This started a few days ago, when we spotted (and ignored) a new article at Answers in Genesis (AIG), written by Ken Ham (ol’ Hambo), the Australian entrepreneur who has become the ayatollah of Appalachia. Ol’ Hambo’s article is Award-Winning Christian Musicians Mock Biblical Creationists.
Hambo is no longer satisfied criticizing preachers and bible colleges because they’re not sufficiently creationist. Now he’s turning his attention — and his wrath — on Christian musicians. He wrote, with bold font added by us:
Christian musicians Michael and Lisa Gungor, members of the Dove-award winning band Gungor, made headlines this week with their denial of the inerrancy of Scripture in Genesis. Then Michael Gungor declared in a clarifying blog post, “NO REASONABLE PERSON takes the entire Bible completely literally” (emphasis Gungor’s).
Blasphemy! This can’t be tolerated! Hambo’s article is a full-force attack on the pair. He said:
Michael Gungor studied jazz guitar at Western Michigan University and the University of North Texas. His wife, Lisa, studied music at Oral Roberts University. Neither is a Bible scholar nor scientist. And yet, they are writing as though they know more than people who have spent their lives studying the inerrancy of Scripture and who — in many cases — have come to different conclusions.
So now ol’ Hambo is extending his imaginary authority over Christian musicians. One more excerpt:
On the Gungor Music blog, Michael uses a mocking tone to explain his view of the Bible’s account of history:
[Hambo quotes Michael:] Do I believe that God literally drowned every living creature 5,000 years ago in a global flood except the ones who were living in a big boat? No, I don’t.
Why don’t I? Because of science and rational thought.
This is intolerable! Hambo rants on and on, but we’ll leave him there, red-faced and sputtering. Anyway, we didn’t pay any attention, not until we spotted this today, at the website of the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) — the granddaddy of all creationist outfits, the fountainhead of young-earth creationist wisdom Their new post is Christian Band Rejects Literal Genesis. Now ICR is joining the jihad. They say:
Respected guitarist and talented Christian songwriter Michael Gungor has recently made the news — not with his music, but with his outspoken rejection of a historical Genesis. Amid this contention, a Baptist church even canceled one of his gigs. Gungor cited science and reason for his position on Noah’s Ark.
We won’t quote much from ICR. Suffice it to say that they too are attacking the musicians. They drone on and on defending the tale of Noah’s Ark, which is too silly to copy here, and then they say, with our bold font:
The Gungors also wrote in their blog, “You can still love God and love people and read those early Genesis stories as myth with some important things to teach us.” Well, who says you can’t? But how worthy of love would a God be who can’t or won’t communicate clearly, or who lied about our beginnings on the very first pages of His book?
Aha — ICR claims that the Gungors think God is unworthy! Then phooey on them and their music!
Neither Hambo nor ICR makes an outright call for a boycott of the Gungors, but it’s certainly implied by their forceful disapproval. And then we found something in The Gospel Herald, which describes itself as “a leading online publication that brings you the most updated Chinese Christian issues around the globe.” Their article is Gungor Defends Faith, Says Band Is Part of a ‘Culture War’ They say:
Popular Christian music artist Michael Gungor recently appeared on the Bad Christian Podcast to address the negative reaction he received from blog posts sharing his beliefs concerning a literal account of creation and the flood in the book of Genesis.
The singer, who along with wife Lisa penned popular worship songs “Beautiful Things” and “Dry Bones,” came under fire after he admitted that he does not interpret the accounts of Noah and Adam and Eve literally. During the podcast, he defended his views and said he feels as though he is a part of a “culture war” between science and fundamentalist Christian beliefs.
Indeed, he is part of the culture war — at least as it’s being waged by Hambo and ICR. Let’s read on:
“If you asked any Christian before the Enlightenment, ‘What is the foundation of your faith?’ Everybody’s going to say Jesus Christ,” he said. “If you ask somebody now, especially an evangelical or fundamentalist, there’s a good chance they’re going to say the Bible.”
It’s surprising to see him mentioning the Enlightenment. We continue:
He said he feels he is a part of a “culture war,” where believers are leaving a fundamentalist belief system and embracing science. “These are issues that are kind of burning in the back of people’s minds that they just need to fight about right now,” he said. “I happen to be a convenient person to use as a scapegoat.”
Indeed. To people like Hambo, it’s gotta be his way or the highway — or rather, the Lake of Fire. Those who appreciate science, however, are content to leave creationists alone. Well, we ridicule them, but we don’t try to shut them down. They have a right to believe and preach as they do, as long as they don’t bother anyone else.
