DIY enthusiast, husband, dad, welder, coder, gardener, gearhead, fledgling writer, archer, half-baked theologian, tinkerer.
Relentlessly optimistic.
Author of Turtle Heaven
The Scriptures are not there for the theologians and the scholars. It’s not there for the rulers.
The Scriptures are there to comfort those who mourn. To bring hope to the dying.
I often wonder about the ontological view of a short-lived mayfly that only lives long enough to watch the tide come in.
What must it imagine will happen to the world after it dies?
I'm now at Genesis 34 in my years-long study of Genesis. This is the chapter about a young girl who gets violated by a wealthy and powerful man who thought he could possess her, just because he was wealthy and powerful. In retaliation, her brothers trick the wealthy man and all of his men into getting circumcised, and while they writhed in pain, the brothers slaughtered them all.
And you know what? I'm really feeling her brothers right now.
"And they overcame him because of the blood of the Lamb and because of the word of their testimony, and they did not love their life even when faced with death."
Revelation 12:11
Perhaps every reader or hearer of scripture who comes to discover that God is for them and not against them must acknowledge their own "model of atonement," and carry with them their own unique story of the way God redeemed them and made them whole.
"Every theologian is another man's heretic."
Perhaps we are all theologians.
Sometimes, I think about the way the KJV includes "unicorn" as a translation of the wild ox in Numbers 23:22 and Job 39:9-10, and think about all the sermons that must have been built around the idea, and how much Christian artwork included it, and how much it shaped culture... and it cracks me up.
Sometimes bad theology is because of hard hearts. But sometimes it's because of translational errors.