evolving Christianity

Michael Dowd has a nice, thought-provoking piece on his blog on 'the salvation of religion: from beliefs to knowledge'. It won't sit well in an Evangelical stomach, but it is not unrelated to my post on why praying for changes to the laws of the universe is problematic. He sets out his core idea thus:

The primary cause of the Church’s decline in size and influence in Europe, and now also in America, is this: valuing the Bible as scripture while failing to see that today’s science, interpreted meaningfully and mythically, reveals God’s nature, God’s ways, and God’s guidance far more accurately than anything the biblical writers could have accessed millennia ago.

Then he goes on to discuss how the advances of science in the latter part of the last millenium, and in particular the 20th century, reveal a world more wonderful, more marvellous, more exquisitely beautiful than anything the biblical writers could see.

And as any kid will tell you, dinosaurs and black holes are just way cooler than bible stories.

Now, Dowd's perspective is outside even my post-evangelical realm. He is happy, I think, to remove the bible from the normative role that most churches would give it - whatever their doctrine of inspiration. I'm at the stage myself of wanting 'both, and': but I find his perspective most refreshing and more than a little inspiring.

When church leaders study the Epic of Evolution as they now do the Bible, and when they teach and preach the discoveries of science as divine revelation—God’s word for us today—Christianity will experience a revival unlike anything the world has ever seen.