Very few have heard of “Dispensationalism,” and fewer could give a paragraph-length definition of it, and yet it saturates Evangelical thinking and influences much of what is in the news headlines today

Are you aware of the common thread that ties together the following diverse list of things:

All of these are connected by one thing: Dispensationalism.  The latter belief system has shaped the theology, values, and worldview of a very large fraction of Christians, particularly American Evangelicals, and is a major driving force behind their prominence in the news headlines today.  And yet a vast majority of people, including many Christians, have never heard of “Dispensationalism”: even those who would claim to have heard of it would be unable to give a short paragraph-length definition of what the word means. 

Next week, we want to explore how Dispensationalism is not just an American phenomenon …. or an American problem …. and why many people feel that it jeopardizes the very future of our planet (its adherents are committed to a self-fulfilling prophecy of global destruction).  But before we get into those deeper waters, we need to give this quick 101 Introduction to that theological construct: its origin, time-line, dimensions, and footprint. 

We spoke to Eric Scot English, who has training in philosophy and Christian theology and history, about his recently released book: The Kingdom of Man: Evangelicalism and the Distortion of Christianity.  Some of the distortions that we talked about include: Christian Nationalism, Christian Zionism, Dominionism, the Kingdom Identity movement, the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, and even the Prosperity Gospel.

Enjoy!

Find more information about Eric at his blog-page or at Patheos.com. His most recent book is available at Amazon.com

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A retrospective on how well we achieved our goals for this season, and pondering whether we need to do some re-branding before the next!?

August is a busy time of year for us: vacations … road-trips … and getting ready for the return to teaching responsibilities at the university.  And for that reason, we have typically gone on hiatus between August and February (when my teaching load is done).  This year will be no exception.

In today’s episode, Scott and I look back over Season Six, and ask ourselves if we met the goal we set for this it: of giving listeners strategies, tools, information, and examples to help  deconstruct a  traditional Christian  world view that doesn’t work seem to work very well anymore in the 21st century,  and to find a way to another form of Christian belief that does.

And then we turned ourselves around 180 degrees and looked to what might be coming down the pipeline if/when we do re-boot in the new year.  We wondered if it might be time to re-brand. 

For example, should we change the name: do we still want to refer to ourselves as Evangelicals (albeit “Recovering” Evangelicals)?  It seems that that label has been irretrievably tarnished by one particular faction within the Evangelical camp, and to use “Recover” as an active verb may be a hopeless cause. Or do we lean more heavily into “Recovering” as an adjective, and continue to create a safe space for those who are in rehab?

And if we take the latter mind-set, do we focus on listeners who are moving further down the “slippery slope” or reconfigure the podcast to make it more friendly …. less daunting ….. to new listeners who are only just beginning to ask hard questions of their own traditional Christian faiths, and haven’t yet gone as far down the path as the rest of us have done.  In a way, it’s similar to the conundrum that many churches  have found themselves in over the past couple decades: “do we go traditional, or contemporary, or try to do some kind of hybrid that targets both” (which rarely works well).

If you have any wisdom to give us on those questions, we enthusiastically welcome your input.

Until that time, stay tuned.  We don’t expect to go completely silent over the next few months.  There will be a  couple episodes that are already in progress and will be released over the next few weeks.  And we’ll keep our eyes on the news headlines and the book publisher’s releases, looking for any particular events or new book releases that merit a quick episode here or there.  If you subscribe, you’ll get an automatic notice of whenever a new episode is released.

Otherwise, check out our Episode Archive through these three links that list all our previous episodes chronologically, thematically, or by guest experts.  A majority of our previous episodes fall into the category of being “ever-green” …. you can listen to them years later and they’re still current.   I mean, we’ve tackled theological questions that have had scholars talking and authors writing for centuries, so a few years is not going to take the shine off those episodes!?

Thanks for listening.  And stay tuned!

