Have you read @ThomasJayOord 's books, “God Can’t,” or “The Uncontrolling Love of God”?
I am intrigued by open theology. I’m not sure I agree fully. I tend to agree more with Dr Oord than most others. However, Randal Rauser critiques it here as well
The Questionable Comfort of Impotent Love: A Review of God Can't - Randal Rauser
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Believe it or not, I have to agree with Rauser! God Can’t eh? Well He did in Jesus. And love doesn’t coerce? I hope it does!
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I agree with you both, @Klax and @Randy. Why oh why must Christianity envision God as so powerful? Seems to me that one byproduct of doing so is to give His adherents a sense of entitlement to the best they can imagine and I doubt if that is healthy. We all know that even our human life gets complicated enough at times to present us with moral dilemmas for which no perfect solution is possible. Sometimes as good as possible is the absolute best one can do. If you conceive as God as a much more complicated being (or at least as coping with much more complicated dilemmas), then why shouldn’t even He need to sometimes make the best of a bad situation. Seeing everything God does as simple for Him is probably demeaning.
Okay, that is possibly more than you want to hear from someone that doubts God is even a separate being.
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Any time MarkD, any time. I might agree with Rauser’s critique but I suspect I won’t with him otherwise, an evangelical big on God’s Sovereignty, whatever that is.
So KLAX,
Please tell me a bit about yourself. I have read your post a number of times and I remain puzzled about your perspectives. I see points of intersection and I’m not sure if we have many points of significant divergence. What is the main theme or themes you would like me to consider?
Please keep in mind that as an engineer, I am not classically trained in theology or philosophy. I had two years of Bible school training years ago, post engineering school. I am largely self-taught after that. For the majority of my adult years, I was quite conservative in my theology (6 day creationist), but certain observed deficiencies in conservative theology led me to rethink my understanding of the Bible and certain conservative themes. I still identify as conservative, but I have significantly departed from certain classic tenets of Biblical interpretation. I have a high view of Scripture, but a lower view of the classic assumptions which have led to our current theology. I think it is time to revisit theology in light of an old universe and the implications of G-d’s use of social evolution in the mentoring of humankind and in the writings of Scripture itself over time.
I identified certain theological conundrums that seem to threaten some sectors of modern Christianity. Let’s call it theological positions that threaten the good name of Christ and Christianity. These questions led me to embrace the truths of science and to meld them together with my altered theology. I worked as a systems engineer which means I looked at the top level of systems to make sure all things work together harmoniously. It is that perspective that I have applied to science and Christian theology with the base level assumption that all truth really is G-d’s truth. Every time I find an apparent mismatch I have been diving in to find the error in thinking. Because science is inherently self checking and self-correcting, I spend my time looking for the theological errors that have few if any self-checks.
It has been an interesting journey, and I writing about the results of my findings. Therefore, I would cherish your critiques offered up in good faith. At the end of the day, all of my assertions must stand up to analysis. This is the way of engineering, and of science, and of my perspectives.
Thanks
Hi Weims. Me? I’m a mess. What would I like you to consider? Wow. That’s too much. I don’t have the skills and I don’t think anyone has apart from oneself. I’m shallow end. I was in accounts for 7 years after a couple in production control, segued in to IT for 26 mainly as an Oracle and other DBA and have done ALLLLLLL sorts else either end. Blast furnace operator, progress chaser, microbiology lab worker with the sniff of a Ph.D., carer, now just an accounts assistant working from home in lockdown. I got a mediocre biological sciences degree in '75 and most of an M.Sc. in Computing. Life intervened. I needed the money! I’m extroverted, lower middle class, an over the top underachiever; I chose the wrong parents. And religion. At 15 - half way… a third… a quarter… a… through a very febrile adolescence - I drew myself in to the world of Herbert W. Armstrong’s heterodox fundamentalist millennialism and came out nearly 30 years later when it deconstructed itself. That explains much of the mess but also kept me out of other trouble. That example of deconstruction carried on for 20 years. Here I am. All that’s left is rationality and desire - I want there to be a best case God - in a very cracked pot. In with the deconstruction is the reconstruction of C. Baxter Kruger, Rob Bell, Brian McLaren, Pete Rollins, Richard Rohr, Steve Chalke et al: the very mainly post-conservative emergent, and neo-orthodox. With a brief immersion in the ‘charismatic’, 7 years of limbo, in to evangelical Anglicanism in the very church building I was infantly baptized, with the elephant in the room of damnationism and out the other side.
