What Do We Say about,... the Bible? Is it Still Relevant?

What Do We Say about,… the Bible?  Is It Still Relevant?

Luke 4:14-21

February 12, 2012

Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding country. He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone. When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

Have you ever been booed?  I mean really booed by others?  I’ve been booed twice.  I actually got booed at my wedding.  You know how at weddings people clink their glasses to get the couple to kiss.  I told Diane that I wasn’t going to do that, and so when people started to clink their glasses to get us to kiss, I shook my head “no.”  That’s when they booed us. 

I also was booed once in a class at seminary.  It was my first year, and I don’t remember what the class was, but we were in the midst of a discussion on the relevancy of the Bible in today’s world.  I made the comment that I just wish we could get rid of the Old Testament.  I said that it was filled with violence, bigotry, and archaic ideas, and that we would be much better off without it.  After I said it, members of the class actually booed me.  I chalked it up to their being ignorant, but over the years I discovered that I was the ignorant one.

My comment was born out of my ignorance.  I had read the Bible from cover to cover the summer before seminary, but I have to admit that I didn’t really understand much of it.  The Bible really isn’t a book to be read cover to cover like a novel.  It’s a book to be read slowly with biblical aids to help it make sense.  But I didn’t know that.  When I read the Old Testament it confused me. I wasn’t sure if it was accurate history or not, and I couldn’t keep all the stories straight.  Also, when I read the prophets, I couldn’t figure out what they were so angry about.  Same with Paul.  I now understand the different books, but back then I was just confused. So I picked up and held up the violence and what seemed like bigotry, without recognizing that this was a very small percentage of the Old Testament.

My beliefs about the Old Testament reflected what a lot of people in and outside the church think about the Bible.  Over the years I’ve heard many, many people complain that it’s an archaic and outdated book full of ancient superstition, violence, bigotries, and ignorance.

Is the Bible outdated?  Is it still relevant to today?  How we answer that question has a lot to do with whether we’ve actually read the Bible or not, and how we’ve read it if we have.  What I’ve noticed over the years is that a lot of people have strong opinions on the Bible, despite the fact that they’ve never really read it, or if they have, they’ve read it like I did before going to seminary.  I had a strong opinion based on little knowledge and lots of ignorance.  But the question still remains:  Is it outdated?  Is it still relevant?  To answer those questions, you have to get clear on what the Bible is and isn’t. 

First, despite what many Christians argue, the Bible is not a history book.  It’s a book of wisdom and revelation.  The Bible is not trying to tell us what happened in human history or the world’s history.  It is trying to tell us about who God is and who we are.  It is trying to tell us about what God has done, is doing, and will do.  It uses history, but it’s not a book of history. 

One reason it is clearly not a book of history is that back when the books of the Bible were being written people didn’t think historically.  That’s hard for us to understand in our modern age, but to delve into history as a study, you need one crucial thing that people of ancient times didn’t have:  leisure time for study, as well as written records to study.  To wonder what happened in history, people have to have the time to sit around and think, and in the ancient world people didn’t have that time.  They often lived hand-to-mouth.  They had very little free time.  So their questions weren’t historical questions about what happened.  Their questions were about why life is so hard and where God is in the midst of this hard life.  When we treat the Bible like a history book, we actually misuse it.  . 

When the Bible is read literally as history, it gets stripped of its wisdom.  As a history book it’s “okay” history.  Many, or even most, of its stories are based on real historical events, but that doesn’t mean that they were written to give us historical accounts.  Remember, the biblical writers were trying to tell us about God, not history. That’s why, in Genesis, there are two different creation stories.  Because we have a need to have only one story due to our desire to have one historical account, we tend to merge the stories to create one story, but there are two, and they can’t be easily merged. 

The first story is the one we often cite.  It’s in chapter one of Genesis, and it tells the story of God creating the world in six days and resting on the seventh.  In this account, humans are the last to be created.  Everything comes before them, and on the sixth day God creates humans, and it insinuates that God created a bunch of them, not just one or two.  As it says, “So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”  So in this story, God creates humans last, and probably creates a whole tribe of humans.  Then in chapter two a whole different story is told.  In this one God creates a garden with a spring welling up in the center that becomes the headwaters of the great rivers of the Middle East.  In this story one human is created first.  The plants and animals all come second.  Toward the end the human is put to sleep and a male and female are created from that one human. 

            These two stories conflict with each other, especially if they are historical accounts.  But they don’t conflict if the purpose of the stories is to tell us about what God has done, is doing, and will do.  In the first story we learn that everything is created as good, and that we humans are created in God’s image.  It’s telling us that we are good, the world is good, God is good, and there is something of God in each and every one of us.  The second story tells us something similar, but it also tells us that there is a propensity toward sin among humans—toward carving our own way in ignorance of what God wants. 

            The Bible knows that these two stories exist side-by-side, yet it doesn’t try to reconcile the two.  It puts them both there to teach us about God and ourselves.  The problem is that we humans (perhaps out of our sinful need for things to have things fit our image) cram the stories together and treat them like historical documents on creation.  We have a need for this, but the Bible doesn’t.  It gives us two stories and says to us, “Learn about God, the universe, life, and yourself from these stories.” 

            The creation stories aren’t the only place in the Bible where different accounts are given.  A bit later in Genesis we get another conflict.  In chapter six, we hear the Noah story that we’re all familiar with.  Noah builds an ark and puts in the animals two-by-two.  But then in chapter seven we get a surprise.  The story is retold and God tells Noah to build and ark and put the animals in seven-by-seven for every ritually clean animal, and two-by-two for every ritually unclean animal.  If it’s history, why the two stories?  Because it’s not trying to tell us history, per se, but about God and us.  These are stories about human sin, and God’s attempt to get humans on the right track.  One is told from a general Jewish perspective, the other from a more orthodox Jewish perspective.  We don’t see the need for the two perspectives today, which is why we tend to choose the first story over the other, but back in ancient Judaism they did see the need because they were trying to communicate different things through each story. 

