ACROSS THE LINES - Archive (2006-2020)

In his successful 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan wooed voters by conjuring an image from one of the most famous sermons in American history - John Winthrop’s A Modell of Christian Charity.  America, Reagan declared, remained “a shining city on a hill."   But Winthrop’s sermon , preached in 1629 to Puritan exiles aboard the English ship  Arbella , was not all brightness and light.  Winthrop encouraged the pilgrims that they had been called into a special “covenant” by God, but he also cautioned:  "If we should so frustrate and deceive the Lords Expectations ... then All were lost indeed; Ruine upon Ruine, Destruction upon Destruction would come, until one stone were not left upon another." By the 1660s, many New Englanders, hardened by their experience in what was for them a New World, were haunted by this darker side of their conditional covenant. In a famous 1953 article in the  William & Mary Quarterly,  Harvard historian Perry Miller resurfaced

There is a famous story that circulates in Latin America of a peasant who was learning to read in a literacy program that used the Bible as its principal text.  Such programs were common in Latin American in the 1960s and 1970s, during the heyday of liberation theology.  Reading aloud to his fellow students, this peasant came to the famous passage in the book of Galatians in which Paul declares to the Christians in Galatia : “In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free.”  In Spanish this verse reads: “En Cristo Jesus no hay judío ni griego, ni hombre ni mujer, ni esclavo ni libre.” When the peasant just learning to read came to this verse, though, he didn’t read, “En Cristo no hay judío ni griego …”  Instead he read out loud: “En Cristo no hay jodido ni gringo …”   because where “griego” means “Greek” – a word the peasant would have never heard of – the word “gringo” is common vernacular for “American,” that is a citizen of the United States.  An

From the time the brothers John and Charles Wesley first convened a "holy club" of friends at Oxford University in 1729, Methodists have declared theirs a pursuit of “holiness” or “Christian perfection.”  For early Methodists, the pursuit of Christian perfection led inevitably to disagreements about what it meant to live a holy life.   As early as  1741 the Wesleys distanced themselves from their closest collaborator, George Whitefield, over his Calvinist teachings.  And while Wesley proclaimed himself to possess "a catholic spirit," his practices - not least, his own refusal to conform to the conventions of Anglican parish ministry - were widely perceived by his contemporaries to be divisive or even "schismatic." Methodism on the other side of the Atlantic retained this same spirit, which should come as little surprise since it was born in an act of separation - in 1784,  Wesley consecrated Thomas Coke as Superintendent, setting in motion the cre

This week the United Methodist Church, in which I am an ordained pastor, gathers elected delegates from around the world for its quadrennial gathering called the “ GeneralConference .”   This year’s meeting is in Portland, Oregon, and the delegates may well define the denomination in a way that requires me some day, as a matter of principle, to separate from it.   In a  blogpost  last week Bishop Scott Jones made it clear that many General Conference delegates are prepared to throw down precisely this gauntlet in Portland. Of pastors  like me , who have presided at same-sex weddings, Bishop Jones wrote: "They are violating the rules of a church they have freely joined when other, similar churches offer acceptable ways of pursuing their calling. If I ever get to the point where I cannot in good conscience obey the key aspects of our discipline — and I pray such a day never happens — it will be time to surrender my credentials as a United Methodist bishop and elder and find some