I expand on all this in Penzu with military grade encryption. Perhaps I’ll link to extracts.
It’s not for me to tell you anything Weims. Despite my bull in a china shop way of handling myself with others here with my absolutism.
I go - via Facebook now - to a typical via media Anglican church here in Leicester where I can’t talk to anyone like this and if I could go anywhere it would be Oasis in Waterloo, London.
Your milage will vary : )
Thank you Weims, Martin
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Martin,
Thanks so much for the self disclosure. It’s good to bring our humanity into view as we interact. My wife and I just finished binge watching Downton Abbey, and so I once read your first post out loud with a British accent because it just seemed fitting. I guess it was. 
We share an engineering past. In my work, I interacted with software, mechanical, digital and “analogue” (my specialty) engineers. I spent 36+ years working for an automatic test equipment company where we designed and manufactured mixed-signal semiconductor test systems. I loved all of that work as it has been my life’s base level calling from the cradle. Theology has been and is becoming more so now a second calling.
I have become disturbed about certain aspects of American Christian theological teachings which have fallen on the wrong side of particular critical issues of culture. I have developed a growing sense that a big part of the Apostles work was acting as shepherds of Christianity within their culture, balancing theological imperatives against cultural traditions and law. Especially in those early days, they needed to make the hard decisions about how to navigate the transition from Judaism to Christianity (Judaism 2.0) in the context of Roman law and tradition. I view much of what I will call 'the integration (math term) of cultural mores as natural revelation spoken by G-d through the maturing process of humanity. When those truths become self-evident, this provides a self-check of sorts for our theology. One such example case relates to the treatment of Women where many churches still restrict the roles of women based on an interpretation of Scriptural admonitions, yet western culture has voted for full female freedom and I see no retreat on the horizon.
Because I believe that culture is not wrong about this, I concluded that we have something wrong in our understanding of Scripture. I have spent years now searching for the answer to that cunundrum (engineers are often tenacious problem solvers). This is the wrong thread to discuss all that, but I now have a plausible explanation that satisfies my mind at least, allows us to agree with what the Bible says, and preserves a high view of Scripture. Sounds too good to be true, but I believe it offers all of that.
But I also feel a growing sense of calling to look for and join with other shepherds of Christianity to help highlight and align some of our theological blind spots. I wish to see Christianity standing on the loving side of these issues which I believe represents the heart of G-d. It may not seem like it, but I believe the future of Christianity is at stake. We must not freeze at the controls and drive the ship aground. Sears was once a huge powerful force in retail, but now they are ship wrecked on the ocean floor. Christianity was designed to adapt over time, but we haven’t fully appreciated that just yet. Blind spots. Loving your neighbor as yourself is as contemporary as we are.
I enjoyed hearing your story, and thanks for responding in kind,
Jack
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Funny how in reading N. T. Wright, I heard it in my mind with his voice and phrasing.
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You’re welcome Jack, we are on the same trajectory.
