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Strap in, this one is a bit of a doozy.
I am an Evangelical Christian raised in, and still regularly attending, the United Methodist Church. I do not belong to a church, but I do belong to the church. I had two ministers in the family (now both deceased). I was raised by relatives, foster parents, and institutional caregivers at various times, resulting in an uneven upbringing in the faith.
At the age of 16, I had a momentary lapse of consciousness while riding my bicycle down a hill, and crashed into the road, requiring stitches in my forehead. After this incident, I came to take my faith seriously, not as something I merely was raised into, because I recognized the divine hand of providence having saved me from close calls on more than one occasion. At the age of 19, I received “baptism” in St. Paul’s United Methodist Church (now defunct) in Niagara Falls, New York. Feeling somewhat let-down by a methodology I felt to be unscriptural (most United Methodists are “baby sprinklers”), I sought a means of a proper scriptural baptism, which I could not find within my church because they do not perform second baptisms. Having struck up a friendship with an ordained minister from outside my faith tradition, I received a new and proper baptism in Lake Erie, near Angola, New York, at the age of 38.
My mission is to remove the deadness that has lain over the mainline churches and their parishioners, and restore them to the truth which is found in Holy Writ; which I mainly have attempted to achieve through my YouTube channel, although I have interaction with other believers as well. I hope that my experience and familiarity with Catholic/Anglo-Catholic tradition, Christian and non-Christian cults, and other subjects is helpful in this regard.
The short answer: I am a Christian.
The long answer: I am a Protestant Christian. I consider myself roughly on the fault line between high-church Anglo-Methodism and Reformed Baptist, as no doubt my rather mixed opinions on various subjects will attest.
The short answer: Ephesians 4.4-6.
The long answer: I also subscribe to the Apostles’, Nicene and Athanasian Creeds; though I consider these merely interpretations of Holy Writ with which I happen to concur.
I am mostly self-taught. As a teenager I spent hours devouring the literature in the religion section of the local public library, and later continued to do a lot of research online and offline (for example, I participated in the protests to educate people about the so-called Church of Scientology back in 2008, and learned a lot from fellow protestors). I spent some time trying different churches before settling back into the United Methodist Church mainly out of inertia.
I use the same YouTube channel for four things. First and foremost is my evangelism, Biblical analysis, Bible reviews and outreach, which are the meat of my channel. Second is my musical arrangements (I only do hymns because I only know how to do hymns, as well as that I am very much a fan of classic Reformation and Methodist hymnody). Third is my Retro Freak project (dealing with old computers and video games, a longtime hobby of mine since I was very young). Fourth is random “bloggy” videos covering various doings of mine irrelevant to anything else.
I speak Spanish with difficulty. I consider myself monolingual (American English) but I also can fumble my way around Spanish and Japanese if the need arises.
For English I usually recommend the King James Version. In my study I do frequently reference other translations, principally the Revised Standard Version (1952/1962/1972), New American Standard Bible (1977/1995), Challoner Version (1750), New King James Version (1982/1985) and my own translation of the New Testament; but I downplay these unless they are necessary. For Spanish I alternate between the 1960 revision of the Reina-Valera and La Biblia de las Américas (1986), a Spanish counterpart to the NASB which nevertheless leans more toward the traditional text than the NASB does, although I also refer to the Nueva Versión Internacional on occasion.
I strongly favor literal translations, and as such usually advise against excessively dynamic translations such as the [Holman] Christian Standard Bible (if the overly presumptuous title were not enough to turn me off to it) and New International Version, or out-and-out paraphrastic translations such as the Contemporary English Version, New Living Translation, Today’s English Version/Good News Translation, or any version where the translator wears his agenda on his sleeve or is otherwise attempting to blatantly pervert the text such as the Passion Translation and the New World Translation. I also prefer to maintain the KJV in liturgical use and in most other uses because our culture is so steeped in its language that to discard it would be a loss of catastrophic proportions.
The short answer: No. Just no.
The long answer: There are some places where a word could be used to refer to people generally, regardless of gender; and there are places where it is abundantly clear that removing obviously male-gendered language from Holy Writ does damage to the author’s intent. Being also a linguistic prescriptivist, I do not believe in breaking the English language in order to satisfy the ideology of a minority of so-called social justice warriors who probably have no interest in the contents of Holy Writ in the first place.
It’s complicated, but I reject the standard critical text (Nestle-Aland). I do not believe that an Alexandrian text type actually exists, but rather that it was an intentionally cobbled together “worst possible exemplar” made to damage faith in the integrity of Holy Writ. I do not, however, take issue with other critical editions, which agree in far more significant part with the Reformation-era texts and come from the hands of more faithful believers.
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