Tag: heaven/hell
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#149 – Creating a new Christian worldview
A week after Easter 2024, and in response to questions from our listeners, we discuss a whole new perspective on who Jesus was, and what he gave the Jews, and the world, when he died on the cross. Several members of our private Facebook Discussion Group asked us to explain how we’ve been able to…
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#146 – Hell? or Purgatory?
We trace the evolution of the human construct “Hell” (Sheol; Hades; Gehenna; Dante’s Inferno), then talk about how hell may not be a place of eternal conscious torture by fire (the modern Evangelical version), but a transitional process intended to purify (Purgatory and Universalism). One of the most disturbing elements of the “Good News” preached…
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#144 – Giving up God – a personal story
For Sarah Henn Hayward, reading a few too many books, meeting a few too many beautiful non-Christians, and asking a few too many questions, was just too much for her Evangelical faith. For five years, we’ve been building a community of like-minded people wrestling with a spirituality that didn’t work for us …. or even…
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#143 – Season 5 opener
Setting the stage for the next season of episodes, and how we want to move beyond merely “dancing in the ruins” of a deconstructed faith We’re back! After a 3-month hiatus to recalibrate and strategise, we’re now embarking on a season in which we’re emphasizing reconstruction of a new Christian worldview that works … for…
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#142 – Putting together a new Christian worldview (part 6)
A brief retrospective on Season 4, and a longer one on the journey that the podcast has taken us on through Christian belief. Well, we kept it going for over a year, and added 54 more episodes to our archive. But all good things must come to an end. And so this will be the…
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#112 – Easter
Comments/questions from our listeners and members prompt this deep-dive into this most important of Christian holidays It’s always tempting to do a blog or episode every year on Christmas and on Easter. They’re both such easy, ready-made topics, with many obvious angles and discussion points. Bloggers and podcasters find them hard to resist. In almost…
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#110 – Putting together a new Christian worldview (part 5)
Piecing together what the previous four episodes showed us about the End Times and Christ’s second coming. After four weeks of talking to experts on various aspects of “End Times” theology, this episode is our chance to put together many pieces of the puzzle into a coherent picture. In part, this means we have to…
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#109 – “End Times”, an ancient Jewish perspective
A close look at apocalyptic literature written before Jesus (and with which he interacted), and long after him (including John’s book of Revelation). In this fourth and final episode of our miniseries on “the End Times”, we talk to Dr. John J. Collins (Prof. Old Testament; Yale Divinity School) about ancient Apocalyptic literature … a…
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#107 – “End Times”, a historical perspective
A historian takes us on a journey through two millennia of evolution of Christian understanding about “the End Times”. In last week’s episode, we compared two pictures of “the End Times”: one drawn by modern day Evangelicals, and the other drawn by Jesus while he was teaching in Palestine. And we found that those two…
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#106 – “Left Behind” … again!?
The latest sequel to a long series of books and movies just hit the cinema!? Yes, you read it correctly … yet another sequel in the Left Behind / Thief in the Night franchise of books and movies has come out. As if the previous ones which began coming out as far back as the…
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#96 – a response to Swamidass and Alexander
Our listeners … and we ourselves …. raise some questions about the previous two episodes and the whole ideological motive behind asking “who is Adam?” Over the last two weeks, we’ve been perusing scholarly works on the subject of “Who was Adam?” [note: a pet peeve of mine … Eve is almost always left out…
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#94 – A Recent Adam & Eve?
