Episode Details

Before describing our new Christian worldview, we thought we should talk about the tools and strategies we used to get there.

Our goal, over the next few weeks, is to have two world renowned Christian theologians — one very conservative and the other very liberal — give us feedback on our now very liberal Christian theology. But before we do that, we thought it would be fair to our listeners to lay out that liberal theology.  We’ll do that next week, but this week we feel we need to explain how we arrived at our new liberal Christian worldview. How does one create and revise a theology.

So today, we start off with asking: “how do we know what we know” …. aka, “epistemology.”  The Socratic method: learning by asking questions.  We also get into what the term “deconstruction” really means: it’s not simply breaking apart, smashing, and leaving a pile of scattered rubble.  It’s more like dissection than demolition: carefully taking something apart in order to learn how it works.

We also take a walk through history, looking at how humans in different periods went about finding truth: the Hellenic Greek period … the Age of Reason, or Enlightenment  … the Reformation …. Modernism.  Then a period in which we saw  the erosion of certainty (Wittgenstein and Gödel destroy the idea that everything can be fully explained purely through mathematics; Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle; Einstein’s theory of relativity: different frameworks produce different realities), which crystalized into Postmodernism, which says there is no absolute truth.

Then we see how these ideas apply to constructing, deconstructing, and reconstructing a Christian worldview, which typically involves an appeal to authorities.  This is true not just for the evolution of Christianity in general over the past two thousand years, but also Christianity in each one of us over the course of our lifetime.

It’s easy to say that God would be the ultimate authority.  But few of us get to hear f