A Fresh Perspective

Whenever I engage in conversation with people I meet for the first time I try to avoid being asked the question, “What do you do for a living?” But if I am asked I say, “I am a minister.” Generally, the one who asks then inquires, “What denomination?” or “What kind of church?” Here is where I always have to clarify, depending on the most recent news headline involving Christian leaders: “I am a Baptist minister, but I am not a science-denying Baptist minister who think that dinosaurs lived alongside humans a few thousand years ago.” What a strange irony that a 30-foot-long fossil of an Allosaurus will be on display at the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky where Museum founder, Ken Ham, recently debated science educator Bill Nye. Ken Ham and his colleague s think it defends the book of Genesis and supplies evidence of Noah’s flood. Good grief! Unfortunately, this is real life, not a Charlie Brown cartoon. According to a recent survey  by the Associated Press, 77% ...

If you have learned anything from me about interpreting Scripture over the years, I hope you have learned that you can take the stories in the early chapters of Genesis seriously without taking them literally. One does not have to deny science or evolution to take these creation stories seriously. And you don’t even have to be a liberal or a progressive like me to do that, you can be an evangelical, though the statistics don’t fair well for evangelicals. According to a recent survey by the Associated Press, 77% of people who claim to be born again or evangelical say they have little or no confidence that the universe began 13.8 years ago with a big bang. And 76% of evangelicals doubt that life on earth, including human beings, evolved through a process of natural selection. Now, the interesting thing, or rather the sad thing is that evangelical professors in evangelical universities and seminaries know better. Darrel Falk, a biology professor at Point Loma Nazarene Univer...