Last night we had a fruitful discussion about the first half of Chapter 23 – our essays are here.

The image above is a common argument atheists and non-believers have used to either discredit Christian-based ethics or Christianity altogether.  Though in this chapter and other chapters of MacCulloch’s book have shown that Christianity (or the Church in general) has played a significant role in the history of slavery, there are some misconceptions about the type of slavery that the Bible mentions; Chris tackles this issue in his essay about slavery.  There is a definite and serious responsibility all Christians should do in making sure that biblical verses be put into its proper geohistorical contexts for proper exegesis and hermeneutics to occur.  Neglecting to do so will amount to serious misunderstandings and be a detriment to the gospel message, as the African-slave experience has shown.

Last night’s meeting reminded me of how special what we are doing at Project Augustine is.  At times, when Christians are gathered in a small group setting to talk about spiritual matters, most are on their best behavior and may not be so upfront about what they truly believe in, fearing that they might be misunderstood or that their questions might be deemed silly at best or even heretical at worst.  But not at Project Augustine.  We’re pretty open – unabashedly open often in fact.  Now, this style may or may not be to everyone’s liking of course.  But this way of engaging Christianity really challenges us and stretches our knowledge of not only the church, Christianity, God, etc., but also ourselves and why we believe what we believe.