That’s all we have to say about this situation, but we’ll leave you with this one chilling thought: What would it be like if people like Hambo ever achieved political power?
Copyright © 2014. The Sensuous Curmudgeon. All rights reserved.
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The Sensuous Curmudgeon 
This is the root of the problem … it is not His book, it is humanity’s book about God.
Charles, that works right into Gungor’s point about the difference between your faith being in Jesus or being in the Bible. Jesus is a figure – you’re never going to know exactly everything about Him as a consequence. I understand the desire to turn instead to the Bible but, well, as a source of truth on matters of science and even history, it just isn’t reliable.
http://www.godofevolution.com/how-the-flap-over-gungor-shows-everything-thats-wrong-with-ken-hams-theology/
Some further discussion here.
(I also slammed Ham on the BCSE community forum (‘Rabble Rouser’ thread.)
PS I also commented – at Eye on the ICR – on the ICR piece. As follows:
”
http://www.icr.org/article/8331/
http://www.icr.org/article/8039/
“Creatures change within the boundaries of their own “kinds” or fundamental forms, so Noah certainly did not need to take on board all “species,”a modern term that seems to bear as many definitions as there are researchers who use it.”
GARBAGE. This is what the Bible actually SAYS at Genesis 6: 19-20 (NIV):
“You are to bring into the ark two of all living creatures, male and female, to keep them alive with you. Two of every kind of bird, of every kind of animal and of every kind of creature that moves along the ground will come to you to be kept alive.” NOTHING their about every ‘family’ or every ‘representative kind’ (frequently species within a large family with different genera won’t be able to interbreed).”
I’ve also flagged re how AiG and the ICR twist or ignore these verses in Genesis 6 at the Jimpithecus Christian blog post dated 15 August (but only just now and he operates pre-moderation so it won’t be visible just yet).
SC ponders the question, “What would it be like if people like Hambo ever achieved political power?”
They already have — in many state legislatures, governorships, and even the halls of Congress.
Sigh … One is left with mixed feelings about Gungor. One part of me wants to congratulate him for making a sane comment, and indeed I did leave such a comment on his site (following the link helpfully provided by Ham, who obviously encouraged his readers to leave CRITICAL comments instead).
Then again, Gungor wants to have his cake and eat it too. He doesn’t want to believe in a 6000-year old earth and a global flood, but he DOES want to “believe in Jesus”. The problem is that the only Jesus we “know” anything about is the hagiographic character described in the gospels, which have Jesus freely referring to the Genesis creation story and the story of Noah alike, and the veracity of either is never questioned at all.
Luke, chapter 3, even lists what purports to be a complete genealogy with Jesus as the 77th generation from Adam. Along the way we touch on such “historical characters” as 969-year-old Methuselah (Methusalem), plus ark-dwellers Noah and Sem.
Like it or not, the Jesus hagiographies of the New Testament are hopelessly interconnected with the classical Jewish legendarium set out in Genesis. So if you want to “believe” in the NT stuff, you have essentially two possible strategies.
One strategy involves wholesale denialism. One ignores or attempts to tear down everything in modern science that indicates that Genesis cannot possibly be a literally correct description of ancient history and the origins of “life, the universe and everything”. That is the path of classical creationism, with AiG and ICR as main players.
The other strategy, which to people like Ham is total heresy, involves some kind of near-Orwellian doublethink. The would-be “believer” has integrated so much of the modern scientific wordview that the twin notions of a recent creation and a global flood simply cannot be maintained, and the relevant Bible stories are relegated to the realm of myth (however edifying). In short, belief in the large-scale “worldwide” miracles is abandoned. But the believer still wants to accept Jesus, his (smaller-scale, localized) miracles and his teachings. Apparently this is Gungor’s current approach.
The catch is of course that Jesus, as quoted in the New Testament, seems to take the Hebrew Bible as absolute truth. So do the writers of various epistles. Paul even builds an important part of his theology on the notion of “Christ” as the “last Adam”, contrasting with the “first Adam” who is clearly supposed to be a real historical character.
“NO REASONABLE PERSON takes the entire Bible completely literally” (emphasis Gungor’s). Indeed. That also includes stories about a dead man rising after several days in the grave. But perhaps Gungor is not quite prepared to surrender that notion, and a lucrative career along with it? So he opts for doublethink instead of wholesale denialism, and now he has to suffer the disapproval of an arch-denialist like Ken Ham.
