The last in this four part mini-series. Previously, we’ve talked about what science has to say about “Original Sin,” and then last week about seven ideas the Church has had for ten or twenty centuries about “Atonement.” Here, we see how those seven ideas about Atonement stand up to our new modern understanding of human origins: we’ve evolved over millions of years from an ancestral species that we share in common with dozens of other hominids, and migrated out of Africa fifty to a hundred thousand years ago. Most of those seven theories are really quite dependent on a very different version of human history: two humans created 6,000 years ago as perfect creatures in a garden in Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq). In fact, one of those theories  — the one that produces the worst image of God … Penal Substitutionary Atonement  — is absolutely dependent on that primal-couple-Garden-in-Eden scenario. The problem is, that scenario just doesn’t match with anything we’ve learned about where humans came from. Three other theories which are basically variations on that PSA theme (Satisfaction Theory; Ransom Theory; Governmental Theory) may be less horrendous, but also don’t square up well with human history. Two of the seven theories are not at all ruled out by human evolution: the Moral Influence Theory of Atonement (Jesus came to show us a better way to live) and Scapegoat Theory (an innocent is blamed for a problem in the community, and their murder by an angry mob solves the problem). In fact, the Moral influence theory fits perfectly with what science tells us about the rise of humans through history, and with the timing of Christ’s appearance in human history: humans did not fall from a state of perfection, and from an intimate, personal relationship with God. Instead, it shows us how we’ve been on an upward trajectory biologically, anatomically, physiologically, intellectually, religiously, and even morally. Christ came not at the beginning of our history to take care of sin before it became a problem, nor at the end of our history after all that sin had taken place. Instead, he came into our history when we were still in the middle of that upward trajectory and finally ready … as a species … for a whole new idea. Moral influence indeed! This new way of looking at Atonement is especially interesting when you look at the word that the Bible uses for sin, which is the fundamental problem being solved here. That word is a metaphor taken not from law (penalty; fine; infraction; punishment), or from medicine (illness; wound; disease; infection), or from architecture (flaw; warped; broken; bent), or from clothing (stain; dirty; torn; rip), but instead a word taken from archery: a sport that’s all about being on a trajectory towards an ideal target … and falling short of the goal. Hmmmmm. Tell us what you think in the comment box below … If you want to play this episode later on your device, look for Recovering Evangelicals in the iTunes Store, Podbean, Spotify, GooglePodcasts, or GooglePlayMusic. If you want to help grow this pod-cast, please like and share with a friend. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find me on Twitter or Facebook. Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page

Atonement … aka, salvation. The whole point behind Christianity.  In fact, the main reason we have religions of any kind.  Atonement is basically about finding a way to God. Given that this is so central, you might think that the Christian church would have had a unified understanding about this right from its earliest days, or that even Christ himself made this idea crystal clear. Think again!  Christian theologians have had all kinds of ideas on why Jesus needed to come to earth. Here are seven of the more popular views, some VERY different from the others. One of the earliest views focused on Jesus’s life and teaching: he came to show us humans a better way to live (Moral Influence Theory) Two other views also widely held from the earliest days of the Christian church focused on his death.  Jesus gave his life as a ransom payment for humans, paid either to Satan or to God himself (Ransom Theory), or as a trick to defeat the powers of evil and to free mankind from their bondage (Christus Victor). A thousand years later, Anselm of Canterbury wrestled with Ransom Theory’s idea that God was in debt … either to Satan or to himself.  Anselm changed the direction of arrows: it was we humans who were indebted to God. We had robbed from God’s honor and inherited a stain of sin, and Christ’s death satisfied the justice of God. Hence: Satisfaction Theory of atonement. A few hundred years later, Dante gave us vivid imagery of a fiery hell of torture, and John Calvin, Martin Luther, and the Reformation movement put a magnifying glass on God’s wrath. Out of this came a view of God as a vengeful monster who consigned humans to death, hell and eternal torment; Christ stepped in as a substitute to receive that penalty and appease God’s wrath … Penal Substitution Atonement. Methodists later softened this PSA view into what is called Governmental Theory of atonement: Christ doesn’t take the full punishment that we humans actually “deserve,” but just simply gives his life as a recognition that a wrong had been committed and some kind of repayment was necessary (similar to a law-suit in which the plaintiff sues for only one dollar, as long as they get their day in court and the accused acknowledges their guilt). Scapegoat Theory of atonement is built on an ancient tendency of humans to identify someone/something else as the cause of a problem within the community (they might even see this problem as a punishment inflicted on the community by the gods), and if that “other” can be ejected from the community or even killed, the problem will be solved. As such, Christ is simply an innocent victim killed by an angry mob. This episode sets the stage for next week, when we’ll look at what science now tells us about human origins and human history, and see how that new perspective may cause us to re-examine these seven theories of atonement. Stay tuned! Tell us your thoughts on this in the comment box below … If you want to play this episode later on your device, look for Recovering Evangelicals in the iTunes Store, Podbean, Spotify, GooglePodcasts, or GooglePlayMusic. If you want to help grow this pod-cast, please like and share with a friend. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find me on Twitter or Facebook. Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page

