Anastasia HegmanI jumped around churches as a kid, usually some flavor of SBC. Went to a SBC university. I currently attend a SBC planted nondenominational church, or stealth SBC as another student within this forum. Also read the Left Behind series as a kid. However, all that left a giant hole of unanswered questions, one of which was the relationship to Israel. I reject dispensationalist theology outright, as well as pretribulationism, preferring a Jewish Apocalyptic Gospel, with a bit of prewrath thrown in for good measure. I find pretrib dispies to be diet supersessionism, where the church basically steals the blessing and leaves the curses and tribulations for the Jews, while never actually being required to demonstrate one’s love for God and man. Greasy grace. How can one be grafted into a plant, yet expect to be ripped off the planet? It’s nonsense and an insidious form of replacement theology.
I’m not a highly reactive person, but these doctrines and the mass genocides of people that have resulted from them induce a visceral reaction, which had led me to walk away from Christianity entirely for a time, before spending years researching what the Bible qould have actually meant to its writers and their original audience. This journey is how I found Philos. I greatly appreciate the work that Philos has done with this program, and am happily recommending it to others. I don’t know that I will change how I read the Bible after this program, since I think it espouses a grammatical historical method emphasizing the Jewish perspective, which I also endeavor to employ. But I hope that I can learn some more practical methods of applying what I read in my own communities.
