Have you ever found yourself longing for a deeper connection to your faith, beyond the Sunday sermons and worship songs? Krista Bontrager, affectionately known as Theology Mom, joins us to unravel the profound tenets that lie at the heart of Christianity. She shares her enlightening journey—rooted in a vibrant Christian home and enriched by her extensive theological studies—inviting us to explore the robust beliefs that shape a resilient spiritual life. Krista imparts wisdom on why it's crucial for believers to move past a cursory understanding of faith, challenging us to embrace the complexities and rewards of a more thorough doctrinal foundation.
Do you want to learn how to study the Bible? Check out the YouTube channel Faithfullyliven youtube.com/@faithfullyliven
Do you want to read about how to live faithfully? Check out the blog http://lyfe102.org
Get a free Road Map to get started learning how to study the Bible https://mailchi.mp/88f9c9405da0/bible-study-road-map
Have you ever found yourself longing for a deeper connection to your faith, beyond the Sunday sermons and worship songs? Krista Bontrager, affectionately known as Theology Mom, joins us to unravel the profound tenets that lie at the heart of Christianity. She shares her enlightening journey—rooted in a vibrant Christian home and enriched by her extensive theological studies—inviting us to explore the robust beliefs that shape a resilient spiritual life. Krista imparts wisdom on why it's crucial for believers to move past a cursory understanding of faith, challenging us to embrace the complexities and rewards of a more thorough doctrinal foundation.
Do you want to learn how to study the Bible? Check out the YouTube channel Faithfullyliven youtube.com/@faithfullyliven
Do you want to read about how to live faithfully? Check out the blog http://lyfe102.org
Get a free Road Map to get started learning how to study the Bible https://mailchi.mp/88f9c9405da0/bible-study-road-map
Welcome to Faithfully Living, the Podcast, where we learn how to live for Christ in our daily lives. I am Dwayne, your host, and I would like to invite you on a journey with me to explore and learn how to be a faithful follower of Christ. Everyone welcome to Faithfully Living the Podcast, where we strive to encourage you to live for Christ faithfully by offering guidance on studying the Bible, how to understand the Bible better and how to remain faithful to historic Christianity in a contemporary society. Today's episode is a replay of a conversation that I had with theology mom, krista Bundrager. Now, as believers, it's important to have a good foundation of knowing the core Christian beliefs. In later episodes we're going to dig deeper into them, but I think this episode with Krista is helpful to start the conversation. Alright, let's get started. So before we start my interview with Krista, let me tell you a little bit about Krista.
Speaker 1:Krista Bundrager is a fourth generation Bible teacher. She is an author, theologian podcaster, former university professor, co-founder of the Center for Biblical Unity and an advocate for the Christian faith. Krista's teaching reverberates with Christians from all walks of life. She has a unique ability to communicate the truth of Scripture in an accessible and practical way. She's dedicated her life to helping others discover how to love God in spirit and in truth. Her extensive teaching ministry can be found on her website at theologymomcom. Alright, here is my interview with Krista. So welcome to the show. I'm so glad to be here. I'm glad that you're here to talk about the core beliefs of the Christian faith, to kind of give us a foundation of what we're supposed to believe and then how we can go about learning more about it. But before we get started, could you tell us about how you came to faith as a believer in Christ?
Speaker 2:Sure, I grew up in Southern California and I was raised by my mother. I didn't have too much interaction with my father growing up, and so my mother it was just me and my mom. I'm an only child. I do have two half siblings, but I was not raised with them. But they're my life and I love them and we're close and everything. But our father had three children with three different women. So we were all raised by our mothers and I had a very strong church upbringing. My mother took me to church. She was a pastor's kid. My grandparents lived near us.
