Iva Duffin

Friday, November 13, 2020

Don’t Overstate the Rewards of Sexual Faithfulness. Don’t Understate Them Either.

The false promises of purity culture shouldn’t overshadow the true promises of God.

In his classic book Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton described the surprising, even subversive, nature of truth: “Whenever we feel there is something odd in Christian theology, we shall generally find that there is something odd in the truth.”

He gave the example of celibacy as an illustration: “It is true,” Chesterton wrote, “that the historic Church has at once emphasized celibacy and emphasized the family; has at once … been fiercely for having children and fiercely for not having children. It has kept them side by side like two strong colors, red and white. … [The Church] has always had a healthy hatred of pink.”

Chesterton’s words serve to frame the helpful approach of Rachel Joy Welcher in her recent book, Talking Back to Purity Culture: Rediscovering Faithful Christian Sexuality. Welcher registers substantial criticism against the evangelical movement that brought pledge cards, books, and rallies to sex-crazed American teenagers. But she does not deconstruct 2,000 years of orthodox teaching on Christian sexuality. Sexual purity matters, if not exactly in the way that purity culture defined it. “As with most earnest, human responses,” writes Welcher, “we didn’t get everything right.”

Good Intentions and Gross Errors

Welcher, a daughter of a pastor, was a high school student in 1997 when Joshua Harris’s book I Kissed Dating Goodbye “captured the attention of the evangelical world [and] inspired countless other books on dating and sexual purity,” she writes. She helpfully situates the movement in its context, reminding readers that purity culture grew up during a period of soaring rates of teenage pregnancy and STDs. Given ...

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Assessing Metropolitan Amfilohije, Whose Religious Freedom Fight Brought Down a Dynasty

An evangelical reflection on the legacy of Montenegro’s Orthodox leader, the highest-ranking clergy worldwide to die of COVID-19.

This past year, Montenegro witnessed a phenomenon unprecedented in its history. Nationwide nonviolent street processions rallied against a new Law on Religious Freedoms, drafted—many believe—to divest the Serbian Orthodox Church of its historic churches and monasteries.

There is no unified view on these events. Some say the marches defended human rights; some say they were a form of clerical fascism.

Personally, as an evangelical pastor in Montenegro, I prefer to call the protests a revival in the making.

Their informal leader, Metropolitan Amfilohije, passed away October 30 at the age of 82. He is the highest-ranking Christian cleric worldwide to have died from COVID-19 complications.

The metropolitan was an iconic figure. He was a man of great internal strength, remarkable intellect, iron-like determination, and fascinating zeal. But he was also accused of political agitation, hate speech against Muslims and ethnic Montenegrins, and—as the former Yugoslavia dissolved into bloody conflict in the 1990s—uncritical support to the “Serbian cause.”

He was called “Dedo” (“Grandpa” in Serbian) by the Orthodox faithful, and was compared to Moses, leading the people from Egypt. He may well be canonized the next Serbian Orthodox saint.

Controversial in life, Metropolitan Amfilohije remains controversial also in death.

His funeral rallied thousands of people to the capital, Podgorica, in the midst of a pandemic, when Montenegro was one of the most infected countries (per capita) in the world. With emotions at their peak, people neglected social distancing and face masks. His dead body was displayed in an open casket, as throngs of people touched and kissed it in veneration. Following ...

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Thursday, November 12, 2020

The Mayflower Pilgrims—as Not Seen on TV

Pop culture has given us a distorted picture of the religious separatists who founded Plymouth Colony. Historian John Turner sets the record straight.

Pilgrims have become a staple of American life and culture. We hear them referenced in political speeches by both Republicans and Democrats and see them depicted in artwork in museums across the country. Wildly historically inaccurate (and often risqué) Pilgrim costumes usually crop up at Halloween parties. Television programs, from WGN’s Salem to Sky One’s Jamestown, feature Pilgrims, Puritans, and other sources of early American drama.

Of course, with Thanksgiving only a few weeks away, op-eds concerning the good, the bad, and the ugly side of the Pilgrims’ arrival in America will be shared all across social media. Already this year, they have been enlisted as part of the pushback against the New York Times’s much-debated 1619 Project, with the National Association of Scholars launching the 1620 Project to invoke “the year in which the pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock and the Mayflower Compact was signed.”

Historian John G. Turner enters into this much-contested territory with his latest book, They Knew They Were Pilgrims: Plymouth Colony and the Contest for American Liberty. Published in conjunction with the 400th anniversary of the founding of Plymouth Colony, the book centers on the concept of liberty: how the colonists pursued it and exercised it, even as they differed in their understanding of what it entailed.

Invention and Reinvention

Debates over the meaning of Christian liberty, as well as the boundaries of liberty of conscience, are a common feature of early American history, and in Turner’s narrative, groups such as Catholics, Quakers, the Wampanoag community, and other Native Americans bring these disputes into sharp (and often violent) focus.

At the same time, Turner ...

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Share the Gospel with Prisoners. Then Apply It to the System.

Evangelicals are superb at the first task. To what extent do they embrace the second as well?

In 1979, Charles Colson, the nation’s best-known evangelical prison ministry director, visited the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla to share the gospel of Jesus Christ. Colson, who had been in prison himself only five years earlier for his role in the Watergate scandal, was known for his sympathy to prisoners’ concerns.

