Tag: Christian
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God’s Life Story
When people give thought to the word ‘God’, they may well have sophisticated notions about its meaning, and might use such words as infinite, eternal, all-powerful and so on. But let’s step back a bit, and focus on the Jewish-Christian God. If we journey back in time, we discover that he has a ‘life history’…
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Me and the Hebrew Bible
I’ve never regretted choosing to specialise in ‘Hebrew and Old Testament’ when I studied ‘Divinity’ over 50 years ago. My only regret is that I did so as a very ‘conservative’ Christian, with a correspondingly semi-closed mind, but it’s never too late to remedy such things. Currently I’m reading through the first 15 chapters of…
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Riches and “the Gospel”
I think about what’s currently happening in my country … here’s my ‘starter for ten’ … I reflect on the fact that mine is still, by some, said to be a “Christian” country. If, so, it seems that something’s gone badly wrong. Perhaps for too long, we’ve had a wrong idea of what “the gospel”…
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Rethinking Jesus (06) His Core Message
According to Mark, (the earliest Gospel), after his baptism and self-questioning in the wilderness, and “after John (the Baptist) had been put into prison”, Jesus launched an evangelistic mission in Galilee, but there’s a complication here. In John’s gospel, Jesus, “in the province of Judea, spent some time with his disciples and baptised”, and, “The…
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I’m 200 today!
Here is my 200th post. I don’t look on this as a credit-worthy achievement, but simply a statement of fact. I’ve always been a person of words, and seemingly destined to read and write. I recall my father taking his youngest son to the local library, and my being outraged that I could only be…
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Science and Religion (iii) A “Selfie” from a Past Life!
In this series of posts, I’m thinking about Thomas Kuhn’s model of scientific ‘paradigms’, with its ongoing alternation between reasonably stable ‘normal’ times and times of ‘crisis’, when what has been the ‘normal’ no longer works and ‘revolutionary transformations’ are required. I’m wondering if this could possibly be applied to religion. Over the last several…
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Confessional
I was once a Christian minister. I’m sometimes asked if I’m still a Christian? In my usual, irritating way, I say that it depends on what’s meant by “a Christian”. A problem for me is an insistence that a Christian is primarily someone who believes certain things. That’s a ‘checklist’ model in my way of…
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