The CNN special called "God's Warriors" highlighted the importance of worldview. This topic spilled over into my conversation with a few friends last night and it has me thinking about how our worldview effects everything we do.

I feel that the biggest mistake in religion is that it often attempts to preserve not just the life lessons and timeless truths of its sacred traditions, but it also seeks to preserve the ancient worldviews held by the architects of those traditions. The authors of sacred texts, like all creative people, tell their stories through the lens of their own unique experiences and limited understanding. Those lenses confine and shape the stories and give them their distinct flavor and style. The stories are vessels of timeless truths but fundamentalist religions have been more concerned with preserving the worldviews that are transmitted as a byproduct of these stories while minimizing the living truth contained in the core of their meaning. Why would we read these wonderful stories and conclude that the one thing to extract from them and preserve is their ancient worldview? That does a great injustice to the stories.

The architects of our ancient traditions had their own worldview shaped and cultivated very deeply by secular and often pagan contemporary philosophers. How much of the ancient Hebrew view of an afterlife and ritual sacrifice was learned from its time in Egypt and its flirtation with the Pagan religions it replaced in the Promised Land? How much influence did Plato and Aristotle have on the authors of the New Testament? The nuggets of philosophy, biology, cosmology, and sociology that are preserved in our texts should be viewed as a unique snapshot in time. I have no problem conceding that our sacred texts display the most important truths known to man about life, love, and community, but they should not be valued when it comes to understanding the working and origin of our world. The author(s) of Genesis would be little help in designing an electric car, but I think they did have great insight on the decision to preserve or destroy our world. Genesis is an environmentally friendly story. Fundamentalists seem to listen only when it is convenient for their own personal agenda. Why preserve the notion that God created the world but ignore the call to care for it? Ancient stories convey powerful truths about our relationships and our responsibilities that transcend time and culture, but they offer little help in solving modern scientific equations or evaluating human origins and evolution. The bible is a lens through which we see God and the point is not to see the lens as a perfect lens. The point is to be in relationship to that which the lens discloses.

What makes it so hard for us to look at our texts and traditions without buying into their flaws? I wouldn’t really even call those types of shortcomings “flaws”. It was the best these people could do. Even fundamentalists critique the ancient political structures (for example Monarchy) and judge those failed attempts as pre-enlightenment naivety, but they try to hold onto ancient theology and even ancient cosmology and biology as if it timeless? Even modern science would not see its conclusions as timeless. The answer seems so clear to me. I can’t grasp what could possibly cause people to struggle with letting this older way of viewing the world wither and die. Isn’t there a way to build a strong and vibrant faith based on the clear message of hope, justice, and peace that is blatantly obvious in our sacred texts while letting go of the ancient worldviews that tag along for the ride on the backs of those stories? Why must there be a fight to the death over something so obvious?

I’m not suggesting that we dismiss these ancient voices, but rather that we understand their limitations in the same way that we should humbly consider our own limitations. If we have learned anything from the modern enlightenment, it should be that we will never have it all ironed out in neat little packages of scientific proof. There are certainly things we don’t yet understand but that is even more reason to keep questioning our worldview. The goal of faith is not to believe the unbelievable. The development of a robust faith cannot not be measured by the level of absurdity in things we will believe to be true.

Postmodern theology has been misunderstood as a return to pre-modern thinking or a rejection of modernity. Instead, I feel that to be postmodern means allowing all the lessons of modernity to become an integral part of our thinking as modernity has had time to sink into the fabric of our society. Postmodern people of faith are no longer fighting the discoveries of science the way our fathers did. Post modernity means the old modern war that sets faith apart from reason is over. Reason has won that battle, thank God! But unlike the early modern secular movement that saw faith and ancient beliefs as a package deal which must be destroyed, we now seek to find a place where faith no longer needs the absence of reason to exist. Postmodern theology is a complete absorption and celebration of the modern enlightenment PLUS the retention of ancient faith traditions, rituals, language, and timeless lessons. Our postmodern goal should be to have a robust "up-to-date" worldview with all the trimmings of modern science PLUS a robust faith with all the valuable insights of ancient traditions.