Engineering Gospel Ideas: Release the Kragle!

On the process of improving our understanding of the gospel

You can listen to the audio version of this essay here.

In the two previous weeks we’ve talked about the “traditions of our fathers” and the possibility of a “ventricular theology.” Both of these essays explored how the principle of context applies to ideas in the past, and how as the context of our knowledge changes, ideas change as well.

Today we’ll be focusing on this process of change. I’ve got a bit of a silly example for you, and then a more serious example, and then we’ll see what we can make of them as they apply to our thinking about the gospel.

We’d like to avoid a ventricular theology, if possible; we want to avoid having our understanding of the gospel be prisoner to what has gone before us even as other things advance around us. But what can we do to that end? Let’s figure it out.