Life, Faith, and Worship after Evangelicalism: The "Post-Evangelical Life"

Post-Evangelical Life

Link to original article

by Guest Contributor

February 10, 2017

This guest post was written by Holly Love.

Back in December, I wrote here and on my blog about how I was having a hard time attending my evangelical church after the [Trump] election. That piece struck a nerve. To date it has almost 7,500 Facebook shares, making it the most read post that I have ever written, by far. This tells me that lots of other people are feeling the same way and struggling with the same things that I was in the wake of November 8, 2016.

I want to tell the rest of the story–what happened after we left that evangelical church and started going to a “mainline” one. It’s not the story of theologically weak/watered down preaching that I thought it would be. For my fellow dissatisfied evangelicals who aren’t sure about leaving: there is light at the end of the tunnel.

My family is now attending a Presbyterian church (USA) about five minutes from our house. I had always thought of the PC/USAs as the “liberal” Presbyterians, and they are, in a sense. This is the first mainline church that I have personally ever attended, and I wasn’t sure what to expect. I was probably not alone in having a mental picture of mainline churches as being kind of like this: wishy-washy, unfamiliar, lukewarm.

But … surprise: that’s not what I found at all. Our new church feels surprisingly similar to the traditional Baptist church of my early childhood: pews, hymnals, a full choir. All the children coming to the front for a children’s message.

There are some welcome differences, however - the associate pastor, music minister, and youth minister are all women, in addition to other roles that are traditionally filled by women in evangelical churches, such as the children’s minister.

The church is unapologetically formal - hymns only, from an actual hymnal, no projection screen. A pipe organ. People up on stage wearing robes. This formality has taken a little getting used to, as I have attended contemporary churches since I was eight years old. It’s growing on me. I appreciate that they don’t try to thread the needle between traditional and contemporary, as many churches do, with the awful “praise team” approach that no one ends up actually liking. While I miss singing my favorite praise choruses I’m gaining an appreciation for the deep theology in the lyrics to the old hymns.

The main thing I was worried about was that a mainline church wouldn’t actually preach the Bible. I have found this not to be true at all. The sermons are very similar to the sermons at the evangelical churches I have attended all my life.

What makes our church special is that even though my family is new, and the church is large, the pastoral staff went out of their way to make us feel welcome immediately. I mean, really: my toddler and I went to one service in early December and talked to staff members briefly on the way out the door. The following week, I got a card in the mail from the pastor, Jonah got a postcard from the children’s minister, and the pastor added me as a friend on Facebook and Instagram. On our next visit, staff members somehow remembered my name, and Jonah’s name. That’s the way it’s done, folks. I have never felt as welcome anywhere.

By way of comparison, at the last church we were visiting, the pastoral staff and their families had a special section to sit in during the service. (Maybe it’s not nice to link and put them on blast–but I think they should know how they came across, right?) Unless someone outside of the section went up to them, I never saw them interact with anyone besides church staff members. No staff member other than the children’s minister ever even looked at me, let alone spoke to me. Not once, over the course of three months.

Regular readers of my blog will recall that I was looking for a church that wasn’t filled with Trump voters and that would speak against him. The first Sunday we visited our new church happened to be the first Sunday of Advent. The pastor spoke about the difference between happiness and joy, and mentioned that attendees might not be feeling very happy this Christmas season. Though he wasn’t explicit, I took this to be a tacit reference to the election. I’ll never forget it. I knew I was home.

Everything has not been perfect on this point. This previous Sunday I just felt sure that the pastor would mention the Muslim/refugee ban from the pulpit. When he didn’t, I was pretty disappointed. There was talk about divisions in the country and reaching out and spending time with someone whose life is radically different than yours, and a prayer for justice and against oppression, but nothing explicit.

But here’s what’s different from the past: even though I’m not a member and haven’t been there long, I felt comfortable enough to message the pastor and ask him about it. So I did. He was very thoughtful and transparent in a way that I am not used to ministers being, saying that he is attempting to minister to a diverse group of people, and while most members feel like he and I do, not everyone does. I’m going to quote him directly, as this is anonymous:

“I probably missed an opportunity yesterday and I’ve struggled with that. I’m still processing the faithful response, in our community, to these days of chaos and outright hatred. I won’t always get it right, so I’m grateful for the gifts of grace and of community. I need voices like yours to speak your truth in love and challenge me to deeper faithfulness.”

I’ll take it. If things go the way they might with human rights abuses and outright evil from the Trump administration, however, I’m going to need a stronger response. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

How are you feeling about church these days?

---

*Holly Love is an ESL teacher and blogger in Atlanta, Georgia. She writes about marriage, parenting, faith, work, politics, social justice, and current events at her blog, lovelyintrospection and can be found on Twitter @introspectivegal.

The City of Jerusalem - Its Archaeology, History, and Pictorial Maps, Part 1

Jerusalem Within These Walls

(an hour long documentary of Jerusalem's History)

Beginning about a year and a half ago I began taking "half-semester" classes at a local Christian college to help me remember subjects from my deep past or to fill in those areas I've always wanted to know about but have had little time to study or investigate since my university days long years ago. Hence, I've taken diverse classes on Economic Monetary Supply and the Modern American Banking System; The Science and Politics of Albert Einstein during the rise of Nazism; Michigan Regiments in the Civil War; read and discussed the very, very long Roman Classic poem The Aeneid by the poet Virgil (phenom!); studied ancient Athenian Greece (my fav city-state!) through the eyes of Greek/Persian historian Herodotus, the Father of Ancient History; read and discussed William Shakespeare's Hamlet (phenom!); undertaken a study of 1&2 Samuel (since religious America seems so interested in modern day Kings and Empires); studied the interconnectivity of Michigan's Environmental Watersheds; and even taken a World Christianity course (so I might hear from non-American Christians of their theology, worship, and convictions from around the world).

