Wrestling with Scriptures and other matters
It's a good thing that Bible passages are not watered down and clear cut. We must use our analytical skills to understand the Bible. Of course, this fact of the Bible's largely narrative, rhetorically driven, rather than expositional, form means we have more to debate and get confused over.
This is my 2100th blog post on this blog. I have kept this blog since 2006, so that's an average of 161.5 posts per year, one usually every 2.25 days. So I can't be accused of starting a blog and letting it dwindle.
The most popular: my post coming out as a Kallman Syndrome patient. Second, an essay I wrote on the movie Twelve Angry Men, which I took down because I knew it was being plagiarized (it was on one of those sites). Others have been popular, but generally they get 20-30 hits, probably from nefarious types in other countries and from porn sites.
I may be blogged out; I may be going into a depression because of a career situation; I may just be more focused on long-form writing and teaching. I don't know that I'll be blogging much in the near future. I could post my Sunday School/Life group lessons like I have in the past, or lectures, or portions of my books, I suppose.
Anyway, I recently (as in last night) finished a book that definitely has me wrestling with Scripture, N.T. Wrights How God Became King. I don't know if I would recommend it or not. His writing is wonderful, although he probably could have written the book in half as many pages. And he sort of got on my nerves with the "nobody has been reading scripture right for hundreds of years" claim. I also realized late in the book that he is coming from a creedal tradition (which he mostly deals with) and that's not really me (despite being Presbyterian for several years), so some of his claims seemed overwrought for a Baptist; i.e., that we ignore Israel's place in the gospels.
However, it does answer some questions for me, shows a very interesting synthesis of the gospels and Old Testament, and deals indirectly with something I ran across last year and consider a heresy: that Paul had a different gospel from Jesus. How could that be? He shows we have let our "Jesus died so I can go to heaven" thesis totally obscure what the cross and gospels are about, but I already knew that. I figured a long time ago the cross was about righteousness and God's glory, not so we get a ticket out of judgment.
I also read The Man Who was Thursday last week. Fun read, very odd ending that stretches one's brain. I had read it before but I didn't understand it or "get it." I read better now. Whenever we reread a book we are a different person, anyway.
So, this might be the beginning of a hiatus on the blog. Please contact me and read my novels and Bible studies!
This is my 2100th blog post on this blog. I have kept this blog since 2006, so that's an average of 161.5 posts per year, one usually every 2.25 days. So I can't be accused of starting a blog and letting it dwindle.
The most popular: my post coming out as a Kallman Syndrome patient. Second, an essay I wrote on the movie Twelve Angry Men, which I took down because I knew it was being plagiarized (it was on one of those sites). Others have been popular, but generally they get 20-30 hits, probably from nefarious types in other countries and from porn sites.
I may be blogged out; I may be going into a depression because of a career situation; I may just be more focused on long-form writing and teaching. I don't know that I'll be blogging much in the near future. I could post my Sunday School/Life group lessons like I have in the past, or lectures, or portions of my books, I suppose.
Anyway, I recently (as in last night) finished a book that definitely has me wrestling with Scripture, N.T. Wrights How God Became King. I don't know if I would recommend it or not. His writing is wonderful, although he probably could have written the book in half as many pages. And he sort of got on my nerves with the "nobody has been reading scripture right for hundreds of years" claim. I also realized late in the book that he is coming from a creedal tradition (which he mostly deals with) and that's not really me (despite being Presbyterian for several years), so some of his claims seemed overwrought for a Baptist; i.e., that we ignore Israel's place in the gospels.
However, it does answer some questions for me, shows a very interesting synthesis of the gospels and Old Testament, and deals indirectly with something I ran across last year and consider a heresy: that Paul had a different gospel from Jesus. How could that be? He shows we have let our "Jesus died so I can go to heaven" thesis totally obscure what the cross and gospels are about, but I already knew that. I figured a long time ago the cross was about righteousness and God's glory, not so we get a ticket out of judgment.
I also read The Man Who was Thursday last week. Fun read, very odd ending that stretches one's brain. I had read it before but I didn't understand it or "get it." I read better now. Whenever we reread a book we are a different person, anyway.
So, this might be the beginning of a hiatus on the blog. Please contact me and read my novels and Bible studies!
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