I recently had a conversation with an old seminary classmate of mine whom I have not seen in years. We became best friends while attending seminary together.
Those were heady days for the both of us, times in which we often would discuss theology for hours, debate our views with one another and with others, and entertain new ways to read and interpret the Bible. Nothing was so sacrosanct to escape our curiosity nor our critique.
Well this is the way I remember it; my friend on the other hand may have an entirely different recollection.
From my perspective, I miss those years we shared in seminary. They were some of the most exciting years of my life.
Yet life moves forward and we found ourselves on different life trajectories, living in different places and taking different career paths. We each evolved according to our own individual experiences and pace of life.
Well, back to our telephone conversation. My friend made it clear to me that he was now an old dinosaur and that entertaining new ideas about theology or politics did not interest him at all.
He was simply satisfied with where he had landed in life and was not interested in developing exciting new ways to think about God, faith or life.
Well, it seems my friend has long since given up on evolution. In other words, he no longer is interested in evolving as a human being. His life journey, it seems, has screeched to a halt and there was no point in going any further with our conversation.
So when I hung up the telephone a dark sense of sadness overcame me. I was sad because my friend seems to have simply stopped growing.
I thought to myself: “If this is what it means to grow old then I am not quite there yet!”
Look, I don’t mind aging in spite of the physical limitations that come along with it. Sure I can’t hit a golf ball as far as I used to; I can’t and shouldn’t climb up ladders anymore; I no longer go jogging; I can’t sleep late like I used to when I was younger; and there are certain physical things I can no longer do.
But I am not ready to stop evolving intellectually, psychologically, theologically or spiritually. I am not ready to throw in the towel on my own personal evolution as a a person of faith and as a human being.
I think if I do that I will be one step closer to dying. I will be a dead man walking as they say.
This, I believe is the central problem with Evangelical conservatism in America today: It has a huge problem with evolution; not just evolution in the Darwin since of the word, but evolution in the way we humans evolve in our thinking, our knowing, our experiencing, and our relating.
Certainty is the bedrock of Evangelical theology. Their mantra is simple:
“The Bible says it, I believe it, and that settles it.”
So any notion of recalibrating how one might read and interpret the Bible is simply unthinkable. Besides, doesn’t the Bible say:
“Jesus the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow?”
Or something to that effect. So why evolve? Why change? Why alter course?
Well the short answer is that death is waiting at the door for you if you stop evolving and growing as a human being.
I’ve written in the past that I believe Evangelical Christianity, in its current manifestation, is trending towards decline. The major reason for this impending decline is its refusal to evolve beyond the present—to move off of its top dead center.
The truth to be learned from this is that God cannot be reduced to the certainty of long established beliefs that never change. God refuses to be shrink wrapped by conventional ways of reading and interpreting the Bible.
He is bigger than all our ideas of him taken together.
I know, this is a difficult pill to swallow for those in love with certainty.
In fact, our understanding of the Bible should evolve.
We humans are evolving. Human society is evolving, slowly but surely. In some areas of the world it’s evolving almost imperceptibly, but it is evolving.
It is true that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow.
But our understanding of him as the eternal Christ continues to evolve nonetheless.
Thank God for evolution!
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