reTHINK

re-exploring Christian teachings

My Overwhelming List of Things to Teach My Children

Aug 12

Posted by Joseph Dindinger in Christian Living | 9 Comments

As parents of two wonderful children, my wife and I are deeply concerned with their education.  We made the decision to home-school them and as our little girl approaches her first year of formal teaching, we are scrambling to figure this out.  I wonder how many parents will relate to our current situation.

My lovely wife is handling 99% of the work in reading books on the subject, researching the best curriculum, buying the materials, and dragging me to home school conventions.  However, the education of my children is a primary concern on my heart and mind as well.  Over the past few months I have begun to consider what I want my children to know when they leave home.

Following are the results of my reading, research and thinking.  The sheer quantity of topics, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t get everything, might be overwhelming, but when you consider that much of it will be covered in the curriculum already and also that we have 10+ years to do it, the task becomes manageable.  I want my wife and I to return to this list at least every year and come up with goals to focus on for the upcoming months.

The first half, Topics for Parents to Teach, are the categories in learning that will rarely, if ever, be covered in school curriculum.  These are things that it will be the parent’s sole Read the rest of this entry »

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Pre-Flood Mysteries

Apr 3

Posted by Joseph Dindinger in Bible Study | No Comments

The antediluvian world, the world before the flood, is shrouded in obscurity.  Very few chapters are written about it in the Bible, five to be exact, and yet it was at least a period of two thousand years.  What happened back then?  How did people live?  What was the world like?  This period in history has long held impenetrable mysteries … until now.

Let’s take a brief journey through recent scientific discoveries and the history that they illuminate for us.  First, the biblical evidence:

Now no shrub of the field was yet in the earth, and no plant of the field had yet sprouted, for the LORD God had not sent rain upon the earth, and there was no man to cultivate the ground. But a mist used to rise from the earth and water the whole surface of the ground. Genesis 2:5-6 (NASB)

These verses speak of a pre-flood world where it never rained.  Instead of rain, a mist came up from the earth to water the ground.  But how is this possible?  Was the hydrologic cycle not working?  This cycle, described several times in the Bible, is the scientifically proven process that happens when water evaporates from the oceans and accumulates in clouds which then empty over land.  If it had never rained, then what was preventing this process? Read the rest of this entry »

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Being Open is Not a Good Idea

Mar 6

Posted by Joseph Dindinger in Christian Living | 5 Comments

OK, I have a problem with being vulnerable.  Let me just get that out of the way.  I have an aversion to telling people my real weaknesses, even though I really want to.  I am not, as the saying goes, the son of a glass-maker; not very transparent by default.  There, I feel much better now…  Confession is good for the soul.

“Why are you writing about this subject then?”, you might wisely ask.  Well, the reason is that I recently learned, for the first time in my life the difference between “being open” and “being vulnerable.”  I realize now that I have been making excuses in my mind for not being vulnerable based on a misunderstanding of the difference between openness and vulnerability.

You see, I have always thought that being open is selfish.  It unloads something negative like bitterness or hurt on somebody else.  In return, they give you an apology, sympathy or compassion.  Either way, it usually feels good for the one being open, and not so good for the one who is being dumped on.  Think through these examples:

“Hi, I just wanted to tell you that you hurt me by not returning my phone call.” Read the rest of this entry »

Interpreting Revelation: Questions for Preterists

Jan 29

Posted by Joseph Dindinger in Bible Study | 2 Comments

The most controversial book in the Bible would have to be Revelation.  Virtually every mature Christian I’ve talked to has a slightly different interpretation of this book.  Amazing how 1900 years after it was written, nobody seems to fully know what it means!  About a year ago I purchased a book by Steve Gregg called Revelation: Four Views.  It is a parallel commentary of Revelation, meaning, it displays a passage and then has four columns explaining the passage according to the four, main interpretations of this book: Historicist, Preterist, Futurist and Spiritual.  I have barely started the book and the only thing I can tell you is that I KNOW that I don’t know the correct interpretation.

Teachers in my church typically (or, almost always) are from the preterist persuasion.  In order to get a fuller understanding of this view, I am going to attend a class which starts next month and I read the teacher’s book in preparation.  The author is Andy Confer and the title of the book is Three Woes for Babylon.  After finishing the book, I am left with a pretty good understanding of the preterist position, but am also left with many questions that I hope will be answered in the class.  (I’d hate to bug the teacher about them, but I will.)  In the meantime, if anybody reading this blog has the answers, please comment. Read the rest of this entry »

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God of Fire?

Sep 28

Posted by Joseph Dindinger in Bible Study | 3 Comments

A good friend of mine recently posted a statement on his Facebook page about God sending people to Hell.  The gist of it went something like this: “… any God who would allow a horrible, nightmarish, place of eternal punishment containing people who simply believed the wrong thing arbitrarily, would be a terrible God.  Not even bad people deserve such a place from a just God … eternally.”

Interestingly enough, George MacDonald, my favorite author, repeatedly said similar things in his writings over a hundred years ago.  One of them is quoted below:

“If sin must be kept alive, then hell must be kept alive; but while I regard the smallest sin as infinitely loathsome, I do not believe that any being, never good enough to see the essential ugliness of sin, could sin so as to deserve such punishment. I am not now, however, dealing with the question of the duration of punishment, but with the idea of punishment itself; and would only say in passing, that the notion that a creature born imperfect, nay, born with impulses to evil not of his own generating, Read the rest of this entry »

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