Recovering Evangelicals

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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Are they just fun parlor tricks? Spiritual gifts and miracles like the ones we read in the Bible? Demonic manifestations? Or simply mind-over-matter?

Dr. Alan Streett was on a career trajectory to be a professional baseball player when a major arm injury and a psychic healer diverted him into Seminary studies as a non-believing church pastor-in-training who got drunk on Saturday nights, preached Billy Graham sermons the next morning, and spent the rest of his time researching the paranormal!?  After finishing his PhD, he had a life-changing spiritual experience and became a sincere Christian and a professor at a Christian college … and continued his fifty year long research project trying to understand the paranormal and psychic phenomena.

His interest in the paranormal was sparked by the psychic healer, who failed to restore his arm but told him many stories, recommended books to read, and got him connected to other people in that world.  He became fascinated, and dove head-first into this pursuit.  Over the course of 50 years, he went through four distinct stages in his understanding of that strange paranormal world.

Stage 1: he enrolled at a Bible Seminary (even though he wasn’t a Christian) and tried to integrate what he was learning about the secular paranormal with examples of the supernatural in the Bible.  To him at that time, they were one and the same.  It was all just neat stuff: harmless and interesting.

Stage 2: the cognitive dissonance of being a heavy-drinking non-Christian on the inside, but a Seminary student and pastor-in-training on the outside, finally triggered a mental crisis and then a profound and life-changing conversion experience.  He was born-again!  And on fire!  And while attending a charismatic church service, he learned that the paranormal/psychic phenomena were in fact demonic!  He immediately made a 180 degree turn away from that world, and completely rejected those phenomena.

Stage 3: after finishing his Seminary training and becoming a professor of Evangelism and New Testament at a Christian College in Texas, he invited a guest lecturer to speak on “Magic: real and fake.”  That guest convinced Alan that, in fact, many of the paranormal and psychic things that had previously so fascinated him (Stage 1), and then terrified him (Stage 2), were actually just devious parlor tricks and fraudulent illusion.  His guest even showed him how to do some of the tricks used by mentalists (“the Amazing Kreskin”; David Copperfield; Darren Brown), palm-readers, Tarot card readers … and even poker players (who read their opponents’ “tells”).  And Alan started perfecting the art himself: he too was now entertaining the crowds while teaching students and church audiences that this was not scary supernatural stuff … just simple deception.

Stage 4: with his interest in psychic phenomena renewed and re-directed, he studied it from a new, more analytical perspective.  He learned about brain states: the fast, excited brain waves of the beta state which provides focused concentration and the fight-or-flight response, versus the slower, relaxed brain waves of the alpha state, the relaxation response and day-dreaming.  He noticed the marked similarities — the slowed breathing and intense mental focus — between the meditation used in yoga, the centering prayer used to have a spiritual encounter with God, the hypnosis used to quit smoking or ignore bodily pain, and the Lamaze classes that are taught to cope with labor and delivery. In other words, the psychic phenomena are largely mind over matter.

We then talked about how Alan’s Stage 4 understanding explains many of the things that we see happening in private spiritual practice (visions; prayer; a peaceful spiritual experience) as well as in very public healing meetings (which are predominantly geared toward dealing with a wide variety of pain and mental issues, and not so much restoring amputated limbs or correcting enzymatic deficiencies like diabetes). It also explains how athletes overcome what appear to be insurmountable barriers. For example, it was long thought to be “impossible” to run a 4-minute mile; until Roger Bannister did it in 1954, and now it’s commonplace.  Likewise in figure skating: for decades no one could do the triple axel, until Vern Taylor did it at the 1978 World Championships … and now nearly all competitive skaters can do it.  In the same way, this also explains how some people feel “the universe” co-operates with their wishes/needs (“the Law of Attraction”): their persistent determination has them repeatedly trying over and over until they finally breakthrough their perceived barrier and achieve their goal.

I think there’s a lot of food for thought in what Alan had to tell us.

