I came across this cartoon today that sums up pretty well how I have been feeling about church and theology lately.
This is a cartoon is from a man named Saji at St. Thomas the Doubter Church in Dallas, TX.
When I look at the board in the picture, it makes sense to me, despite its multiplicity. From the initial inception of the church, there have been factions and divisions along ethnic, cultural, and leadership fault-lines. This is perpetuated in every generation as the church grows and expands. As a Euro-american in Church History classes, the basic projection that I learned was the split of the Roman Catholic Church from the Eastern Orthodox Church, then the Reformation, then the further splintering into Protestant Denominations, until the advent of our particular religious movement which desired to re-introduce a church structure based on Acts 2 (we called ourselves The Restoration Movement, which has since devolved back into a de facto denomination).
The anthropological term to describe the attitude of the student in the cartoon is ethnocentrism, or to believe that one’s own particular group is superior and their ways are normative. This has obvious dangers in hardening prejudices or mistreating others. What is more subtle, however, is the influence that this assumption of normative understanding is applied to theology and Biblical interpretation. View full article »
