Karen Armstrong (pronounced Car-en, if you care) isn’t a religion scholar I’d normally recommend, but I think she makes a fairly good description of what appears to be a good bit of the situation we find ourselves in as regards the relationship of religion and science.

In short, religion hasn’t always carried around the obligation to “prove” God and his ways. As far as Christianity goes, it was a buy-in into rationalism that produced the kind of rationalistic fundamentalism that is, in my opinion, driving a lot of evangelicals into positions of increasing hostility to the findings of science. It’s common to read intelligent Christians, sometimes those who work in fields requiring technical proficiency, talking as if our default position toward science must be absolute skepticism or worse.

This morning at church, a little child sang “Jesus loves me….cause the Bible tells me so.” I wondered if that same child, wanting to be a doctor or an astronomer someday, will find out that they need to add verses like “The earth is 10,000 years old….” and “All scientists are lying….” Thankfully this isn’t true in every Christian communion. Please speak up if it’s not yours. Someone surely needs to know.Continue reading “Riffs: Karen Armstrong on the Science/Religion Cul De Sac and N.T. Wright on his Differences with Piper”

We should always be ears up when The Episcopal Church speaks of heresy. Here’s the presiding bishop of the TEC coming out swinging at the recent general convention.

The crisis of this moment has several parts, and like Episcopalians, particularly ones in Mississippi, they’re all related. The overarching connection in all of these crises has to do with the great Western heresy – that we can be saved as individuals, that any of us alone can be in right relationship with God. It’s caricatured in some quarters by insisting that salvation depends on reciting a specific verbal formula about Jesus. That individualist focus is a form of idolatry, for it puts me and my words in the place that only God can occupy, at the center of existence, as the ground of all being. That heresy is one reason for the theme of this Convention.

Not being a confessional church, this sort of thing isn’t quite as surprising as it would be if a Baptist said it, but it still underlines why the rifts in the Anglican Communion are about truly significant issues. I can spin these words to where they are better or worse, but what’s actually being said here? Let me suggest it’s something like: “Those of you forming the ACNA are no longer real Anglicans. You’ve become fundamentalist revivalists.”

You can read the whole address here.

My lowest of the low ecclesiology has the following essentials: 1) Keep the truth about Jesus safe, especially from smart Christians. 2) Constantly encourage me to be a Jesus follower in my sphere, not your church. 3) Assist me in those aspects of following Jesus that can’t be done alone, like baptism and the Lord’s Supper. 4) Know your place in God’s missional playbook and don’t act like you’re the whole show. 5) Don’t make stuff up to justify what you’re doing, then carp at me for not buying it.

Discuss amongst yourselves.