Sorry to be late to the party. I’m on a trip with students at the moment and may only have spotty time to catch wifi this week. So here’s my quick self-intro for now.
I grew up in a Christian household in a rural Mennonite (but not Amish) setting, and I have retained and made that abiding faith my own in my adult years – passing it along to my own children as best I can. My general sense for how my parents saw (or would see) these issues is … that they didn’t. (My dad has passed from this life, and my mom is still with us, but has long since succumbed to dementia.) But while I was growing up, dad would always express praise and amazement for all of God’s creation and how it all fit together. We have always been (and remain) unapologetic creationists.
At the same time, I don’t remember dad spending a lot of emotional energy opposing evolutionary science or deep time perspectives. He may have made disapproving comments of such things I suppose, and my memory may be “sanitizing” any such realities to make him seem to be closer to where I’ve slowly grown --I know such memory tricks do happen. But I’m pretty sure I never saw any books by, say Whitecomb, Morris or similar authors until I was investigating these issues on my own. [Added edit: my immersion in the scriptures, however, was constant and a given, and is still a given today.] All this is to say that my parents obviously thought there must be bigger fish to fry than to throw more fuel onto that warfare thesis during my childhood years in the 70s.
Fast forward to college; I attended a Mennonite community college (Hesston) where I continued my high school interests of science and math (with no anti-evolutionary powder or shot spent there either), and then finished up a 4-year electrical engineering degree at K-state. Through God’s direction at opening some doors and closing others, I ended up teaching some physical sciences and upper level math courses at a small private, non-denominational Christian, K-12 school.
My general approach to science and faith is to aspire to follow the apostle Paul’s example of focusing on Christ, and (not to put too fine a point on it!) to consider everything else as rubble in comparison. So I consider myself as having a mission of bridge building, and stumbling block removal. The tricky thing is to keep from confusing those two things with each other. I fellowship with and respect people on every different side of these origins issues, who would agree with the priorities I just expressed, but who would have very different ideas about which are the stumbling blocks, and which are the bridges that can help people reach Christ. [added: Another drumbeat I persist with is that all truth is God’s truth and that the Christian need have nothing to fear from pursuing any truth revealed by God’s creation properly understood, or from scriptures properly understood.]
I try to stay supple and learning, but to also stay rooted in my most important core convictions which give me my framework for such growth. That growth has been a slow journey for me, and I recognize that others too need time to consider and for the Spirit to move them and mature them each at their own pace. I have long appreciated this forum as just such a place for that growth to be cultivated, and I am glad to have the opportunity to help that along as I can.
I’ve shared bits of introduction on a couple threads in the past, but here’s something a bit more thorough:
Jay, this doesn’t mean you’ll have to tone down your snarky edge, does it? Boo!
