Decoding Our Christian Words

Book titles are interesting excursions into semantics. This book, Decoding our Christian Words: From head-trip analysis to gut-trip analysis, by Dr. William E. Salmon who prefers to be called Pastor Bill, is about discovering through gut-level experience new metaphors for enduring realities our Christian code words embodied in a time long past. It looks for meaning in life versus truth in academic terms and definitions. By the time the reader has worked through this workbook these old terms will take on new meaning. Does this change reality? Not at all What is changed is how the reader finds the Christian lexicon meaningful in its application to reality today. Is it less powerful? No it is more powerful because it deepens and broadens one's ability to live a profound live.Reality never changes, but our perception of reality is clouded by several things such as the prevailing world view which changes over time. Such a radical change in understanding took place in the 15th and 16th Centuries giving us the familiar metaphors of the Modern world view. A world going from flat to round created no small uproar in the understanding of who we as Christians were and how we articulated basic concepts of our faith. Again, beginning with Einstein in the 20th Century our metaphors provide us with new tools to describe an old reality.Today's young adults and youth, as well as many adults, live out of a Post-Modern worldview. They are hungry to find meaning in a world that is experienced in upheaval; our economic, political and symbol systems are in a giant flux. Many people--all around the globe--are seeking to find meaning to make sense of it all and to find hope in apparently hopeless times. Today's churches can never reach the multitudes until it comes face-to-face with the Post-Modern experience. It needs to give the current generation new metaphors that give meaning to enduring realities. This book is dedicated to this purpose.