That said, putting these two tweets next to each other reveals, what seems to be, the continued impact of Enlightenment emphasis on right thinking over right living. It seems one can think the right things and yet act wrongly (Driscoll) and receive grace. But if one acts rightly and yet thinks the wrong things (Bell) you get farewelled from the Christian community.
.. Looking at those two tweets next to each others, I can’t help but wonder, are we as a church in danger of conflating right thinking with salvation, thus making it a work by which we are saved?
Are actions more forgivable when a person’s theology is right?
.. We must watch out for false teachers, correct them, and protect the body of Christ from them. What I don’t understand is why we wouldn’t work to restore them like we would anyone else. Why does Rob Bell and his questionable teaching get farewelled and Driscoll and his documented abuse get grace?
We Need a Less Anxious Response to Houston Subpoenas
As our society becomes increasingly post-Christian, the influence of Christianity is waning. Christians are feeling marginalized. Many are even buying into the narrative that Christians in America are being persecuted.
What if there is another story?
I wonder if what we are experiencing is really persecution, or simply, the feeling of no longer being as influential as we once were. Our opinion used to matter. Our beliefs shaped culture. People used to listen to what we had to say. That isn’t happening any longer. Our voice is now one voice among many, no longer favored but given equal weight. But, because of the position of privilege we used to enjoy, it feels like we aren’t being heard. It feels like we aren’t being considered. It feels like we are marginalized, but in reality, maybe we are being treated as equals. Which makes me wonder, do we, the church, know how to exist in our culture when we do not have political and cultural power?
.. Flooding the Houston Mayor’s office with Bibles may seem like a good idea, but is it really helpful? Is it a faithful witness to our call as ministers of reconciliation? Or is it an example of “You push me and I’ll push you back” under the guise of a political stunt? As humans, our first instinct is to fight back and to stand up for our rights, but as Christians it is more important that we ask ourselves, “Is our current response a move toward peace and loving our neighbors?”
A Bombshell Document at the Vatican Synod
the Pope had puckishly tweaked Cardinal Müller, the Vatican’s keeper of doctrinal orthodoxy, telling the assembled bishops, “Speak clearly, don’t think that Cardinal Müller is going to pounce on you!”
.. Pius IX, in his infamous “Syllabus of Errors,” published in 1864, listed a series of mistaken ideas held by the contemporary Church, ending with what he considered the greatest error of them all: “The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism, and modern civilization.” The principles he held onto included a defense of the institution of slavery and a rejection of democracy and freedom of speech.
Richard Dawkins: His atheism is its own kind of narrow religion
Intelligent life on a planet comes of an age when it first works out the reason for its own existence. If superior creatures from space ever visit earth, the first question they will ask, in order to assess the level of our civilisation, is: “Have they discovered evolution yet?” Living organisms had existed on earth, without ever knowing why, for over three thousand million years before the truth finally dawned on one of them. His name was Charles Darwin.
Unlike the best of the colonial administrators, some of whom were deeply versed in the languages and histories of the peoples they ruled, Dawkins displays no interest in the cultures of the African countries where he lived as a boy. It is the obedient devotion of those who served his family that has remained in his memory.
.. As anyone who reads his sermons against religion can attest, his attitude towards believers is one of bullying and contempt reminiscent of the attitude of some of the more obtuse colonial missionaries towards those they aimed to convert.
.. I became increasingly aware that Darwinian evolution was a powerfully available alternative to my creator god as an explanation of the beauty and apparent design of life. … It wasn’t long then before I became strongly and militantly atheistic.”
.. Quite apart from the substance of the idea, there is no reason to suppose that the Genesis myth to which Dawkins refers was meant literally. Coarse and tendentious atheists of the Dawkins variety prefer to overlook the vast traditions of figurative and allegorical interpretations with which believers have read Scripture. Both Augustine and before him the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria explicitly cautioned against literalism in interpreting the biblical creation story.
.. When he maintains that Darwin’s account of evolution displaced the biblical story, Dawkins is assuming that both are explanatory theories—one primitive and erroneous, the other more advanced and literally true. In treating religion as a set of factual propositions, Dawkins is mimicking Christianity at its most fundamentalist.
.. The idea of free will, after all, comes from religion and not from science. Science may give us the unvarnished truth—or some of it—about our species. Part of that truth may prove to be that humans are not and can never be rational animals.
.. There are many philosophies of science. Among them is empiricism, which maintains that scientific knowledge extends only so far as observation and experiment can reach; realism, which holds that science can give an account of parts of the world that can never be observed; irrealism, according to which there is no one truth of things to which scientific theories approximate; and pragmatism, which views science theories as useful tools for organizing and controlling experience.
.. If the human mind has evolved in obedience to the imperatives of survival, what reason is there for thinking that it can acquire knowledge of reality, when all that is required in order to reproduce the species is that its errors and illusions are not fatal?
.. If religion comes in many varieties, so too does atheism. Dawkins takes for granted that being an atheist goes with having liberal values (with the possible exception of tolerance). But as the Victorians well knew, there are many types of atheism, liberal and illiberal, and many versions of atheist ethics.
.. One might wager a decent sum of money that it has never occurred to Dawkins that to many people he appears as a comic figure. His default mode is one of rational indignation—a stance of withering patrician disdain for the untutored mind of a kind one might expect in a schoolmaster in a minor public school sometime in the 1930s. He seems to have no suspicion that any of those he despises could find his stilted pose of indignant rationality merely laughable.
.. What exercised him was that Tony Blair had invited leaders of the main religions in Britain to Downing Street to discuss the situation—but somehow omitted to ask a leader of atheism (presumably Dawkins himself) to join the gathering. There seemed no question in Dawkins’s mind that atheism as he understood it fell into the same category as the world’s faiths.
In this, Dawkins is surely right.