Exploring Christianity Reflection Paper

Key Moments of Exploring Christianity Before taking this class I had very little formal training on the key beliefs of Christianity. I was baptized Protestant, but did not know what that meant and instead of going to Bible class on Sundays I would practice with the Children’s choir. When I got older I started going to Catholic mass with other members of my family, but all that I knew about mass there was that I wasn’t allowed to take communion. After not going to any mass at all for years I took a religious history course at the Community College of Philadelphia. Both the history course and a later world religions course I took there helped me to understand other religions better. Regrettably, I still was missing a lot of basic fundamentals as to what being a Christian meant. I had never read the Bible, nor did I understand the implications of the text. During our in-depth

Our dialogue about the Bible also emphasized one of the most important insights for me, and that was understanding the concept of the Bible as revelatory. The most important idea to understanding Christianity in the world around me was another very basic idea. This idea was the concept of Tradition as a key foundation to Christianity. Together, these three insights have had great effect in shaping the way I think about Christianity.

A key concept that was completely foreign to me upon starting this class was the revelation that the four Gospels have multiple audiences. Upon entering this course I had not read any of the Gospels, nor did I understand the similarities and differences of them. When we first