As always, tell us your thoughts on this topic …

Find out more about Alan at his faculty page, and his book at Eerdmans Publishing.

If you enjoyed this episode, you may also like our collection of episodes dealing with the religious experiences and spiritual encounters.

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A Harvard-trained sociologist gives us far more than downward church attendance graphs and the “rise of the nones” that Pew and Gallup dish up

None of our listeners would be surprised by news that religious faith is in decline. Pew and Gallup have been talking about “the rise of the nones” and of the “spiritual-but-not-religious” for many years now. Church attendances are down; church closures are up. Again, this is not news.

But we talked to Dr. Christian Smith, a Harvard-trained sociologist who’s just published a book entitled Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America. “Obsolete” is very different from “in decline”! And he doesn’t say that it’s “on its way to obsolescence”: he says it’s already gone obsolete! And to add insult to injury, he says this obsolescence was unplanned (in contrast to the planned obsolescence that our Western economies are built upon) and largely self-inflicted!?

He delineates dozens of factors and events that contributed to this phenomenon. Far too many to list here. You’ll need to listen to the episode to hear some of the more important ones, and then read his book to fully unpack all of them. But suffice to say that these factors include a variety of slowly-developing trends …. changes in demographics, society, culture, science, politics, and the economy …. as well as a number of key events (the 9/11 plane attacks; church scandals; end of the Cold War; the internet). He refers to a series of perfect storms converging. The pivotal year was 1991, and everything was in place by 2009.

He does concede to some caveats. Most importantly, he concedes that he’s not talking about religion in general: instead, his story is about “TRADITIONAL religion” … “in the US.” And he defines what he means by “traditional” (mainline Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism, Mormonism) and “not traditional,” at least not in the US (Buddhism; Hinduism; witchcraft; astrology; New Age beliefs; the Laws of Attraction; alternative healing; crystals …. and a long list of other belief systems that ARE indeed growing in America). And that’s another thing about obsolescence: it doesn’t mean useless. It just means that fewer and fewer people want to use it, and that more people are choosing something else (for example, music aficionados will never give up their vinyl records, while a vast majority of people opt for digital media). Just think about all the Baby Boomers who grew up in religious homes in the 60s and 70s, but who have raised a generation of Millennials who don’t go to church!? And how church-ey will be the yet-to-be-seen generation being raised by those unchurched Millennials!

Another concession: he doesn’t think that America will go totally secular. Humans are fundamentally spiritual/religious at their core.  In every part of the globe, every civilization and culture all through human history, we’ve always had religion. Religion spans all ages, all genders, all races, and all socioeconomic brackets. And see what happened in cultures that intentionally tried to suppress religion: Communist Russia/China, or the French Revolution.

So what does Dr. Smith see replacing that traditional faith in America? A new millennial, post-boomer zeitgeist. A cultural re-enchantment. Something that is individualistic, anti-institutional, anti-authority, presentist (not a deep sense of history), very relativistic and subjective (think Postmodernism, and people talking about “my truth” versus “your truth”).

We also talked briefly about whether this book has anything to say about the apparent or claimed growth of Protestant and Catholic faiths in Africa, in South America, or even recently in Britain. And what about us Canadians who live just next door to the US and are so deeply tied with it? The short answer is: yes …. and no.

As always, tell us your thoughts on this topic …

Find more information about Dr. Christian Smith at his faculty page, and about his book at Oxford University Press.

If you enjoyed this episode, you may also like a mini-series of episodes we did near the end of COVID entitled “Back to Church.”

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A theologian and professor at an Evangelical Theological Seminary describes a very unique, but instructive, “slippery slope” experience.

As promised, here’s our second conversation with someone who walked that “slippery slope” out of Evangelicalism, but did so while leading and teaching a large group of Evangelicals who were still quite comfortable with their own Christian worldviews.  Last week it was John James Kirkwood, as the pastor of a church with strong Christian Nationalist leanings.  This week, it’s Dr. Pete Enns, a theologian and the Abram S. Clemens Professor of Biblical Studies at Eastern University (formerly Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary).

