While doing school awhile back I decided to look up information on the internet for a paper I had to write. The paper was on the Atonement of Christ. I found this really interesting site called Theopedia. It was defined as “a growing online evangelical encyclopedia of biblical Christianity, a network of interconnected pages, constantly being refined and updated.”
I became quite interested and decided to look at the “About” page. Their vision: “to centralize the efforts of thousands of Christians into a comprehensive encyclopedia on biblical Christianity for the benefit of God's people around the world, to keep the articles at Theopedia free forever, and to give others broad freedoms to redistribute, publish, and adapt the content, to promote sound theology, to lessen the gap of theological knowledge between the seminary trained church leader and the layman, to build a Christian community for the promotion of good theological content, and to promote the Lordship of Jesus Christ in all things. Their primary statement of faith is that the Editors/Users are required to personally affirm the entirety of the primary statement of faith. Any exceptions or deviations must be approved by the board members. We, the board, reserve the right to make changes to the statement to guard the truth. This statement contains basic things that we would expect any Christian to believe.” Some might ask why Christians would bother to even try to make an online encyclopedia of Christianity. Yet Rob Moll (Christianity Today) states, "Two-thirds of American Internet users surf the web for spiritual purposes." Another person stated that "God created computers for missions. He just happens to let the rest of the world use them." Michael J. Vlach of How People of Faith Are Using Computers and the Internet commented on the internet sharing that ''Since computer technology is here to stay, retreat from it seems neither required nor appropriate... 'There comes a time when the church of Jesus Christ has to be bold enough to lay claim to a new medium.' Claiming a new medium, though, goes beyond just mere use of the medium. It involves understanding how the medium works."
But isn’t Wikipedia good enough?
Well the authors and editors of Theopedia stated that *”Wikipedia strives to maintain a Neutral-point-of-view (NPOV) policy for its material to prevent biased presentation. Theopedia, however, openly maintains a bias, or a Particular-point-of-view, that being "conservative evangelical Protestant Christianity." Contrary to Wikipedia, this bias is to be expected in Theopedia content. *Apart from any content issues, there are incompatibilities between Theopedia's Creative Commons License and Wikipedia's GNU Free Documentation License which preclude verbatim copying of articles from Wikipedia. One may still provide links to Wikipedia articles where appropriate.”
I was greatly encouraged to see a Christian alternative to Wikipedia and would love to hear what you think of Theopedia!
Here’s the webpage: http://www.theopedia.com
Terrah
