Painting the Stars, An Evolving Faith

This Sunday we'll continue the Painting the Stars series with Chapter 4, An Evolving Faith.
From the included literature:

"“Christ is the evolver, the centrating energy of the evolutionary
movement. But Christ cannot be the energy of evolution unless the
incarnation is allowed to be continued in us.”—Ilia Delio

“Stress is the only thing that creates evolution.” —Elisabet Sahtouris

Scholar Phyllis Tickle claims that every five hundred years or so the church
holds a massive rummage sale. These are the times when it becomes
necessary to go through all the theological and ecclesiastical baggage that we
have been carrying with us over the years, and do the hard work of sorting out
what we need to let go of, what we intend to keep, and what we need to make
room for. The last big rummage sale was the Protestant Reformation. With the
advent of the printing press, and a rise in literacy, it became possible to take the
Bible out of the hands and dominion of the priesthood and entrust it the laity.
These rummage sales are evidence that the church has always been in the
process of evolving in response to shifting life conditions.
In an evolutionary paradigm, shifting life conditions represent provocations to
adapt. When these life conditions represent a deep enough challenge, sufficient
creative tension is produced that give birth to a whole new set of values, beliefs,
intelligences, and technologies. A new worldview emerges in response to crisis
requiring the church to evolve. Modernity, for example, challenged priestly
authority with the mantra of “no more myth and no more superstition.” German
scholars, one hundred and fifty years ago, began to distinguish between the
Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. The church was compelled to find out
what Jesus, the first century Mediterranean Jew, actually said, and what the
early church said about him. It is now commonplace for us to differentiate
between the religion of Jesus and the religion about Jesus. Radical
postmodernism began to challenge the legitimacy of any grand narrative, realizing that “truth” is contextual, and arises in and through perspectives.
Postmodernist philosophers noticed that the interpretive keepers of the grand
narrative tended to gain a disproportionate amount of power in society.
Eventually, the “myth of the framework,” (all we can really know is the frame
we’re looking through), replaced the “myth of the given,” (the traditional idea that
Truth is revealed from on high). In response, the church has needed to update it
truth claims and the basis of its faith.
It’s time for another rummage sale.""

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