This is the place for ...

This venue of communication is a place to ask your long unanswered questions.  Discuss your confusions and frustration about 'what the bible says' and doe not say.  It is a place of grace!  A place to be free not to know  A place where your questions, wonders, and thoughts can be freely presented without judgment.  A place that invited only civil conversation.

So I invite you into the conversation!  Because, our history as the Christian Church has done all of us a disservice in muddying the waters of God/Jesus' story.

Lets remember that It has been a long time since the Bible was written.  And over the centuries God and Jesus have been through many interpretational changes.  From the very beginning of time the people have been totally confused about this God of the Bible. Jesus came to try to untangle the web; and was crucified for his efforts. In the 1500s Martin Luther preached a theology of grace by faith.  And encouraged people to live their lives offering God's love, mercy and forgiveness.  But then, in the mid 1700s,  Jonathan Edwards preached of a very different God. Edwards was known for sending the message of God's-Hell-Fire-and-Damnation.  Grace was not even a possibility! 

So from the earliest of times the institutional/organized church has taken great liberties with the page written between the cover of the book call The Bible.  A book that offers people the opportunity to know about God and what God was like.  However it becomes very confusing to the average reader.  The Old Testament people gave a view of God much like Jonathan Edwards preached about.  The New Testament is the part about the God that Jesus came to tell.  That is, the "Good News" about a God of grace and acceptance.

So how does one decide what is really true about God?  Well the truth is no one does!  But we can use our God given minds to read and understand by paying attention to the context and culture in which the books of the Bible were written.  We can pay attention to the two major languages -- the Hebrew of the Old Testament and the Greek of the New Testament.  And we can learn a great deal from the scholars who have studied closely the patterns of the biblical  writers in each culture and context and language.