A few weeks ago, I participated in a debate on whether or not we should endorse gay marriage? That debate was an significant experience for me. My partner for that debate was one of my best friends, Ben Dyer. Ben graduated from Talbot School of Theology in 2003 with a degree in philosophy of religion and ethics. He’s a now graduate student at Bowling Green State. I asked him to give a sort of report from the front lines of that debate. The following is part 1 of that report.

The four of us share a car headed for a small community college extension campus in rural Ohio, and we don’t share much else. Mark and Jacob are going to defend their positive answer to the debate’s open question, “should we endorse gay marriage?” Jonathan and I will defend the view that we shouldn’t, and as we drive I’m wondering whether any of the great debaters (Fr. Copleston and Bertrand Russell, or G.K. Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw, for instance) ever shared a cab on the way to their storied debates.

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Last week, Jonathon rightly pointed out in last week’s blog Christian Scandal (the good kind) that:

… all of these distinctly Christian stumbling blocks have been questioned by the Culture Driven Church. Grace and Hell have long been disparaged. Grace has either been watered down into universal salvation or thickened with concepts of good works. Hell has been disparaged by even venerable dons of theology. Evangelism has been abandoned in favor of a social gospel and Brian McClaren’s religous pluralism. And sexual ethics have been simply and quietly ignored in favor of discreet trysts or transformed into political debates. All of this in an effort to remove the skandalons that offend.

As we have continually emphasized through the series on the Culture Driven Church that nothing happens in a vacuum. We got to this point through processes in the past which bring us to where we are at today, in culture and the church as well. A physical analogy may be helpful. Continue reading …

 In our discussion about the Culture Driven Church, I keep coming back to one major question. You should know how questions affect me. Questions are the hobgoblins that niggle my brain. On more than one occasion my good friends have heard me begin a two hour conversation with the words, “There’s this question that’s been bugging me.” Questions are the launching pads for inspiration. And often I find if we let some questions simmer and bubble without rushing to a judgment, they tend to yield some useful insights. So here’s the question that been crawling up the side of my mind throughout the last year.

“What Christian critiques of the culture are truly scandalous?”

By “scandalous”, I don’t mean which ones fit the Pulitzer Prize nominated National Enquirer’s definition of scandal. I mean those aspects of our proclamation to the culture that are stumbling blocks that non-Christians Continue reading …

Fundamentalist Christians had by the 1950s become more defined by a particular set of do’s and don’ts than by answering the “what’s” and “whys” of their beliefs. Their world was neatly divided into “the black hats” and “the white hats,” the good folks and the bad. The anti-intellectual faith of the fundamentalist Christian community had reduced its practical distinctive into a set of dress and behavioral codes. “The rules” stated clearly that Christian men must have short hair—women must always wear dresses. No one could listen to music Continue reading …