes are more susceptible to financial or sexual scandals.
Evangelical churches are themselves sometimes politicized, perhaps even more so than liberal Mainline congregations. Evangelical churches tend to be more politically homogenous than Mainline congregations, so pastors can feel freer to be political from the pulpit. The politics of the Religious Right, although more populist and organic than the more elitist and clergy-driven Religious Left predominating in Mainline Protestantism, has sometimes distracted evangelical congregations and disenchanted some congregants. Evangelicalism has successfully built a subculture, but it has not shaped and led American culture like Mainline Protestantism did across several centuries. Maybe as a mostly contemporary movement, it just has not had enough time. Maybe it is too focused on congregational life to build wider multigenerational institutions. Maybe its suspicions of academia, having seen the secularizing of Mainline schools, prevented its building a more robust intellectual life with influence beyond its own subculture.
Mainline Protestantism built a nation and a society that, by many political and economic measures, is the most successful in history. The whole world, to the extent it benefits from America’s political and economic capital, can thank, at least partly, Mainline Protestantism. Its failures and decline over the last half-century don’t negate its unprecedented accomplishments of the previous three centuries.
Mainline denominations like the Presbyterian Church (USA) may no longer exist in 20 years or less. Their remaining beautiful sanctuaries may largely become condominiums, or restaurants, or transfer to new religious entities. But what they achieved across many generations uplifted humanity and will endure eternally. We can learn from their mistakes and their ultimate demise. But we should more importantly also learn from their unparalleled success.
(NEXSTAR) – During the pandemic, many found themselves with time to return to hobbies they may have lost before. Others found themselves with extra change in their pockets thanks to the stimulus checks.
While some took that time and money to the housing market, others took it to a different, equally hot market – the trading card market. In some cases, the market was so hot and the desire so great that retailers like Target had to restrict access to its trading card department.
During the first half of 2021 alone, eBay reports $2 billion in trading cards transactions occurred on its site, with an average of one sports trading card being purchased every second.
“In the last three years, our industry has really exploded. A lot more people have come into the sports collecting industry,” Mike Provenzale, a production manager with Heritage Auctions tells Nexstar.
For those who already found themselves with sports trading cards in hand, you may be wondering, now what?