Maybe Sister Cindy should try preaching repentance as liquidation of assets and a life of poverty if she's to become edgy again

What Can Fascination With ‘Sister Cindy’ Teach Us About the ‘None’ Generation?  :

I do think thoughtful conservative religious people would likely be concerned to discover—to use Christian language—that the scandal of the gospel has largely lost the power to scandalize (an enervation for which they themselves are, in my view, largely responsible). And if religion indeed no longer has this power, then we may perhaps imagine that religion of the kind that made real claims on and demands of people is heading, like that elderly aunt, rather headlong into oblivion. It may be that the world will be a better place when it’s gone, but it may also be that we come to miss it deeply. 

So likewise, whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple. 

-- Luke 14:33

“I abhor his doctrines. Christianity is truly a religion for the expropriated.” 

-- Russell Kirk in 1942

Chris Lehmann blames gnosticism for American Christians' development of a sanctified money cult

From an interesting review here by a progressive, which entirely misses the materialism inherent in both the American conservative and progressive interpretations of the meaning of the Christian faith, making gnosticism kind of beside the point because it's adapted for materialist ends, which in a real gnostic would be a contradiction in terms.

Americans, it seems, specialize in perverting not just the orthodoxy, but also the heterodoxy:

At the root of this depressing defeat for a prophetic and socially-conscious Christian faith, in Lehmann’s reading, is what amounts to a strong and ever-present current of Gnosticism: the belief that I can rise above all obstacles and can transform myself and succeed against all odds with God’s help; that I can even transcend basic human limitations—suffering, illness, and death—and become God-like in my personal triumph. It’s always about me and “my” God; it’s never about transforming the social conditions that cause so much unnecessary suffering for so many.

Lehmann demonstrates how during times of the most acute public suffering, like the depressions of 1837, 1857, 1893, etc., almost all Protestant thought leaders served up new formulas for individual self-improvement rather than challenging the presumption and arrogance of wealth. Hence his title, “The Money Cult”: in what many are pleased to regard as a Christian nation, the functional faith of most believers has usually boiled down to a sanctified form of acquisitive individualism.

Dimwit religion professor from Alma College blames Constantinian Catholicism for the tyranny of orthodoxy

One Kate Blanchard, here, who seems to be as seriously in thrall to an idyllic albeit anarchic world pre-Constantine as the Pentecostal fanatics among us are to its "Spirit-filled" environment. Well, Alma College was a Scottish Presbyterian institution where the Catholics must have been guilty of something, sometime.  

'There is no simple way to explain why some of us submit to the whole shebang and others don’t. In the spirit of gross oversimplification, I blame not social media but Constantinian Catholicism—not for intra-religious diversity, but for the idea that life should be any other way. Before 325 CE there existed a vast network of small clusters of pagan and Jewish Christians around the Mediterranean, mostly meeting in people’s homes, sharing a collection of related but not uniform sacraments and stories about Jesus.

'But when Constantine became the Roman Caesar he decided he needed to build a more uniform religion for his empire. The religious power elite saw their chance and spent the next decades fighting over which version of Christianity would prevail, developing a biblical canon, determining official formulae for Jesus and the Trinity, and approving only certain ways of doing baptism and communion. By the end of the century, Theodosius I would outlaw all “wrong” forms of Christian belief and practice and punish them severely.'

This is just plain silly. Constantine didn't submit to the "whole shebang" himself, and encouraged a process meant to achieve consensus among the fractious Christians, not "orthodoxy", even as he maintained religious freedom for non-Christians throughout his tenure. He was baptized on his deathbed by a heterodox Arian, Eusebius. It is anachronistic to speak of "Constantinian Catholicism", which is a relic of the medieval Roman Catholic imagination.

The passion for orthodoxy is hardly a Catholic invention. The idea is built into the Christian religion, and is at least as old as Paul himself, who in 1 Corinthians 16:22 anathematizes those who do not love the Lord, and in Galatians 1:8f. does the same to any who preach a different gospel than his.

Last time I checked, this Paul was a hero of the Presbyterians, but apparently no more, at least at Alma College.

For there must be also heresies among you, that they which are approved may be made manifest among you.

