Welcome!

My name is Matthew Baugh. I'm currently the pastor of the First Congregational Church in Lockport, IL. which is a member of the United Church of Christ. I am a graduate of Eden Theological Seminary where I received by Masters of Divinity. That means I had three years of work after college (four actually because I took a 1 year internship) to get this degree which prepared me to be a pastor/theologan (that was the phrase by advisor at seminary really liked, and it's a good description.)

What that means is that I'm pretty smart, have a load of schooling, and know where to go to get good, reliable answers. This does not mean that I am automatically smarter, or more faithful than anyone reading this blog. It certainly doesn't mean that I am always right. In fact, if you think I've missed out on some important facts, or have drawn some conclusions that are not logical, or that I'm just plain wrong, please let me know. I appreciate independent thinkers, that's an indespensible quality for studying the Bible.

If you're used to the approach to the Bible you're likely to see on Christian TV, or hear on Christian radio, my reflections may sound strange. The airwaves are mostly occupied by Evangelical Christians, Fundamentalists and the Christian Right.

While I mean no disrespect to these folks, I come from a differnet branch of the Christian family tree. We are variously called Mainline Protestants,
Progressive Christians, or even (if you want to use the dreaded "L word") Liberal Christians.

That gets me to to my ground rules for writing this blog. These should help explain where I am coming from.

1) I believe that the Bible is true, but that it is not literally true. That word is something modern people have added in to try to defend the scriptures from an increasingly skeptical world. Unfortunately, when we try to read the Bible as literal, we often miss the point it is trying to make. The Bible is true because it it was written by honest and faithful people, not because it was written by people who were history's greatest fact-checkers. It is meant to draw people into a relationship with God, not to provide us with all the factual answers we could ever want.

2) I do not believe that the Bible is inerrant. The Bible is an inspired and inspiring collection of books, but it was still written by human beings. The writers were limited by the times they lived in and so is a lot of what they have to say about the earth and the solar system, the universe in general, biology, medicine, history, and many other topics. If you want to know whether the sun goes around the earth or if it's the earth that goes around the sun, the Bible is not the place to look. However, there are some very important things about God, humanity, justice, mercy, the meaning of life, etc. that the Bible gets better than any book of science or history ever could.

3) I do not believe that the Bible is free from contradiction. The people who wrote the scriptures had profound faith, and many were brilliant, but none of them were perfect. They sometimes told different versions of the same story. Their writing reflects their different ideas about the nature of God. Despite this, there are some powerful themes that shine through that have touched people's lives for millennia and continue to do so.

4) I do believe that the Bible should be read critically to be properly understood. This may seem irreverent, but it's not. In fact, critical reading is actually a part of exegesis, which is the word for the technique of reading the Bible without accidentally adding things that aren't really there. Asking questions is very important if you're serious about Bible study, and no question should be off limits.

4) A lot of what we think is in the Bible isn't really there. Christianity is 2000 years old so there are all millennia of doctrine and sermons that have been layered on on top of the scripture. What we will be doing in this blog is trying to strip away all the extra baggage so that we can understand the scriptures better.

5) There are some popular theological questions that this blog is not going to address. For example, I am not going to go into trying to prove the existence of God. That doesn't mean that I think there's anything wrong with the question, it's just that would be very off topic here. Besides, I have another blog for stuff like that.

With all that in place, let's go!