by | Jun 12, 2023 | Uncategorized
Can we recover a healthy, Christ-honoring vision for masculinity?
In recent decades, evangelicals have invested a colossal amount of discipleship, activist, and publishing energy toward promoting “sexual purity” and a “biblical” vision for sexuality. Despite this, the pattern of scandal, abuse, and misconduct by men and male leaders makes clear that the purity movement has not solved the problem of unhealthy sexuality in the church. The #ChurchToo movement and related denomination-specific investigations have demonstrated that “sexual purity” is often a mere façade covering up deeper patterns of wickedness.
The crisis of abuse, dysfunction, and sexual violence in the church is downstream from a theologically deficient understanding of what it means to be male. Specifically, we have perpetuated a hypersexual vision of masculinity. These scandals and patterns of dehumanization have infected the church, not despite the purity movement but in many ways because of it.
It’s time to change the way we talk and think about male sexuality. This sub-Christian view of masculinity creates a culture in which men are allowed to wallow in ongoing sexual immaturity. It shouldn’t be surprising when dehumanizing theology leads to dehumanizing—and consequently sinful—behavior.
The church is beginning to grasp how purity culture objectifies women and dehumanizes them. What’s often less appreciated is the way the movement also has dehumanized men. If purity culture dehumanized women by treating them as sexual objects, it dehumanized men by casting them as sexual animals. If it hypersexualized women’s bodies, it hypersexualized men’s minds. Much of our rhetoric and resources adopted the culture’s assumption that men are helplessly …
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by | Jun 12, 2023 | Uncategorized
For Amos, it depends on whether the God we worship demands justice.
In this Close Reading series, biblical scholars reflect on a passage in their area of expertise that has been formational in their own discipleship and continues to speak to them today.
My mother was Guatemalan, and she went to great lengths to make sure that our family spoke Spanish and celebrated holidays with a Guatemalan flavor. I spent most of my summers as a boy in Guatemala, spending time with family and getting to know that country that is so dear to my heart.
Years later, I found myself back in Guatemala City as a professor at a seminary. It was a time when the 36-year civil war was at its worst. The war had begun when I was a boy, but I had never processed it. I was used to seeing soldiers around and hearing stories, but the fighting was primarily in the mountains. It seemed so far away.
As an Old Testament professor, I taught students from all over Latin America who would be confronting overwhelming poverty, widespread political corruption, and armed conflict; Guatemala was not the only country experiencing civil war. What could the Old Testament offer them? Could I make the Word of God come alive in relevant ways? Clearly, God cared about these things.
Roman Catholic liberation theologians were speaking into this complicated context and offering their own analysis and theological solutions. At the time, Latin American evangelicals were just beginning to venture into discussions of society and politics. Church services largely avoided these topics, as they were thought to be too worldly, but they drove the conversation in the coffee hour. These were the realities of my everyday life.
What would an evangelical approach to these problems—one deeply grounded in Scripture and our tradition—look like? That is …
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by | Jun 12, 2023 | Uncategorized
Chosen by Sarah J. Hauser, author of “All Who Are Weary: Finding True Rest by Letting Go of the Burdens You Were Never Meant to Carry.”
The Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness: The Path to True Christian Joy
Timothy Keller
When we connect every experience and interaction with ourselves, constantly overanalyzing what we’ve said or what people think, we can easily grow exhausted. In this brief book, Keller shows us the freedom we can experience when we understand our identity and worth in Christ. When there’s no need to perform or manage our ego, we find, as Keller says, a “blessed rest that only self-forgetfulness brings.”
Soul Care in African American Practice
Barbara L. Peacock
In our busy, frantic lives, practices like prayer, spiritual direction, and soul care can end up on the back burner. Using the examples of ten African American faith leaders, this book invites us to return to these practices to find the rest and soul transformation so many of us crave. As Peacock writes in her conclusion, “God has used servant leaders in the African American faith community to blaze paths of internal spiritual freedom that manifest externally.”
