For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away.
We see the world in metaphors. Faced with the vast, chaotic, incomprehensible alienness that is life, we seek to impose order onto it. We try to make connections, we search for patterns: the only way to make life navigable is to impose some sort of order onto the chaos. Whenever we are faced with the... Continue Reading →
I can sympathise with Peter. In so many ways he is just like us. If you have grown up in the church, as I have, you will know what I mean when I say that “being on fire for God” is regarded as the optimal state of being for any believer. In other words, the... Continue Reading →
All of us will have stories of teachers who have – for better or for worse – shaped how we see ourselves, who we have become, and – by extension – the children we raise and the communities we participate in. Many of us will have unwittingly adopted attitudes, paradigms, habits that were engendered in... Continue Reading →
Until you can answer the question of why we need to pray, you cannot begin to engage with how to pray. I have been making the case that The Lord’s Prayer is much more a theological statement than it is either a magical formula for unleashing the power of God (which I don’t believe it... Continue Reading →
I think it is a very sad comment on the church that I suspect that my son has a better chance of developing a sound Christian theology if I take him out of a Christian school. And before anyone argues that if what I consider to be a “sound Christian theology” and what the school... Continue Reading →
With low, brooding rainclouds and gently rolling hills, the Oxfordshire countryside was everything I had imagined it would be. I grew up reading Enid Blyton, Billy Bunter, and William, so driving down narrow country lanes, flanked by hedgerows laden with berries, seemed a bit like coming home after years away. But this was not my... Continue Reading →
I hope my regular readers will pardon my relative silence lately. I have been trying to get all my ducks in a row, workwise. To be honest, I am not even sure I own ducks anymore. Certainly we don’t seem to occupy the same farmyard. So I haven’t had time to do a lot of... Continue Reading →
Alexei Yurchak, in his book Everything was Forever, Until it was No More: The Last Soviet Generation, describes what it was like to live in the Soviet Union prior to its collapse. He argues that its flaws were readily apparent to everyone, and that people could see that the system was failing them. But because... Continue Reading →
Last week I outlined some of the key reasons why I cannot accept a penal substitution understanding of the cross. In other words, I do not believe that what happened at the cross was God punishing Jesus in our place. Now don’t misunderstand me. That does not mean I reject the idea of Jesus dealing... Continue Reading →
Penal Substitution Atonement theory has almost become synonymous with Christianity. So much so, in fact, that I suspect most Christians in the West are not even aware that there are alternative ways of understanding Jesus. I say “in the West” because the Eastern Orthodox churches do not (indeed, never have) understood the Passion of Christ... Continue Reading →
Vapors In The Wind 