Episode Details
Back to Episodes#190 – Theological anthropology updated
Description
It’s time to revise our picture of human origins, and the theology built up around the one handed down to us by authors and church fathers who knew nothing about our hominid cousins.
This is the final episode of our miniseries looking at the impact that scientific discoveries over the past couple centuries of our hominid ancestors might have on Christian theology. It needs to be recognized that none …. NONE ….. of the Biblical authors, nor the characters they write about, nor any of the church fathers who unpacked Christian theology over the centuries after the Bible was written … NONE of them knew about human evolution, about millions and billions of years, about our hominid cousins with whom we interbred and interacted, nor about the spiritual journey that we … and possibly also those cousins … have been on for the past many hundreds of thousands of years. It’s time that we updated the picture.
The four episodes which preceded this one have raised many questions. Today, we’ve distilled those many questions down to five broad categories and brought in a world-class theologian (Dr. Douglas F. Ottati) to help us explore how to reconfigure Christian faith to accommodate that new information that was completely unavailable to the Biblical authors and Church Fathers. Those five are:
- the tension between Biblical revelation and scientific discovery. Many Christians like to speak about “the Book of God’s Word” and “the Book of God’s Works” (or God’s World) being in harmony. But the uncomfortable fact is that the two often do NOT tell the same story. And John 3:16 does NOT specifically refer to humans/people, but to the entire universe (which would include other species)!
- many Christians are becoming comfortable with human evolution and even asserting that God “used” biological evolution to “guide” genetic changes; however, biological evolution is supposed to be random and undirected.
- so much scientific evidence rules out the ideas of:
- a first human or a primal pair, which are foundational to a great deal of C