Glen Stassen has written that we need a "thicker Jesus." I thought the following paragraph was worth quoting in full. Let me know what you think:
We still live in the hangover from Christendom, when churches assumed the culture was Christian, so that all that was needed was to baptize those who had been nurtured by the culture and they would spontaneously do what is Christian. So evangelicals assume that the task is to convert people, Pentecostals assume the task is to be receptive to the power of the Spirit, spiritualists assume the task is to feel the presence of the divine, and liberals assume the task is to articulate a philosophical principle, and then the desire to be good, combined with the obvious meaning of goodness that we all know in the midst of our reasonable culture, will produce good Christians. Yet the culture is not Christian; it is good in parts, and it does have a sense of morality, but it is also imperialist, laced with unconscious racism, infiltrated by belief in the myth of redemptive violence, and driven by enormous concentration of wealth that works consistently to weaken or co-opt all possible critics. Unless we teach a thick and holistic ethic with articulate antibodies against those ideologies, Christians will be co-opted, hijacked, and flown off in untrue directions by the forced of accommodation.
Glen H. Stassen, “It is Time to Take Jesus Back: In Celebration of the Fiftieth Anniversary of H. Richard Niebuhr's Christ and Culture,” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 23, no. 1 (Spring-Summer 2003): 139.
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