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Genesis 9:20-25 – the ‘Curse of Ham’

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Genesis 9:20 Noah, a man of the soil, began to plant a vineyard. 9:21 When he drank some of the wine, he got drunk and uncovered himself inside his tent. 9:22 Ham, the father of Canaan, saw his father’s nakedness and told his two brothers who were outside. 9:23 Shem and Japheth took the garment and placed it on their shoulders. Then they walked in backwards and covered up their father’s nakedness. Their faces were turned the other way so they did not see their father’s nakedness.…

1 Cor 6:1-11 – New life, new lifestyle (sermon notes)

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Text: 1 Corinthians 6:1-11

You should be ashamed of yourselves!

  • Down the Lechaion Way – neighbours locked in a boundary dispute
  • Alexandra’s jewelry business – unpaid invoice
  • In the family of Fabius – a feud over inheritance

And these are all Christians suing one another!  What are the godly doing, asking the ungodly to resolve their differences?

‘Why not rather be wronged?’ (v7)!

Root problem: Christians are using worldly means to settle their petty disputes.

Norwich in 2021 is not the same as Corinth in AD50. …

Slavery and the early church

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Mark Brumley, a Roman Catholic author, asks: Did the early Church endorse slavery?

He answers:

Certainly, the early Christians more or less tolerated the slavery of their day, as seen from the New Testament itself and the fact that after Christianity became the religion of the Roman Empire, slavery was not immediately outlawed. Even so, this doesn’t mean Christianity was compatible with Roman slavery or that the early Church did not contribute to its demise.

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George Whitefield: slaveholder and evangelist

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George Whitefield (1714 – 1700) was an outstanding evangelist.  When, in 1740, he first traveled to North America he was appalled by the way slaves were treated:

‘Your dogs are caressed and fondled at your tables; but your slaves who are frequently styled dogs or beasts, have not an equal privilege. They are scarce permitted to pick up the crumbs which fall from their masters’ tables.… Although I pray God the slaves may never be permitted to get the upper hand, yet should such a thing be permitted by Providence, all good men must acknowledge the judgment would be just.’

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Why did so many Christians in the South support slavery?

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It seems incredible to most of us today that mature and thoughtful Christians leaders in the American South (including J.H. Thornwell and R.L Dabney)  persisted in defending the institution of slavery.

It should not be supposed, however, that they did so from simple-minded malice. Anyone who thinks about the matter would do well to reflect on the ways in which they attempted to justify the practice.

An article in Christianity Today summarises the key reasons given by church leaders in the South:

Biblical Reasons

• Abraham, the “father of faith,” and all the patriarchs held slaves without God’s disapproval (Gen.…

Let’s talk about the church, racism, and history

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Ben Lindsay is a Christian pastor (in London) and founder of the charity Power the Fight, which ‘trains and empowers communities to end youth violence.’

Ben is author of We Need To Talk About Race (SPCK, 2019), a book endorsed by Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury, as a ‘must-read’.  It is also recommended by the Church of England Evangelical Council.

Based on personal experience (of himself and others) and historical analysis, the book’s central thesis is that the UK church continues to be deeply affected by, and must take responsibility for, its historic racism.…

The example of Christ

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I have been struck by the way in which some some of the classic Bible passages about Christ’s atonement are linked to his example.

To be sure, we cannot follow our Saviour in atoning for our sins or for anyone else’s.

But we can follow him,

  1. in generous forgiveness.  Eph 4:32 – ‘Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.’
  2. in putting others’ needs above our own.
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Compositional devices in ancient biographies

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How do we account for difference between the Gospels?

Michael Licona, in his book, Why Are There Differences in the Gospels? What We Can Learn from Ancient Biography (2017) argued that the Evangelists would have been acquainted with, and would have utilised, compositional devises that were ‘practically universal in ancient historiography’.

These include:

  • transferal (attributing words spoken by one person to another),
  • displacement (placing something spoken in one context to another),
  • conflation (combining elements of two different events or people as one),
  • compression (describing events as taking place in a shorter period of time than actual),
  • spotlighting (focusing attention upon a particular person),
  • simplification (omitting details in order to focus attention),
  • expansion of narrative details (the creative reconstruction and free composition of plausible circumstances),
  • paraphrasing (creative retelling of an event to emphasize a point),
  • the law of biographical relevance (the addition or omission of biographical information according to the purpose of the author)

Robert Stein (from whose review the above list has been taken), comments that a number of these are not only uncontroversial, but by no means limited to ancient Greco-Roman historiography (we find just such spotlighting in the Old Testament stories of Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Joshua, Samuel, David, Solomon and others. …

Abandoning hell

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A while ago, Dr Sam Wells wrote this article for the Church Times in which he explores the implications of a Christianity without belief in hell.

Wells begins with the words of Jesus in Jn 10:10 – “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”  This, he says, supplies an excellent mission statement for the church:

‘Jesus is our model of abundant life; his life, death and resurrection chart the transformation from the scarcity of sin and death to the ab­un­dance of healing and resur­rection; he longs to bring all humankind into reconciled and flourishing relationship with God, one another, themselves, and all creation.’
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Christian ethics – creational or eschatological?

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In seeking to develop and refine biblical ethics, are we supposed to look back, to how things were when God created the heavens and the earth, and pronounced all things good?  Or should we look forward, to our perfected life in the new heavens and new earth?

Sam Wells would like to see ‘backward-looking’ thinking replaced by ‘forward-looking thinking.’

There is no getting away from the fact that Jesus and the apostles do look back to creation to support and explain their ethical teachings.…