I would request that you read this before you read the rest of this blog.
Now normally I don’t flip out over what other religious teachers say… unless they really trigger an emotional response, such as this one. The number one way to trigger the switch is to alienate others, particularly those who are not of the faith or those who are and not really sure what to do OR you cause a credibility problem. This does both.
It’s not that I have a beef with him believing the earth was made in six literal days. Yeah, I think he’s wrong, but I know I’m wrong about a few things myself. It’s the fact that he wants to hinge everything on this story.
The purpose of Jesus was to stop what Adam started? That sounds wrong to me. I thought the purpose of Jesus was to show the Way (not just the way to heaven, although that is included, but the way to be the servant leader, the way to be peaceful, the way to join in higher and better community, the way to…), not to rectify the idea that Adam sinned so we all had to sin after him because that’s the way it is.
I get so sad when we try to reduce all of Christianity down to a math equation. We are so guilty of being the Pharisees and setting rules that we expect all others to meet and by setting hoops to jump through so that they can be “one of us”. By boiling it all down to we are horrible people (thanks to a person who may or may not have literally existed) and we needed the son of God to die to get to heaven… it just doesn’t work out for me. If that was all Jesus existed for, why was he not killed as a baby by Herod?
I’m sure that Mr. Mohler would not say directly that that was Jesus’ only purpose, but it is things like this that create a credibility problem. As twenty first century Christians, it is our duty to marry faith and reason and prove that both can live in the same house. We cannot keep fighting for stupid things. Placing our whole credibility on whether Adam and Eve were literal or figurative is silly to me. When the Catholic Church told Galileo he was wrong, they won the battle, but they lost big time and now, to this very day, are forced to eat a lot of crow for their work at halting scientific and artistic advancement during the Renaissance.
In the end it is all about a psychological event called ‘cognitive dissonance’. In cognitive dissonance, which is when two ideas conflict, the human mind has to reconcile them or it will go insane. Like this example, “My parents told me green people are mean. But Billy (who happens to be green) is nice.” In this example, we would reconcile this by saying, “not all green people are mean” or even more maturely, “the color of people doesn’t determine if they are nice or mean.” What Mr. Mohler has done is this. “The bible says God made the world and the first humans were named Adam and Eve. But modern science says that life was evolved over millions of years and that the traditional idea of Adam and Eve cannot possibly compute.” Instead of trying to reconcile this, he throws the second statement under the bus. This is called ignoring the problem. The only problem is that our peers aren’t ignoring the problem; they are seeing that we have no credible answer and therefore are not credible ourselves.
I leave you with this idea, taken from one of my favorite teachers, Kay Gamble. This was originally printed in Doonesbury and hangs in her office (cartoon style of course). [as the cartoon is 700 miles away, I cannot quote it directly for you, but I can give you the ‘gist’]
“What!? This calculator didn’t give me the answer I wanted! It must be broken let me try another. What?! This calculator must be broken too! Those calculator manufacturers sure are wrong!”
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