Tuesday, December 09, 2008
Keys To Prosperity?!
Over at Kruse Kronicle he recently looked at the rise of modern science and the fact that it arose out of Christianity.
Frankly, the answer is trite - SIN! Whenever we succeed, in this case in understanding the natural world, and as Kruse points out, the material prosperity that such leads to, we want to take credit for it, and neglect God as the true source of all.
First pass through this post and I put a bunch in here about the French Revolution as the origin of the misunderstanding of the relationship of science and faith, but that is really off topic. We are the origin of the problem, just like we always are.
As the church in society we fight many battles. We want to keep God in the public square. We want a decent and prevailingly moral society. We want freedom to practice our religion without interference.
But, what I see when I read this stuff from Kruse is that we will lose all these battles and more if we do not to the hard work of building disciples. Unless we teach individuals, on an individual basis how to conquer the sin in their lives, society will, inexorably, sink into sin with them.
Simply put the church has to quit building congregations and start building disciples. And more, we have to stop competing for building disciples. We need to learn to be grateful for disciples, even if they are Brand X.
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Alfred W. Crosby’s fascinating book The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society 1250-1600 (8) shows that the activity of breaking reality down into measurable quanta preceded the rediscovery of Greek scholarship. This development would ultimately lead to modern science. The intellectual achievement that finally established modern science and took it beyond Greek accomplishments was the development of the scientific method in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Rodney Stark offers of a list of the top 52 scientists from this era. He identifies 32 of them as devout Christians, 18 as conventional Christians and two as skeptics. (Edmund Halley, 1656-1742, and Paracelsus 1493-1541). (9) The rise of science grounded in the scientific method let loose a revolution that reverberates down to this day.Kruse makes a heck of a case here, I don't need to revisit it. What most struck me about it was how utterly obvious it was to me. But then I studied science through graduate school and have been a student of the history thereof as well. But this history is largely muddled, and people have come to view science as antithetical to religion. To me, the key question is, "WHY?"
Frankly, the answer is trite - SIN! Whenever we succeed, in this case in understanding the natural world, and as Kruse points out, the material prosperity that such leads to, we want to take credit for it, and neglect God as the true source of all.
First pass through this post and I put a bunch in here about the French Revolution as the origin of the misunderstanding of the relationship of science and faith, but that is really off topic. We are the origin of the problem, just like we always are.
As the church in society we fight many battles. We want to keep God in the public square. We want a decent and prevailingly moral society. We want freedom to practice our religion without interference.
But, what I see when I read this stuff from Kruse is that we will lose all these battles and more if we do not to the hard work of building disciples. Unless we teach individuals, on an individual basis how to conquer the sin in their lives, society will, inexorably, sink into sin with them.
Simply put the church has to quit building congregations and start building disciples. And more, we have to stop competing for building disciples. We need to learn to be grateful for disciples, even if they are Brand X.
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