Friday, August 4, 2023
August 4, 2023 This one was tough. I originally wrote a pretty antiseptic description of the issue, then realized what a gut wrenching, soul sucking struggle this has been for me. My 20s were spent in a lonely search for a father figure—I learned to love my dad, but he could never be the nurturing presence I needed. At his funeral, I sobbed because there was no longer any hope for resolution of the tangled mess he’d left behind.Saturday, July 29, 2023
This is about my State of Faith project but not actually part of it—kind of a meta-post. I’m not entirely done with the deconstruction part, but I’ve documented the snot out of why I’m no longer even Evangelical adjacent and maybe not even Christian. I want to start writing about something positive—what I’m constructing now. I hesitate to call it reconstruction because I don’t want to simply replace one rickety system with another.Thursday, July 13, 2023
July 13, 2023 I’ve been working on this for ages, and I need to publish something, so here it is. I’ll likely come back to this post and refine it—it certainly isn’t in a final form, but it is a good start. Atonement I could be accused of burying the lede here, because changing my view of atonement, actually, just learning there were alternative views of atonement, was the first domino that fell and knocked down a whole series of beliefs.Saturday, June 3, 2023
August 4, 2023 Experiential Problems with Faith This one was tough. I originally wrote a pretty antiseptic description of the issue, then realized what a gut wrenching, soul sucking struggle this has been for me. My 20s were spent in a lonely search for a father figure—I learned to love my dad, but he could never be the nurturing presence I needed. At his funeral, I sobbed because there was no longer any hope for resolution of the tangled mess he’d left behind.Sunday, May 28, 2023
May 28, 2023 This is a tough one because we all want a God who can intervene on our behalf. I mean, what good is a God who is all powerful but can’t or won’t use that power to give us a hand? What are miracles? Are they God benevolently helping people out of a tough spot? Altering natural laws? What if favoring one person harms another? Be careful of what you wish for, the folks tales tell us—unintended consequences lurk behind our wishes, and they can be far worse than our original plight.Wednesday, May 24, 2023
May 24, 2023 This gets a bit technical, so first, a few Greek words (from a non-theologian): ** Sṓma** (also sárx): the physical body, flesh. Sárx can be used of a corpse. ** Psyché**: soul, life. The life force which leaves the body at death and goes to the underworld. ** Pneúma**: spirit, literally breath. This is very similar to soul but also implies that which can commune with the divine.Wednesday, May 24, 2023
Updated June 3, 2023 Any discussion of the existence and nature of God must take seriously the problem of evil. If God is the omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenvolent being of classical theology, then how does this perfectly good deity cause or, at minimum, tolerate the presence of evil in creation? Theodicies comprise an entire branch of theology devoted to answering how a good God and evil can coexist. The subject is far too complex and deep for me to cover here, and it may be the single knottiest problem in all of theology; however, I can’t simply ignore it.Tuesday, April 11, 2023
April 11, 2023 In our next exciting installment, we’ll explore the authority of scripture and how has collapsed for me. Sort of. I still find scripture compelling, and I’m trying to understand how to read it appropriately. Scripture In Reformed Christianity, Scripture is the single most important revelation of the nature and work of God, and if one takes sola scriptura seriously, it is the only true revelation of God.Wednesday, March 22, 2023
May 28, 2023 I’ve been all over the place, revising older posts and wrestling new ones into publishable form. Don’t ever let anyone tell you writing isn’t work. Introduction I’ve been in a near constant state of gradual spiritual evolution over the last 40 years (since college), a process which reached a turning point around 2016. Even though I was more comfortable calling myself “Evangelical adjacent” than Evangelical, Evangelicals were still my people.Thursday, March 16, 2023
March 16, 2023 “Deconstruction” has become overused and weighed down with cultural baggage, but I still find it a useful concept. I am disassembling bits and pieces of my spiritual heritage and the framework I’ve built to determine what can support belief and what needs to be discarded or renovated (made new again). This isn’t hipster indulgence (as if—I’m 61 years old), as it is sometimes labelled by religious curmudgeons and the overly certain, but an in-depth analysis of beliefs I’ve inherited and a thorough exploration of alternatives.