Christians spend far too much time discussing Creation. What’s worse is that the theology that comes out of this obsession is very often warped and ‘me centred’. It’s all ‘I believe that God made me to be special, so I can tell you how evil you are and how you should live your life’. I […]
This morning at church we looked at the call of Matthew in Matthew 9. Jesus tells Matthew, the outcast tax collector, to follow him and accepts an invitation to dinner chez Matt. There he is criticised for being associated with the riff-raff, the people who were most hated by the religious establishment – “Why does […]
Why is it that my brain switches on whenever I get in the shower in the evening? It never does that in the morning! All sorts of things go through my mind, seemingly completely unconnected with whatever’s gone on in the day – ideas for blog posts, questions about books that I read, even ideas […]
Here it is. The big one – I know at least a few of you have been waiting to have a chance to read this, I hope you find it as interesting to read as it was to write. Despite the unassuming title, the subtitle gives away the potential controversy in the content of the […]
Now here was a module well outside my comfort zone – brought up in a cessationist context, I’ve come to think that’s not right, but I’ve never done any real Bible study on it. So a Pentecostal tutor who’s written a book on Baptism in the Spirit – a challenge to say the least! The module […]
I was hugely looking forward to this module – thinking through in a rigorous academic context how the Bible speaks to contemporary culture and can bring about social and political transformation. I brought in some ideas that I was aware of but not really fully up to speed on, like liberation theology, it was an […]
Semester 2 was a different beast to the first one. Two new modules, a new direction in the core and beginning to think about the dissertation (more of which later!) The core Wisdom module moved from the Old Testament to the New, then on to look at how Christian Wisdom is found in later years, […]
There seems to be a lot of this “Man’s Church (grrrrrr)” going around at the moment – posturing and faux-butchness, saying Christianity has become weedy and feminised, that it needs a good manly rescue in the guise of complementarians. I don’t buy it. This time it’s John Piper – I read some edited ‘highlights’ of his address at […]
Evangelism has become a dirty word to some people and cultural changes are happening across the world, ones that I would normally label as ‘postmodern’, which raise new problems with how we share the Christian message. It’s these issues that Doug Pagitt tackles in his new book Evangelism in the Inventive Age. ‘Inventive Age’ is what […]