Tag: Church
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A ‘Renegade’ Bishop and God
The recently deceased Bishop John Shelby Spong stayed in the Episcopal Church, though no longer able to accept many traditional teachings at face value. To be true to themselves, people must either leave, or seek change from within. Choosing pursuit of change, Bishop Spong wrote the book “Unbelievable” in which, like the reformer Martin Luther,…
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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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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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Science and Religion (ii)
Following on from the previous post, let’s note that some people like to keep science and religion in separate boxes, even though both address the origin and nature of ‘ultimate reality’. The totality of what is ultimately real, for religion must include the material (hence the ‘creation’ stories in Genesis), and for science must include…
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Jesus and the Church
Did Jesus intend to be the founder of a “Christian Church”, which would first ‘supersede’, and then separate itself from, his own Jewish religion? To answer this, it seems to me that we must strip away 2,000 years of exegesis and christology, and try to recapture the religious views of a 1st century Palestinian Jew,…
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Because Jesus was a Jew …
At some point, possibly in the 27 CE, beside the river Jordan, in a part of the world known to its Roman overlords as Palestine, a charismatic preacher, John by name, was holding forth to all who would listen to him. He was also baptising those who found themselves agreeing with his message, some of…
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An Unexpected Reversal
In a previous post, I wrote about Jesus agreeing with the teaching of John the Baptist, joining his movement, and being baptised by him in the river Jordan. John, however, was arrested and executed. Jesus formed his own movement, and continued with the same teaching, which is summed up near the beginning of Mark’s Gospel…
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