At least not solely so. This post from Vaughn is a great one, and so true. I saw an episode of ER this week where Carrie Weaver was talking to her new found Mother, and she was trying to break the news about her being gay, and when the mother started spputing Bible verses, you could see Carrie’s horror; not at the verses, but at the recognition that she was about to come face to face with a culturally instilled “dogma” of many “Christians” today, and you could see her confidence melt. I can see lots of Religous Right folks identifying this as an “anti-Christian bias” , but it seems to me like simmply a matter of identifying a culture being perpetuated in our Church today; this is a perfect example of what Vaughn talks about in this post

ICTHUS: Confessions of a street evangelist

“Evangelism–the sharing of the ‘good news’–can no longer happen on the street. It’s sad, but true. Christians have so screwed with their name that it’s become impossible for them to share a message apart from cultural connections that ruin that message. The motivation of the message could be perfect–it doesn’t matter. The message that is received by a target, isn’t the message that the sender intends to send.”

There’s some truth there, but I think that even this is not the issue. I’m wondering if we somehow have got the wrong message. The “Good News” is that God has reconciled the world to Himself through the person and work of Jesus Christ. The “Good News” is that people are free to love one another, countries are free to have peaceful relations, and indeed, the old is passing away, and new things have begun. I’m not quite sure where the immaterial “soul” gets into this picture, but I tend to think (from a pragmatic perspective) that the true power of a new creation is better shown than spoken.

Yes, Christians have indeed “screwed with the name”, and Clarence Jordan would call this blasphemy (the literal meaning of the word: “to give the name a bad odor” blas (to pass gas) – pheme (name)