Pastor Foltz is Pastor Emeritus of Saint James Lutheran Church in Gettysburg, PA and author of the the Frontline Study content.
Traditional culture provided all sorts of guidelines for relating to our neighbors. Some of you have questioned if there was ever such a thing. You argue I should recognize the US has never had a common story. In the past, our democratic government has simply been able to prevent our present cultural wars. Perhaps then […]
I think I got ahead of myself. Responses to the first lesson indicate I should define what I mean by culture and technology. In the past, a community was associated with a culture. That culture was not something consciously built but an understanding that developed naturally from living together. That is not to say everyone […]
A member of our Science, Technology, and Society group from South Korea mused that he belonged to three different cultures during his lifetime. The first was the traditional Korean in which he grew up, the second was American after the war in 1953, and the third was the technological in recent decades. He argued technology […]
Many work for peace, justice, and love. Karen asked if Christian faith offered optimism that is worth the time and effort. I think she was expressing the frustration a lot of us are experiencing. We felt we were overcoming our past shortcomings. We had elected a Black American president. We had a viable woman candidate […]
The third major biblical vision of the future is the promise of love. Let’s use Martin Luther King’s teachings to examine it. He specifically relates hope to the modern situation in the USA. In his “I Have a Dream” speech, the vision is the Beloved Community. He begins by describing it as “I have a […]
A second vision of the future prevalent throughout the Bible is God’s promise of justice. It’s important to understand we are talking about justice not law. Ours is a society of law that tries to provide fairness and equality in resolving conflicts between individual people and groups. The justice vision promises a caring community that […]
Most of the Bible was written to people who did not seem to have a future. Faith in God offered hope against hope (Romans 4:18). That faith was informed by stories that often included promises about the future in which peace, justice, and love prevailed. These promises offered encouragement for pursuing those visions in the […]
What seems to be the initial biblical scenario did not work out. Jesus did not raise the dead and then return with them to establish an eternal kingdom on earth. At first, believers were told to wait patiently. Some still do. However, most modified this vision of the future. Believers supposedly enter some kind of […]
There are a number of scenarios for the future in the Bible. Sadly, popular Evangelicalism has promoted those that do not offer much hope for 21st century believers. For instance, the Risen Jesus returning on a cloud assumes an ancient cosmology in which God resides in a heaven above and comes down to earth to […]
I was not sure where to go from here. I began with Karen’s question of whether faith offered a healthy optimism about positive change in society. After looking at how this was asked throughout the Bible, I elected to reduce it to whether there is even a future considering the violence of society. My first […]
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