Genesis 22:1-14, 28/6/26

This sermon, preached by Glynn Cardy, is dependent on the thinking of Jim Palmer

https://jimpalmerblog.wordpress.com/about/

Religious ideas help human beings cope with uncertainty, mortality, suffering, belonging, identity, and meaning.

The problem is though that these religious ideas that help us cope are developed under one set of historical conditions and do not necessarily remain viable under another.  As human knowledge expands, certain religious explanations become increasingly difficult to believe. Yet the needs they were addressing do not disappear.

Religious ideas are often treated as beliefs. Jim Palmer calls them ‘survival architectures’ – that is
psychological, social, and existential structures developed to help human beings navigate realities that would otherwise overwhelm them. They are frameworks for managing life.

This does not mean they are true. Nor does it mean they are false. Rather than ask whether a belief is factually correct it’s better to ask what function it performs. What problem does it solve? What human need does it address?

Every enduring religious idea survives because it does something for the people who hold it. The difficulty facing modern societies is that many of these solutions are no longer intellectually sustainable. Yet the underlying needs these ideas once addressed remain very much alive. We continue to seek certainty, belonging, purpose, identity, and explanations for suffering.

When one ‘survival architecture’ collapses, another quickly emerges to take its place. Human beings remain meaning-seeking creatures.

This helps explain one of the defining features of our historical moment. The decline of traditional religion has not produced a less religious species. Rather it has produced new objects of devotion. The same psychological and existential needs that once organized themselves around churches, creeds, and sacred texts now organize themselves around political ideologies, conspiracy movements, online tribes, and charismatic influencers. The forms change. The functions remain remarkably similar.

We are therefore living through a peculiar historical moment. The architecture is weakening while the needs it once organized persist. Millions of people are losing confidence in inherited religious frameworks while still wrestling with the same questions that produced those frameworks in the first place. Many of the deepest challenges of human existence remain, even when the traditional answers no longer do.

With this in mind, I want to briefly look at nine Christian doctrines of the past –not as theological claims but as attempts to solve enduring human problems. And note, what survives the collapse of a doctrine is not the doctrine itself, but the challenge to us hidden within it.

1. The God in the Sky

For much of human history, people imagined God as a cosmic king ruling the universe from above.

This image solved an important psychological problem. It placed ultimate authority somewhere. It reassured people that someone was in charge. In a dangerous and unpredictable world, the belief that a wise and powerful ruler governed reality provided a profound sense of order.

Today, however, many people can no longer believe in the image of a supernatural male monarch directing events from another realm.

Yet the underlying need remains. Human beings still seek trust, coherence, and a sense that existence is not merely random. The challenge is learning to relate to the idea/persona of God without reducing God to a cosmic father figure, to remain in relationship with mystery without reducing it to certainty.

2. The Book That Contains All Truth

The belief that one sacred text contains ultimate and final truth offers certainty in an uncertain world. For life is complicated. Reality is ambiguous and be overwhelming. The promise that all essential answers can be found in a single authoritative source relieves us of the burden of ongoing discernment.

The problem is that reality continually exceeds our categories. Knowledge evolves. Understanding deepens. New questions emerge.

What many people come to discover is that certainty and truth are not the same thing. A closed system can provide certainty while cutting us off from reality.

The challenge is learning how to remain open and curious, navigating complexity, ambiguity, and uncertainty, without requiring infallible answers.


3. Original Sin

The doctrine of original sin attempted to explain something people could easily observe. Human beings repeatedly hurt one another. We betray our values. We act selfishly. We participate in systems that cause suffering. We often know better but don’t do it. Original sin offered one explanation: humanity is fundamentally flawed.

Modern psychology, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and trauma studies provide different explanations. We understand far more today about developmental wounds, conditioning, attachment, fear, and survival mechanisms.

The deeper question remains unchanged. How do we account for the gap between our potential and our behaviour? How do we understand the destructive tendencies that emerge within individuals and societies?

The challenge is to recognize both the creative and destructive capacities within ourselves without collapsing into either self-condemnation or self-deception.

4. Hell

Hell solved a moral problem. History is filled with tyrants who prosper, victims who suffer, and injustices that appear unresolved. The doctrine of eternal punishment promised that, eventually, the moral books would be balanced.

