Category Archives: Science and Faith

To Be or Not to Be?

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Shel – I hope the original InterMonk can hear my big Amen in the presence of God….

iMonk on Interpreting Genesis 1

from internetmonk.com by iMonk

seven-days-of-creation-i-sushobha-jenner

From To Be or Not to Be?
Everybody thinks I should be a young earth creationist. I’m not. Why?
by Michael Spencer (undated)

* * *

The young earth creationists believe that Genesis 1 is “literally” a description of creation. I do not. It is this simple disagreement that is the cornerstone of my objection.

I believe that Genesis 1 is a pre-scientific description of Creation intended to accent how Yahweh’s relationship with the world stands in stark contrast to the gods of other cultures, most likely those of Babylon. Textual and linguistic evidence convinces me that this chapter was written to be used in a liturgical (worship) setting, with poetic rhythms and responses understood as part of the text. It tells who made the universe in a poetic and pre-scientific way. It is beautiful, inspired and true as God’s Word.

Does it match up with scientific evidence? Who cares?

Here I differ with Hugh Ross and the CRI writers. I do not believe science, history or archaeology of any kind establishes the truthfulness of the scripture in any way. Scripture is true by virtue of God speaking it. If God spoke poetry, or parable, or fiction or a pre-scientific description of creation, it is true without any verification by any human measurement whatsoever. The freedom of God in inspiration is not restricted to texts that can be interpreted “literally” by historical or scientific judges of other ages and cultures beyond the time the scriptures were written.

In my view, both the scientific establishment’s claims to debunk Genesis and the creationists claims to have established Genesis by way of relating the text to science are worthless. Utterly and completely worthless and I will freely admit to being bored the more I hear about it. I react to this much the same I react to people who run in with the Bible and the newspaper showing me how 666 is really the bar code on my credit card…

Does the Bible need to be authorized by scientists or current events to be true? What view of inspiration is it that puts the Bible on trial before the current scientific and historical models? Has anyone noticed what this obsession with literality does to the Bible itself?

The compliment that is paid to the Bible by those who say it is “literally” and scientifically true comes at the expense of an authentic and accurate understanding of the text.

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If you are looking for a good read – First Things! Here is a great review

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November 2012

Miraculous Witness
A review of Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts
Leroy Huizenga

Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts
by Craig S. Keener
Baker Academic, 1172 pages, $59.99

 


 

On October 13, 1917, seventy thousand Portuguese witnessed the sun dancing in the sky at Fátima, the conclusion of a series of visitations of the Virgin Mary to three shepherd children. In 1964, a teenage woman evangelizing in the Dominican Republic fainted from shock when she healed an elderly man’s shriveled hand through prayer. In 1994, a friend recounted to me the healing of her shattered knee through the laying on of hands. Having inherited the Enlightenment’s a priori rejection of the supernatural, many people would reject these claims outright. But would they be justified in doing so?

In Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts, Craig S. Keener demonstrates that those who take their cues from David Hume and say miracles cannot happen are wrong, and then in a second step proceeds to show why they are wrong. And as Keener, a professor of New Testament at Asbury Theological Seminary, shows in great detail, the reasons are not pretty.

The rise of critical biblical studies is bound up with the rise of modernity, as the Reformation reliance on the sensus literalis became the modern historical-critical method performed according to the canons of secular academia. It was thus an enterprise divorced from the faith and life of the Church, even while it demanded the Church accept its so-called “assured results.”

But, as often observed, the method became more of an ideology with the advent and dominance of “scientific history,” which operates within a closed universe of material cause and effect. The high-water mark of the historical-critical method is the approach of the early-nineteenth-century scholar H. E. G. Paulus, who sought purely natural explanations for biblical miracles. To this day, major denominations’ Sunday School curricula teach that the miracle of the fish and the loaves is best explained to children by telling them that Jesus’ example in sharing what little he had inspired the five thousand to share the fish and loaves hidden under their tunics.

