For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away.
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 →
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 →
We can be sure of one thing: Jesus never read the Bible. Not as we know it anyway: the Bible as we know it would only come into existence around 400 years after Jesus. However, he would have studied Torah, and he would have studied from within a Jewish tradition of Torah study. Needless to... Continue Reading →
A friend of mine made the following statement to me last week: "The difference between Catholics and Protestants is that Catholics believe in "Jesus and..."; Protestants believe in "Jesus only". He's wrong, of course. Nobody believes in Jesus only. We all add something. And if I were to be cynical, I would argue that Protestants don’t worship... Continue Reading →
I don’t know if you have been watching the Winter Olympics. Out of a sort of morbid curiosity, I have been following on and off. Truth be told, the sports are entirely foreign to me. Living in South Africa, where the climate is beautifully tropical pretty much all year round, playing in the snow is... Continue Reading →
If you read the Bible and find comfort there, then I suspect you are not reading the Bible properly. Almost certainly, you have not fully understood what you are reading. The various texts that comprise the Bible were penned for a lot of different reasons: to preserve the history of a people, and to tell the stories... Continue Reading →
My mind sometimes works in, I think it is fair to say, unorthodox ways. I am aware that most people, when the local radio station (goodness alone knows why) decides it would be marvellous to play The Presidents of the United States of America’s Peaches, would not immediately recognise an opportunity to discuss Biblical exegesis.... Continue Reading →
We did not arrive here by accident. Make no mistake about it, the mess that is the world was created by our own actions, rooted in our beliefs and values, shaped by the way we think about who we are and how we ought to relate to others. If our misogyny allows us to perpetuate... Continue Reading →
Vapors In The Wind 