If your 13 year old is pretty astute and into the topic, it could work. It’s a bit complicated with my 15 year old–he’s caught-up with one of his brothers in Todd White’s teaching videos that are focused on bringing the Kingdom with miracles–where the church we’ve been a part of for 40 years was 40 years ago. This is a little dry compared to miracles. And, a lot of it is repetition for him at this point as I gave him all the basics of it over the last few years. Getting him to do 10 modules a day through the summer is a bit of challenge. But, he’s getting it.
Denis has this book coming out that will be one of his shortest Evolution: Scripture and Nature Say Yes. I’m planning to do a review but have to read Duane Gish’s old YEC book, “Evolution: The Fossils say No”, first to compare them. Aaaargh.
Denis also has his shorter “Web Lectures” (he needs a marketing guy/gal) Science & Religion Web Lectures Denis Lamoureux that are more introductory to the topics. But, I really don’t think there is a substitute for going through the whole course–only way to really know who to handle the flood and Adam and other issues, I think.
I tell myself it’s not liberal, it’s post-evangelical
This review of Enn’s Sin of Certainty had a great description of post-evangelicals (a term I’m hearing more and more) at the end, which addressed the isolation issue that @Keith_Furman alluded to. It is precisely because post-evangelicals aren’t really theological liberals that they don’t really have a place of their own in the current American church setup.
[quote] The Sin of Certainty is yet another volume written by post-evangelicals for post-evangelicals. While Enns will be dismissed as a “liberal” scholar by the evangelical establishment he is another animal altogether. Post-evangelicals share much with their liberal kin, but they retain a passionate commitment to biblical authority, in general, and to the centrality of Jesus, in particular. There is a passion in this subset of American Christianity that you rarely find among academic theologians who are tempted to approach biblical scholarship and Christian theology as in-house parlor games. To quote Rachel Held Evans,
“When you grow up believing that your religious worldview contains the key to absolute truth and provides an answer to every question, you never really get over the disappointment of learning that it doesn’t. It’s a lonely, frightening journey and most of us are limping along as best we can.”
Post-evangelical writers like Enns, Evans, Brian McLaren and Christian Smith (to name just a few) agree that the doctrine of biblical inerrancy makes the Bible ”impossible (to use Smith’s arresting term), but they continue to take the Bible seriously because they take God seriously.
Post-evangelicals disagree on many side issues, but, like Enns, they have made their peace with question marks. Christians who share the journey from evangelical piety to post-evangelical ambiguity will embrace most of Enns’ conclusions as therapeutic restatements of the obvious. But how many post-evangelicals are there, and outside this limited demographic, who else will define theological certainty as a species of sin?
Post-evangelicals grow up born-again, emerge from adolescence as true believers, attend graduate school in some branch of the humanities (or read omnivorously from the restricted list on our own) and discover that the certainty we imbibed as children doesn’t bear up under scrutiny.
After a decade or so of floundering, the typical post-evangelical emerges on the far side of doubt with a renewed passion for the teaching of Jesus and a profound respect for mystery.
How many Americans have walked that lonesome valley? One hundred thousand? Five hundred thousand? A million, tops? Whatever the number, there are few American cities big enough to support a church rooted in an emerging post-evangelical consensus. For this reason, post-evangelicals frequently wind up on the Canterbury road to Anglicanism or make their peace with the Protestant mainline.
But mainline Anglicans, Lutherans, United Methodists and Presbyterians rarely demonstrate the spiritual earnestness you find among the post-evangelicals. The difference is real.
The post-evangelical world is more virtual community than gathered community. That’s fine as an interim arrangement, but if Enns really wants to build a “culture of trust” dedicated to the gracious mystery of Jesus, an evangelistic strategy is needed. [/quote] ‘The Sin of Certainty:’ Peter Enns’ journey from belief to trust – Baptist News Global
When I read the endorsements for Enn’s latest book in a pre-release e-mail I got, I thought, “Hmm. Those are not my people anymore.” I stopped reading Brian McLaren and Rob Bell and Tony Jones about a decade ago. I actually enjoy reading Enns more in books/articles where he interacts with or writes alongside other Bible scholars, like those Zondervan counterpoint books or the Books and Culture symposium on original sin.
Personally, I’m comfortable enough being a bit of an outlier in a mainstream Evangelical church. The “progressive” end of Christianity goes places I’m not happy to go theologically and I get annoyed with what seems to me to be a pendulum swing from an uncritical politically conservative orientation to an equally uncritical liberal political orientation. I’m evidently not as damaged as some people were by their Evangelical experiences and the constant moaning and outrage about how awful “fundamentalists” are from the progressive end is just as tiresome to me as the constant moaning and outrage about how awful the “wolves in sheeps’ clothing” are from the conservative Evangelical end. Being judgmental and self-righteous is not attractive, not matter what politics or theology inspires it.
