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    The Ladder of God
    The Ladder of God
    The Ladder of God
    Ebook64 pages58 minutes

    The Ladder of God

    By Edwin Walhout

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    About this ebook

    What might Christian theology look like if we take seriously the fifteen billion years that it took God to develop the earth as a suitable habitat for the human race, and that humans themselves have common ancestors with chimpanzees? Here is a bold new exploratory look at Christianity, using a developmental paradigm.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherEdwin Walhout
    Release dateMay 23, 2012
    ISBN9781476215358
    The Ladder of God
    Author

    Edwin Walhout

    I am a retired minister of the Christian Reformed Church, living in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Being retired from professional life, I am now free to explore theology without the constraints of ecclesiastical loyalties. You will be challenged by the ebooks I am supplying on Smashwords.

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      Book preview

      The Ladder of God - Edwin Walhout

      THE LADDER OF GOD

      An Overview of Human History

      Using a Developmental Paradigm

      by Edwin Walhout, 2012

      Published by Edwin Walhout

      Smashwords Edition

      Copyright 2012 Edwin Walhout

      Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible.

      Cover design by Amy Cole (amy.cole@comcast.net)

      For additional e-books by this author, go to Smashwords.com

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      CONTENTS

      Chapter 1 PERSPECTIVE

      Chapter 2 CREATION

      Chapter 3 MONOTHEISM

      Chapter 4 TORAH

      Chapter 5 MONARCHY

      Chapter 6 RETURN FROM CAPTIVITY

      Chapter 7 JESUS

      Chapter 8 CONVERSION OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE

      Chapter 9 CONVERSION OF EUROPE

      Chapter 10 THE RENAISSANCE

      Chapter 11 PROTESTANTISM

      Chapter 12 NORTH AMERICA

      Chapter 13 CONCLUSION

      Chapter 1 PERSPECTIVE

      When the ancient Jews listened to the Apostle Paul preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ, some of them objected that if what Paul said was true, then everything the Jews had been doing in the service of God for the past thousand years was worthless. Specifically they referred to the Torah, God’s law given at Mount Sinai. Torah obedience had been the trademark of Jewish religious life for countless generations; so now Paul, are you telling us that to obey the Torah is not only unnecessary but downright useless; doesn’t this mean we have been wrong all these years? Is that what you are telling us, Paul?

      So Paul, in his letter to the church in Rome, explained as best he could that the Jews did have great advantages from their obedience to the Torah, but that now something even better has come, namely obedience from a holy spirit. As good and necessary as the Torah has been, God is now giving us something that will bring us beyond the kind of legal obedience that the Torah requires, the obedience of the heart which comes from faith in Jesus, our messiah.

      Something similar happened at the time of the Protestant Reformation. Loyal Roman Catholics objected that if the Reformers were right, then the way we have practiced our Christian faith for a thousand years is wrong. Is that what Protestants are telling Catholics?

      The answer is also similar to the answer Paul gave to the Judaizers of his time. God is now providing something better. We were doing the best we could in past generations under the leadership of the Pope, but now God is giving us a new burst of freedom in the Spirit, something that will liberate our spirits from the now-outgrown discipline of papal control. Medieval religious practice did provide numerous benefits in European life, but now a great expansion of liberty and faith is at hand.

      I am suggesting in this treatise that something comparable to those two major advances in the plan of God is taking place in the twenty and twenty-first centuries. It is a major shift in theology from the Augustinian pattern of creation, fall, and redemption into a developmental paradigm for history. I refer to the theory of evolution with its vastly improved understanding of the origin of the universe, of the planet earth, and of the human race. Modern science has been improving by leaps and bounds since the Reformation freed science and philosophy and theology from the outworn shackles of medieval custom. What began as hypothesis, and gradually became theory, has now become pretty much established truth, on a level with the shape of the earth and the path of its orbit around the sun.

      If we take seriously that the God who created the universe and who saw to it that various forms of life, including humans, appeared on this tiny planet, that this Creator God is also in control of the development of that universe, including the development of human life and history, then we need to respond to what he is telling us via the amazing progress of scientific insight into such matters as the origin of the world and of human life. What he is telling us now in the modern world is that the traditional patterns of theology that regard Genesis 1-11 as literal historical fact can no longer be maintained. Adam and Eve can no longer be regarded as actual first parents of the human race, so that the stories in Genesis must now be regarded as parables rather than as history.

      This development also demonstrates that the Augustinian model of using Adam and Eve as first parents, their

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