We talked about the Christianity he grew up within (German Methodist), and his early years at Messiah University (a private evangelical Christian university in Pennsylvania) getting his BA in Behavioral Science, followed by an M. Div from Westminster Theological Seminary, and then a PhD at Harvard University (Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations).  During those 16 years of academic learning, Pete’s understanding of the Bible changed completely. He now saw human fingerprints all over it, and his interpretation of it looked very different from that of many Evangelicals (and completely heretical for Fundamentalists).

We talked about that journey, and why it seemed to look and feel so different from the “slippery slope” experience that many of the rest of us typically describe.  Instead of the incapacitating elements of confusion and disorientation, for him it was more of an invigorating intellectual evolution.  He also didn’t experience the peer pressure that I had expected: the coercive influence of what his peers (scholars; professors; intellectuals), his employer (the University) or his students (bright-eyed Evangelicals themselves) might think.  Instead, he was motivated by being true to himself and following the evidence to its logical conclusion … being authentic and maintaining his integrity.  But he did experience one other key element of the “slippery slope” syndrome: the emotional collapse at the end of the journey.  He described the sadness he felt when he realized “I may never sing another Christmas carol again.”  The isolation, and loss of a community.  The uncertainty of having no guardrails, nor Someone constantly watching over him.

We also talked at length about his confrontation with the Board at Westminster Theological Seminary, where he had been teaching for years, and how it ended with the resignation of almost a dozen leaders at the University, including Pete himself.  How it was clearly a battle over orthodoxy, and the control of orthodoxy, especially how that crystalized around one particular book that Pete had written (Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament) … the VERY different perceptions about that book held by the Board, the Faculty of the University, his book publisher, his readers, and even himself.

Finally, we also talked about a couple other books he’d written which were particularly relevant to this discussion: The Sin of Certainty: Why God Desires Our Trust More than Our ‘Correct’ Beliefs (a clear reference to orthodoxy), and Curveball: When Your Faith Takes Turns You Never Saw Coming (or How I Stumbled and Tripped My Way to Finding a Bigger God).

We thoroughly enjoyed this conversation, and are sure you will find much to learn from it.  Enjoy!

Find more information about Dr. Pete Enns at his faculty page, his podcast page, and this link to the books he’s written.

If you enjoyed this episode, you may also want to look at our collection of similar life stores of people leaving traditional Fundamentalism/Evangelicalism to find a Christianity that looks completely different.

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One of our listeners tells his story of chipping away at Christian ideas, only to find a faith that feels more Christian.

This week and next, we’re going to hear the life stories of two more people who grew up in a Fundamentalist / Evangelical world, but embarked on a journey with which our listeners are very familiar: one that is strewn with baggage, rejected ideas, and old theologies.  Those who’ve walked this path will all say that when you reach the end, you feel like you’ve lost it all … only to find that you hold a faith that looks completely different from the one you started with … but which feels more Christian.

Today, our guest will be one of our listeners who walked that journey while being the pastor of a very Fundie/Evangelical church: John James Kirkwood.

We heard a bit about the kind of Evangelical faith that was handed to John in his childhood, and how he essentially ran away from that in his teen years.  But the story really begins when this Prodigal Son returns home and begins pastoral work at his father’s church.  For twenty years!

At first, he tried to build a persona that might be best described as a cross between Ravi Zacharias (before the scandal) and Rush Lumbaugh.  He wrote a very conservative column, hosted a radio show and became very vocal about politics.  His views morphed into Christian Nationalism: he was often reacting against perceived abominations (like boycotting Target because they don’t say Merry Christmas) … gun rights were sacred … the US was the new Israel.

That changed when Donald Trump first became President.  The reception given by the Religious Right started some very unsettling questions for John.  He started to read some books (the first tell-tale sign of that “slippery slope”) and listening to speakers on the forbidden list (like Bart Ehrmann), particularly in the areas of Creation/Evolution, and the origin of the Bible.  One night, after slamming shut Francis Collins’ book the Language of God, he said to his wife “I can’t believe I’ve been wrong all this time.”  And then he apologized to his two teenage sons for what he’d been teaching them.

