word | spirit | world | church
When you first touch biblical languages one of the first things you learn is that words have a semantic domain. What that means, in the simplest terms, is that a given word means different things in different contexts; you look up a word in a lexicon and that doesn’t mean it carries all of those… Continue reading Symbolic Domain
Obvious enough, except we’re increasingly wired to treat it like one. Technologies change the boundaries of what is possible for us and they effect the frame of how we approach the world. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If you also have screwdrivers, you’re able to distinguish the difference… Continue reading The Bible isn’t a smartphone.
My third and final Bible study question is probably the most mundane. Everyone asks this in our Bible studies. I imagine my readers here are convinced, as are most participants in a Bible study, that the Bible should in some fashion change us and will have practical applications to us or to the world around… Continue reading How do we apply this?
The second question I ask when studying the Bible with others, is ‘Where’s Jesus?’ By this time, we’ve spent some time discussing what is strange about the text in question. We’ve got under the skin of it a bit and are trying to face it on its own terms. We have not applied it, discussed… Continue reading Where’s Jesus?
When I lead a Bible study, I invariably ask the same three questions every time. The first is simply ‘what’s weird?’ Occasionally, depending on the group, the text, and how easy it is for them to follow, I might start with a fourth: ‘what’s going on?’ This is the basic comprehension question, which does sometimes… Continue reading What’s Weird?
Nietzsche attacked Christianity with all the strength his mind and powerful prose could summon up. His hatred for Christians was sourced in part because he considered the faith to be a religion for the weak and a religion that idolised and encouraged weakness. For Nietzsche the way of Jesus propagated what he called ‘slave morality’… Continue reading The weakness of God
When God floods the earth in the days of Noah it’s like he turns the clock back on everything that’s happened in the last six chapters of Genesis, and the world reverts to Genesis 1. Before God created and ordered over seven days, the world was water. In Noah’s flood he unmakes and disorders by… Continue reading Decreation
What do we mean by ‘forgiveness’? If you’re meant to forgive someone, what does this actually mean? I fear that a lot of the ways we talk about forgiveness in the church are slightly out of step with how the Bible talks about forgiveness. While a thorough exegesis of the relevant passages would be helpful,… Continue reading 3 Kinds of Forgiveness
There is no one who is higher than the Lord Jesus. He is Yahweh, God of gods, King of kings, Lord of lords. He is seated on the throne in the heavenly temple and the train of his robe fills the place. There are winged fiery lightning snakes that attend his person and serenade him,… Continue reading High and Lifted Up
“He’s no longer in the land of the living,” we say with great solemnity as we pronounce that our friend has fallen asleep on the sofa. It’s a phrase we use fairly commonly, either to mean prosaically, “they’re dead”—which is actually uncommon because we prefer cleaner euphemisms that hide the reality entirely—or to refer to… Continue reading What is the ‘Land of the Living?’
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