A Preliminary Thought Concerning The Story We Find Ourselves In

I may have set a new personal record in reading a book.

Last week, I received The Story We Find Ourselves In by Brian McClaren in the mail from good ol' Amazon.com, along with several other books I've been wanting to read (including the "story I find myself in" right now, Mere Discipleship). It's interesting how often a "coincidence" happens when I read a book - it seems that many a time I will end up reading a book that talks about either what I've been thinking a lot of, or something that happens to be dominating the news. Well, I read it in an hour or so.

My first couple thoughts when I was done were: "Wow, I read that fast" and "I bet he got in trouble for this one."

You may be surprised, but I didn't find one of the parts that most people have a hard time with in this book by McLaren hard to swallow at all. It's the part about God and evolution being compatible. As the battle starts raging in the courts and in the news concerning the allowance of "intelligent design" to be taught in public schools, I find myself actually siding with those who don't want intelligent design taught. In fact, there is really only one thing that I wish public school teachers would do concerning teaching evolution in science classes - it's that I wish that they would make sure everyone knows that evolution is still just a theory. Perhaps the best theory out there (who knows), but still, just a theory.

But I digress. I guess I'm just one of those people whose faith doesn't rest on whether God created everything in six days; on whether the earth is 6,000 or 6,000,000 years old; on whether God uses microevolution or macroevolution or no evolution. It's not a big deal to me. The only thing I ask in debating these issues is that someone uses common sense and logic in doing so. I remember throwing out a comment on a website once that I was a firm believer in the old earth theory, as opposed to the new earth (earth is 6,000 years old) theory. Lucky me, I got comments from some that I must not be a Christian, that Genesis explicitly shows that the earth is 6,000 years old, and that anyone who didn't believe God created the earth in six literal days was going straight to hell. I mostly ignored those cheap shots, however, and got involved in a debate with someone over the old earth/young earth battle. One of the questions I asked was: "if the earth is only 6,000 years old, why is it that there is so much evidence that it is much older than that? Why do even certain areas of our globe just even look much older than 6,000 years old?" The person's reply was "Because God just made the earth look that way." Why? Why would he make the earth look older than it really was? What is the point? This person couldn't give me an answer, probably called me a heretic, and left the debate.

I guess I just don't believe that having differing opinions on something that we won't be able to know definitely as a "fact" anyhow is that big of a deal. (the origin of life will never be able to be proven as a fact because it's not something that we can recreate in a laboratory or experiment.) It's just not something that's essential in what we believe. And as the mantra goes, in things that are non-essential, there is liberty - freedom to believe differently than what someone else believes.

I don't know how much flack McLaren got for making his character Neo a Christian and someone who believes in evolution. I do know that the next book of his I'm going to read - the third book in his A New Kind Of Christian trilogy - has gotten him into a lot of trouble. Should be interesting. I will post more thoughts about The Story We Find Ourselves In at a future date. I keep reminding myself that I started a couple of series of blog entries on other books - The Church On The Other Side and Authentic Faith - and need to get back to them soon.