Our goal next week is to talk about the core of Christian faith: Atonement Theology. But before we can do that, we need to talk about a fundamental concept on which it’s built: a concept called “Original Sin.” The Christian understanding of that idea is rooted in the story found in the third chapter of Genesis: the one where Adam and Eve bite into the apple in the Garden of Eden, breaking the human-Divine relationship and unleashing sin, death and destruction into all of human history, and also on the rest of creation. Last week, we saw how Christians took this story and turned it into something completely different from how the ancient Hebrew authors intended it, and how their ancient Hebrew readers understood it to mean. This week, we’ll see how they took this story and turned it into something that bears no resemblance at all to what modern scientists have learned about actual human history. We think it’s legitimate to bring Science to bear on this very theological discussion, because science can be used to: show us that humans never originated from a primal pair roughly ten thousand years ago in a Garden in Mesopotamia, but instead arose out of a group that never numbered less than a few thousand, and migrated out of Africa a few hundred thousand years ago. trace a couple of our common ancestors down through genetic lines: “Y-chromosomal Adam” who lived in one part of Africa about 240,000 years ago, and “mitochondrial Eve” who lived about 100,000 years later than him (and from a different part of Africa a thousand miles away). trace down through genealogical lines (different from genetic lines) to show how it’s conceivable — not a proof, but a distinct possibility — that everyone alive on earth can still trace their ancestral roots to some one individual who lived as recently as 1000 AD to 2000 BC. dispel the idea that humans fell from a state of perfection. Instead, over the past several million years, we’ve always been on an upward trajectory physically, physiologically, intellectually, theologically, and even morally. still show us that we did “fall”: we’ve been on that upward trajectory, but “fell short” of our full potential. We caught a glimpse of a human-Divine relationship, and we turned that into a resource. Remember, we learned last week how, when the Biblical authors looked for a word for “sin,” they didn’t borrow one from law (rule; penalty; fine; infraction; punishment), or from medicine (illness; wound; disease; infection), or from architecture (flaw; warped; broken; bent), but instead they took a word from archery … a word that literally means “to fall short.” With this new information on the table, what can/should we now say about Atonement Theology? Stay tuned till next week! Tell us your thoughts on this in the comment box below … If you want to play this episode later on your device, look for Recovering Evangelicals in the iTunes Store, Podbean, Spotify, GooglePodcasts, or GooglePlayMusic. If you want to help grow this pod-cast, please like and share with a friend. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find me on Twitter or Facebook. Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page

