Crazy Theological Thoughts

We have looked at the four different ways people learn. We have showed you how the church can and has used these four methods to teach and instruct people in the true faith. But we have over looked something throughout this discussion. Maybe you have already added this information from your own instruction and knowledge with regards to the Christian faith. I told you that the Bible only provides one way of learning. You need to read it. The Word of God is brought to us by either the written word (which is to say what you are reading now) or the spoken word (which is to say what someone may be reading to you). But God does leave us with only these two methods? God also has commanded his people to make disciples through baptism. This is taking physical water and placing over someone. You have a verbal component or Audio component as someone declares to you what is actually happening. You even have a tactile element as you feel the water upon your head and as that water drips awa...

Now we get to the Logical segment of Education. Luther wrote two Catechism for the church so that pastors would teach and heads of households would teach the people of God in an orderly fashion. There are some people who like Logic and they like things to be short in a simple and orderly fashion. Teaching in logic is again a very traditional method. You can find a lot of Logic taught by Paul. He tends to teach us step one and step two which will eventually lead to either a truth or a falsehood. Thus, St Paul can say things like if you don't believe in the Resurrection on the Last day, you can't believe in Christ being raised, and if you don't believe in Christ's Resurrection your faith is in vain. Logical arguments are simple step problems. They take you one step at a time until you have already fallen down the Rabbit hole too far. This is a strategy many people use to teach people or convince people to become Christians. But the problem still remains that God...

With the spirit of Christmas in the air, we often remember the many Christmases in the past. We can even remember people long gone. One of my favorite Christmas time songs, is White Christmas . I remember watching the movie by the same name at my Grandparents house every year. I remember the first year I faced a none White Christmas when I was on Vicarage in Oregon. There are all sorts of images the right Audio can bring. We do learn through verbal interaction with other people. We learn as other people tell us the stories of Christmas past. The traditional style of teaching through lectures has worked for years. Even when we don't learn through lectures, we can use all kinds of audio stimulus to help us to learn different things. There is always the ABC song, that taught you your alphabet. You may have even learned other songs from your childhood that taught you about different things in life. Songs and Hymns are great ways to teach the faith. This why we do sing during o...

In this month of Thanksgiving we can be reminded how we learn from a Tactile or Kinetic way. During the month of Thanksgiving we are supposed to give thanks to God for all we have been given. We give thanks to God by voicing all the wonderful things he has done for us. We can also give thanks by sharing what we have with others. Thus, there is a tactile component of actually doing something. You can help out at a soup kitchen. You can just provide food to your neighbor. I am sure you can even help with our LWML Mission project for this quarter. Through these service projects we can learn what God has done for us. But this is only one way. Likewise, through your regular daily activity, God has provided you with various vocations in which you can act out your service and your faith. We can do all kinds of different physical activities that remind us about God. This time of your it may even be crazy to think you can give thanks to God for your good health by starting to eat r...

There has been a great amount of work done in the past actually trying to utilize Visual learning. The Apostles tried this by giving people examples of how to live your life. They became themselves visual examples, for others to model. The early church took this one step further, picking up on the activities in other cultures and even in the old Testament as they made statues and other works of Art. But it was really not until the Church started to design large cathedrals that they developed more art forms. These were in the form of mosaics and stained glass and statues. Even the various paintings were all made to teach us different things about God. They would either teach us about the understanding of the Holy Trinity and God's continued work with his creation. Some were done to teach us about Old Testament or New Testament figures and their struggles with faith. Yet others just simply repeated the story in the form of art. We continue this process, as we decorate our ch...

It is amazing the different ways in which people learn. There was a recent Mythbusters episode that talked about getting better by playing video games. I even remember at Seminary talking with some fellow students to try and create a board game that would teach you different things about the Church, some with relationship to the history of the Church and some with regards to the actual teachings of the church. All in an effort to teach people, through abnormal means. There are some people who like to read and learn by studying material found in various books. There are other people who learn by talking and discussing information. Some people need to learn by actually practicing something over and over, these people often need some kind physical activity to be involved with. Some even learn by people showing them different things. The Church has traditionally only utilized two key learning styles. Auditory, or verbal discussions, and logical, or written in an orderly fashion...