            Again, there are other areas where the Bible conflicts.  For example, look at the Gospels.  There are four gospel stories.  If it were history, wouldn’t we only have one?  And looking at the Gospel stories you find that some actually conflict in the details.  For instance, let’s just look at the time when Jesus overturns the tables in the Temple.  In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, this takes place after Jesus has spent three years teaching, preaching, and healing.  It’s part of what irritates the Jewish authorities, and eventually leads them to crucify him.  But in John’s gospel Jesus overturns the tables right after he’s baptized.  Then he goes on to do his three-year ministry.  Some have tried to say that the discrepancy is due to the fact that Jesus must of have overturned the tables twice—once in the beginning of his ministry, and once during the end.  But that’s not what the Bible tells us.  The Bible doesn’t care about the chronology because it’s trying to tell us about the nature of Jesus, of God, and of us.  It’s not trying to be history.  It’s trying to be a book of wisdom and revelation. 

We have a need to turn the Bible into something it isn’t.  What the Bible is best at, though, is lifting the veil between us and the Divine.  It doesn’t care so much about history as it does about trying to help us connect with God and to see God all through everyday life.  All of its stories are about people experiencing God, people struggling to follow God, people calling on each other to be better in following God, and instructions on experiencing and following God.  It also contains prayers (the Psalms and Lamentations), wisdom (Proverbs and Ecclesiastes), and much more.  And at times it actually argues against itself.

For instance, in the earlier books of the Bible there’s an implicit theology that when we do good, God will bless us with stuff—wealth and health.  And when we don’t do good, we get punished by God taking away our stuff.  But the whole Book of Job argues against this belief by suggesting that an upright, honest, and righteous man is cursed even though he is good.  In that book it changes the theology to say that sometimes we aren’t blessed because we are good.  Instead, even though we are good we must find a way to hold onto God in faith even though bad things happen to us. 

It’s because the Bible lifts that veil that we preach on it each week, and it is why Jesus studied it himself.  You see the Bible is a book of ancient wisdom and revelation.  It’s not like the bestselling books on spirituality of today.  There are a lot of very popular books both in the Christian world and outside of it, but none have the full scope that the Bible offers.  We get attracted to books written by one person, writing from a modern perspective, telling us what is comforting for us in a modern context.  In other words, we get attracted to spiritual books that are geared to us today.  And as a result, that tend to have modern biases that we simply can’t see because we are modern.  In essence, we are obsessed with newness, and often lack appreciation for ancient wisdom.  We love new things and new ideas.  Think about this.  Who of you, if I offered you $100,000 to renovate your home, buy a new car and television, and do whatever you want, would turn it down?  We love new things.  And like things, we are captivated by new ideas.  We tend to think that only ideas generated today are valid.  We do this in all areas of life.  We think that ancient people we generally ignorant compared to today—that they were superstitious, lacking in scientific knowledge, and prone to ancient biases. 

The Bible overcomes this by being a book written by hundreds of writers spanning almost 3000 years.  The Bible itself was composed over 1500 years, but it contains stories that go back much earlier.  What this says is that the Bible is timeless, not time-bound, while our thinking is time-bound, not timeless.  When we look at the Bible, we are tempted to think of it as just being old.  But compare the stories of Daniel with the stories of Moses.  There’s almost a 1000-year gap between the two.  We tend to think that only a generation or two separate them, but the wisdom of Exodus and of Daniel span a long period.  This overcomes the obsession with newness by connecting us with wisdom and revelation about God that is timeless.  Thus, the Bible is not a historical textbook, or even a guidebook.  Instead, it is a book that should be read, reread, and thought deeply about so that in the process we can become transformed into people that God calls us to be.  As the Eastern Orthodox Christians might say, we are created in God’s image, but through reading the Bible we begin to be formed more and more in to God’s likeness. 

Ultimately, what makes the Bible powerful is how, century after century, it has had the power to transform people who read it.  The Bible is always relevant because it always has the power to transform cultures, nations, and people.  Think about all the movements that have been inspired by the Bible.  Individual rights conferred on people through the Magna Carter were principles that came out of Christian thought.  Modern capitalistic thought was built, in many ways, by the thinking of the Puritans in Massachusetts and the Quakers of Pennsylvania.  James Madison’s understanding of Presbyterian government inspired much of our modern American Democracy.  The Civil Rights movement under Martin Luther King came straight out of his and others’ reading of the Bible. 

Ultimately, though, what I think makes the Bible incredibly relevant year after year is how it has had the power to transform individuals for over 2000 years.  Let me show you what I mean.  A number of years ago a retiring general was given a send-off dinner by his staff.  This general had been a good general, caring about his troops, organized in his manner, and effective in his thinking.  To everyone around him, it seemed like he had had a seamless and consistently rising career.  During the dinner, several junior officers asked him, “You’ve had such a successful career without the normal ups and downs.  How did you do it?” 

The general said to them, “You think this because you don’t know much about my earlier career in the military. Let me tell you about my life before I got it together.  When I was a young officer I let alcohol destroy my life.  When I was sober, I was a good officer.  I was respectful of my superiors, and supportive of my soldiers.  But I couldn’t quit drinking.  There were days when I started drinking early in the day.  And on those days I was surly to my superiors, and I abused my soldiers.  No one knew what kind of officer they were getting on any day.  Then I started getting demoted.  I was one of the few officers ever demoted to private, which they did to try to get my head on straight.  All it did was make me more despondent and I drank more. 

“One day a monk from the local monastery came by.  The officers used to let them come to the base to beg for alms, and to give spiritual counsel.  The monk saw me sitting on a bench, looking like the world was crushing me down.  He asked me what was wrong.  I told him my story.  He said to me, ‘I have an idea.  Tomorrow I will bring by a copy of the four gospels, and each time you want to drink, try reading a chapter from them instead.’  I looked at him like he was crazy, and said, ‘That’s not going to help me.  Reading a book isn’t going to help me.’  He replied, ‘Well, the reason I suggest this is that this is exactly what my brother did.  He was in as poor a shape as you, and his salvation was the four gospels.  He did what I suggested to you, and he’s now been sober for 15 years.  Just try it.’