Speaker 2:My mother made a very strong priority of having my extended family involved in my life, so my grandparents were a huge part of my life. My uncles and aunts and cousins were a huge part of my life. Even though we didn't have a lot of money when I was growing up, my mother saved up all year so that we could buy two plane tickets to go to Missouri or go to Minnesota every summer. So I had time to know my cousins and be with my cousins and I think that all of those efforts that she put into adding stability to my life, even though I was growing up in a single parent context really helped provide a lot of stability. I had a very strong youth group experience. I had a very unique youth pastor and all of those factors really helped to keep me on the good road. I think that not growing up with a father there were challenges in that, but my mother did a good job of helping me navigate all of those things in spite of the challenges. So, yeah, I had a very strong Christian upbringing and when I was 15, I was a freshman in high school. My mother worked two jobs so I could go to a Christian high school and I really, I think when I was 15, it really understood Jesus' love for me for the first time, even though I'd grown up in the church and always heard the gospel. It was just kind of that aha, moment of this is for me kind of a thing, and so that was really a turning point for me when I would say a day and a time of when I got saved, if you will, but that's not to say that I wasn't already in a Christian context and there was really no time I didn't know the Lord in some sense.
Speaker 2:And I went to Biola University for my university studies. I was a film and television major there and that's where I met my husband. We were in the same major together and that was just another season of my spiritual life. Spiritual growth in college, learning more about the Lord Biola, requires you to take 30 units of Bible as part of your program, and so my senior year I took a theology class from a very different kind of theology professor. He just taught theology very differently than I had ever heard before and it really got my attention. And so I continued on into graduate school, started seminary right away after I had graduated from Biola and was in seminary for about six or seven years and did two master's degrees at Talbot School of Theology and all of those things, all of those steps were all part of my spiritual growth, learning theology. For me it was a big part of my spiritual formation and so it's kind of all of those things together, if you will.
Speaker 1:I love how your mother was intentional in bringing you up in the Lord and making sure that you knew about Him, even though you have to choose for yourself, but I love that for you. Yeah, yeah, all right, so let's kind of move into our topic. What are the core or central beliefs of the Christian faith? So kind of tell us about. What are those?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a great question and we'll kind of work our way through it. I think we have a tendency as American Christians to think about our faith in very minimalistic ways. We have a tendency to think about it as like, okay, what's the bare minimum I have to do. Anyone who's been a parent of teenagers or been a teenager can remember you know asking your parents like, well, what's the bare minimum I have to do in order to do XYZ thing? This is just a feature, I think, of American thinking of you know, what is the bare minimum in order to qualify for this? I tend to view things in a little bit more of a holistic or broad manner rather than starting with the bare minimum, and people, I want to say up front, different theologians answer this question differently. I'm going to give you my answer and how I've worked it out and taught about it over the years. So how Christians have historically thought about their faith, of what are the minimum beliefs that you need is through a credo statement called the Nicene Creed. Now, some people might not have heard of this before. They might have heard of the Apostles Creed. If they grew up Catholic, they might have gone through a Catholic catechism class and even memorized the Apostles Creed.
Speaker 2:The Nicene Creed came along a little bit after the Apostles Creed, a little bit more developed, but it is the kind of creed is just a statement of faith. It's a summary of our faith. And there are creeds in the Bible. When we think about Deuteronomy, chapter six, it says here oh Israel, the Lord, your God, is one. That's a creed statement. Philippians, chapter two, starting in around verse five and following where it talks about Jesus, there's a poem there that Paul, the Apostle Paul, includes. That was likely an early creedal statement. It's a summary of our faith. So there's nothing mysterious about creeds, they're just handy ways of summarizing an issue. So the Nicene Creed came about in the late 300s. It's fairly early in the church's history.
Speaker 2:And this is the one statement that all Christians agree on. Whether you're a Catholic or a Protestant or Eastern Orthodox, whether you're a Presbyterian, a charismatic or a Baptist, we all agree on the Nicene Creed. And so when I teach theology, this is where I start Students is grounding them in the Nicene Creed. So some of the things that are contained in the Nicene Creed are statements about who the creator is. I believe in God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth. So this tells us something about the origin of the universe. It tells us something about the origin of ourselves. There's a section in the middle where it talks about who Jesus is. He was born of the Virgin Mary. He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried, and on the third day he rose again and he will come again to judge the living and the dead.