One of the classes I'm currently taking is an archaeological course on the City of Jerusalem. Here is a very short history of the city through its historical eras:

• beginning as a religious city under the reign of Melchizedek's time (Genesis 14.18-20) to Abraham's time where God prevented the sacrifice of his son Isaac on Mt. Moriah (the very same place where today's modern Islamic Mosque now rests along with Ishmael's bones);

• later becoming known as "Jerusalem" to serve as the capital city of Israel beginning in King David's reign through to the later occupations of Assyria, Babylon, Persia, and Rome;

• into the InterTestamental period between the Old and New Testaments (539 BC - 69/70 AD) when Jewish exiles to Jerusalem undertook a second rebuilding of the temple under Ezra and Nehemiah until its later destruction nearly 600 years later by Rome;

• through to its brief Christianized period after serving as a Jewish citadel of religious importance for much of its ancient history;

• then into the Byzantine period of Turkish domination of the Ottoman empire as it swayed between Christianity and the nascent Islamic religion developing during this time;

• into the early and middle medieval periods of the "Christian" Crusades and Muslim defense of their lands from Westernizing influences;

• and finally, as a deeply segregated city housing all three of the world's major religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) within its modernized borders brought about by the  wicked holocausts of World Wars 1&2.

Topography of Israel

Maps and Pictures of Jerusalem

Aerial View of Jerusalem

French Map of Old Jerusalem

Landmarks layout of Old Jerusalem

Synopsis of Old Jerusalem

Jerusalem may be considered the fountainhead of three major world religions housed within its city walls offering to the visitor a kaleidoscopic view of the city and its people as they are today - a remarkable outcome of 3,000 years of history, hope, and faith.

Model representation of Ur David

Model representation of Ur David

Model representation of Ur David and Ur Solomon (further up the hill)

Model representation of Ur Solomon with the Temple of Jerusalem within

Jerusalem's Jewish Period

Starting with Ur Jerusalem (the City of Jerusalem) during the reign of King David. There is a large model representation in Jerusalem of Ur David, Ur Solomon (further up the hill), and Mt. Moriah (further up still, where God stayed Abraham from sacrificing his son Isaac). It was on Mt. Moriah where the Temple of Solomon was built (after 970 BCE) to be later destroyed by Babylon (587-6 BCE). Fifty years later (539 BCE) Nehemiah and Ezra rebuilt the walls and temple of Jerusalem (it was a much poorer version to the original) which was destroyed 600 years later in 69/70 CE by Rome. Since the Christian church had no use for the temple site, and the Jews held no power under Rome, it slowly transformed to become the city garbage dump over the next 500 years until Persia came in to rule Jerusalem (638 CE). At which point the site was cleared of refuse and the Muslim Mosque built and dedicated to Muhammad's (570-632 CE) resurrection from this spot until its present day's use:

"Although the Qur'an does not mention the name "Jerusalem", the hadith assert that it was from Jerusalem that Muhammad ascended to heaven in the Night Journey, or Isra and Miraj.[citation needed] The city was one of the Arab Caliphate's first conquests in 638 AD; according to Arab historians of the time, the Rashidun Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab personally went to the city to receive its submission, cleaning out and praying at the Temple Mount in the process. Sixty years later the Dome of the Rock was built, a structure enshrining a stone from which Muhammad is said to have ascended to heaven during the Isra. (The octagonal and gold-sheeted Dome is not the Al-Aqsa Mosque to the south, the latest version of which was built more than three centuries later). Umar ibn al-Khattab also allowed the Jews back into the city and freedom to live and worship after four hundred years.

"Under the early centuries of Muslim rule, especially during the Umayyad (650–750) and Abbasid (750–969) dynasties, the city prospered; geographers Ibn Hawqal and al-Istakhri (10th century) describe it as "the most fertile province of Palestine",[citation needed] while its native son, the geographer al-Muqaddasi (born 946) devoted many pages to its praises in his most famous work, The Best Divisions in the Knowledge of the Climes. Under Muslim rule Jerusalem did not achieve the political or cultural status enjoyed by the capitals Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo etc. Interestingly, al-Muqaddasi derives his name from the Arabic name for Jerusalem, Bayt al-Muqaddas, which is linguistically equivalent to the Hebrew Beit Ha-Mikdash, the Holy House."

- Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Jerusalem)

Did you know?

The Ark of the Covenant of Israel came as an adaptive type from Egypt? The Egyptian's used "processional arks" to honor their gods, culture, and Pharaohs. Having left Egypt from bondage, and being well acquainted with Egyptian culture after many years of servitude, Israel established a "processional ark" for their God, Yahweh. Here are some drawings showing the similarities (Israel's ark is the last picture typically seen in the movie, "Indiana Jones").

Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ark_of_the_Covenant

Egyptian hieroglyphic of a ceremonial ark in processional

Egyptian ceremonial processional of  Pharoah

Egyptian ceremonial processional using on ark to carry one of their gods or goddesses

Egpytian processional of an ark in ceremonial usage

A depiction of the Ark of the Covenant

Kwok Pui Lan - Chinese PostColonolism and the Need for Theological Innovation

Kwok Pui Lan with Professor John Cobb

On postcolonialism, theology, and everything she cares about

http://kwokpuilan.blogspot.com/2017/03/a-rich-past-for-positive-future-for.html

by Kwok Pui Lan

March 5, 2017

*Presented at the “New Frontiers in Theology” Conference

at Claremont School of Theology on February 17, 2017

A Rich Past for a Positive Future for Theology

As an Asian postcolonial feminist theologian, my relationship to the Christian past is multifaceted and ambivalent. My reading of the Bible and the long theological tradition is never a “natural” reading, arising out of a living tradition that shaped my culture. For example, I wondered how the termsousia and hypostases in the debates on Trinity could be translated into Chinese and whether there would be equivalent concepts in Chinese philosophy.

So why do we have to study the Christian past? Sometimes my students put this even more bluntly, “Why do we have to study the dead white guys?”

We study the past because we want to learn different models of how theologians addressed social, political, and ecclesiastical issues of their time. Take for instance, this year we are commemorating the 500th anniversary of Luther’s posting of the 95 theses. The questions that Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and Münster raised for the church and wider public remain with us to this day, such as, the source of authority, the shape of liturgy and the meaning of sacraments, the visible and invisible church, the relation between the two kingdoms, and the relation between the established church and radical reform impulses.

Kwok Pui Lan teaches theology and spirituality
at the Episcopal Divinity School and is the author
of Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology

A highly relevant question for today might be “How can the Church be reformed so that it might respond to the challenges of the Trump era?” Although the Chinese may not have an event equivalent to the Reformation, the Reformation provided a mirror through which to look at the relation between religion, politics, and power at a watershed moment of the early development of capitalism and modernity.

Without learning from the past, we impoverish ourselves because we are left with the tyranny of the present. We can easily lose hope and fall prey to cynicism and despair. This is especially important in the United States because historical literacy is low and people seek immediate relevance. Facebook and social media outlets can make us obsessed with the immediate present. Learning from history allows us to maintain a certain distance and to have a broader perspective when examining our present time.

Given that we have such a long and rich theological tradition and so many theological giants before us, there is also the danger of the tyranny of the past. We might become so immersed and inculturated into certain modes of theological thinking, patterns of argument, and the common vocabularies of a certain theological tradition and our minds be so colonized that we are unable to see the horizon beyond or dare to take the road less traveled.

Theological innovations often begin by posting radical questions to the past. The feminist theological movement wrestled with the validity of past tradition. Mary Daly argued that the Christian tradition is so sexist that it is irredeemable, while Letty Russell spoke of a usable past. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza offered a revisionist history of Christian origin, and Rosemary Radford Ruether recovered the lost voices of Christian women in history.

Many theologians who have found their cultures and traditions left out from the dominant theological tradition have recovered their histories through the use of slave narratives, alternative archives, oral history, literature, and myths and stories to create a colorful tapestry of theologies. Today, theology is a global enterprise and we must pay attention to the global contexts shaping human lives and our theological imagination. Theology is contextual, but our contexts are deeply intertwined today. We need to find ways to educate ourselves about how others are developing theologies to respond to common concerns of our time. This must be a sustained and deliberate effort and not something to do only when we have time.

I wish I knew when I began to study theology that this would be a life-long vocation with many twists and no easy answers. Our work is harder because, unlike Luther and the reformers who stood in the vanguard of the intellectuals of their time, we as contemporary theologians have to defend our existence in the academy and larger society. When Christian theology is in a defensive posture, the marginal voices within it could be even more marginalized or suppressed. A danger for theological movements is that they become reactionary or ossified over time and fail to respond to new challenges. There is often much excitement when a theological movement begins, but as it becomes institutionalized or domesticated, it needs new reformers and discussants to keep it alive and on the cutting-edge.

Facing the future, theologians have important roles to play in the Trump era. Latin American theologians reminded us that we must distinguish between the worship of God and the worship of idols. When people are mesmerized by populist claims such as “Make America Great Again” and the representation of the President as pseudo-Messiah, theologians must challenge idolatry and alternative facts. In the battle for truth, we stand on the shoulders of giants such as Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, Jr., Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Y. T. Wu, Oscar Romero, Mercy Oduyoye, Tissa Balasuriya, Desmond Tutu, Gustavo Gutiérrez, Ivone Gebara, and others. When the country begins to look inward, we need theologians and leaders of faith communities who are cosmopolitan in theological outlook, astute about world politics, and have a deep sense of American multiracial and multicultural history.

We must develop a culture of resistance in the churches and rid ourselves of Constantinian Christianity in order to see clearly the life and ministry of a postcolonial Jesus. Americans have not been comfortable seeing the connections between empire and Christianity. Middle-class American Christianity has so successfully adapted to the individualistic culture that religion has often become a private affair.

The Christian message of sin, atonement, justification, and salvation has been thoroughly individualized, if not psychologized, such that they have relatively little social import. We look at Jesus as primarily a religious figure, separated from the highly politicized and volatile situation of his time, an era filled with periodic popular revolts and protests against Roman colonial rule. We must recover that the Jesus movement was a resistance movement against Pax Romana. Jesus was not a passive religious leader, but took an uncompromising stance against the Roman Empire and its client Judean and Galilean rulers. Jesus’ revolutionary message is relevant to our time more than ever as we struggle against pax Americana.