“The next day he brought a copy of the four gospels to me.  I thumbed through it and scoffed, thinking, ‘I don’t even understand what I’m reading.’  With that, I threw it into my footlocker.  Later that day I felt the need to have a drink, so I looked through my footlocker for money and came across the gospels.  I started to read.  At first I felt nothing but the desire to drink, but as I kept reading chapters the desire to drink went away from me.  The next day I felt the need to drink, and this time I grabbed the gospels, and the desire went away.  Over the course of the next year I read the gospels everyday, and the desire to drink went away completely.  I’ve now been sober for 25 years.  I begin everyday with a half-an-hour of Bible reading, and it keeps me on the right path.  From that point on I was made an officer again, and rose up through the ranks to what I am now.  So you see, my career wasn’t always easy, but once I got right with God things worked out.” 

This is the power of the Bible.  It transforms history, nations, cultures, groups, and individuals, and it has been doing so for 2000 years.  What it says to me is that the Bible is always relevant, but to find out how relevant it is, we have to actually try reading it. 

Amen. 

What Do We Say about,... Being Spiritual but not Religious?

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Luke 15:11-32

January 29, 2012

Then Jesus said, “There was a man who had two sons. The younger of them said to his father, ‘Father, give me the share of the property that will belong to me.’ So he divided his property between them. A few days later the younger son gathered all he had and traveled to a distant country, and there he squandered his property in dissolute living. When he had spent everything, a severe famine took place throughout that country, and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed the pigs. He would gladly have filled himself with the pods that the pigs were eating; and no one gave him anything. But when he came to himself he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired hands have bread enough and to spare, but here I am dying of hunger! I will get up and go to my father, and I will say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands.”’ So he set off and went to his father. But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him. Then the son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’ But the father said to his slaves, ‘Quickly, bring out a robe—the best one—and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. And get the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate; for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!’ And they began to celebrate. “Now his elder son was in the field; and when he came and approached the house, he heard music and dancing. He called one of the slaves and asked what was going on. He replied, ‘Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fatted calf, because he has got him back safe and sound.’ Then he became angry and refused to go in. His father came out and began to plead with him. But he answered his father, ‘Listen! For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours came back, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him!’ Then the father said to him, ‘Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.’”

I want to begin by asking you to look up on your computer a video on YouTube.  It’s a video that’s gone viral (for those who don’t know what that means, it means that word-of-mouth about it has led millions of people to watch the video).  The video is by a Seattle man, Jefferson Bethke, and it speaks to many in the younger generations about their take on religion.  Go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IAhDGYlpqY

This video seems to make a lot of sense to a lot of people, but it has a major flaw, which is that you really can’t be a Christ-follower and at the same time declare yourself to be non-religious.  This video is a Christian version of a wider belief in our culture that you can be “spiritual but not religious.”  And this belief has the same flaw as the video, but I’ll get to that in a bit. 

I certainly understand the whole “I’m spiritual but not religious” attitude.  I shared it for at least eight years.  I mentioned last week that I dabbled with atheism for about a year, but after that I pretty much declared myself to be “spiritual but not religious.”  What was ironic was that I still said it while I was in seminary.  I really struggled with religion.  I understood personally how “spiritual but not religious” people look at our churches and think, “Man!  I don’t want to be like them.”  They say it because among us they see so many people who are clearly “religious but not spiritual,”

They see people in church, or who proclaim themselves to be Christian, but who don’t seem to have a loving bone in their body.  They see pettiness among Christians.  They hear gossip and criticism among Christians.  They see bad behavior and a lack of compassion (of course, I’m not talking about Calvin Presbyterian Church members ;-).  They see religious leaders on television and the internet who seem bigoted and dismissive of everyone who isn’t Christian like them.  It becomes easy for them to think that, “religion gets in the way of faith and spirituality, and I want to have nothing to do with it.” 

I get all this because I personally said all this.  But what changed my mind was something a New Testament professor of mine said in my last year of seminary.  I don’t remember what we were talking about, but he made the comment that “You can’t follow Christ without a community, and the people of Jesus’ times understood this because they weren’t individuals.”  That’s a hard statement for us to digest because it doesn’t quite make sense to us modern Americans.  He explained that back in Jesus’ day, people weren’t individuals.  Individualism—the tendency to see ourselves as individuals first, part of a group second, was a modern concept.  Back in Jesus’ day, the phrase, “be your own man,” or “just be yourself” would have made no sense. 

In Jesus’ day it was your family, your community, and your religion that gave you a sense of identity.  The people of his day identified themselves by their community (Jesus of Nazareth) and by their tribe (the twelve tribes of Israel).  They had no concept of being anything but religious since their religion, Judaism, was their identity.  To say that Jesus hated religion and came to abolish it simply wasn’t true.  Jesus’ religion was part of his identity. 

The professor’s statement made me realize that claiming that we are “spiritual but not religious” is a view of faith that arises out of our cultural trap.  We modern Americans are trapped in a perspective that is uniquely American and modern.  America is obsessed with individualism.  We worship the individual.  We worship those who stand out from the crowd as individuals and seem to have made it, whether we are talking about Steve Jobs, Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Sydney Crosby, Tom Brady, Taylor Swift, Brad Pitt, or any one of a thousand different people. 

The sociologist Robert Bellah was one of the first to really talk about the American obsession with individualism.  In his groundbreaking book, Habits of the Heart, he pointed out that America was settled by individualists who were willing to leave family and friends to strike out on their own in a new land. This ethos has stayed with us, but nowadays it seems like it is on steroids.  He even coined a term for this kind of religious individualism: Sheilaism. He coined the term after interviewing a woman named Sheila Larson, who told him that “I believe in God.  I’m not a religious fanatic.  I can’t remember the last time I went to church.  My faith has carried me a long way.  It’s Sheilaism.  Just my own little voice…  It’s just try to love yourself and be gentle with yourself.”  Bellah and his researchers noticed in this that people were creating their own religion based on their own beliefs, and that Sheila wasn’t alone.

I was an adherent of Sheilaism (well,… Grahamism, actually).  And the movement from being an individual to being part of a religious community was hard on me.  That’s one reason my Ph.D. dissertation explored the movement from an individualistic to a communal spirituality.  I realized that to grow spiritually we need to become part of a spiritual community, but for many Americans that is very difficult, especially since modern culture has become so much more individualistic than even when I was a kid.