Even conservative, believing scholars often operate according to the canons of the historical-critical method. Believing exegetes who would interpret the gospels theologically, for instance, usually seek what the evangelist was thinking or, using a narrative hermeneutic, what the story suggests about God and the work of the Church. Rarely do they engage head-on the possibility that the miracles happened.

Either the miraculous dimension is dismissed as legend (by those who don’t believe in miracles) or treated in terms of story outside normative late-modern reality (by those who do). It was this dearth of belief in the reality of the miraculous that precipitated Keener’s work. What became a two-volume, 1,172-page book began a decade ago as a footnote in a commentary on Acts. “Because some scholars have treated miracle claims in the Gospels and Acts as purely legendary on the premise that such events do not happen, I intended to challenge their instinctive dismissal of the possibility of such claims by referring to a few works that catalogued modern eyewitness claims of miracles.”

He found precious few works of value, and a book was conceived. Keener’s primary thesis is thus modest: “that eyewitnesses do offer miracle claims, a thesis simple enough but one sometimes neglected when some scholars approach accounts in the Gospels.” He supports this with extensive documentation and discussion of miracle claims—well over five hundred pages’ worth, covering antiquity to the present.

Keener is correct. The majority of New Testament scholars now readily concede that Jesus was a thaumaturge, as his working of miracles is woven into the Jesus tradition.

Many of them do not merely say Jesus was perceived to work miracles but speak of his wonder-working as a positive fact. For instance, E. P. Sanders says it is “almost indisputable” that “Jesus was a Galilean who preached and healed,” while the cheerful apostate and self-described “happy agnostic” Bart Ehrman believes scholars of any persuasion can affirm that Jesus performed healings and exorcisms without evaluating the claim that Jesus did so with supernatural power.

On the other hand, commentaries on the gospels written in the last several decades offer a curious distinction between the respective treatments of parables and miracle stories. The former are evaluated for their historicity and interpreted for their meaning. The latter are often presented “as straightforward narratives of events,” as modern interpreters often find “exclusively non-physical spiritual significance in these accounts” and even engage in allegory while leaving historical questions of facticity at the margins.

Keener’s secondary thesis is even more ambitious and will prove much more controversial in biblical studies and the wider culture, given the recent outbreak of jejune New Atheism. He posits “that supernatural explanations, while not suitable in every case, should be welcome on the scholarly table along with other explanations often discussed,” for “antisupernaturalism has reigned as an inflexible Western academic premise long enough.” (Keener mentions in passing that he himself is a former atheist.)

This second thesis necessitates dethroning David Hume. Now, there’s nothing much new about that, as believers have endeavored to refute Hume and his disciples since the publication of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understandingin 1748.

Not a philosopher himself, Keener offers little that is novel or groundbreaking in the way of refutation, but he nevertheless marshals an impressive host of thinkers as he painstakingly shows how Hume’s argument must assume atheism or deism to work and how Hume’s metaphysics fails in light of modern physics. In short, like many others, Keener demonstrates that Hume is merely operating in a “deductive circle.”

The extensive documentation of miracle claims is impressive, but what’s really new and useful is Keener’s claim that rejection of the miraculous is ethnocentric, particularly Eurocentric. One might even say Teutonocentric.

Rudolf Bultmann famously declared that we could not use electric light and the wireless and modern medicine and still believe in “the New Testament world of spirits and miracles.” His “modern world” is a white, male, technocratic world, and the global phenomenon of nonwhite Pentecostalism had barely begun when Bultmann was writing. As far as German scholars of that era go, though, he was one of the good guys, a member of the Confessing Church who spoke out against the mistreatment of Jews, whatever negative Marcionite opinions he had regarding the relevance of the Old Testament.

Hume, however, not so much. Keener notes that Hume possessed an expressly and virulently ethnocentric outlook. In his essay “Of National Characters,” Hume writes: “I am apt to suspect the Negroes to be naturally inferior to the whites. There scarcely ever was a civilized nation [of any other complexion than white], nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. No ingenious manufactures amongst them, no arts, no sciences.”