Do I think theology will have a positive future? My answer is yes. When I began to study theology in the early 1970s, Gustavo Gutierrez had published A Theology for Liberation Theology for a few years. [But] Mary Daly had not published Beyond God the Father. As a doctoral student, I witnessed the development of Womanist theology, Mujerista and Latina theology, Asian American feminist theology, and gay and lesbian theology. Today we have [a great] such a plurality of voices arising from racial and ethnic communities in the U.S. and from faith communities around the world.

In the 1960s, some of the avant garde theologians launched a series of books with the title “New Frontiers in Theology” and their aim was to facilitate “discussions among Continental and American theologians” and the discussants were all male. Here at this conference, we have such diversity of theological voices, and this should give us hope for a positive and more inclusive future.

- KPL

Islam, Christianity, and Pope Francis

I provide Dr. Olson's article today in hopes of standing in solidarity with those peaceful sects of Islam dedicated to the peace and love of their religious beliefs and principles. I think it is important to recognize that Islam is as diverse as Christianity is, as urbane as Christianity can be, and even as distraught over Western culture as Christianity has shown. The point being, Islam's "bad press" has come from terror-based fundamentalist sects described as "radical" but far removed from the teachings of Islam. Like some terror-based sects of Christianity (KKK, Jim Crow laws, and today's more radical Dominionists churches) both religions have had their share of ungodly evil shown in the wicked works of terrible acts against humanity. And when juxtaposed with Western culture in its secular or nationalistic forms, has good grounds, as would Christianity, to oppose its ungodly character. As background then, the blog below is written to a base of evangelical readers many of whom are struggling with the meaning of their faith in a world gone mad. To these readers I express my sympathies and encouragement even as I do all Muslim readers joining this post. Thank you for your consideration.

R.E. Slater

March 3, 2017

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Was Pope Francis Wrong about Islam?

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2017/03/4636/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=BRSS&utm_campaign=Evangelical&utm_content=259

by Roger Olson

March 2, 2017

Comments

According to many news reports, Pope Francis made some off-the-cuff remarks to reporters about Islam. The “gist” of this informal talk—not a papal pronouncement—was that there is no such thing as “Islamic Terrorism” unless there is also such a thing as “Christian terrorism.” This conversation took place aboard the papal airplane on the pope’s way back to Rome after a special event in France in late 2016. (The precise date does not matter here.)

Some American conservatives are angry that the pope would deny the existence of “Islamic terrorism” and especially that he would seem to place Islam and Christianity on a plane of moral equivalence. Actually, there is much debate and dispute about exactly what the pope said and what he meant. But I will put that aside for now and tackle only one question: Is Islam itself, as a religion, inclined toward terrorism?

*Sidebar: The opinions expressed here are my own (or those of the guest writer); I do not speak for any other person, group or organization; nor do I imply that the opinions expressed here reflect those of any other person, group or organization unless I say so specifically. Before commenting read the entire post and the “Note to commenters” at its end.*

But first I need to lay out my credentials for talking about this. During my Ph.D. in Religious Studies at Rice University (Houston) I co-taught an introduction to religion course for undergraduates. I was assigned by the department chair to teach a mini-course, as part of the semester course, about Islam. I dived into the subject and read many scholarly articles and books about Islam and taught the course. I even visited the local mosque and spoke with a group of Muslim men gathered there. I invited to my classroom representatives of different kinds of Islam who I could find in Houston. Two stand out to me as especially, even extremely, different. One was a Sunni Muslim from the Middle East and the other was a Sufi Muslim from Turkey.

One thing I discovered during my studies and later learned more about is Islam’s diversity. Exactly like Christianity, there are different “denominations” of Muslims. Of course they do not call them “denominations,” but I am simply using that term for “branches,” “types,” “tribes” of the same religion. Most people in America are woefully ignorant about the diversity of Islam.

• For example, how many Americans know which country in the world has the most Muslims? Wait for it….Indonesia. And Islam in Indonesia is very different from Islam in, say, Saudi Arabia.

• How many Americans know anything about Sufiism—a mystical branch of Islam? (Yes, I know, many Muslims deny Sufis are real Muslims. So what? Many Christians deny Quakers are real Christians [because they don’t practice water baptism]. To sociologists of religion, Sufis are Muslims.)

My point is simply that I do have a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from a major research university and that my studies then, during my program there and then and since, I have studied Islam much more than the average America ever will.

So back to the pope and Islam. His point seems to have been that Islam itself is not inclined toward terrorism or violence but that some Muslims, like some adherents of many religions—including Christianity—distort their true heritage and misinterpret and misapply it to justify violence including terrorism. Who can really doubt that about Christians? Think of the Crusades. Then think of the event in Norway a few years ago in which a devoted Christian slaughtered many young people at a camp for his own religiously-inspired reasons?

The vast majority of so-called Muslim terrorists or Islamic terrorists come from a particular part of the Middle East and are driven by some Imams of a particular branch of Islam especially common in Saudi Arabia known as Wahabism. (I am not claiming that all Wahabi Muslims support terrorism.) Almost none come from Indonesia, for example, although some might be recruited from there and other predominantly Islamic countries.

I think the pope’s point is simply that one ought not to label a whole religion—in this case Islam—with terrorism. That is what some conservative Americans especially tend to do. That is what “Islamic terrorism” or “Muslim terrorists” tends to mean to many Americans especially.

On the other hand… It does seem to me there’s no escaping those labels. So what’s the right solution? Perhaps it is not, as the pope suggests, to abandon those phrases entirely but to teach people—in churches, in schools, through the media—that those phrases do not mean that all Muslims or even branches of Islam are inclined toward violence or terrorism and that there are many Muslims in the world who abhor terrorism.

