This week at the Brown Bag Bible Study, we moved onto the second chapter of When Christians Get It Wrong which involved how Christians deal with scientific advancement as well as how we incorporate politics into our Christian life. While these two topics may seem very dissimilar, they distinctly have in common both fear and ignorance.
Growing up in a conservative area, anytime the evolution theory came up at school, it was met with much criticism from my classmates... and myself. It was derided as a concept incompatible with Christian teaching, and you either had to believe God created us or we were evolved from more primitive life forms, and there was no in-between. Looking back on my days in biology class, I wish there had been a third explanation. It would have been an explanation that allowed both the Creation Story and the Evolution theory to complement each other instead of forcing them to tear each other down. An explanation that wouldn't box God into something that limits his powers. An explanation that wouldn't make Christians seem like we're living in a bubble.
Yes, that would have been nice. Instead of embracing scientific advancements, many Christians will reject anything that doesn't exactly line up with a literal reading of the Genesis account. And I think the motivation behind this rejection is not just ignorance, but fear. Fear that the next advancement will disprove God all together. Fear that science will prove their way of life a sham. When Christians have these fears, I must question how deep their faith is.
The other topic of the day was how Christians deal with politics. Once again, growing up in the Bible Belt, I have found that if a church does indeed align itself to a certain political party, it will more than likely be the Republican Party they align themselves to. However, when I was in DC, I found that many churches align much of their views to the Democratic Party. What happens again is that we box God into a certain political party making His ultimate wisdom and power only as great as either the Republican Party or the Democratic Party. That would be a really sucky world if that were true. Christians use fear and ignorance again by promoting a message that says God takes a certain side in politics. Adam Hamilton mentions in his book about how it is important for us to be involved with issues of our time. Our time being the key words. We must differentiate worldly issues that will at some point come to a close and Kingdom issues .
In addition to last week's descriptions of Christians, judgmental, hypocritical, and unloving, we now have ignorant. We can fix this moniker. We don't have to be the joke of the scientific community. Instead of constantly shooting down any scientific idea, we could instead use it to magnify and glorify our God. Crazy, I know. Only when we are able to identify our ignorance will we as a Christian community be able to minister to an increasingly educated world.
-Jeremy
Hey,
ReplyDeleteI found your thoughts interesting. Catholics can believe in evolution as long as we believe that God created creatures with the ability to evolve. I mean He is God after all.
And politically, I've always thought Christians tend to be democrats since we tend to want to help the oppressed and give the poor better opportunity. The prolife thing is where the big struggle for me. I don't care for the republican party or the democrats truly, but I will not vote for a candidate that is prochoice.
Sounds like the study you're doing is interesting