word | spirit | world | church
Lamentations is a difficult book. I’ve been reading through it with my Bible reading group recently and it’s heavy going. There’s much to gain, but when you read through it in your mornings you can slide through it fairly quickly. When you spend a few hours per chapter slowly chewing it over around a table… Continue reading A Lamenting Samaritan
Evangelicals love magic. On the face of it that doesn’t sound like a true statement, perhaps you remember the mild panic over Harry Potter in the early 2000s, or the much bigger panic over Dungeons and Dragons in the eighties—witchcraft remains something we are inherently nervous about, sometimes leading to absurd extremes. Which is true… Continue reading When Christians Love Magic
When we gather to the table to eat the supper with the saints, we do exactly that. I wonder if you’ve ever considered it. If the Lord’s Supper is a participation in the marriage feast of the Lamb—and most Christians would be comfortable describing it as at least a prefiguring foretaste, though I’m going further… Continue reading A Great Cloud of Witnesses
Last week I outlined what I called a 'taxonomy' of Baptism in the Spirit. In essence I broke down the various questions we need to ask in order to clarity the terrain of the debate. I originally came up with this a few years back when I was trying to figure out exactly what I… Continue reading Receiving the Spirit
We live in a world that tells a story about itself: we learn the story as children in school and we imbibe it in our cups as we go about the day. It’s whispered to us by automobiles and tarmac and concrete pillars and we receive it intravenously by the tap our smartphones have placed… Continue reading Individualism in the Machine
I’m a charismatic, one of the perennial questions in charismatic theology is ‘what is the Baptism in the Holy Spirit?’ Other Christians who know and interact with charismatics and Pentecostals may well have answers to the same question, but its less likely to be a matter of debate. Among charismatics, it’s one of the fault… Continue reading Baptism in the Holy Spirit: a taxonomy
Have you ever felt like there was more to life than this? Known some sense of longing for the future? Perhaps you’ve enjoyed a great steak done exactly how you like it, or a really well poured beer, or the absolute delight of seeing your team triumphant in your favourite sport (Curling, in the Suffield… Continue reading Feeding our Longing
The modern story is one of autonomy: the path to human flourishing will be found in being most myself. I will achieve actualisation if I am my most authentic self, whoever that proves to be. At its very simplest it boils down to the Disney princess mantra, we follow our hearts. If that ruffles a… Continue reading Against Autonomy
What is joy anyway? It’s one of those words we all think we understand, but sometimes I wonder. I’ve written before on how longing is the ground of joy, but a friend pointed out that I didn’t actually define joy in that piece. A fair criticism, that if I’m honest was because I was still… Continue reading On Joy
God creates by dividing, that’s the pattern begun in Genesis 1. He continues to create that way today. I’ve written before on how the Lord makes order from chaos in the first Creation narrative, and how that work which is begun but not completed becomes our work. Adam was meant to create order in the… Continue reading Creation requires Division
nuakh 