provocative

http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/3168791/Church-courts-controversy-with-Christmas-billboard

(may offend)

more dissonance

I was a little taken aback to read that Peter Rollins was in Seattle visiting Mars Hill Graduate School. Pete Rollins and Mark Driscoll are both cool in their own way, but theologically they surely have as much in common as ... some very unlike things. I understand a lot more of Driscoll than I understand of Rollins. But I like much more of the latter than the former. Perhaps there's a reason for this.

But evidently Mars Hill Graduate School, despite being in Seattle, seems to have nothing to do with Seattle's Mars Hill Church. So that's all right then.

I'm not surprised Evangelical Christianity is on the rise

Ooh. Now, this is scary. But it doesn't seem to be backed by any hard facts. So perhaps we can ignore it.

I'm not surprised Evangelical Christianity is on the rise

Review: A History of Christianity

The BBC is running a series at the moment on the history of Christianity. It's got a very different approach from last year's Channel 4 series, which impressed me greatly although many critics slammed it.

I wish there were transcripts available online, because the script has lots of lines dripping with nuance, deserving to be discussed. But I cannot find any. So we must settle for a quote from the website describing this week's epsiode:

Diarmaid MacCulluch traces the growth of an exuberant expression of faith that has spread across the globe - Evangelical Protestantism.

Today, it is associated with conservative politics, but the whole story is distinctly more unexpected. It is easily forgotten that the Evangelical explosion has been driven by a concern for social justice and the claim that one could stand in a direct emotional relationship with God.

It allowed the Protestant faith to burst its boundaries from its homeland in Europe. In America, its preachers marketed Christianity with all the flair and swashbuckling enterprise of American commerce. In Africa, it converted much of the continent by adapting to local traditions, and now it is expanding into Asia. But is Korean Pentecostalism and its message of prosperity in the here and now an adaptation too far?

He introduced the segment about Pentecostalism (and the prosperity message) by asking if some forms of Evangelicalism have wandered too far from the message of Jesus. It's an interesting question - and are the prosperity gospel folks the right ones to pick on as outliers? As he toured one or two African indigenous churches, the thought occurred to me: just how wide is the Christian family?

It seems an unanswerable question. His recurring theme in the series is that the strength of Christianity has been its willingness to adapt to local circumstances. Doubtless, that's true. But where does truth end and heresy begin? Is that, indeed, a sensible question?

Everyone tends to describe the answer by looking at their neighbours, and those they come into contact with. Some are 'in' and some are 'out'. But of course, if you look at their opinions of their 'in' neigbours, and so on, you will eventually get to places where you wouldn't be so comfortable. (I think there's an analogy to be made with inter-breeding bird species around the North Pole, but I can't find a reference).

It's tempting to think that we know what the faith truly is. But perhaps it isn't so. We tend to construct it in terms of its unchanging truth: but maybe, just maybe, it is its adaptability which is a much better way to look at it. Somehow that feels really unsettling.