blackbird said:
JJ
Dr. Evans has a book out
What A Way to Live
I think there's a subtitle
The Kingdom Agenda
Looks like another book I need to place on my wish list. See, until I was an adult (and have been one for many years), I had not read any books by any Kingdom teachers, except the Bible. I was raised with it, but not very difinitively, and only from context, but I was also raised with the opposite. However, once I learned to read the Greek, I saw that the grammar and the context never contradict one another.
As an adult, I have read a little writing of others, and for the most part, we have come to the same conclusions, sometimes from the teachings of others, and sometimes strictly from the Bible.
The former pastor at the church where I was preaching up until recently had gone to a "good" Baptist colled in PA, and he spouted off the stuff they taught him, until one day, while studying a "contradiction", it dawned on him that the contradictions seemed to stem from passages that were talking about a "Kingdom", although his "good" Baptist college had taught him that they were the same thing, or the Kingdom was simply some mystical good feeling, depending upon which professor was teaching.
He started teaching it, and that's what drew me to that church while I was awaiting assignment to a pastorate out in the bush. We studied together indepth. He told me that he had discovered that "hell" and "lake of fire" were not always the same. (Of course, at that point, I challenged him to show me where they were ever the same, and he realized that "hell" (gehenna) is a warning to saved people.)
I've never read Hodges' works. A dear friend of mine knows him, and they have fellowshipped, but I've not read anything that he's written, and AFAIK, I've only ever read half a sentence that's attributed to him. That was posted here, and I intentionally skimmed over it because I wanted to read the entire thing in context myself.
S. S. Craig certainly is not "new" to Kingdom teachings. He realized long ago that "aionios" cannot mean "forever", and wrote a book called "The Dualism of Eternal Life".
I've not read Faust's works, although I want to. I've not read Evans' works. I've read Chitwoods' works, and although we agree for the most part, there are a few things that we disagree on. (Accountable informed me while he was up here that Chitwood has changed some of his beliefs that we disagreed upon.)
But, growing up, when we would visit a church, while travelling or visiting or something, about half the time (probably a little less), the churches would preach the Kingdom, some better than others. About the same number would teach "get saved!" and that that's all the Bible talks about. A hanful of them would teach something else, either somewhere in between or somewhere out in left field. The Kingdom teaching churches have dwindled drastically, and many of them have dropped "Baptist" from their names because of the way that the Baptist denomination has changed. I've rarely encountered a Kingdom preaching church that was not Baptist, although I do have a friend who is a AoG preacher who preaches the Kingdom, and he's accused by other AoG churches of being a Bapti-Costal. (I'm working on his pentecostal beliefs, but we're not there yet.)
I've never read anything from most of these men, and the ones I have only in the last few years, yet I've been accused of being their disciples. Yet, I get my information from the Scriptures alone.
