For more than two centuries, careful scientific research, much of it done by Christians, has demonstrated clearly that the earth is billions years old, not mere thousands, as many creationists argue. We now know that the human race began millions of years ago in Africa - not thousands of years ago in the Middle East, as the story in Genesis suggests.
And all life forms are related to each other though evolution. These are important truths that science has discovered through careful research. They are not “opinions” that can be set aside if you don’t like them.
Anyone who values truth must take these ideas seriously, for they have been established as true beyond any reasonable doubt.
There is much evidence for evolution. The most compelling comes from the study of genes, especially now that the Human Genome Project has been completed and the genomes of many other species being constantly mapped.
Jesus Christ lived in the midst of his enemies. At the end, all of his disciples deserted him. On the cross he was utterly alone, surrounded by evildoers and mockers. For this cause he had come, to bring peace to the enemies of God. So the Christian, too, belongs not in the seclusion of a cloistered life, but in the thick of foes. Dietrich Bonhoeffer ☀
To see a person walk fully clothed into water, becoming heavy and vulnerable in nature, weighed down by corporeality — it’s an almost mythological sight, evoking Ophelia as much as Moses and Jesus. It is an act that immediately makes us think of drowning, just as the emergence of that same person walking slowly, drenched, gasping a little, up through the mud makes us thinks of survival. Of salvation. The river baptism, which needs little more than a body of water and a group of willing participants, is a simple act, but aesthetically, it’s a powerful one. From the spectator’s vantage, watching someone immersed backward — face, clothes, hair, and all, into a river — you can feel the catch in your own lungs, the terrifying bit of water in the nose, the mute roar of the river rushing in your ears. You could almost think you’re falling, too. Stefany Anne Golberg ☀
Acts is not a manual with blueprints and a set of instructions on how to be a church. Acts is not a utopian fantasy on what a perfect church would look like. Acts is a detailed story of the ways in which the first church became a church. A story is not a script to be copied. A story develops a narrative sense in us so that, alert to the story of Jesus., will be present and obedient and believing as we participate in the ways that the Holy Spirit is forming the Jesus life in us. The plot (Jesus) is the same. But the actual places and circumstances and names will be different and form a narrative that is unique to our time and place, circumstances and people. Churches are not franchises to be reproduced as exactly as possible wherever and whenever – in Rome, and Moscow, and London and Baltimore – the only thing changed being the translation of the menu. But if we don’t acquire a narrative sense, a story sense, with the expectation that we are each one of us uniquely ourselves – participants in the unique place and time and weather of where we live and worship – we will always be looking somewhere else or to a different century for a model by which we can be an authentic and biblical church. The usefulness of Acts as a story, and not a prescription or admonition, is that it keeps us faithful to the plot. Jesus, and at the same time free to respond out of our own circumstances and obedience. Eugene Peterson ☀
Jesus tried desperately to keep us within and connected to the great chain of being by taking away from us the power to scapegoat and project onto enemies and outsiders. We were not to break the chain by hating, eliminating or expelling the other. He commanded us to love the enemy and gave us himself as Cosmic Victim so we would get the point — and stop creating victims. But we are transformed into Christ slowly. Our inclination to break the chain — to decide who is good and who is bad — seems to be a basic control mechanism in all of us. We actually are a bit worried about the God that Jesus believes in: “Who causes the sun to rise on bad as well as good, who lets the rain fall on the honest and the dishonest alike” (Matthew 5:45). If we dishonor the so called inferior or unworthy members of creation, we finally destroy ourselves, too. Once we stop seeing, we stop seeing. Like nothing else, spiritual transformation is an all or nothing proposition. Like Jesus’ robe, it is a “seamless garment.” He wore it and then offered it to us. Richard Rohr ☀
The church in America is led by scholars. Essentially, the church is a robust school system created around a framework of lectures and discussions and study. We assume this is the way its supposed to be because this is all we have ever known. I think the scholars have done a good job, but they’ve also recreated the church in their own image. Churches are essentially schools. They look like schools with lecture halls, classrooms, cafeterias and each new church program is basically a teaching program.
The first disciples were not teachers, they were fishermen, tax collectors and at least one was a Zealot. We don’t know the occupation of the others, but Jesus did not charge educators with the great commission, he chose laborers. And those laborers took the gospel and created Christian communities that worked, that did things and met in homes and were active. They made speeches, for sure, but so do businessmen and politicians and leaders in any number of other professions. Educators make speeches and do little else, except study for their next lecture. I wonder what the first disciples would think if they could see our system of schools, our million lectures, our billion sub lectures, our curriculums and our lesson plans. I think they’d be impressed, to be honest, but I also think they’d recognize a downside.