If you disagree (and I expect even some of my best friends will disagree) please imagine something with me for a moment. Imagine that a particular sect of Christianity became a fertile ground for extreme violence and even terrorism. (This has happened in history.) Then imagine that news reached you that in some countries where Christianity is not well-known and is little understood most people began to talk about “Christian terrorism” and “Christian violence” such that all Christians living there were under suspicion of being potential terrorists—including members of Christian “peace churches” (e.g., Friend/Quakers, Mennonites, etc.). Would you not want some spokesperson for the dominant religion in those countries to speak up in support of Christians and Christianity as a whole and contradict those there who spoke without qualification about “Christian terrorism?”

Now, please, do not respond by saying “That could never happen because no sect/denomination of ‘real Christianity’ would ever become terrorists.” Perhaps so; I’m inclined to agree. But! Some Muslims say that Islamic terrorists do not represent “real Islam!” My point is not about the meaning of “real Christianity.” My point is that there are many kinds of people who claim to be Christians and it is not at all inconceivable that a group of such might someday become terrorists and people who know little about Christianity would probably equate their terrorism with Christianity. Wouldn’t you want someone among them to correct them? I would.

- RO

*Note to commenters: This blog is not a discussion board; please respond with a question or comment solely to me. If you do not share my evangelical Christian perspective (very broadly defined), feel free to ask a question for clarification, but know that this is not a space for debating incommensurate perspectives/worldviews. In any case, know that there is no guarantee that your question or comment will be posted by the moderator or answered by the writer. If you hope for your question or comment to appear here and be answered or responded to, make sure it is civil, respectful, and “on topic.” Do not comment if you have not read the entire post and do not misrepresent what it says. Keep any comment (including questions) to minimal length; do not post essays, sermons or testimonies here. Do not post links to internet sites here. This is a space for expressions of the blogger’s (or guest writers’) opinions and constructive dialogue among evangelical Christians (very broadly defined).

Revelation: The Challenge of the Gospel to the Apostosies of the Present Time

When speed reading through the NT last fall I discovered The Book of Revelation for the first time as a letter written in encouragement by the Apostle John to the early churches he had founded. That they might greatly persevere in their Christian faith against growing Roman-Greek-Jewish oppression and persecution which was leading to the loss, displacement, even death, of early Christians for testifying to their faith founded in their Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

A faith that challenged the early belief systems and paganisms of their day even as it does now in today's post-truth world devoted to patriotic nationalism to the exclusion of the civil and human rights of a society's populations. A nationalism that has slipped into today's undiscerning religious churches and is confusing the gospel of Christ with the gospel of an ungodly Empire regressive in its religious Dominionism; repressive in its anti-intellectual reconstructions of the bible; and holding so many more ungodly teachings and behaviors as to create an ungodly heathen altar upon which another sacrifice is being made to the exclusion of Christ, the Lamb of God, slain before the foundations of the world.

Not unlike today's outbreak of post-truth Nationalism which is contending for the soul of the church, so too The Book of Revelation is a letter displaying John's great heartbreak for his churches as they slipped away into the pernicious teachings of Gnostic mysticism; worldly racisms and discriminations; and a plethora of unchristian ideas and teachings challenging the early Christians founded in Christ and His gospel through faithful Apostolic teaching.

The Apostle's churches were being continually challenged by the incursion of untruthful false teachings and by disingenuous false teachers working hard against the gospel of Christ causing the churches of Asia Minor to slip away all too quickly from the ministries of John and his disciples. These false teachers were more than oppositional to the gospel of Christ. They were highly motivated, caustic, argumentative, duplicitous, conniving, and purposeful in destroying the hard-won ministries of John across Asia Minor.

A ministry which John's churches had testified to by word and by deed, had learned, had even discussed and witnessed, in the Apostle's very presence. At the time of writing Revelation John was discovering through the many emissaries he was sending out of the grave challenges coming against the gospel of Christ he and his disciples had labored so hard to preach and teach. Deeply oppositional challenges growing across Asia Minor's enculturated societies in anger and resoluteness to deny, resist, and remove from their older Hellenistic traditions and customs the Christian gospel that was replacing those beliefs and practices.

So then, the Book of Revelation was yet another letter by the Apostle John to the Asia Minor churches to hold fast to Jesus, to endure persecution, to forsake false gospels, and to grow in the faith and hope they had first learned in Christ. The apocalyptic imagery he used drew from popular "end-time" literature and spoke to their "present time" of hardship-and-trial - that it would continue to increase proportionate to the gospel's outreach into the tribes and nations of the ancient world.

John's final letter to his churches would culminate in what he had sown, taught, and exampled through his earlier visits, letters, and gospel, as the first century quickly drew to a close and a new era commenced far removed from the Jewish-Messianic Christianity John once had transitioned under in his Lord's day in the lands of Israel, his holy ancestry.

Now, into the pagan cultures of the ancient world had come yet another challenge from a foreign religion, Christianity, dismissed and despised as unworthy and unwanted. A religion founded in a Judeo-Christian ethic with the understanding of Christ's culmination of the Old Testament, it's laws, and salvation history to the nation Israel through its cycles of faithfulness and faithlessness. This Judeo-Christian faith was unknown in Asia Minor's Greek-Persian-Roman culture; spoken by a foreign tongue and descended from a foreign culture (Jewish); and didn't make sense to the Gentile populations becoming convicted by its strange teachings of love and sacrifice. And yet, under the hand of God, it was growing in its missional outreach to fast become a fundamental religious belief - if not religious philosophy - that all the Gentile nations across the ancient world were beginning to wrestle with as to its truths, cultural demands, and personal commitments.