Not only did Hume’s racism affect his argument, as it was those outside of his white, genteel world who made miracle claims, it left a lasting legacy, as Keener notes that it was explicitly adopted by none other than Kant. Here one may observe that the “four horsemen” of New Atheism, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens, are white Anglo-American males. Perhaps their truth claims concerning a certain species of reason function (unwittingly) in the service of white male power over women and people of color in the majority world.

Western skepticism may in fact be a terminal patient rallying one final time before expiring. Craig Keener’s work should prove a compelling witness to those who doubt miraculous claims both ancient and modern.

Leroy Huizenga is director of the Christian Leadership Center at the University of Mary.

 

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From JKA Smith: Is Ours a “Galileo” Moment?: Re-posturing the Faith/Science Dialogue

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Is Ours a “Galileo” Moment?: Re-posturing the Faith/Science Dialogue

from Fors Clavigera by noreply@blogger.com (James K.A. Smith)

In September’s Christianity Today magazine I published a short article entitled, “What Galileo’s Telescope Can’t See” (now available online) which also gets at some of the core themes that concern us at The Colossian Forum on Faith, Science, and Culture.

The article pushes back on a tendency to immediately equate contemporary discussions at the intersection of Christian faith and science as “Galilean” moments–demanding that our reading of Scripture be revised in light of new scientific evidence.  While responsible theological interpretation certainly requires that we attend to “the book of nature,” in the article I suggest that this analogy with Galileo is often hasty and unhelpful.

Here’s an opening snippet:

Analogies have persuasive power, a suggestive force that operates on an almost unconscious level. To say that A is “like” B is to suggest that everything we associate with A should also be associated with B—whether good, bad, or ugly.

So, for example, if I describe American soldiers as “crusaders,” I have just painted them with an analogical brush that colors them as religiously motivated warriors guilty of the worst bigotries of the West. The analogy is loaded with a moral depiction that exceeds what’s actually said. So all the disdain we have towards our (usually caricatured) understanding of the Crusades is now overlaid on our perception of military operations in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Conversely, if I describe the proponents of my cause as “prophets” or “martyrs,” I have loaded the perceptual deck with images of heroism and purity. Just by the analogy, we get to don our white hats and claim the moral high ground. Or if we describe our regime as “Camelot,” we associate ourselves with romance and royal privilege. Never underestimate the power of an analogy. And never simply accept it.

There is a particular analogy often invoked in current discussions about the relationship between Christian faith and science. Ours, we are told, is a “Galilean” moment: a critical time in history when new findings in the natural sciences threaten to topple fundamental Christian beliefs, just as Galileo’s proposed heliocentrism rocked the ecclesiastical establishment of his day. This parallel is usually invoked in the context of genetic, evolutionary, and archaeological evidence about human origins that challenges traditional Christian understandings.

Historical analogies like this are often particularly loaded because our age is characterized by chronological snobbery and a self-congratulatory sense of our maturity and progress. Since we now tend to look at the church’s response to Galileo as misguided, reactionary, and backward, this “Galilean” framing of contemporary discussions does two things—before any “evidence” is ever put on the table.

Read the rest of “What Galileo’s Telescope Can’t See.”

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Faith, Science, & the Resurrection (Part 1)

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Faith, Science, & the Resurrection (Part 1)

by Skye Jethani

 

Did God create the universe in six 24hr days, or was it a gradual process over eons? Were humans made from the dust of the ground, or did we evolve from earlier species of primates? Was there a literal Adam and Eve? What about the fossil record, dinosaurs, and genetic evidence?

Since I was a kid I’ve loved discovering how our universe works. Despite my layman’s appreciation for science, I have stayed far, far away from the faith versus science controversies that our society and media seem eager to engage.