 

-- 1 Corinthians 11:19

John Shelby Spong's mother helps explain the obsessions of the man

From an interview here:

I happen to know the Bible pretty deeply and I didn’t reject the Bible when I rejected its literal frame of reference. I happen to be a believing, practicing Christian. I don’t go to church on Sunday mornings for show. I go because I want to be there and I need to worship. It’s not an option for me to sleep in on Sunday. My faith is deeper than that. I do not eat a meal that I don’t stop and say grace beforehand because that’s how I acknowledge the presence of God in my life at a regular time. I try to live a life of absolute commitment. I claim my Christian identity publicly.

This puts me at odds with my colleagues in the Jesus Seminar who are so scholarly but they are not devoted. They really think the church is a sick institution and they don’t want to be part of it. I think the church is the only place we’ve got, but we’ve got to transform and redeem it. If the church is not going to be the place where people encounter God and Christ I don’t see any other place in our society to do so. I work to transform the church. I don’t work to get rid of the church. I work to transform the meaning of what it means to be a Christian, not to get rid of that meaning. ...

I wrote a book once about reclaiming the Bible for a nonreligious world. I really want to take it back from those people who I think are ruining it. I don’t dislike those people. My mother was a fundamentalist. She had not finished the 9th grade. She knew no other way to approach the biblical story.

Spong was more inclined to wear membership in the Jesus Seminar as a badge of honor as recently as 2012, here:

In the 1990’s, Robert Funk invited me to become a Fellow of the Jesus Seminar. I was the first Fellow not to be a professional academic. ... While being a successful author and possessing a number of honorary doctorates, I did not have an earned PhD, which was normally regarded as a pre-requisite for becoming a Fellow of the Jesus Seminar. Nonetheless, the Seminar honored me by accepting me to its membership.  I have loved my association with them over the years.  I have participated in their debates and deliberations.  I have been invited to address some of their largest gatherings, including the 2004 event called “The Jesus Seminar at Times Square.”  The Seminar has adopted some of the perspectives that I have offered and they have under-girded my career with their incisive scholarship.  I have previously been recognized by them in several ways.  I was chosen for membership in the “David Friedrich Strauss Society of Biblical Scholars,” a society named for an early 19th century German New Testament scholar, who first brought the findings of the academy to the attention of the people of Europe.  Later I was given the “John A. T. Robinson Award” for “Courage and Integrity in Theology.”

I was deeply touched by each of these honors.  To close the gap between the academy and the people in the pews has been both the goal of the Seminar and the primary ambition of my career.  The Jesus Seminar has been a major force in enabling me to fulfill that vocation.  I have many friends today among the Fellows of the Seminar and I believe they have a new respect for the willingness of the clergy and lay people that I represent to be engaged in biblical scholarship. 

Just another reason I'm not a member of the American Academy of Religion

Story here:

This past weekend the New York Times ran a column—”Setting Aside a Scholarly Get-Together, For the Planet’s Sake“—about the American Academy of Religion’s new commitment to battling climate change.

Matthew Avery Sutton grossly overestimates how many American Christians believe in the rapture

Which just proves that you can become infected by apocalyptic while studying it.

Seen here:

"And yet the apocalyptic never leaves. It’s still there, that’s where the polls come back. It’s now assumed by hundreds of millions of Americans that the rapture is a real thing and that Jesus is coming back."

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That is said notwithstanding the fact that the country as a whole doesn't have enough population to support making it in the first place. Don't they teach geography in the schools anymore? It's pretty embarrassing coming from a Ph.D.

Meanwhile Pew polling most recently shows that 78% of the adult population is nominally Christian, with 51% Protestant and just 26% Evangelical, ground zero for the rapture theology. That puts the upper limit on who would likely believe in an apocalyptic interpretation of the Christian faith somewhere in the neighborhood of 63 million, not "hundreds of millions", if that.

This tendency to exaggerate is not limited to the sphere of religion, however, where members of all faiths fudge on polls asking how many times they attend religious services. A famous politician in America known by all, a left-wing ideologue, also frequently opines that the country is far more populous than it really is, which suggests that politics and religion often operate with the same defective spatial reasoning, not to mention the same defective enthusiasms.

Or was it the dope smoking?

The Dark Side of English at Religion Dispatches

Will the harassment never stop?

(source)