word | spirit | world | church
There’s a series of important questions around what songs you sing on a Sunday: their theology and how well it coheres with the church’s, their singability by this particular congregation, song choices that best encourage and inspire expressions of praise, and what songs fit the moment or ‘stage’ of the morning you’ve reached. I’d like… Continue reading What songs do you sing?
There’s a video of John Piper doing the rounds as I write; Piper offers some cautions for Biblical theology during a panel discussion. You can watch it here. Piper reflects on James Hamilton and others showing him connections all across the Psalter, and other parts of the Bible, that he’d never seen before. He’s delighted… Continue reading Why John Piper is (mostly) wrong on Biblical theology
I believe in eucharismatic church: word and spirit and sacrament church that takes seriously the history and theology of the church, believes in God’s action in all aspects of our gathered worship, and is devoted to reading the Bible three-dimensionally. Of course, not many—if any!—of these churches exist. I don’t lead one (yet), not least… Continue reading Eucharismatic Institutions
Just before the Hebrews cross the Jordan, Joshua sends a second round of spies into Jericho. As best we can tell they don’t discover anything useful to the disposition of the troops during the upcoming siege—particularly because that disposition involves walking around the walls of the fort while blaring loudly on ram’s horns—but they do… Continue reading Underneath the linen boughs
You are what you eat, said St Augustine. Well, he said ‘you become what you consume’ in the context of teaching on the Lord’s Supper. Nevertheless, the point is important. Consumption of the Supper has a formative effect into Christlikeness. The how and the why might be interesting, and I suspect Augustine and I part… Continue reading We become what we behold
I wrote a few months ago about the so-called ‘quiet revival,’ which I argued is neither quiet nor a revival, but perhaps evidence of a reaction to the meaning crisis, or to sound incredibly pretentious, a metamodern turn. I was more positive about the reaction to the meaning crisis than about the metamodern turn. The… Continue reading On the ‘Quiet Revival’ again
Forgive me, this post is moderately pretentious. I’m intrigued by the idea of summarising someone’s thought. Particularly for a thinker who has a ‘project’ (in the academic sense), there’s an interesting thought experiment about which book or essay is the quintessential summary of their thought. For C. S. Lewis it’s Till We Have Faces—and for… Continue reading What’s your starter pack?
One of the reasons we struggle to make good judgements about a given technology is that we assume that any good use justifies the technology as a whole. Because our basic assumption is that technologies are neutral—they aren’t—we think that if a good use can be seen then we should assume that difference between good… Continue reading Making judgements on technology
It was evening, it was morning, it was the eighth day. All was bright and new in a garden cradling a rich man’s tomb. Spices floated on the air. A gardener met a woman wandering and called her name. The first humans’ first scene replaying on the sixth of April, the year of our Lord… Continue reading The Eighth Day of the Week
This is a large topic that, as is the nature of blogs, I’m going to think out loud around the edge of. It’s common in Evangelical spaces to be told that you shouldn’t necessarily trust your emotions, instead we’re pointed to eternal truth found in the Bible. It’s common in more Charismatic spaces to be… Continue reading On Emotions
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