word | spirit | world | church
An easy question you would think, and it probably should be. I’ve seen it treated very vaguely very often though, there’s a depth and complexity here which people like to skate over the surface of. Jesus is baptised (Matthew 3, Mark 1, Luke 3) with John’s baptism which is clearly stated to be a baptism… Continue reading Why was Jesus baptised?
Abraham gets a bad rap, and I think lots of it extends from bad reading. We are talking, of course, about what is sometimes called the ‘sister fib.’ Abraham—still called Abram at the time—tells Pharaoh that Sarai (Sarah) is his sister rather than his wife, and hilarious hijinks ensue (Genesis 12). Actually no, not hilarious… Continue reading Rescuing Abraham
The Bible is music. Or so Alastair Roberts and Andrew Wilson claim in the introduction to their superb Echoes of Exodus. I don’t know a lot about classical music, but the crux of the point is that we see various themes in the scriptures, and they are picked up and repeated by repeating stories or… Continue reading Repost: The Bible is Music
When reading through 2 Timothy with some folk a few weeks back, I got a number of questions about some of Paul’s instructions that seemed very strange to my fellow readers. There are a number of people that Paul seems to not want Timothy to associate with. He lists some individuals but then at the… Continue reading “Avoid such people”
I’ve come across the idea, a few times recently, that the Bible doesn’t speak to everything. In the context I’m hearing it, this means that there are lots of matters of faith and practise that the Bible doesn’t tell us what to do on, so we have to figure it out for ourselves. Which is… Continue reading The Bible doesn’t speak to that
I’ve argued before that British Christians don’t know their Bibles, and I’d like to push that thought a little further. I think there are a set of nested problems that inform and intensify each other, I’ll briefly touch on each in turn, mention what I understand some of the causes of this to be and… Continue reading We don’t know our Bibles
A couple of weeks ago I ran an event in Birmingham called 'Reading 2 Timothy', where we did exactly that: read the book of 2 Timothy over the course of a Saturday morning. It’s a Bible study, which probably doesn’t seem that revolutionary. It probably isn’t that revolutionary, to be honest, but I’ve not seen… Continue reading Reading the Whole
Psalm 8 is about Jesus. Which is not a ‘big’ claim, the Psalms are the book of Christ and they all tell his story in one way or another. Psalm 8 is a kingly Psalm, that connects itself to the creation and the early chapters of Genesis. We could fruitfully notice the parallels with Psalms… Continue reading Son of Man
Recently, my wife’s Step-Grandmother died. Along with a plethora of other things, we inherited from her house stuffed with treasures a very large Bible. It’s about the size of a PC tower—they don’t make them like they used to. It’s the Step-Grandmother’s family Bible, it has all her family’s names written in it going back… Continue reading Written in the Book
I believe in Baptism in the Spirit. Admittedly, no one doesn’t, we just debate what we mean by that. But I believe in receiving the Holy Spirit as an experiential reality that (ideally) happens at conversion, though it can happen later. You can read my brief summary of how to approach this question, and my… Continue reading On Receiving the Spirit
nuakh 