One of the core tenets of Christian theology … is also often one of the hardest to embrace, and all-too-often a reason for giving up on the faith. How is an abstract, theological concept like guilt or sin transmitted down through genetic lines? Can that really be inherited like skin color, or a tendency towards high blood pressure? Or does it become my problem because I’m genealogically related to “that guy,” an ancestor of mine who lived thousands of years ago? (Genetic and genealogical relatedness are two different things.) But how can I be held responsible for what he did? And what do I do with the mountain of scientific evidence that tells me “that guy” never even existed? And how does Christ’s death fix this problem? Why can’t God just forgive? Questions like these make this idea of Original Sin really hard to hold on to. But if one jettisons the idea, then what was the point of Jesus dying on the cross? In this episode, Boyd and I team up with an Old Testament / Hebrew scholar to look at how the ancient Hebrews who wrote/read the story in Genesis chapter three never interpreted it the way the Apostle Paul did, and certainly not the way Augustine later stretched it all out of proportion. And we set the stage for a whole new perspective on this idea, and for the even thornier discussion about Atonement Theology that builds on it. What gives us the right to second-guess the Apostle Paul and Saint Augustine? The fact that we now have information that was completely unavailable to them at the time: humans did NOT originate from a primal pair in what we now call Iraq, six thousand years ago. Instead, a mountain of evidence given to us (by God) tells us that humans originated two or three hundred thousand years ago, out of Africa, and have never numbered less than ten thousand. Faced with this contradiction, most believers opt for one of three easy solutions: blissful ignorance … pretend the science isn’t there; denial … label the science as false; give up … discard the whole belief system. We think an honest and pragmatic approach is to re-examine those ideas. Here’s the first in a four-part series of episodes that dig into this core aspect of Christian theology. Tell us your thoughts on this in the comment box below … If you want to play this episode later on your device, look for Recovering Evangelicals in the iTunes Store, Podbean, Spotify, GooglePodcasts, or GooglePlayMusic. If you want to help grow this pod-cast, please like and share with a friend. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find me on Twitter or Facebook. Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page

Mind. Personality. Soul. Consciousness. Spirit. These five things which account for the human experience are often seen as overlapping, or even interchangeable. Boyd and I see them all as related … but quite separate. For us, the first four are material and emergent properties of the brain and therefore completely within the scientific realm. In fact, in a previous episode (#10), we’ve given a scientific explanation for the human soul. In this episode, we look at some of the directions being taken by scientists to explain consciousness using materialistic mechanisms. First, we explore in a bit of detail what “emergence” and “emergent properties” mean. Basically, these refer to relatively simple things obeying relatively simple rules to give rise to very surprising and complicated things which were never even hinted at within those simple components. Like a huge flock of starlings becoming a massive “sky-amoeba” … or 26 alphabetical letters becoming a Shakespearean sonnet … eight musical notes becoming Handel’s Messiah … a collection of circuits and software become an immersive virtual reality game … or artificial intelligence. Pretty amazing stuff! With that foundation, we then look at how a few nerve cells, obeying a few simple rules of logic, can create interesting and relatively simple reflexes … but then multiplying that by billions and trillions to produce consciousness, mind, personality and soul. This kind of discussion involves some pretty heady neurobiology, physics, informatics, and computer coding, but we’ve kept it at a very attainable level. Some scientists even bring in quantum physics to explain how the brain might act more like a parallel quantum supercomputer than the computers you find in your home or office which work with simple zeroes and ones. In fact, they even suggest this can explain how professional athletes can perform stupendous calculations within time-frames that completely defy normal physics, mathematics, and neurobiology … like hitting a ball hurled at them at over a hundred miles per hour … and seem to do this by sending quantum information forward through time!? Oh, and that fifth element which is at the heart of what it means to be human … the immaterial spirit … well, that’s a topic for another day. Your thoughts on this? Leave a comment below … stir the pot a little bit! If you want to play this episode later on your device, look for Recovering Evangelicals in the iTunes Store, Podbean, Spotify, GooglePodcasts, or GooglePlayMusic. If you want to help grow this pod-cast, please like and share with a friend. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find me on Twitter or Facebook. Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page

