Recovering Evangelicals

One of the core tenets of Christian theology … is also often one of the hardest to embrace, and all-too-often a reason for giving up on the faith. How is an abstract, theological concept like guilt or sin transmitted down through genetic lines? Can that really be inherited like skin color, or a tendency towards high blood pressure? Or does it become my problem because I’m genealogically related to “that guy,” an ancestor of mine who lived thousands of years ago? (Genetic and genealogical relatedness are two different things.) But how can I be held responsible for what he did? And what do I do with the mountain of scientific evidence that tells me “that guy” never even existed? And how does Christ’s death fix this problem? Why can’t God just forgive? Questions like these make this idea of Original Sin really hard to hold on to. But if one jettisons the idea, then what was the point of Jesus dying on the cross? In this episode, Boyd and I team up with an Old Testament / Hebrew scholar to look at how the ancient Hebrews who wrote/read the story in Genesis chapter three never interpreted it the way the Apostle Paul did, and certainly not the way Augustine later stretched it all out of proportion. And we set the stage for a whole new perspective on this idea, and for the even thornier discussion about Atonement Theology that builds on it. What gives us the right to second-guess the Apostle Paul and Saint Augustine? The fact that we now have information that was completely unavailable to them at the time: humans did NOT originate from a primal pair in what we now call Iraq, six thousand years ago. Instead, a mountain of evidence given to us (by God) tells us that humans originated two or three hundred thousand years ago, out of Africa, and have never numbered less than ten thousand. Faced with this contradiction, most believers opt for one of three easy solutions: blissful ignorance … pretend the science isn’t there; denial … label the science as false; give up … discard the whole belief system. We think an honest and pragmatic approach is to re-examine those ideas. Here’s the first in a four-part series of episodes that dig into this core aspect of Christian theology. Tell us your thoughts on this in the comment box below … If you want to play this episode later on your device, look for Recovering Evangelicals in the iTunes Store, Podbean, Spotify, GooglePodcasts, or GooglePlayMusic. If you want to help grow this pod-cast, please like and share with a friend. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find me on Twitter or Facebook. Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page

Mind. Personality. Soul. Consciousness. Spirit. These five things which account for the human experience are often seen as overlapping, or even interchangeable. Boyd and I see them all as related … but quite separate. For us, the first four are material and emergent properties of the brain and therefore completely within the scientific realm. In fact, in a previous episode (#10), we’ve given a scientific explanation for the human soul. In this episode, we look at some of the directions being taken by scientists to explain consciousness using materialistic mechanisms. First, we explore in a bit of detail what “emergence” and “emergent properties” mean. Basically, these refer to relatively simple things obeying relatively simple rules to give rise to very surprising and complicated things which were never even hinted at within those simple components. Like a huge flock of starlings becoming a massive “sky-amoeba” … or 26 alphabetical letters becoming a Shakespearean sonnet … eight musical notes becoming Handel’s Messiah … a collection of circuits and software become an immersive virtual reality game … or artificial intelligence. Pretty amazing stuff! With that foundation, we then look at how a few nerve cells, obeying a few simple rules of logic, can create interesting and relatively simple reflexes … but then multiplying that by billions and trillions to produce consciousness, mind, personality and soul. This kind of discussion involves some pretty heady neurobiology, physics, informatics, and computer coding, but we’ve kept it at a very attainable level. Some scientists even bring in quantum physics to explain how the brain might act more like a parallel quantum supercomputer than the computers you find in your home or office which work with simple zeroes and ones. In fact, they even suggest this can explain how professional athletes can perform stupendous calculations within time-frames that completely defy normal physics, mathematics, and neurobiology … like hitting a ball hurled at them at over a hundred miles per hour … and seem to do this by sending quantum information forward through time!? Oh, and that fifth element which is at the heart of what it means to be human … the immaterial spirit … well, that’s a topic for another day. Your thoughts on this? Leave a comment below … stir the pot a little bit! If you want to play this episode later on your device, look for Recovering Evangelicals in the iTunes Store, Podbean, Spotify, GooglePodcasts, or GooglePlayMusic. If you want to help grow this pod-cast, please like and share with a friend. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find me on Twitter or Facebook. Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page

