There's an awful lot of biblical ignorance, and the church perpetuates that ignorance.

The God understood as a father figure, who guided ultimate personal decisions, answered our prayers, and promised rewards and punishment based upon our behavior was not designed to call anyone into maturity.

The God content of the past no longer sustains the contemporary spirit. We sense that our only hope is to journey past those definitions of a God who is external, supernatural, and invasive, which previously defined our belief. We must discover whether or not the death of the God we worshiped yesterday is the same thing as the death of God.

The primary message of the Christian Church is that we were born in sin and we need to be rescued; we cannot rescue ourselves, so God comes to our rescue, pays the price of our sin and transforms us through the death of Jesus.

Biblical higher criticism is preserved in the particular enclave of academic Christian scholarship and is thought to be too unfruitful to share with the average pew-sitter, for it raises more questions than the church can adequately answer. So the leaders of the church would protect the simple believers from concepts they were not trained to understand. In this way that ever-widening gap between academic Christians and the average pew-sitter made its first appearance.

We are in a survival mentality, and that's hard-wired into our humanity, because we are the winners of an evolutionary struggle of millions and millions and millions of years.

The church is like a swimming pool. Most of the noise comes from the shallow end.