"Tinfoil Hat" Theology Revisited

General Revelation

1. We act as if our decisions and actions matter.
2. The meaning, value, and purpose of our experience is either apparent or real.
3. Naturalism explains our subjective human experience as a self-organizing "operating system" of a human machine which itself is the incidental end product of millennia of random mutations that caused increased survivability for these organisms in their environments.
4. If only apparent - as it appears to be within a purely naturalistic worldview - then all meaningful discussion ends as meaning, value, and purpose are simply random entities within a biological program.
5. If, on the other hand, our experienced belief that our decisions and actions really do matter - that they are real - then they must be supernatural and this, rather than some post-Enlightenment concern regarding whether revelation or miracle violates natural law, is the heart of Christian claims regarding the supernatural.
6. Naturalism can explain our experience but lacks to necessary concepts to validate that experience as real.
7. Whether or not a perceived or reported miracle (event) does or does not appear to stand in contradiction to standards of Enlightenment reason and evidence is of minor concern compared with the disclosure and discernment of ultimate meaning, purpose, and value in the event.

Special Revelation

1. Our life experience is meaningful, valuable, and purposeful.
2. That meaning, value, and purpose is unconditional.
3. That meaning, value, and purpose is ultimately resilient in confrontation with the intimidation, temptation, and aggression of death.

 The Bible and the Christian Tradition

1. The Bible is the authoritative witness to God’s revelation of meaning, purpose, and value in the life of Israel and the early church.
2. The broad, central, Christian tradition is the authoritative interpretation of that witness.
3. Contemporary revelation within and without Christian institutions in our private and public lives occurs in the context of that tradition: we recognize the gospel of God in Christ in our lives as we recognize it in the Bible and the Christian tradition.

The Gospel of God in Christ

1. The problem is human enthrallment to death and our destructive attempts to overcome, evade, or covenant with death.
2. The solution is God in Christ’s ironic victory over death through apparent defeat at its hands.
3. The new human possibility is genuine freedom in regards to death even and especially at those times when death seems ascendant over all human experience, whether private or public.
4. No longer seeking justification and salvation from death for our own lives, we are now free for both private and public efforts to be good stewards of Creation.

The Resistance of All People to the Gospel of God in Christ

All of us, Christian and non-Christian, resist the gospel because it is terrifying. It invites us to abandon our own personally and socially destructive means of securing relief from death and to instead, in our naked and terrible vulnerability, find God in Christ's salvation in the very midst of death's feigned rule. God in Christ has overcome death on a cross rather than a throne and calls us to do the same. And that is not the gospel we want to hear. So while the decision to accept the gospel may (or may not) come to a focus at one particularly significant point in our biography it is a decision that will be revisited as death continues to confront us every day of our lives even as we grow in confidence that God in Christ can be trusted onto death.