Yeah, that bothered me. I tend to lean towards the view held by those in our informal “intelligent design” club who came to Christ via studying evolution, that the design happened at the start of things in the rules of chemistry, though I often ponder the results the one biology major concluded, that God didn’t have to intervene more than seven times altogether. The first view might be categorized as “God had no role” by some.
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I knew a gal who said she has a personal relationship with Christ but identifies her belief(s) as “Native American”. I got the impression that she considers “the Great Spirit” to be both the Father and the Holy Spirit, a kind of weird modalism.
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The problem with creationists is that they assume that every verse in the Bible is a statement of literal objective “fact”. Yet so much of what we read and say is patently NOT “objective fact”. For example, if you read the accounts of Jesus’ parables he basically states “such and such happened”. Yet we know it didn’t, he’s simply giving illustrations of a more basic teaching.
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If my church made it a requirement of membership that you had to accept creationism, I would leave that church.
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Hopefully few churches go that far, though at times many congregations make you feel a bit of an outsider for some secondary beliefs, not only evolution but environmentalism, women’s roles, and politics.
We just started a class on living doctrine out with the text being Beth Felker Jones book Practicing Christian Doctrine. It seems that if a church places such things as requirements, they then become doctrine or dogma, and the problems are much more serious. We will see how the class goes.
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Been there, done that.
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this is a point that interests me greatly and an important one. HOWEVER…
it appears that you infer that the corruption of YEC is at fault.
I would suggest that individuals are finding that the evolutionary explanation actually begins to make more sense than God and therefore those individuals leave Christianity. Lets face it, do any of the Christians here really know from a scientific viewpoint that Christ can actually come in the clouds of heaven? Isnt that belief largely a “if pigs fly” claim? I dont think there is much room in science for faith/hope so if one starts to doubt the biblical narrative of Genesis and the geneologies leading up to Christ, its relatively easy to understand the 2012 Gallop poll statistics.
good point Randy…you know this might seem a little offtopic, but to me its in line with your comment…
I often wonder, given Christ came to realise that he was God (The Son of Man), how is it that he said almost nothing about any of this…I mean surely, if he could either see the future or be inspired by a vision from The Father regarding the future, he would have at least forseen this debate and other ones like it (such as sexuality, Islam, The Sunday Sabbath, we cant find the Ark of the Covenant with the 10 commandments inside etc)…but he didnt.
That frustrates me…why does God have to make himself so bloody misterious when it comes to these things…so much so that people leave Christianity because of it? I mean surely this isnt an army training camp aimed at weeding out the failures…isnt Christ telling us its the failures he came to save?
I think i could safely argue that what has happened during the reformation is more argumentative and more destructive than anything judaism did prior to the time of Christ. Christians argue so much from different denominal points of view, Im sure we have made even the idea of God a burden (let alone the Mosaic rules of the O/T)
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I can’t agree more, @adamjedgar. Adam. Thank you for your deep thoughts. It is hard. I don’t know the answers. In a way, it makes me fall more on belief that God will ultimately be good–better than I can imagine.
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If they make a human interpretation of the Bible into their God, then that is entirely possible.
Things we can know through science:
- The age of the Earth and the Universe
- The occurrence of global catastrophic floods over the last 10,000 years
- The genetic relationships between species
If YEC is actually true then the scientific evidence would support it.
What people are doubting is the need for the biblical interpretation required by YEC’s.
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Please stop mixing science and theology.
Whoa – only someone who’s never really done any science could say that!
Because He isn’t aiming to satisfy the curiosity of people.
He gave us enough to be able to identify false prophets such as Mohammed.
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Which in this context means imposing their own worldview into the Bible.
Yes, and it would do so without having to warp and twist and lie.
And in my experience in my university days, when that interpretation is ditched, people come to Christ.
