Evolution is Now Accepted By More and More Evangelicals! Yesterday's Liberals Are Now Today's Evangelicals, Go Figure!
Evangelicals in the nineteen seventies rejected Karl Barth, women in leadership/teaching roles, the annihilation view of hell, inclusivist salvation, the mythical interpretation of the Genesis creation stories, the late dating of 2nd Isaiah and Daniel, and they especially rejected homosexuality and evolution. Any attempt to reject the historicity of the Garden of Eden story of Adam and Eve's fall into sin (from whence this all began) was rejected outright without a second thought. These liberal views are now being accepted by evangelicals while still calling themselves evangelicals rather than liberals.
Karl W. Gilberson said "The Evolution Wars Are Here to Stay and Heads Will Continue to Roll." Later I'll be sharing books by evangelicals, or former evangelicals, who now embrace evolution. It's something I never expected would happen. This dispute is taking place along with the debate evangelicals are having over homosexuality. It must be fun being an evangelical these days. Not! Evolutionary science and the acceptance of gay marriages is the wave of the future among evangelicals. You can count on it. Gone will be a historical fall into sin by two individuals named Adam (male) and Eve (female)--which never made sense anyway--and the prohibition against homosexuality. There are apparently no limits to their ability to find loopholes in the Bible so they can obfuscate their theology. It will become the new evangelical orthodoxy in the future, as I have predicted. Then amnesia will set in, and future evangelicals will claim true evangelicals always stood for these things! Their amnesia will provide quite the laugh to the rest of us, since we saw it coming. In fact, that's what they've been doing since the inception of their faith when it came to the question of who should be circumcised.
Debate Books:
Ardel B. Caneday, Matthew Barrett, Stanley N. Gundry, eds., Four Views on the Historical Adam.
Charles Halton, Stanley N. Gundry, James K. Hoffmeier, Genesis: History, Fiction, or Neither?: Three Views on the Bible’s Earliest Chapters.
William T. Cavanaugh and James K. A. Smith, eds. Evolution and the Fall.
Other books, probably written by evangelicals, or former evangelicals:
Ronald E. Osborn, Death Before the Fall: Biblical Literalism and the Problem of Animal Suffering.This book is billed by the evangelical flagship magazine "Christianity Today" as "A full-bore, unflinching assault on literalism in biblical interpretation..." It also has a foreword by evangelical John Walton.
John Walton, The Lost World of Adam and Eve: Genesis 2-3 and the Human Origins Debate.
Peter Enns, The Evolution of Adam: What the Bible Does and Doesn't Say about Human Origins.
Scot McKnight, Dennis R. Venema, Adam and the Genome: Reading Scripture after Genetic Science.
Denis O. Lamoureux, Evolution: Scripture and Nature Say Yes.
Denis O. Lamoureux, Evolutionary Creation: A Christian Approach to Evolution.
Karl Giberson, Saving Darwin: How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution.
Karl Giberson, Saving the Original Sinner: How Christians Have Used the Bible's First Man to Oppress, Inspire, and Make Sense of the World.
Kenneth R. Miller, Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul.
Kenneth R. Miller, Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution.
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Andrew J. (Jack) Good, an ordained pastor of the United Church of Christ and Educated at Boston University School of Theology wrote the book, The Dishonest Church.
The Christianity of the future will eventually be innoxious. Christianity has always changed like a chameleon to science, culture and the times in general. It's emphatically NOT the case that the Christianity of the 1st or 2nd centuries has survived. The heresy of a previous generation just becomes the orthodoxy of the next one. Subsequent generations develop an amnesia about what Christianity used to be. That's it. The conservatives in one generation become the moderates in the next one who become the liberals in the following one, and sometimes atheists. In each of these subsequent generations conservatives who object to this trend start their own churches, publishing houses and seminaries. Then these new churches, publishing houses and seminaries follow the same trend. And as they do, conservatives break off again and the trend starts all over. Do you want to know the Christianity of the future in America? I suspect it might look more like the inclusivist/universalism of Rob Bell along with the pop-psychology gospel of Joel Olsteen. There's also the Emerging Church movement.
If Nothing Else Look at the Trend, From Conservative to Moderate to Liberal to Agnostic to Atheist.
