Biblical Christianity is BankruptBy Rev Michael Dowd
The Center for Progressive Christianity
http://www.tcpc.org/library/article.cfm?library_id=843http://inewp.com/?p=4699...
Biblical Christianity that does not integrate our best evidential understanding of the universe and human nature is doomed precisely because it is wedded to unchanging scripture. It suffers from what I call "idolatry of the written word." No longer does it link together what young people learn in church and what they learn in their science and history classes at school—and on the Discovery and History channels at home. ...
...As Joseph Campbell, Huston Smith, Paul Tillich, Rudolf Bultmann, and other 20th century scholars of mythology and world religions remind us, we simply cannot understand religion and religious differences if we ignore the
human propensity to relationalize—that is, personify—anything important or mysterious. Evidence from a wide range of disciplines, from cognitive neuroscience to anthropology to cross-cultural study of the world’s myths and religions, all support the claim that
God is a personification not a person, and that we instinctually forget this. More, there is no counter-evidence! This fact alone makes sense of the
thousands of competing stories around the world as to what God supposedly said or did. "God" is a mythic name for Reality in all its sublime fullness. Any so-called God that is imagined as less than this is unworthy of our devotion and deserves to be mocked, as the New Atheists so readily do.
Poseidon was not the god of the oceans, as if some supernatural entity separate from water were looking down from on high or rising from the deep. Poseidon was the personification of the incomprehensibly powerful and capricious seas.
Sol was not the spirit of the sun, as if there were a separation between the two. Sol was a sacred name for that seemingly eternal, life-giving source of heat and light—and occasionally life-taking source in times of desperate drought. By saying “Sol,” “Helios,” or some other proper name, our ancestors experienced that reality as a “Thou” to be related to.Today most of us have a starkly different subjective experience. We look up and say “the sun” and think of “it” in a depersonalized way: not as the God “Helios” but as the generator of the element helium through stellar nucleosynthesis. Such an intellectual gain need not, however, come at an emotional loss. Again, my relationship with the Sun, as with all of reality, is personal.
Whenever any story or any scriptural passage claims, "God said this" or "God did that," what follows is always, necessarily, an interpretation. It's an interpretation of what some person or group of people thought or felt or sensed or wished Reality was saying or doing, and almost always as justification after the fact or to make a theological point.
There is no compelling evidence that such subjectively meaningful claims are ever objective, measurable truth. In other words, had CNN or ABC News been there to record the moment of "divine revelation," there most likely would have been nothing out of the ordinary (nothing miraculous) to report on the evening news—nothing other than what was coming out of someone's mouth, or pen, or whatever folks wrote with back then.
If we fail to grasp this not only will we trivialize the divine, but also, even more tragically, we will miss what Reality, or God, is up to today.My own transformation from biblical Christianity to evolutionary Christianity—and from religious un-naturalist to religious naturalist—demonstrates the profound difference between believing in a personal God and relating to Reality personally, that is, communing with Life As It Really Is. For example,
prayer from my now-evolutionary perspective is a far more intimate process, and does not require me to believe in anything otherworldly.
Prayer is no longer an act of petitioning a far-off, invisible, unnatural entity to miraculously intervene in the world according to my wishes or desires. With an understanding of God as no less than a personification of Reality, through prayer I experience myself as a cell in deep communion with the larger body of which I am part. ...
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