A medical scientist who fully affirms human evolution and common ancestry with the apes shows that science can’t rule out a recent Adam&Eve. There are many who believe in a historical Adam&Eve as recently as six thousand years ago, based on a direct, surface-level reading of the first couple chapters of Genesis. And then there…
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#93 – Mailbag #3
Our responses to a flurry of comments and questions to two recent episodes: one on Open/Process Theism, and the other comparing theology and science as legitimate avenues in the search for Truth. Two of our recent episodes both evoked a tremendous response from our listeners, in terms of comments left at our two Facebook sites…
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#91 – Science, Theology and the search for Truth
Luke asks two theologians to convince him that theology is a legitimate avenue for coming up with robust models of our reality Science and theology are both human endeavours seeking to explain our past, our present reality, and possibly also the trajectory of our future. Both build elaborate ideas on the foundation of previous scholars,…
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#90 – Open Theology and Process Theology
A brief introduction to two forms of theology that are as old as the Bible itself, but have labels that are only a few decades old. One of the biggest problems in Christian theology arises out of the simple belief that God is all-loving, all-knowing, and all-powerful. The problem? … why, then, is there so…
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#88 – Hell
Our understanding of Hell has been evolving for thousands of years … and we’re the ones making all the changes! Dr. Meghan Henning (Associate Professor of Christian Origins; University of Dayton, OH) gives a scholar’s view on the historical evolution of JudeoChristian thinking about this … “place?” … state? …. concept? For thousands of years,the…
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#57 – Origin and evolution of the Old Testament
Dr. Peter Enns gives us the first in this new “Origin and evolution of …” series of episodes. This week, we’re starting in a whole new direction. Well, two different directions, actually. One theme that we’ll be pursuing we’ve entitled “The origin and evolution of …” series of episodes. You’d probably expect that we’ll fill…
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#56 Lessons from an exvangelical wanderer
Dissection of a deconstruction journey and a search for truth and meaning. Last week, Boyd and I introduced you to the Sunday Assembly. We talked to Colin and Matt, who each lead Sunday Assembly chapters in their respective local communities (Halifax, Canada and London, UK) (#55). We had also intended to include 5 or 10…
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#54 A global deconstruction network
Last week, we talked about believers starting out with a simple but passionate Christian belief (stage 1) which crumbles as doubts and questions erode the pillars of their faith (stage 3). This is such an unsettling experience for anyone going through that, but Brian McLaren showed that it is still possible to find Faith after…
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#53 Back to church III – growing up
Last week, we heard about people returning to church after COVID had kept the doors closed for over a year. This week, we hear about people returning to faith after doubts and too many questions kept them locked out for much longer. In his latest book … Faith after doubt: why your beliefs stopped working…
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#52 Back to church II – doing things differently
Last week, we talked to people considering the possibility/opportunity of going back to church. We learned about the things they missed most about not being able to go for so long … whether that was over a year because COVID kept them locked out, or whether it was much longer than that because of a…
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#51 – Back to church, part I
COVID-19 is blamed for a lot of bad things, but there is one good thing it’s done for us: it forced us to stop everything and re-evaluate. Our healthcare system … government … business … schools … and even church. Almost two years after slamming the church doors on us, we’ve had time to re-evaluate…
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#50 – We’re back! (Season 3 opener)
We’re back! Here’s a sneak peak of what we’ve been preparing for Season 3. We began with a simple question: “Why should we go back to church?” Some people were forced out by COVID; others elected to drop out long before COVID because of a faith crisis. And many in both camps are now wondering…
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#46 – Religious trauma (pt 1)
In the past few episodes, we’ve learned about the important role that other people play in one’s spiritual experience: we see, feel, and hear from God in part through our encounters with other people. This makes sense if the church is “the body of Christ.” Unfortunately, there’s a dark side to this fact: many people…
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#45 – Neurobiology of spiritual experience – part 3
The neurobiology of the spiritual relationship is such a big topic, we thought it would be good to hear from a second scholar who comes at this from a completely different angle. Dr. Sarah Lane Ritchie obtained her graduate degree in Theology and Science studying consciousness, neuroplasticity and religious belief … we couldn’t have found a…
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#42 – “Personal relationship”
Many Christians insist that this is the main thing that distinguishes Christianity from all other religions: “we have a personal relationship with the Divine”. I certainly heard this many times during the first few decades of my spiritual journey. The problem for me was, I just didn’t seem to ever experience what they claimed. The…
Reaching into Plato's Cave 