Blog Archive
for May, 2008
Transracial Adoption, the Gospel, and You
— Thursday, May 29th, 2008 —
Years ago I was adopted into a family of a different ethnicity than my own, and it was traumatic. You should see how long it took me to learn Hebrew.
This, and the fact that I’ve adopted two children from the former Soviet Union, led me to read with great interest a current report about so-called “transracial adoption,” the phenomenon of parents who adopt children of a different ethnicity or cultural background.
The report — issued by the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute — is against transracial adoption. The New York Times reports that the report does not conclude that transracial adoption produces any kind of psychological or social harm in children, but that “these children often face major challenges as the only person of color in an all-white environment, trying to cope with being different.”
Now, on the one hand, I can see why the social workers would have such concern. As I’ve asserted repeatedly elsewhere, contemporary American rootlessness atrophies the human spirit. It is probably impossible to quantify just how damaging to our happiness this current age of hyper-mobility and commercialized sameness is.
Moreover, the 1970s and 1980s gave us a popular culture view of transracial adoption as novelty at best, condescension at worst. Movie audiences roared with laughter when Steve Martin narrated in the opening minutes of The Jerk: “I was born a poor black child.” Television audiences cooed as the theme song to one seventies sitcom told the story, “A man is born, he’s a man of means; then along come two, and they got nothing but their genes, but they got diff’rent strokes.”
The joke in both instances is how nonsensical the concepts seemed: a white Midwesterner with African-American parents; two streetwise African-American kids growing up in a Park Avenue penthouse. The laugh tracks belied an American wink-and-nod at the idea of a familial racial unity-in-diversity.
Even so, the discouragement of trans-racial adoption is counter-productive and dangerous.
Keep Reading...Beyond a Veggie Tales Gospel: Why We Must Preach Christ from Every Text
— Monday, May 19th, 2008 —
Have you ever seen the episode of Veggie Tales in which the main characters are martyred by anti-Christian terrorists? You know, the one in which Bell Z. Bulb, the giant garlic demon, and Nero Caesar Salad, the tyrannical vegetable dictator, take on the heroes for their faith in Christ. Remember how it ends? Remember the cold dead eyes of Larry the cucumber behind glass, pickled for the sake of the Gospel? Remember Bob the tomato, all that remained was ketchup and seeds?
No, of course you don’t remember this episode. It doesn’t exist–and it never will. Such a concept would be rejected out of hand by the creative minds behind the popular children’s program, and the evangelical video-buying public wouldn’t hand over the cash to buy such a product. It would be considered too disturbing, too dark, for children. Instead, the Veggie Tales episodes we’ve all seen are bloodless. They take biblical stories, and biblical characters, but they mine the narrative for abstractions–timeless moral truths that can help children to be kinder, gentler, and more honest. There’s almost nothing in any episode that isn’t true. But what’s missing is Jesus.
The Veggie Tales–and its biblical children’s story predecessors, including scores of Sunday school lessons and Eastern pageants–don’t handle Jesus very well, except as a distant “forever friend” somewhere in the heavens, because one can’t have the biblical picture of Jesus without having a disturbing, violent scene–a Roman torture instrument, spattered blood on a screaming mother, a flash of cosmic energy in a borrowed grave.
There’s plenty of Veggie Tales preaching out there, and it’s not all for children.
Keep Reading...The Kingdom of God and the Church: A Baptist Reappraisal
— Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 —
Some Baptists are debating right now whether or not our church rolls ought to contain the names only of those who are actually worshippers of the Lord Jesus. Some see this as a minor issue, one we ought to avoid so that we can get back to “Kingdom business.”
But what if our church membership rosters have everything to do with the business of the Kingdom?
The Kingdom of God is everywhere across the pages of the Bible. Some of us would even argue that God’s establishment of the Kingdom of Christ is the central theme of the Scripture itself. So why sometimes do Baptists act as though the Kingdom is a denominational program or an individual devotional exercise rather than as the invasion force forming the church itself?
My friend Robert Sagers and I have written an article together on the ways in which Kingdom theology informs a Baptist understanding of the church, and vice-versa. We think our vision of the Kingdom of God has much to do with some of our contemporary debates over worship, the ordinances, preaching, and regenerate church membership.
Keep Reading...
