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During my childhood, my family attended a few Charismatic churches before moving to a different region. We then attended a series of Southern Baptist congregations before settling in to an unlabeled “Reformed Baptist” theological framework. I became passionate about Apologetics as a teenager, but unfortunately the monoculture yielded no opponents for my burgeoning debate skills! I carried that passion onto college, where FINALLY I met and engaged with people who lightly disagreed with me.

In my mid 20’s, I was happily attending a wonderful church in a different part of the country, serving as a volunteer Community Group leader. I am not sure why, but my old passion for study and Apologetics started burning anew during this period. I began devoting time to better understand the cultures, processes, and peoples that produced the Bible, and almost immediately began to have my dogmas challenged. It should not surprise the reader to know that what I learned over the span of 2 years changed my life forever, and not in a positive way at first. What I personally found persuasive and important on my journey I have collated into my paper, Deconstructing Biblical Literalism and Belief: A Rational Inquiry.

This site exists exclusively (for now) to make that work freely available to the public. My goals are simple and twofold: 1) to centralize these ideas in a format I wish I’d had access to when I first began asking hard questions, and 2) to have my thoughts and opinions on the matter live in a format that I can share with people in my life and with the public. I’ve written this paper to be both accessible and rigorous…grounded in scholarship, yet approachable for anyone. This work, and anything else I may publish here on Iron Chariot, is about opening space for honest inquiry, intellectual freedom, and a deeper appreciation of truth, wherever it leads.

In a way, it was not the present me who wrote my paper, but a past version of me. I will always find these topics interesting, but they do not occupy a large part of life currently. Present day me loves travel, cooking, being in nature, fellowship with my community…and sleeping in on Sundays ;D.

Thanks for reading,

-HU

Contact me at hisoka.uchiyama@gmail.com