*The following is part of the Evolution of Adam Blog Tour.
About four years ago, a glaring issue terrified me. At this point in my spiritual journey, I had dealt with many theological assumptions bequeathed from popular Evangelicalism. The grand shift of recognizing God’s love for the cosmos and God’s intention to join heaven and earth in renewed creation started a chain reaction. Several significant changes can be traced back to this fresh realization in college. With all of the paradigms shifts up to this moment of fear and trepidation, I feared I now was stepping into sacrilegious territory: an openness to biological evolution.
Believe it or not, at that time I was fairly immersed in the emerging church dialogue, but had never read Brian McLaren’s A New Kind of Christian trilogy. When the main character was scripted as a science teacher who embraced both evolution and Jesus, my worldview felt like it was crumbling. It didn’t help that as I struggled with these questions in the subsequent months that I was accused of being an atheistic youth pastor by friends. But now I digress.
I wrestled with God, dialogued with others, and found myself in want for helpful resources. Some books were written with people like me in mind, but many of these didn’t quite give me the answers I wanted. Each moved me closer and closer to understanding how to handle biblical authority and modern science with integrity. Then, resources like Biologos.org came along and I started to move beyond superficial answers such as “Genesis 1 is a poem,” etc.
I also discovered that other prominent evangelical leaders have an open posture toward evolution, such as – Billy Graham, Timothy Keller, Greg Boyd, N.T. Wright, C.S. Lewis, and John Stott – and my fear of sacrilege subsided. Continue Reading…