It isn’t that I think these questions are unimportant, or that I don’t sympathize with those who struggle to reconcile their faith with science. And I am grateful for those seeking to thoughtfully and graciously bridge the divide between the scientific and faith communities. Some members of my own church have done wonderful work in this area. And lately I’ve been intrigued by the work of BioLogos. The group was started in 2007 by Francis Collins, the brilliant scientist who led the Human Genome Project. BioLogos’ mission is to show the compatibility of science and religion. The group’s website includes endorsements by many theologians, scientists, and pastors, and it includes articles on many of the questions I list above.

Like those behind BioLogos, I share the belief that science is an indispensable, legitimate, and God-ordained vehicle for truth. It can tell us how our universe works, and these answer become the basis for solutions to many of humanity’s most vexing problems. So why do I remain hesitant to allow externally verifiable logic to always trump faith when controversies arise between science and religion? Here’s why: While science can tell us how our universe works, it cannot prove the universe has always worked, or will forever work, the same way.

A lot of science, and the worldview behind it, is predicated on one assumption–that the laws that govern our universe are unchanging. From this premise the materialist worldview believes that if we can discover the way the cosmos works now, then we can peer back in time or project ahead and accurately understand both the origins and destiny of our world. But…

What if E has not always equaled mc2 ?

read the rest here:  http://www.outofur.com/archives/2012/05/faith_science_t.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+christianitytoday%2FOutOfUr+%28Leadership+Blog%3A+Out+of+Ur%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

 

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A Few Thoughts about Science and Theology

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Shel Boese / Shelby – Roger does a great job of presenting the moderate to conservative case regarding science and theology.  I would add that philosophy (sorry to the current blind-faith physicists) also plays a similar role in pushing back on science and the nature of knowledge/discovery.

 

A Few Thoughts about Science and Theology

May 5, 2012 By rogereolson

I did not get to hear Alvin Plantinga when he spoke at my university a couple weeks ago. His topic was theology and science. He has a new book about it that I plan to read (when I have a month to digest it!).

Several people have asked me here about what role I think science does play in theology. That’s because I rejected as invalid “Dear Abby’s” claim that modern science has made the Bible’s view of homosexuality invalid. I said that science can’t do that.

The argument is that if science proves (as some allege has happened) that sexual orientation is biological/genetic, then we have to believe that same sex sexual behavior is morally right. The usual caveat is that it must be mutual and not coercive. And, of course, that it must be between consenting adults.

The reason this doesn’t touch the traditional Christian stance about sex outside of heterosexual marriage is that traditional Christianity has always taught that we are all fallen and born with sinful inclinations (orientations). Science proving that homosexual desire is biological/genetic wouldn’t affect that belief any more than science proving that men are naturally inclined toward sexual promiscuity would force Christians to alter their belief about sexual promiscuity. (One could go on and talk about alcoholism and numerous other conditions that may very well be biological/genetic but not therefore morally good to act on.)

The larger issue, of course, is whether you can ever derive an “ought” (moral imperative positive or negative) from an “is.” Science deals ONLY with “is.” Ethics deals with “ought.” The latter cannot be based on the former in a causal relationship. Certainly what is the case may have some bearing on decisions about what ought to be the case, but what is the case can never determine what ought to be the case. By definition “ought” goes beyond “is.”

Oughtness requires something transcendent to nature. Attempting to derive ought from is is called the “naturalistic fallacy.” Whether a certain sexual behavior is right or wrong cannot be determined by observing nature–even by observing what people do that they cannot help.

Illustration: Let’s suppose that the day arrives when science demonstrates conclusively that pedophilia is biological/genetic. I do not know of anyone who would argue that that would result in our having to conclude that adults preying on children is okay.

I have been told by scientists that it is just as likely that, in some people, alcohol addiction is genetic as that homosexual orientation is genetic. Yet I know of no one who argues that abusing alcohol (or abusing oneself with it) is good or right or even neutral. It’s a bad thing that people ought not to do.

None of this speaks to other issues such as what ought our attitude toward people who do what they ought not to do be. That’s a secondary issue. Nor does any of this speak to issues of punishment or treatment or anything like that. Those are all secondary issues that come up AFTER it is decided that a certain behavior is wrong.

