Parchment and Pen has a thoughtful post about not claiming that God will protect us in special ways<\/a> when we know that Christianity does nothing to exempt one from suffering. But in light of this honesty, we do need to ask how we should think of God and God\u2019s relationship to the world. Does God only intervene on \u201cspecial occasions\u201d? Or does God work through the natural processes of the universe and history? One cannot acknowledge that Christians are not specially exempted from suffering without also realizing that this necessitates that we think differently about God than the Biblical authors and most Christians down the ages did.<\/p>\n C. Orthodoxy has a post on Holy Week without the death and resurrection<\/a>, objecting to the removal of suffering and death from an Easter curriculum for small children. (Chris Salzman has a follow-up<\/a>). I don\u2019t see the problem \u2013 not everything in the Bible is appropriate for small children. In the same post, the role of fantasy in communicating Christian ideas is also raised. Reading it, I found myself thinking that we must ask what the nature<\/a> of the resurrection story<\/a> is, and its power, when one can no more prove that Jesus rose as a physical, historical fact than that Gandalf or Harry Potter did. For the first Christians, as for us today, if \u201cyou ask me how I know he lives\u201d, the only honest answer we can give is \u201che lives within my heart\u201d. But that is not a claim about history<\/em> but about a profoundly life-changing religious experience<\/em>. Can pure fantasy challenge us the same way, and bring about changes in our lives, every bit as much as unprovable history can? At any rate, rather than water down stories, perhaps we should indeed leave the Bible, the Lord of the Rings, and Harry Potter until children are the appropriate age.<\/p>\n Codex has a post about not treating Proverbs as promises<\/em><\/a>. As RJS (at Scot McKnight\u2019s Jesus Creed blog) continues his discussion of Francis Collins\u2019 The Language of God, he brings up what is the crux of the matter for many Christians: the relationship of \u201cAdam and Eve\u201d to the theological appropriation of those stories in the New Testament. I had a chance over the past […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":136,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3855","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
If you haven\u2019t been watching Battlestar Galactica, here\u2019s your chance to get caught up<\/a> in time for the start of the new season.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/tracker\/7622297540113836091-6719573102763139167?l=exploringourmatrix.blogspot.com\")