As he continued to jettison one idea after another and replacing them with new ones, while still pastoring at the church and putting the spotlight on the ministry and teaching of Jesus, people began to complain.  And then some started leaving. 

Eventually it was time for John to leave too.

He now finds himself in Arizona, involving himself in a variety of ministries, targeting “the Nones and the Dones,” with a new Christian worldview that looks nothing like what he had thirty years ago. 

And John couldn’t be happier.

As always, tell us your thoughts on this episode …

To find more about John, go to his podcast Sparrow’s Call.

If you enjoyed this episode, you may also want to look at our collection of similar life stores of people leaving traditional Fundamentalism/Evangelicalism to find a Christianity that looks completely different.

Episode images used by permission.

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An exploration of belief, unbelief, delusion, and critical thinking, and some (coping) strategies in dealing with this peculiarity of being human.

Humans can believe some pretty crazy things. Pew Research has at times found that 1% of Americans believe the earth is flat. And that 6% aren’t quite sure whether it is or not! In 2017, Peter McIndoe started a movement that claims the federal government has exterminated all birds and replaced them with look-alike drones to spy on citizens … a movement that now has 100,000 followers. In 1997, 39 members of the Heaven’s Gate cult committed joint-suicide in order to board Comet Hale–Bopp, which they believed was a disguised alien space ship that would take them to a beautiful new world.

As diverse as these movements are, they have a few features in common. The adherents collect their own data, make their own interpretations, and label any counter-evidence or counter-arguments as lies and conspiracies.

Sound familiar? The Kennedy assassination? The 9/11 plane crashes? Anti-vaxers and COVID19/measles? Global warming? Gender issues? Republicans and Democrats? Fundamentalist Christians? Young Earth Creationists?

This week, Scott and I discuss this quirky characteristic of humans. And we brought in a guest that we’ve had on more than once in the past — Doug Traversa — because he’s on “the other side” of Scott and me when it comes to the two most divisive of topics — religion and politics (he’s an American, and an atheist) — and yet he also has a long track record of modeling what Scott and I think is an excellent way to interact positively and respectfully with others who think very differently from him.

First, we explored the diverse manifestations of this human characteristic of dismissing evidence and explanations from qualified experts and replacing them with their own. The list is too long — and too distressing — to repeat here.

Then we identified a number of contributing factors, because you can’t fix a problem if you don’t fully understand it. Here are some of the ones we found:

Finally we talked about our responses to this:

As always, tell us your thoughts on this topic …

If you want to learn more about Doug, check out our episodes in which he tells his full life-story, or why he decided to give up his faith, or get his views on the Richard Dawkins / Ayaan Hirsi Ali interview.

For episodes that are closely related to this topic, check out what we said about science denial, or a collection of episodes that focus on Evangelicals.

Episode image is a modified still image from the 1999 block-buster film The Matrix.

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Many people think that the church burned scientists and their books during the Dark Ages; they would be wrong …. and here’s why

We’re still discussing the book Of Popes and Unicorns: Science, Christianity, and how the Conflict Thesis fooled the world.  

Last week, we spoke to one of the authors of that book — an academic historian (James C. Ungureanu) — about what this Conflict Thesis is (“the church and science are inherently at war … always have been, always will be”) and who it was that originated the idea (two 19th century American scholars: John William Draper and Andrew Dixon White). 

This week, we’re talking to his co-author (David Hutchings) about how and why the Conflict Thesis is so embedded in the 21st century Western zeitgeist.  As a testament to how embedded that is, Luke talked to a dozen non-experts (friends, family, neighbors) and asked them straightforward questions that give glimpses of this underlying Conflict Thesis thinking.

In particular, we talked about Galileo’s story, Bruno’s story, stories of the Church burning science books and even whole libraries, and the period in human history commonly referred to as the Dark Ages when the church is said to have suppressed science forcefully and brutally.  In each case, we explored:

As always, tell us your thoughts on this topic …

Click here for more information about David Hutchings’ books, including the one we discussed today: Of Popes and Unicorns.

