Well the end of my second semester of seminary is here and I do not believe that it has gone by this fast! I am headed back to Indianapolis for a short time before I come back here for my summer classes. I hope to get on the road early since to avoid some of the holiday traffic. I know I don't want to spend an hour on US 23 like I did the last time I went back home! Well, have a good couple of weeks!

What a dull night so far at the library (where I work.) I thought why not delve a little deeper into why I created this blog. I was at home over Easter and I was at my uncle's house. This was to be a time of great joy as we were spending time with my second cousin who has brain cancer. Everything was going well until I hear someone mention contemplative prayer. As one who values that type of prayer I thought that the conversation might be one that I might want to join. And as I listen more closely I hear this person (a cousin's wife) talking about how wrong contemplative prayer is. I bring up the Taize community. It is a community in France that strives to bring Christians from all over the world together in prayer. And what does this women do? She starts talking about how bad and how wrong that community is. Well in my natural state of things I walked into the other room, sat down at the piano and started playing Taize hymns! But after I got back from break I started to question myself on how someone like that could be so hateful. How could someone like that have all of the answers when this community brings thousands of Christians together every year. Jesus-is-savior.com does the same thing to the Taize community as well as to the UCC, Orthodox church, Catholic church, Anglican Church, the Lutheran Church, and many other churches as well as religions. It is this kind of stuff that has made me very angry and has inspired me to start this blog. God Bless!

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit! Amen!

There is a website that is called "http://jesus-is-savior.com/". It is a fundamentalist website that has many off of the wall articles on it. I have looked at many of the articles on the website and at almost every one found myself so angry I did not know what to do next. It is amazing to me how many people out there that don't want to accept any form of Biblical criticism out there. It is also amazing to me that most of them think they know more than the scholars in the field doing the research. As I stated before I am attending an United Methodist seminary and would consider myself a part of the UMC, the Episcopal Church, Disciples of Christ, American Baptist USA, and perhaps the UCC. It is offensive to me how this person who writes the stuff on jesus-is-savior.com thinks he knows more than the scholars of these particular denominations. It is offensive to me to see all of the attacks on the Catholic church on that website (not to mention any protestant denomination that disagrees with his theology).

I heard someone once say that the Bible was not the word of God, but that Jesus was the word of God (see John 1.) While I do not affirm that statement (because I believe that Holy Scriptures lead us to the eternal Word which is Jesus) I think people like this guy are putting the scriptures in an idolterous place. Holy Scriptures tell us about God and God's son Jesus, but they themselves are not in the place of God. They are the words of God preserved to us today. But we must not mistake them for the Eternal Word who is Christ.

We also must realize that these text were written by people. They have human opinions within the text as well as divine revolations. Paul was under the opinion that the return of Christ the parousia would happen within his life time. We believe that he was killed in the 60s. That was 1940 some years ago. The Parousia did not happen yet. It also gets to me how many people mis use Paul. There are many letters atributed to him that scholars are not sure he wrote. They have differnt language than the comfirmed epistles of Paul, and at times they seem to have slightly differnt ideas. There are some that hardly any scholars would say were written by Paul, and yet these are the ones most often used to make claims such as women should not serve in the church (see 1st Timothy) which is in contrast to him greating Phoebe (Romans 16:1) which in the Greek it calls her a deacon. (Yes I did take 2 years of Greek through my undergrad).

So what do you do with these text? Well they are our Holy Scriptures. They, in one form or another, have been passed down to us through the ages from our parents and their parents. But I believe that it is the responsiblitiy of church leaders today to educate people on the scriptures. What do they mean? How can we treat these works with respect and still understand them and what they mean? Does it take a crises of faith? No! One just has to keep an open mind, and one must stay in prayer. These are the writings that tell us about our lord, but we have to keep an open mind, because if not we will abuse the people that wrote these, the communities that accepted these, and ultemently our Lord who died upon the cross of Calvary to save us.

In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit! Amen!

Welcome to my musings. I am just finishing up my first year at an United Methodist seminary. I have seen how people warp the Christian faith to spread their twisted ideas of what the faith is about. This blog is a response to others who twist the faith. What is faith about? Faith is about believing in something higher than oneself and showing the world that faith. How does one show their faith? Not by 'street preaching' book burnings and such. NO! We show our faith by feeding the hungry, taking care of the poor, and loving ones neighbor as oneself.