God, Aliens, and Other Stuff

                          The link below is from ASOR, American Society for Oriental Research, and their newsletter "Ancient Near East Today." The link talks about archaeological research into when Homo sapiens and the ancestor Homo erectus and other Homos began to control fire and cook their food. It's a good short presentation on the consensus of human development. https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/when-did-humans-start-cooking-food It has to do with our understanding and application of Genesis 1-4. Hermeneutics is the branch of knowledge that defines how we interpret the Bible. Do we take those chapters literally and as genuine history? Are we falling away from Jesus or failing God if we take them metaphorically and plumb them for the theological message therein? Here's the thing. I think I've written about this before, but it's worth a refresher. I didn't learn this in church. I read those 4 chapters from 1965 ...

  A friend urged me to write about the whispers. My approach to biblical interpretation has helped her resolve a weighty load of frustration and unanswered question about how to deal with Bible conundrums. She has never been content to believe something just because, and neither have I. We have to begin with the understanding that God is, that he is locatable rather than being an all-pervasive, non-localized force. He may well be omni-present, but he is not merely a conglomeration of all things everywhere. He is logical. He is compassionate. His reason is beyond ours, but not in the sense of it being incomprehensible. He reveals himself to mankind bit by bit because the gap between his understanding and ours is so immense. He steps into our primitive world with our archaic customs and knowledge and changes us little by little. Change is always difficult. It’s frightening and dangerous and requires adaptation and care to make sure that it is a change for the better. Change always pr...

   Some time ago a friend recommended a book called Making Sense of the Bible: Rediscovering the Power of Scripture Today, 2014, by Adam Hamilton. It sounded intriguing, so I ordered it, read it, and was amazed. The author is a United Methodist pastor, a founder of Church of the Resurrection in Kansas City. The jacket blurb states, “The church is well known for connecting with agnostics, skeptics, and spiritual seekers. In 2012, it was recognized as the most influential mainline church in America, and Hamilton was asked by the White House to deliver the sermon at the inaugural Obama prayer service.” His church has 18,000 members, and no wonder! Hamilton is still pastor there as of today (2023). Part 1 is the stuff one learns in seminary: who wrote the Old and New Testaments? When were they written? Which books made it into the Bible, and why were other books rejected? He writes extensively about the Bible authors, Paul, Matthew, Luke, Mark, John, Peter, and Jude. We could call...

Other than the Bible, of course. A friend recently recommended a book called Making Sense of the Bible, by Adam Hamilton. It sounded intriguing, so I ordered it, read it, and was amazed. The author is a United Methodist pastor, a founder of Church of the Resurrection in Kansas City. The jacket blurb states, “The church is well known for connecting with agnostics, skeptics, and spiritual seekers. In 2012, it was recognized as the most influential mainline church in America, and Hamilton was asked by the White House to deliver the sermon at the inaugural Obama prayer service.” His church has 18,000 members, and no wonder! The book is divided into two parts, but at the end of Part 1 there is a hermeneutic section that I intend to present here in detail. Part 1 is the stuff one learns in seminary: who wrote the Old and New Testaments? When were they written? Which books made it into the Bible, and why were other books rejected? He writes extensively about the Bible authors, Paul, ...

Sometimes the evangelical doctrine of “inerrancy” (there are no errors in the Bible and all ideas presented reflect the thinking of God) snares the church in some sticky wickets. For example, the Christian church, the Body of Christ, the light on a hilltop, the salt of the earth, the purveyor of the love of God, finds that to be true to inerrant Scripture it must suppress women. Why? Because Adam was born first and Eve sinned first. That puts women beneath men forever, until the Second Coming. They must also bash gay people as sinners worse than any on earth . . . worse than the philandering minister, the heterosexual predator teaching Sunday School, and the lukewarm Church of Laodicea whom Jesus threatened to reject. It is not the lackadaisical believers that will bring a curse on the U.S., it is the gays getting married. For many years Christians felt they had to burn blaspheming heretics at the stake. They all did it, Catholics, Lutherans, Reformed Protestants, the Puritans… ...

My friend urged me to write about the whispers. My approach to biblical interpretation has helped her resolve a weighty load of frustration and unanswered question about how to deal with Bible conundrums. She has never been content to believe something just because, and neither have I. We have to begin with the understanding that God is, that he is locatable rather than being an all-pervasive, non-localized force. He may well be omni-present, but he is not merely a conglomeration of all things everywhere. And he is logical. He is compassionate. His reason is beyond ours, but not in the sense of it being incomprehensible. He reveals himself to mankind bit by bit because the gap between his understanding and ours is so immense. He steps into our primitive world with our archaic customs and knowledge and changes us little by little. Change is always difficult. It’s frightening and dangerous and requires adaptation and care to make sure that it is a change for the better. It always ...

A sophistry is something that looks good, feels good, and sounds really good...so good that it becomes an absolute truth for long periods of time, deeply impacting culture, before people realize that it's just wrong and they have to let the idea go. A sophistry stops all progress until it is exposed. One example in our own history in the U.S. is that black people are not fully human, so it's OK to buy and sell them on the open market. One of the biggest sophistries in the world today is promoted by the global Christian church. It is the evangelical belief that the Bible is inerrant, that there is no error in the Scripture, that all ideas expressed are those of God Himself. The belief that there can be no human content or cultural bias in the writing of the Bible is just wrong. To continually aver that the Bible is perfect, inerrant, and always reflects God's current view of the world sounds so good, so pious, so holy, so heroic...and is always rewarded with amens and "...

Fundamentalists love the Book of Job. Besides the fact that it's great literature, who can't empathize with Job's predicament? He is being tested by God. He has lost his children, his goods, and his health. His wife is shrieking at him and his supposed friends, those misguided comforters, are accusing him of being a sinner. Furthermore, Job doesn't understand what is happening with his God. God is behaving in ways that don't make sense. Something is terribly wrong, but what and why? The fact is, Job's friends were standing on solid ground. They were standing on God's Holy, inerrant, unchanging Word. Deuteronomy 27 and 28 assure the reader that bad things happen to the disobedient sinners. Good things happened to the obedient. They had tradition on their side. "Ask the former generations and find out what their fathers learned, for we were born only yesterday and know nothing, and our days on earth are but a shadow. Will they not instruct you and tell yo...