word | spirit | world | church
There’s probably a lot to be said about using commentaries to prepare preaching, but I’m going to address one very narrow aspect: how I’ve developed a way of knowing which commentaries to regularly consult. I’m a pastor but not employed by the church, I preach approximately monthly and so don’t have the luxury of lots… Continue reading Developing a ‘canon’ of commentaries
Yes. But not like you think I mean. There are a number of passages in the New Testament which speak about perfection. Perhaps most famously, and challengingly, Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount declares that we should “be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” Matthew 5.48 It is common to wave this away.… Continue reading Can We Be Perfect?
Are we supposed to judge others, or not? D. A. Carson has quipped, and is often quoted, that John 3.16 is no longer the best known verse of the Bible in western cultures. Instead, it’s Matthew 7.1: ‘judge not, that you not be judged.’ Which tells you a fair bit about our culture’s reception of… Continue reading On Judging Others
We need to learn to play in the Bible’s text. I’ve touched on this in an article about the way I read the Bible with others, but I’m convinced that what we need to learn if we want to revive our reading of the Bible is the freedom to try things out in discussion. The… Continue reading Playing in the text
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
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