I’ve been looking at some ways that christianity is changing, including changing views of evolution and gay marriage.
But how much are christians free to change while remaining true to God and the Bible?
Many christians fear any change is a slippery slope that will lead them right away from being faithful to God’s revealed truth. Is change a slippery slope?
Most of us doubt our faith at some time, and it isn’t much fun. Tim Keller said: “Believers should acknowledge and wrestle with doubts”. But the book of James says a person who doubts is “like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind.” (James 1:7). How do these things fit together?
I imagine we all have doubts about all sorts of things we think are true, whether it is religious belief, politics, personal relationships or other choices we make. For many christians, especially those raised in christian families, adult life requires many aspects of belief to be re-considered.
How should we deal with this?
Taize is an ecumenical monastery in Burgundy, France. The Lakota are an American Indian nation on a reservation in South Dakota, USA. You might not expect them to feature in the same story, but recently they did. It is a moving story.
Jason Micheli joined more than a thousand pilgrims attending a Taize gathering, this time not in France but on the Pine Ridge Reservation, at the invitation of Lakota nation.
During a time of worship centred around the cross, he had some insights into the cross, human suffering and oppression.
I came across them on Tony Jones’ blog, Theoblogy, and then back on Jason’s blog Tamed Cynic. I felt they needed to be shared.
Check it out. I think you’ll find it worthwhile.
Photo taken from Theoblogy
When Darwin first published his On the Origin of Species in 1859, it met with mixed reactions from christians. Some opposed evolution while others had no issues with it, and some even welcomed it. Since then, the Catholic church has decided it sees no problems with the scientific theory of evolution, whereas by the mid twentieth century, evangelical christians had come to generally totally oppose evolution.
But the last two decades have seen huge signs that christianity is changing.
Did you know that since the horrific school shootings at Newtown in the USA in December last year, more than 4000 people have died from gunshots in the US? Let’s try to put this statistic into context.
If you read a number of blogs, you need to keep up with new posts. There are several ways to do this, but subscribing to a feed is one of the best ways. And for several years, the easiest feed reader to use was Google Reader. I had Google reader on my iGoogle home page, but Google has announced that both Reader and iGoogle will be discontinued – Reader in just over a month.
I put quite a few hours research into finding a replacement, so I thought I’d share what I learnt – hopefully it may save someone some work.
Last post I looked at some comments by Tim Keller on gay marriage and its possible future acceptance by evangelical christians. I concluded by pointing to a broader issue that Keller also raised.
So let’s look at whether changing an apparently Biblical doctrine is acceptable.
A few weeks back, influential New York minister Tim Keller spoke at a forum run by the US Ethics and Public Policy Centre, during which he made some comments on the issue of gay marriage. What he said attracted a lot of discussion, but was apparently misunderstood by some, and he subsequently issued an explanation.
His comments merit further thought.
Christianity is changing. Of course it has always been changing – I read once that christianity owes a lot of its success to its adaptability to circumstances and culture. But like most other things, it seems to be changing faster these days.
So is it good or bad?
A few weeks back I posted on an investigation by Craig Keener of accounts of healing miracles around the world, which concluded that perhaps 300 to 400 million christians around the world believed they had experienced, or observed, a miraculous healing.
Here is some more information, and an estimation of probability.
I recently wrote about how academics in christian universities and colleges in the USA are finding their professional conclusions coming into conflict with the faith statements of their colleges. But this is an issue that to some degree affects all christians.
How should we respond when secular learning seems to contradict traditional christian belief?
This morning I attended the local Anzac Day dawn service, which commemorates the Australian and New Zealand soldiers who have died in battle. For many Aussies, this is the most sacred day of the year. I don’t feel that way, and I don’t usually attend, and it was a time of conflicting emotions and thoughts.
It seems inevitable that there will be a tension for christians between academic knowledge and faith. But sometimes the tension becomes very personal in its impacts, and feelings are high on both sides. These issues have come to a head a number of times in recent years at universities and colleges in the USA.
Many years ago, in a mis-spent youth, I completed some formal theological study. For one subject, I studied the prophet Isaiah. Just this week I prepared and led a study on Isaiah, and renewed my awe of this amazing man.
I really think he had the deepest understanding of God of any person who lived before Jesus, and more than most people since.
Yesterday I outlined some terrible facts about modern-day slavery (People shouldn’t be bought and sold). But what can we practically do?
When I was at school, we were taught about how slavery was abolished in Britain and the USA. This was obviously a good thing.
It came as a shock to find out, some years ago now, that there are more slaves in the world than ever before.
It is a circular argument, but it has been made often, from David Hume down to present day sceptics. There is no believable evidence for genuine miraculous healings, they say. But what about all the stories of people being healed? We know they can’t be true, they say, because no-one has ever shown scientifically that healing can occur.
So New Testament scholar Craig Keener decided to break the circle.
There are a number of things about our world, and about the christian faith, that seem hard to explain if God is loving – for example, the pain and suffering people experience, hell, the commands in the Old Testament to kill and even wipe out whole tribes and God’s disapproval of homosexuality.
What should christians say about these things?
In October 2012, 14 eminent scientists, philosophers and other thinkers met for 3 days in a workshop entitled Moving Naturalism Forwards. What should we learn from this meeting?
