The followers of Jesus have been fighting about the proper way to interpret his teaching from the very beginning. Since Jesus did not write down his philosophy the writers of the ghospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) that made it into New Testament had signficant interpretative flexibility to write up his message, making it all the easier for church leaders to disagree on what should be official doctrine. If you don’t agree (and it does not matter here whether you are right or wrong) and if you have leadership skills you simply split with mother church. Today there are at least 300 different Christian demoninations, with every single one telling their children that they are being taught the correct faifth, and this means that there must of been hundreds of groups that broke away from the mother church over the past 2000 years.

The rise of modern science and its spectacular success in explaining the natural world better than the biblical stories has presented a whole new set up challenges for Christian theologians and informed laypeople who want preserve truth as important moral value within Christianity. Peter Boyer in a recent article in the New Yorker (attached below) on the conflict about the ordination of gay priests in the American Episcopalian church does a wonderful job in summarizing how difficult it is for Christian churches to incorporate insights from modern science without opening the floodgates that calls the entire basis of Christian doctrine into questions. (I boldface the most relevant passage in his article.) I am pretty sure that if Jesus could see what happened to his teachings he would not be able to believe it.

A CHURCH ASUNDER By Peter Boyer, New Yorker, April 17, 2006

For Episcopalians, faith in the power of compromise was almost doctrinal—until a diocese elected a gay bishop

In the late summer of 1965, a high-school valedictorian named Gene Robinson anxiously set off from Lexington, Kentucky, for college. He was the first in his family to come so far, and the school he’d chosen, the University of the South, in Sewanee, Tennessee, was not an obvious fit. Sewanee, as the school is known, was conceived, by an Episcopal bishop turned Confederate general, as an