hwachecks.blogg.se

Changing Our Mind by David P. Gushee
Changing Our Mind by David P. Gushee







Changing Our Mind by David P. Gushee

Gushee’s views on homosexuality placed him, by his own account, beyond the margins of evangelical Christianity. Some evangelicals thought Gushee’s arguments were clearly heretical. A great many evangelicals found the arguments that Gushee made in those texts to be highly objectionable. In 2014, he published a set of articles that formed the basis for a book called Changing Our Mind: A Call from America's Leading Evangelical Ethics Scholar for Full Acceptance of LGBT Christians in the Church. Writing those articles and that book dramatically transformed Gushee’s relationship with American evangelicalism. Gushee now describes himself as an “ex-evangelical” (142). Since then Mercer University has been his academic home. (In the 1990s, Southern was rapidly being turned in to a bastion of the fundamentalist wing of the Southern Baptist Convention.) In 1996, Gushee fled Southern for a small Baptist college-Union University-located in Jackson, Tennessee. He soon found himself embroiled in a series of ugly battles. In 1993, Gushee was offered a job teaching ethics back at Southern. After his first year at that school, Gushee concluded that a vast “gulf” stood between him and “most people at Union” (43). But at Union Gushee very often felt like a stranger in a strange land. While pursuing his doctorate, Gushee developed strong relationships with professors such as Larry Rasmussen and Beverly Harrison. One of those moderates, Glen Stassen, encouraged Gushee to pursue doctoral work at the Union Theological Seminary in New York. In the 1980s, when Gushee studied there, Southern’s faculty still included a number of moderate evangelicals. After earning his bachelor’s degree at a secular college, Gushee continued his education at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. The men and women who played a direct role in Gushee’s decision to become a follower of Jesus could all be labeled as “evangelicals.”Įvangelicals played a decisive role in shaping the rest of Gushee’s life. Three days after he walked into the church-a church that was associated with the Southern Baptist Convention-Gushee made a decision to follow Jesus. Then, for reasons that are not altogether clear, Gushee decided to walk up a nearby hill and enter the building in which the Providence Baptist Church held its worship services. On a warm afternoon in the summer of 1978, Gushee went to a shopping mall in Tyson’s Corner, Virginia to visit a gym. His book sheds a great deal of light on the history of white evangelical Protestantism in the years between 19.

Changing Our Mind by David P. Gushee

David Gushee, who teaches Christian ethics at Mercer University, has given us a concise, valuable, and beautifully crafted memoir.









Changing Our Mind by David P. Gushee