Confessions of a Quirky Christian Artist

I used to know my place in the universe by my doctrine. I felt secure because I knew I was right. I knew I was right because I was surrounded by those who agreed with me. How much I felt I was absolutely right about has changed. Why? Because I find it presumptuous to believe that I, (or my religious subculture) out of deafening roar of the multitudinous past, have heard and believed the Pure Truth. When I survey Christendom’s history I find so much variety in doctrine, attitude, works, and form that I find it unintentionally humorous when I hear or read my fellow evangelicals make huge, sweeping statements based on the proposition that they, out of all Christendom, are the ones who got it right. We are ready and willing to argue our interpretation of scripture and God down to the jot and tittle with our last breath, because to do less would be to compromise the Gospel, right? Yet we claim – at least most of us do – that we are not sectarians. We claim that the rest...

I was at the Tacoma Dome Holiday Food and Something or Other Thingy a couple of weeks ago thanks to my friend, Dennis the Santa sculptor. He heads up Artists In Action which is a group of artists like me who go to art fairs and stuff and actually make art, rather than sit in the back of our booth doing crossword puzzles. I don't have anything to sell yet, so I was trying to get people to sign up for sculpting lessons taught by me. Well I got about a dozen people who showed enough interest to actually put their name on my list. But when I sent out emails to everyone only one person actually got back to me. So she and her husband were the only students I had yesterday. Which I guess isn't a bad thing. I got to teach my first class with very low demand and stress, and get a feel for how to teach people who have never touched Sculpey before. We ended up doing Santa heads. It was a very interesting challenge to constantly view their work and try to figure out e...

I’m including this entry under my Heterodox Aftershocks category even though it does not deal specifically with Hell®, Free Will™, or theodicy. Though not explicitly connected with those topics, one’s stance on the nature of the Biblical will radically affect ones determination on those issues. So I have been working on this in the background concurrent with my other studies. I’ve involved myself in a broad ranging debate about this issue on the CARM forum, and have been studiously following links to papers, sermons, books, and other material on the subject. In that quest I came upon a bunch of lectures from a professor at Covenant University , Dr. Michael Williams who is an inerrantist. One of those lectures helped to organize this topic for me, so I’m following his lesson plan for the first part of this entry. The hot topic on the issue of Biblical authority is inerrancy. The second hottest topic is what inerrancy even means. Orthodox Christianity had used the t...

In my quest to fully research the claims of Universalism I'm re-reading the entire Bible to verify a couple of claims that they make. First of all, I'm not just going to just believe that every time eternal Hell® is mentioned the 'eternal' was derived from aion or aionios simply because they say so. Also, there may be other arguments for the eternity of Hell® that don't actually use the word eternal or some derivation thereof. There are a lot of proof-texts for Universalism, and so that means a lot of context to study. Anyway, one of my first arguments at the beginning of this whole thing was that the translations of the Bible that we modern Americans are reading were doubtlessly shaped by the theology of the translators. To what extent that effect pervades the text is unknown to me since I've never translated a text and don't read Greek. Well, I was reading in my New Living Translation Bible, (published by Tyndale) the following verse: ...

Last weekend I went to Whistler Canada with my honey for a marriage retreat. My mom, the superhero, came up to watch the kids for us. The marriage material was a video of a speaker who wrote the book Love and Respect , which is based on the passage in Ephesians 5 about wives respecting their husbands and husbands loving their wives. Men tend to respect rather than love, and women tend to love rather than respect. Yet each gender needs what the other doesn’t naturally give. So that's why the Bible tells them to do what does not come naturally to them. We need to recognize that our needs are fundamentally different and that's ok. This is almost the exact same stuff our pastor taught us in our pre-marriage counseling, so I don't think we got anything out of the class part of our trip. I guess the fact that my wife has different needs is just plain obvious to me. And really, the thing that most marriages seem to suffer from is ungodly expectations. (This...