Wow, Christy, how many likes can I give that–one is woefully inadequate! Well said. The only thing that chafes at me is the words used that reviewer used to describe what I am, “POST evangelical”. I still love and agree with the gospel, even if I might understand Hell a little differently than typical evangelicals (IDK, more like CS Lewis in The Great Divorse or perhaps like the annialation view in Zondervan’s 4 Views on Hell–don’t let John Piper hear that!, but reviewers thought there was a good case made and I plan to read it!). Oh, and I accept evolution and a different view about Adam and Noah, but still hermeneutically sound… But, I still see need for Christ’s atoning sacrifice and we ask others to believe the resurrection based on evidence. I still share and love the gospel! So, am I not one of those POST evangelicals (yet?)? Or do we need a better name for it, like “Neo Evangelical”, IDK? I kind of like that. Neo Evangelicals accept Neo Darwinism. Or we could call ourselves AND for ardent neo evangelicals. I’ve also toyed with ardent evangelical Christian evolutionist (AECHE), pronounced “ache” – that’s what we do! We AECHE in isolation at the moment. We need an identity that goes beyond an org, as great as BioLogos is, just not yet another denomination ;-o)
While I can sympathize and want to ride on this “lonely bandwagon?” too, given the illustrious company fast accumulating, we probably shouldn’t repeat history again for the zillionth time by jumping ship on everything. I’m glad you brought up C.S. Lewis, because he might make an excellent example for us here. So he still gets so favorably cited by so many of us still today, and yet … there he was remaining in his no-doubt stayed and traditional Anglican communion with all of its warts that he could surely describe in detail if he wanted (maybe he did). Just as divorce in families shouldn’t be easy – at least not with respect to everyday troubles that will visit every loving marriage, so we should be loath to excuse ourselves from fellowships. If you are kicked out, that may be one matter (and I realize that may not be hypothetical for some here!), but to preempt your faith community’s anticipated disapproval and excuse yourself first should more than make us uneasy if we are as relationship-centered as we claim we should be.
@Christy, I had similar thoughts about the label as I heard/read a columnists (NPR no less!) carelessly refer to a certain candidate’s popularity among (a presumed majority of) evangelicals. That depressed me until I opened up a Christianity Today article that set the record straight about the minority of evangelicals (especially of ones that … you know … actually go to church) that were really in that camp. But if so many bail, we may help make the fashionable lie come true.
But on the other hand … labels schmabels. It’s the relationships that are important, after all.
One advantage of being openly neo-evangelical or whatever in a conservative fellowship, is that you probably won’t be asked to serve on many committees! Win win!
But that doesn’t work when you attend smaller churches like I like to do. I wear more than one hat, not because I want to (although it is fun most of the time!), but because it needs to be done. Be careful if you walk through our doors. If you don’t keep your wits about you we’ll have you reading Scripture up front within a few Sundays.
Wow. It’s a little scary how well he described my life. Even down to winding up in a mainline denomination. Even though we will never be Calvinists we started attending a Presbyterian church this year (after decades of being leaders in non-denom megachurches) because the people have depth and they love through action. It’s the best we can hope for right now.
You all are making me feel like I’ve found my people!
Mervin, I couldn’t agree more. I firmly believe in not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There appears to be a strong human tendency to do so. So, everything should be tested before jumping ship on any one point, I think. That takes hard work. That makes it such a big challenge when having a paradigm shift. Doing that, you can’t just leave one group of folks and jump into the arms of a whole other group for comfort. That’s part of why so many of us feel isolated, I think.
And I expect God is looking for [not just] a few good men/women who will have the courage to take that narrow road.
The key question is will we preach the gospel? I’m still an evangelical because I don’t know a better orthodox tradition that so effectively preaches the gospel. Billy Graham showed us this urgency. We shouldn’t throw out this heritage of evangelical purpose just for a disagreement over origins. My concern is that the gospel orientation is becoming just lip-service, and we aren’t preparing ourselves everyday for this effort. Origins/science is important but pales in comparison to gospel work.
Doug, this question of “can we major on the majors and forgive each other our little differences” seems to be the unmet challenge of the times. I think these origins controversies, and our denominational splintering in general, all of which should be a sideline to preaching the gospel, may be suffering the same sort of illness that American politics are suffering from right now.
There is an excellent and educational Atlantic Monthly article here titled “How American Politics Went Insane”. (It started a long time before our current election … which is a symptom of rather than a cause of the chaos – read the article).
I think we evangelicals are mirroring this same sort of “angry no-compromise” mentality. Instead of tolerating each other where we disagree in the name of what we can agree on, we instead leave in the name of an imagined purity of principle. So our debates over science and faith may be tinged with the same sort of fanatical anger that is pushing politics right now.
I totally agree. We need a radical reorientation that explains how we can see science in light of the Gospel of Jesus. Somehow, in the origins debate, especially in science, often evangelicals forget their heritage and legacy and never mention Jesus in science. Nothing is more tragic.
I agree Mervin–there is a connection. I think George Will puts it better than the Atlantic:
“Every republic,” writes Charles Kesler, professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, “eventually faces what might be called the Weimar problem.” It arrives when a nation’s civic culture has become so debased that the nation no longer has “the virtues necessary to sustain republican government.” Do not dwell on what came after the Weimar Republic. But do consider the sufficiency of virtue that the Constitution’s framers presupposed.
And so we must be that group nurturing and making civic culture. However, not through a certain strategy or program but through the preaching of the gospel and lives transformed by the Holy Spirit.