Speaker 2:So when we think about something like the Nicene Creed, this is how Christians have historically summarized what it means to be a Christian. I see Christianity as a worldview. It is a lens, it is a way of seeing the world, so I do not approach this question, as you know this minimalistic. Well. As long as you've asked Jesus into your heart, you're good Like. That is not how Christians have historically thought about this issue, so I always like to start with the Nicene Creed. Now here's.
Speaker 2:The thing about the Nicene Creed, though, is that it doesn't say anything about scripture, or the authority of scripture, or the scripture, or what books ought to be in the Bible. It doesn't have anything to say about gender or marriage, which are big issues for us right now that we are wrestling with. So what I like to do with students as well is point them also to modern creeds where conservative Bible believing scholars have gotten together, much like the Council of Nicea in the 300s, and looked at scripture and put together a statement that summarizes the historic Christian position on things. So something I find helpful is like the Nashville statement. If people want to look that up on Google, they can look up the Nashville statement. It's a more recent statement of faith of what Christians have historically believed about gender and marriage. It's a very helpful summary. I think this is vital for us today. Now, must you have this in order to be saved? That's a different question.
Speaker 2:Someone might come into the faith and come from a very progressive background. Sanctification takes time. It takes time for us to understand the height and the breadth and the depth of our faith. So someone might have very progressive theology at their salvation. But then as they learn and they grow in a more excellent understanding of the scriptures hopefully they have people to disciple them. They ought to come into an understanding of something approximating the Nashville statement when they're thinking about issues like gender and marriage.
Speaker 2:The Chicago statement on anerancy is another very helpful statement that outlines what Christians have historically believed about the Bible, and that was a council in the late 1970s, early 1980s, kind of a modern council of Protestant scholars from across denominational lines that came together to discuss the doctrine of the Bible. So this is kind of what, for me, makes up the core of the Christian worldview. These are the things that, when we're talking about, what are the things that we Christians really need to believe. I think that these are helpful statements that consist of the web of beliefs that Christians ought to hold. Does that help? Feel free to ask any follow-ups.
Speaker 1:Yes, it comes to moving along talking about doctrine. What is doctrine and how does Christian doctrine? How does it relate to the core beliefs of the Christian faith or is it? The same thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So doctrine and theology I kind of use those terms interchangeably. Theology is just is from the Greek word. It is theos, which means God, and logos, which means knowledge or word. And so when we think about theology we are thinking about thoughts about God and who he is. And so in this sense I say, like Dr Arcee Sproul, who is a very well-known and popular theologian, that all Christians are theologians. All Christians have thoughts about God. What's interesting to me is that even non-Christians to some degree are also theologians. They also have thoughts about God or his non-existence, or what he can and cannot do. These are all theological kinds of statements.
Speaker 2:Doctrine is just more of the specific classical categories of how we organize our theology. We might organize it according to the doctrine of God. Sometimes this is called theology proper, and so we put together all of the things that Christians have historically believed about who God is, his names, his decrees, his existence, his character, all of these things. We might have the doctrine of the church. Sometimes this is called ecclesiology from the Latin and it's from Greek. I'm sorry, that is from the Greek word eklisia, which is the Greek word for church. So our doctrine of church is everything the scripture teaches about the church, we might have the doctrine of salvation. This is everything the Bible teaches about salvation. So doctrines are. If you were to pick up what's called a systematic theology textbook, like by Millard Erickson or Wayne Grudam those are two very common ones used in evangelical seminaries you would see that they're organized according to various doctrines doctrine of God, doctrine of the church, doctrine of the Holy Spirit, doctrine of salvation, and so on.
