Gospel perspective adjustment

Here's a perspective on life not often heard (I expect) in the Scottish Parliament:

And here is another perspective: 

“Let me entreat you to be far from the thoughts of leaving this land. I see it, and find it, that the Lord hath covered the whole land with a cloud in his anger; but though I have been tempted to the like, I had rather be in Scotland beside angry Jesus Christ, knowing He mindeth no evil to us, than in any Eden or garden on the earth.” [Samuel Rutherford]

More strong words from a Scot who was entranced by the person, the works and the promises of Jesus Christ.

Demons defeated

Nice animation of Mark 5:1-20. I'll be using this at eXcel on Wednesday. 

Prison to Pulpit

Once an abused, addicted, homeless, Christian-despising criminal, Mez now serves as senior pastor of Niddrie Community Church in Edinburgh, Scotland, and founder of 20 Schemes, a ministry dedicated to building gospel-centered churches for Scotland's poorest communities ("schemes"). Here's their vision:

Our long-term desire is to see Scotland's housing schemes transformed by the good news of Jesus Christ through the planting of gospel-preaching churches, ultimately led by a future generation of indigenous church leaders. . . . We believe building healthy, gospel-preaching churches in Scotland's poorest communities will bring true, sustainable, and long-term renewal to Scotland's schemes.

The Gospel Coalition 

veiled in flesh

Confession clarifies Confusion

Christ, in the work of mediation, acts according to both natures, by each nature doing that which is proper to itself; 

yet, by reason of the unity of the person, that which is proper to one nature is sometimes in Scripture attributed to the person denominated by the other nature.  

[Westminster Confession of Faith 8.7]

The works that Christ did, then, were not simply the works of a human; they are the works of the mediator, who is both fully God and fully man. Therefore the value of Christ's death is infinite because of the worth of the person. In other words, one who was a human being only could not have paid the debt owed to God for so great a number of people. Yet because Christ had a true human nature he was able to pay the debt on behalf of sinful humanity. [p22-23 of Mark Jones' A Christian's Pocket Guide to Jesus Christ.] 

Christmas is like knitting

you'know basically good ... but responsible for a lot of bad things.

click on the image for an excellent minute and a half by Milton Jones. #4thought

Christmas Uncut

If you come to our Family Carol Service you'll be offered a copy of Christmas Uncut. 

Here's a taste. 

under the mistletoe

heaven kissed earth when God became man.  

A Christian's Pocket Guide to Jesus Christ p9

Cur Deus Homo

Good 'Advent' Reading

Why did God become a man? Anselm's book (Cur Deus Homo: "Why God Became Man") gave the answer that many Christians might give: God became a man to repair the damage done by sin ... or 'for us and for our salvation' as the Nicene Creed puts it. But that is not all. There is something deeper and more wonderful to say in answer to the question Cur Deus Homo? 

(according to Goodwin) the principal reason that the Son of God became man was not that sinners might be saved by his meritorious work, though of course that was also a reason. Rather, in Goodwin’s view, the benefits procured by Christ ‘are all far inferior to the gift of his person unto us, and much more the glory of the person itself. his person is of infinite more worth than they all can be of.’ 

Therefore, God’s chief end was not to bring Christ into the world for us, but us for Christ .... and God contrived all things that do fall out, and even redemption itself, for the setting forth of Christ’s glory, more than our salvation’.

God speaks of his children as those who are ‘called by [his] name, whom [he] created for [his] glory, whom [he] formed and made’ Isaiah 43:7 
(p3-4 A Christian's Pocket Guide to Jesus Christ)

Questions of God

Good 'Advent' Reading

When Jesus was a young man helping his father Joseph in carpentry, would it have been appropriate for Jesus to ask what a certain tool was? 

Or, being fully God, did Christ know the answer already?   

When Jesus prayed, did he do so because he needed to or just as an example for believers?  

Our answers to these questions depend entirely upon the view we have of Christ's person. 

(A Christian's Pocket Guide to Jesus Christ p1)

The Christmas Chord

Strikes a chord with me! 

defeatists are already beaten

Evangelical defeatism in matters of public theology is a failure of biblical and historical perspective. Lacking that perspective, British evangelical defeatists are riddled with white and Christian guilt and are marked by parochial and pessimistic self-loathing and suspicion. They offer their hands to the humanists' handcuffs and their children to their indoctrination centres, making loud assurances that the last thing they would want to do would be 'to impose their morality' on others. 
Evangelical defeatists begin to twitch if someone mentions too loudly in public that the Bible is God's infallible and sufficient Word, that Blair and Brown and Cameron and the rest of them are idolatrous high priests of the greatest false god of modern times, the state, and will one day be on their knees before King Jesus, and that the task the Lord Jesus Christ has given the church is to subdue the earth an fill it, that is, disciple the nations. 

(A Higher throne: Evangelicals and Public Theology p86-87)

Leaving my religion

Channel 4, tonight at 7.55 pm. 

Ro's Conversion from Zoroastrianism 

Pod's Conversion from Sikhism 

The Story of God, the World and You

Against Christianity (Notes 3)

Part 1 - Against Christianity 
Peter Leithart's first section has 23 points to it rather than chapter divisions. This summary will work through it in in chunks [Notes 1]. 

