A Fresh Perspective

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...

I love the legendary story that has emerged with regard to Michelangelo’s Pieta (a masterpiece of Renaissance sculpture that depicts Jesus being held by his mother Mary after being taken down from the cross). According to the legend, Michelangelo was too poor to purchase new marble for his work, so he went out among the stones deemed unworkable and discarded by other artists. As he made his way through this graveyard of rejected stones, a particular stone captured his attention. As he studied it, he could see the figures of Jesus and Mary just waiting to be released. Does God see in us an image just waiting to be released? Of course, the archetypal image for Christians is the Christ image. We are called to follow Jesus, to reflect his love, his grace, his compassion for the downtrodden and his passion for a just world. What needs to be chiseled away for us to become like Christ? Does God need to chip away at our anger, our indifference, our apathy, our resentment, our gree...