Evolving Christianity

Evolving Christianity

Seem like something on the order of a fairy tale?

I’ve been looking for an intelligible faith my whole life. By intelligible I mean something that makes sense of the way we look at the world, how we understand it works. It used to be that the ol’ time religion with its language of blood sacrifice made sense. We thought that blood had magical properties back then, but we don’t think that anymore so what sense does this sacrifical metaphor make? The answer is to many folks, “Not much,” and that is why I believe churches have emptied. But I think the langauge of sacrifice points to the nature of evolution. The language of Trinity points to the three dynamics of relationship that humans, no matter what their tradition, have been experiencing for as along as we can tell. It’s a question of understanding what the early Christians were pointing at when they described the faith in what seems to us today, a very strange way. Just as our worldview has evovled, so too must our understanding of faith. This class is about finding the language that makes sense of the old and draws us into an ever more beautiful dawn.

In some ways this class is a mirror image of the World Spirituality class. In that class we seek to find a shared language, the underlying structures of faith traditions generally, so that we have a way to share with and challenge one another to grow and develop. Ths class seeks to take those shared structures and recognize how Christianity has wrestled with them over the years.