Recovering Evangelicals

Bill Gates created Microsoft. The Pharaoh Cheops built the Great Pyramid in Egypt. George Washington founded the United States of America. But did any of them actually get their hands dirty doing so? God may have created everything. But did he carefully design it  — put molecule to molecule … assemble the bits and pieces […]

The last in this four part mini-series. Previously, we’ve talked about what science has to say about “Original Sin,” and then last week about seven ideas the Church has had for ten or twenty centuries about “Atonement.” Here, we see how those seven ideas about Atonement stand up to our new modern understanding of human […]

Atonement … aka, salvation. The whole point behind Christianity.  In fact, the main reason we have religions of any kind.  Atonement is basically about finding a way to God. Given that this is so central, you might think that the Christian church would have had a unified understanding about this right from its earliest days, […]

Our goal next week is to talk about the core of Christian faith: Atonement Theology. But before we can do that, we need to talk about a fundamental concept on which it’s built: a concept called “Original Sin.” The Christian understanding of that idea is rooted in the story found in the third chapter of […]

One of the core tenets of Christian theology … is also often one of the hardest to embrace, and all-too-often a reason for giving up on the faith. How is an abstract, theological concept like guilt or sin transmitted down through genetic lines? Can that really be inherited like skin color, or a tendency towards […]

Mind. Personality. Soul. Consciousness. Spirit. These five things which account for the human experience are often seen as overlapping, or even interchangeable. Boyd and I see them all as related … but quite separate. For us, the first four are material and emergent properties of the brain and therefore completely within the scientific realm. In […]

Chronological snobbery. Science of their day. Phenomenological science. These related terms came up many times in our previous episodes, and we kept saying “sometime we’ll have to get into that in more detail.” Here we come through on that promise. Clearly, the Biblical authors saw things differently than we do. But does that mean that […]

Here, we take a close look at a dozen high-profile people who were once fully Evangelical in their outlook, and active in Christian leadership … with far more theological training and ministry experience than the average believer … and who found their Fundamentalist Christian faith increasingly didn’t make sense or was deeply disturbing. Although they […]

Many times, Boyd and I have been asked “What’s with the name of your podcast?”  Here’s our answer. In the first of a three part series, we take a look at how Evangelicalism has morphed and deviated away from its historical roots: the Gospel message itself. Boyd starts us off looking at our respective experiences […]

An Old Testament scholar tells us that the Bible makes it very clear: there has to be a resurrection of the body. Early church fathers were convinced that this body would contain the very same molecules that we “owned” while alive on earth. And many Christians today, without thinking too deeply about the subject, imagine […]

Can there be a materialistic explanation for the soul!? Does the soul have to be immaterial? In the previous episode, we found that scholars  — scientists and philosophers — have long wrestled with the concept of an immaterial soul (and spirit) and come to a fully reasoned conclusion that it doesn’t work. Here, we first […]

The vast majority of people — whether they be Christians sitting in the pews of our churches, or non-believers outside the church — think that Substance Dualism is a central and core tenet of Christianity. That one can’t reject Substance Dualism and still call themselves Christian. And yet many scholars — both Christian and non-believers […]

Many Christians think they get their idea(s) about the human soul from the Bible. But the Bible doesn’t actually say too much about that. Which is rather paradoxical or ironic given that one would think that the Bible is all about the development of our soul. What exactly does the Bible have to say about […]

Before we look at what the Bible has to say about the soul, we take a look at how the Biblical authors obtained their scientific understanding on things in general. Luke first introduces his understanding of “phenomenological science” — the science of their day — and then goes through several examples of science reflected in […]