Should Gungor ever adopt a more consistent way of thinking and decide to go all the way, expect to see Ham lamenting what a sad end Gungor has come to because he compromized his faith with evolution. Then the fatal rot spread, all because he didn’t take Genesis seriously enough!
Oooooooh, doggy! Christian band groupies! I can feel the heat from here, all that repressed sexual energy.
It gets hot, so, oppressively hot down here in the South at night. You know the coolest spot in town, Laura? The graveyard. You know why? ‘Cause they got all those big, cool tombstones. You ever stretch out on a tombstone, Laura? Feel that nice cool marble on your body.
I do declare, I think I’m comin’ down with the vapors!
“Neither is a Bible scholar nor scientist.”
Hmmm. A rather ironic statement by Ham. He isn’t a Bible scholar (although, he pretends to be) or a scientist (although, he pretends to be), either. I guess Ham thinks that pretending to be something means you are something. Well, Ham certainly is something – but, there are rules on here that rightly prevent me from say what that something is.
Let me know when the DI weighs in.
Mr. Gungor seems to be more perceptive and thoughtful than your typical Country Music performer. He notes that young people are more inclined to accept scientific explanations of the natural world than they are to hew to fundamentalist Christian dogma. The results of public opinion polls that have been released recently seem to confirm that well educated respondents are most likely to reject creationism and that this is a continuing trend. This is good news. These well educated young people represent the future of our society.
Hambo’s article especially laments that some young people who look up to these performers will start to question the bible. Ham then launches into his warning that most young Christians who go off to college will abandon their faith and reject religious fundamentalism. Hambo than lashes out at compromising colleges as the reason for this trend and that a return to biblical inerrancy is the only way to stem the exodus.
Hambo knows that demographic trends do not suggest a bright future for YEC and it has already passed its high water mark. The irony is that Hambo does not recognize that the anti-modern positions he espouses are probably the biggest reason young college educated people are most likely to reject creationism.
WRT Hambo saying that the Gungors are “unworthy.”: Actually he wrote “But how worthy of love would a God be who can’t or won’t communicate clearly, or who lied about our beginnings on the very first pages of His book?” The way I read that, Hambo is saying that gawd as described by Gungors would be the unworthy one.
BTW, remember old Jim Bakker of Jim and Tammy / PTL/Heritage USA fame? Since he got out of prison for his fraud convictions he’s gotten himself a new TV show. He can again be found on the religulous cable channels, now talking up the End Times, and hawking survival goodies to help prepare for such times. I wonder how long before old Jim and his current wife get busted on new fraud charges.
http://jimbakkershow.com/
Hey… they’re hiring!
The catch is of course that Jesus, as quoted in the New Testament, seems to take the Hebrew Bible as absolute truth. So do the writers of various epistles. Paul even builds an important part of his theology on the notion of “Christ” as the “last Adam”, contrasting with the “first Adam” who is clearly supposed to be a real historical character.
So what of Jesus, who after all was raised as a Jew of his times, took the Hebrew Bible as true? What’s important about Jesus as far as modern people is his own message.
Moreover, one might note that if he had publicly rejected the Hebrew Scriptures, he’d have become a pariah in his native Judea. While that might have meant his living to a ripe old age, since the Romans wouldn’t have seen him as a potential leader of some new uprising oif Jewish zealots, it would also quite probably have strangled Christianity as a religion. Jesus spoke in an idiom his fellow first-century Jews–some of them, anyway–could understand and accept.
SC wants answers: “What would it be like if people like Hambo ever achieved political power?”
Saudi-Arabia, but worse.
I tend to be skeptical that the AIG, DI, or ICR are all that bent out of shape by the Gungors’ personal theology. They are all big boys and know the landscape. What really motivates these gangs of creationists probably reduces down to their shared core values, which favor pleasing their political sugar-daddies, or pushing up profits from textbooks and home-school curriculums.
So I will wait a bit to see if these creationists were merely looking for something to whine about on a slow day and then fades away, or whether they have been employed to open a full frontal attack on non-orthodox viewpoints, in a mode similar to the campaign launched against the Dixie Chicks. That might tell a story.
But how worthy of love would a God be who can’t or won’t communicate clearly, or who lied about our beginnings on the very first pages of His book?
