Moralizing Scripture…the Rush to Application and Misappropriating the Text
When you teach the Bible there should be a desire to find the application to our everyday lives. The quickest path to finding application is to moralize scripture. Moralizing scripture is finding good moral lessons in the verses we are readying and using the scriptures to teach people who to behave better. That is not […]
Richard Beck on Shame and Sexual Purity
That last post reminded me of something Richard Beck wrote in his book “Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Morality” about shame and sexual purity and how we tend to isolate sexual sin into its own, most severe, level of sin. Here is what he wrote, “Beyond issues of severity, some sins are unique loci […]
The Problem With Culturally Defined Truth
A few things that were once considered culturally acceptable by various groups: Slavery The Crusades Killing infants by exposure (leaving them to die) Murdering Jews Segregation The list could go a lot further than that but the point is, at some point in time there were large groups of people found these things socially and […]