Author Archives: admin

Why does God bother with the church?

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I like a couple of illustrations that Philip Yancey uses to  explore what God might think of the church, with all its imperfections:-

The composer Igor Stravinsky once wrote a new piece that contained a difficult violin passage.  After several weeks of rehearsal the solo violinist came to Stravinksy and said that he could not play it.  He had given it his best effort but found the passage too difficult, even unplayable.  Stravinsky replied, “I understand that. 
…

Children’s Letters to God

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A bit of light relief.  Here are a few of my favourites from Children’s Letters to God:-

Dear God…

‘I would like all the bad things to stop.’
‘My father is mean.  Please get him not to be.  But don’t hurt him.’
‘Instead of letting people die and having to make new ones why don’t you just keep the ones you’ve got now?’
‘Please send me a pony.  I never asked for anything before.  You can look it up.’…

Pluralism and its impact

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D.A Carson, in The Gagging of God, has some helpful things to say about pluralism and its impact.  Among the different forms that pluralism takes, the following are to be distinguished:-

1. Empirical Pluralism. This refers to the sheer and actual diversity of race, value systems, heritage, language, culture, and religion in many Western and some other nations. Although it gives rise to particular challenges and opportunities, it is neither intrinsically good nor bad.…

‘God is Love’

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The statement, “God is love” (1 John 4:8,16),  ‘is one of the most tremendous utterances in the Bible – and also one of the most misunderstood.  False ideas have grown up round it like a hedge of thorns, hiding its real meaning from view, and it is no small task cutting through this tangle of mental undergrowth.  Yet the hard thought involved is more than repaid when the true sense of these texts comes home to the Christian soul. …

Prayer – ‘The Conversation of Friends’

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‘Prayer is the conversation of friends.  It is not a mere convenience for letting God know what we are thinking or what we want.’  So writes Tim Chester, in The Message of Prayer.  The development of this ‘conversation’ may be traced from Genesis to Revelation:-

The riddle of creation

Genesis 1:26-27.  In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth…Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” …

Preaching and systematic theology

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Systematic theology seems in eclipse at the moment.  It is suspected not only of being detached and impractical, but also of using biblical texts in hopelessly non-historical and non-contextual ways.  It’s time, I think, to re-assert the value systematic theology for the preacher.  Here’s a summary of what Donald McLeod has to say on the subject:-

“Theology without proclamation is empty, proclamation without theology is blind.” (Gerhard Ebeling)  “I don’t care anything for a theology that doesn’t help a man to preach.”…

Christ and culture

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How are we to understand the relationship between Christian faith and the world in which it is to be believed and practiced?  Over 50 years ago, H. Richard Niebuhr, in his Christ and Culture, outlined five approaches to culture in Christian history.  These still provide a helpful framework today:-

1.  Christ against culture.  This represents a tradition of Christian opposition, not to culture per se, but to existing cultures.  The Christian world view is seen as diametrically opposed to non-Christian world views and their cultural outworking. …

Fundamentalism and evangelicalism

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The word ‘fundamentalism’ has gone through several metamorphoses in the course of its 100-year history.  Originally, it attached itself to the sentiments of a set of articles entitled, The Fundamentals: a Testimony to the Truth, which sought to affirm, in the light of ‘attacks’ from liberals and modernists, what were regarded as essential doctrines of the Christian faith.  Latterly, of course, the word has often been used to refer to militant extremists of any religious background. …

Leisure and lifestyle

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According to J.I. Packer, in an essay entitled Leisure and Lifestyle: Leisure, Pleasure and Treasure, evangelicals have paid relatively little attention to thinking about leisure, emphasizing ‘work rather than leisure, activity rather than rest, and life commitments rather than life-style choices.’  This is as it should be, since pre-occupation with leisure is unhealthy, a symptom of the deadly decadence that has already set in in the Western world.  See 1 Jn 2:15f.  ‘All around the world, as capitalist consumerism and the market economy grind on, carrying all before them, leisure and life-style are becoming areas of entrapment for Christian people. …

The body – a story of repression

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It is often supposed that the Christian faith has had, down the years, an overwhelmingly repressive attitude towards the human body.  This ‘story of repression’ is discussed by Philip Sampson in his book Six Modern Myths Challenging Christian Faith, (a book that deserves to be better known, I think).  Here are some of the things that Sampson has to say.

Jonathan Miller described Christianity as more concerned for ‘the metaphysical fate of mankind’ than for ‘the physical order of nature’.…