When he found out that the men in Walla Walla’s solitary confinement facility had to live with human waste and rotting food that the warden refused to clean up, he promised to lobby the state legislature for change. The effort succeeded, and Colson expanded his campaign for prison reform nationwide. But because Colson was no liberal, his ministries depended on a close alliance with law-and-order evangelicals and even law-and-order politicians who helped create the prison system that Colson found so troubling.

This paradox is central to the historical narrative that Aaron Griffith presents in God’s Law and Order: The Politics of Punishment in Evangelical America. With an undergraduate degree from Wheaton College and a history of personal involvement in prison ministry, Griffith sympathizes with many of the evangelicals profiled in the book—especially Colson, whom he describes as genuinely compassionate and sincerely interested in prisoners’ well-being.

But with a doctoral degree from Duke University Divinity School, Griffith is also well-versed in liberal Protestant critiques of evangelical politics, and he shares the concerns of critics who question whether evangelical support for law and order can be squared with a gospel-centered theology. Have evangelicals adopted their seemingly contradictory views of the prison system in spite of their theology, or because ...

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One-on-One with Beth Seversen on ‘Not Done Yet’

How can the Church reach and keep unchurched emerging adults?

Ed: “Authenticity” seems to be a recurring theme throughout your book. Based on your research, how would you define the “authenticity” that emerging adults are seeking, as you assert in your book? How does this authenticity cross generational boundaries?

Beth: Young adults need to know that we’re for real. Believe it or not my research shows us they are on the outside looking in at us through our virtual windows checking our churches out. No matter the reason that draws them, they are peeking in at our webpages, watching our online services, and critiquing our message—both our silent and our spoken messages. They are evaluating if our Christian faith is real and if our Christian community—the church—is good. Just the fact that we’re a part of an institution for some causes their goodness radar to go off.

Young adults have moral compasses. They may not be set on the same “true north” as yours or mine, but they are skeptical of people who: suggest everyone vote the same way, or reject people based on their sexual identities, are trying to sell something, or who are immersed in consumerism, and say they’re not antiracist but are blind to their own racial bias. Some young adults go so far as to reject Christianity for being immoral for lots of good reasons.

By becoming friends with young adults across generational borders, myths and stereotypes can be deconstructed and what is true and real can be experienced through genuine Christian community, transparency, and authenticity.

Ed: In your book, you mention a psychological phenomenon called “identity procrastination,” in which isolation leads to delayed identity formation in young adults. How can ...

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The Bible Is Our Blazing Fire

A look inside our special issue exploring women's passionate engagement with Scripture.

Imprisoned by the Nazis in Ravensbrück, Corrie ten Boom and the other women in her barracks regularly gathered to covertly read from a smuggled Bible. “The blacker the night around us grew, the brighter and truer and more beautiful burned the word of God,” ten Boom wrote in The Hiding Place. They’d crowd around the Bible “like waifs clustered around a blazing fire … holding out our hearts to its warmth and light.”

Though ten Boom had believed and loved the Bible throughout her life, in the brutal conditions of a concentration camp—enduring daily threats and violence, surrounded by evil and death—God’s Word spoke to her with a new potency. “Sometimes I would slip the Bible from its little sack with hands that shook, so mysterious had it become to me,” she said. It was as if “it was new; it had just been written. I marveled sometimes that the ink was dry.”

We, too, can open the familiar Book and encounter unexpected mystery. Well-worn passages we can recite by heart suddenly speak in new ways directly to our hearts. Stories we already know somehow know us. We read, and the living and active Word does its sharp work, convicting us about our innermost thoughts and attitudes (Heb. 4:12). We study, and amid the words we pore over, we encounter the Word of Life himself (1 John 1:1).

Evangelical women have a high commitment to Scripture; in fact, several studies demonstrate that American Christian women read the Bible more frequently than Christian men. The articles below were all featured in our CT special issue, “Why Women Love the Bible.” In these articles, we highlight Scripture’s power in the lives of those facing persecution, ...

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A True Religion Does Three Things and Answers Four Questions

John Stackhouse offers a checklist for sincere spiritual searchers.

The more you interact with people outside the Christian faith, the likelier you are to encounter the intriguing question scholar and writer John G. Stackhouse Jr. raises in his latest book, Can I Believe?: An Invitation to the Hesitant. After all, Christianity unabashedly proclaims some odd, even bizarre-sounding ideas: a talking serpent, a death-dealing piece of fruit, a city’s walls collapsing at the sound of a trumpet, and the sun standing still in the sky, not to mention a young carpenter who turns water into wine, walks on water, and eventually rises from the dead.

Then there are Christianity’s ethical demands, some of which seem unrealistic at best, like the call to turn the other cheek and love our enemies. Does anyone really live up to these standards? Throw in elements of the church’s checkered history—its role, for instance, in the Crusades and the Inquisition, or its occasional ambivalence about scientific discovery—and there seems to be ample reason not merely to reject Christianity but to find it utterly appalling.

And yet, some two billion people across all lines of culture, class, ethnicity, time, and place have come to embrace this strange, self-denying, and often-controversial faith. Most of them are sensible and decent, and quite a few—Ivy League professors, Oxbridge dons, Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners—are incredibly intelligent, sophisticated thinkers. How has this happened?

In his book, Stackhouse invites outsiders to consider whether Christian faith is more reasonable and compelling than they might suppose. After defining religion as a set of beliefs, values, and practices, he sets out some basic issues that anyone would want to consider in sorting through the ...

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