A Fresh Perspective

Samir Selmanovic has written a wonderful book titled: “It’s Really All About God.” He shares how his devastated parents tried everything within their power to turn him away from Christianity when he embraced the Christian faith. They recruited one of Europe’s best psychiatrists and over fifty relatives to take their best shot in helping their son get over his infatuation with God. While his parents were not religious, their background was Muslim, and on one occasion they invited Imam Muhammad, a man respected in the Muslim community of their city, to their house to talk with Samir. His parents figured Islam was the lesser of two evils. Samir says that Muhammad “was the most environmentally progressive and socially conscious person” he had ever met. He was a vegan who walked to his house from the other side of the city, avoiding transportation on principle in order to protect the environment. He was a small gray-haired man with a large smile emanating peace and playfulness. Samir wa...

Most Christians look to the Bible, especially the New Testament, as their major source for determining what is relevant for a life of faith. This process of discovering God’s will from the Scriptures is not simply a matter of understanding what the biblical writers were saying. We inevitably bring our presuppositions, beliefs, ideas, and biases to the text. Always. Our interpretations of the intended meanings of the biblical writers/communities and our applications of these texts to our contemporary lives are always shaped by our worldview, that is, the theological, social, political, and other cultural perspectives with which we approach the text. Hopefully we are open, honest, and humble enough to acknowledge this and allow two thousand years of Christian tradition, modern science, psychology, and other branches of knowledge, as well as reason and good common sense to guide us in our interaction with Scripture. Interpreting the Bible as a means of discerning God’s redemptive will i...

In my sermon last Sunday, drawing from James 1:1-8, I talked about how God can use suffering to grow our souls. My theme was that God is in the business of soul making and God uses our sufferings in the process of soul growth and development. What James says about the redemptive value of “trials of diverse kinds,” however, does not cover all forms and expressions of suffering. There are sufferings of such tragic proportions that it is difficult to see any redemptive value at all. The atrocities committed against “the other” as we have witnessed in Nazi Germany and more recently in Rwanda and Darfur cannot be described in a redemptive way. Even the suffering that follows natures' upheaval such as we are witnessing now in Haiti seem to make no sense whatsoever. Last night one of the “world news” programs did a piece on the humanitarian efforts of a 78 year old doctor, who is in Haiti now doing all he can to assist and comfort the wounded and hurting. The coverage showed a traumat...

There are two vastly different Christian approaches to evangelism being practiced today. One can be described as inclusive and invitational; the other is dualistic and confrontational. The one that is inclusive and invitational is based on the theology that all people are children of God, regardless of their religious faith or lack thereof. All human beings share a common humanity and a common identity as God’s beloved children. Practitioners of this type do not claim to be in sole possession of the truth or that their way of knowing and serving God is the only way available to human beings. All they know is that it is the best way for them. They are growing in God’s love and becoming more compassionate, responsible, and forgiving persons by following Jesus. They are learning through their discipleship to Christ how to love well, and they are acquiring a larger view of life. They are so grateful for the abundance of life they have discovered they want to invite others to join them ...

If our Christianity does not move us beyond our particular Christian group or church or denomination, or our faith system or doctrine, to accept those who believe and practice a different faith than ours, then our faith will most likely be more detrimental than helpful to the work of the kingdom of God on earth. If we cannot embrace others as God’s children without requiring them to adhere to our faith system then we become obstacles, obstructions, barriers to the creation of God’s beloved community. Our Christian faith should be a resource that compels us to hold our beliefs in humility, to work for peace, to listen to and treat others of different faith traditions with respect, and look for common ground on which we can stand together as children of God. “Blessed are the peacemakers,” said Jesus. “Blessed are those who hunger after justice” (the kind that attends to the inequities of the disadvantaged). Isn’t it ironic and sad that so many versions of Christianity today have the ...

I believe that the more inclusive one’s Christian faith becomes (or for that matter any religious tradition) the more transformative and real and spiritually healthy it becomes. The more dualistic a faith is the more its adherents concern themselves with who is “in” and who is “out,” who is “saved” and “unsaved,” and in the more fundamentalist versions of Christianity this means separating those who are going to heaven from those who are going to hell. Dualistic believing Christians employ different methods and criteria in determining who is in and who is out. The criteria may include church membership, baptism, believing certain doctrines, adopting certain formulas like saying the sinner’s prayer, etc. For example, I have a Christian friend who was labeled “unsaved” by some of his more conservative Christian friends because he doesn’t believe in the virgin birth. Certainly I believe that church membership, baptism, Christian doctrine, etc, have their place, but I am convinced th...

The Advent of Jesus marked a gigantic leap forward in the evolution of religious thought. Jesus broke old, unhealthy patterns of relating to the Divine which were rooted in our projections of fear and our tendency to transfer guilt. In ancient religious practice it was commonplace to offer up either a human or animal sacrifice in order to pacify and appease the deity. This was practically a universal pattern of ancient religious cultures—offering up the firstborn, the virgin, the best of the herd or flock to propitiate the deity. Jesus related to and spoke about a God (Abba) of providential care and grace. His acceptance of “sinners and tax collectors,” his compassion towards the diseased, the demonized, and the destitute, his inclusion of those excluded, revealed a God who cares deeply about the oppressed, the marginalized, and the condemned of the world, a God of unconditional love. And yet this was no mere sentimentalism. Jesus confronted and challenged the hypocrisy, rigidity, ...