What If We're Still in the Early Church? A TNT on Whether Religion Gets to Evolve

Bo sent me a meme. That's the whole setup. An account called Reasoned Reality posting "seven core Christian doctrines invented after Christ died, and the church wrote down the exact dates" — Trinity 325, original sin with Augustine, Anselm in 1098, inerrancy in a Chicago hotel in 1978, the rapture with Darby in the 1830s. I didn't text him back that night because I was writing notes. Here's the thing: the premise is right and the execution is a slander. Doctrines do develop. But when you put a date on something and act like it came out of nowhere, you're announcing you haven't read it. If evangelicals want to be liberal theologians, be real ones — von Harnack has nine volumes on the history of dogma, agrees the thing evolved, and actually understands why. So we spent the hour on whether religion is allowed to evolve, which turns out to have a whole typology of answers from people with Saint in front of their name. Plus: Bo's springs metaphor for contextual theology and the postcolonial critique that's made him rethink it, the LDS question in a town that's seven-out-of-nine Mormon at one high school, the guy who told Bo that feeding people without praying first makes it filthy rags, and the golf round where Bo asked a retired CMA pastor what good taking the Bible seriously does if you end up at Trump. It got quiet after that.

You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube

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