Adam, great point. I actually wasn’t meaning the YEC was at fault–I think that, given God is like a father and knows our struggles and insecurities, it’s our picture of Him as unforgiving, unbendable, demanding that we know things we can’t be sure about–that can get us stuck. It’s not even our fault that we can be excessively attentive to detail. However, being too unforgiving on the science side can be a pit of fundamentalism as well. We can be fundamentalists and depicting a God (and ourselves) of no understanding. Greg Boyd’s book, “Benefit of the Doubt,” helps me a lot with that. In it, he describes how he became a Christian from being a skeptic, but found one house of cards fall after another, when he joined a very fundamentalist, Pentecostal group. It wasn’t just science–but a bunch of things he had to realize weren’t correct. He realized eventually that it was so important to remember that God understands where we come from. That’s more important than the details–that He’s just. You and I have both had wonderful parents–and it’s hard to imagine someone better than they are–but He’s better, we both think. .
Thanks for your deep thoughts.
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But did he? Why give us enough to see that Islam is fase, given that religion didnt even exist until hundreds of years later, and not enough to be certain about tue other things i mentioned…like the day of worship? Lets face it, Christianity’ s own founder, didnt worship on the day most of His followers now do. There are also Christians who dont even follow the Old Testament, despite Christ having spent a great deal of time reading it publicly and citing it when explaining God.
For me its pretty easy to accept demons being cast out of a man into a heard of pigs, however, Christ returning in the clouds?
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Hard to worship on the day of your resurrection when you haven’t been raised yet.
Jesus told the woman at the well that the place of worship for Jews and Samaritans was going to be changed. If He was ok with changing where worship was to take place (it was defined in the OT after all) why not also change the day?
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That seems to be something Paul dealt quite a bit. From my limited understanding, Paul thought Gentiles were free from the Laws in the Torah (e.g. circumcision), and I would assume that also applies to what day worship was held on. The relationship between Judaism and Christianity was one of the earliest issues the Christian church had to contend with given it is something that Paul himself had to tackle.
Let’s look at your list:
Sexuality? Maybe because it has nothing to do with the Gospel.
Islam? One reason it was called a Christian heresy early on was that scholars recognized that a great deal of the Quran’s ideas were lifted directly from heretical works, such as the idea that God deceived everyone to think that Jesus got crucified or that Jesus made clay birds as a child and brought them to life or that Jesus not only spoke like an adult but also taught while still in the cradle, and that a lot of material in the Quran was lifted from Christian poetry – and of course the fact that it denied any Atonement or Resurrection.
“Sunday Sabbath”? Jesus never said anything about following that rule, and for that matter neither did Paul or Peter or John, which pretty much says it’s not important.
“we cant find the Ark of the Covenant”
Can we find the Holy of Holies? Of course not – it was superseded. The same is true of the Ark.
“with the 10 commandments inside”
Why should anyone care? Christian ethics don’t involve the Ten Words, Christian ethics flow from the Cross.
The only item on that list that is of any actual value is Islam; the rest are just matters of curiosity.
Those would be the ones who have paid attention to Acts 15, where the entire Old Testament system is reduced to just four things:
For it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay on you no greater burden than these requirements: that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols, and from blood, and from what has been strangled, and from sexual immorality.
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Which is a humorous way of illustrating that the New Covenant hadn’t yet been inaugurated.
It wasn’t so much a change as just a superseding: the Sabbath had to do with the original Creation, but in Christ all things are made new, and the day to celebrate in connection with that is Resurrection Day when Jesus held His ‘triumph’, His victory party.
Jesus addressed this indirectly when He talked about putting new wine into old wineskins: the Temple, the Ark, the Sabbath all qualify as old wineskins.
It’s interesting to me that in the early church there were those who referenced Sunday as the day the cosmos changed, when death “started to run backwards” as C.S. Lewis out it; many called it “the eighth day” because the old creation wrapped up on the seventh day but now a new creation was inaugurated; others merely noted that the Resurrection of the Incarnate Word was an event so much greater than the setting aside of one day, and some of those referenced every day as now being the Sabbath since Christ has given us His rest and that isn’t restricted by the day of the week; a few echoed a modern song that says “every day’s Resurrection Day; the past is over and gone” and said that while the Jews began the Sabbath with reading from the Torah, every Christian should begin every day by reading the Gospels.
So the early church had multiple sound reasons for moving the day of worship which are clear enough that taken together they are enough to convince a jury that while the Sabbath didn’t move its functions did – many to Sunday, some to every day.
After all, where two or three are gathered in His name, something/Someone greater than the Sabbath is present!
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