You know what sort of "pop theology" really got me? So many people say, "The Old Testament God is very different from the New Testament God, and so therefore blah blah blah."
I actually repeated that first part many times to other people, coming off like I knew something about the Bible. But when I actually began to study bits of it here and there, it gradually emerged how totally wrong even that simple understanding was.
Yahweh is barely even mentioned in the New Testament, mostly just in the very strange Revelation. (And even Revelation, popularly understood only from the "futurist" perspective, is in main clearly about the past with only a minor part a description of the coming times.)
In the OT, OTOH, Yahweh is all over it, in first-person no less, and he changes attitude quite drastically in the course of it. No one ever, ever mentions that, to the extent that it appears literally incomprehensible to them.
I often think, "What the hell have all these people been studying all these centuries?" I mean, there are entire Christian bookstores! What could be in all those books? I find it all mind-boggling and pretty much the last thing I ever expected.
You know what sort of "pop theology" really got me? So many people say, "The Old Testament God is very different from the New Testament God, and so therefore blah blah blah."
I actually repeated that first part many times to other people, coming off like I knew something about the Bible. But when I actually began to study bits of it here and there, it gradually emerged how totally wrong even that simple understanding was.
Yahweh is barely even mentioned in the New Testament, mostly just in the very strange Revelation. (And even Revelation, popularly understood only from the "futurist" perspective, is in main clearly about the past with only a minor part a description of the coming times.)
In the OT, OTOH, Yahweh is all over it, in first-person no less, and he changes attitude quite drastically in the course of it. No one ever, ever mentions that, to the extent that it appears literally incomprehensible to them.
I often think, "What the hell have all these people been studying all these centuries?" I mean, there are entire Christian bookstores! What could be in all those books? I find it all mind-boggling and pretty much the last thing I ever expected.