Thursday Thoughts - January 5

Some Christians are open to engaging with cultural and philosophical ideas, but when it comes to theology, they shut down. If this doesn’t change we’re going to find our churches emptier than they may be already. A younger generation will simply not “go along” with the older one. In fact, they're leaving church in a mass exodus or not interested at all. It is now more important than ever to recall that theology is not static and has to be in dialogue with other informers, if it is to maintain credibility in our times. As new information hits the universities and the streets including, the monumental immensity of the universe and the possibility that there’s more than one; DNA developments that seem to indicate more strongly than ever that humans evolved; neurosciences discoveries about how the human brain functions and some of the implications of that for selfhood and religious belief, are all eventually going to have an unavoidable impact, and rightly so, on how we view God. There is far, far, more to discover about who this God character is, not least in the vast related and distinct mega stories of the natural world and the biblical text. Perhaps, even, we’re at the beginning of an enormous paradigm shift.