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Showing posts with the label Christian Living

Nicodemus and the Rich Young Ruler

Shane Claiborne loves to quote his friend, the late singer and songwriter Rich Mullins, on the way Christians read the Bible.  Mullins used to say that it was as if we had highlighters for certain verses.  Jesus says, "you must be born again", so we must all be born again. But didn't Jesus also say, "sell all you have and give to the poor"?  Why don't we all have to do that too? Since I read that, the story of the rich young ruler keeps coming up in my reading.  It features in two of Walter Brueggemann's collected sermons, as well as in the first two of the Second Series of George MacDonald's amazing  Unspoken Sermons, where once again he is contrasted with Nicodemus. All this started me thinking.  Are these stories alternative visions of Jesus - one 'spiritual', one 'political'?  Or is there something that holds them together? The story of the rich young man is found in Matthew, Mark and Luke, with only slight variations.  He

The Four Days of Easter

Easter stretches over four days, with the day measured from sundown to sundown - for us it begins on Thursday evening and stretches through to the close of the day on Monday.  It is an emotionally harrowing time for those who take it seriously and hence requires preparation, which is why Christian traditions include Lent, a period of fasting and reflection, in the month beforehand. The period describes the four literal days of Jesus' death and resurrection, but also four figurative days or periods of time, four states of being in which Jesus' followers live and which we pass through over time.  Let me explain. Easter Friday  is a day of fear and anxiety.  Jesus and his disciples are in Jerusalem, defenceless and surrounded by powerful enemies who are closing in on them.  The idyllic, hopeful life they lived as a band of brothers and sisters, travelling together and creating a new Kingdom of God, appears to be collapsing.  As the day progresses, things get worse - they are a

The Next Christendom

I haven't been blogging for a while because I've been too busy with other things - a couple of weeks holiday in Western Australia, lots of work before and after to clear two weeks for a holiday, a journey to a strange land to do a job I can't tell you about.... Anyway, I can tell you about a book I've just finished reading which provides a kind of counterpoint to our current moral panic about Islam .  It's called The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity,  and it was written back in 2001 by Philip Jenkins who at that point was Distinguished Professor of History at Pennsylvania State University although he has since moved on to other academic posts.  To some extent it may be a little aged, but because it deals with long term trends (both past and future) it remains largely relevant in 2015. We often think of Christianity as a Western European religion, centred on Italy, France and Spain if you are Catholic, and on Germany, Netherlands and Britain i

The Inescapable Love of God

Over the past couple of weeks I've been reading Thomas Talbott's book, The Inescapable Love of God.    I'm not really obsessed with the question of universal salvation but it does form part of my Christian faith and the question has come up in my church over the past year as some others move in a more Calvinist direction.  So I thought I'd provide a quick review just to keep the pot boiling. The Inescapable Love of God was first published in 1999, but has been out of print for a number of years before Talbott and Cascade Books released a second edition last year.  Universalism aside the author appears to be a fairly orthodox and even conservative Protestant, perhaps in a similar mode to Robin Parry whose book The Evangelical Universalist   was published in 2006 (under the pseudonym Gregory MacDonald) and dedicated to Talbott alongside my cousin Alex. Yet while Talbott's influence on Parry is clear, his book is very different to Parry's.  Parry concentrates o

The Subversion of Christianity

Reading Leo Tolstoy's religious writings earlier this year made me want to have another go at reading Jacques Ellul's The Subversion of Christianity.   I began to read this book some years ago, only to find that the copy in my hands was a misprint and half the text was missing.  Life intervened, and it took Tolstoy to remind me of it. In some ways, Ellul was a French equivalent to the Englishman CS Lewis.  Like Lewis he was a prominent Christian intellectual of more or less orthodox Protestant views.  Like Lewis, he had a depth of theological knowledge but was mostly self-taught (although Ellul did complete most of a theology degree before the Second World War intervened) while pursuing an academic career in a different discipline (Ellul in sociology, Lewis in literature). Of course there are also differences.  Lewis wrote for a popular audience and much of his writing is highly accessible.  Ellul was far more "intellectual" and his writing can be dense and diffi

Colossians Remixed

Well folks, there's been too much politics on this blog lately and not enough theology, so it's time to review a book I've just finished reading on Paul's letter to the Colossians. Oh, hang on a minute... The book's title, Colossians Remixed,  would not normally have got me in. Sounds dull, and Colossians is one of those books you tend to read quickly on your way between Romans and Hebrews. Still, the subtitle, Subverting the Empire,  was a bit more intriguing.  However, what really got me in were the authors. Brian Walsh and Sylvia Keesmaat are a couple from Toronto, where Walsh is a university chaplain and Keesmaat an adjunct professor of biblical studies.  A couple of years ago they did a speaking tour of Australia and although I didn't hear them I read the text of one of their presentations and found myself wanting more. The clincher, though, was Walsh's book Kicking at the Darkness , a theological reflection on the songs of Bruce Cockburn . Anyone w

Tolstoy's Faith

At the end of the 1870s Count Leo Tolstoy seemed to have everything.  He was in the prime of his life and in excellent health.  He was the owner of a hereditary title and a large, profitable estate. He was happily married with a growing brood of children.   War and Peace and Anna Karenina  had made him one of the most celebrated novelists in Europe. Yet he was profoundly unhappy.  He detested his great novels almost as soon as he had finished them.  He felt uneasy about his title and his wealth.  He felt that his life had no value and no meaning and if this was the case, what was the point of bringing children into the world? The result of all this dissatisfaction was three years of intense, harrowing soul-searching which he describes in A Confession .   He scoured the works of contemporary philosophers, scientists and religious thinkers trying to understand the meaning and purpose of life.  Nothing helped him.  The only conclusion he could reach was that life was pointless and abs

Jewish but not Pharisaical

This evening I get to preach on what for me is one of the most intriguing passages in the Bible, the first two chapters of Paul's letter to the Galatians.  Here's roughly what I'm going to say. Galatians is a passionate letter written by Paul to a group of churches in Galatia, shown on the map.  It's not entirely clear who he's writing to but the explanation that makes the most sense to me is that the recipients were the churches in the south of the province - at Iconium, Lystra, Derbe and Pisidian Antioch - which he and Barnabas founded on the first journey they took after being commissioned by the church in Syrian Antioch.  He certainly seems to have known his correspondents personally and talks to them as a spiritual father.  These cities were multicultural communities, Greek colonies in a region inhabited by Celts, ruled by Roman overlords, and the churches there would almost certainly have been multiracial. The letter addresses one of the most cruc