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TechnoratiPastor Larry Osborne of North Coast Church in Vista, Calif., was saved a lot of heartache when he was taught not to base his Christian belief system on what everybody else said.
Biblical scrutiny was key to helping him gain greater trust in God’s Word and pinpoint the “partial truths” that many Christians hold as complete truths.
And these beliefs that “smart, sincere, good, and godly Christians” hold aren’t just false, they’re dangerous, he says.
He lays these out in his newly released book, 10 Dumb Things Smart Christians Believe.
CP: Many Christians don’t seem to know or are confused about what exactly they should believe and on top of that they are not really studying Scripture. Is that part of the reason you wrote this book?
Osborne: We live in a day and age of sound bites and so often so much of what we think is in the Bible is just a partial part of a verse or a statement without any knowledge of all the verses that are around it or the other parts of Scripture that might qualify what a particular verse says.
CP: You talk about spiritual urban legends. You mention that these actually get passed around in Sunday school, bible study, a devotional or even sermons. How does that happen? Shouldn’t Christians expect to receive proper teaching from these areas?
Osborne: Definitely, we should be expecting proper teaching. But what happens especially in Sunday school classes and Bible studies and I would say only occasionally in sermons, somebody passes out a truism that sounds good and we’ve just heard it so many times we don’t bother to check it out and that’s the source of most of these urban legends. They’re true partially but they’re not true completely. And it’s the qualification and the rest of the story that’s important. It kind of reminds me of when Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount “you have heard that you shouldn’t murder but I tell you you shouldn’t hate or be angry.” Well they were correct when they said you shouldn’t murder but they were wrong to think it stopped there. Many of the spiritual urban legends are the same way. They’re just the partial truth that we shouldn’t be building the whole house on.
CP: What proportion of Christians do you estimate believe in these spiritual urban legends?
I would say very few Christians probably buy all of them and most of us have one or two of them that will cause us to go “hm.” But the mixture of these is just rampant throughout the Christian community.
CP: It seems like if Christians were clear on all these points you mentioned in the book, they’d do better in debates with atheists or even just be able to clear up a lot of the questions and even criticisms that non-Christians have.
I think some of these would clear them up. Not all of them. Probably the most common thread through all of them is that it would remove the disillusionment that comes when we bank on promises that God actually never made. And if you look at some of them, absolutely they can help in defending our faith and others maybe wouldn’t help so much there but they’d help in the disillusionment area. For instance, I’m not sure agnostics or atheists want to get into a debate about whether or not forgiving means totally forgetting everything that happened. The negative impact is more upon my spiritual life than my witness. Continue »
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