Painting Fakes

Bearing in mind my previous post on the non-legalistic way of understanding the Law and the New Testament, I'd like to illustrate by applying it to Paul's writing about relationships in a household in Ephesians 5 and 6.  It's a long passage so I won't quote it all here.  You can look it up if you want to (read it here ), or else just take my word for it. Paul's letter to the Ephesians follows the general structure he often uses in his letters - theory (or theology) followed by practice.  In the first three chapters he talks about how his readers have been chosen and redeemed, how Christ is now exalted and we have new life in him, how God has broken down the dividing wall between Jew and Gentile to make one people and how he (Paul) is a servant of this message. In Chapters 4-6 he addresses the impact this should have on the way his readers live.  This second half of the letter can be divided into roughly four sections, and in each he provides some general guid

When I wrote about the conservative Christian response to same-sex relationships  a couple of weeks ago, I talked about how many Christians approach the Bible, including the New Testament, with a legalistic mindset. By this I don't mean that they have a strict morality.  The equation of legalism with strictness is a mistake, as is the equation of non-legalistic morality with laxity.  What I mean is that people with a legalistic mindset see morality as a set of rules which must be obeyed.  Our ethical task is to interpret those rules correctly and then follow them. I have suggested plenty of times in this blog that this is not Jesus' view of morality nor that of his apostles.  Jesus taught that the whole law and the prophets could be summed up in two commandments - love God and love your neighbour.  This is often called "golden rule" morality - "do to others as you would like them to do to you". A few years ago I had a go at summarising this view in two

Traditionally-oriented Christians are often portrayed as homophobic because of their opposition to same sex marriage and the various things that go with it. While it's true that there are some Christians who really think that "God hates fags", in my experience they are relatively few.  Most of the conservative Christians I know, and most of the conservative Christian writings I've read on the subject, are quite clear that God loves LGBTI people as much as he loves anyone else.  They will also tell you, if you ask, that same-sex relationships or encounters are not in a special category of sin - they are no more evil than, say, heterosexual adultery or stealing. However, after saying all these nice, loving things and providing an assurance of God's love, acceptance and forgiveness they will be immovable on one thing.  A same sex relationship, they will tell you, cannot possibly be right.  While there are lots of wrong ways to do heterosexual relationships there is

A few weeks ago I wrote about the idea of "lone wolf terrorism" .  Now we have had our own version of the same thing, a terrifying and spectacular act of violence in which an Iranian immigrant called Man Horan Monis held a group of staff and customers hostage in a cafe in Sydney's Martin Place for 16 hours.  The standoff ended with Monis' death and that of two of his hostages. In its wake, government leaders and commentators have been asking the same question I did.  Was Monis a terrorist, or was he just a criminal?  On the one hand, he had a history of espousing radical Islamism and claimed to be acting in support of the Islamic State.  On the other hand, he didn't even have an IS flag to display, and had to ask police negotiators to bring him one.  His previous crimes appear to include writing hate letters to the families of Australian soldiers killed in Afghanistan along with violence of a less political nature including a string of sexual assaults and bei

In Part 1 I provided a quick summary of what Paul says about slavery.  How should we understand this message as 21st century Christians? For 21st century readers of the Bible, our immediate, visceral reaction to Paul's words on slavery is to say, "Why didn't he just come out clearly and say that slavery is wrong and slaves should be freed?  Why was he so circumspect?  Surely loving people who have been enslaved must entail giving them their freedom!"  Many devoted Christians down the ages have agreed.  The emancipation movement in 18th century England was famously led by evangelical Christians who saw the slave trade as an unmitigated evil. I suspect the answer lies in the problem of legalism.  The main danger of legalism, as identified by Jesus and Paul, is hypocrisy.  If we have obeyed the letter of the law, we see ourselves as righteous even if we actually do great harm.  This is precisely the danger in relation to slavery. Under current Australian law, i

Reading The Good Book has reminded me about the issue of slavery.  One of the more frequent complaints atheists and others make against Christianity is that the Bible, and particularly Paul, seems to support the ownership of slaves.  After all, doesn't Paul say "slaves, obey your masters"? The New Atheists say many silly and ill-informed things about Christianity, but this is not one of them.  They are raising a serious issue, so I thought it was worth a serious answer.  I'm afraid the result will be a rather long post which for the sake of the blog format I will post in two parts (Part 2 is here ).  Even then I will only just scrape the surface. Lest you think this is a dry exercise in ancient history bear in mind that human rights organisations estimate 27 million people are currently enslaved around the world and somewhere between 300 and 1,000 women are trafficked into Australia every year, mostly to work in the underground sex trade. I'll get back to

Well blow me down with a feather duster.  After not hearing Lewis' Trilemma (the "lunatic, liar or Lord" argument) for years, I hear it twice in a fortnight. I couple of weeks ago I told you how I heard it from the pulpit in my own church.  Fair enough, our rector is a busy working pastor and doesn't have time to think through the fine points of every sermon.  Then last Thursday a good friend graduated from the Queensland Theological College and I went along to clap as he got his hard-earned piece of paper.  There it was again, popping up its three ugly heads at the close of Douglas O'Donnell's guest speech.  I hope the theological graduates were shaking their heads at the faux pas . It slightly spoiled what was otherwise an intriguing address.  O'Donnell's subject was the Sermon on the Mount, and his point was that the central theme of the sermon is Jesus' authority.  In support of this idea he cited four pieces of evidence. The first

Obviously I was a bit fired up when I wrote a few days ago about George Pell's response to the announcement of the Royal Commission into institutional child sex abuse.  One of the things I was trying to say, though, is that cultures of abuse are widespread and not at all confined to the church.  One example I cited was the recent and still ongoing Peter Slipper/James Ashby affair.  For those who haven't heard, Peter Slipper resigned from the Liberal Party to take on the job of Speaker in Australia's hung parliament, and was subsequently accused of sexual harassment by a member of his staff, James Ashby. The accusation was a hot political issue because Slipper's defection shored up Labor's thin majority.  It's quite possible that Ashby's accusations are malicious and he certainly didn't help himself by conferring with senior Liberal Party figures before going public.  Nonetheless, the way the Labor Party turned on him and set out to discredit him w