Waking up yesterday with my first cup of coffee, I idly watched the Mississippi River from my seventh floor hotel room in La Crosse, Wisconsin. The river was flowing rapidly, and I started to wonder, why does a river flow? I don’t know how you are, but my body wakes up first and it takes a while to get the brain going. Why does a river flow? Of course, it has an outlet, and then there’s the shape of the earth and gravity, and whatever other scientific facts. My point: I found an explanation in science, not in God, the “maker of heaven and earth.”
I was in La Crosse for a conference of pastors from south Wisconsin. Three of our Concordia Seminary professors spoke about “Finding a Lutheran Pastoral Voice in Theology and Science.” Some older people hear “theology and science” and immediately think of the debate between creation and evolution, but the 21st century presents many more scientific issues where pastors and laypeople need the insights that come from God’s Word. The most basic issue: where do we turn to understand and deal with life? Waking up, I mused about scientific reasons a river flows. When you have a problem with your computer or device, you go to tech support, not to God. When you have a medical need, you go to your doctor or hospital, and yes, you do offer a prayer, but the real place you look for help is medicine. And so it goes, economy, finances, agriculture; we look to human resources.
“The modern world quite literally ‘manages’ without God. We can do so much so well by ourselves that there is no need for God, even in his church. Thus we modern people can be profoundly secular in the midst of explicitly religious activities. Which explains why so many modern Christian believers are atheists unawares. Professing to be believers in supernatural reality, they are virtual atheists; whatever they say they believe, they show in practice that they function without practical recourse to the supernatural…. The call to follow Jesus Christ runs directly counter to this deadly modern pressure toward secularization.” (Os Guiness, “The Call,” 149).
By the time of my second cup of coffee, my brain was engaged. “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” (Luke 18:8).
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