Sunday, May 11, 2008

 

Christianity Today-- Christian:?

I've heard that the magazine Christianity Today has gone liberal. Some evidence of this is the article,
Go ahead and disagree with Obama's pastor. But remember: He's family." But it doesn't offer any evidence that the anti-American pastor Wright actually is more than a nominal Christian-- indeed, the article seems to think Wright should get credit merely for that:
Jeremiah Wright goes to church looking for Jesus. And that's why evangelicals should pay attention to him. This is not to say they should agree with him. But Jeremiah Wright is a serious Christian. He didn't have to be — many gifted black intellectuals have gotten off the bus with the church for having been, as it inarguably has, a slave religion. (Wright has argued with Muslim friends that its track record is no better on slavery.) Even within the young tradition of Africentric theology, birthed by James Cone at Union Seminary in the late 1960s, former theologians have left Jesus behind in their effort to embrace the wider black diaspora worldwide. Cone himself worries that exclusive attention to Jesus yields something he calls "Christofascism," by which he seems to mean exclusivity. His brilliant student Dwight Hopkins, a leader at Trinity, also seems to think the Christian church too narrow an allegiance, and wants black folks generally to ally over race rather than religion. (Wright has repeatedly endorsed Cone and Hopkins, yet he doesn't use language like "Christofascism"--this is one of the things you should ask him about). In conversation with his teacher Cone, and the most distinguished theologian at his church in Dwight Hopkins, Wright is staking his claim solely on Jesus — respectfully, of course, in dialogue with Islam and black nationalist thought — but he's standing on the promises of this God.
 

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