I didn’t see any further responses to your posts about The Shroud, so just thought I’d mention that claims about creating a “fake Shroud” have always been about re-creating something that superficially looks like the Shroud… but none has ever come close to copying all of its more mysterious aspects, the types of things that seem virtually impossible for someone in another century to have been able to do…since we aren’t able to do so even in this century. For instance it’s pretty much proven now that the blood on the cloth is underneath the image and thus was there first, but Garlaschelli’s version does not recreate this aspect. Another defining aspect of The Shroud is its 3D encoding. Something that fakes, including Garlaschelli’s routinely fail on. More recently, it’s been discovered that there is a very faint, second image on the opposite side of the cloth, completely in line with the top image. Again, something exceeding difficult for a fake to accomplish. And that’s without explaining all the anatomical and medical information in the Shroud that would have been unknown at the time.
Basically, anyone that has done any serious study of the Shroud image finds the idea that it was created by a person completely absurd and ridiculous. However… that doesn’t necessarily mean it was created by miraculous means either. But there’s no doubt that what means did create it was very unusual given that nothing else like it exists.
The hypothesis for the image creation that seems to have the most support based on the scientific evidence is that the image is a result of an enzymatic reaction in the soap layer on the cloth. It is extremely thin (another very difficult aspect of the image for human fakes to achieve) and delicate, and has none of the normal aspects of a painting. While many people think of the Shroud as a photo-negative, it really has very few aspects of normal photography, there is no light source, and the 3D encoding suggests instead that the image creation was related in some way to the distance from the cloth (closer to the cloth, the more enzymatic reaction you get and thus the darker the image in that area would be). This also is why some aspects of the image do appear distorted in ways that you would not see in a normal photo.
The carbon-dating of course is often touted by atheists as well that discount the Shroud as any kind of evidence of the existence of Jesus, but while there is no reason to question the accuracy of the dating itself (taking each labs tests in isolation), there are serious issues with the samples that were taken. Unfortunately the original protocol for taking samples from different Shroud areas was NOT followed and the ones that were taken are believed to be from a section of the cloth that appears to have gone through a later repair, and thus contaminated with earlier fibers. Most recently, re-examination of the raw data from the 3 labs showed that they did not fall into the level of confidence reported, which puts further credence on the suspicion that the fibers were from a repair spot.
Ultimately the biggest challenge with the Shroud is unlike other relics of scientific curiosity, there is a decided lack of access to study it. The radiocarbon dating question could easily be addressed with a second test which the Catholic Church to this point has denied. But two things are for certain… there is NO definitive answer currently as to when and how it was created… and it is difficult to find even a single aspect in which the person depicted on the Shroud does not fit the Gospel description of Jesus, and the manner of his death.
What does atheism have to do with C14? And there is no new evidence.
Because you were cautious and specified “some Christians”, this is not a challenge to an arm-wrestling match; but I would like to interject here that (a) I agree that the “eternal meaning” I hope for is aspirational, but (b) it is very probable that I would, in fact, not choose my faith if I were convinced that there is no “eternal”. I can say that confidently simply because, although I believe in the eternal and aspire to occupy some portion of it eventually, my attempt to “live by faith” currently is less than perfect, … far, far less, even by my own liberal standard.
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Given the quote in the post that originated this topic:
Many Shroud scholars have come to the conclusion that the Shroud is precisely this…or at least, the closest we will ever come to it. Will it ever definitively be proven to be of miraculous origin? Certainly not, at best you can only prove that it is NOT. Proof of a God that exists outside the bounds of the natural world is problematic for science (which concerns itself solely with the natural world) to find… so at best, it would continue to remain a mystery that we cannot explain.
What I often find when discussing it with atheists though, is how very little about the Shroud they actually know, particularly the bulk of the scientific evidence on it, being the most studied historical artifact ever. They generally seem to think it’s proven beyond any doubt to be a forgery, when that is FAR from a decided question scientifically. There are just too many conflicting results, and unexplained things about it that scientists continue to try and answer, and one single C14 test that has never been collaborated, and for which many questions have been raised, is data no unbiased scientist would ever consider “proof”. A great deal of the focus has been on a date, while no one yet has come anywhere close to just recreating the image with its most critical aspects, or to even explain how a 14th century artist would have such an incredibly accurate knowledge of medical anatomy and how crucifixions would have been performed.
