“I love the Bible. I’m in awe of it.” “But my quest for a new kind of Christianity has required me to ask some hard questions about the Bible I love.”
“We’ve gotten ourselves in a mess with the Bible.”
“First, we are in a scientific mess. Fundamentalism…again and again paints itself into a corner by requiring that the Bible be treated as a divinely dictated science textbook.” “This approach has set up Christians on the wrong side of truth again and again.” “Many pious people deny our envirenmental crises by quoting Bible verses and mocking science. Just as they were the last to acknowledge the rotation of the earth and its revelution around the sun, they’ll be the last to acquiesce to what science is telling us about our growing ecological crises.”
“Second, we are in trouble in relation to ethics.” “…we are stuck now:…largely obsessed with narrow hot-button feuds (eg. abortion, sexual orientation, nationalism, genetic engineering) that end up being little more than litmus tests for political affiliation.”
“In the United States, white Evangelical Christians are the most fervent advocates of government-sanctioned torture and that frequent churchgoing is a statistical indicator of support for torture.”
“Third, we are in deep trouble relating to peace.” “When careless preachers use the Bible as a club or sword to dominate or wound, they discredit the Bible in a way that no skeptic can.”
“It’s an old and tired game: quoting sacred texts to strengthen an us-versus-them mentality.” “In case after case in the past, there is a kind of Bible-quoting intoxication under the influence of which we religious people lose the ability to distinguish between what God says and what we say God says.“
Taken from “A New Kind Of Christianity” by Brian McLaren. Buy it HERE.
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“There are two ways to read the Bible, frontwards and backwards. If we locate Jesus primarily in light of the story that has unfolded since his time on earth, we will understand him in one way. But if we see him emerging from within a story that had been unfolding through his ancestors, and if we primarily locate him in that story, we might understand him in a very different way.”
“…nobody in the Hebrew Scriptures ever talked about original sin, total depravity, “the Fall,” or eternal conscious torment in hell.” “It’s the shape of the Greek philosophical narrative that Plato taught!”
Taken from “A New Kind Of Christianity” by Brian McLaren. Buy it HERE.
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