As always, tell us your thoughts on this topic …

If you enjoyed this episode, you may also like our collection of other episodes in which we look at a series of releases and try to extract a few general themes to help in re-building a new Christian worldview.

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Although Christians may say that “Jesus was fully human and fully divine,” many of them tend to slow-pedal the first half of that fundamental tenet.

A fundamental Christian belief is that Jesus was fully human and yet fully divine. But for many, including us at Recovering Evangelicals, this tenet raises all kinds of questions and problems.  In fact, Christians have wrestled with that idea for two thousand years: this is NOT a new problem!

In this episode, we’re putting a spotlight on the first part of that belief statement: that he was fully human.  Some Christians don’t like to do this: they feel a need to keep his divinity front and center.  But our guest today — Dr. Daniel Kirk — thinks we lose quite a bit when we do this.  And he’s written a book to explain why: A Man Attested by God: The Human Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels.

We first explore the many lines of evidence in the Bible of his full humanity:

In the second half of our conversation, we discuss why some Christians (often Evangelicals) get so uncomfortable about emphasizing his humanity, as well as why Dr. Kirk finds so much value in doing exactly that.

As always, tell us your thoughts on this topic …

Find more information about Dr. Daniel Kirk at Patheos, and his books at Amazon.

If you enjoyed this episode, you may also like two previous episodes in which we explored Jesus as the Jewish Messiah (#82) and as the cosmic Christ (#83).

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It’s time to revise our picture of human origins, and the theology built up around the one handed down to us by authors and church fathers who knew nothing about our hominid cousins.

This is the final episode of our miniseries looking at the impact that scientific discoveries over the past couple centuries of our hominid ancestors might have on Christian theology.  It needs to be recognized that none …. NONE ….. of the Biblical authors, nor the characters they write about, nor any of the church fathers who unpacked Christian theology over the centuries after the Bible was written … NONE of them knew about human evolution, about millions and billions of years, about our hominid cousins with whom we interbred and interacted, nor about the spiritual journey that we … and possibly also those cousins … have been on for the past many hundreds of thousands of years.  It’s time that we updated the picture.

The four episodes which preceded this one have raised many questions.  Today, we’ve distilled those many questions down to five broad categories and brought in a world-class theologian (Dr. Douglas F. Ottati) to help us explore how to reconfigure Christian faith to accommodate that new information that was completely unavailable to the Biblical authors and Church Fathers.  Those five are:

As always, tell us your thoughts on this topic …

Find more information about Dr. Ottati at his institutional web-page, and his many books at Amazon; you may also want to check out our previous conversation with him a few months ago.

Episode image by Andrew. Thanks Andrew!

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A committed secular humanist, two Christians (and a Jewish rabbi) compare perspectives on their agreed claim that human morality has been on the upswing.

A year ago, we did an episode with a Jewish rabbi and scholar — Dr. and Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson — exploring the claim that human morality has been trending upwards, in large part due to a Judeo-Christian influence on modern Western society: that we’ve been climbing the evolutionary ladder, not just in a biological and cognitive sense, but also in a moral and ethical sense.  A lot of people really struggle with that claim, largely because they look at headlines in the newspapers and say: “You’ve got to be kidding me!”

Another leading scholar who’s very skeptical and resistant to religion — Dr. Michael Shermer — made the same claim about human morality, although he believes science and reason are the driving force behind the increase (and very much plays down any positive contributions from religion). 

We thought it would be fun, and enlightening, to compare notes with Dr. Shermer.

One of the points that we agreed on is that news headlines can be very misleading if you’re trying to find a trend: those are snapshots in a very dynamic situation, very much like the daily status of the stock market. In Michael’s words: “three steps forward but two steps back.”  You need to look at the overall trend.  It’s like compound interest.  Even historical retrospectives looking back over a few centuries are too myopic.

We discussed a variety of scientific and political developments and societal factors which are contributing to this trend and the volatility masking it:

In the end, we also seemed to agree that both science and religion can create problems, and solve problems.  Getting past our turbulent status quo will require cooperation between religion and science … Christians and secular humanists … humans of all stripes.  It’s a choice that we have to make: a determined decision backed by resolve.  And so, on that note, we also talked about hard determinism versus free will (or free won’t!?).

