The familiar Christian triad of faith, hope and love occur not only in the writings of Paul but also in the ministry of Jesus himself.
Faith is prominent in passages such as Matt. 6:30; 8:10, 26; 9:2, 22, 29; 14:31; 15:28; 16:8; 17:20; 21:21; 23:23.
The idea of hope (even if not always the actual word) occurs in Matt. 9:2; 14:27; Mark 5:36; 6:50; 9:23; John 11:11, 23, 40, etc.
And love, pre-eminent of the three, is stressed in passages including Matt.…
Marcus J. Borg describes himself as ‘moderate to liberal’ scholar. In setting out his ‘appreciative disagreement’ with Tom Wright (in response to the latter’s Jesus and the Victory of God), Borg homes in on the question of miracle. He sees the Gospels as a combination of ‘history remembered’ and ‘history metaphorized’. The first of these terms refers to those events that are recorded in the Gospels simply because they actually happened. The second term refers to other things that are related in the Gospels. …
On 29th April, eight convicted drug traffickers, including the two ring-leaders of the so-called ‘Bali Nine’, were executed by firing squad.
All except one of the eight had turned to Christ during their years in incarceration. Their lives had been transformed, and they had been transforming other peoples’ lives, writes Joy Tibbs.
…Despite protests from across the globe, the authorities decided to uphold the death penalties. But when the day came for them to face the firing squad, something extraordinary happened.
Asia Bibi is now (mid-2015) 50 years old. For more than five years she has been on death row in Multan Jail for alleged blasphemy against the prophet Muhammad.
Her family have been Europe recently, seeking to galvanise support for Asia’s case. They have now rushed back, after hearing news that Asia is in poor health. She has intestinal bleeding, is struggling to eat, and can barely walk.
Her lawyers are trying to persuade the authorities to ensure that she has a thorough medical examination and better health care, and to allow her to be moved to Lahore Jail, in order to be nearer to her family.…
Joel Beeke and Mark Jones, in A Puritan theology: doctrine for life, outline some of the human impediments in the way of a person coming to Christ for salvation.
Some people fail to come to Christ because they pay little or no regard to the Christ of the Bible. They seek a Christ of their own imagination; they seek Christ on their own terms. We do not urge such people to read the Bible as a mere duty, or because in doing so they will have some kind of mystical experience. …
In Matthew 19:6 (= Mark 10:9) Jesus quotes Genesis 2:24, and then says, “what God has joined together, let man not separate”.
R. Paul Stevens discusses three approaches to the vexed question of remarriage after divorce: (a) the textual/legal approach, which seeks to find out what Scripture says about permissible grounds; (b) a dispensational approach which asks whether the harder teaching of the Bible is for our own day or some other age; and (c) through a biblical theology approach, which seeks to connect the reality of Scripture with the reality of contemporary culture.…
The account (in Genesis 22) of how God commanded Abraham to sacrifice his only son, Isaac, is one of the most problematic in the whole of scripture. It seems to teach that blind, irrational faith is a ‘good thing’, even the result is that you are willing to slaughter a member of your own family because you think that God has told you to do it. Of, course, God prevented Abraham from killing Isaac in the end (Gen 22:12), but that does not seem to get us off the hook: we presume that Abraham would have gone through with the terrible deed if God had not intervened.…
I wouldn’t normally expect a satirical news show to make a point defending Christians (who, after all, are regarded as such soft targets for ridicule). So I was surprised, and pleased, when Ian Hislop did precisely that on last night’s Have I Got News For You.
Judges in Northern Ireland have recently found a bakery business, run by Christians, guilty of discrimination for refusing to bake a cake that carried a pro-gay slogan.
Hislop simply asked what the outcome would be if a bakery run by Moslems was asked to bake a cake with a depiction of Mohammed on it.…
What does gospel (that is to say, evangelical and reformed) spirituality look like? Peter Adam writes:-
Christ is the mediator of the revelation of God, so this spirituality is Christ-centred, responding with faith in Jesus Christ, and especially to his saving death and resurrection.
Christ has revealed the Father, so this spirituality is that of trust in God our Father, his love and kindness in Christ, and his sovereign and providential rule over everything.…
What follows is based on (‘inspired by’, if you like) this post by Mack Stiles.
It is all too easy to assume that we know what a biblical approach to evangelism would look like, while persisting in the delusion that the bare declaration that ‘God loves you’, or an invitation to follow three of four simple ‘steps’ will do the trick. We must severely critique both what our tradition says evangelism is, and also what our culture says it would like it to be.…