Certainly there are plenty of skeptics that believe with more access to the Shroud they would be able to find a natural explanation for the image regardless (as the author points out in that second article I referenced above)… but it’s just not as convenient as being able to just discard it outright as a “fake” that someone made. And that is essentially what the C14 date provides. A way out of having to find any scientific explanation for how the image actually even got on there. So there is a ton of vested interest in proving it one way or the other. When in an ideal world, we would simply collaborate the result by repeating it, using samples from different locations on the Shroud.
As for “new evidence” additional studies on the Shroud are being released all the time…both for and against a medieval date. Obviously these are done on existing images, or shroud fragments, but they would certainly still be considering “new” data that contributes further to the conversation and possible understanding of this relic.
Ironically I find many Christians though are equally happy to go along with the idea of it being a forgery too (even many Catholics I find know very little about the Shroud and give it nary a thought)… as they are just as bothered by the idea that there might be any level of evidence for the existence of Jesus… preferring to think that only by blind faith can you be saved.
It’s a genuine fake.
Rest assured there shall be no such undeniably convincing revelations regarding the eternal by either camp. We will all get to and have to go on making up our own minds about that without the comfort of conclusive reasons.
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For the record, I believe that the Shroud of Turin is the actual shroud of a human being who was beaten and crucified, and am inclined to believe that the Shroud of Turin is the actual burial shroud of Jesus of Nazareth after he was crucified. However I am content to believe it regardless who else believes it, and I decline to arm-wrestle anyone or to play “'Tis/'Tisn’t” over the Shroud.
I well remember hearing about the Shroud around 1977, and getting a copy Ian Wilson’s book, “The Shroud” (1978). I happened to have the book with me during an overnight visit to new acquaintance who were evangelical nondenominational Christians, and I showed the book to one of the elders. His response was dismissive, and cautionary (knowing that I was involved in the Catholic Charismatic Renewal at the time), and went something like this: “As Christians, we shouldn’t attribute value to religious objects.” I nodded my head in agreement and said, “What? like bibliolaters? I agree.”
However, I still think a life-size version of the Shroud would make a heckuva altar banner or wall-hanging. It’s a three-dimensional, non-human version of THE Gospel message described by Paul: ! Corinthians 15:3-4, “That Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures.”
Yup, I know Wilson’s book well, it started my own fascination and more in-depth study into the Shroud, even through decades where I wasn’t much of a believer, as well as his more recent follow-up book which is very good as well, although now a bit outdated on the science (which not surprisingly often changes faster than published books keep up with).
And yes, whatever other “value” one might think is appropriate or not to place on it, it certainly is a very stark reminder of the horrors of crucifixion. I would love to even just once SEE a full-size replica of the Shroud someday (a trip to see the real one would be impossible for me, even given the rarity that its on display).
Some years ago, I have heard about a theory that would easily explain this. During middle ages there was a trade in relics. Majority of course would be fake, and apparently it was a very good business. So the “artists” wouldn’t do it to try prove God’s existence, but purely for the money, imagine how much such a relic would have been worth in 14th century! Enough to stage a crucifiction and commit murder! Back then there were no police, news agencies, smartphones and people were killed all the time by bandits on the roads, so someone going missing wouldn’t rise suspicion. And a lot of guys look like Jesus with beard and long hair, shouldn’t be too difficult to find. And they must have known details of crucifiction, it’s not all modern knowledge, is it?
So it’s possible they tortured and murdered some unlucky individual and wrapped him up in the shroud and this is the result.
Just to keep this post balanced…what does rise the question for me is, why the shroud hasnt been recreated to the same detail and quality as the Tourin one? Not suggesting we should murder somebody lol, but perhaps recreate some aspects of it on some animal?
If you’ve got a spare $10M to make someone rich doing it, go ahead!