Michael Ward is a professor of Apologetics at Houston Baptist University and a Fellow of Blackfriars Hall at the University of Oxford. He asks a question that not too many Christians ask these days.
Is it possible to be too religious? To be so interested in unity and oneness that you never look for change? Can’t the religious impulse devolve into a kind of frigidity or frozenness, a paralysis in which the way we’ve always done things must be the way we always do things, forever and ever, amen?
True religion should always be corrigible: both self-critical and open to criticism from without, open to revision in the light of new knowledge and in response to new situations. Not cramping in on itself, or incessantly ratcheting up the interior tension, but periodically relaxing, taking stock, surveying new horizons. [1]
In raising the questions about Christianity in this blog, what has been most surprising to me is that most Christians simply do not ask these questions. When I confront Christians with these questions I have yet to find one individual who has challenged the conclusions we have reached on the basis of logic, reason, and what the Bible says. Instead the response has been to just continue to ignore these questions. Is that the type of religion to which Dr. Ward says we should aspire. If that the type of religion we want to basis our life upon?
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[1] Michael Ward, “A Time to Scatter Stones and a Time to Gather Stones Together”, Imprimis, July/August, Volume 46, Number 7/8, p. 3.