Our passage for this morning has something to say about this individualism.  The prodigal son was an individualist.  He wanted his money, his share, of his inheritance so that he could go out and do his own thing, be his own man, and find himself.  But when it all went bad he realized that he needed something beyond himself, and that to find it he had to both rejoin his family and his community.

Basically, the point of everything I’m saying is that being “spiritual but not religious” eventually makes us neither spiritual nor religious. Why do I say this?  Let’s look at several reasons.

First, the “spiritual but not religious” crowd treats spirituality like a smorgasborg or buffet.  I want you to imagine that after church you go down to the Sheraton in Cranberry Township for the Sunday brunch.  You get up from your table and make your way to the buffet.  There’s so much yummy stuff.  You can get a freshly made belgian waffle with syrup, whipped cream, and blueberries.  You can get crepes.  You can get eggs benedict.  You can get muffins and danishes.  You can get bacon and sausage.  Sure, there’s healthy stuff there, but you’re not going to eat much of that.  You’re not there for that.  But then think about how do you feel afterwards? Sluggish?  Tired?  A bit sick? 

Being focusing on taste, not health, is the whole reason for being there.  People who are “spiritual but not religious” treat faith and spirituality like a buffet.  They pick and choose among all the religions and their teachings to take what feels good, tastes good, and is easy.  By and large they aren’t choosing the tough parts about practicing faith and growing spiritually—things like being part of a community that pushes you to pray, study, become self-disciplined, work together, and care for people and situations beyond yourself.  Growing in faith takes work, commitment, struggle, and learning.  The “spiritual but not religious” crowd treats growing spiritually like all it takes is a walk in the woods.  They say things like “Well, I find God more in the woods or in a park than I do in church.”  So?  Often I do too?  But the woods don’t push me to grow.  They don’t push me to care about others.  They don’t push me to feed the poor, help the afflicted, care about the oppressed.  Growing spiritually isn’t just about feeling good.  It’s about being pushed to stretch and grow beyond ourselves.  When we pick and choose, like in a buffet, it dulls our senses rather than enlivening them.  It really makes us neither spiritual nor religious.

Second, despite what the video clip says, Jesus was religious.  Jesus was a deeply religious man.  For example, in scripture what name did the disciples give Jesus?  Often they called him “rabbouni” or “rabbi.”  He was a rabbi, acting out of the Jewish rabbinical tradition.  That’s why he had twelve disciples.  That was typical of rabbis in that day and age.  Rabbis (the term means “teacher”) generally gathered a group of disciples (students) around them, and they would live together while the rabbi taught them day-to-day how to live in obedience to the Law.  By gathering twelve disciples around him, Jesus was living out of the Jewish religion.  He also was known to worship and read in the synagogue, and he spent time in the Temple.  He might have caused problems there, but only because he overturned the tables of the moneychangers he saw as corrupting the religious practices of the Temple.  He was protecting the religion, not trying to abolish it.  He was trying to reform it, but that’s different from hating it or wanting to abolish it. 

Third, the “I’m a follower of Jesus, or “spiritual but not religious” crowd also ignore what religion does that is crucial.  Religion offers teachings, practices, rituals, and opportunities that open people up to God.  These are opportunities that the “not religious” crowd often doesn’t think about. Everything at Calvin Presbyterian Church is geared towards engaging us in activities that stretch and grow us spiritually.  We worship, offer and take classes, engage in times of prayer, are part of small groups, give to charity, and engage in a LOT of mission.  Everything we do stretches us to grow beyond our self-complacent spirituality.  Our spirituality is a lived out spirituality that pushes us to reach beyond ourselves in many, many ways.

It’s this opportunity to practice faith and spirituality that’s the most important.  What we want to be is spiritual and religious, because the combination is powerful in helping us actually grow to be deep spiritual people.  But when people say they are “spiritual but not religious,” they are saying that they are spiritual but really don’t want to practice their spirituality in any way that may cause them to really grow.  It’s kind of like saying, “I’m into nature, but I don’t like to be outside.”  “I’m athletic, but I don’t do sports.”  “I’m a learner, but I don’t believe in education.”  “I’m an actor, but I don’t believe in plays, films, and television.” 

To grow in anything you have to be stretched to grow.  What stretches people who are “spiritual but not religious?”  Walking in woods?  That’s not stretching.  That’s relaxing.

The basic problem of being “spiritual but not religious” is that doing it on your own, according to your own whims, following your own way, creating our own practices, and being our own guides actually pulls us away from being spiritual.  It makes us neither spiritual nor religious.  Not being religious kind of makes us like a spiritual water spiders who can skitter all over the surface, looking at interesting things, but unable to go into any depth.  We never discover what’s deeper down because we stay on the surface. 

I’ll close with a parting comment by reminding you that we still have to listen deeply and carefully to what people who are “spiritual but not religious” have to say to us about us.  I may have argued against what they say, but their criticism of us is still legitimate.  When they say that they are “spiritual but not religious,” they are reminding us that we are deeply called to be spiritual and religious, rather than religious but not spiritual.  We are called to be beacons of light, and not just empty lanterns. 

Amen.

What Do We Say about,... Atheism?

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Acts 17:16-34

January 22, 2012

While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was deeply distressed to see that the city was full of idols. So he argued in the synagogue with the Jews and the devout persons, and also in the marketplace every day with those who happened to be there. Also some Epicurean and Stoic philosophers debated with him. Some said, “What does this babbler want to say?” Others said, “He seems to be a proclaimer of foreign divinities.” (This was because he was telling the good news about Jesus and the resurrection.) So they took him and brought him to the Areopagus and asked him, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? It sounds rather strange to us, so we would like to know what it means.” Now all the Athenians and the foreigners living there would spend their time in nothing but telling or hearing something new.

Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, “Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us. For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we too are his offspring.’ Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals. While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”

When they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some scoffed; but others said, “We will hear you again about this.” At that point Paul left them. But some of them joined him and became believers, including Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris, and others with them.