My point here is not about homosexuality or alcoholism or any other specific orientation or behavior. It is only about the relationship between science and morality/ethics. It is simply a logical fallacy to think that what science discovers determines the rightness or wrongness of anything. There is an unbridgeable gulf between science that sticks to its sphere of research and proper methods and ethics. You cannot get from one to the other.

Now, having said that, I qualify that I am NOT arguing that ethicists (or theologians) ought to ignore science or vice versa. Of course not. The disciplines can and should communicate. Science needs ethics to guide how it handles sentient subjects in research, for example. And ethics needs science to tell it what is possible which can be helpful in determining proper punishments or treatments for (for example) criminals who do what they cannot avoid doing.

But simply to leap from the “fact” (the jury is still out) that homosexuality is biological/genetic to that same sex intercourse, for example, is morally acceptable is logically fallacious. At most all one could conclude (if one is a naturalist, for example) is that it is normal for some people. To go anywhere in determining moral rightness or wrongness one has to transcend what is natural or normal.

Now, there’s much more to this subject than what I have said here. For example, to what extent should theology adjust its doctrines based on scientific inquiry and proven conclusions? There I will appeal to and agree with Charles Hodge (who agreed with Galileo’s Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina) that theology cannot and should not ignore facts. Whenever science (of any branch) proves something (i.e., it becomes undeniable fact), theology must adjust to that. However, theology does not have to adjust to theories. All of that assumes that science stays in its proper boundaries.  For example, that the earth revolves around the sun is fact and lies within the purview of science. Whether a certain behavior is right is not within science’s purview.

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“The Biggest Theological Debate of the Next Twenty Years” Awesome Analysis! The Alliance Definitely is Caught In this

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Shel Boese / Shelby Boese (Böse) – Andrew does an excellent job of laying out the issues.  I find this kind of thing very important to wrestle with.  Moreover the Christian & Missionary Alliance will need to more intentionally deal with this.  In some ways the fundamentalists (often in neo-reformed clothing) are trying to take over.   BUT the issues are WAY more complex than that…

The Biggest Theological Debate of the Next Twenty Years

http://whatyouthinkmatters.org/blog/article/the-biggest-theological-debate-of-the-next-twenty-years#When:08:00:05Z

Author. Andrew Wilson | Publication Date. 31/08/2011

I’ve never been very good at gazing into the crystal ball, so my predictions for the future probably aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. Nevertheless, I’m going to stick my neck out and say that I think I know what the biggest theological debate of the next twenty years is going to be about. It doesn’t sound very exciting – and certainly not as likely to make headlines as hell, or penal substitution, or the roles of men and women, or the various other theological hot potatoes that the last decade has seen chucked around – but fundamentally, it is the issue that drives all the others. It is the question of the doctrine of Scripture: how we read, understand and apply the Bible.

Much modern discussion about hell isn’t really about what specific texts say, but how (or even if) we should form our theology of judgment, or God, from them. Much modern discussion about the roles of men and women isn’t really about what specific texts say, but about whether or not the situation in which they were written was different enough from ours to allow us (or compel us) to apply them differently today. As such, although the debates seem to be about one thing – hell, gender roles, gay bishops, the atonement, or whatever – they are actually about something else: how we understand and apply these ancient texts in the modern world.

It used to be easy to tell the goodies from the baddies. From the 1950s to the 1980s, you had evangelicals (hooray): strong, thoughtful, humble and godly people who preached the gospel and believed the Bible was God’s true and inspired word (John Stott, Billy Graham, Carl Henry, Martyn Lloyd-Jones and JI Packer). And then you had liberals (boo, hiss): weak, fluffy, compromising dilettantes who didn’t believe the Bible, didn’t believe the virgin birth, didn’t believe the resurrection, didn’t believe anything (Rudolf Bultmann, JAT Robinson, David Jenkins and John Shelby Spong). Forgive the caricature, but if you affirmed the resurrection, you affirmed the Bible and everything in it; if you rejected it, you rejected the Bible and everything in it. Simple.

