The Blue Collar Scholar

As the pandemic carried on into its second month, our church continued its 2020 quarantine. This episode brings our Sunday School lessons at the time up to nearly the present in our exploration of church history, as we take a look at developments in Christian history in the 19th & 20th Centuries.

This episode is the audio lifted from the Facebook Live broadcast of our Sunday School lesson at Living Hope Southern Baptist Church of Parsons, KS, for Easter 2020. It was April 12th, the 4th week of quarantine. The Sunday School lesson was recorded on Good Friday because I had to be on the way to the airport on Sunday morning, quite an ordeal amidst Covid Quarantine. Nevertheless, the show must go on. And our Sunday School lesson was the continuation of our church history series. In this episode, we take an extremely "broad strokes" look at church history in the 17th & 18th Centuries.

The history of the English Bible goes all the way back to the mid-1300s when John Wycliffe decided that English speakers needed our own Bible. His version was available as of 1382. For the next 229 years, there were a variety of English translations that appeared, but none of them were as excellent as the Authorized Version - commonly known as the King James Version or the KJV - which appeared in 1611. The reason the KJV has persisted for 413 years and counting is because it was a magnificent translation. But the translators did not have access to thousands of manuscripts that have been found in the last few hundred years, and the way English is spoken has naturally evolved. So several modern translations are objectively better than the KJV, if by "better" you mean "closer to the original Scripture documents that were written in Koine Greek, Ancient Hebrew, and Aramaic." In this episode, we take a brief look at at the KJV and English translations.

This episode explores the distinctive beliefs and practices that make Baptists different from other Christians.

Note: This episode was recorded 4 years ago. I refer to COVID-19 as "Coronavirus" because "COVID-19" wasn't the popular term for it yet. I refer to the pandemic as something that was just beginning. Some of my political, social, and religious opinions are subtly different now than they were 4 years ago. But I still stand by this teaching, which was Week 2 of out church in quarantine.

In March 2020, COVID-19 snuck up on us and caused most of our institutions to close. We had to wear masks and only walk down the Walmart aisles in a single direction, and the TP aisle was empty. It was a weird time. Our church made the decision to go online for a few weeks, which ended up becoming several months. And even after coming back in person, we had to do quarantine again, and yet once more a few weeks later. When quarantine kicked in, I was in the middle of a church history series, so when going to Facebook Live, we suddenly had the lessons recorded for posterity. So, this is where we pick up, in the middle of a Sunday School series on Church History. And as a Baptist Church, we set aside an entire lesson just on Baptist History. And this episode of the podcast is that lesson.

In this, the grand finale of the American Revolution class, we examine the Constitutional Amendments. First, we take a look at all of the proposed amendments that were approved by Congress & sent to the states, but failed to be ratified by 3/4 of the states. Next, we look at each of the 27 Amendments that are part of the US Constitution. Finally, we explore several possible Constitutional Amendments that would be excellent additions to the US Constitution.

In this final episode in the Women in the Bible series, I introduce the concepts of Complementarianism & Egalitarianism as philosophical positions one might take when deciphering the New Testament's teachings on gender roles. We go through four of the most potent and controversial passages in the New Testament on the topic. As to whether Complementarianism or Egalitarianism represents the correct, more-Biblically-faithful way to interpret these passages, well, I leave that up to you.

The Revolutionary generation in the United States of America could not lead the country indefinitely. Eventually they had to pass the torch to the next generation. This episode surveys the history of the early American Republic in the early 1800s. We will discuss the major events, trends, and controversies during the Jefferson, Madison, & Monroe Administrations as three men from the same party and from the same state hold the White House for 24 solid years. After that is the passing the torch moment as leadership is passed from the Revolutionary generation on to the likes of John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. There are also a few bunny trails that examine Martin Van Buren, William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, and even a bit deeper into American History.

This episode surveys all the women who appear in the narrative of Acts, or who are mentioned in any of the books of the New Testament after the Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, & John).

With the Constitution firmly established as the Law of the Land, the federal government was up and running, and in much better shape than it had been under the Articles of Confederation. Probably the most obvious change was that the United States finally had an executive officer as head-of-state. George Washington and then John Adams were our first two Presidents to fill that role, and in these 12 years, many patterns, traditions, and precedents were set that affected the United States of America for centuries.