Sure the Web is great, but books are . . . great too!
Introducing Volume 2 of articles reprinted from Spiritual Insights for Everyday Life:
(Yes, I started with Volume 2, not Volume 1, of a planned five volume set. Sue me! đŸ˜› )
This 450 page book offers a selection of 51 articles organized into six parts:
- Part 1: Understanding the Bible
- Part 2: Human Beginnings
- Part 3: The Narrative of Israel
- Part 4: Prophecy and Controversy
- Part 5: The Lord’s First Coming
- Part 6: The Lord’s Second Coming
To preview or purchase the paperback edition on Amazon, click here.
To preview or purchase the Kindle edition on Amazon, click here.
Enjoy!
Volumes in this series:
- God and Creation
- The Bible and its Stories
- Spiritual Rebirth (not yet published)
- The Afterlife (not yet published)
- Sex, Marriage, and Relationships (not yet published)
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Lee Woofenden is an ordained minister, writer, editor, translator, and teacher. He enjoys taking spiritual insights from the Bible and the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg and putting them into plain English as guides for everyday life.
Spiritual Insights for Everyday Life 
i’d be interested to know how you respond to bible quotes like
Everyone who goes on ahead and does not abide in the teaching of Christ, does not have God. Whoever abides in the teaching has both the Father and the Son. If anyone comes to you and does not bring this teaching, do not receive him into your house or give him any greeting, for whoever greets him takes part in his wicked works – 2 John 1:9-11
it is full of prejudice and if traditional christians always bring their jesus is the the way, the truth gospel and we bring our more universalist themed quotes of not everyone who says to me lord lord will enter the kingdom but those who did the will of my father than are we just choosing bits of the bible based on our personal beliefs and rejecting the rest and saying we follow the bible when thats not the truth as a lot of it is rejected by people which begs the question what to believe and what not to.
snakes can’t talk, neither can burning bushes, virgins can’t get pregnant but as a person of faith like i am to a certain extent with a belief in god and a higher power believe in the unimaginable and believe in it or use it as an interpretation and if we doubt do you think god looks down on us for doing that
Hi Annie,
Thanks for your thoughts and your question.
In reading the Bible as in reading any other book, it’s important to read and pay attention to the whole context, and not take quotes out of context. Just before the two verses you quote, John said:
He’s not talking about people who are just mistaken, but about deceivers, meaning people who are intentionally misleading people, usually for their own gain.
It may sound harsh, but John is zealous for the truth that he himself has experienced: Jesus Christ coming “in the flesh,” as a real human being who is also God and Lord. He wants to warn believers away from people who would come along and say something different, sowing confusion and error among the body of believers. There were many such people then just as there are now. But since Christianity was still in its fledgling phase, it was especially important not to allow pretenders and charlatans who had not experienced Jesus Christ and his life and teachings for themselves, as John had, from causing the new faith to veer off course before it even got started.
How much of the Bible literally happened, and how much is pure symbolism? Also there’s conflicting accounts in the Gospels, to the point where there’s even variation of Christianity teaching that Christ was never a physical being.
Hi K,
I’m not sure that question is definitively answerable. We are very limited in our ability to know what actually happened at particular points in history because we weren’t there, and we often have few to no objective sources of information about them.
However, for the most part it doesn’t really matter to the spiritual message of the Bible, which is its real and intended message, whether or not the things it described happened historically as described. Their intent is not to record history, but to deliver a moral and spiritual message.
As for whether Christ was a physical being, even most secular scholars believe that Jesus was a historical individual. Of course, they don’t believe he said and did everything recorded about him in the Gospels. But they do think that he existed as an actual person.
Have you heard that Judaism used to be polytheistic, and that Christianity was influenced by Zoroastrianism?
Maybe the New Church explanation there is that there was an original faith that got corrupted, and the corruption is the predecessor of later world religions such as Judaism and Zoroastrianism, which can have elements of the original faith?
Also one could argue that God was guiding the Hebrews to monotheism when they chose a storm god to be the one.
Hi K,
Yes, God guided the Hebrews toward monotheism. It was a long journey that took many generations, over many centuries. The particular god they chose probably doesn’t matter that much. It was the increasing focus on one God that mattered.
Hi K,
I wouldn’t say that Judaism used to be polytheistic. Rather, I’d say that Judaism came from polytheistic roots. This is clear from the Bible narrative itself. Abraham, who represents the earliest beginnings of the Jewish religion, came from a polytheistic father (Terah) and clan. Jehovah, or in more modern terms, Yahweh, the God of the Hebrews, revealed himself to Abraham, and started the journey of his clan toward monotheism.
However, that journey did not go straight from polytheism to monotheism. Rather, it went through a long period of henotheism, which is “the worship of a single, supreme god that does not deny the existence or possible existence of other deities that may be worshipped.” This is reflected throughout much of the Old Testament, in which there are many passages about Jehovah being the God of gods and the Lord of lords, and so on—in other words, that Jehovah was the greatest God among all the gods.
Judaism proper didn’t start until the Exodus from Egypt and the giving of the Ten Commandments at the earliest. Some would argue that it didn’t start until much later, given that the name “Judaism” comes from the tribe of Judah, which was the primary surviving tribe that came out of the various exiles of the Israelites. Before the time of the divided kingdom people were called Israel and Israelites, not Judahites or Jews.
By New Testament times, Judaism had become much more solidly monotheistic. By this time Jews had largely left behind their henotheism. They no longer thought that other gods besides the one God existed. Today’s Judaism has long since completed that journey, and is strictly monotheistic.
Based on all this, it would be more accurate to say that Judaism used to be henotheistic. This is not the same as being polytheistic. Henotheists worship only one God, even though they believe that other gods may exist. Henotheism is an intermediate step between polytheism and monotheism.
Further, today’s Judaism is not the Judaism of Bible times, which ended with the destruction of the Temple—and therefore of the ancient Jewish system of sacrificial worship—by the Romans in 70 AD. Today’s Judaism is rabbinic Judaism, which is the religion that replaced ancient Judaism when sacrificial worship could no longer be practiced. Though I am not a religious historian, and could be mistaken, I believe that rabbinic Judaism was monotheistic right from its start in the first century.