For the past several months, knowing that I’d be doing this sermon this morning, I began reading what atheists have to say about religion and Christianity.  Overwhelmingly, I came across quotes like these that show little but disdain for those of us who are religions. For example, Abu’l-Ala-Al-Ma’arri, a tenth-century philosopher wrote this, a quote that appears on many modern atheism t-shirts, mugs, hats, and websites:  "The world holds two classes of men—intelligent men without religion, and religious men without intelligence."  Also, Douglas Adams, the writer of the popular sci-fi novel, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, wrote, "I find the whole business of religion profoundly interesting. But it does mystify me that otherwise intelligent people take it seriously."

So, what do we respond to folks who say things like this?  What do we say to people who are this convinced that we Christians and religious people are all so stupid?  What do we say to people whose basic attitude toward us seems to be that we’re all superstitious, misguided, naïve, hypocritical, and dumb, and that we don’t even know that we’re so dumb? 

I do understand them a bit because I dabbled with atheism back in college.  I had become discouraged with Christianity specifically and religion in general, although I’m not sure if I was discouraged because of my own insights, or because I was mimicking the culture.  Back when I was a teen and a college student, the anti-Christianity and religion movement was beginning to grow.  Today it’s grown to be very strong among younger people, with it almost becoming an accepted fact that Christianity and religion are bad things.

What kept me from becoming a permanent atheist wasn’t that I was getting dumber as I got older.  Instead, it was that as I studied more and more about everything, I found that I didn’t like limiting my thinking the way atheism demands that we do.  I had too much curiosity about life to just dismiss everything about faith and religion as pious nonsense.  I didn’t want to limit my thinking to some sort of rigid, reductionistic way of thinking that can only see life from one perspective.  I wanted to understand life from many perspectives because I wanted to grow. 

Most atheists would never admit this, but they’re generally the ones who aren’t open-minded, even though they often see themselves as being brilliantly open-minded.   Because they deny a whole way of seeing, experiencing, and thinking about life and the cosmos, they shut down the possibility of knowing and experiencing life in a different way.  It would be very similar to saying that we will no longer listen to music or look at art because they lack rationality. 

What I’ve noticed is that many atheists, if not most, suffer from three basic problems when it comes to their thinking about religion.  First is that they have put so much of their faith in human rational thinking that they’ve become what I call rationalist fundamentalists.  To understand what that means, you have to first understand what it means to be a fundamentalist.  I believe that in our modern age, fundamentalism is one of the biggest threats we face.  Every religion and movement has its fundamentalists who try to hijack that faith.  Fundamentalism is the attempt to reduce truth to basic “fundamentals”—simplistic ideals and concepts that give followers a sense of clarity about life and how to live it.  By adhering to basic, simple fundamentals, and renouncing and diminishing all other beliefs and ways of thinking, they simplify their lives, even if they do so by creating conflict with all those who believe differently from them.  Fundamentalists always denigrate and diminish those who think differently from them. 

You find this kind of reductionism and diminishment of all other belief systems among Christian fundamentalists.  They deny much of scientific thinking, they diminish other religions and their belief systems, and they denigrate any who disagree with their basic fundamentals (fundamentalism got its name with the rise of Christian fundamentalism in the 19^th century, which outlined a set of “fundamental” Christian truths that one must adhere to in order to be saved).  You also have Islamic fundamentalists, such as the terrorists of 9/11 as well as the Taliban.  Like all fundamentalists, they believe so much in the purity of their thought that it excuses all the violence they do.  You also find Jewish fundamentalists in Israel, many of whom live in the occupied territories and refuse to leave, believing that they have a divine right to these territories and that they are actually hastening the coming of the Messiah by provoking conflict with Muslims. 

So many atheists have become rational fundamentalists who believe religiously in human rational thinking.  They’ve reduced all ways of knowing to basic rationalistic principles (fundamentals) that become the basis for all their arguments.  Like all fundamentalists, they demand that we see the world only from their perspective, and that our thinking follow only their lines of logic.  As Karen Armstrong, one of the best writers today on understanding religion, has written in her book, A Case for God, that “Typical of the fundamentalist mind-set is the belief that there is only one way of interpreting reality. For the new atheists, scientism alone can lead us to truth. But science depends upon faith, intuition, and aesthetic vision as well as on reason.”  She’s pointing out that atheistic faith in rationalism is a religious faith.  I think it’s a fundamentalist faith.

Second, most of the atheists I hear arguing in public (Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Stephen Hawking, Bill Maher, Christopher Hitchens—who just died) have little more than an elementary school understanding of religion.  When they argue against religion, their understanding of how we think and live is somewhat juvenile.  And to compound it, they tend to treat all of us as though we are fundamentalists, too.  When they argue against religion, they assume that all of us are biblical literalists.  Ironically, in their arguments they treat the Bible in a more literalistic way than Christian fundamentalists do.    

I believe that the problems they have with religion is a problem many people have when they grow up in the church but leave the church after being confirmed.  They become like high school dropouts, moving through life with a ninth-grade religious education.  They may go on to college and study business, science, literature, or engineering, and become very sophisticated in those fields, their religious knowledge remains at a ninth-grade level.  When I hear these atheists argue about religion, I hear ninth-grade level arguments.  They think they have a sophisticated understanding, but having them lecture us on religion would be like having a ninth-grade school dropout lecture a biology class in a college. 

As a person who has studied for nine years of post-graduate education in religious areas, I can tell you that there is SOOOO much more out there to know about religion and faith than any of them ever suspect.  For my master degrees and Ph.D., it’s not like we sat around and twiddled our thumbs, waiting to have our degrees conferred on us.  But I hear so many atheists say, “I grew up in the church, so I know what I’m talking about.”  Not really, any more than having taken a class in Chemistry in high school makes me an expert on discussing the nature of chemical amalgamations and transformations. 

Third, when arguing against religion, so many atheists tend to present Christianity at it’s worst, and atheism at its best.  I see this consistently.  They look at the worst things that have been done in the name of religion, and then generalize this to everything we are and do.  They don’t pay attention to all the good that is done.  Even more, they make arguments that from a rational perspective can’t be supported.  For instance, you’ve heard many atheists say that religion has caused more wars than any other source.  Really?  How do you test that theory?  Do you have a comparison group that has been persistently non-religious?  And how do you factor out human nature as a cause of war in that comment?  How do you know that religion is the cause, and not human nature?  Is human nature basically non-violent until it becomes religious? 

