The Blue Collar Scholar

Our class collectively decided to do a half class this night, as we are 95% KC Chiefs fans and wanted to get home to watch them beat the Baltimore Ravens (which they did, 27-20, coming down to the last second of the game and a Ravens would-be-touchdown that was out-of-bounds by less than an inch. But I digress). In this episode, we make a case for John the Apostle as the author of the Book of Revelation, and explore how the book functioned as a hopeful epistle for the early church.

As part of the class I am taking ("Modern America Since 1968") for the History Master's Degree program at Pittsburg State University, I reviewed the classic American movie The Graduate. I gave the movie an A-, and recommend that all American adults see the movie at least once. It is perhaps the quintessential Sixties film without any over-the-top '60s tropes.

When John wrote the Book of Revelation, it was obvious that he was heavily influenced by large swaths of the Old Testament. There are obvious parallels between the plagues in Exodus 7-12 and the judgments in Revelation. But the parallels are even greater when comparing Revelation to the Books of the Prophets (Isaiah through Malachi). In many ways, Revelation has much more in common with these books - in terms of tone, style, voice, imagery, etc. - than with the other books of the New Testament. So in this episode, we will take of brief survey of the Old Testament passages that influenced the Book of Revelation and our understanding of eschatology.

Greetings! It is time for our Fall 2024 class: The Book of Revelation! We are glad to have you join us in this first lecture of the Fall, where we are introduced the the concept of "revelation" as a means by which we know things and how we know God. We take a brief journey through the Scriptures and conclude with the Bible Project videos about the Book of Revelation. Please note: the audio of these videos is shared with you for educational purposes only. This audio is not being shared with the express permission of the Bible Project, or by Dr. Tim Mackie, who is the lead scholar of The Bible Project and the narrator of videos. Neither I nor The Blue Collar Scholar podcast are earning money from this episode. I strongly encourage you to go to bibleproject.com and explore all their amazing videos on all the books of the Bible as well as hundreds of topical videos. It is an amazing resource for personal Bible study.

When our church went into lockdown in early March 2020, we were all expecting the Quarantine to last a few weeks. Well, in the early Fall, we finally started live worship services again, roughly 6 months after our lockdown began. A surge in COVID-19 would lead us to do a second, shorter lockdown a few months later, but our first foray into pandemic quarantine came to an end with this Facebook Live Sunday School lesson about the Gospel and the path to personal salvation.

The Bible makes it clear that "all have sinned & fall short of the glory of God." (Romans 3:23) The Ten Commandments are a great mirror to show the reader one's own need for salvation. Spoiler alert: In the next episode, we will see that Jesus Christ is the source of that salvation.

The previous three episodes built a brief apologetic case for the existence of God. Now comes the closing argument, where we present the evidence for Jesus Christ as the Messiah of the Jewish people, prophesied frequently in the Old Testament, as powerful evidence for the existence of God. This closing argument also helps us move past apologetics arguments that argue for a generic deity, and now we are clearly talking about the Triune YHWH: the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And Jesus, as God the Son, shows us God's character and identity. NOTE: This episode was cut off abruptly by a faulty internet connection. So this Sunday School lesson ends in the middle of an argument and lacks a conclusion.

This episode makes the positive case that the existence of objective moral values and duties proves that there is a God. This episode also addresses the arguments against God's existence collectively known as the Problem of Evil or the Problem of Suffering.

This episode analyzes the Cosmological Argument for the Existence of God. Or, rather, the cosmological arguments, plural. There is the Kalam, the Leibnizian, the Argument from Contingency, etc. I invite you to dive into this episode as we discuss these arguments, as we advance our mission to lead someone to Christ who does not even have a concept of God.

Apologetics has nothing to do with apologizing, even though "apologetics" and "apology" share similar etymology. Rather, apologetics is the intellectual defense of the faith. Over the next few episodes, we will explore both apologetics and evangelism as we engage in a thought experiment: how to talk about God and Jesus Christ to someone who is such a tabula rasa that they don't even have a basic concept of God (such a space alien, or a member of a tribe that has been completely untouched by modern society). In this episode, I give a quick survey of some of the apologetic arguments I find the most appealing.