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Some Christians view the postmodern age as a threat to Christianity, but actually it is a great historical stage for Christians with great privileges that our faith ancestors could not enjoy, and thus Christians in postmodern age are also highly honored to have a great responsibility not only in spreading the gospel, but also in making breakthrough in our faith quest. We can see three major privileges for Christians to make faith breakthrough in this postmodern age:
First of all, the scientific development in this postmodern age has come to such a mature state that we could see clearly that science is serving as a strong testimony to the Bible among all other traditional cultures or believing systems.
Second, the development of postmodernist culture in the areas of language study, psychology, and philosophy has shown us that there are limitations on human understanding of meanings through language. This reminds us one very important and long-ignored truth that our human understanding of messages from God is influenced by our human limitations and thus our human understanding of the word of God is not equivalent to the word of God.
Third, since the great religious reformation happened about 500 years ago, more and more Christians agree that the only central authority in explaining the Bible is the Holy Spirit, not any human body. As a result, in a global revival of the glory of God, more and more Christians are seeing God from the glory of God, not from their own human imaginations.
With this privileged historical background, one ultimate task that we Christians need to work hard on is to find out the integral harmony between the Bible and science. Too much often we can hear Christians blame scientific progress to be the creation of devil while they are enjoying the comfort of the modern living condition, or even while they are typing their words into internet web articles or emails through personal computers. In that way, they are not glorifying God.
This is an abstract for an article (about 23000 words in 40 pages) that is intended to be the introduction (http://murongqingcao.blogspot.com/2008/09/christian-faith-breakthrough-in.html)to a book that is devoted to the cause of Christian faith breakthrough in this postmodern age. The introduction is divided into seven sections.
Today many non-believers view science as human experience based but faith is solely teaching based. In section 1 of the introduction, a simple discussion about science and Christian faith leads to a conclusion that both science and Christian faith are mainly supported by human experiences, for science they are publically traceable common experiences, and for Christian faith they are personally undeniable experiences. Then a detailed comparison between scientific theory about the 14 billion years evolution and the biblical teaching of the 6 days creation is provided to promote the awareness that there are more agreement between the two than most people might have thought. And then a conclusion is reached that after several thousand years of the development of human civilization, science comes into play as a solid testimony for the Book Genesis among all other cultures and religions started at the time of Moses or later!
Section 2 introduces the dilemma of Adam that would be a critical issue in understanding the harmony between the book Genesis and science, which would be further discussed later in section 6.
Section 3 contributes to an understanding of the freedom we were given by God through the great religious reformation happened about 500 years ago.
Section 4 provides a review of the current faith reality in Christendom, which forms a great privilege as well as a great challenge for us Christians to make a breakthrough in our faith quest.
Section 5 is divided into three subsections. The first subsection is a discussion about language and how we understand the meaning behind the language expressions. The second subsection views the postmodernist culture based on human limitations. The third subsection reviews the description of 6 days creation in Chapter One of the book Genesis from a postmodernist aesthetic sense. One difficulty for many non-believers to appreciate the 6 days creation description in the book Genesis is that they always try to read Chapter One of the book Genesis in a straight scientific narrative way, which is the traditional or modernist way of thinking and obviously is not the way how 6 days creation is described. However, different from traditional or modernist mindset of a flat world, postmodernist culture offers us a much more flexible mindset of layered and correlated world. The third subsection demonstrates how we could appreciate the 6 days creation teaching much better from the postmodernist way.
Section 6 is divided into five subsections. The first subsection discusses spiritual revelations in general, and then reviews 6 days creation teaching again based on that understanding. The second subsection contributes to biblical numerology of the numbers 6 and 7 in Chapter One of the book Genesis. The third section contributes to resolve the Adam dilemma that was introduced in Section 2 previously and then to discuss the messages we could learn from Adam and Eve related teaching. The fourth subsection is similar to the third subsection of Section 5, but is a postmodernist view on the Adam and Eve story. The fifth subsection provides a simple discussion about the prospective future about the Christianity in the postmodern age and thus leads readers into the planned main parts of the intended book.
Section 7 introduces how the book would be organized.
The writing of the whole introduction was and thus the writing of the whole book will be based on this faith that the Glory of God is for perfect beauty and perfect harmony, not for self-confliction. We might defer some unanswered questions to the future, but it does not mean that we should accept inconsistency and disharmony as part of the Glory of God.
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