Confessions of a Quirky Christian Artist

Don't worry, I don't know what I mean either. I'll try to break it down for us in a minute. First let me preface this entry with a human interest segment. So I'm at my folks house for another family council meeting and my favorite cousin, Zack, comes into town so I get to talk with him for a couple hours. He's my favorite because he has a Masters degree in both philosophy and theology. Talking with him always makes me so beautifully and painfully aware of how dumb and under-educated I am! But I think that's healthy. It does make me rue my decision to get married at 18, thereby diverting me to a course that could never include getting masters degrees in my favorite subjects. But then I remember that I have two kids and a wife now, and poor Zack has a lot of catching up to do in that area of life. Take that, Zack! I may be ignorant, but you'll be 70 at your kid's graduation ceremony! Anyway, I hate/love verbal communication about complex matters l...

Is He? Of course this question only concerns folks who consider themselves Christians as I do. So does answering this question wrongly determine your eternal destiny? That's certainly what I was raised to believe. My branch of Christianity insists that to even consider Jesus as anything less than completely God is not just disrespectful, but will doom you to eternal torment. Since Jesus never took the time to sit down and write out all the details of how this issue works, His followers have been all over the place on it. Especially during the first 4 or 5 hundred years, as Christianity was defining itself. There were groups that said Jesus was pure spirit, (Some Gnostics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnostic ) groups that said He was just a man, (The Ebionites ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebionites ) and every flavor in between. Eventually those on the edges were 'weeded out' and we ended up with a dichotomous orthodox declaration that insists that Jesus was both ...

April 18 th 1979   We had a family council meeting yesterday at my parents house. My mom had a letter that she had written to her family from Japan in '79. It's a fascinating glimpse into the life of my parents in the military overseas. There are a couple reports about things I said as a 3-year-old that I thought were funny and related to the themes of this blog. So here are the questions of a quirky Christian 3-year-old artist as told by his 26 year old mother:   "Josh is really thinking about things. Once as I was driving along, he asked – Why does Jesus love bad people? – After explaining God is love, he said – But if bad people are in heaven, they will try to kill Jesus. – So then I explained how bad people have to love Jesus and let Him change their hearts before they can go to heaven. Then Josh said he wanted to go to heaven and play a little bit and come back which led to a lengthy conversation…"   And from my dad at the end of the same letter:   "A...

Let me start out by making it clear that this is not really a book review in the sense that you would think when seeing a review in a magazine or newspaper. This is literally me reviewing (as in: refreshing my memory of) a book I've read, and recording my interaction with its ideas. This is just for me and those interested in my thoughts. It has nothing to say really about the merits of this book as literature. This is an autobiographical account of my interpretation of this book.   I've read quotes from this book in 3 or 4 other books related to Universalism, so I figured I better check it out for myself. First, I looked the author up and found that the book was written in 1966 and that Hick's beliefs have changed since then. In 1966 He was an evangelical, questioning his fundamentalist presuppositions and coming to very different conclusions than what he had been taught. Obviously I see myself this way at this point in my life, so I find the trajectory of his beli...