Church divisions are almost exclusively academic divisions. The reason I don’t understand my Lutheran neighbor is because a couple academics got into a fight hundreds of years ago. And the rest of the church followed them because, well, they were our leaders. So now we are divided under divisions caused by arguments a laboring leadership might never have noticed of cared about. Practitioners care about what works, what gets things done. They have to agree because there are projects on the line. Educators don’t have to agree at all. They can fight and debate and write papers against each other because, well, the product they are churning out is just thought, not action.
So why are we led by teachers? After all, the church and the school system are the only institutions in our culture led purely by academics. Well, the reason is the printing press. The government once controlled the church, but that ended when the printing press was invented and people could read the Bible for themselves. And the scholars were the only people who could read, so they got the job of church leadership by default. So church leadership went from fishermen, to government workers, to scholars. I wonder who’s next? I’ve got money on music executives, if only because they’re all looking for work.
To be truly Christian means to see Christ everywhere, to know him as all in all. I don’t mean to water down my Christianity into a vague kind of universalism, with Buddha and Mohammed all being more or less equal to Jesus—not at all! But neither do I want to tell God (or my friends) where he can and cannot be seen! We human beings far too often tend to codify God, to feel that we know where he is and where he is not, and this arrogance leads to such things as the Spanish Inquisition, the Salem witch burnings, and has the result of further fragmenting an already broken Christendom. We live by revelation, as Christians, as artists, which means that we must be careful never to get set into rigid molds. The minute we begin to think we know all the answers, we forget the questions, and we become smug like the Pharisee who listed all his considerable virtues, and thanked God that he was not like other men. Madeleine L’Engle ☀
King failed. But not achieving true racial equality wasn’t his greatest failure. His greatest failure came when he returned to his roots, his radical gospel roots, for in his final years, his positions on the Vietnam war and ending poverty pushed him into closer to obscurity and unpopularity. When King returned to his gospel roots, steeped in the biblical narratives of justice and exodus, he began to preach for equity between the rich and the poor, and for solidarity between the poor of all races.
And he damned America, fiercely, for her violence and for her injustice.
Two weeks before he was assassinated, King preached this, “You know, Jesus reminded us in a magnificent parable one day that a man went to hell because he didn’t see the poor. And I come by here to say that America, too, is going to hell, if we don’t use her wealth. If America does not use her vast resources of wealth to end poverty, to make it possible for all of God’s children to have the basic necessities of life, she, too, will go to hell.”
Yes, many of us are rejecting theologies that seem to dress up secular conservative ideology in “Sunday best.” But that doesn’t mean we want to put secular liberal ideology in robes and collars instead. Of course not. We’re seeking — imperfectly at every turn, no doubt — an incarnational theology, a theology that brings radical good news of great joy for all the people, good news that God loves the world and didn’t send Jesus to condemn it but to save it, good news that God’s wrath is not merely punitive but restorative, good news that the fire of God’s holiness is not bent on eternal torment but always works to purify and refine, good news that where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more. If some like Dr. Mohler want to reserve the terms Evangelical, orthodox, and even Christian for those who hold fast to the traditional view of hell, they seem to have the power and moxy to do so. Those of us who can’t in good conscience defend that view any longer are certainly not condemning people who can’t in good conscience stop defending it. But we are hoping at least to be given the courtesy of a fair hearing. To impugn our motives (that we are selling out the Bible for the pottage of popularity), to reduce our concerns about love and justice to sentimentality, to dismiss us with the “L” word and a questionable narrative surrounding it, and to demean as “secularized” our attempt to articulate a fresh vision of the gospel probably won’t pass muster as a fair hearing. Brian McLaren ☀
Here’s a name for you: Rollen Stewart. Born Feb 19th, 1944. Ring a bell? You probably know who he is you just don’t know his name although it’s not like you’re gonna run into the guy at Starbucks or anything since he’s serving 3 consecutive life sentences on kidnapping charges in a California penitentiary. His other claims to fame include being Married 4 times, being jailed by Moscow police at the 1980 Summer Olympics, and stink bombing Trinity Broadcasting Network. And most recently Rollen Stewart is known for coming in #1 for most common response on my Facebook wall when I posted the question when you hear or read the words “John 3:16” what does it make you think or feel or remember? You see, Rollen Stewart is the wacky rainbow wig guy who is famous for holding up John 3:16 signs at big sporting events. And while I don’t have the data to back up this claim I’m willing to bet that his antics didn’t win a whole lot of so-called unbelievers over to Jesus. Sarcastic Lutheran ☀
A GNT creation ©2007–2011
