question for Christians

>>10003899
Bonhoeffer's The Cost of Discipleship for Protestants
Chesterton's Orthodoxy for Catholics
Both are entirely worth reading whatever your persuasion, or non-persuasion.

On the Christian Doctrine by St. Augustine and How to Think about God by Mortimer J. Adler.

>>10003960
There isn't nearly enough love for Bonhoeffer on /lit/ or in general

>>10003993
Great writer, great man. The Ethics are challenging but well worth the effort.

What contradiction are you having trouble with? In my experience I find that there's almost always a compelling explanation for any contradiction and that many critics grossly overreach in their attempt to discredit the bible. For somebody that doesn't know any better, or hasn't actively studied scripture in any way, it's easy to fall into this trap of believing that the bible is filled with irreconcilable contradictions. As an example look at Jason Long in his book "Biblical Nonsense"

"The author of the first letter to Timothy advises his reader to drink only wine instead of water (5:23). While researchers in the medical profession currently believe that alcohol is beneficial in moderation, consuming enough wine to remain hydrated for the rest of Timothy's life would certainly destroy his liver after a very brief period."

It's baffling why Long would interpret Paul's advice that Timothy "No longer drink water and only drink wine, but use a little wine for the sake of your stomach and your frequent ailments" to mean that Timothy should drink only wine in the future. The Fundamentalist tendency to read into text what a person wants to see can be found even among nonreligious fundamentalists--including some atheists who are hell-bent on discrediting the bible. You must challenge your own assumptions of the bible because there are a lot of skeptics who base their opinions on extremely shoddy exegesis.

I would recommend Hard Sayings by Trent Horn.

>>10004017
Good post, anon.

>>10004017
OP here. I'm not struggling with anything in particular, I'm just having a little bit of trouble understanding certain OT stories (particularly the long instructions regarding strange rituals and sacrifices in the torah), and a little bit of the theological vocab in the NT (like getting regeneration and sanctification confused, or properly defining the trinity). I've decided to just start over and get a better grasp of the basics

>>10004063
Those instructions are for the Temple priests. Those chapters are a job description and training manual.

>>10004074
theres parts that involve things like sprinkling bird blood at the doorways to prevent leprosy. Those kinds of instructions make absolutely no sense to me.

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>>10004063

My first stop for those sorts of questions are the study guides by Scott Hahn. If you've ever seen the Ignatius study bible it's the exact same format except it's for the Old Testament. They can be hard to recommend since they're kind of expensive--he's only releasing single booklets right now to fund further research which will eventually be released as a single bible. At the very least get the one for Genesis.

>>10004084

I like to put stuff like that in the context of salvation history, which is the idea that we're sort of living in a story. One with a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning is Genesis, the middle is the coming of Jesus, and the end is revealed to us in Revelation. God is the writer who is guiding us, his characters, throughout the story. His end goal is to turn us into saints who will freely love him and spend eternity with him. At some point in salvation history God revealed himself to a fairly primitive and evil people in order to begin guiding and reforming them into accord with who He is, and these odd rituals are just the beginning steps of the process. I believe it was necessary to be done this way because if God revealed himself in the person of Jesus nobody would have understood. The binding of Isaac had to happen in order to make sense of the Eucharist.

The one book nobody tells you to read: the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

>>10004678

What use is the catechism for scriptural exegesis?

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This one is pretty good.