Chronological snobbery. Science of their day. Phenomenological science. These related terms came up many times in our previous episodes, and we kept saying “sometime we’ll have to get into that in more detail.” Here we come through on that promise. Clearly, the Biblical authors saw things differently than we do. the earth being unmovable, and the sun revolving around it human infertility … always a problem with the woman the soul … localized to the heart, kidneys, intestines, liver the weather … just read Job chapters 37 and 38 the origins of the universe, of species, of humans the origins of language, music, agriculture, cities the making of Eve from Adam’s rib (you won’t believe two of the “scientific explanations” which have been given for this) bats being classified as a type of bird But does that mean that we see things better than they did? That our understanding is so much better than theirs? Can we really justify this kind of chronological snobbery. Sure, the Bible is not a science book for today. It might have been at one time … for people thousands of years ago, trying to make sense of the world they lived in. But all science books have a shelf life: their ability to explain fades as our understanding of a given subject increases. The curriculum needs to be updated. This is particularly true when it comes to our understanding of origins … origin of the universe … origin of life … origin of humans. Science has improved our ability to understand/explain things in two ways. First, by building better tools to see and measure things: this is “phenomenological science.” Telescopes to see farther; microscopes to see closer; space probes to put our eyeballs on the other side of the solar system; EEGs/ECGs to “listen” to the heart or to the brain; ultrasound to “listen” to the shape of a fetus, or the progression of a tumor; thermometers to replace subjective feelings with objective numbers. Second, by using the scientific method: collect observations, come up with an explanation for those observations, and then … most importantly … do your best to disprove that explanation. Test the null hypothesis. The more the idea passes that test, the more you can trust it. (Science is not about certainty, but about increasing the probability of being right.) So maybe we have a different scientific understanding, but is that the same as saying we have a better understanding? Maybe yes … but maybe no. We look at examples of modern science also being blinkered by group think, peer pressure, and -of-the-gaps thinking. And is this line of questioning relevant only to science? Is it worth considering whether there was a “history of their day” … a “theology of their day” … an “ethics of their day”? … your thoughts on this? Leave a comment below … stir the pot a little bit! If you want to play this episode later on your device, look for Recovering Evangelicals in the iTunes Store, Podbean, Spotify, GooglePodcasts, or GooglePlayMusic. If you want to help grow this pod-cast, please like and share with a friend. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find me on Twitter or Facebook. Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page

What is it about Evangelicalism that sets believers up for their faith to fail when confronted simply by scientific facts? We suggest four answers to this question … (1) An inflexible adherence to inerrancy and infallibility of Scripture, and putting the Bible on too high a pedestal that borders on turning it into an icon … a thing to be worshiped. Bibliolatry. (2) Diminishing God and elevating self. Too many Evangelicals treat God and Jesus as their good buddy. They speak of frequent (daily?) direct encounters with the ineffable, even a personal relationship. But what about the rest of us (many of us) who do not experience those feelings? On the other hand, there’s also a tendency to see ourselves as the center of the universe: that it’s all about us. (3) Exclusivity. We’re always drawing lines … defining who’s in and who’s out. And then too quickly consigning those outside the lines to hell (and even insisting on an eternal conscious torment!?). And we think we have nothing to learn from other seekers, philosophers, or religions. (4) Certainty. The arrogance that we know exactly what a given Bible passage means … that our theological understanding is complete and accurate … that the Bible is “so simple that even a child could understand it.” … that we’re right and everybody else is wrong. And that anything which might call our thinking into question … like scientific findings … are just wrong and to be dismissed. What are your thoughts on this? If you want to play this episode later on your device, look for Recovering Evangelicals in the iTunes Store, Podbean, Spotify, GooglePodcasts, or GooglePlayMusic. If you want to help grow this pod-cast, please like and share with a friend. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find me on Twitter or Facebook. Don’t forget to leave comments below … stir the pot a little bit! Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page

Here, we take a close look at a dozen high-profile people who were once fully Evangelical in their outlook, and active in Christian leadership … with far more theological training and ministry experience than the average believer … and who found their Fundamentalist Christian faith increasingly didn’t make sense or was deeply disturbing. Although they tried for years to contain the cognitive dissonance, to continue to put on an outward appearance of committed belief, and “still wanted to believe,” they eventually found they had to give it up. They didn’t just fade into the background and disappear. Instead, they publicly declared their rejection of their once deeply held faith, and have even become very vocal against those Fundamentalist beliefs, still reaching and influencing millions of people with the reasons why they felt they had to give it up. They all describe this as a very personally upsetting experience, a decision not taken lightly, but one motivated by just wanting to pursue truth and to be real, honest, inquisitive, and open. There are many others just like them, hundreds of influential speakers and writers whose stories we don’t have time to tell, and thousands (millions?) of others who do not have a high public profile … but who all also found the reasons to not believe outweighed the reasons to “just believe.” The response from the church typically has been to quickly cut these people off, saying “they were never really one of us … they must have never believed.” This, despite the personal sacrifices: years of serving in ministry … thousands of dollars spent on theological training … careers abandoned, or promising career paths never taken, in order to devote their lives to furthering the Kingdom. Can we learn something from their stories? Has the Church failed them? Is there something about Evangelicalism that sets people up for their faith to fail? That will be the subject of part III. If you want to help grow this pod-cast, please like and share with a friend. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find me on Twitter or Facebook. Don’t forget to leave comments below … stir the pot a little bit! Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page