As always, tell us your thoughts on this topic …

Find more information about Michael Shermer at michaelshermer.com/

If you enjoyed this episode, you really should check out our previous episode on the same question: “#162: “Bending the arc of the moral universe.”

“Bending the moral arc of justice” image by Andrew, and modified. Thanks Andrew!

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The questions “who was the first person to speak English?” and “who was the first human?” are equally ridiculous and unanswerable, and for the same reasons.

For many Christians, the many recent discoveries of our ancient hominid ancestors have raised uncomfortable questions.  Some of them will cope with this by just trying to avoid any reports/discussions of these discoveries, or simply denying the data (“they’re all hoaxes”), or deciding to re-interpret or re-define the data (Answers-in-Genesis, for example, will simply re-define a new discovery as either human or ape … no intermediates are allowed).  We’ve addressed these coping strategies in previous episodes.

Some other Christians will accept that humans and hominids have been evolving, but will still find it necessary to draw an arbitrary line in the sand, declaring humans on “this” side of the line as completely separate from any ancestral humans and hominids on “that” side of the line.  For example, they might claim that, at some discrete point in time, God picked up a couple of those ancestral humans and gave them a massive upgrade, with new hardware and software (advanced cognitive abilities; a “soul”; the “image of God”), and then started a unique relationship with those newly created beings.  But the scientific data that we have on hand — including genetics, bones, tools and art work — just do not reflect a sudden and dramatic change in the human line.  It simply is not possible to claim that there was a “first human” or a first primal pair.

But many people find that hard to understand.  They might insist that “there just had to have been a first human!?”

In this episode, we want to directly confront this claim using an excellent metaphor that everyone should find easy to understand: the evolution of language.  More specifically, the evolution of English.  We talked to an academic linguist — Dr. Gareth Roberts, at the University of Pennsylvania — about the history of the English language and the forces that drove changes in that language.  The Old English that was spoken by King Alfred, the Venerable Bede, or Aethelstan [the 1st king of England]) gradually morphed into the Middle English used by Chaucer and Henry the 4th, which eventually became the “modern” English used by Shakespeare, Ben Franklin, Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth.  Dr. Roberts gave us a great example of that evolution: the skeptical listener should listen to the Lord’s Prayer spoken in the English of the 15th century, and then the 13th century, and then the 10th century!

Throughout this discussion, we tried to point out the similarities between the evolution of language and the evolution of biological life forms.  New languages or new dialects are the linguistic equivalent of new biological species.  The new languages spoken by enslaved people combining parts of their home language with the language of their owners is equivalent to biological speciation through hybridization.  Societal pressures on “proper” language are equivalent to sexual selection of genetic traits.  Even complicated biological phenomena such as “ring species” and “founder effect” have their correlate in the evolution of languages.

But the most important point that we wanted to leave with the audience is this: the question “who was the first person to speak English” is just as ridiculous or impossible to answer as the question “who was the first human” ….. and for all the exact same reasons.

As always, tell us your thoughts on this topic …

Find more information about Dr. Gareth Roberts at his university faculty page and his research lab’s homepage.

If you enjoyed this episode, check out our collection of episodes on human evolution, or Luke’s book Standing On The Shoulders of Giants: Genesis and Human Origins.

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Christianity’s response to discoveries of ancient hominids today is exactly the same as their response to previous discoveries of “non-Adamic” people in the Americas … “they’re not human!”

