Jump to content
  • entries
    15
  • comments
    68
  • views
    6,641

Omegaman 3.0

1,120 views

Five Minute Theology (updated from May 8, 2015)

I recently purchased a small book entitled "Concise Theology - A Guide to Historic Christian Beliefs" by J.I. Packer. I think the book is excellent, and it is what is describes itself as. Each topic in the book is only a page, or a page and a half, so it is truly concise. The topics also cite scripture verse addresses to support the conclusions. The book is also easy to understand for most people I think, assuming that they have normal capacity for understanding, and God's grace of the Holy Spirit to enable them to understand and accept spiritual truths.
I was calling this, "Five Minute Theology, because that is about how much time it takes to read each topic.

Those who are not born again, might have difficulty accepting it, as they do many things of God, and of course, even believers have trouble accepting and understanding the things of God at times. If that were not true, then all believers would agree on all doctrines, and likely denominations would be far less common or important.

Copyright issues will keep me from posting the entire book online, but I thought perhaps, some people might be interested in reading a chapter at a time, so I thought perhaps I could quote small amounts of it at a time, in the Bible Study room of the Arrow Chat or Comet Chat feature of Worthychat.

For those who choose to participate, they will not receive a seminary level degree of instruction on Christian theology, but they will come away knowing the basics of historic Christian theology, which in my estimation, would bring them easily into the upper 5% of believers, in terms of knowing what the church has believed and accepted, as the teaching of the Bible, concerning faith and practice. This amounts to, essentially, an elaborate statement of faith.

My idea is to paste quotes of this book, into the room, and those present may read these quotes. Then afterward, if people have questions, or want to comment or otherwise discuss what was posted, they are of course, welcomed to do so.

Now, of course theologians and lay Christians alike, disagree over so details or peripheral theology, and that will be no different here, so there may be some debate, some disagreement on some points discussed. This is okay, that can be done as long as people are willing and able to be civil and respectful in their discussions. For those who do not care to attend this event, or do not want to participate in the discussion and or just hate debate and disagreement, the regular section of Worthychat is open for them, without be disturbed by the activities in the Bible Study room.

My hope and goal here, is that this will prove to be both instructional, and edifying, and that the discussion of these topics, will add a dimension of depth for our chatters, that is too often absent at times.

We had the first chat session in July of 2015. I cannot commit to the frequency of these events, but I hope to make them a regular feature. This is still a bit of an experiment. Our chatters come from every time zone, and some have schedules which will keep them from participating no matter what time is chosen.

This is a problem for which I know no solution. Possibly, it can be reduced by doing this at more that one day of the week, or hour of the day, we'll have to see.

There are 94 topics, so as you can see, if we did this once a week, this would take about one year and 9 and a half months to finish. That is a big commitment for those who would want to attend, and for the one leading.

Of course, chatters do not have to commit to attendance, but I do not think there is a chatter who would not benefit from attending.

Of course, if you are interested, you can always just purchase and read read the book , but my thinking is, that we would or could benefit, from the discussion of the topics. Perhaps, we could even do more than one topic per week, I would be interested in hearing your thoughts and suggestions - about if you would be interested in participation, and best of good times to do this, etc.

I am going to disable comments on this post here in my "Thoughts and Rants Blog" - I put this here for the exposure. If you want to comment, I suggest that you do so in the Worthychat section of the forum.
qr.gifYou can see more of my blog entries here.

3 Comments


Recommended Comments

On 6/8/2016 at 4:47 AM, enoob57 said:

You needed to buy the 10 minute one and you wouldn't be a Calvinist :thumbsup:

Cute enoob! However, I bought that book after I came to my positions. That Calvin also agreed with Paul, and John, and James, and . . . you get the idea is fine. I do not follow Calvin, and though I tend to agree with the 5 points of the T.U.L.I.P. I do not know if Calvin was even aware of that acronym. I never checked the chronology to see if that was possible. I think Calvinism, is whatever Calvin believed. I never read his institutes, have you? Really, to write a work of that magnitude and only get a real rise out of 5 points, is quite an accomplishment.

So, I do not refer to it as Calvinism, but as Reformed Theology (the theology that the early protestant church advanced as opposed to Roman Catholicism or the Church of England) or the Doctrines of Grace, since that is what they are!

Sorry for the late response, I did not know you has made one. Thanks for your light hearted stab!

Link to comment
×
×
  • Create New...