Chronological snobbery. Science of their day. Phenomenological science. These related terms came up many times in our previous episodes, and we kept saying “sometime we’ll have to get into that in more detail.” Here we come through on that promise. Clearly, the Biblical authors saw things differently than we do. the earth being unmovable, and the sun revolving around it human infertility … always a problem with the woman the soul … localized to the heart, kidneys, intestines, liver the weather … just read Job chapters 37 and 38 the origins of the universe, of species, of humans the origins of language, music, agriculture, cities the making of Eve from Adam’s rib (you won’t believe two of the “scientific explanations” which have been given for this) bats being classified as a type of bird But does that mean that we see things better than they did? That our understanding is so much better than theirs? Can we really justify this kind of chronological snobbery. Sure, the Bible is not a science book for today. It might have been at one time … for people thousands of years ago, trying to make sense of the world they lived in. But all science books have a shelf life: their ability to explain fades as our understanding of a given subject increases. The curriculum needs to be updated. This is particularly true when it comes to our understanding of origins … origin of the universe … origin of life … origin of humans. Science has improved our ability to understand/explain things in two ways. First, by building better tools to see and measure things: this is “phenomenological science.” Telescopes to see farther; microscopes to see closer; space probes to put our eyeballs on the other side of the solar system; EEGs/ECGs to “listen” to the heart or to the brain; ultrasound to “listen” to the shape of a fetus, or the progression of a tumor; thermometers to replace subjective feelings with objective numbers. Second, by using the scientific method: collect observations, come up with an explanation for those observations, and then … most importantly … do your best to disprove that explanation. Test the null hypothesis. The more the idea passes that test, the more you can trust it. (Science is not about certainty, but about increasing the probability of being right.) So maybe we have a different scientific understanding, but is that the same as saying we have a better understanding? Maybe yes … but maybe no. We look at examples of modern science also being blinkered by group think, peer pressure, and -of-the-gaps thinking. And is this line of questioning relevant only to science? Is it worth considering whether there was a “history of their day” … a “theology of their day” … an “ethics of their day”? … your thoughts on this? Leave a comment below … stir the pot a little bit! If you want to play this episode later on your device, look for Recovering Evangelicals in the iTunes Store, Podbean, Spotify, GooglePodcasts, or GooglePlayMusic. If you want to help grow this pod-cast, please like and share with a friend. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find me on Twitter or Facebook. Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page

What is it about Evangelicalism that sets believers up for their faith to fail when confronted simply by scientific facts? We suggest four answers to this question … (1) An inflexible adherence to inerrancy and infallibility of Scripture, and putting the Bible on too high a pedestal that borders on turning it into an icon … a thing to be worshiped. Bibliolatry. (2) Diminishing God and elevating self. Too many Evangelicals treat God and Jesus as their good buddy. They speak of frequent (daily?) direct encounters with the ineffable, even a personal relationship. But what about the rest of us (many of us) who do not experience those feelings? On the other hand, there’s also a tendency to see ourselves as the center of the universe: that it’s all about us. (3) Exclusivity. We’re always drawing lines … defining who’s in and who’s out. And then too quickly consigning those outside the lines to hell (and even insisting on an eternal conscious torment!?). And we think we have nothing to learn from other seekers, philosophers, or religions. (4) Certainty. The arrogance that we know exactly what a given Bible passage means … that our theological understanding is complete and accurate … that the Bible is “so simple that even a child could understand it.” … that we’re right and everybody else is wrong. And that anything which might call our thinking into question … like scientific findings … are just wrong and to be dismissed. What are your thoughts on this? If you want to play this episode later on your device, look for Recovering Evangelicals in the iTunes Store, Podbean, Spotify, GooglePodcasts, or GooglePlayMusic. If you want to help grow this pod-cast, please like and share with a friend. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find me on Twitter or Facebook. Don’t forget to leave comments below … stir the pot a little bit! Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page

Here, we take a close look at a dozen high-profile people who were once fully Evangelical in their outlook, and active in Christian leadership … with far more theological training and ministry experience than the average believer … and who found their Fundamentalist Christian faith increasingly didn’t make sense or was deeply disturbing. Although they tried for years to contain the cognitive dissonance, to continue to put on an outward appearance of committed belief, and “still wanted to believe,” they eventually found they had to give it up. They didn’t just fade into the background and disappear. Instead, they publicly declared their rejection of their once deeply held faith, and have even become very vocal against those Fundamentalist beliefs, still reaching and influencing millions of people with the reasons why they felt they had to give it up. They all describe this as a very personally upsetting experience, a decision not taken lightly, but one motivated by just wanting to pursue truth and to be real, honest, inquisitive, and open. There are many others just like them, hundreds of influential speakers and writers whose stories we don’t have time to tell, and thousands (millions?) of others who do not have a high public profile … but who all also found the reasons to not believe outweighed the reasons to “just believe.” The response from the church typically has been to quickly cut these people off, saying “they were never really one of us … they must have never believed.” This, despite the personal sacrifices: years of serving in ministry … thousands of dollars spent on theological training … careers abandoned, or promising career paths never taken, in order to devote their lives to furthering the Kingdom. Can we learn something from their stories? Has the Church failed them? Is there something about Evangelicalism that sets people up for their faith to fail? That will be the subject of part III. If you want to help grow this pod-cast, please like and share with a friend. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find me on Twitter or Facebook. Don’t forget to leave comments below … stir the pot a little bit! Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page

