The View from the West Mesa

As I travel through this life, I find religious folk who do not really grasp what they are supposed to be doing and non-religious folks who do not quite understand Christianity as well as they think they might. So here's a layman's introduction to God. Well, what our response to God is to be.  The Commandments can be broken into two types: Those that deal with God and those that deal with other people. We see that we are to have no other gods before God and we are to be considerate and kind to other people. The Commandments though are not arbitrary rules this God of ours dreamed up some Tuesday morning. No, they illustrate (granted, negatively) the very character of God. Why is this important? Because as we will see later, the Christian's job, the Christian's mission on this planet is to let God mold them into His likeness. As such, God has provided for us in the Commandments views of His character. We can detect that God is concerned that we honor Him as God and be con...

Having heard all the hullabaloo about the Supreme Court's decision concerning the death penalty and folks who are under 18 years old, it seems that Thielike's book A Little Exercise for Young Theologians might apply. In this book T addresses both fledgling and experienced theologians. For our purposes, we only need to look at his instructions for the experienced ones. Thielike urges theologians to always remember that it is the church that provides the conscience and that theology, appropriately done, is done in and for the church. In fact he will make a distinction between diabolical and sacred theology by evaluating the faith and faithfulness of the theologian. This is not said to put theologians in straight jackets, but to have them remember that they are members of a community of faith that holds various principles as core beliefs and understandings. A theologian who goes beyond the faith and becomes overly academic or theoretical loses contact with the church and is in dan...