Dale M. Coulter

The recent visit of Pope Francis to the Cathedral of Lund was an historic occasion. The Holy Father joined the Lutheran World Federation’s president, Bishop Munib Younan, and the General Secretary, Rev. Martin Junge, as part of a joint commemoration that celebrated the Reformation. Both in Junge’s homily and the statement signed by Pope Francis and Bishop Younan, there were calls to push forward in the dialogue with the goal of a common Eucharistic table, even if both sides recognized the ongoing obstacles to attaining it. While the choice of Lund was related to its being the place where the Lutheran World Federation began in 1947, the celebration set in relief just how deep the ecumenical challenges are. Continue Reading »

Christianity lives in the tension between its apocalyptic vision of life and its creational mandate to occupy. The former pushes Christians to uproot and pull down the orders of society while the latter draws them back toward the earth and roots them in the orders of creation. Continue Reading »

Recently I attended my son’s installation ceremony as a member of the student government at his elementary school. The passage into office was marked by a series of oaths in which students made vows to uphold the integrity of their charges and the duties that flowed from those vows. In the ancient Roman world, the term most employed to refer to the civic relationship to which such vows bound a person was pietas. Continue Reading »

I have made no secret of my disagreement with the historical and theological reasoning Mark Noll employed to lump together dispensationalists, holiness churches, and Pentecostals in his indictment of evangelicalism’s anti-intellectual impulse. Yet Noll and George Marsden, among others, have rightly pointed out how activism operates as a fundamental force within evangelical identity. This operation has both positive and negative consequences, one of which is, no doubt, a culture that devalues the characteristics necessary for the cultivation of the life of the mind. Continue Reading »

It’s that time of year again, when Protestants begin to reflect on what the Reformation has meant and continues to mean. It is a contested legacy, the interpretation and appropriation of which depends upon historical trajectories and contemporary concerns. Within the evangelical world, the legacy of the Reformation unfolds in different ways depending on whether one identifies primarily with the confessional or the pietistic wing. Continue Reading »

Colin Gunton piped up, “Oxford? There are no theologians at Oxford.” I blurted out, “We have John Webster”—to which Gunton replied, “Right, well, Webster is an exception.” Continue Reading »

I continue to ponder the discussion in First Things of the civic role of religion in America. It is a worthwhile discussion, though admittedly fraught with so many challenges that it becomes difficult to deal with them from any single viewpoint. To take but one example, one might consider Rod . . . . Continue Reading »

The recent passing of the well-known Gospel singer Andraé Crouch offers an opportunity to reflect further on the way in which Christianity continues to shape culture through the creation of new cultural forms of music, art, etc. Continue Reading »

Lurking in the shadows of Marsden’s argument is a running twentieth-century debate over the culture created by what Lasch called “bourgeois society.” With its Marxist sheen dulled, much of this debate has ceased to be about class divisions (although it retains that edge in certain thinkers) and more so about mentalités—mindsets or common outlooks—that comprise the beliefs inhabiting the social imaginary. Continue Reading »

In a recent article for Christianity Today, Ed Stetzer offers some sociological analysis as to why Pentecostals continue to experience growth despite trends of decline or stagnation among many forms of Christianity. His three reasons coalesce around the distinctive Pentecostal doctrine of a baptism . . . . Continue Reading »