What should we do if we disagree with our pastors?

I’m sorry that updates have been sporadic. My schedule has evened out, and I hope to get us back on a Wednesday-to-Wednesday rotation again. Thanks for your patience!

The recent discussions about Rev Jeremiah Wright’s comments in his sermons have raised lots of spin-off topics, including what is appropriate speech from the pulpit, the pent-up resentment among blacks who have been discriminated against and disadvantaged, and perhaps most notably, whether it is right or acceptable to stay at a church which has a pastor whose views are in conflict with one’s own beliefs. Barack Obama explained his views on some of these issues in his “A More Perfect Union” speech, denouncing some of the particular things Wright said while painting a fuller picture of the man. In tonight’s Democratic debate, the issue of Obama’s association with Wright was raised again, and Hillary Clinton was asked to defend to an earlier comment of hers, to the effect of, “I would not have Rev Jeremiah Wright for my pastor.” In her response, Clinton stated that “you get to choose your pastor. You don’t choose your family, but you get to choose your pastor.” (watch the clip)

Certainly Clinton is right in that people have the ability to leave a church if they disagree with the pastor, or work to get a pastor removed if he is out of favor with the church body. Her comments were too brief to get any sense of nuanced consideration or other context, but the question I’m working up to isn’t about her position; it’s about how Christians ought to approach such a situation:

If you found yourself in disagreement with your pastor over a significant issue, what would you do? What do you think would be the best approach?

If you are having a hard time with the hypothetical, consider if you had been a member of Rev Wright’s church when he spoke these words in a sermon, talking about the treatment of blacks in the US: “The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no, God damn America, that’s in the Bible for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme.” (news clip) What would you do?

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What is prayer all about?

Certainly a key discipline of the Christian faith is prayer. It is also among the more mysterious; study of the Bible clearly imparts knowledge, service promotes humility, confession is the first step to reconciliation, but it is perhaps less clear what the precise function of prayer is.

We would probably agree that prayer is at least talking to God. The popular view of prayer seems to be that it is mostly about asking God for things to happen (after all, Jesus says, “You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it.”), except perhaps at mealtimes and on Thanksgiving. But what does the Bible have to say about prayer? What are we to understand that it is, and is intended for from what the Bible tells us?

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What does Genesis chapter 1 mean?

Update: I’m going to leave this question up for a second week, as it seems the discussion is still getting going, perhaps due to Easter and, for some of us, spring break having been part of the first week.

Our previous question touched on the issue of the Bible’s historical accuracy, but we can only go so far with what we would typically call “historical” evidence. At some point, we run out of eyewitness accounts and eventually even identifiable artifacts. We are ultimately faced with questions of origin – where did we come from?

The Bible gives an account of “first things” in the aptly-named book of Genesis. For the purpose of this question, we are concerned with Genesis 1, which explains the creation of the universe. That’s all well and good, but what does this passage actually mean?

Answers to this question fall along a spectrum punctuated by key positions such as:

• Genesis 1 is literal truth, given in plain language about the 6 24-hour days that God spent actively creating the universe.
• The passage is figurative, and shows that God is responsible for the existence of the universe, but is not literal truth.
• The creation story of the Bible is nothing more than that – a story. It has nothing valuable to say about the origin of the universe, Earth, or people.

By way of example, Answers in Genesis is devoted to the idea that the Bible means exactly what it says: creation happened in 6 days. Their claim is that if we take the text seriously, we can come to no other conclusion:

Recently, one of our associates sat down with a highly respected world-class Hebrew scholar and asked him this question: ‘If you started with the Bible alone, without considering any outside influences whatsoever, could you ever come up with millions or billions of years of history for the Earth and universe?’ The answer from this scholar? ‘Absolutely not!’ (from A young Earth—it’s not the issue!)

Others, such as the folks at TheisticEvolution.org, would say that the text is not meant to be taken literally, and therefore we should not use it as such. “What about Genesis and evolution?”, an article from a church in the UK, does a nice job of explaining what it calls the “literary-cultural view”, that we should seek to understand the text from the perspective of its original readers, and the article explains other views well also.

Certainly there are those who don’t believe that the creation story has anything to do with anything. Paul Doland, in his critique of Lee Stroebel’s The Case for Faith, suggests that the opposing evidence given by literalists and scientific research rules out any honest reconciliation of the Bible’s account and historical fact.