If you enjoyed this episode, you may also like our mini-series of episodes on:

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Almost everyone in the 21st century Western world have bought into this unfounded myth (very possibly YOU too!?)

A few days ago, it was the 1st of April …. April Fool’s Day!  Instead of playing some kind of prank on our listeners, we thought we’d look at a great book about a hoax — on the level of a conspiracy theory — that has hoodwinked the world for almost two centuries!  This con-job has most people today believing in “the Dark Ages,” and that the church in the past often tortured and even killed scientists, and burned down the ancient library of Alexandria (containing thousands of books, the collective knowledge of the world at that time). When you, the listener, hear about the whole “Galileo Affair,” does your mind immediately jump to religion vs science, or do you imagine two different groups of philosophers/scholars disputing cosmology using Greek philosophical arguments?

The book we’ll be bringing to our listeners this week is Of Popes and Unicorns: Science, Christianity, and how the Conflict Thesis Fooled the World, by David Hutchings and James C. Ungureanu.  This week we’ll hear from James (a PhD historian), and next week from David (degree in physics; popular speaker and apologist).

James did his entire PhD thesis on the Conflict Thesis and who first proposed the idea.  He and David dug through historical archives, chasing down footnotes in textbooks, newspaper clippings, and letters between scholars, and the trail converged on two 19th century American scholars: John William Draper and Andrew Dixon White.  And their idea — the Conflict Thesis — claims that “the church and science are at war … fundamentally at odds … always have been, always will be.”

Draper and White were both brilliant polymaths, energetic intellectuals, and recognized scholars in a scholar’s world.  Draper was a scientist, White a literary scholar who had been on a path toward preaching, but was enticed away by intellectual influences into more secular pursuits.  Both wrote books which became the foundation for the Conflict Thesis.  Draper’s (History of the Conflict between Religion and Science) was dense and only readable to professional egg-heads, while White’s (A history of the warfare of science with theology in Christendom) was aimed at a more popular level. 

And both were Christians!  In fact, Draper was not attacking religion itself, but advocating for a return to a pure, rational form of Christianity; he saw the Protestant Reformation as a turning point not just for religion but for science as well. 

Nonetheless, both held, developed and passed on a distorted view of history of the relationship between church and science, which was then picked up and promoted by later scholars over the ensuing decades, and then more recently popularized by influencers like Carl Sagan, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins, the late Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Joe Rogan, to name just a few.  The Conflict thesis can be found in textbooks used in high schools, colleges, and universities … in the introductions to scholarly papers published in scientific and medical journals … in magazine articles and documentaries … popular TV shows (Family Guy) and movies like Dan Brown’s blockbuster the Da Vinci Code.  It’s no wonder that anyone growing up in 21st century Western society just absorbs this idea (the Conflict Thesis) by osmosis, takes it as a historical fact, and makes it a part of their worldview. 

Luke was curious about how Draper and White got their grossly distorted understanding of history: “Were they just honestly stupid, or deceitfully biased, or perhaps misinformed?”  We also talked about members of a mysterious “X Club” who met in lounges over cigars and drinks and discussed big ideas.  About the Free Religious Association: radical Unitarians, Universalists, spiritualists, transcendentalists, and other religious minorities who promoted free thought and more philosophy without the constraints of institutional Christianity, and promoting a new religion of Humanity.  About Stephen Jay Gould and “non-overlapping magisteria.” 

And about why this Conflict Thesis just doesn’t want to go away.  Luke asked if historians have given up debunking the distorted history. James replied historians are growing tired of trying; that the public just prefer to have a simple good guy / bad guy story, rather than the highly nuanced but much more accurate understanding.

As always, tell us your thoughts on this topic …

Click here for more information about Dr. James Ungureanu and the book we discussed.

