The Little Friar

This image made its rounds on Facebook, particularly on pages that purport to defend the "New Atheism". I spend a lot of my time engaging in the ideas that these New Atheists put forward because, frankly, so much of what they have to say assumes Christianity to be of a particular sort.  Namely, Christian fundamentalism. Let me establish yet again:  I do not believe in the Bible.  I believe in the God of the Bible. That's not to say I think the Bible is unimportant.  The Bible is the unique prophetic and apostolic testimony of God in Jesus Christ.  As a testimony, the Bible therefore demands a great deal of study.  When I was ordained, I was asked:  "Will you be diligent in the reading and study of the Holy Scriptures, and in seeking the knowledge of such things as may make you a stronger and more able minister of Christ?"  I answered:  "I will".  And the rest of my life has been spent keeping that promise. Anyone who listens...

It's quite appropriate, I think, that my 1000th post should deal with this issue.  Yesterday I wrote a piece about the nature of biblical truth and facticity that brought a reader to ask this question:  "You seem to be hinting that you don't believe in creation science.  But doesn't the vast amount of creation science confirm what read in Genesis 1?  Doesn't that support the Bible's truth and trustworthiness?" First, let me be honest:  "Creation science" certainly aims to support Genesis 1.  And it succeeds in certain places.  But I think its greatest weakness is that it ignores the readings of Genesis 1 that make the most literary and theological sense.  There are many "creation research" organizations, with many different methodologies, so the following evaluation of their methodology may not apply to every organization out there.  But it tries to describe a trend I have seen repeatedly in the reasoning of these organiz...

I  wonder what comes into people's minds when they hear the word creation .  If you're a Christian I'm pretty sure that most folks would think of the opening chapter of Genesis, which indeed the Good News Bible entitles "The Story of Creation".  But then when you read Genesis 1, what  then  comes into your mind? If you're American, turns out evolution  comes to mind.  And in light of Pope Francis' recent comments that evolution and the Gospel are not contradictory, maybe it's time I set out (yet again) what I think about all this.   Evolution, of course, is one of those issues that plague Christians in America. Because we invest it with so much crappy science to begin with.   When I say evolution  I do not mean by it some naturalistic positivistic science -- as if nature and science are all that is.  That's crappy science.   And  crappy philosophy.  (Not to mention heretical Christian faith.) The "issue" is so content...

Some Christians get enthusiastic about Big Bang cosmology or Intelligent Design.  They think that both contribute to a notion that life, and even the very universe, has a beginning.  A "moment of creation". But I think that excitement rests on a basic misunderstanding of the Christian doctrine of creation.  The doctrine of creation is not an attempt to describe the way the universe or life  began -- it isn't a quasi-scientific statement about the origins of the universe or life, and it thus has no special interest in questions of life's early history. Charles Darwin once put it this way:  "I had no intention to write atheistically.  But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design ...  There seems to me too much misery in the world.  I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the parasitic wasps with the express intention of their larva f...

Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill: A Call to Action against TV, Movie & Video Game Violence  is a first-rate expose of the overwhelming contemporary scientific evidence about the destructive effects of media violence on our children.  We may want to deny it, but Grossman and DeGaetano bear witness.  But they also provide us with tools -- real life and workable tools! -- to change all the violent media diets that have been changing our kids for the past two generations.  And no one is more qualified than Grossman to lay out those effects.  His On Killing  and On Combat  are meticulously researched classics.  So when I ordered this book I was expecting much of the same.  But I was blown away!   Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill  provides  indisputable, scientifically demonstrable facts that media violence is psychologically, emotionally and even  physiologically  doing damage to our children.  Every parent must read ...

It's no secret that I'm not a fan of "natural theology".  My mentor, Stan Hauerwas, said it best in his 2000 Gifford Lectures, With the Grain of the Universe :  Natural theology, far from giving us causal explanations ("god") for the universe, merely results in a theologia gloriae , leaving no room for the cross.   But here's my new idea:  What if, instead of the usual "first cause" arguments that we get with natural theology, it instead offers us a unification  of lots of different explanations?  In other words, what if all the various (strange) phenomena in science could be brought together in a wholistic way theologically, under the rubric of natural theology ? What if nature bears transcendence, but not in a "natural" way?  Not out of its own essence, since there's  no mere  uninterpreted nature, but only different constructed "readings" of nature (think Young's Double-Slit Experiment from your general physics da...

I often lament the role scientism -- that belief that science alone provides clear and guiding answers to all reality -- plays in our society.  And since I went in defense of Halloween this year, some have challenged me that calling for a re-enchantment of death is denying the devotion to good science (as opposed to scientism) that I also often do.  So let me offer a bit of cultural criticism here I order to set out -- yet again -- how I think reading the Bible (or more broadly re-enchanting the world's mysteries) and engaging in good science are tensions  to one another, not contradictions.  And let me begin at the movies.  I'm not a big horror movie guy.  But Kendra loves them and I love her so I watch them occasionally.  And here's something I've been noticing:  science offers all the explanations, the metanarratives, for our movies these days.  Take vampire and zombie movies, for example.  The classic vampire genre cast vampires as e...

Continuing the series that deals with developing a contemporary theology of revolt, I want to turn today to my reading of the Genesis story.  Specifically, I want to lay out why I think Genesis is the creation of the good world by a vulnerable God. This strong vision of a weak God requires that we deal with some very real questions about Creation and New Creation.  Specifically, how do we understand " omnipotence ", particularly that part that seems to depict God as a powerful creator in the first chapter of Genesis? First, there's the "traditional" reading of Genesis.  On this view, Genesis 1.1 sets up 1.2.  In this reading the first act of creation (1.1) is God creating a chaotic and formless world -- the deep (found in 1.2).  From there God begins to impose order on the chaos (1.3 and following). Then, there's another reading, this one originating in Jewish theology.  For this reading, Genesis  1.1 is not read as an act of creation but re...