Let me lay out some terminology to help us have a clearer discussion:

• natural selection: better-adapted organisms have more offspring, thus creating more well-adapted organisms
• evolution: the process by which life forms change over time, by way of natural selection and random genetic mutation. not to be confused with…
• abiogenesis: spontaneous generation of life, that is, life appearing without any supernatural cause

Now, finally, the question: what do you think Genesis 1 means? Why? What does it tell us about our origins?

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Is the Bible reliable?

Terms are important; so are source documents. For Christians, the ultimate source document is the Bible, the Word of God. The Bible makes some significant claims for itself, but this week we will merely pose the question of its reliability as a document. By this we mean:

• Has the text been corrupted?
• Is the Bible internally consistent?
• Does the Bible correctly report history and other external facts?

If the Bible can be shown to fail any of these tests, we would have to conclude that it is not reliable, in that it claims to be a representation of God’s very words, but would be shown to have been altered, contradictory, or simply false.

There are many arguments out there about these sub-questions.

The Dead Sea Scrolls showed that the text of the book of Jeremiah had been changed.

Paul Carlson points out many instances of inconsistencies in the Bible. The virgin birth wasn’t prophesied? Matthew 21:1-7 says Jesus rode 2 donkeys at once? What can we say to these?

What about the claim that Jericho didn’t exist when the Israelites would have marched around it and taken the city?

Are all these claims wrong? Or do real problems exist with the Bible as a reliable document?

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Looking good!

Thanks to those that have posted comments, read along, and kept the discussion going! I’m glad we’re getting off to a good start, and I hope even more will chime in and join the conversation.

First, we’ve decided to post new topics Wednesday mornings. The idea is that this will give everyone some time to think things over for a couple days, time to post over the weekend, and a few days to respond to each other. Of course, you can post whenever you like, but we thought that might work out well for a lot of people.

Second, there is an event coming up Monday evening, 7-10pm at UIUC’s Lincoln Hall: James Randi and Richard Roberts will be speaking at an event called “Science, Magic, and Belief”. James Randi is a well-known debunker of paranormal claims, and Richard Roberts will be speaking about how science led him to atheism. We don’t particularly endorse the event, but it may be interesting as the content has some overlap with things we will be discussing here.

Hi, friends

My name is John, and I set up this blog to provide a place for us to discuss topics facing Christians. For a long time, I’ve had a special interest in being able to explain and defend my beliefs, and I did a lot of reading on the subject in high school and my first couple years of college. Later in my college career, I came to see that the Gospel was not just about objective truth and logic, but also – perhaps even more so – about relationships, reconciliation, and wholeness. I became a bit disillusioned with apologetics as being dry and not applicable to “real life”, especially life as the emerging postmodern culture sees it.

Recently, though, I’ve again become acutely aware of some important questions about Christianity. Skeptic and atheist views have a stronger voice in our society than they have ever had before, and their objections and arguments have re-awakened my apologist side. To my dismay, I’ve found that the answers I used to understand well have faded out of my memory somewhat, and I have been faced with other questions I don’t quite know how to address. The faith I had firmly planted seemed to suddenly be on sandier soil than I had thought.

Now I find myself on a quest for truth and understanding – and I would like to invite you along. We will be asking honest questions, seeking honest answers, working on these things together. I need your knowledge, wisdom, and insight; it is my hope that as a community we can build each other up.

If you’d like to join us, please start off by reading the pages linked along the top (about, plan, rules, topics), and consider introducing yourself in a comment on this post. Then read the first question and chip in a response: What do we mean by “faith”?

What do we mean by “faith”?

To have a reasoned discussion about anything, it is important to first define some key terms. A foundational term for Christians and others is “faith”. We call religious folks “people of faith” and we may speak of figures in religious history or pillars in our communities as having great faith.

But what do we mean when we use the word “faith”? Is it really something we would like to ascribe to ourselves and those we respect? After all, “Faith is a… belief that is contrary to the sum of the evidence for that belief.” (Carroll) Who would be interested in believing something that has the weight of evidence against it?

The skeptic’s argument seems to be that since faith is a flawed concept, and religious people appeal to faith to bolster their beliefs (rather than showing evidence, which, if it were there, would presuppose the need for faith), there is not enough evidence for a rational person to believe religious claims.

Is this a fair definition of faith? Does a better definition exist? How would you answer a skeptic using the argument above?

Note: This discussion is not about whether any particular claims have evidence to back them up or not – please keep your comments on the topic of faith itself, and post any further questions this may spark on the topics page, so that we can address them together in the future.

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