The Questioning Christian

  • Relevance

    From a column by James Murray in The Australian, “Who Decides Who’s a Christian?”

    [The Anglican primates] might also wonder if the world at large is more concerned about such questions as the actual existence of God. Or the incredible disparity between rich and poor. Or how a benevolent God can allow suffering. They might even question the vast property holdings, especially of Western churches, and their own disobedience to the rabbi from Nazareth that his followers sell up everything and give it to the poor.

    These are perhaps more serious biblical betrayals than the desperations of an uncertain sexuality. Anglicans will stumble on, pretending that their comprehensiveness will save them from schism. But who will save them from growing irrelevance in a world asking ultimate questions?

    (Link via Anglicans Online)

  • Scripture, Stonings, and Homosexuality

    Traditionalists often argue that homosexuality is supposedly condemned by the Bible, and that’s that.

    But it seems to me that, if the literal words of Scripture held the once-and-for-all answers to all moral questions, then we would still be stoning rebellious sons at the town gates, as commanded by Deut. 21:18-21.

    (I mentioned the stoning business to my mother on the phone not long ago. No doubt remembering my adolescence, she laughed and responded, "so?")

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  • Bibliolatry

    To paraphrase the Rev. Dr. John Polkinghorne, Scripture is an invaluable laboratory notebook, in which are recorded a multitude of data about God and man.

    We can even make the judgment that everything we need for salvation has been recorded in that notebook.

    But just as the map is not the territory, the lab notebook does not completely define the reality.

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  • Scripture: Word, or Logos?

    Scripture is often said to be the Word of God. I wonder whether that statement ought to be phrased a bit differently.

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  • It’s Not a Numbers Game

    In these days of church controversy, it’s useful to know, and worth prayerfully considering, that millions of Anglicans in the “Global South” supposedly believe X, or Y, or Z. But that can never be dispositive.

    Truth isn’t a numbers game — if it were, we’d all have to be Roman Catholics or Muslims. And if the vote had been taken 2,000 years ago, we’d likely all be pagans, or maybe Buddhists or Hindus.

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  • Urban Legends and Scripture

    Non-believers sometimes dismiss the New Testament as the stuff of legend. Christians sometimes respond that legends about Jesus could not have arisen in the 20 to 50 years between his death and the writing of the various Gospels and Epistles. Is either group right? I don’t know, but I do know that urban legends can certainly arise quickly, including in the religious context. See, e.g., the Ship of Fools urban-legends collection.

  • Does Faith in Jesus Really Save Us?

    In traditional Protestant Christianity, faith in Jesus is what supposedly saves us. This notion goes back to Martin Luther. But was Luther mistranslating the Bible?

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  • What the Cross Really Symbolizes

    For years I was uncomfortable with traditional Christian reverence for the cross.  I recently realized that there’s an alternative symbolism for the cross that, for me, has a much greater ring of truth to it.   

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  • The Not-So-Eternal Universe

    In an earlier posting, I recounted the story how, in the 1920s, astronomers concluded that the universe was expanding. Some scientists were uncomfortable with that idea, because it implied that the universe must have had a beginning. They preferred instead the notion that the universe was eternal.

    The debate was suddenly ended by two Bell Labs researchers, working on something else entirely, who won the Nobel Prize for their accidental discovery.

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  • The Rain, the Water Cycle, and God

    We slept late this morning (out too late at a charity event last night), so I had to walk the dog alone. It was raining, and having seen the news stories about Hurricane Isabel, my mind wandered to the water cycle as one of the wonders of the universe. As we all learned in school:

    • Energy from the sun heats the oceans (and lakes, rivers, etc.), causing water to evaporate.
    • The resulting water vapor is pretty pure, because the other stuff in the sea doesn’t evaporate nearly as much at the temperatures found on earth.
    • The water vapor moves around the atmosphere, eventually to condense into clouds.
    • Rain falls and collects as fresh water in aquafers, lakes, rivers, etc.
    • All this reasonably-pure water is available for use in the various processes that we humans depend on, not least of which are our own bodily processes.
    • “Used” water eventually makes its way back to the oceans, where the sun-driven process starts around again.

    Of course this nifty arrangement arose, and continues, because of the laws of physics. Some folks believe God purposely designed it that way, others think it’s just a series of coincidences, still others fall somewhere in between.

    Regardless, if you’ve ever worked on cars (or in my case years ago, Navy nuclear reactors), you’ve just got to admire the way that this mechanism works, and on a planetary scale no less.

    As I was getting soaked this morning, this was a very joyous thought.