In this episode we discuss the biggest mistranslation in the Bible, and here's the crazy part: it's only a preposition. Entire theologies and doctrines have been based on this mistranslation, some of the worst abuses committed by the Church were based on this mistranslation, and entire political blocs are based on this mistranslation. We go through not only what the mistranslation is and how it occurred, but also its implications in our world today. 

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Today's conversation focuses on Cornel West's essay, The Crisis of Christian Identity in America. He presents two perspectives of Christianity that he calls Constantinian Christianity and Prophetic Christianity. We talk about the differences between the two and their implications in our lives. 

This is Part 1 of our 3-week series on Liberation and we're working with Dorothee Sölle's 3 Frameworks of Christianity. There's a handout for this conversation that would be really helpful if you're listening to this. 

Click here to look at the handout. 

As a prime for our 3 week series on Liberation coming up, the conversation today was centered on what the purpose of faith is. We talked about personal experiences, how purpose of faith has been viewed in the mainstream, and ultimately tried to create a contextual purpose of faith. The conversation might be a bit muffled because we're abiding by the county's mask mandate, but next week I'll have a decent recording device. Still, hope you enjoy! 

Belief has been framed as the foundational condition of Christianity. Few, if any, other religions have this condition, and frankly, neither does Christianity - at least not the way it's understood today. This conversation was a deconstruction of belief. We looked at the Greek text of the New Testament and talked about both belief misuse and hopefully positive attributes. 

It's interesting to look at a timeline of Christian development. In this gathering we looked at some of the hallmark moments in this timeline to understand better what informed Christian dogmas and doctrines that were created and see how little was developed from the first 3 centuries of Christianity when it was a religion of the persecuted. We used a graphic in this conversation, which I forgot to take a picture of for future use, but hopefully the conversation is enough to gather what's being said. 

We had a really powerful reaction to our conversation on Historical Criticism; so much so that it was hard to realize how much church doctrine was created outside of the context in which the Bible was written. In this gathering we look at the positives of Historical Criticism and why it's so needed for faith communities today and in the future. 

Historical Criticism is a fancy way of describing the process of looking at an ancient text in the context in which it's written. While it might seem like the most obvious way to understand any ancient texts, most are not read this way. Historical Criticism is such a controversial topic that more conservative religious institutions have called it a heresy and have put significant resources in trying to repudiate its scholastic role in understanding texts like the Bible. In this episode our gathering discusses the significance of Historical Criticism today.