Tag: Spirit
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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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“God the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth” ..
I’m continuing to ask myself, what is Christianity? A previous post saw it as being like the typical supermarket set of shelves, with many different options on offer. Let’s narrow things down, however, to a traditional, historical, generic outline of what Christianity has said it’s about. Let’s consider the 4th century CE Apostles’ Creed, which…
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Let’s get ‘Real’ (ii) ‘The Lord of the Dance’
My previous post was about Materialism, which the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines as “the theory or belief that nothing exists except matter”. My point was that Materialism, arguably, ‘doesn’t have very much in it’, since matter is made up of atoms that are 99.99% ‘empty space’! The truth of the matter (!) is that…
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The Bible – Window or Mirror?
In the early verses of Genesis, the story goes that God said, “let’s create humans in our own image”. “Our” is taken to refer to God plus his divine council of supernatural underlings. It’s a bit like a prime minister and his cabinet (no, not the drinks one!) A great deal of ink can be…
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A Picture or 1000 Words
The old saying tells us that “a picture is worth a thousand words”. The Hebrew Bible/Old Testament contains thousands of words about God, but it seems to me that it also contains two ‘pictures’ that put all these thousands of words in their proper place, and warn us against understanding them in any crudely literal…
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Rethinking ‘God’ (5) ‘Conclusion for Now’
In my previous post I outlined, (with a brief indication of why), some sources other than the Bible, which seem to me to have a useful contribution to make to the concept of ‘God’. That being so, what are my thoughts at this point in time? I don’t go in for labels that carry baggage…
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Rethinking ‘God’ (3) ‘Body or Spirit’
In the 3rd post in this series, it’s time to consider how we might re-think ‘God’. The traditional view is that the Bible tells us everything about him that we need to know. The problem with that is, that the Bible’s picture is inconsistent and sometimes even contradictory. On the one hand, God has a…
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William Wordsworth’s God
It seems to me that Wordsworth, in these “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”, is describing a kind of experience that lies, for more than a few people, at the root of what could be called ‘a religious sensibility’. Once upon a time, human beings thought the universe was very small – a…
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What can we say about God?
I’ve written about God being indescribable and, in essence, unknowable. The Bible, however, does have a bit of fun with a God who has legs that enjoy a walk in the Garden of Eden; cheeks that can feel a cooling breeze; and arms and hands that can do a bit of pottery, ribcage surgery and…
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The Ten Commandments
The 2nd Commandment “You must not make for yourself (for the purposes of worship), either a carved image, or a representation of anything in the sky above, or the earth beneath, or the waters under the earth. You must neither bow down nor offer service to them, because I, Yahweh your God, am a jealous…
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