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Subscribe to CommentsI believe the Bible literally, word for word. Sorry, that’s not good enough. It’s not direct enough. It’s not immediate enough. It’s not what God–through the Bible–is communicating. God wants to speak to us through the Bible and this can only happen when the words become more than literal. It can only happen when they become actual.
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Thirty years ago, evangelicals started talking about “worldviews.” I first remember hearing it from Francis Schaeffer. It began innocently enough–as an attempt on the part of evangelicals to become a little more thoughtful about the faith. But a hundred years of separating the head from the heart, as if there are two homes within which to house your faith–and we know which one is superior–had taken their toll. Soon “worldview” was reduced to another piece of the evangelical apologetic armor, a little pop anthropology to go with our pop psychology. People sent their high school kids away for a month to learn about “the Christian worldview” and its nemesis “the secular humanist worldview.”
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We love these sticky phrases, don’t we? Especially the ones that get us off the hook like this one does. The ones that swoop in and lift us right over the horns of the dilemma that another sticky phrase plunges us into: “judge not, lest ye be judged.” How do we do that, without all hell breaking loose? Gosh, we have to judge don’t we? He couldn’t have meant, literally, “judge not, lest ye be judged.” No, he meant judge carefully, judge wisely, judge lovingly, judge well, judge insiders. So why didn’t he just say that? Because he didn’t have us around to write his speeches for him! So we come up with our own sticky phrase to “complement” his. “Love the sinner, hate the sin.” Voila! we’re off the hook! Or are we?
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Something’s happening in American Evangelicalism. We are waking up from a stupor. We are attempting to fear our founder more than we fear our movement’s group think. Because He is asserting his proprietary rights over His brand–a brand which has been the subject of trademark infringement for too long. We are standing up to be counted as conscientious objectors to the evangelical culture war that has been distracting us from the evangelical mission.
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Today marks the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin, a man whose name has been much maligned by many in my own American evangelical tribe.
My friend, Carl Safina, an ocean conservationist and author of the acclaimed Song for the Blue Ocean told me that his two heroes are Charles Darwin and Jesus; Darwin for revealing the unity of all living things, and Jesus for teaching us to love our enemies. Would that my fellow believers understood as well the rule of Jesus, a rule which demands that we bother to understand each other.
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My friend Rich Cizik, a prominent leader of the National Association of Evangelicals resigned recently after the proverbial firestorm of protest. He candidly answered some questions posed by Terry Gross on NPR’s “Fresh Air.“ Cizik revealed the following things about his personal views when asked: that civil unions in his view are OK, that it might be wise for the government to offer contraceptives to those who can’t afford them in order to reduce the number of babies who are aborted rather than born, and that he voted for a Democratic candidate (Barak Obama) in the Democratic primary in his state.
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“The problem with writing about religion is that you run the risk of offending sincerely religious people, and then they come after you with machetes.” — Dave Barry
That is word for word perfect. And it’s the reason many, many, and might I add an increasing number of many people are keeping their distance from things like, oh, say, churches. Because they know this to be true or at least true enough, which is, to say the least, too true.
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It’s the political season, the golden moment for the talking heads. I enjoy listening to them. But I have a request: could we ban “look!”, “frankly,” and “sort of”? Look seems to be the word of choice for the experts. They are being asked to analyze the convention or the polls or their dog’s position in the race and they begin every other assertion with “look!” I want to say, Look! We’re listening already! We think you have something worth saying or we’d be on another channel. The hosts have asked you to be their guest, and not some other talking head. Jesus said, “Behold!” but he was special.
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