How difficult it is to honor the ancient customs and traditions of our religion and stay intellectually honest at the same time. Our Christian faith is ageless but it is encumbent on us to keep it relevant with a language and form that’s believable. To do so requires very great care to utilize modern language and an interpretation of those time honored truths that fit realistic, scientific, and current cultural paradigms. This is not a “selling out” of the core beliefs, but a deepening understanding of them.
Equal care must be taken to mine the spiritual truths from the various genres that make a literal interpretation unworkable. Poetry, prophecy, and prose weave in and out of the fabric known as the Bible, as well as another dozen plus forms.
The need to restate the ancient Christian doctrines comes with great danger, but to live in 2,000+ year old language, cosmology, and superstitious belief systems is to fail our task of bringing the GOOD NEWS forward into the decades and centuries in which we live. A world is waiting for us to make sense of what seems nonsensical.
Many are struggling. Many more have simply given up!
How shall we help them and us? We must be both faithful and credible. We must be led by the Spirit while keepig our feet on solid ground. God help us all.
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