PROLOG

I suspect that many readers will wonder why I am writing about this topic. Three years ago, I had the privilege of filling in our church’s Adult Ministries team. Coming out of several years of cancer-driven isolation, it was a chance for me to test the waters to see if my ideas were still welcome at any church. The title of this article was one of the thirteen concepts I had for an Adult Sunday school class. Most of my ideas were rejected outright, except for a couple. How Science can Enhance our Relationship with God and Why do We Suffer? Having just gone through three years of unbearable suffering at that time, I could not teach the suffering class. I couldn’t even mumble the word “suffering” without getting choked up and tears filling my eyes.

The thing I accomplished from that and a small group experience at the same time was to prove to my wonderful church friends, as I did with my previous wonderful church friends, that I’m a weirdo… at best. I sensed an attitude of “good riddance” when I left that Adult Ministries group. There must be a church somewhere that would welcome my provocative class ideas, but those churches must be rare. But I believe that any system of thought or belief must address the most challenging questions of life to remain relevant.

It is my observation that the conservative church champions conformity to dogma. It is like putting your mind in a steel cage, where specific thoughts, books, or friends are forbidden, and therefore, the hard questions are smoothed over with dogma. You are ranked there by your conformity to their dogmas and social norms. I would be thrown out for even mentioning Homo Naledi in a conservative church, as their dogma precludes such honest reflection. Yet, despite this, I adore those people and would love to have them as friends.

I have also learned during the thirty years since I let my mind out of the cage, that the vast majority of what we thought was “Biblical” dogma was interpretation based more on Christian culture than anything the Bible says. That impression was proven, in my opinion, when the most refined dogmatists that I know were the first to be duped by Trumpism, which is the exact antithesis of historical Christianity.

The progressive church, as I attend, is full of other wonderful people and has its highest calling: harmony. This may be in response to the divisiveness of conservative churches. Harmony is a noble Christian cause, if it is built on the right scheme.

The historical Jesus made it clear that harmony was grounded in love and selflessness, not in agreement. But the most expedient path to harmony in the twenty-first century is grounded in the secular philosophy of postmodernism, which asserts that there are no fundamental truths but only existential experiences. For example, another class suggestion I made, which was rejected, was to examine the bare minimum fundamental truths of Christianity: that there is a personal creator, that Jesus lived in history and was the messiah of that creator, as proven by his resurrection. Even that was rejected for being too divisive.

The problem with the postmodernist scheme is that it has a short shelf life, maybe one or two decades. After that, one day you wake up and realize that your system of faith is built upon… nothing. Just the wind. In those progressive churches, they do not want to consider challenging questions, fearing that multiple answers could emerge, and that having no answer is more conducive to harmony than having numerous possible answers. I respect their intentions despite their means.

But you, I, and every Christian I know have someone they love who has abandoned Christianity forever. I believe the fundamental reason is that we did not address all questions, including the most challenging ones, with honest answers. Cliches don’t work in the foxholes of life’s difficulties.

To be clear, as I undertake this arduous journey of examining human evolution in light of Christian tenets, we will not arrive at simple answers, only a catalog of possible answers. My highest pursuit is not of religious conformity, or so-called dogmas, but factual truths.

Before I forget, if you want to pursue this further than I will in the coming couple of articles, I suggest Peter Enns’s (Biblical Scholar) book, The Evolution of Adam.

Respectfully,

Mike