Not any more. For many leaders and theologians today, not to mention ordinary Christians, there is not one danger to be warded off, but two: liberalism and fundamentalism. Liberalism is still at one extreme, but now fundamentalism is at the other, and evangelicals are increasingly self-identifying as those who sit in between those two positions. So, whereas fifty years ago a critique of liberalism would mark you out as a good evangelical, these days it might suggest you had drifted from the vitally important middle ground, and were in fact a fundamentalist in disguise – and this causes some influencers to avoid critiquing liberalism without critiquing fundamentalism as well (like Tim Keller, Tom Wright, Ben Witherington and many others), and others to devote far more time and energy to debunking fundies than liberals (like Rob Bell, Brian Maclaren, Scot McKnight and many others). Those who operate within the 1950s framework, and who speak in terms of those who submit to the Bible and those who don’t, are regarded by many as naïve bumpkins, divisive antagonists or worse (like Wayne Grudem, Mark Driscoll, Al Mohler and many others).

This adjustment in the theological spectrum has a number of implications, some of them simple, some of them more complex. To start with four simple ones: (1) Conservative evangelicals have become more marginalised within the Christian mainstream (oxymoronic though that term may seem). Lots of self-identifying evangelicals disagree with their positions, which erodes the consensus on their biblical arguments; consequently, they have increasingly been accused of prooftexting and arguing based on their (conservative) cultural preferences. Sometimes these charges have been fair, and sometimes not.

(2) One flashpoint issue can quickly become a Shibboleth to establish someone’s evangelical credentials. This is clearest in the USA, where theistic evolution is probably the most obvious one: for some, belief in theistic evolution proves someone’s liberalism, while for others, rejection of it proves someone’s fundamentalism. There are a number of possible British equivalents – sexuality, theistic evolution, hell, gender roles, justification, and so on – and I remember Tom Wright saying of the penal substitution debate: ‘It’s become a sort of witch-hunt. Hands up everyone who agrees with Steve Chalke? Right, now we know who the bad guys are.’ I think he was right, and it is obviously worth those of us in the UK working hard to maintain open dialogue about all of these issues to avoid ideological entrenchment and division.

(3) Splitting people into teams has become much harder, and this is a good thing. So: is Tom Wright a good evangelical, for defending the historical Jesus and his bodily resurrection, or a liberal scallywag, for denying imputed righteousness? Is Tim Keller the next CS Lewis (hooray), for his brilliant apologetics and credibility with the world, or is he the next CS Lewis (boo), for fudging hell, baptism, church government and evolution? And when I’m caught up in a debate between paedobaptist complementarians and credobaptist egalitarians, whose team am I on: the papists or the feminists? Both, and neither. Which is just as it should be.

(4) Loving and mutually encouraging relationships can make up for enormous differences in theology. I can’t speak for the convenors of The Gospel Coalition, but my guess is one reason that they can happily disagree with each other on baptism, but make gender roles a deal-breaker – even though, you would think, how somebody becomes part of God’s people is more important than who gets to speak in a church meeting – is that DA Carson (credobaptist) really likes Tim Keller (paedobaptist), and Justin Taylor really likes Kevin DeYoung. When you love people, you see them as fellow believers before you see them as theological opponents, and that really helps.

So far, so good. But there are three further questions raised by all this, and in particular by some of those who believe fundamentalism is at least as big a danger to the modern church as liberalism, which require more thoughtful responses.

(5) Do we believe in the clarity of Scripture, and if so, what do we mean by it? If the disagreements within the evangelical community are anything to go by, the texts of Scripture appear to be far from clear on all sorts of issues that (you would think) are fairly important, and would certainly fall under the category of instruction, reproof, correction and training so that we may be equipped for every good work (2 Tim 3:17). How do we respond to that?

