The Big Picture

We'll be posting snippets from Sunday's sermons on
Conversations with an Atheist here every Monday. Feel free to share
your thoughts and continue the conversation. If you'd like to hear the whole
sermon, go to the sermon page on our website. Sermons will be posted during the week.



"The fact that every Christian group has their own different belief system is
evidence that religion, or Christianity at least, is man made…Essentially what
it says to me is that none of them understands what God really wants. So how am
I supposed to find faith in what they are offering, when it is clear to me they
don't really know what it is themselves?"

These words from a friend of mine are one common reason given for why some do not
believe in God, the Christian version or otherwise.

One of the great things about the Bible is that it helps put our world in
perspective today. Sometimes we think that we are the first people to struggle
with the big questions of life. We’re not. At the very beginning of
Christianity believers had differences of opinion. As time has gone on the
questions have changed – we don’t argue about whether non-ethnic Jews have to
first become Jewish before they can be Christians like they did in those first
few years, or whether the third person of the Trinity proceeds from the first
person or the first and second person like they did when that question split
the church 1,000 years ago. We argue about different things today, like God’s
view on sexuality and abortion. And we argue about some of the same things
we’ve always argued about like how literally to interpret the Bible. The bottom
line is that it is a simple fact that every group of Christians believes
something different. It’s always been that way, and at our best Christians have
always acknowledged that. Here’s the best proof. By forty years after Jesus’
death there were three popular tellings of his story. They were all similar to
each other, but different in many details. They each took a different approach
in talking about Jesus and you can tell when you read them that they believed
slightly different things about Jesus. In another twenty years or so a fourth
version of the story became well known. Today we call those stories the Gospels
of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. The four gospels in the Bible. If you read
them one after the other you can tell that they are different in many ways, and
yet by the middle of the second century those were far and away the most widely
respected versions of the story.
Our modern sensibility doesn’t like the idea that there can be multiple legitimate
and truthful ways to tell the story of Jesus. Something is either true or it’s not.
At most only one of those four tellings of the story can be true. But this was
not a problem for the first believers, and it doesn’t need to be a problem for
us.

Let me give you a modern example. You know that there is a good sized group of people who believe the universe was literally created in seven days. One way these creationists argue against evolution is to point out that scientists don’t all agree about evolution. That is factually true in the same way that most political ads that we see today are true. It's a true statement, but very misleading. With the exception of a very small handful of scientists, the disagreements are not about whether evolution is true, but about specific applications or mechanisms
within evolutionary theory. They don't question whether humans came from monkeys; they may question which monkeys and how many thousands of years ago.

Scientists agree on the essential components of the theory of evolution. They disagree
about many of the specifics. Christians agree on the essential components of our
faith; we disagree about many of the specifics.

What do you think? What are some of the key places where
Christians disagree? How many of those disagreements are core to the Gospel and
how many are "details?"