From the post The Apocalypse Isn’t Coming; Its Already Happened at peterrollins.net

Fundamentalist Christianity has long expressed a view of apocalypse as some future event that will consume the present world and replace it with a new one. Yet while this is a bloody and destructive vision I will argue that it is inherently conservative in nature and nowhere near violent enough to warrant the name “apocalypse”. For those who hold to such a vision are willing to imagine absolutely everything around them changing so that their present values and beliefs can remain utterly unchanged.

Emphasis mine.

Richard Beck strikes a chord with me again, discussing Thoreau and The Narrowness of My Experience

For my own part, I’ve always felt that philosophy and theology is a form of coping. A way of making sense of my experience. As I experience, I think. Often theologically.

Some people, it seems, have no experience of God. At least no experience they trust. Thus, they feel no need to “make sense” of an experience they lack. These persons are agnostics and atheists. And to be clear, I don’t fault my skeptical friends for “making sense” of their experience in this particular way. Their experience is their experience. I can’t argue them out of what they feel to be true in their bones.

In a related way, there are those of us who have (and continue to have) experiences that we can only “make sense” of by labeling them as holy, sacred, transcendent, divine, or spiritual. William James called these experiences “ontological emotions,” a feeling of thereness. And in light of these experiences people often “make sense” of their lives in ways that we might label “religious.”

From the post Adam and Eve among Evangelicals and around the Blogosphere | Exploring Our Matrix

In addition to the NPR article, around the blogosphere several other posts touched on this same basic subject. Pete Enns continued his series at BioLogos on the CSBI doctrine of Scripture, asking whether the Bible is historically infallible and inerrant, with attention to the early chapters of Genesis. RJS at Jesus Creed discusses how those stories came to be in the Bible, and asks whether it matters that ancient readers would have assumed their basic truthfulness. (My answer is that no, the fact that ancient readers and even Biblical authors assumed things were factual because they had no way to know otherwise, does not justify those of us who do know otherwise of insisting on their factuality even so).

From the Futurama movie Into the Wild Green Yonder comes a description of a fictional species competing with others for dominance in a given environment.

The frogs … evolved into vicious killing machines, honed by the merciless forces of natural selection and intelligent design.

I like how they take the intelligent design aspect to it’s logical conclusion: if species really developed by design then that process incorporates as much indifference to suffering as “random variation” does so long as natural selection is still in effect.

Wow, this guy nails a description of depression pretty well. From the post Depression, Hope, and Travis Tritt « The Seeking Pastor

I had been used to having success without trying very hard.  Good grades, somewhat decent athletic ability, spiritual growth, a good family–all of these things had come to me quite easily or at least it seemed that way.  But when I moved out, got married, got a job, and became a pastor all I did was fail. 

And fail and fail and fail.

It didn’t matter how hard I tried, how much I prayed, or how many tears I cried.  I kept on failing.  This led me to one of the worst thoughts that people can have about themselves.  I began to think of myself as a failure. 

I know now that a failure is an event, not a person.  I didn’t know that then.  My marriage, job, and church were all having problems and it was all my fault.

From the post Five Final Thoughts on “Love Wins” (and then I’m finished) | Shawn Smucker

When Jesus died on the cross, two thieves died beside him. If I would have been a follower of Jesus on that day, it would have been easy for me to look at those thieves and think, “Those evil men are going straight to hell.” But what would have been unknown to me was the fact that one of those thieves looked at Jesus and said “Remember me!” Simply that. No Roman Road. No prayer of salvation. Did he even know Jesus’s name? We’ll never know. But he asked Jesus to remember him, and Jesus said he would join him in paradise that very day.

Who am I to make a judgment call on whether that person of another faith did or did not go to heaven? How can I possibly know?

From the post Imprecise Language about the Bible’s Authority: The Second Summary Statement of CSBI | The BioLogos Forum

You probably need to read the development of Dr. Enns’ argument building to this paragraph to understand it’s full import, but this is the paragraph that contains the major point of the article so it’s the paragraph that I excerpted.

It should not be presumed that Scripture’s authority in touching on the matter of creation demands a literal reading of Genesis 1. Put differently, it is not at all clear that the Spirit’s superintendence of the biblical writers means that historical and scientific accuracy is now required of a faithful reading of Genesis 1 simply because Scripture is “authoritative” and “touches” on the issue of creation. The Spirit’s superintendence might have led the ancient biblical writers to “touch” on the matter of creation according to ancient ways of understanding Scripture, not beholden to our current notions. In that case, just what we mean by biblical authority with respect to Genesis 1 becomes a far more complicated matter than CSBI lets on.

From the post Doctrinal Conformity | Unreasonable Faith

History of this type comes down to an assessment of probabilities. Stark has produced a very likely interpretation of what the passage [2 Kings 3:26-27] meant (or, rather, he’s repeating a likely interpretation that most historians agree on. He didn’t invent it.) But for someone like Hess, any interpretation that runs counter to his doctrinal position is impossible.

It’s an interesting problem: how do you hold a discussion with someone who cannot ever accept that you might have a point? No matter how persuasive or logical your arguments, they can never allow themselves to agree.

From the post The Passion, prophecy, the pedigree of proof-texting, and a podcast

Preachers and inspirational/devotional writers make whole bales of hay out of this sort of typology and similarly anachronistic readings of the OT: our congregations are led to believe that there is christological, or at very least explicitly Christian, significance to be found in seemingly every nook and cranny of the OT. … We should keep around the Old Testament not because of an erroneous assumption that it is crypto-Christian, but precisely because it’s a testimony of what faith in God looked like before Christ. Reading the Old Testament makes me glad I’m a Christian.

From the post No One Believes That The God Of The Bible Exists Anymore at Exploring Our Matrix:

To put it bluntly, classical Christianity is itself now our Old Testament…We have to use traditional Christianity in the same way as Christianity itself has always used the Old Testament. In both cases there is a great gulf but there is also continuity of spirit and religious values…When a Christian sings a psalm he knows there is a religion-gap and a culture-gap, but it does not worry him because he believes his faith to be the legitimate successor of the faith of the psalmist. Similarly, since the Enlightenment there has developed a religion-gap and a culture-gap between us and traditional Christianity, but we may still be justified in using the old words if we can plausibly argue that our present faith and spiritual values are the legitimate heirs of the old” (Don Cupitt, Taking Leave of God, p.135).