Scripture Engagement

Another point I made in my blog on syncretism in the Western church is this: 'A kind of intellectual belief in evolution that makes us want to believe any advance is good, not only in technology, but also in morality, world view, spirituality, and so on. There is no biblical basis for this. In fact the Bible tends to view many so-called 'advances' as moves away from God. For example, when the people of Israel asked for a king, so they could be like other nations, the prophet Samuel (in 1Sam 8 ) told them very clearly what that would mean for them, and it wasn't an upgrade!' At the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century there was enormous optimism in Western culture. We seemed to be making many discoveries, documenting all known life-forms, and progressing at a tremendous rate in terms of scientific progress. Underlying much of this optimism was a belief on evolution - not just evolution of species but evolution of civilisations. We believed th...

In my previous post I said that the Western church exhibits: 'A certain cynicism about miracles, so healing is thought not to be real, but in someone's imagination. This is a result of secularism, and what Paul Hiebert called 'the flaw of the excluded middle' in his article on the subject, which shows that Westerners don't believe in the middle realm between supernatural and natural. The Bible, however, constantly mentions dreams, angels, unclean spirits, and so on, which are very much to do with this middle realm.' This shows itself in two, rather extreme ways. The first is to deny that miracles happen. This is the secular approach to miracles. They don't happen now, they didn't happen then i.e. in biblical times and therefore somebody must have made them up, we think. It is possible to find a whole host of literature in theological libraries that is written from this position. Miracles are something outside our experience, which is much more re...

I don't know if you're preaching on Easter Sunday? And I don't know what your congregation is like, but imagine you're preaching in an honour-shame context on Easter Sunday. What would you say? How would you explain the efficacy of the work of Christ on the cross? You wouldn't mention Christ 'paying the price for our sins'. Noooo You would mention restoration to a new family, the family of God You would mention a sense of belonging to that family You would mention that Christ's death took away our (collective) shame and restored honour to both God and to us (collectively) You might mention that Christ (as representative of a new humanity) succeeded where both Adam (representative of humans) and Israel failed You might mention that as our elder brother Christ paved the way for us to share the honour that belongs to him You probably would mention that we now have access to the Father, and have the same right to the privileges that Christ won fo...

There is a growing trend in the UK church to equate mission with local evangelism. This worries me for several reasons: It seems to me that God's mission is much broader than evangelism, in that it includes liberating the poor i.e. the whole socio-economic side of mission is left out if we reduce it to evangelism. Exodus. On top of that it ignores the environmental side of God's mission - green ethics. Genesis 1-2. It forgets what is probably the main thing - God's mission is to the nations. That was the whole point of Abraham's calling (the beginning of God' redemptive story). Genesis 12. If we reduce mission to local evangelism we are back to the divide that used to exist between spiritual and physical dimensions (materialism), between one nation and another (nationalism), and between us and the rest of God's creation (anthropocentrism).  As Chris Wright has pointed out, it's not that God has a mission for the church in the world, it's tha...

Often we talk about being 'in God's house' on a Sunday morning. What does the Bible mean when it talks about God's house? In the Old Testament it refers to: Bethel, 'the house of God', a place where Jacob met with God in a dream, and God spoke to Jacob and renewed the covenant he had made with Abraham with him Gen 28:10-22. This place is mentioned frequently throughout the rest of the Old Testament The house built in Shiloh to house the ark of the covenant Jdg 18:31. It may just have been a tent, like the tabernacle, we don't really know, but we do know that the ark was kept in the most holy place, where God's presence was powerfully experienced The temple 1Ki 5; 1Ch 6:48 often referred to as 'the house for Yahweh [the LORD]' rather than 'God's house' 1Ki 6:1, and it was filled with a cloud representing Yahweh's presence 1Ki 8:10, though this wasn't actually where Yahweh lived, as the whole of heaven cannot contain h...

We often talk about the birth of the church at Pentecost as a completely new beginning. But was it? The event happened in Jerusalem, and the early believers often went to prayers at the temple or met in the temple portico. They were Jews, albeit from a variety of places.  Most of them only left Jerusalem as a result of persecution and a prophecy (Act 1:8). The fact that the early believers,   including leaders were Jews, means that as well as a new start we need to talk about continuity: The same people The same customs The same location Mostly the same beliefs When new churches are planted today there will be some continuity with the past. We shouldn't be afraid of that. Much of it is good, as it keeps people where they should be, in their communities. The new thing we want to introduce is 'the word of the Lord' i.e. the good news that Jesus the Messiah is Lord (and God). The rest is not unimportant, in fact it might be very useful background to this message, ...