Reading the Bible
Great post from Derek Leman here on 'Reading the Bible Realistically'. It pretty well sums up my own approach. I encountered the Bible - or rather, selected bits thereof, well predigested - at Sunday...
View ArticleThe Wearing of the Red 2
Remembrance Sunday always gave me the creeps. We once - a long time ago - asked everyone at church what it meant to them. It didn't mean a thing to anyone. We thought about ceasing to observe it but...
View ArticleThe Wearing of the Red 3
Entirely predictably, the media have been assuring us that Remembrance Sunday is about servicepeople. Many churches, I hope most of them, make a point of saying that it's about all the victims of war,...
View ArticleCreation ex nihilo
Rabbi Michael Samuel suggests here that the idea of creation ex nihilo may be older than I thought. He hasn't got any clear statements of it though, only texts which might suggest some such idea at the...
View ArticleIn the Beginning 3
We left Genesis at Chapter 1:19 (here; the first post in the series is here) ; God has brought forth order, and made land, sea and sky. He's created plants, immediately after separating land and sea,...
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Felix Dies Natalis Solis Invicti
Happy Birthday of the Unconquerable Sun! Which, of course, happens to be 25 December, which was the shortest day of the year when Julius Caesar established his new calendar in 45 BC, though it's...
View ArticleA new discovery
I was clearing out the allotment shed today, and somewhere down among the mouldering remains of old seed packets I found a book. It appears to be an account of how God gave an onerous list of rules to...
View ArticleIn the Beginning 4
I've gone through the first creation account in Genesis, but haven't really looked at the theology we can get from it. It looks rather like the stories told by other Near Eastern peoples of the time,...
View ArticleLooking at Jesus
Recently, I was involved in an online discussion about some of the problems we have in the church, and someone said we should get people to look at Jesus not at the church, or words to that effect. I...
View ArticleWinter night shelter
I spent the other night helping at a pilot for a winter night shelter using church premises. We only had one customer, when we had ten beds available, and there are probably 300-500 people sleeping...
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The Nicene Creed
We used the Nicene Creed in church last Sunday. We hardly ever say it at my church, and I find I dislike the thing more every time. I began to dislike it twenty years and more ago, when I found out...
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Creation Take 2 Part 1
Genesis 2:4-7 These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created. In the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens, when no plant of the field was yet in the earth...
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Charles Taylor
So one of the monsters has been convicted, of a lesser offence. There's been no attempt to prosecute anyone for the atrocities committed in Liberia during the civil war there. None of the other major...
View ArticleMoltmann on open communion
There's a good post here from Richard Beck. I think Moltmann's on the right lines; I particularly loathe the idea that eating together has some connection with chuch discipline, or that access to it...
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Stories of Salvation
It's about time I stopped neglecting this blog! I've added a pretty picture showing one of many reconstructions of Solomon's temple, which I freely admit to having nicked. It's meaningless, but...
View ArticleReading Genesis literally?
Jim McGrath brings up a point I hadn't thought of. In Genesis, Adam and Eve are literally 'one flesh'. They're one individual who's been cut in two to make a sort of prototypical human community. In...
View ArticleWhat about God?
Tony Jones has issued a challenge to progressive bloggers to do a post about God. He thinks, perhaps rightly, that progressives/liberals/call them what you will don't talk about him much compared to...
View ArticleGod continued
The problem of talking about an infinite being in terms comprehensible to finite beings like myself remains. We're very good at imposing our own categories on God, seeing himself as a projection of...
View ArticleWorship Wars
There's some real wisdom here from Michael Spencer, with a follow-up here. The thing that jumps out at me is just how similar, and yet dissimilar, this is to the situation I'm familiar with. In British...
View ArticleCalled to Love and Praise (1)
My attention was recently drawn to this Methodist sttement (available via the link halfway down the page here) on ecclesiology, adoped by Conference in 1999. 'Adopted' in Methodistspeak means that it's...
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