Contemplating Wisdom

Got your coffee? Previously I referenced the story of Galileo whose theory on the sun being the center of our solar system contradicted the Biblical interpretation of Earth being the center. The Church forced Galileo to recant, cease his writing, and though he was not executed for his heresy he would spend the rest of his life as a prisoner. This same struggle is coming home to the Christian faith and the church in a world that has moved beyond modern to post-modern while the faith of many remains in a distant world of the past. The fastest growing segment in our population are those who indicated they are "non-religious". Being non-religious does not mean they are without a God consciousness or have no desire to develop an awareness of the part of their existence that is spiritual. Rather they are saying that the state of current religious practices and explanations of life don't work for them. The challenge of modern religious life is to do what societies have always do...

Allegory is defined as "a representation of an abstract or spiritual meaning through concrete or material forms; figurative treatment of one subject under the guise of another." The purpose of allegory is to provide a parallel example that is understandable to a subject that is not as easily understood. Synonyms for allegory are parable, moral, symbolism, and story. Some of the more famous allegories are John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, Plato's Allegory of the Cave , and the writings of C.S. Lewis, especially The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe . Gulliver's Travels is a classic allegory about British political life during a particular time in history. The Christian book Revelation is an allegory written in a form called "apocalyptic" meaning end of time. Revelation has stirred a number of Christian pop culture books called the Left Behind series. An unusual book that recently made the best seller's list is The Shack; a story that chall...

The past is massive. So much so that we tend to shrink it to manageable sized sound bites. For example we often think of human development as happening in a straight line. That is, different cultures divided by thousands of miles and separated by light years of diverging thoughts all arriving at the ultimate conclusions at about the same time. Closer analysis reveals that in the big picture there are similarities related to human development but that doesn't mean they were anywhere near being alike. In our western world (think of that as Asia Minor, Europe, and much later the Americas) religious and scientific development has its key roots in Greek/Roman and Jewish cultures. Theses cultures come clashing together when the church, harmless as a dove but wise as a serpent (Jesus' words not mine) slithered into the Roman Empire. About the time the earliest Greeks were beginning to “philosophize” on the origins of the universe the Israelite were exiles in far away Babylon. Th...