Flexible Faith

In light of my previous post, I have come across a very insightful observation by Rob Bell in his book Velvet Elvis. He talks about the need for Christian faith to be flexible - that is the only way it will last. If you build your faith with firm, unbending brick-like tenants that can never change, then if one brick crumbles, so too does your entire faith. Here is his example...

"Somebody recently gave me a videotape of a lecture given by a man who travels around speaking about the creation of the world. At one point in his lecture, he said if you deny that God created the world in six literal twenty-four-hour days, then you are denying that Jesus ever died on the cross. It's a bizarre leap of logic to make, I would say.

But he was serious.

It hit me while I was watching that for him faith isn't a trampoline [flexible]; it's a wall of bricks. Each of the core doctrines for him is like an individual brick that stacks on top of the others. If you pull one out, the whole wall starts to crumble It appears quite strong and rigid, but if you begin to rethink or discuss even one brick, the whole thing is in danger. Like he said, no six-day creation equals no cross. Remove one, and the whole wall wobbles ...

...if the whole faith falls apart when we reexamine and rethink one spring, then it wasn't that strong in the first place, was it?"

Christians should not be threatened by the idea that evolution might be true. If faith is built on rigid, inflexible beliefs like that, all it is, is fragile.