So, I subscribe to an email news letter for a ministry called Reasons to Believe, yesterday it included this:
Dan Brown, best-selling author of The DaVinci Code and of the highly anticipated novel The Lost Symbol, made an intensely personal revelation in an interview with Parade magazine (September 13, 2009). He described how a pastor’s response to his probing questions about science and the Bible led him to “gravitate away from religion.” More recently, though, Brown has come to see “an order and a spiritual aspect to science.”
This sends my mind down two trails. One thinking about how science and faith don’t have to be at odds and the other about how disregarded and downplayed questions turn honest inquirers into cynical agnostics (at best) or at worst skeptics who don’t look ask enough question and write best selling books that are filled with falsehoods.
I’ll go down trail number 2.
When I was working as a campus minister at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, I had an opportunity to build a relationship with the Wiccan and Neo-Pagan group on campus. They had tried to organize as an official student organization and the student government board tried to turn them down because they were a “unusual religious group.” I helped to lead the charge of Christian groups who backed them up and eventually helped to get them recognized as an official group on campus. Why? Because EUP is a state school and legally they can’t deny them, but (more importantly) they have the right to use their student activities fees to organize however they want as long as they have enough students.
For a while some of us went to their weekly meetings and some of them came to our weekly meetings – because we were friends. On three or four occasions Carrie and I hung out with them for a few hours afterward in one of their apartments (on their own turf). While we were there Carrie asked a great question:
What was it that made you decide to be Wiccan or to believe what you do now?
With only a single exception all of them told stories of asking parents, pastors or some other spiritual authority in their life a question that was a difficult question. Some of them asked why it was okay that God had the Hebrews kill people in the Old Testament, others asked how Jesus was both human and God at the same time, one I think even asked a question about dinosaurs. All of them either got in response an angry “Don’t ask questions like that.“ Others simply got a dismissive, “What does that matter? Just believe it.”
They don’t ask those questions anymore, because they have dismissed the Christian faith entirely.
I don’t know that I blame them. Actually, I know that I don’t blame them.
If the Christian faith is true we should not be afraid of questions – it can handle it. If it’s true we should not be afraid to say “I don’t know,” if we can’t we probably need to repent of being arrogant enough to think that we know everything. You can even say, “I think this, but I’m not sure, let’s try to figure that out together.”
So, what about dinosaurs, the Trinity, free will, predestination, how the world will end, how it started, how many angels fit on the head of a pin, and how can Jesus be both God and human?
I don’t know for sure, but I think I can give some of the answer…
Well, except for the angels thing… that’s just a stupid question.
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