Many times, Boyd and I have been asked “What’s with the name of your podcast?”  Here’s our answer. In the first of a three part series, we take a look at how Evangelicalism has morphed and deviated away from its historical roots: the Gospel message itself. Boyd starts us off looking at our respective experiences with contemporary Evangelicalism, then takes us back to when that period in the movement really came to the forefront of the consciousness of modern church culture: the days of Billy Graham to the present. We then step back to the 1800s, when the term “Evangelical” first started being used by the church. Which prompts an awkward question: “was the Church not Evangelical before the 1800s?” Luke then takes us back a couple millennia further, to a time that predates Christianity itself, and an entirely different culture that first introduced the term “Evangelical” to the world. No, not the Hebrew culture. The Romans themselves had a “Euangelion” … a “Gospel” … a Good News message of a savior for the world and for all mankind: a son of god who would bring in a fantastically new world order … a whole new kind of liberty, freedom, stability, and prosperity … such that no one before or after would ever be able to out-do his achievement. His name was Caesar Augustus. This was their message long before Jesus gathered his disciples around him and co-opted the same word. Some Christians might get uncomfortable with this, but it’s nonetheless a part of our history. An honest seeker will embrace that … and then unpack it. Perhaps we can show that Caesar Augustus’s acclamation was premature, and that Jesus himself took it to a whole new level? His new world order is not only still standing, but still growing: it brings to mind a mustard seed, or yeast in a lump of dough. Caesar’s, on the other hand, collapsed in on itself within a few centuries and continues only as echoes in our language, law, medicine, science … and Hollywood movies. It is a fact of history that Christ’s euangelion has indeed been growing to fantastic proportions (Matt 13:31, 33), and has indeed been producing all kinds of “treasures, new and old” (Matt 13:47, 52): not just spiritual benefits (forgiveness; salvation; healing), but also societal ones (hospitals; schools; humanitarian efforts; movements to abolish slavery; peace-and-reconciliation commissions after a genocide; the laws which govern many countries). It has been casting nets to catch “fish” (Matt 13:47), and has been preparing a banquet (Matt 22:2). “Thy kingdom come … on earth as it is in heaven.” If you want to play this episode later on your device, look for Recovering Evangelicals in the iTunes Store, Podbean, Spotify, GooglePodcasts, or GooglePlayMusic. If you want to help grow this pod-cast, please like and share with a friend. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find me on Twitter or Facebook. Don’t forget to leave comments below … stir the pot a little bit! Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page

An Old Testament scholar tells us that the Bible makes it very clear: there has to be a resurrection of the body. Early church fathers were convinced that this body would contain the very same molecules that we “owned” while alive on earth. And many Christians today, without thinking too deeply about the subject, imagine their resurrected body looking very much like it does today. But there are some simple reasons why it can’t be as physical as one might have imagined (hoped?): too many people have “owned” the same molecules while alive on earth, and each of us have “owned” many different bodily forms over the course of our earthly lives. We then go on a historical journey over the past fifty thousand years looking at the evolution of Hebrew and then Christian thinking about the afterlife. The Hebrews held a very Babylonian and Egyptian view of the afterlife, with no postmortem judgement scenario: everyone ended up in a dark, dusty place crawling with maggots. Christians radically changed that in response to Zoroastrian and Greek thinking: there was now a postmortem judgement followed by a place of reward or of punishment. In the process of this change: the Garden of Eden morphed into Paradise, which eventually became Heaven, while Sheol became Gehenna and then eventually Hell. Christians also introduced a couple new ideas to solve the problem of how one’s final destiny was decided: Penal Substitutionary Atonement and Purgatory. If you want to play this episode later on your device, look for Recovering Evangelicals in the iTunes Store, Podbean, Spotify, GooglePodcasts, or GooglePlayMusic. If you want to help grow this pod-cast, please like and share with a friend. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find me on Twitter or Facebook. Don’t forget to leave comments below … stir the pot a little bit! Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page

