Category Archives: Ted Campbell

Yes, I know, it should be “Whence Do Saints Come?” but hey it’s a blog.

I’ve been thinking about that company of people, in heaven and now on earth, who reflect the glory and the holiness of God. Read the rest of this entry »

Is it possible that what the New Testament means by preaching is not quite the same phenomenon that goes by the name “preaching” today? Consider simply the length of Christian sermons. The sacred scriptures of the New Testament record four verbatim sermons given by St. Peter and St. Paul. The lengths of these truly biblical models of Christian sermons Read the rest of this entry »

ΔΙΕΡΧΟΜΕΝΟΣ ΓΑΡ ΚΑΙ ΑΝΑΘΕΩΡΩΝ
ΤΑ ΣΕΒΑΣΜΑΤΑ ΥΜΩΝ ΕΥΡΟΝ ΚΑΙ ΒΩΜΟΝ ΕΝ
Ω ΕΠΕΓΕΓΡΑΠΤΟ ΑΓΝΩΣΤΩ ΘΕΩ

dierkhomenos gar kay anatheohrohn
ta sevasmata heemohn evron kay bohmon hen
hoh epegegrapto agnohstoh theoh

for going about and looking at the objects
of your worship i also found one altar inscribed
TO AN UNKNOWN GOD
(Acts 17:23)

Here’s what the Apostle Paul should have done. He should have walked through Athens screaming bloody murder and denouncing all the religious shrines he found as sinister objects of evil deities. He should have stood on Mars Hill and delivered a speech like this:

Evil and sinful Athenians: I think I’m going to puke. You are all caught up in the worship of false gods, and as the one true God is my witness, I am here today to condemn your ungodly idolatry and to tell you why you are so wrong and I am so right. Every single one of these altars is an affront to the one true God. Repent, you nasty, ignorant jackasses! Repent of your false worship, and worship the one true God!

But somehow the holy apostle got weak knees when he stood up on Mars Hill and so he blabbered out this sweet-as-molasses thing about how the Athenians really were worshipping the one true God, they just didn’t quite have all the correct data about the one true God, which Paul was happy to deliver to them. Ho hum. I would have preferred a fight. To be fair to the apostle, though, Christians have been pretty consistent in claiming that the God Christians worship is same the God that other people have worshipped as the supreme God under whatever names people may have used.

This is difficult for a Methodist. In Beaumont, Texas, Baptist was the default religion. If you weren’t anything else, you were just presumed to be Baptist, or “Babdist,” as we were inclined to say. Whatever else Methodists were, we were not Baptist. The truth is that Baptist piety and practices deeply influenced popular Methodist religion, but Methodist leaders worked hard to distinguish Methodism from Baptist culture. A lot of Methodist “New Member Classes” taught very little about Jesus and God and salvation and stuff like that but were really just extended polemics against Baptist views and practices. So why would I think the Baptists may have been right after all? Well, lets see…

1. Infant baptism isn’t the swooftest idea anyone ever came up with. Methodists have so vehemently defended infant baptism that you would think Read the rest of this entry »

April 1, 2011

The stunning news that the UMC has been declared as having a monopoly for religious purposes and the subsequent court-ordered breakup of the denomination has church officials reeling, but in the meantime it’s spawning some creative proposals for new sub-denominations created from the hulk of the old church.

One group based in Berkeley, California, has proposed a new sub-denomination to be called the Oldtimeyreligion Methodist Church (OMC). The proposed group will take the Cokesbury Worship Hymnal (1938) as the denomination’s sole book of polity, liturgy, and hymnody Read the rest of this entry »

My great grandfather and great grandmother Campbell were members of the Braxton Church of Christ in Cannon County, Tennessee, and after my great grandfather died and my great grandmother moved her three boys to Texas, she raised them in the South Park Church of Christ in Beaumont, Texas. My grandfather and one of his brothers married Methodist sisters and the women succeeded in diverting them into Methodist churches. The reputation that the Churches of Christ had among my kinfolk was that they were eccentric because Read the rest of this entry »

C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity is usually described as an “apologetic” for belief in God and the Christian faith because it begins with an argument for the existence of God. I feel really bad about the fact that I never have understood his argument for the existence of God. My friend Lena Davis gave me a copy of Mere Christianity in the fall of my senior year in high school and I trudged dutifully through the chapters that presented his argument. I had a counter-argument to everything he came up with. Didn’t get it. Still don’t. In fact I still wake up as an atheist on choice Monday mornings. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s an eleven-minute unauthorized introductory/promotional video on my new book, Wesleyan Beliefs: Formal and Popular Expressions of the Core Teachings of Wesleyan Communities (Nashville: Kingswood Books, 2010):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1XuPXpeJ34

Blessings,

/ted

Check out what Kevin Watson has rattling over at his web site, Deeply Committed:

http://deeplycommitted.com/

Great stuff on Wesleyan renewal today, including a review of Wesleyan Beliefs (thank you very much). Kevin felt he needed to reveal that he is my graduate student, but I don’t feel the need to make any such reciprocal announcement. I did think about an alternative web site name: Committed To An Institution, but I’m already committed to heartcoreMethodist, so I’ll stick with that for now. Blessings! Stay committed — deeply committed, /ted

One of the most ancient of rituals is the making of solemn promises in the presence of witnesses. In weddings we ask couples to make a mutual solemn promise to be faithful to each other “till death do us part” or “as long as we both shall live.” Read the rest of this entry »