Christianity today is not handling well the recent discoveries of ancient hominids.  A lot of denial and dismissal; very little excitement or enthusiasm. One shouldn’t be surprised by this, nor wonder about how they might try to cope with this new knowledge, because we’ve already seen the playbook before: when the Church in the 17th century had to wrestle with the discoveries of indigenous peoples in far-off continents that were only accessible by the best technology of their era: ocean-going sailing ships.  This discovery raised HUGE theological questions, as well as political ones.  To call it paradigm changing would be an understatement.  “How could there be people in the Americas or in the far polar regions if they can barely make canoes?  They couldn’t possibly be descendants of Adam.  And if not, are they even human?  Do they have souls?  If they’re not human, can we capture them and sell them as slaves?”

In this episode, we talk to Dr. David N. Livingstone, author of Adam’s Ancestors: Race, Religion, and the Politics of Human Origins, which explores that part of Church history in great detail.

We first looked at how the Church and Christianity understood anthropology and human origins over the course of three thousand years.  Back when the Babylonians and Egyptians were in charge, the ancient Jews were fully committed to a worldview that all humans descended from a primal couple that were created by YHWH.  Then the Greeks and Romans took over and introduced a new idea: the possibility that there were “monstrous races” that looked very non-human, living at the furthest reaches of the maps that they generated in their explorations.  In fact, Pliny the Elder in the 1st century created a whole taxonomy of those creatures: in addition to the one-eyed cyclops that you may have seen in B-movies, there were people with dog-heads, and others with gigantic feet that were used to shield their heads from the sun; and many others.  When the Roman Catholic Church took over, they debated a little bit about those “Plinians”: Augustine, in the 5th century, wrote a whole treatise on whether they were human or not, let alone “of Adam” and therefore possessing a soul.  By the time of the Renaissance, though, the Church (and the world that it ruled) were fully committed to the idea that all people on Earth descended from Adam and Eve.  And that Adam and Eve were Caucasian! (just look at any paintings from that period of history.)  But then explorers set out across the oceans, “discovering” new continents and dutifully reporting that they never saw any “Plinians” … but there were other humans!  Indigenous peoples of the Americas and Greenland.

And that’s when those uncomfortable theological questions sprang up, and thinking Christians had to start re-writing their theology.

We then talked with David about the amazingly close and provocative parallels between that period in Church history and the present one four centuries later, when we started discovering ancient hominids.  And learning that some of the latter had the potential to be as intelligent and religiously-minded as Homo sapiens are. 

There’s a lot of food for thought here, as we continue through this mini-series of episodes looking at the impact of recent scientific discoveries of ancient hominids on Christian theology.

As always, tell us your thoughts on this …

Find more information about Dr. David Livingstone at his faculty page.

If you enjoyed this episode, check out our collection of episodes on human evolution, or Luke’s book Standing On The Shoulders of Giants: Genesis and Human Origins.

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Do we need to update our theology in light of Christian-bigotry toward our genetic cousins?

During the millennia that Biblical characters were living out their lives, Biblical authors were writing their texts, the early Christian church was forming, and the medieval Church fathers were constructing a Christian theology, nobody had any idea that humans had genetic cousins: Australopithecus (“Lucy”), Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo floresiensis, Homo juluensis, and so many more.  But we today DO know about those hominid cousins, and that knowledge raises many, many, huge questions for the Christian theology that emerged during those 4,000 years of JudeoChristian history.  Much of modern Christianity has been in denial of the existence or relevance of those “cousins”:

Luke described a strategy that Christians typically employ when trying to cope with the new scientific evidence: first try to just extend the timeline (from 6,000 years to a couple hundred thousand years, but otherwise keep all other parts of the Adam&Eve story intact), then start admitting that “God used biological evolution” instead of a potter’s wheel and Adam’s rib to create the first humans, and then finally accepting that the origin of humans was very much a random, unguided thing.

We discussed a wide range of [theological] questions that are raised by these scientific discoveries of our hominid ancestors.  Some of those questions are of the “low-hanging fruit” kind that always come up immediately in any conversation about this topic:

But there are other questions that are hanging a bit higher up on the tree that are rarely, if ever addressed by other speakers/writers/podcasters:

Maybe it’s time that we come up with an updated, more inclusive Christian theology.