So that in the midst of all this the dear Apostle John was sorrowfully witnessing a fundamental falling away of the church under renewed raw persecutions aggressively challenging everything he and his apostolic disciples had learned and taught. It held a renewed energy unlike what he had ever expected and would require a new generation of Christians to uphold-and-contest in vigor, and personal commitment, against the evils of their generations.

This was the energy of the gospel of God into the dark world of mankind lost in its blindness and sins. And it was the power of God through Christ by His Spirit to release men and women from their torments and chains to find a spiritual freedom unlike what they had ever known. It was the beginning of the era of the church of God speaking truth in love, duty, honor, and commitment that would be led by men and women of God trained to go forth to plant, defend, and wisely shepherd the flocks of God.

"Even so Lord, Come in Power, in Majesty, in Reign, into our hearts!"

R.E. Slater

March 3, 2017

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Things You (Might) Mistakenly Believe About The Book of Revelation

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/formerlyfundie/things-might-mistakenly-believe-book-revelation/

by Dr. Benjamin L. Corey

March 2, 2017

If you grew up in Evangelicalism/Fundamentalism, you probably grew up with a doom-and-gloom view of the future and “end times.”

Me? I grew up with the whole deal: raptures, tribulations, the Antichrist, and even warnings that those things we first called “barcodes” might actually be the mark of the beast.

End times belief is so much more than an area of theology. It is a complex world-view that shapes every single aspect of our faith and the way we see the world, whether we’re able to recognize it or not.

The book of Revelation– the last book in the Bible– is perhaps the most complex book in Scripture. It is also in this obscure and highly symbolic book that much of the doom-and-gloom end times world-view is planted and watered.

There’s just one problem with building an entire world-view off the book of Revelation: it is a book that is notoriously difficult to understand or interpret. While it would be impossible for anyone to truly understand the book without sitting down for an interview with the author, John, there are some things we do know about it. In light of the few things we know for certain, here are a few corrections to things we were mistakenly taught to believe about the book of Revelation:

The Book of Revelation is not about the “end times.”

John’s Revelation was not something intended to be put in a time capsule and opened 2000 years later. Instead, it was a letter written to very specific churches and was addressing imminent events that directly impacted the people it was written to. John repeatedly uses terms like “soon”, “quickly” and “shortly” in reference to his prophesy– he goes out of his way to make it clear that he is writing about soon-to-happen-events, not ones distant in the future.

Simplified version: It was a letter written by one man to a handful of churches about imminent matters that were relevant to them. For us [today], this means that Revelation is mostly a book about past events.

Revelation is not a fear-based book of doom-and-gloom.

The book of Revelation isn’t a doom-and-gloom book at all, but rather is a very specific genre of Jewish literature where the main goal is to encourage the readers. Any interpretation that falls outside of encouraging the specific recipients of the letter, is an interpretation that is inconsistent with this literary genre.

It is a letter from one person to a handful of churches, addressing imminent events, and the entire purpose is to encourage them in the midst of these events.

The book of Revelation does not teach a secret “rapture” of the Church.

If I could count the times someone has told me to go back to Revelation to read about the rapture, the number would be considerable. The reality is however, that Revelation doesn’t teach a rapture at all. It’s simply not in the book. (It’s not even in the Bible.)

Those who believe in the rapture will argue that it’s “implied”, since the Church is only discussed in the first part of the book, but that’s silly. We can’t just make stuff up, but when we say that Revelation teaches the rapture we actually *are* just making stuff up. Rapture theology wasn’t developed for another 1500 years after John wrote this letter.

(Same is true for the Anti-Christ, which is a figure from the earlier letters from John and is not in Revelation.)

No one knows exactly what all if it means, and if they claim to, they’re lying.

Since Revelation is apocalyptic literature, it is by nature massively symbolic. Throughout the book we find symbols, numbers, and all sorts of other interesting stuff. While some of it can have an obvious meaning because of themes in the rest of Scripture (such as a symbolic lamb, which is obviously Jesus), much of what is found in this book has been endlessly debated with no clear way to determine a “correct” interpretation.

The reality is that without the ability to travel back in time and talk to the author who wrote it, and the recipients of this letter, we’ll never know the full and correct meaning of everything. While this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, it does mean you should be ultra skeptical of end-times preachers who claim to have it down to a science.

…

The book of Revelation is certainly interesting and filled with wonderful lessons to be gleaned, but it is notoriously misunderstood. It is not a book about the “end times.” It does not hold more news than your local newspaper, and it has very little to do with the future.

Instead, it’s a letter John wrote to several churches when he was exiled on Patmos. It was a letter he wrote in the Jewish apocalyptic genre, which was intended to foretell events to immediately occur, and which was designed to encourage those churches as they experienced the turbulent times of the mid first century.

The book of Revelation is a lot of things– but it’s not what your childhood pastor told you it was.

Social Evolution & The Role of Religion in Humanity

Having written over the years of the evolutionary progress of life, humanity differs little from the animal world it resembles when viewed through scientific critique. However, it is unique from the animal world in its adaptation to survive its own species by locking onto that eusocial preservative trait known as religion. As a result, mankind was better able to survive as a species through the evolution of a conscience devoted in part to a developing societal religious consciousness seen both scientifically and theologically as hard wired into humanity's makeup (neurologically, if not genetically). But if God is Creator this would be a very natural consequence as God cannot divorce His presence from His creative work (which then would include quite naturally all of His creative work that has been divinely enacted into creation).