Speaker 1:Okay, I see, and so you were also. You kind of interspersed theology in there as far as everybody being a theologian. So just to kind of recap a little bit when you said everybody's a theologian, this is how we study and learn our core beliefs as believers, is that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, where are you looking and maybe we could talk about why that's important. Why is it important for us to study theology, which is, in my opinion? This is an opinion, but, working as a professional theologian for the last 25 to 30 years, I think that if Christa ruled the world, every church would have glasses in theology. This is really just teaching us what we believe. And, again, this is where our minimalist approach sometimes hinders us as American Christians is we think like, well, I come on Sunday, I hear the sermons, you know, and that's enough. But there are so many things that our pastor sermons might not cover and we need more than just going to kind of a biblically based TED talk on Sunday to know really what the core of the faith is. And I cannot tell you how often when I teach theology classes and I do offer online theology classes for regular well, I call them, I call it theology for regular people. These are the things that I learned in seminary, that I've kind of translated down for the person in the pew and invariably, when people take my classes, the number one piece of feedback I get is why I has never, no one ever, taught me this.
Speaker 2:I've grown up in the church. I've been in the church my whole life. I've never learned about. You know the impossibility of God or why that's important. Or you know the hypostatic union of Christ, that he's fully God and fully human.
Speaker 2:These are things that are basic and foundational to our faith and yet they are not taught in many of our churches. So why this matters is, let's say, you know you're dating someone or, for those of listeners who are married, it's really hard to take you seriously if you say I love my husband or I love my boyfriend or girlfriend, but you don't know anything about them. You don't know their birthday, you don't know their favorite color, you don't know whether they like cats or dogs or both. You don't know their favorite food. These are things that when we know about the person, it sends a signal of. You know that we care about them, and when we come into a relationship or, as Jesus says, a friendship with the creator of the universe, we want to know him, we want to know some things about him, and that, for me, is really why learning theology is so important.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I wish we had more of that in our churches too. Yeah, and knowing what we believe and why, and you know, have that confidence, because if you study something, you know you have to take time to mull over and learn it. And as versus, like you said in a Sunday sermon, you hear it, but you know there's different types of learning. So you, exactly, it's not always the best for a lot of people. So you hear it and you don't remember it. So I think that would be great. So all right, and then kind of diving a little bit more. It's not deeper, but more detail as far as like denominations, our denomination Whoa, what is a denomination? And tell us kind of like a broad overview of how the denominations are organized. Of course I know there's different denominations, are organized differently or developed differently, but just kind of get that overview.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and happy to do that, and I just want to let people know if they want the longer answer. I have a teaching on my channel at theology mom on YouTube where I do like a one hour presentation on denominations and all of that issue. So I'm just going to give kind of a little thumbnail here. But yeah, that would be great. And so when we think about this, what we, what we? First, I'm going to answer this question from a historical standpoint because I think that's the most helpful.
Speaker 2:For the first thousand years or so of the church, the church was informally divided East and West. There were five major centers in the ancient church Constantinople, jerusalem, antioch, alexandria and Rome and these five major centers of our faith were kind of the leaders, and we see this even emerging in the book of Acts, constantinople withstanding, but these were the places of real influence in the early church. Now, the only one of those cities that was in the West was Rome. All of the rest were in the East. The theology for the most part of East and West was the same, but over time Rome began to and this is very political okay, but there was a division between Rome and the other four cities and eventually what happens? There's multiple situations that go into this, but eventually what happens is Rome breaks away from the East and this is where we get the idea of the Pope and Roman Catholicism. So that's really the first major break in the church. There had been what were called schisms before, regional disputes, but overall the church was still one when Rome and the East separated. This is the first big break. And so we have Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. Okay, now there is a small subunit under Eastern Orthodoxy called Oriental Orthodoxy, which I'm not going to go into, but it's still under the umbrella of the East. These are my friends who are the Coptic Christians and the Ethiopian Christians. So we're just going to set that aside for now and we're just going to call it Eastern Orthodoxy, generally Pan-Orthodoxy, whatever you want to call it, and Roman Catholicism in the West.