We’re going to unpack many of these questions/ideas in the next handful of episodes:

As always, tell us your thoughts on this topic …

If you enjoyed this episode, check out our mini-series of episodes on evolution, or Luke’s book Standing On The Shoulders of Giants: Genesis and Human Origins

Episode image by Andrew K. Thanks Andrew!

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The anniversaries of two pivotal legal cases brought by evolution deniers got us talking to the National Center for Science Education about their work

2025 is the 100th anniversary of the infamous Scopes Trial (aka, the “Monkey Trial”), in which a high school teacher in Tennessee was convicted of violating a law that banned teaching human evolution.  2025 is also the 20th anniversary of the Kitzmiller v. Dover Trial which ruled that a school board in Pennsylvania had violated the Establishment Clause by requiring teachers to present Intelligent Design as an alternative to evolutionary theory. 

To commemorate these pivotal events, we reached out to the National Center for Science Education, a non-profit organization dedicated to pushing back on the efforts of Creationists and Intelligent Design proponents in promoting science denial.  Deputy Director Glenn Branch and science education specialist Wendy Johnson gave us a quick overview of the history of anti-evolutionism and the mission, scope, and activities of the NCSE:

As always, tell us what YOU think …

Find more information about our guests and the National Center for Science Education at their homepage. And if you like what they’re doing, you can make a donation there!

If you enjoyed this episode, you may also like our interview with Dr. Janet Ray Kellogg (#138) who’s actively pushing back on science denial, or our two mini-series on Young Earth Creationism and Intelligent Design.

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Time magazine’s pick for “most influential Evangelical in 2015” tells his own story of leaving behind traditional Evangelicalism.

Over the past five years, we’ve interviewed many people who are “Recovering Evangelicals” … people who were handed an Evangelical/Fundamentalist faith that they eventually found they had to reject.  As they explored their faith from different angles, they found it just didn’t work anymore: they had to keep giving up one belief after another until they thought they had nothing left.  We have a web-page that collects over a dozen such stories.

But recently, we thought it was important to show that these “slippery slope” experiences are had not only by “average” lay-people: Christian leaders, pastors, and theologians are also prone.  So a few weeks ago we heard from John James Kirkwood, who was a pastor of an Evangelical church during the years that he was giving up on traditional Evangelicalism (#180).  And then we heard from Peter Enns, who was a professor and theologian at an Evangelical College when he walked the same path (#181).  Both had to contend with the tension of helping other Evangelicals build up their Evangelical faith while tearing apart his own.

In this episode, we hear from Brian McLaren: also a pastor at a large and flourishing Evangelical church during the years that he was giving up the traditional Evangelicalism he grew up with.  But he was not “just another pastor”: he assisted in the development of several new churches, was a guest lecturer for denominational and ecumenical leadership gatherings around the world, and a prolific Evangelical author with a couple dozen book titles to his credit.  In 2015, Time magazine named him as one of the 25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America! 

He, too, became a Recovering Evangelical.

This is his story.

We’ll hear about how he grew up in a Plymouth Brethren environment, steeped in Biblical literalism and Young Earth Creationism, and at the ripe old age of 12 defiantly declared he’d renounced that form of Fundamentalism because it couldn’t handle evolution and was too obsessed with sex.  About a transcendent spiritual experience on a hill-top in his teen years that crystalized his faith in a God of love.  About his slippery slope experiences while he began to pursue a career as a college professor of English literature, then stumbled into a career as a pastor, an author, a seeker, a culture warrior, and a Jesus freak.

And about where he’s at now in his Christian worldview …. faith expressing itself in love.

And the cherry on top in this interview was a sneak peak at his next book to be released: the first in a trilogy of sci-fi novels that will add a new dimension to his message of pursuing meaning and fulfillment.

Find more about Brian McLaren and his many books at his website.

If you enjoyed this episode, you might want to check out a similar conversation we had with another world-class Exvangelical author … Philip Yancey (#113) … as well as our collection of other “slippery slope” life stories.

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