Out of Solitude: Three Meditations on the Christian Life
Henri J. M. Nouwen
Priest, professor, and theologian Nouwen writes incisive, convicting words with humble, pastoral gentleness. In this book, he reflects on three scenes in the life of Jesus to show us how communion with God through solitude enables us to live the Christian life with depth and courage. Out of Solitude helps us quit finding our worth in usefulness or accomplishments.
Analog Christian: Cultivating Contentment, Resilience, and Wisdom in the Digital Age
Jay Y. Kim
Our attention is divided now more than ever. With technology and social media, we’re endlessly distracted, constantly comparing, and inundated by outrage—all of which …
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by | Jun 12, 2023 | Uncategorized
Occupied, liberated, and now underwater, Kherson remains on the frontline of fighting—and faith. A local seminary president explains how the latest baptisms reveal deepening faith.
For eight months, the Ukrainian city of Kherson endured Russian occupation.
Now—along with at least seven churches—it is underwater.
Experts estimate that the collapse of the Nova Kakhovka dam, 44 miles upstream, released an amount of water equal to the Great Salt Lake. A new wave of evacuations is underway in southern Ukraine, with 25,000 people in Russian-controlled areas and 17,000 in Ukrainian-held territory advised to leave.
An estimated 2,000 houses have been flooded, with 16,000 people made homeless. A lack of drinking water, electricity shortages, and floating land mines have contributed to the humanitarian and ecological disaster.
The dam’s reservoir contributed 2,600 tons of fish to the local economy. Wheat prices have spiked, as 94 percent of Kherson’s irrigation system has lost its supply. And 150 tons of machine oil have been carried toward the Black Sea.
But that is just the physical damage.
Tavriski Christian Institute (TCI) in Kherson is a spiritual casualty. Liberated from Russian occupation last November, the seminary’s riverside properties suffered a new blow with the deluge. Early in the war, its president, Valentin Siniy, evacuated west with his wife and two children to Ivano-Frankivsk, where TCI continues in-person education for relocating staff and students.
And from over 500 miles away, he oversees seminary-based relief efforts.
CT spoke with Siniy about the state of the Kherson campus, the emotional impact of the flood, and challenges to faith that have led to newfound spiritual insights.
What is the situation with your seminary?
When the Russian military descended upon our cherished seminary, it was an emblem of knowledge and spiritual growth. They stripped it of its essence. …
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by | Jun 9, 2023 | Uncategorized
The Duggar documentary shows how the fundamentalist movement got parenting and children wrong.
Families can be pernicious places for children.
Theologian Adrian Thatcher notes this in his book Theology and Families, which I read over a decade ago. Thatcher’s words were a steady refrain in my mind as I watched the new Amazon Prime docuseries Shiny Happy People.
American evangelicals have devoted an extraordinary amount of time, energy, and resources toward the goal of shoring up and strengthening the family. Yet such efforts have largely overlooked the painful truth that appears with chilling clarity in Shiny Happy People: that families can be pernicious places for children.
This claim might sound unnecessarily provocative. Isn’t the family God’s first created institution? Isn’t it the primary place God places children for their benefit? Isn’t it designed by God for the good of its members and broader society? Yes, yes, and yes. But there remains a distinction between “The Family” and “families.” Indeed, the gap between the family in theory and families in reality can be a yawning chasm—just ask the Duggar daughters.
In these and many other cases like it, abusers and their enablers are quick to see sin in young children and especially in the outside world, but not in themselves. It’s a malignant error.
One reason why families can be damaging places for children is because of their innate vulnerability. Due to their developmental immaturity and negligible socioeconomic power, kids are weak and wholly reliant on others to protect them and meet their needs.
Yet in my research on the lived theology of family in US evangelicalism, I found an alarming lack of awareness regarding childhood vulnerability. Among so-called quiverfull families, …
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