New Kind of Faith Participant's Guide

A New Kind of Faith Participant's Guide Copyright © 2006 by Lee Strobel and Rocket Pictures Requests for information should be addressed to: Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49530 ISBN-10: 0-310-26860-5 ISBN-13: 978-0-310-26860-4 All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible: New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved. The website addresses recommended throughout this book are offered as a resource to you. These websites are not intended in any way to be or imply an endorsement on the part of Zondervan, nor do we vouch for their content for the life of this book. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means - electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other - except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Interior design by Angela Moulter Printed in the United States of America 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 - 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 11 Session 1 Must Christianity Change or Die? Read It! Reality Check? Galileo Galilei held to some radical ideas that ran contrary to church doctrine in the 1600s. Get this: This guy actually claimed that the Sun, not the Earth, was at the center of the solar system. Can you believe that? Of course you can! By now that's scientifically proven and astronomically accurate. That fact is so obvious that it seems ludicrous the church would have ever had a problem with it. But it did. Galileo was taken to trial by the church authorities for these "outlandish" beliefs. Theology of that time hinged on the assumed reality that the Earth was the center of the universe. As far as the church was concerned, Galileo's claim messed up its entire belief system. The first time he was brought to trial, he was found innocent and warned not to teach the Copernican, Sun-centered system ever again. Later, with permission from the church under the leadership of a new pope, Galileo published a book presenting a creative dialogue between friends - the most brilliant friend took the Sun-centered point of view, while the simpleminded character represented the Earth-centered view. It was supposed to present these ideas as theory, but the book made it obvious who was right and who was the idiot. The church didn't like this book. The pope, suspecting he was a model for the simpleminded character, halted the book's printing and put Galileo, then sixty-eight, on trial for teaching the Copernican theory after being ordered not to. When threatened with torture, Galileo publicly confessed that he had been wrong to have said that the Earth moved around the Sun. He was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. Because of his age and fame, they adapted the imprisonment to house arrest, where Galileo Galilei lived out the final years of his life. Oh, but the church came around. In 1992 Pope John Paul II publicly endorsed a papal commission's finding that the church had made a mistake in condemning Galileo. Wait - did you catch the year? - 1992! It only took the church 350 years to admit the truth and face reality. That's a snail's pace approach to change, wouldn't you say? Shouldn't Christianity evolve more efficiently than that? If you're not careful, you'd think God invaded the earth through the miracle of the virgin birth and then escaped the earth through the miracle of the cosmic ascension. Or would you? Aren't those just weak, first-century attempts to try to make sense out of a few unusual events? The church claims it's reality, but is it really reality? The idea that somehow the bloodStrobel, Lee is the author of 'New Kind of Faith Participant's Guide', published 2005 under ISBN 9780310268604 and ISBN 0310268605.