That is demanding that God behave according one’s own human standards. Demanding that God speak “clearly”, and not speak in parables. (Matt.13:10-17). Calling what God says is a “lie”, when it does not say what I want to hear! Setting up standards for makes God worthy of love!
Ceteris Paribus: “So I will wait a bit to see if these creationists were merely looking for something to whine about on a slow day and then fades away…”
That’s what I suspect, and here’s why:
First the game that all anti-evolution activists, be they Biblical or ID, is to first whine about “atheists.” But as the “debate” gets deeper, they eventually have to admit that they have more objection to theistic evolutionists, because (1) they at least agree with the atheists on the false dichotomy, and (2) TEs have scientific and theological objections to creationism/ID, whereas ATEs have only scientific ones.
Biblical activists, because they claim to hold a specific literal interpretation, are forced to occasionally refute contradictory ones, from fellow anti-evolution activists. They don’t like doing that, but its necessary for consistency, which at least some fans expect. ID activists omit this part entirely, because they have no “official” position (individuals occasionally state one, but never challenge any contradictory one).
The musicians may be technically “evolutionists,” and as I understand so is Pat Robertson, who recently criticized YEC (From what I read he didn’t stop at OEC-without-common-descent). But these people are “Christian first, ‘evolutionist’ second,” so unlike TEs like Ken Miller, who is “a critic of creationism/ID first” they would not be expected to consume as much of the activists’ time, energy, and passion.
ID activists, as they did with Freshwater, will ignore this as long as they can. Only when their self-imposed silence becomes too obvious (e.g. avoiding any comment on the never-ending Freshwater case for years) will they reluctantly weigh in. And of course they will spin it against “Darwinism” even if it undermines their efforts to “distance themselves” from the Biblicals.
Bottom line, it all makes sense when one views Creationism/ID as a strategy, not a belief.
TomS: “That is demanding that God behave according one’s own human standards. Demanding that God speak ‘clearly, and not speak in parables. (Matt.13:10-17). Calling what God says is a ‘lie, when it does not say what I want to hear! Setting up standards for makes God worthy of love!”
You know how bored I am with all that religion-speak, especially since all the absurdities and evils of creationism/ID can be demonstrated (and even more clearly IMO) without reference to religion. But this issue never ceases to amaze me – how the same people who have no problem with God allowing death and suffering insist that He would never dare state the origins account differently than it actually happened. Note I didn’t even say “lie,” because if God did write Genesis (another debate for another time), an accurate account would not have been understandable by the people of the day anyway, so some sort of oversimplification was not just understandable, but necessary.
I suppose that an almighty could have instantaneously updated all the printed words – and our memories thereof – as evidence became available and understandable. But what actually happened may be better for us the long run. If God is indeed like a “parent” He would be expected to not just always make it easy for us, but to balance that with challenges that make us stronger. Literalists, like scared children, are looking only for comfort (hold the banana jokes, please). While the anti-evolution activists who exploit them throw their own tantrums by demanding handouts.
Frank J
However we describe the creation/design of the universe/life on Earth, and the capacity for thought, with all of the supposedly false
appearances of common descent over “deep time”. If the creator/designer(s) are up to doing that, why should we expect anything different from what we are told?
Nature may be difficult, but it takes an intelligent designer to be deceptive.
Ham is at it again. Today’s blog post on AiG is about Peter Enns, who is working with the theistic evolutionists at BioLogos (or in Ham’s own words, “the leading proponent of compromising positions … on Genesis”).
Ham got himself kicked out of a homeschooling conference for lambasting Enns, and is clearly still sore about it.
Now Enns has written a piece which to Ham’s ears sounds like blasphemy, and wouldn’t you know it … Michael Gungor has re-tweeted it!
You can read this vile, blasphemous, Ham-ridiculing, Bible-denigrating, Gungor-supported satire here:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/peterenns/2014/08/ken-ham-blasts-god-for-not-taking-the-bible-seriously/#ixzz3ASQQgQYq
Clearly Ham, boldly suffering this wave of religious persecution, is entitled to use his blog to warn against these near-evolutionist compromisers who don’t take Genesis nearly as seriously as they should.
(… compromisers who DON’T take …) Anybody up there?
[*Voice from above*] It’s where I dwell.
hnohf,
Hambo spews some of his worst venom at Christians that in his mind are not Christian enough.
hnohf – just a slight clarification – Pete and BioLogos parted ways a while back because Pete’s biblical scholarship was just a bit too incompatible with the conservative evangelicals’ interpretation of Genesis.