The greatest commandment is to love God with all your heart, soul, and mind. The second is to love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus says, “All the law and the prophets hang on these two commandments”. So LOVE is what all righteousness (law) and revelation (prophets) depend upon and stem from, first of God and then of each other. Without this love, we miss the whole point of our creation. It stands to reason that the Holy Spirit wouldn’t inspire one to break these two commandments, so we can assume that any action or thought that breaks these commandments is not inspired by God.
"No one who is speaking by the spirit of God says ‘Jesus be cursed’ and no one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the spirit" (1 Corinthians 12:3). That which glorifies God, bearing witness to His supremacy, is of the Spirit, and that which vilifies Him is not. Scripture can be God-glorifying or it can be used (improperly) as a condemnation of God, so it really depends on the context; neither the written word nor the findings of science are of themselves holy or unholy.
Many people, including myself before I became a Christian, see the book of Genesis and its obviously flawed cosmology as a barrier between themselves and Christianity. I found the way through, but the barrier still isolates many people from the message of Christ and the salvation found in Him. This is the greatest of tragedies and must be resolved.
We must realize that adherence to a literal interpretation of Genesis is not central to Christian theology, and isn’t the pill that must be swallowed to be saved. Rather, the divinity of Christ, His sacrifice for the sake of our salvation, His resurrection and ascension are, cumulatively, the pill, and it’s a much smaller pill when one doesn’t have to simultaneously throw up centuries worth of brilliant and honest work from the best scientific minds.
Biblical literalists may want to pick nits and posit stale arguments about some aspect of the scientific perspective on the origins of the universe, but the conflict basically boils down to one group of people that want to hold up a literal interpretation of the Bible and make science adhere to it, and another group of people who want to destroy God and start from scratch. Neither of those positions is satisfactory; we must find a middle ground that moderates on both sides can not only accept, but relish.
In fact I think plenty of people would stand in the center of those two extreme positions, thinking there is a middle ground, knowing that Genesis is not literally true, possibly even suspecting that the story of Jesus is in some ways embellished beyond His own intent. But in spite of all that, they sense a deeper truth that their spirit cannot and will not deny.
These half-Christians may identify themselves as atheists, Christians, or "just spiritual", they might believe in God--maybe a few even go to church--but they also know there’s something undeniable about evolution. They might think God created the universe at the point of the Big Bang, but the Big Bang doesn’t answer their questions: Where did we come from? Why? They know intuitively that no matter how deep we go with science, it will never answer these questions, yet we will still need answers. The spiritual realm has always been the place we look for those answers, and it will always be so.
As Christians, we need to recognize these half-Christians as our neighbors, love them, and stop trying to make them give up Darwin for Genesis. Get to know and love Darwin and the 14 billion year epic of Creation. Praise God! What they really need to understand is that God gave His Son so that they would not perish in an unjust universe, but that they would live, justified, in His Grace.
Who's with me?
Showing posts with label God. Show all posts
Showing posts with label God. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Spirits in the ethereal world
We are spirits in the material world, so the song goes. What is material about the world? Newton boiled it down to particles with well-defined behavior, though there are some notable inconsistencies between the observable universe and what Newtonian physics predicts.
Then Einstein came along and said (if I understand relativity at all, which I might not), we shouldn't "nevermind" that, we need to patch those holes, so he boiled down to discrete units of energy with well-defined behavior. But there were still holes, they were just smaller, and took eight years of college to detect.
So now we have quantum theory or quantum string theory or some other theory that none of us regular folks, even the pretty smart ones, really understand (certainly I don't), but there are still holes that drive guys like Stephen Hawking up a wall. But in any case I hear that at the quantum level things get quite unpredictable and the units, which are hardly discrete, start behaving unpredictably, with a sort of life of their own. I fail to keep my finger on the pulse of physics research to a sufficient degree to claim to know how far this rabbit hole goes, but none of these pills seem to make me larger; each seems to make me and the whole universe more empty and more insubstantial than the last. So "we are spirits in the ethereal world" is perhaps closer to the mark.
The Heisenberg uncertainty principle, if I understand it at all, tells us that the better you know where a thing is, the less you know about what it’s doing, and the more you know about what it’s doing, the less you know about where it is. What this means is that things are not so much firm objects in space and time, but more nebulous clouds of possibility ; the more you nail down where they are, the less they seem to be anywhere at all.
By being afraid to explore the deeper reality of the universe, we also deprive ourselves of the deeper meaning. I think the scariest thing for us, though, is the deeper meaning, because inevitably it tends to imply that our self-importance is a delusion. Like currents in a river, we are not made of the same stuff from one moment to the next, yet there we are. But the reality is, if we choose it to be, that the more we understand the ethereality of our form, the more we see ourselves as patterns in the flow of space and time, the more miraculous we become--perhaps more miraculous than we had ever thought possible--and as organizing forces in a chaotic and unpredictable universe, more important than ever.
Realizing this, perhaps it's not so hard to understand how there could be some creator God out there with time in His busy schedule to love each and every one of us.
Then Einstein came along and said (if I understand relativity at all, which I might not), we shouldn't "nevermind" that, we need to patch those holes, so he boiled down to discrete units of energy with well-defined behavior. But there were still holes, they were just smaller, and took eight years of college to detect.
So now we have quantum theory or quantum string theory or some other theory that none of us regular folks, even the pretty smart ones, really understand (certainly I don't), but there are still holes that drive guys like Stephen Hawking up a wall. But in any case I hear that at the quantum level things get quite unpredictable and the units, which are hardly discrete, start behaving unpredictably, with a sort of life of their own. I fail to keep my finger on the pulse of physics research to a sufficient degree to claim to know how far this rabbit hole goes, but none of these pills seem to make me larger; each seems to make me and the whole universe more empty and more insubstantial than the last. So "we are spirits in the ethereal world" is perhaps closer to the mark.
The Heisenberg uncertainty principle, if I understand it at all, tells us that the better you know where a thing is, the less you know about what it’s doing, and the more you know about what it’s doing, the less you know about where it is. What this means is that things are not so much firm objects in space and time, but more nebulous clouds of possibility ; the more you nail down where they are, the less they seem to be anywhere at all.
By being afraid to explore the deeper reality of the universe, we also deprive ourselves of the deeper meaning. I think the scariest thing for us, though, is the deeper meaning, because inevitably it tends to imply that our self-importance is a delusion. Like currents in a river, we are not made of the same stuff from one moment to the next, yet there we are. But the reality is, if we choose it to be, that the more we understand the ethereality of our form, the more we see ourselves as patterns in the flow of space and time, the more miraculous we become--perhaps more miraculous than we had ever thought possible--and as organizing forces in a chaotic and unpredictable universe, more important than ever.
Realizing this, perhaps it's not so hard to understand how there could be some creator God out there with time in His busy schedule to love each and every one of us.
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