For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away.
If the Bible isn’t inerrant—if it’s a messy, human text shot through with contradiction and confusion—then what on earth do we do with it? Why bother? I want to stress that my aim in writing these posts has never been to reject the Bible, nor to reject God. Rather, I want to call into question... Continue Reading →
I have spent much of my life in some form of Christian ministry, and I can tell you this: one of the most consistent difficulties in handling God’s PR is that God’s CV is ... problematic. On the one hand, you’ve got Jesus, turning the other cheek, handing out free food, getting himself crucified rather... Continue Reading →
One of the problematic consequences of adopting a doctrine of the infallibility and/or inerrancy of Scripture is that we are blinded to the fact that what we read in a text is what we bring to it. We always read ourselves and our assumptions and contexts into texts. We cannot do otherwise. As a result,... Continue Reading →
If you insist that the Bible is inerrant or infallible, the question you need to answer is “Which Bible?” Even without the complications we explored in the last post – that human engagements with texts are always interpretive and subjective and that what we read in a text is what we bring to it, so... Continue Reading →
Two of the most common critiques of Christianity today come from very different directions. The first—hypocrisy—is not a critique of Christianity itself but of its failure to live up to its own vision. The second, however, strikes at the heart of what many have come to believe Christianity is: the doctrines of biblical inerrancy and... Continue Reading →
Reading is exhausting. That is because all good writing – indeed, all good art – is, to quote Jeanette Winterson, “conscious, and its effect on its audience is to stimulate consciousness”. In other words, the writer as artist seeks to bring a certain dissonance into the consciousness of the reader. Wrestling with the discomfort that... Continue Reading →
I am a good reader. It is hardly surprising because I have devoured books since I was small. Consequently, I was often asked to read the Bible passage at church, prior to the sermon. And I always used to add afterwards, even though it was not part of the liturgy, “This is the Word of... Continue Reading →
The paradigms through which we engage the world shape the questions we are able to ask, and limit the truths we are able to see. Mostly our paradigmatic frameworks are invisible to us, and so we accept as normal and real the worlds with which we are presented. If you are a 21st Century Protestant... Continue Reading →
In a very real sense, I think, we become what we worship. Whatever higher power we regard as giving meaning to our lives – whether that is a deity, or an ideology (like democracy, or humanism, or Darwinism for that matter) – shapes our values, which in turn shape our actions, which inform the kinds... Continue Reading →
I used to believe that technology hated me. I am sure many of you will be able to identify with that. If you have ever had a video or sound-clip form a critical focal point of your presentation only to have it suddenly refuse to play at the crucial moment; if autocorrect has ever embellished... Continue Reading →
Vapors In The Wind 