word | spirit | world | church
Jesus came to give us life, and life to the full. Life that is abundant, excessive in quantity. We know the words of John chapter 10 well enough, but I think it’s difficult for us to picture what that means. I hear the phrase “life to the full,” and I inevitably picture someone into extreme… Continue reading Life to the Full
I am convinced that every word of the Bible is about Jesus. The whole book, in all its several thousand years of composition history and score of different authors is a unified whole: it tells a single story, carefully crafted by the primary divine author, that not only points to Jesus but is about him… Continue reading Preaching Jesus in every text
So, before you lose it, I’m not going to try and argue something clearly mad like “slavery is ok, really,” slavery is evil. I do think that why we argue that it is evil turns out to be an interesting question for theological method. Several years ago, I remember having very long debates with someone… Continue reading Why is slavery wrong?
We don’t think much about the Ten Commandments in my corner of the Christian world, which some of us would think is exactly as it should be—“we’re a people of grace!”—and I fit in the other camp when I wonder if our resistance to the commandments as law means we lose them as wisdom. It… Continue reading On Names and Naming
“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 The Land of the Living
Small details matter in the Bible. They often tell the story that’s under the story, or draw out a minor aspect or theme in a greater whole. One of the details that can often matter is what a scholar might call cosmic geography. Which is the idea that some of the geographical references in the… Continue reading An East Wind
A small child totters out of the children’s work after your church’s Sunday meeting and beams at you as you get a coffee and cast about for someone to chat to. “What did you learn today?” you absentmindedly ask while thinking about ten other things. “God wants to be my friend!” they excitedly declare while… Continue reading God is our friend
Grace is the currency of Christianity, its heart and soul. Without grace, you have a religion that demands you follow God wholeheartedly and declares that you cannot. With grace? A freely given bounty that never runs out. Christianity is grace. What we mean by that is that the heart of the faith is that God… Continue reading Grace is not a thing
There’s this odd moment in the midst of our Easter celebrations, you might call it ‘Holy Saturday’ or just that day in the long weekend that doesn’t have a name. It’s that strange day caught between Friday’s sorrow and Sunday’s joy, where ‘nothing happened.’ Or maybe, an awful lot happened. There are I think three… Continue reading Holy Saturday
Jesus hung on the cross, suspended between heaven and earth, dying. To us, a detail that we can perhaps use poetically but incidental among the whole. To the Church Fathers, however, an important point to understand the cross. When St Athanasius is exploring why God became Man in his famous On the Incarnation, he devotes… Continue reading High and Lifted Up
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