I do think there is some comparison we can do.  Let’s look at the record of atheistic nations in terms of violence and war.  For example, look at the how atheistic Soviet Union treated people under Stalin.  He had 25 million people killed (many because of their religious beliefs), and in war the Soviet Union was particularly brutal.  In atheistic China, Mao had 15 million Chinese killed.  In atheistic Cambodia under Pol Pot, 1.5 million were killed.  Nazi Germany, which was run by an atheistic Hitler and his minions, acting out of their weird nationalistic, atheistic ideology, exterminated 6 million Jews.  If atheists look to the best of themselves and the worst of ourselves, why shouldn’t we be able to do the same?  By the way, you can add up all the people who have been killed in supposedly religious wars, and they don’t come anywhere near the 47.5 million killed under those 4 atheistic regimes. 

What makes so many atheists limited in their thinking is that they assume that rational thinking is the only legitimate kind of human thinking and knowing.  They criticize us for having faith in unprovable assumptions, despite their faith in unprovable assumption that they can achieve objectivity.  They can’t, as the German theoretical physicist  Werner Heisenberg pointed out in his well-known principle, the uncertainty principle.  This principle is that when observing any kind of experimental event, “the more precisely one property is measured [such as the position or momentum of a property of a particle], the less precisely the other can be controlled, determined, or known” (Wikepedia).  In other words, no matter how objective an observer is, his or her observation always changes what it being observed.  That’s a very technical way of saying that we can never be purely objective about anything because once we put our attention to it we become part of it and change the nature of it.  Atheists can’t be rationally objective about religion because their beliefs change the nature of how they see religion.  In other words, by adopting atheistic beliefs, they no longer have the ability to be objective about religion.  We religious aren’t objective either, but then we never claim to be.  We base our beliefs on subjective experience, not objectivity. 

The biggest problem among atheist’s criticism of religious people like us is that they assume we have no legitimate reason for being religious.  And in the process they dismiss the one reason so many of us are religious and have faith, which is that we have experiences of God and the Holy.  Despite what atheists think about us, most of us aren’t religious because we love religious tradition, we’re superstitious, or we’re ignorant.  We come to church on Sundays because we’ve experienced God somehow in the music, in the sermon, in our prayers, or in the sacraments.  And we form our faith because we’ve experienced God and the divine in life—all throughout life.  In fact, those who are most committed to religion generally are those who’ve had the most consistent experiences of God in their lives. 

The irony among atheists is that they will accept as valid anyone’s experience of God’s absence, but not their experiences of God’s presence.  Why is it that not experiencing God in life is a valid experience, but experiencing God in life isn’t?  I will tell you that I’m religious and a Christian because of my experiences of God over the years.  I’m a pastor because of my profound and persistent experiences of God in my life.  These aren’t delusional experiences.  They are deep and transforming ones. 

So, what do we say about atheism? What I’ve learned over the years is that we often can’t say anything to an atheist because we won’t be heard, but we have a lot to say about atheism.

First, we’re not Christian or religious because we are naïve, weak, or stupid.  We are Christian and religious because faith deepens and expands our lives, and we experience that on a constant basis.  And we share our faith and evangelize because we want others to experience what we’ve experienced.  It’s kind of like when we see a really good movie or read a really good book.  We tell others because we want them to share our experiences.  Many atheists are similar in this way.  They want to share their experience of God’s absence, although I can honestly say that my experiences of God’s presence are more energizing and transforming. 

Second, if atheism is going to be true to it’s rationalistic, scientific understanding of life, it needs to be a bit more empirical in it’s understanding of religion.  They need to test their experiences by getting out of the armchair and empirically testing the validity of religion from the inside.  Something I’ve said to agnostics and atheists over the years is that if they really want to test whether God is real or not, run an experiment based on Christian experience.  Take forty days and pray three times a day.  And during that prayer, ask God to reveal God’s self.  If at the end of forty days nothing happens, so be it.  But I will tell you the experience of our associate pastor, Connie Frierson.  Fourteen years ago she came to Calvin Presbyterian Church as an agnostic.  She met with me, and we talked about religion and faith.  I suggested to her that she do the forty-day thing, and she did.  The result?  She not only experienced God, but felt a need to learn more.  It led her eventually to go to seminary, and from there to become a pastor.  This experiment can be dangerous because you never know what it may lead to. 

Paul called on the Athenians in our passage to do something similar.  Paul challenged them to experience God.   As we read in the passage, “When they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some scoffed; but others said, “We will hear you again about this.” At that point Paul left them. But some of them joined him and became believers, including Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris, and others with them.” 

I’d like to close by quoting Karen Armstrong again, and to let her have the final word.  She says, “We have become used to thinking that religion should provide us with information. Is there a God? How did the world come into being? But this is a modern preoccupation. Religion was never supposed to provide answers to questions that lay within the reach of human reason… Religion’s task, closely allied to that of art, was to help us to live creatively, peacefully, and even joyously with realities for which there were no easy explanations and problems that we could not solve: mortality, pain, grief, despair, and outrage at the injustice and cruelty of life.”

            Amen. 

What Do We Say About,... Science?

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Proverbs 1:20-33

January 15, 2011

Wisdom cries out in the street;

   
in the squares she raises her voice.


At the busiest corner she cries out;


   at the entrance of the city gates she speaks:


      “How long, O simple ones, will you love being simple?

      
How long will scoffers delight in their scoffing


         and fools hate knowledge?


Give heed to my reproof;

   
I will pour out my thoughts to you;

   
I will make my words known to you.


Because I have called and you refused,


   have stretched out my hand and no one heeded,


   and because you have ignored all my counsel


      and would have none of my reproof,


      I also will laugh at your calamity;


      I will mock when panic strikes you,

         
when panic strikes you like a storm,


            and your calamity comes like a whirlwind,


         when distress and anguish come upon you.


Then they will call upon me,

      but I will not answer;


   they will seek me diligently,

      but will not find me.