Karl W. Gilberson said "The Evolution Wars Are Here to Stay and Heads Will Continue to Roll." Later I'll be sharing books by evangelicals, or former evangelicals, who now embrace evolution. It's something I never expected would happen. This dispute is taking place along with the debate evangelicals are having over homosexuality. It must be fun being an evangelical these days. Not! Evolutionary science and the acceptance of gay marriages is the wave of the future among evangelicals. You can count on it. Gone will be a historical fall into sin by two individuals named Adam (male) and Eve (female)--which never made sense anyway--and the prohibition against homosexuality. There are apparently no limits to their ability to find loopholes in the Bible so they can obfuscate their theology. It will become the new evangelical orthodoxy in the future, as I have predicted. Then amnesia will set in, and future evangelicals will claim true evangelicals always stood for these things! Their amnesia will provide quite the laugh to the rest of us, since we saw it coming. In fact, that's what they've been doing since the inception of their faith when it came to the question of who should be circumcised.
Debate Books:
Ardel B. Caneday, Matthew Barrett, Stanley N. Gundry, eds., Four Views on the Historical Adam.
Charles Halton, Stanley N. Gundry, James K. Hoffmeier, Genesis: History, Fiction, or Neither?: Three Views on the Bible’s Earliest Chapters.
William T. Cavanaugh and James K. A. Smith, eds. Evolution and the Fall.
Other books, probably written by evangelicals, or former evangelicals:
Ronald E. Osborn, Death Before the Fall: Biblical Literalism and the Problem of Animal Suffering.This book is billed by the evangelical flagship magazine "Christianity Today" as "A full-bore, unflinching assault on literalism in biblical interpretation..." It also has a foreword by evangelical John Walton.
John Walton, The Lost World of Adam and Eve: Genesis 2-3 and the Human Origins Debate.
Peter Enns, The Evolution of Adam: What the Bible Does and Doesn't Say about Human Origins.
Scot McKnight, Dennis R. Venema, Adam and the Genome: Reading Scripture after Genetic Science.
Denis O. Lamoureux, Evolution: Scripture and Nature Say Yes.
Denis O. Lamoureux, Evolutionary Creation: A Christian Approach to Evolution.
Karl Giberson, Saving Darwin: How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution.
Karl Giberson, Saving the Original Sinner: How Christians Have Used the Bible's First Man to Oppress, Inspire, and Make Sense of the World.
Kenneth R. Miller, Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul.
Kenneth R. Miller, Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution.
---------------
Andrew J. (Jack) Good, an ordained pastor of the United Church of Christ and Educated at Boston University School of Theology wrote the book, The Dishonest Church.
Good reveals that most of his fellow pastors in the mainstream American churches are systematically preaching from their pulpits teachings which they themselves know to be blatant lies. Why the systematic lying? The basic problem, Good explains, is a divergence during the last several centuries between what he calls "academic" Christianity and what he dubs "popular" Christianity.This difference is accurate, although it can better be described as the difference between educated people and uneducated people, between people who care about truth from people who like their childhood fairy tales, between people who accept the science of evolution and those who refuse to remain ignorant about it. The preachers Good speaks of are spoon feeding their parishioners a fantasyland they wish to hear for fear of offending them, or worse yet, getting fired. Bart Ehrman has said the same kinds of things.
The Christianity of the future will eventually be innoxious. Christianity has always changed like a chameleon to science, culture and the times in general. It's emphatically NOT the case that the Christianity of the 1st or 2nd centuries has survived. The heresy of a previous generation just becomes the orthodoxy of the next one. Subsequent generations develop an amnesia about what Christianity used to be. That's it. The conservatives in one generation become the moderates in the next one who become the liberals in the following one, and sometimes atheists. In each of these subsequent generations conservatives who object to this trend start their own churches, publishing houses and seminaries. Then these new churches, publishing houses and seminaries follow the same trend. And as they do, conservatives break off again and the trend starts all over. Do you want to know the Christianity of the future in America? I suspect it might look more like the inclusivist/universalism of Rob Bell along with the pop-psychology gospel of Joel Olsteen. There's also the Emerging Church movement.
If Nothing Else Look at the Trend, From Conservative to Moderate to Liberal to Agnostic to Atheist.
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