Safe Haven

You know, I can recall getting rather heated with a friend of mine when he read a quote from a Francis Collins book (one of the human genome dudes) defending Christianity from atheists (ironic, that) via also defending evolution. It was one of those "make your head explode" kind of quotes like, "No reasonable person of any intelligence denies the science behind evolution." Granted, I am a Christian, and a deeply "conservative" orthodox (whatever that means) one, at that. I am not a scientist, but I was under the distinct impression that science at its best draws provisional conclusions that are always testable and falsifiable, and that "what we know" can change radically based upon new information. It just seemed like a very unscientific statement from a man who should know better. I always identified very sympathetically with Michael Crichton's portrayal of R. Karp, a fictional scientist in his master work, The Andromeda Strain . Karp had di...

So there I was, reading Jurgens on the Fathers, (pp.87-89, for those scoring at home) when I came across this breathtaking paragraph from (St.) Irenaeus: “It is possible, then, for everyone in every Church, who may wish to know the truth, to contemplate the tradition of the Apostles which has been made known throughout the whole world. And we are in a position to enumerate those who were instituted bishops by the Apostles, and their successors to our own times: men who neither knew nor taught anything like these heretics rave about. For if the Apostles had known hidden mysteries which they taught to the elite secretly and apart from the rest, they would have handed them down especially to those very ones to whom they were committing the self-same Churches. For surely they wished all those and their successors to be perfect and without reproach, to whom they handed on their authority.” Yikes. Give me a moment. [Birthing a Reformation-era bovine with a tasty, er, um, disposition, God-wil...