Head Scratchin' and Thought Hatchin'

In 1956, at a Christian revival meeting, a preacher prays for a boy with polio and declares him healed. The preacher encourages the mother to take the boy’s braces off his legs, if she has real faith. The boy collapses onto the ground. They keep the braces off anyway, and later, his legs swell and he is taken to the hospital.

Christians insist the Bible is our most reliable guide for life. But what does it say? This website claims the Bible condemns rock music, this site emphasizes the “Biblical” teaching that the sun revolves around the earth, while these people proclaim hate for practically everyone, based on “adhering to the teachings of the Bible.”

What’s the deal?

These are fringe nutcases, right? Probably, but they also speak to the more subtle ways we manipulate our own faith. Why are these activities able to masquerade as Christian? Why is the faith so easy to hijack for whoever’s agenda? I know Jesus referred to his followers as sheep, but I think he meant we blindly follow Him, not every flimsy idea that floats by with the label “Christian” or “Bible.”

The solution is simple: our brains. We contend that Christianity would be a lot better off if believers learned to think. God created our minds, and He transforms and renews them as He jolts us to life by revealing Himself through Jesus Christ. Our brains might be the best tool we have for following Christ and understanding what he has to say. As a scarecrow once said, “My head I’d be scratchin’ as my thoughts were busy hatchin’.”

We strive to understand Christ and the Bible, but when there is a moment of confusion, instead of thinking it through, we fall back on traditions, our instincts, or just whatever random thought happens to be on our mind. Worse, we rely on our own agenda, which our old, self-reliant flesh wants.

Enter the blog.

This blog exists to encourage, talk about, promote, and advocate the idea that Christians should use their brains. Basically, we want to be an incubator for hatching genuine thinking about faith in Jesus. To accomplish our goal, the authors plan to do the following:

• give our opinion on spiritual matters in commentaries and other blog posts
  
• keep up on religion in the news
  
• produce thought-sparking videos
  
• provide interesting and educating links
  
• compile and write resources
  
• review books, and
  
• interview important thinkers of our world.

Four promises

There are plenty of melancholy ramblings that miss the point out there, so the authors of this blog will enhance your blog-reading experience by adhering to four unbreakable laws:

Enjoyable. We will make every effort to craft each post as relevant, enjoyable and well-written. This blog is not for our vents and rants. We want you to be able to depend on us to provide regular fuel for your spiritualized brain. We hope you will subscribe to our RSS feed or visit regularly to get your fix of things to think on.

Open conversation. Being young and uninformed on many topics, we will boldly speak opinions in the hopes of hearing your views and the information we’re ignorant of. This blog will be unique in that over the course of time you will likely change our minds on many topics as we converse as a community about Jesus Christ in posts and comments. Please leave comments!

More than criticism. We promise to avoid merely tearing down others or poking holes in what braver men and women do and say. We will never criticize without offering an alternative viewpoint, strategy, or methodology that we think makes more sense.

Centrality of Jesus. Hopefully the dominant theme of this blog comes to be the outrageous unmerited reality that we can know God and know about God because he showed up on earth and turned it upside-down. We want to be people who are so excited about God’s grace that we can’t stop talking about it. Every topic we speak on will be used to emphasize this point, never to detract from it.


What else to expect

The only question left is, what will we actually talk about day-to-day here? The answer: anything to get those thought eggs a-hatchin’. Early topics beside the centrality of Jesus will include how we read the Bible, science and faith, the end times, the inerrancy of scripture, the Holy Spirit, and current events. But none of these are the meat of the blog. The meat is, as Reese Roper once said, “Use your mind to use your soul.”

And so begineth The Faith Thought Hatchery. Welcome. Please visit daily or subscribe.