Because they hated knowledge

   
and did not choose the fear of the Lord,


      would have none of my counsel,


         and despised all my reproof,


      therefore they shall eat the fruit of their way

         
and be sated with their own devices.


For waywardness kills the simple,


   and the complacency of fools destroys them;


but those who listen to me will be secure

   
and will live at ease, without dread of disaster.”

This may or may not matter to all of you, but I’m not involved in our local ministerium.  For those who don’t know what a ministrerium, it’s a meeting of local pastors who meet to talk about what we can do together in the community.  I was very involved in the ministerium in Murrysville, as an associate pastor there before I came to Calvin Church.  And I became involved in the Zelienople ministerium when I first moved here, but a series of events caused me to stop going. 

The first was the attempt to get Christian Coalition voter guides into the hands of all of our members back in 1996.  As a registered independent, I don’t like the affiliation of church organizations with one political party, and it was clear to me that these voter guides were completely biased toward the Republican Party.  Then, there was a discussion in one of the meetings about who was saved or not, and two of the pastors in town declared that the interim pastor of Park Presbyterian Church, Maxime Pardee, wasn’t saved because she was a woman pastor, which was against the Bible.  Also, the fact that some of the pastors of the ministerium have periodically approached our members over the years, telling them that we don’t preach the Gospel in the right way here at Calvin Church, has kept me from rejoining over the years. 

What got me to stop being part of the ministerium in 1998 was something that happened then.  I was at the center of a little controversy.  It was nothing serious, but it was enough to cause me to reconsider how much of a connection there was between the ministry of Calvin Presbyterian Church and that of the local ministerium.  The ministerium had an idea that I thought was a good idea, until it was put into practice.  The idea was to have a weeklong event in the park in Zelienople, an event that would make people more aware of the churches in town and hopefully get people to think about attending our churches.

            The event would start with a weeklong vacation Bible school in the park during the week, and then on Friday and Saturday nights it would bring in inspirational guest speakers with great music. The hope was that after going to these events, people would want to begin visiting our churches. I was supportive at first, but then two problems arose.  I had suggested that one of the speakers should be evangelical like the evangelical churches in town, while the other would be more moderate.  That way the speakers would represent the diversity of churches.  Instead, they chose two evangelical pastors—one a fundamentalist, and one a little bit less than a fundamentalist.  But what really did it for me was the vacation Bible school program that was chosen.  It was one that taught Creationism, the belief that only the creation account in the Bible is right, and that the theory of evolution is wrong.  There was no way I could agree with sending our church’s kids to that kind of program, not only because I didn’t agree with what Creationism teaches, but also because I knew that many of our members wouldn’t agree.  How could I involve us in something that goes so completely against Presbyterian principles, which has no problem with the theory of evolution, recognizing that it’s a theory. 

            I voiced my discontent, saying that I could support the program if we simply agree to pick Bible school material that moved away from this topic and was agreeable to all churches.  What was the response?  They decided to keep the material, and then had one of the pastors in town come and talk with me.  He came to my office on a Friday morning and asked me to go for a walk.  We walked out of the church, down Division Street, into the park, up around the softball field, and then back to the church.  It took about an hour.  For pretty much the whole hour the pastor told me politely, but also pointedly, why I was wrong for believing in evolution.  Of course, I never told him I believed in evolution.  I just told him that I didn’t believe in strict Creationism.  I never said what I actually believed, which is that I believe in both biblical and scientific views on creation.

            He kept giving me argument after argument, telling me why evolution was wrong, why biblical creationism was the only answer.  He had an answer for every question I asked, although many of the answers weren’t very convincing.  In the end he got to his point, which was pretty much to say that to be a Christian meant believing only what the Bible said about creation.  To believe anything else was to degrade the Christian faith.  He said to me, “You know, I’ve studied this question a lot.  I have a master’s degree in religion, and know how to think through these things.  I’ve come to the conclusion that to be a Christian means accepting only the biblical account.”  My response was a polite, but just as pointed, “Yeah, I understand where you are coming from.  You also have to realize that I have a Ph.D. and three masters degrees.  I’m fairly sharp when it comes to thinking my way through these things myself, and nothing you have said is convincing.” 

Very early on in that walk I realized that there was nothing I could say in return because he wasn’t actually interested in hearing from someone who had studied science more than he had.  My training has been almost as much in the scientific fields as it has in the religious field.  I was a psychology major in college, and had to take courses in experimental psychology, research statistics, and the like.  Because of this background, I had a hard time initially at seminary because research at seminary was done in a very different way.  Theological research isn’t based on scientific study, but on citing the works of accepted and respected theologians as they interpret scripture based on rational and spiritual techniques.  The problem was that there were no indications for who was accepted and respected and who wasn’t.  It didn’t feel very objective for me. 

For my master in social work, I also had to take a number of classes in research, classes that emphasized how to do scientific research that could be validated, replicated, and declared reliable.  My Ph.D. wasn’t in traditional theological studies, but in formative spirituality, which was an attempt, among other things, to create a science of spirituality.  The focus there wasn’t on empirical science, but on a different kind of science—phenomenological science.  But more on that later. 

Due to my background in both science and religion, I found the pastor’s lack of interest in hearing from someone with a science background to be a problem, a problem that persists among many in both the religion and the science fields.  Too many scientists have too little religious training, and too many religious have too little scientific training.  As Gerard Schroeder, an MIT trained, Ph.D. physicist, who left his post as a professor at MIT to study and teach religion in Israel, has said, “Acknowledged experts in science may assume that although scientific research requires diligent intellectual effort, biblical wisdom can be attained through a simple reading of the Bible. Conversely, theologians who have devoted decades of plumbing the depths of biblical wisdom often satisfy their scientific curiosity through articles in the popular press and then assume they can evaluate the validity of scientific discoveries.  The “opposition” is viewed with a level of knowledge frozen at a high school or pre-high school level.  No wonder the “other side:” seems superficial, even naïve.  To relate these two fields in a meaningful way requires and in-depth understanding of both.”