Many times, Boyd and I have been asked “What’s with the name of your podcast?”  Here’s our answer. In the first of a three part series, we take a look at how Evangelicalism has morphed and deviated away from its historical roots: the Gospel message itself. Boyd starts us off looking at our respective experiences with contemporary Evangelicalism, then takes us back to when that period in the movement really came to the forefront of the consciousness of modern church culture: the days of Billy Graham to the present. We then step back to the 1800s, when the term “Evangelical” first started being used by the church. Which prompts an awkward question: “was the Church not Evangelical before the 1800s?” Luke then takes us back a couple millennia further, to a time that predates Christianity itself, and an entirely different culture that first introduced the term “Evangelical” to the world. No, not the Hebrew culture. The Romans themselves had a “Euangelion” … a “Gospel” … a Good News message of a savior for the world and for all mankind: a son of god who would bring in a fantastically new world order … a whole new kind of liberty, freedom, stability, and prosperity … such that no one before or after would ever be able to out-do his achievement. His name was Caesar Augustus. This was their message long before Jesus gathered his disciples around him and co-opted the same word. Some Christians might get uncomfortable with this, but it’s nonetheless a part of our history. An honest seeker will embrace that … and then unpack it. Perhaps we can show that Caesar Augustus’s acclamation was premature, and that Jesus himself took it to a whole new level? His new world order is not only still standing, but still growing: it brings to mind a mustard seed, or yeast in a lump of dough. Caesar’s, on the other hand, collapsed in on itself within a few centuries and continues only as echoes in our language, law, medicine, science … and Hollywood movies. It is a fact of history that Christ’s euangelion has indeed been growing to fantastic proportions (Matt 13:31, 33), and has indeed been producing all kinds of “treasures, new and old” (Matt 13:47, 52): not just spiritual benefits (forgiveness; salvation; healing), but also societal ones (hospitals; schools; humanitarian efforts; movements to abolish slavery; peace-and-reconciliation commissions after a genocide; the laws which govern many countries). It has been casting nets to catch “fish” (Matt 13:47), and has been preparing a banquet (Matt 22:2). “Thy kingdom come … on earth as it is in heaven.” If you want to play this episode later on your device, look for Recovering Evangelicals in the iTunes Store, Podbean, Spotify, GooglePodcasts, or GooglePlayMusic. If you want to help grow this pod-cast, please like and share with a friend. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find me on Twitter or Facebook. Don’t forget to leave comments below … stir the pot a little bit! Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page

An Old Testament scholar tells us that the Bible makes it very clear: there has to be a resurrection of the body. Early church fathers were convinced that this body would contain the very same molecules that we “owned” while alive on earth. And many Christians today, without thinking too deeply about the subject, imagine their resurrected body looking very much like it does today. But there are some simple reasons why it can’t be as physical as one might have imagined (hoped?): too many people have “owned” the same molecules while alive on earth, and each of us have “owned” many different bodily forms over the course of our earthly lives. We then go on a historical journey over the past fifty thousand years looking at the evolution of Hebrew and then Christian thinking about the afterlife. The Hebrews held a very Babylonian and Egyptian view of the afterlife, with no postmortem judgement scenario: everyone ended up in a dark, dusty place crawling with maggots. Christians radically changed that in response to Zoroastrian and Greek thinking: there was now a postmortem judgement followed by a place of reward or of punishment. In the process of this change: the Garden of Eden morphed into Paradise, which eventually became Heaven, while Sheol became Gehenna and then eventually Hell. Christians also introduced a couple new ideas to solve the problem of how one’s final destiny was decided: Penal Substitutionary Atonement and Purgatory. If you want to play this episode later on your device, look for Recovering Evangelicals in the iTunes Store, Podbean, Spotify, GooglePodcasts, or GooglePlayMusic. If you want to help grow this pod-cast, please like and share with a friend. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find me on Twitter or Facebook. Don’t forget to leave comments below … stir the pot a little bit! Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page