As a Christian this divine process is what one would expect when looking at divinely decreed creational evolution begun from a biologically chaotic state preordained, or "shaded towards", the scientifically discovered Darwinian model of life somehow managing to survive naturally hostile environments. The church might call this a "divine spark", or a "miracle", but when presented as a fully mature evolutionary system divinely decreed and sovereignly ruled God does not "interfere" with His design (by spark or miracle) but "partner with it" a la a free will creation imbued with indeterminative choices and results.

It also would be in keeping with a future always open and moving forward towards reconciliation with its Creator. It is the opposite of what is taught in many evangelical churches portraying God as the ultimate "choice maker" as versus a God giving that divine function over to His creation by wont and by will. Where, in place of predetermination, there lies an open, unknown future rebuilding towards a divinity locked away in itself. Drawn as it were by a Sovereign God through love and wisdom rather than by judgmental decree, otherworldly control, or divine retribution. The former is known as an Open and Relational (Process) theology of God-and-creation whereas the later avoids any process to its theology and falls back on Greek Hellenistic ideas of "gods and goddesses controlling everyone and everything according to their rights of divinity." This latter is thus a closed and definitive system disallowing any loving, free-willed partnerships.

R.E. Slater

March 1, 2017

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An adult male marmoset carries the offspring he fathered on his back at the Bronx Zoo in New York. Marmosets are among the world’s smallest primates, with their heads slightly larger than the size of a quarter. | The Wildlife Conservation Society via AP

“A lot of people assume, falsely, that science and religion are zero-sum games:

that if science explains something, then religion must not be true. … If you were

God and wanted to set up the world in a certain way, wouldn’t you create

humans with bigger brains and the ability to imagine?” - Robin Dunbar

A scientist’s new theory: Religion was key to humans’ social evolution

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2017/02/27/a-scientists-new-theory-religion-was-key-to-humans-social-evolution/?tid=sm_tw&utm_term=.f2ed0f684ce8

by Julie Zauzmer

February 27, 2017

BOSTON — In humans’ mysterious journey to become intelligent, socializing creatures like no other in the animal world, one innovation played an essential role: religion.

That’s the theory that a preeminent evolutionary scientist is setting out to prove.

“You need something quite literally to stop everybody from killing everybody else out of just crossness,” said Robin Dunbar. “Somehow it’s clear that religions, all these doctrinal religions, create the sense that we’re all one family.”

Dunbar, an evolutionary psychology professor at Oxford University, gained some measure of fame more than 20 years ago for his research on the size of animals’ social networks. Each species of primate, he found, can manage to keep up a social bond with a certain number of other members of its own species. That number goes up as primates’ brain size increases, from monkeys to apes.

Humans, Dunbar found, are capable of maintaining significantly more social ties than the size of our brains alone could explain. He proved that each human is surprisingly consistent in the number of social ties we can maintain: About five with intimate friends, 50 with good friends, 150 with friends and 1,500 with people we could recognize by name. That discovery came to be known as “Dunbar’s number.”

And then Dunbar turned to figuring out why Dunbar’s number is so high. Did humor help us manage it? Exercise? Storytelling? That riddle has been Dunbar’s quest for years — and religion is the latest hypothesis he’s testing in his ongoing attempt to find the answer.

“Most of these things we’re looking at, you get in religion in one form or another,” he said.

Dunbar is just one of a recent wave of scientists who are interested in how religion came to be and how people have benefited from it.

“For most of Western intellectual history since the Enlightenment, religion has been thought of as ignorant and strange and an aberration and something that gets in the way of reason,” said Christian Smith, a sociologist at the University of Notre Dame who studies religion. “In the last 10 or 20 years on many fronts, there’s been a change in thinking about religion, where a lot of neuroscientists have been saying religion is totally natural. It totally makes sense that we’re religious. Religion has served a lot of important functions in developing societies.”

In the case of Dunbar and his colleagues, they already published research demonstrating that two other particularly human behaviors increased people’s capacity for social bonding. In the lab, they showed that first, laughter, and second, singing, left research subjects more capable of forming connections with other people than they were before.

Religion is the remaining key to explaining humans’ remarkable social networks, Dunbar thinks. “These three things are very good at triggering endorphins, making us feel bonded,” he said last week at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting, where he presented his team’s research on laughter and singing and introduced the forthcoming research on religion.

Religion includes numerous elements of Dunbar’s earlier studies on endorphin-producing activities. Lots of singing, to start. Repetitive motion triggers endorphins, he said, noting that traditions from Catholicism to Islam to Buddhism to Hinduism make use of prayer beads.

Plus, researchers have shown that doing these activities in synchronized fashion with other people drastically magnifies the endorphin-producing effect: Picture the coordinated bowing that is central to Muslim, Jewish and Catholic worship.

And Dunbar’s most recent published research demonstrated the effectiveness of emotional storytelling in bonding groups of strangers who hear the story together — again, a fixture of religious worship.

“What you get from dance and singing on its own is a sense of belonging. It happens very quickly. What happens, I suspect, is that it can trigger very easily trance states,” Dunbar said. He theorizes that these spiritual experiences matter much more than dance and song alone. “Once you’ve triggered that, you’re in, I think, a different ballgame. It ramps up massively. That’s what’s triggered. There’s something there.”