The result of this advanced knowledge in one field, and elementary knowledge in the other, means that often the two fields compete when they really should converge.  The problem both fields have is a difficulty that all people with advanced education have.  It is called the Curse of Knowledge.  The term was coined by Chip and Dan Heath, two writers in the area of marketing and business.  They recognized that in any field, the more knowledge we gain about a subject, the more the education “curses” us to an extent.  The curse works in two ways.  First, the more knowledge we gain, the less we can remember what it was like before we gained the knowledge.  Second, the more knowledge we gain, the less we can explain what we know.  This impacts both scientists and theologians.  Each is very good at knowing their own field, and usually terrible at explaining it to those who don’t know their field.  Thus, when scientists and theologians talk science and faith, they are both cursed by their own knowledge and tend to talk past each other. 

What I’ve learned through studying both science and faith is that modern American culture doesn’t really understand science very well, which is at the root of the problem.  Let’s start with the basics.  What is science?  If you were to give a definition, how would you define it?  To really define it, you have to start with the root of the word itself, scientis.  What does scientis mean?  It means “knowledge.”  What is science?  It is the pursuit of knowledge.  That doesn’t mean that it’s a pursuit through objective means only.  It is the pursuit of knowledge through a variety of means. 

Throughout history there have been two basic kinds of science (it might surprise some that even in ancient times people pursued scientific knowledge).  The two kinds of science are the “science of measurement” and the “science of meaning.”  We’re used to the first kind, but not the second.  The science of measurement is an attempt at objectivity through empirical and mathematical analysis of events.  It does so either through experiments or correlational studies (looking for relationships between variables that might indicate a possible cause and effect relationship).  The physical sciences are able to more directly measure something, while the social sciences have to “operationally define” variables in order to define them.  That means, for example, that we can’t measure anger, but if we operationally define anger as hitting, yelling, accelerated blood pressure and heart rate, we can measure those.  These are only one kind of scientific study pursuit.

Another kind is the science of meaning.  This is a scientific pursuit that philosophers, mathematicians, and even modern psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and archaeologists have pursued.  When I studied at Duquesne, I was taught a kind of phenomenological scientific research, which meant diving into an experience and trying to understand it from the inside, rather than from the outside.  For instance, to study trust, we don’t operationally define it as “self-reporting that we are willing to rely on and depend upon another.”  We jump into the experience and ask people who have experienced trust, “what does deep trust feel like, and what is experienced by the person from her or his own perspective.”  This is just as legitimate a science as empirical science, but you wouldn’t know it from most Americans, who only know empirical science.  We are a scientific culture in many ways, but one with a limited scope in our scientific knowledge. 

The issue between faith and science is that American science often pursues empirical knowledge through measurement, while religious study often pursues experiential knowledge through meaning.  The two pursuits are exploring different areas of life. 

What many modern scientists also don’t understand about religious scholarship is that it has integrated empirical and measurement techniques into it.  For example, much of modern biblical scholarship uses the techniques of modern empirical science by integrating ideas and discoveries from archaeology, history, and anthropology.

The problem today is that people in each area of investigation, science and religion, tend to legitimize only the scientific exploration of their own area of expertise, while diminishing the legitimacy of other areas of expertise.  Thus, many biologists see their field of study as the preeminent one.  Many physicists see their field as preeminent.  Many psychologist see their field as preeminent.  Many theologians see their field of study as preeminent.  They all tend to suffer an arrogance of ignorance.  In other words, because they are ignorant of the other fields, they easily become arrogant about their own field. 

I’ve seen this many times.  For instance, I remember back in the early 1990s I was teaching a Sunday class in the church I was serving.  As part of the class I shared some psychological research.  An engineer, who worked at Westinghouse at the time, raised his hand and said, “You know, you’re citing stuff from a pseudo-science.  It’s not real science.”  There’s your arrogance of ignorance.  For him, only physical sciences were real.

So what are Christians to say about science?  For most of our history, we’ve had very little to say about it because our understanding—dating back to the Roman period—is that science and Christianity explore life in different ways.  Both want to unlock mysteries, both want to understand life, the world, ourselves, and both want to contribute tremendously to life.  Many people in the science field point to Christianity’s intolerance of science as evidence of our backwardness and ignorance.  But the reality is that these times have been rare.  There were short periods during the Renaissance when the church persecuted some scientific researchers, but that was the exception, not the rule.  For the most part, they looked at those doing biological, medical, or cosmological research as having little to say about religious life. 

The one growing area of intolerance toward science has been modern fundamentalism, which began in the late 1800s, and has always been an attempt at biblical science.  What fundamentalists have tried to do has been to turn the Bible into an objective document of scientific data regarding truth.  It has tried to reduce religious life to certain, “objective” fundamentals.  I’m not a fundamentalist because I don’t see these fundamentals as either fundamental or objective.  The Bible is about meaning, not measurement, and you can’t turn this book of meaning into one of measurement.  Unfortunately, many scientists, when they talk about Christianity, reduce us all to fundamentalists, believing that all of us think like that.  Not me. 

So what are we to say about science?  You can see our simple answer if you look at the majority of Christian colleges and universities.  If you had an opportunity to study biology, chemistry, physics, psychology, sociology, or some other science at Notre Dame University (Catholic) or Duke University (Methodist), would you consider it to be a lesser degree because it is a religious university?  What about studying at any of the Ivy League schools, which were all started as religious schools.  What about many of the area colleges such as Allegheny (Methodist), Westminster (Presbyterian), Thiel (Lutheran), or La Roche (Catholic), and most of the other area colleges?  Many of these universities and colleges have either good or great physical and social science departments. 

As Presbyterians, our approach is to respect every field of study in the same way we hope they respect us, and to integrate knowledge they offer into our own understanding of life.  Personally, my approach, as most of you who have taken classes with me recognize, is to integrate knowledge from different fields because I believe that this integration is what leads to wisdom.  Wisdom comes from gaining perspective, both scientific perspective and religious perspective.  And I think our approach should be in harmony with what Proverbs said to us this morning: 

Wisdom cries out in the street;

   
in the squares she raises her voice.


At the busiest corner she cries out;


   at the entrance of the city gates she speaks:


      “How long, O simple ones, will you love being simple?

      
How long will scoffers delight in their scoffing


         and fools hate knowledge?


Amen.