Speaker 2:Fast forward about 500 years. Along comes a German monk named Martin Luther. Martin Luther was a man who was living at the end of the 1400s, so in the 15th century, and he it was a time of the beginning of the Renaissance, kind of a rebirth of interest in Greek and Roman sources. So there were a lot of things happening all at once. But Martin Luther has concerns over what he sees as excesses in the Roman Catholic Church, so he nails a call for debate on the door of a local church, and this was the standard practice back then. You want to have a debate, you nail this thing on the door, we're going to have this debate. So he wasn't doing anything peculiar or weird.
Speaker 2:It was never Martin Luther's desire to break away from the Roman Catholic Church. In the beginning he wanted to reform the Roman Catholic Church. He was not trying to go off and do his own thing, but eventually the Roman Catholic Church kicked him out and so he ended up doing his own thing. And this is where we get Lutheranism. It has a very unfortunate title of being named after Martin Luther, so it sounds like it's just about a man, but it was really about the fountainhead of what started what we call Protestantism Protestants and I love Protestantism because the word protest is right in our name we were a break off of Roman Catholicism. So meanwhile in the East they're just living their life, they're doing their own thing, but out here in the West we have Catholicism. Then we had Lutheranism, which broke off of Catholicism. From there we start getting more and more splinter groups and this is where we get denominations. So it's largely organized around country of origin, and this is what most people don't understand. So Lutherans are primarily German Christians. It is the dominant form of Protestantism in Germany and Denmark and Scandinavia. Okay, catholicism remains strong in France and Belgium. Those countries predominantly stayed Catholic, as well as Italy because of Rome being there.
Speaker 2:Eventually, in the second generation of Protestantism, there were more breakoffs and these became what I call doctrinal disputes and some of them, looking back, seemed very minor, of what the original issue was, of why they split off. But Presbyterians are Scottish Protestants, they come from Scotland. Anglicans are British Protestants. And let me give another example the Reformed tend to be Dutch Protestants. So that was where my family was from. My great-grandfather was a minister in Holland in the Dutch Reformed Church. And then immigrants started coming to America. Well, what did they bring with them? They brought with them their particular form of Protestantism to the world. So the Scottish immigrants brought Presbyterianism. The Anglican or British Protestants brought Anglicanism, which in the American version is called Episcopalianism. The Reformed, the Dutch, brought the Reformed version of Protestantism to America. So when you drive down the street and you see these different churches, many of them have these names because of the old country, as my grandfather used to call it, the old country connections of Protestant Europe.
Speaker 2:Now again in Africa and in the East they're just doing their Eastern Orthodox thing. They're not part of Protestantism. So if you live near a Greek Orthodox Church or a Coptic Church, ethiopian Orthodox Church that's over here in the East Well more splintering happens. Then we have the Methodists. The Methodists come along another hundred years later. They're a splinter group off of the Anglicans. They come out of Britain. The Methodist ministers come to America and they are called circuit riders and they were vigorous church planters and this is why we see so many Methodist churches in the South in particular is that they were really instrumental in helping to settle America and they would plant churches.
Speaker 2:Let me give one more as the Baptists. Baptists technically started in England, but they have really flourished in America. They're almost as close as you can get to being an American denomination and there are thousands, apparently, versions of Baptists, because if there's one thing a Protestant likes to do, it's protest, and so we go off and we do our own thing. So when we think about denominations, yes, there are shades of differences between these groups, but there's also the historical origins that were part of it. That is what brought, and then they brought that with them to America and so now we're in this kind of melting pot where no longer do you even think about Presbyterians as being Scottish per se. You go join a Presbyterian church because you align with their doctrine, or a Baptist church because you align with their doctrine, and so we're not as concerned with the ethnic background of the denomination here in America, much like everything else, which is just a big melting pot and people shuffle around.
