What made the interview so interesting to me is that Pastor Gulley, while obviously a nice enough guy, serves as the perfect stereotype of a humanist, liberal theologian.
I do not understand why someone would call himself a Christian, and serve as a pastor, while holding beliefs such as (and I quote him verbatim here):
- "No religion is better than another. All people are loved and cherished by God."
- "I'm not sure if there is an afterlife, but I do know this: What we believe about the afterlife has a tremendous impact on how we treat people in the present life."
- "When we talk about the afterlife, when we talk about God - who no one has seen - we ought to talk in 'if' language."
- "I don't believe in the divinity of Jesus. I don't think Jesus believed it. He was a monotheistic Jew who did not see himself as divine."
- And to this question from the interviewer: "How about the push for teaching of intelligent design alongside evolution?" - Pastor Gulley replied, "It's crap. It's a denial of the enlightenment and the scientific process."
I totally respect Pastor Gulley's right to believe whatever suits his fancy. But I have to wonder: If you do not believe that the Bible is true, if you're not even convinced of the reality of God, what is your motivation in ministry? Do you just like to play church? Does clothing yourself in "religious-speak" help to lend authority to what are basically just personal opinions?
Now you can believe whatever you want. It's a free country. But it seems silly to me that you claim to be a Christian if you don't even believe what Christ himself said. You scoff at the divinity of Jesus, but how do you ignore all of the claims he made about himself?
- "I am the way and the truth and the life, no one comes to the Father except through me." - John 4:16
- "I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty." - John 6:35
- Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father." - John 14:9
- "I tell you the truth," Jesus answered, "before Abraham was born, I am!" - John 8:58
I could go on and on, since the Gospels are full of quotes from Jesus making his claim of divinity. This was precisely the reason that the Jewish authorities hated him so much! They considered Jesus a blasphemer because he spoke of his equality with God.
To state that no religion is better than another is ludicrous. That is just another way of saying that it doesn't matter what you believe, since no religion is true. The only way all religions could be equal is if they were all equally false. They contradict each other in so many ways, the only logical conclusion is that they are all false - or ONE IS TRUE, and all the others are false.
There is no sensible middle ground here. For example, if you wanted to debate the merits of Christianity and Islam, you have a clear choice to make. Either the God of the Bible; the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is God, or Allah is God. They cannot both be God. They display completely different characters and personalities.
The God of the Bible declares that the Jews are his chosen people. The God of the Koran dismisses the Jews as infidels. Yet an enlightened, free-thinking, modern, humanist theologian will tell us that either belief is equally valid? Please, give me oxygen!
I do agree with Pastor Gulley on at least one point. All people ARE loved and cherished by God. That truth is emphasized in John 3:16 - "For God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten son, that whosoever shall believe in him should not perish but have eternal life." Jesus came to die for all of us. We all have equal access to his grace and mercy. The question is, will all of us choose to humble ourselves before him to receive it?
For the sake of brevity, I will limit myself to one final rebuttal of Pastor Gulley's statements. His condescending swipe at the idea of intelligent design - "It's crap. It's a denial of the enlightenment and the scientific process." - rings especially hollow with me.
Advances in the field of molecular biology over the past two decades have caused a growing number of respected scientists to seriously consider new ideas about the origin of life. Darwin's theory of natural selection does offer a reasonable explanation for the slow evolution of species over long periods of time, but it falls woefully short in explaining the irreducibly complex, assembly-line-like, nano-technology that scientists have discovered in the cells of even the simplest organisms.
And do we even need to mention the astounding, detailed information stored in our DNA, more complex than any software program known to man? If man evolved, by chance, over the eons of time, then so did my PC!
(For a fascinating documentary about the origins of life, go to unlockingthemysteryoflife.com)
In my opinion, there is one big reason that people don't want to allow the idea of a real, living, purposeful God into their thinking.
That reason is pride. We all want to be our own boss. We all want to make our own way. And we don't want some nosey God interfering with our decisions. So we do our best to pretend he does not exist, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
To make ourselves feel even better about this, we deride and mock those unenlightened, ignorant believers who keep noisily insisting that God is real and that he will hold us accountable for our actions. Their very presence is an annoying reminder that maybe there really is a God. That is why the followers of Jesus have suffered persecution since the day the church began.
Born-again Christians remind the people of this world of what they do not want to know.
