open source theology

Bart Ehrman has written another book.  It’s called, Jesus Interrupted.  You can read a short article about Ehrman and the new book, an excerpt of the book, and listen to the NPR story here.  I have not read the book; let me be clear about that.  But what I talk about in this essay has nothing to do with the content of the book.  Rather, I am interested in a working presumption that makes Ehrman’s argument possible in the first instance.  The presumption is that the words that compose the Bible are more or less accurate representations of what really happened, which makes “contradictions” and differences in the gospels to be particularly problematic.

If ever there was a book whose time has come, this is it. Drawn against the backdrop of the banking crisis and the U.K. M.P.’s expenses scandal, the prodigious pen of Tom Wright presents a biblical case for the development of ‘virtue’ as one of the main tasks of the Christian believer during the course of a life lived in earth.

Many Christians argue that syncretism is a problem for believers today.  Blending Christian and non-Christian practices is a bad move.  For instance, Denny Burk recently argued that Christians should not observe Ramadan with Muslims and hecalled out Richard Mouw and Brian McLaren for doing so.

Not just because I get quoted on Dave Wainscott’s blog (Gustavo Martin pointed it out to me - in connection with his article on Register Analysis in Mark 13 ), but because there is also a great example of how the narrative/historical can be applied to contemporary belief and practice, I offer the following link to Rob Bell on Revelation, also on Dave Wainscott’s blog.

Ed Yong at the blog, Not Exactly Rocket Science, discusses a recent study:

For many religious people, the popular question “What would Jesus do?” is essentially the same as “What would I do?” That’s the message from an intriguing and controversial new study by Nicholas Epley from the University of Chicago. Through a combination of surveys, psychological manipulation and brain-scanning, he has found that when religious Americans try to infer the will of God, they mainlydraw on their own personal beliefs.

Psychological studies have found that people are always a tad egocentric when considering other people’s mindsets. They use their own beliefs as a starting point, which colours their final conclusions. Epley found that the same process happens, and then some, when people try and divine the mind of God. Their opinions on God’s attitudes on important social issues closely mirror their own beliefs. If their own attitudes change, so do their perceptions of what God thinks. They even use the same parts of their brain when considering God’s will and their own opinions.