OMG U DONT KNO WHO JESUS IS!?!??!

If I had a friend who didn't know who Jesus was, and he was actually curious about why I cared about this messiah so much, I'd try to structure my introduction a little like this...

I would start off by briefly explaining the concept of God (If he doesn't know a thing about Jesus, then we need to start at the beginning.) God existed before the universe, created it, created man, and has been working on our behalf ever since. Jesus is, or was, because he existed as and with God before, a replacement for an old covenant God established with us, a man created directly by the creator, who was himself fully God. That sounds crazy, so I'd seek to elaborate on Jesus' nature a little bit. Jesus was fully human, that is, with a physical body and a human soul, but yet he was made by God, and fully possessed his spirit, too. He dealt with and struggled against the same things we do, but he was directly in sync with his father, God, guided for our sake. Additionally, he had a two-pronged mission: firstly to show the world who and what he was. It's easy to find the concept of God a little out-of-touch. After all, it's asking someone to believe in some faraway, all-powerful something that cannot be seen, touched, or even imagined. Whether this something is benevolent or not, he seems far too distant to matter. That's why God put himself on our planet, to show in the most relateable form possible who he was and why he mattered. The key word is relateable; God could have revealed his true power and blinded us all into submission, but it was much more loving and significant to humble himself into one of us. Jesus was limited in the same ways we are, and yet carried in his blood the power of God. That's the key to the second part of God's mission: we as humans don't and can't live up to God's standards; we aren't perfect like he is. We needed, one way or another, to be atoned  for. While Jesus spent two years spreading the human image of God, it is the last two months or so of his life we remember most. The punishment for our imperfect lives is irretrievable death, so to prevent us from that fate, God himself died. Woah, that's a big deal. Jesus, being human and mortal, allowed himself to be tortured and killed, dying a criminal's death despite his innocence, so that we wouldn't have to. I really hope my friend is tracking with me, or else he'll miss the best part. It doesn't end there, because Jesus is alive with God today. How? Well, if Jesus had remained dead, there would be no victory over death; it won over Jesus. That's where the God-part of him comes in. Three days after he died, he came back to life: resurrected. Only Jesus was brought back from the dead by God's direct will, and his physical destiny was fulfilled for us all forever. Kind of a big deal.

I hope that at least establishes what's important and why it's important for my Jesus-less friend. For me, I think the most important part of Jesus' life is that God was trying to make a point: I care about you guys, enough to myself come down and hang out with you. That's why Jesus' humanity, his deity, and his power all matter; without any of those the story falls apart.

Christian Dietary Essentials

To be honest, I'd never really thought much of doctrinal differences in Christian denominations before, assuming they were all small details that in the end wouldn't matter. Many are  just that, but when I was forced to draw the line between essential and nonessential I didn't really know where to start. After all, I had never talked through doctrine with someone who disagreed with me; that just seems like a weird discussion. Thinking it through a little more through the Bible Class debates we've had, I did at least have some concept of my options in choosing the essentials of Christianity. There is only one truly honest and mostly non-biased account to consider in analyzing our faith: the Bible. First assuming the Bible is honest and authoritative (and that's assuming a lot for some people, yikes,) I already had one essential down. With the Bible's self-declaring authority lost, I believe the whole faith loses its credibility, so I hold first and foremost that Scripture is true, and (though there are many interpretations of passages within) it provides clear and relevant guidance in most cases that count as essential doctrine. (ie. The Trinity, Jesus' Ressurection, An Afterlife) In sorting this all out, I really like the method stated in the paper we looked through in class, proposing that recurring and clearly stated passages are essential truths, while interpretations of vague and singly stated passages are the nitty-gritty nonessentials. That might have an exception here and there (just saying; somebody's always  going to make a case against a universal statement,) but I think it's just a comforting bit of logic to help sort out the mess that is our faith. It does raise some crazy questions, however (essentially foreign to me until now:) "Is Hell really eternal?" "Is it okay to believe that Hell is not eternal?" and most infamously recently, "Exactly how and to what extent is homosexuality a sin?" All of these questions are cringeworthy to me, and to be frank I'd rather not debate them at all, but it's nonetheless mind-opening to get the chance to. As for how I'd deal with something I'd never heard before or disagree with, I'd probably use that method. Is the Bible clearly for or against this issue? If not, then it's really likely nonessential. To verify that, what passage is this view based on? Does that shed any light on the issue? etc. I really think this is the simplest (and in many cases the simplest method is the best) and most applicable method of interpreting unfamiliar ideas, because, as I would say any true Christian necessarily believes, the Bible is the authoritative word of God, and thus it stands as a foundation on which to build faith in Christ.

Why does no-one call it the book of Jim?

James, in its short and to-the-point delivery of important morals, has a very clear message on wealth. In its final chapter, James really lays it down hard on rich folks, forecasting misery and destruction ahead of them that oppress others with money. The general theme of the book is getting people on a common page: instructing the rich to respect and equate themselves to the poor, and for the proud to show humility, and this has large implications. The question of the week in our Bible class comes from this: Is the accumulation of wealth a sin in itself, and if not, how can we be sure we are in control of our money for God, not in it for ourselves? James tells us that money is something to be shared communally, not to be withheld and hoarded. If we are making money for ourselves, James states that its corruption will destroy us. I would say the rest of the Bible agrees. After Moses freed the Israelites from Egypt, and the group met at Sinai, God ordered everyone to pool their resources for the creation of the tabernacle and the ark of the covenant. Those that disobeyed and kept treasure for themselves were ruthlessly dealt with; in that case the accumulation of wealth brought about instant destruction. Some time later, in the famous instant that doomed Saul, king of Israel, to be replaced by David, Saul kept the spoils of battle instead of destroying them as the Lord commanded. After this, Saul fell out of favor with God, and eventually he too would pay harshly for his greed and disobedience. In the gospels, Jesus talked often of the danger of accumulation, shaming the rich young ruler for not being able to surrender his wealth to the poor, and essentially living without wealth of any kind during his own life. In all these examples, whether hoarding riches was disobedience to God or simply a distraction from him, the result is the same, that you will, as James puts it, "weep and wail because of the misery that is coming upon you." Money can easily become a lifelong obsession and distraction from God, and that makes it an idol to him, but there is an straightforward solution, provided by Jesus. In the form of an argument: why let the temptation of hoarding wealth be an issue in the first place; if you give away your extra to the poor, you won't have any riches left to hoard.

"...so that we can give it away to the poor!"