Can there be a materialistic explanation for the soul!? Does the soul have to be immaterial? In the previous episode, we found that scholars  — scientists and philosophers — have long wrestled with the concept of an immaterial soul (and spirit) and come to a fully reasoned conclusion that it doesn’t work. Here, we first look at what the soul “does” for us, and then at an idea that explains all those functions using neurobiology. So could “the soul” be a material emergent property of the material brain? The Bible never speaks clearly on what the soul is (note: it never says that soul and the immaterial spirit have to be one and the same thing). But to get to the bottom line, we need to first define what “material” and “immaterial” are, and then go over some basic neurobiology. With that in place, we can talk about the human soul being an emergent property of the material brain: a very complex and intricately wired region of the brain which represents the “self” to oneself, to other humans, to the rest of Creation, and … if one is so inclined … to the Divine. This material view of the human soul opens up whole new avenues for understanding postmortem resurrection (the topic of next week’s episode). It also opens up a way to bring together the Hebrew understanding of “the imago Dei” (being created in God’s image) with the very different Greek understanding of that concept. Tell us what you think … leave questions or comments at bottom of this page (stir the pot a little bit!). If you want to play this episode later on your device, look for Recovering Evangelicals in the iTunes Store, Podbean, Spotify, GooglePodcasts, or GooglePlayMusic. If you want to help grow this pod-cast, please like and share with a friend. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find me on Twitter or Facebook. Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page

The vast majority of people — whether they be Christians sitting in the pews of our churches, or non-believers outside the church — think that Substance Dualism is a central and core tenet of Christianity. That one can’t reject Substance Dualism and still call themselves Christian. And yet many scholars — both Christian and non-believers — who have spent decades studying this question have reasons to conclude that Substance Dualism “doesn’t work.” Here, we go through a number of scientific and philosophical arguments against Substance Dualism, and Biblical reasons why we don’t have to hang on to this idea. (1) Spirit of the gaps: inserting this immaterial concept into the unknown has no explanatory power, and becomes increasingly irrelevant as science continues to provide material explanations for what the soul does. (2) The mind-body problem: the vast majority of scholars going all the way back to Rene Descartes (and even Augustine) could not conceive how the immaterial soul can interact with the material body. (3) Thermodynamics: the constant intervention of the immaterial into our material universe would massively upset the balance of energy in our universe. (4) Depending on one’s view of when the immaterial soul is “attached” to the material body, there will be very uncomfortable ramifications when a fertilized egg splits into two different embryos (identical twins) or two different fertilized eggs join into one embryo (a “chimera”). If you want to play this episode later on your device, look for Recovering Evangelicals in the iTunes Store, Podbean, Spotify, GooglePodcasts, or GooglePlayMusic. And if you want to help grow this pod-cast, please like and share with a friend. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find me on Twitter or Facebook. Don’t forget to leave comments below … stir the pot a little bit! Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page

Many Christians think they get their idea(s) about the human soul from the Bible. But the Bible doesn’t actually say too much about that. Which is rather paradoxical or ironic given that one would think that the Bible is all about the development of our soul. What exactly does the Bible have to say about this? Does it specifically say that we are made of two very different substances (a material body and immaterial soul … aka “Dualism”), or that the soul and body could both be material (“Monism”)? In this episode, we trace our way through the Bible in a historical fashion and see how the Hebrews and Christians developed their thinking on this question as they encountered other civilizations and worldviews. The Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible) begins with a very Dualist view, but then wobbles back and forth between Monism and Dualism. These five books reflects several thousand years of ancient Hebrew thinking: beginning with the first eleven chapters of Genesis which closely resemble ancient Sumerian/Akkadian narratives, then continuing with a very Babylonian Abraham bringing his descendants into a very Egyptian worldview. The Prophets (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, plus all the books named after prophets) reflect Hebrew thinking when Israel became her own nation, and were then quickly taken into captivity. These show them still wobbling between Monism and Dualism. The Writings (Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes) and several of the Prophetic books reflect Hebrew thinking during that captivity. These show the latter leaning more strongly towards Dualism, and this idea just explodes onto the scene in the writing of Daniel. Is it a coincidence that this is also when Israel encounters Zoroastrianism and Greek philosophy, both of which were overtly Dualist in their understanding of the human soul? After this, we have the books of the New Testament, which reflect Hebrew thinking filtered heavily through a Greek philosophical lens. It is in these books that Dualism is undeniable. Clearly, JudeoChristian thinking did evolve, and did so as it encountered the worldviews of the pagan nations surrounding them. If you want to play this episode later on your device, look for Recovering Evangelicals in the iTunes Store, Podbean, Spotify, GooglePodcasts, or GooglePlayMusic. If you want to help grow this pod-cast, please like and share with a friend. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find me on Twitter or Facebook. Don’t forget to leave comments below … stir the pot a little bit! Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page Leave a comment and tell us what you think …