A Fresh Perspective

Dove Award-winning Christian musician Michael Gungor has been taking a hit from some of his evangelical fans for saying that he has no more ability to believe that Adam and Eve were literal persons who lived 6,000 years ago or that “a flood covered all the highest mountains of the world only 4,000 years ago” than he is able “to believe in Santa Clause or to not believe in gravity.” In a recent podcast Dr. Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist’s flagship seminary in Louisville , claims that Gungor “is shifting into theological reverse, moving right back to the last decades of the 19 th century.” According to Mohler, Gungor’s ideas are the result of Protestant liberalism, “which also came over to the United States [from Germany ], infecting many denominations and seminaries.” I mean, really, Dr. Mohler? When is learning how to think a disease? What Dr. Mohler doesn’t say is that practically all mainline biblical scholarship rejects his inerrantist view of the Bible...

In a recent piece for the Washington Post E. J. Dionne beautifully wrote of our imperfect quest for the truth. Christians need to humbly acknowledge, wrote Dionne, how “imperfectly human beings understand the divine” and how, “over the history of faith, there have been occasions when ‘a supposedly changeless truth has changed.’” Truth exists, but our experience of it is limited and fallible. Christians would do well to humbly acknowledge that our sacred texts are also limited and fallible. Jesus did. According to the Gospels, Jesus had no problem dismissing, rejecting, and reinterpreting the sacred texts within his Jewish tradition. For example, some religious authorities in Jesus’ day abusively used Deut. 24:1 to justify divorcing a wife for any reason whatsoever, very much the same way religious authorities today abusively use Scripture to condemn the LGBT community, condone violence, and subjugate women in the home and in the church.     Jesus dismisse...