Dunbar’s team will start research on religion in April, and he expects it will take three years. To begin, he wants to map a sort of evolutionary tree of religion, using statistical modeling to try to show when religious traditions evolved and how they morphed into each other.

Of course, religious people themselves might find Dunbar’s theory odd — most don’t think of religion existing to serve an evolutionary purpose, but of their faiths simply being true.

But Smith thinks one can easily have faith in both God’s truth and religion’s role in human development.

“From the religious point of view, you can say this … . God created humans as a very particular type of creature, with very particular brains and biology, just so that they would develop into the type of humans who would know God and believe in God,” Smith said. “They’re not in conflict at all.”

He added: “A lot of people assume, falsely, that science and religion are zero-sum games: that if science explains something, then religion must not be true. … If you were God and wanted to set up the world in a certain way, wouldn’t you create humans with bigger brains and the ability to imagine?”

One more research finding on the place of God in our brains — remember Dunbar’s number, the five intimate friends and 50 good friends and 150 friends each person can hold onto? Dunbar says that if a person feels he or she has a close relationship with a spiritual figure, like God or the Virgin Mary, then that spiritual personage actually fills up one of those numbered spots, just like a human relationship would. One of your closest friends, scientifically speaking, might be God.

WHAT IS THE BIBLE? A Good Question that Biblical Inerrancy Can't Answer

WHAT IS THE BIBLE? A Good Question that Biblical Inerrancy Can't Answer

http://www.peteenns.com/what-is-the-bible-a-good-question-that-biblical-inerrancy-cant-answer/

by PeteEnns

February 22, 2017

I deeply respect Scripture, but I am not an inerrantist. I have several reasons for this, but it comes down to two things:

• The Bible as a whole (rather than a prooftext or two) doesn’t support inerrancy.
• The history of Jewish and Christian interpretation of the Bible doesn’t support inerrancy.

I write quite a bit about the first point (see some blog posts here). Some might say “too much” but you’re not the boss of me. Jesus is and just this morning he told me personally that I need to keep writing about it.

The bottom line here is that the Bible is too diverse and contradictory for “inerrancy” to hold any explanatory power. To “hold on” to the term would mean either (1) ignoring the the biblical data, or (2) qualifying the term “inerrancy” beyond recognition.

Neither posture contributes to spiritual growth, but stifles it.

Some choose to take one or both of these approaches, thinking that too much is at stake if we “let go” of inerrancy. My response is that wishing it to be a central doctrine doesn’t make it so, if in fact the Bible you are protecting doesn’t support the theory.

On the second point, the history of Jewish and Christian interpretation of the Bible is so diverse, that to expect to mine through all that and find beneath all the chaos an inerrant Bible seems rather nonsensical to me—unless one’s version of Christianity entails the belief that your tradition has gotten the Bible entirely right and others that disagree are wrong and need to be corrected. This leads to religious wars or at least rumbles at church softball games.

Jewish and Christian interpretation of the Bible evinces diachronic and synchronic diversity, meaning diversity through time and diversity at any one time.

The presence of these diversities is simply a fact. You can look it up.

A deep problem with inerrancy is that it presumes (or works best with) the notion that the Bible “properly” understood will yield one and only one authoritative meaning.

But the Bible is famously fraught with ambiguities, tensions, and contradictions that are part of the character of Scripture, and the result of either intentional internal debates by the authors or the natural by-product of diverse authors writing at diverse times under diverse circumstances and for diverse reasons. Add to that the great distance between a book whose beginnings go back about 3000 years—as far removed back in time for us as the year 5000 is from us ahead.

Simply put, the phenomenon of a Scripture that is diverse and the inevitably diverse history of interpretation of such a diverse text do not sit well with the insistence that God would only produce an inerrant text.

What Is the Bible?

The question remains, then, “What is the Bible?”

Good question, but I don’t always like the way it’s posed: “Well, Enns, now that you’ve taken inerrancy away form us, what are we supposed to think of the Bible now, huh? HUH?!”

That way of phrasing things assumes the normalcy of an inerrantist paradigm.

Another bad way of asking the question is, “So, I suppose that makes you an ‘errantist.’”

No, no, and no. That too presumes the normalcy of inerrancy—that discussions of the nature of the Bible center on whether or not there are errors, and everyone falls on one side of the divide or the other.

There are many other ways of thinking about the Bible. What is needed here is to broaden one’s field of vision.

My own answer to “What is the Bible?,” at least at this moment in my life, includes but is not limited to the following:

In the Bible, we read of encounters with God by ancient peoples, in their times and places, asking their questions, and expressed in language and ideas familiar to them. Those encounters with God were, I believe, genuine, authentic, and real. . . . All of us on a journey of faith encounter God from our point of view. . . we meet God as people defined by our moment in the human drama, products of who, where, and when we are. We ask our questions of God and encounter God in our time and place in language and ideas familiar to us, just like the ancient pilgrims of faith who gave us the Bible. . . . This Bible, which preserves ancient journeys of faith, models for us our own journeys. We recognize something of ourselves in the struggles, joys, triumphs, confusions, and despairs expressed by the biblical writers. ~ The Bible Tells Me So, pp. 23-24

No answer will be perfect, and I think it is wise to be willing to hold our definitions loosely (as I try to). But my point here is simple that an “inerrantist model” of the Bible creates unnecessary conflict with with how the Bible behaves and how it has been read for a very, very long time.

And there are other, faithful, ways of answering the question, “What is the Bible?”