As the BBC reports, some church leaders in the Netherlands want to
transform their small nation into a laboratory for rethinking
Christianity — “experimenting with radical new ways of understanding the
faith.”
Religious Affairs Correspondent Robert Pigott tells of Rev. Klaas
Hendrikse, a minister of the PKN, the mainstream Protestant denomination
in the Netherlands. Pastor Hendrikse doesn’t believe in life after
death, nor even in God as a supernatural being. He told the BBC that he
has “no talent” for believing historic and orthodox doctrines. “God is
not a being at all,” he says, but just an experience.
Furthermore, as Pigott reports, “Mr. Hendrikse describes the Bible’s
account of Jesus’s life as a mythological story about a man who may
never have existed, even if it is a valuable source of wisdom about how
to lead a good life.”
By any normative definition of Christian belief, Klass Hendrikse is an
unbeliever, but in the largest Dutch denomination, he is considered a
minister in good standing. As a matter of fact, he is not even unusual. A
study undertaken by the Free University of Amsterdam determined that
about one of every six Protestant ministers is either agnostic or
atheist. Keep Reading...
No comments:
Post a Comment