The 2000 year spiritual journey from Abram to Jesus culminated in the Christian Church of the 4th century AD. During the past 4000 years since Abram’s migration from Mesopotamia to Egypt, the Bible is a recent form of God’s revelation.

19th century BC — Abram, a Mesopotamian trader and El Shaddai worshipper, migrated to Egypt

14th century BC — Moses, an Egyptian prince led the Hebrew slaves to worship Yahweh under Joshua in Canaan

10th century BC — David, a Canaanite shepherd ruled the Nation of Israel under the Lord which split to become the Kingdoms of Ephraim & Judah

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The issue of recoveries from comas and vegetative states raise some important theological questions regarding the ethics and doctrines regarding life, death and existence in between.

In the past, death was registered when the cardio-vascular system fails. Today, it is brain-death that is more important, since we are now able to mimic the heart’s function as a PUMP, with mechanical devices. While it is possible to keep the brain artificially alive, there is no way to mimic its function as the MIND.

It also raises the question of how badly those of us who say be believe in an AFTERLIFE…

Rationality is humanity’s most important survival strategy. It operates between different modes of knowledge and across different reasoning strategies. This makes interdisciplinary and cross-contextual conversation possible.

Why should Christian theology bother to engage across disciplines and contexts?

The Great Commission extends the Gospel across geohistorical borders of ancient Israel., i.e., across space and time (both backwards into the past and forwards into the future). The Christian mandate to engage interdisciplinarily is supported both theologically because Christianity makes universal claims, and epistemologically because human thought operates with shared resources of rationality, i.e., our quest for understanding overlaps in every field of…

Today, I pay tribute to my teacher and friend, the late Professor Lamin Sanneh. He was a professor of history and World Christianity at Yale. Born into a Muslim family in Gambia, he earned his PhD in Islamic history at the University of London’s famed School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS).

His 1989 book, “Translating the Message”, was a seminal work that challenged the history of mission and gave many of us first hand accounts of a major thinker who grew up a Muslim and converted to Christianity but retained a deep love for Muslims, a respect for Islamic…

WHY INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDY IS CRUCIAL FOR THEOLOGY?

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CLAIM: People of faith who believe in God need history, philosophy & science to keep theology honest.

STATE OF AFFAIRS: Covid 19 has finally done what I was hoping decades of research and study would do — expose the deep problem of Spiritual Integrity. In one fell swoop, the SARS CoV-2 virus exploded the myth that we spiritual leaders know what we are talking about when we proclaim more than we know. It is proper for skeptics to ask why a hitherto unknown piece of protein wrapped in a skin of protective…

Human Origins, Genetics and the Illusion of Otherness

The interdisciplinary investigations in science and theology draw our attention to the illusion of otherness. Behind the geohistorical veil just 5500 years ago, we find a planet of 20 million humans with no known writing. This places our current preoccupation with textual authority in perspective. Before 12,000 years ago there is no evidence of buildings dedicated to worship among the 4 million people on earth. Around 30,000 years ago, there were at least three species of humans co-existing. At least 65,000 years ago we created the earliest known artwork. 100,000 years ago…

We shall explore the anthropology, geology and biology of human evolution.

Paleoanthropology

Two scientific explanations for human origins exist — the punctuated and the gradualist models.

Ian Tattersall, a punctuationist, thinks symbolic behavior emerged from one chance mutation that suddenly and dramatically transformed the human mind.[1]Modern humans arrived from somewhere into Europe (Cro-Magnons) around 40 thousand year ago (tya) and replaced the prior Europeans (Neanderthals). In Becoming Humans, Tattersall points out that in humans, “the potential arose in the mind to undertake science, create art, and discover the need and ability for religious belief, even though there were no specific…

Six Questions about DIVINE REVELATION

1. What did God reveal?

The short answer is everything that is knowable. From as far back as historians can delve, the human mind has been learning new things. God’s revelation is not static and certainly continues. Religious dominance from the earliest times of shamanism around 50,000 years ago evolved to become institutionalized religions by about 5000 years ago in places such as Egypt. Many shamanistic religions exist among the Australian aboriginals and in much of Africa, Asia and South America as well as remote parts of Europe and North America. Political leaders encouraged the belief…