Speaker 2:So the final group is Charismatics. Charismatics don't come around. It's the Holy of God in 4th Square, pentecostal, thank you. Yeah, those don't come around until the 20th century and the Azusa Street revival in the early decades of the 20th century. So charismatic are really the Johnny come lately of the denominational divide. But so if you think of it as a tree, the kind of the stump and the root of it is, you know the trunk is that first thousand years. Then we start breaking off Catholics and Orthodox and then by the time we get to the branches at the top, you know we got, we got thousands of denominations.
Speaker 1:So it seems like the Catholic and Protestant branched off a lot, but the Eastern Orthodox they kind of just stayed like their own pretty much yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so people can go on my channel and I did an interview recently with my very good friend who converted to being Coptic Orthodox and they can. If they're curious to know more about the Orthodox perspective, they can check that out. But yeah, they were just kind of doing their own thing and they haven't really changed all that much. There's been some changes, but they, as my friend, who's Orthodox, says, we change very slowly. For us we're still acting like it's we're in the year 400. Like it's just that they don't do anything quickly. They're unconcerned about, you know, the modern conventions and that sort of thing.
Speaker 1:Oh wow. Well, I love the way you explained that. I mean, when you look at it at the different regions of the world, it kind of makes more sense now and how they kind of branched out.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and this is why I think that there's so many, so much movement to in America to rise and reorganize around non-denominational things is because there is a sense in which, you know, a lot of this stuff is a little bit connected to the old world and the non-denominational people. Churches will just try to focus on the essentials, things like the Nicene Creed, as an organizing principle, and so what we're starting to see now is less and less division over minor denominational differences and more uniting around the core essentials, and that's the idea of the non-denominational church.
Speaker 1:And within the denominational church do they kind of like have a governing body for them?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so that's a very interesting question. So the Episcopalians or Anglicans, depending on if you live in America or in Great Britain, and really the conservative Anglicans now are the ones who live in the global South. It's really the Africans and the Chinese and the Indians who are preserving the apostolic faith. For the Anglicans, the Church of England and the Episcopalian Church in America have become so progressive and so liberal that the future really is the global South. I did a podcast about that last year, a fascinating discussion of the rise of the global South, and I think the future will be, as the American churches become more progressive, I actually think that the African churches, the churches in China and Asia will become instrumental in preserving the apostolic faith. I think that they are on the rise. And now I can't remember your original question because I thought it was a standard there, I'm sorry.
Speaker 2:So, yes, episcopalians, the Anglicans and the Catholics and to some degree the Eastern Orthodox kind of function on a model of. It's a very hierarchical model where there's almost like this top-down type of leadership and in the case of the Catholics, there's a pope at the top and then there's the College of Cardinals and then it filters down to the local level of the priest, with the bishop being over multiple parishes, and that's similar in the Anglican tradition. Although they don't have a pope, they informally have a head, which is the Archbishop of Canterbury. But that is also changing as the church in England has become increasingly apostate. The churches in the global South really no longer acknowledge the Archbishop of Canterbury as their head, but there is sort of still this hierarchical idea of the bishop over multiple parishes and then the priests and the deacons at the local parishes.
Speaker 2:So those denominations tend to be much more structured and hierarchical Presbyterians, reformed Lutherans. They tend to be more elder led and the pastor is a teaching pastor among equals. He's an elder among equals, so that tends to be their governance system. Baptists and non-denominational churches charismatic churches tend to use what I call more like the senior pastor model, where there is the senior pastor is kind of the lead and you might have an elder or deacon team, but they have varying levels of authority in actually managing the church. The real focus in the church is on the lead pastor or the senior pastor.
Speaker 1:So what about like the Southern Baptist, like Southern Baptist Convention, is that? How is that kind of? I know how they organized it, yeah.