11. The Philippians, so proud of being Roman citizens and so protective of Roman custom, needed to learn to live as citizens of a different commonwealth that placed new demands on its citizens. [cf. Philippians 3:20] 
In short: throughout Philippians, which some identify as one of the least political of Paul's letters, Paul was treating the Church as an alternative to the politico-religious organization of the city and of the empire. 
12. politeuo shouldn't be rendered 'conduct yourself' but rather ' live as a citizen'. 
13. ekklesia echoes the Sinai assembly and the returned exiles; and in Greek it is the assembly of citizens of the polis for decision making and deliberation. So the Church is not presented as another 'sect' or cult that existed under the umbrella of the polis. She was an alternative governing body for the city and the beginning of a new city. 
14. Despite pagan opponents seeing this clearly even in the patristic era 'Christianity' was making an appearance (Church as philosphical club or escape into desert etc.). 
15. If salvation is the re-creation of man through Christ and the Spirit (which it is), then salvation must be restored relationships and communities as much as individuals. If Christ has not restored human community, if society is not 'saved' as much as the individual, then Christ has not restored man as he really is. Salvation must take a social form, and the Church is that social form of salvation, the community that already (though imperfectly) has become the human race as God created it to be, the human race that is becoming what God intends it to be. 

(Against Christianity p16-27)

Against Christianity (Notes 2)

Part 1 - Against Christianity 
Peter Leithart's first section has 23 points to it rather than chapter divisions. This summary will work through it in in chunks [Notes 1]. 

4. Christianity is biblical religion disembowelled and emasculated by (voluntary) intellectualisation and/or privatization. 
5.  The Church is strange: she is the creation of the Father through Word and Spirit, the community of those who have been united by the SPirit with the Son, and therefore brought into the eternal community of the trinity. She is a city whose town square is in heaven. She is a city without walls or boundary lines, a polity without sword or shield. 
But she is ordinary: the Church is made up of human beings, with features that identify her as a culture among the cultures of the world. 
God created a world of stories, symbols, rituals, and community rules. Into this world of stories, GOd came with His own library; in a world of symbols and rituals and sacrificial meals, the Church was organised by a ritual bath and a feast of bread and wine; in the midst of cultures with their own ethos and moral atmosphere, God gathered a community to produce the aroma of Christ in their life together. 
6. The Church can cut across the grain of existing human societies and cultural life only if she bears some likeness to existing societies. 
If the Church is God's society among human societies, a heavenly city invading the earthly city, then a territorial conflict is inevitable. 
7. Paul, Peter and John visit Georgus Barnus, a religious marketing consultant in the mid-first century. A very very illuminating sketch! 
8. Anti-supercessionism [the view that contemporary Jews are still in covenant with God] seems more a result of post-Holocaust guilt than of exegisis. 
9. Every church is an urban reality; every Christian lives in the suburbs. What is meant by this is that Churches on earth are outposts of heavenly Jerusalem that will be revealed at the last day (Galatians 4:26; Hebrews 12:1-27; Revelation 21). 
10. Aristotle's Politics begins with the claim that 'every state is an association (koinonia)'. The political koinonia (the city being it's highest form) is aimed at establishing things that are 'common' (koinos) to the citizens. 
The apostles tell us that the Church also forms a koinonia arising from the common sharing in Christ and His Spirit (1 Corinthians 12:12-13). 
In short, the Church is not an addition to the Greco-Roman polis but an alternative to, the koinonia of the polis. 

(Against Christianity p16-27)

Against Christianity (Notes 1)

Part 1 - Against Christianity 
Peter Leithart's first section has 23 points to it rather than chapter divisions. This summary will work through it in in chunks.

1. The Bible never mentions Christianity but speaks of Christians and the Church. Christianity is gnostic. 
2. Christianity is the heresy of heresies and underlying cause of the weakness, lethargy, sickness and failure of the modern church. 
3. In itself the linguistic fact of point 1 has little significance. The Bible never uses the word trinity either. The issue is the concept, and 'Christianity' is often used to refer to a set of doctrines or a system of ideas [and is contrasted to the teachings of Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism or Islam]. But the Bible never speaks of such beliefs except as all-embracing confessions of God's people. No 'belief system' can be isolated from the church and put in the lab for analysis. And the church is not a people committed to common ideas, but is a people committed to a whole stance of life. The Bible in short is not an ideological tract and does not teach an ideology. 
Sometimes 'Christianity' is used to embrace not only beliefs, but the practices of Christian people and the Church. This is better - but not if this is conceived as being a 'religious' layer added onto human life. Being a Christian is not simply a matter of installing a new 'religious' program into an existing operating system - it is the installation of a new operating system. And this goes for church too, for church is not another layer on social life, but is rather, a new way of living before God and of being human together. 
What Jesus and the apostles proclaimed was a new human world, a new social and political reality. In other words, a salvation. God has established the eschatological order of human life in the midst of history, not perfectly but truly. The Church anticipates the form of the human race as it will be when it comes to maturity. Conversion thus means turning from one way of life, one culture, to another and our 'resocialisation' into an alternative paideia. 
In the NT, we don't find a two story house. 1st story: private faith. 2nd story: public implications. The gospel is the announcement of the Father's formation, through His Son and the Spirit, of a new city - the City of God. 

(Against Christianity p13-16)

One Giant Leap

Not impossible

Commenting on Mark 6: 

(Jesus) is not merely the healer of afflicted individuals or the rescuer of endangered disciples; he is the one who is not bound by the rules of normal experience of what is possible and impossible. The Gospel of Mark (The new international Greek testament commentary) p263

Lyrical Theology