I feel like he has compared orthodoxy to our current scientific worldview and without reading any supporting argumentations seems like he feels that Christianity needs to be modified to encompass the scientific views.

I don’t really care if we arrive at a position that we need to reevaluate certain Christian doctrines such as a literal Genesis. However, I think that this needs to be done objectively and allowing for the orthodox positions to still be correct.

I guess we are simply reading his ideas differently and so finding different motivations behind them. (Imagine that!)

The growing divide between science and religion bothers me. The growing outright rejection of science by Christians bothers me even more. I see/hear/read more and more Christians concluding (in what appears to be an unconscious, and unintentional fashion) that science and scientists are some kind of global scale propaganda tool to promote atheism because the scientific understanding of how our universe is ordered and functions make notions like a 10,000 year old planet, the violation of the laws of matter (miracles) and the notion that heaven is “up there” above the sky childish at best and intellectually dishonest at worst.

I see a man standing up to the establishment and saying “science is not teaching us to reject G-d, science is teaching us to find a new way to think about what these passages are trying to teach us”.

I see a man trying to snap the church out of its intellectual stupor which it has permitted itself to wallow in for far too long by substituting orthodoxy born of rigorous discussion for orthodoxy born of tradition and an unwillingness to rethink things we have become comfortable believing.

What are the first parts of the faith we learn in Sunday school as children? The Creation story. Jesus’ ministry through miracles. The Christmas story complete with magickal virgin birth. We are taught that it is not only appropriate but expected good practice to pray to G-d and ask him for the things we do not have (whether that is courage for the first day of school, world peace, a new bike or whatever else). Much of Christian mythology is perpetuated through the “dumbing down” of good theology to make it accessible and palatable to children.

The problem is, those things become deeply ingrained and comforting for us, and thus they become some of the most difficult pieces of our theology to become critical about later in life when we decide to apply some intellectual rigor to our theology.

I see a man standing up and saying:

Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.

(emphasis mine of course)

It doesn’t seem to get much more postmodern than that.

*shrug* I could be wrong, right?

~jhimm
—
nothing lasts.
nothing is finished.
nothing is perfect.