Speaker 2:So the Southern Baptist Convention is interesting because technically they're not a denomination, they are an affiliation. So their churches are all technically independent. But then they collaborate financially on things like curriculum. So Lifeway people might have heard of Lifeway publishing that's run by the Southern Baptist. So an individual church would contribute a certain portion of its budget to go to Lifeway to produce curriculum. They have their own seminaries, they have a mission board, they have an international mission board and a North American mission board. They also have the. They have like a, like a think tank on religious liberty is the ELC.
Speaker 2:So individual churches send money to the SBC and I think it's called I'm not Southern Baptist, so this is just based on research. But they contribute, like to collaborate, I think is what they call it. So it's collaborative money. And then that money gets pooled into these official Southern Baptist entities and so when the convention meets every year, they each of those entities gives reports to the representatives from the churches are called messengers, who come to the convention because they're responsible to report on how that money is being used. And so technically every Southern Baptist church is independent, though that the Southern Baptist convention does not control the churches.
Speaker 2:Now they can throw them out. From what I understand, they have to adhere to their statement of faith. It's called the Baptist faith and message. If a church begins to drift outside of the Baptist faith and message, I do believe the SBC can vote that church out, which is what Saddleback has been going through, which is Rick Warren's church that he planted 40 years ago. There's a lot of controversy right now about whether or not that church will be able to be readmitted into the SBC and all of that. So that's my understanding of how that operates, okay.
Speaker 1:All right. So going back to our core beliefs and things like that, what would be some resources that you could recommend for people to study and learn more about the core beliefs of the faith?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So for somebody who's kind of starting at the beginning, I would recommend a book by my friend, Ken Samples. He is a theologian, he's one of my mentors. He has a wonderful little book called Without a Doubt, answering the 20 tough faith questions, or something to that effect. But it is a wonderful introductory primer to the Christian worldview and he goes over, I think, many of the core essential doctrines. So if you don't wanna make a big commitment to reading Wayne Grudem's systematic theology not quite at that level yet Ken Samples book Without a Doubt is a wonderful start and it's one of the books in my top five books that I think all Christians should read. It's a very helpful book. And then if you wanna go to the next level, I might suggest taking a class.
Speaker 2:I offer theology classes through my website. People can go to the centerforbiblicalunitycom or theologymomcom and I have classes, live classes and on demand that I teach here around in various issues related to theology and theology. For regular people. We meet on Zoom and it's a wonderful way to get some guidance on how to learn theology. If people are really ambitious they can get ahold of Wayne Grudem's systematic theology. He has the full version which I call the big book. It's about three years, fine. But then there's an abridged version it's called biblical doctrine, that people can get and he just updated that last year.
Speaker 2:But another very good one that I think I'm gonna use next time I teach through the theology sequence is Millard Erickson's systematic theology. That's the one that I used when I was in seminary. Again, there's a big version, there's the thick one and there's an abbreviated one, and both of them are very fine. Millard Erickson, you're gonna get kind of the standard Baptist theology. Wayne Grudem you're gonna get an eclectic mixture of reformed theology. So he's a Calvinist but he's also believes in the continuation of the supernatural spiritual gifts. So he's kind of an unusual person in that he almost seems like part reformed and part charismatic. But it's a very great textbook and it is used in many seminaries. It's very helpful. So those would be some ideas for further study. All right, well.
Speaker 1:Krista, thank you for being on the show and sharing with us your wisdom about theology and Christian beliefs.
Speaker 2:Well, it's my pleasure.
Speaker 1:thanks for having me, the core Christian beliefs identify us as a follower of Christ, so it's important to know what you believe. I'm grateful to have had this conversation with Krista on this topic. Please go check out her website, theologymomcom, for various courses she teaches on theology. Until next time, remember God is always good and he's always faithful. Thank you for listening to the podcast. Do me a favor by following the podcast and leaving a review to help spread the word. I look forward to hearing from you.