If you enjoyed this episode, you may also like our mini-series of episodes on:

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Scott unpacks the journey he’s been on, and the very un-Evangelical and very unorthodox faith he now holds.

Three weeks ago, Luke sketched out what his faith looks like now, after completely deconstructing and reconstructing the one he grew up with.  This week it was Scott’s turn!

We first traced out the common path we’ve both been on.  Both of us spent our pre-teen years in a church-world that was largely irrelevant to us because it was imposed on us by our parents. But we then both dove headfirst into a very Fundamentalist Evangelical faith of our own during out late teens and early twenties.  But our inquiring minds and adventurous spirits took us down a path that constantly reevaluated that faith … we were on that metaphorical “slippery slope” … eventually finding ourselves decades later with a much more liberal faith that looks nothing like that Fundamentalist Evangelical one.  It was NOT that we had neglected our faith and just simply let it grow cold: instead, we actively pursued our faith and belief system, and it died slowly by a thousand cuts.  Many other people, including many of our listeners, have walked that very same path. A path that ends at a fork in the road: a decision that one must either reject faith entirely, or find an entirely new faith that is sustainable, meaningful and rewarding.

Scott then unpacked what he believes (and doesn’t believe) now.

First, God. Scott begins with accepting the existence of God as a given rather than looking for or requiring evidence or logic to prove that existence before moving forward.  Luke then pushed Scott on the hiddenness of God, whether God insists on a blind faith, whether God must be transcendent (completely beyond space and time), God’s aseity (existing of and from itself), Panentheism, Process Theology, and even Deism.

Next, Christianity and Jesus. Scott talked at length about the humanity of Christ: a Jewish rabbi, with human limitations, an extraordinary individual who lived in an obscure place and time, but nonetheless had an incredible impact on human history, and even a Messianic figure.  When pushed to talk about Christ’s divinity, Scott admitted to a lot less precision here, but felt he could at least say that Jesus channeled Godhood and God-awareness in a unique way, and that the face of God is the face of Christ. And what about the meaning or ‘purpose’ of Christ’s death? After briefly talking about the Moral Influence theory, about Jesus needing to die in order to light a fire within his followers, and Substitutionary Atonement, Scott landed more firmly on Christus Victor theory of atonement (overcoming through love and suffering). We noted that humans are learning to emulate his example (Moral Influence theory again?), overcoming and finding liberation through passive resistance, love and suffering (Ghandi in early 20th century India, and the civil rights march at Selma Alabama in 1965) rather than the vicious cycle of violence (Israel and Hamas today).

With only a few minutes left, and so much more to talk about, Scott briefly touched on the nature of faith, and some talk about heaven.

As always, tell us your thoughts on this topic …

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The book-end to our conversation last week with a conservative scholar, this time with a leading thinker on the opposite end of the spectrum.

Last week, Dr. Roger Olson — a highly-credentialed conservative Christian theologian — gave us his critique of liberal Christian theology.  In that discussion and in his book, he referred often to another highly credentialed scholar from the liberal end of the theological spectrum: Dr. Douglas F. Ottati.  We thought it would be good to get Dr. Ottati’s responses to Dr. Olson, as well as his comments on our theology.

We first asked him to define “liberal” theology, and where it came from.  He talked about “historically particular circumstances” and “historically particular societies” … the discovery of previously unknown people groups in the Americas … the intrusion of modernity, and wanting to engage with sciences … and the re-discovery of the social gospel.

Next, the definition of “orthodoxy” and Dr. Olson’s insistence that liberal Christians are not “orthodox.”  The word literally means “correct teaching,” but can also refer to adhering to a long-standing tradition.  Dr. Ottati challenged both meanings: “orthodoxy develops over time” … “there are orthodoxies, plural” … “one man’s orthodoxy is another man’s heresy” … “some statements of orthodoxy are just not found in the Bible!”

We then addressed the same four points that Luke focused on when he put his own liberal theology on the table two weeks ago, and asked Dr. Olson to comment on those four points last week:

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, including the one we highlighted today: A theology for the twenty first century.

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