word | spirit | world | church
I’ve been blogging around Matthew Lee Anderson’s Called into Questions over the last few months. It’s a great book, though difficult, that Pastors should give some extended reflection to. We turn at the end to God’s questions. Anderson comments: “Hearing God’s questions is the cost of our freedom to question God.” Called into Questions, 23.… Continue reading God’s Questions
“In order to arrive at what you do not know, you must go by a way … of ignorance” says Eliot in East Coker. Commenting on this, Matthew Lee Anderson says, “It is a truth that is easy to write, but difficult to live out. Yet we can only learn when we are free to… Continue reading Learning not to know
Knowing your heart is harder than you think it is. Your intentions are often not transparent, even to you. Sin’s dark shadow means we must always think that there’s an iceberg of ourselves we haven’t fathomed, with much unseen and looming beneath the surface. The motivations for our actions, our thoughts, our feelings, even for… Continue reading Know Thyself
We have an intellectual problem in the modern West. We’ve forgotten the intellectual underpinnings of all knowledge. That’s Jesus by the way. The resurrection of Jesus is the central beating fact of all existence. Our response to it is the core of our lives. Christians whose lives look the same as their neighbours are a… Continue reading Christ is the start of all inquiry
There is no greater unknown, no more difficult question that we can face, than whether we are ready to die. Matthew Lee Anderson, Called into Questions, 35. I think he’s right. We are scared of death. We live in a culture scared of death. It’s much commented on that the Victorians seemed prudish (to us)… Continue reading The art of dying
The church is facing a number of issues right now. Here in the UK the ongoing crisis of leadership in the wake of numerous high-profile cases of Pastors abusing their positions might be the most obvious. I’ve written about another crisis, of discipleship, where the average Christian’s faith doesn’t touch the sides of their life.… Continue reading Navigating the Crises
“God said it, I believe it, that settles it.” Is this a helpful ‘creed’ for thinking about the faith and the Bible? I don’t think it is. There’s a lot of commend about this approach, people who say either the cliché or a more nuanced view of it tend to trust God. They tend to… Continue reading Ask Why
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