But many of us can no longer reconcile infinite punishment with the nature of a God defined by love.

The challenge then becomes learning how to pursue justice without relying on cosmic torture chambers. Rather than relying on fear of punishment, the challenge is to cultivate responsibility, accountability, and ethical concern because of the kind of people we wish to become.

5. The Virgin Birth

The virgin birth belongs to a larger family of sacred stories in whichextraordinary figures enter the world through extraordinary means. Such storiesare not primarily concerned with biology. They are concerned withtransformation.

Human beings have always wrestled with a fundamental question: Can something genuinely new emerge from the existing order of things? Can history produce a different kind of human being? Can individuals transcend the limitations of the cultures that formed them?

The virgin birth can be understood as one symbolic answer to that question. It suggests that the future need not be a simple continuation of the past. Something new can emerge. A different way of being human is possible.

Modern people often overlook the question underneath this doctrine. How does transformation occur? What allows human beings to break free from inherited patterns of fear, violence, conformity, and survival? What gives rise to greater compassion, courage, wisdom, and love?

Those questions remain every bit as relevant today as they were two thousand years ago. The challenge is to learn to become participants in our own development and to remain open to the possibility that genuinely new ways of being human can emerge, even within us and through us.

6. Satan

The figure of Satan solves a psychologically tempting problem. It relocates evil somewhere else. Rather than confronting the complexity of human aggression, cruelty, and self-deception, we can project these destructive forces onto an external enemy. Evil is outside us.

History suggests a more uncomfortable reality. The capacity for both creation and destruction runs through every individual and every society. The challenge is not defeating a supernatural villain. The challenge is developing the awareness and maturity necessary to confront our own shadow.

The challenge is shadow integration. Rather than projecting evil onto external enemies, we must learn to confront the aggression, fear, and destructive tendencies that exist within ourselves and our communities.

7. Divine Violence

Religious narratives often portray God authorizing violence. At one level, these stories helped ancient communities interpret war, conquest, and tribal conflict. They assumed God supported their side.

Human beings possess a remarkable ability to sanctify their own interests. We repeatedly convince ourselves that our enemies deserve destruction and that our causes justify extraordinary measures.

The question these stories leave us with is whether genuine faith expands our capacity for compassion or merely provides sacred language for our aggression.

The challenge is to learn how to pursue justice, defend values, and confront wrongdoing without sanctifying hatred, domination, or dehumanization.

8. Blood Sacrifice

Sacrificial systems emerged because human beings needed a way to repair ruptured relationships. When guilt (like I suggest is behind the Abraham/Isaac sacrifice story), conflict, or wrongdoing, threatened communal stability, sacrifice provided a symbolic mechanism for restoration. The deeper need beneath sacrifice is reconciliation.

The question modern people face is whether healing requires payment, punishment, and violence, or whether restoration becomes possible through entirely different means. What if forgiveness is not a transaction? What if reconciliation emerges through truth, responsibility, repair, and transformation?


9. Going to Heaven

Perhaps no religious idea has become more detached from ordinary life than the notion that the primary purpose of faith is securing a favourable afterlife. This belief addresses one of humanity’s deepest fears: mortality.

We do not want death to have the final word. We want reassurance that our existence matters and that our lives participate in something larger than themselves.

The deeper invitation of faith may not be about escaping this world but entering it more fully. Not preparing to live later in an after-life, but learning how to be fully present to the life we are living now.

Conclusion

The crisis of our time is not that people are losing religious beliefs. The crisis is that millions are losing the belief structures that once helped them orient themselves within reality, while possessing no alternative framework for meaning, belonging, morality, mortality, or purpose.

This is why the future of faith will not be decided by arguments about doctrine. It will be decided by whether we can develop forms of mature faith capable of carrying the human needs that the Christianity of the past provided the survival architecture for.

The question is not so much what we believe, but whether we can become the kind of people who no longer require certainty in order to remain in relationship with reality.

The task before us is not simply constructing new beliefs. It is developing the capacity to live honestly within uncertainty, mortality, complexity, and freedom. In other words, the challenge is existential, and it’s from such grappling with such that new beliefs, new theology, will arise.

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