word | spirit | world | church
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?
Evangelicals love magic. On the face of it that doesn’t sound like a true statement, perhaps you remember the mild panic over Harry Potter in the early 2000s, or the much bigger panic over Dungeons and Dragons in the eighties—witchcraft remains something we are inherently nervous about, sometimes leading to absurd extremes. Which is true… Continue reading Magical Thinking
Stretching Minds IV If we want to stretch our minds, we need to hear the Bible. This is the form it was designed to be interacted with. There’s nothing wrong with reading—it’s very good—but it can be very solitary. It is good for us to read the Bible together and hear it together. Most evangelical… Continue reading Read the Bible, Together
Over the Summer, on Mondays, I’ll be reposting some of my favourite posts from nuakh. This post explores how Christians turn everything that should be an 'instrument' into a 'device.' Evangelicals love magic. On the face of it that doesn’t sound like a true statement, perhaps you remember the mild panic over Harry Potter in the… Continue reading Repost: When Christians Love Magic
I’ll give you, it’s not the best question. We all intrinsically know what books are and how they work, it’s not a complex technology. A couple of boards with some paper glued or sewn between, right? Except, I fear that as we move into a post-literate society, its less instinctual than you might think. If… Continue reading What is a book?
There can be a tendency in a certain kind of academic work on the Bible to heavily assert that the Bible is a collection of documents written by a diverse array of authors in different settings and time periods (so far, that’s entirely true) and that therefore it isn’t reasonable to speak as if the… Continue reading Is the Bible a cacophony?
Christianity is weird. Really weird. In middle-class western churches we seem to have forgotten that in the name of respectability. That isn’t actually why, of course, though it’s an easy accusation to throw. In the evangelical world we’ve shuffled away the weirdness because it’s not easy to explain. We’re keen to get a hearing ‘for… Continue reading Making Christianity Weird Again
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
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