word | spirit | world | church
If I asked you to summarise the story of the Bible, I wonder what you’d say? I do often ask this in classroom settings with Christians and there are a whole host of frequently given answers. Typically, people tell some version of the story of redemption from sin involving the fall and then Jesus’ incarnation… Continue reading The Bible’s 3 Stories
In the Old Testament, the Temple was a microcosm, a miniature copy of reality. We see this in the way it’s structured; it’s built as a copy of the Garden of Eden: a mountaintop land with trees. The Temple is on the apex of a mountain, it’s full of trees (the lampstands and the decorations),… Continue reading Church as Blueprint
Character matters. I suspect everyone agrees on that much. We say when appointing pastors that character is the thing that matters most—whether we follow through on that is a good question, of course—and we say the same thing about what matters in the Christian life. It’s vitally important. Jesus wants us to grow up into… Continue reading Restor(y)ing Character
I’ve spent the last few months working through the works of St. Irenaeus. Which to most readers probably sounds utterly uninteresting. You aren’t going to do that. That’s OK, though if you’re an Elder or Deacon or anything similar I’d like to gently suggest it would be good for you to read some Christians from… Continue reading Why Read St. Irenaeus?
We live in a strange moment of time and cultural winds that gets called all sorts of different names, but we can all agree its ‘modernity.’ Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, how concerned we are by it, and what features it has that we should embrace or push against are all… Continue reading The Bombadil Option
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?
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
Our world is made of atoms, of spinning particles of energy careering around one another in a fabulously chaotic and surprisingly ordered way. Or so the story goes. I don’t mean to suggest that I doubt the scientists whose work informs our understanding of physics and matter; I have no reason to do so. What… Continue reading Repost: We Are Made of Stories
I was recently reading this fascinating article in Plough Magazine about intergenerational stewardship. I first heard about it while eating tapas with the editor, because apparently that’s my life now. Anyway, to the article: all well and good you might think, as long as you’re a German Prince with land that stretches back generations in… Continue reading Stewarding Stories
I’m the sort of person who spots patterns and thinks in patterns. That’s not by itself better or worse than someone who thinks in a different way (or doesn’t have a typology for how they think—which is the hallmark of a pattern-person), it’s just a thing. It has strengths: I can see that these three… Continue reading Seeing Patterns
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