(6) What sort of hermeneutic is appropriate to the Bible? Even when agreement on the meaning of a specific text is achievable, its application today can be hotly contested, because of different views of the narrative shape of the scriptures. What do we do with passages about slavery, circumcision, mildew, silence in churches, eating blood, head coverings, the Sabbath and brotherly kissing? We will generally justify each decision with reference to the narrative shape of the whole Bible, but what is this narrative shape? Do we read the Bible dispensationally (like Charles Ryrie), covenant-theologically (like Michael Horton), with a redemptive-movement hermeneutic (like Bill Webb), or as a five-act play (like Tom Wright)? Why?

(7) What is the relationship between reason and Scripture? To rely on human reason without reference to Scripture is classic liberalism, but what about relying on Scripture without reference to reason? Is this desirable, or even possible? What do we do when human reason appears to conflict with Scripture, whether on trivia (like the identity of ‘the smallest of all seeds’, or the age of the earth) or on theology (like an all-loving God ordaining that some go to hell)? How should reason and scripture interact?

God willing, I’m planning to do a few posts on these big questions over the next few Wednesdays. If I’m still alive after all that, I might even consider (8) whether ‘inerrancy’ is a useful word or not. Let’s keep thinking, and keep talking.

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Smith’s Thinking In Tongues – Two “Faith Claims” of Some Science

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James KA Smith’s Thinking in Tongues is great – I’m reading it the second time – slowly.  I have said for years now – Post-modernism is a gift and co-worker with the Holy Spirt particularly for the pentecostal (renewalist) worldview.  Of course not totally a gift – but it helps break open the faith of modernism.

 

FYI Smith uses “p” pentecostal in the way I tend use it or “renewalism” with includes all of us who believe in the operation of the gifts of the Spirit without necessarily affirming “P” “Pentecostal” view that speaking in tonuges is the “Initial Physical Evidence”  Aka the “IPE dogma” of being “filled/baptized in the Holy Spirit”.

 

Here’s some stuff opening chapter 4.

 

“The world of pentecostal worship and spirituality replays what Bultmann dismissed as the “mythical” world of the NT: a world of “signs and wonders,” a space where the community expects the unexpected and testifies to events of miraculous healings, divine revelation in tongues-speech, divine illumination, prophecy, and other “supernatural” phenomena.  One of the central features of pentecostal spirituality is the unique combination of a gritty, material, physical mode of worship that is radically open to transcendence.  Thus above I have argued that one of the core components of a pentecostal worldview is a sense of radical openness to God, with a distinct emphasis on the continued operation of the Holy Sprit in the world and the church.

 

However, this clearly has ontological implications that need to be worked out, as well as implication for pentecostal participation in (and appropriation of) regnant paradigms in the natural and social sciences – as well as paradigms that govenr the science/theology dialogue.  If is an essential feature of pentecostal belief and practice to be open to god’s surprises, this presupposes a sense that the universe and natural world must also remain open systems. But this ontological claim would seem to stand in opposition to two key affirmations of contemporary science:

 

(1) what we could call “metaphysical naturalism,” which affirms (beyond strictly “scientific” evidence) that the universe is a determined, closed, immanent system of natural processes; and

 

[Shel: I often point this out to those following pop-atheism that there are entailed "religious faith claims" required to hold to that position - they tend to be in total and complete denial however - very blind - which is very funny considering their critiques and out right distortion of spiritual beliefs.]

 

(2) “methodological naturalism,” which, while it may remain agnostic with respect to metaphysical naturalism, nevertheless claims that science qua science must operate as if the universe were a closed system.”

 

Shel Boese / Shelby Boese : Smith’s chapter here is just great stuff…a must read.

 

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Our Brain on God by J. Brink

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“Contemplating a loving God strengthens portions of our brain–particularly the frontal lobes and anterior cingulate-where empathy and reason reside. Contemplating a wrathful God empowers the limbic system, which is “filled with aggression and fear.” It is a sobering concept: The God we choose to love changes us into his image, whether he exists or not.”

Michael Gershon, reviewing Andrew Newberg and Mark Robert Waldman’s, How God Changes Your Brain.

 

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