Liars and Heretics

  The idea of God meeting us where we are in our own individual stories, is something we see throughout the Bible when people encounter him. God meets people where they are, so that they may grow in their understanding and knowledge of him. We’ve already seen this when we looked at the story of Abraham and Isaac. God shows Abraham a different way of seeing sacrifice, and walks him through how it works. God doesn’t just tell Abraham that he should approach sacrifice differently, God is with him in his existing understanding and demonstrates to him that there is another way. If we consider God working in this way, then it also makes sense of some of the difficult things we find in the Bible. For example, a lot of people struggle with God’s actions in some of the stories of the Old Testament.   Renowned atheist, Richard Dawkins describes the God of the Old Testament as “a vindictive, bloodthirsty, ethnic cleanser”, because God apparently endorses the slaughter of entire natio...

What do we do with all of this?   One of the things I learned on my journey was the idea of binding and loosing. We see this in the gospel of Matthew. In these passages, Jesus tells his disciples that whatever they bind on earth will be bound in Heaven, and whatever they loose on earth will be loosed in Heaven. You won’t be surprised to hear that there are several different interpretations on binding and loosing, but the one I want to focus on is to do with how we interpret scripture, and that what we bind and loose in our biblical interpretations will be honoured by God. This is the understanding of binding and loosing that seems most logical to me, but it is also the understanding which I have struggled with the most.   Binding and loosing is a rabbinic term which means to forbid and permit, and was used when there were disputes concerning Jewish Law. For example, in the first century there were two rabbinic schools, the school of Shammai which was known to bind, and...

There are many aspects of our faith that we might question, and which we need to come to terms with, and I’ve only covered a handful of them here. Working through the questions that we have can take time, and I have come to see that the work of figuring out our faith, is a long-term project.   When we start seeking answers to our questions, we soon realise that things aren’t as one sided as we may have thought. People have all sorts of different views and interpretations, which are all apparently valid and reasonable, but which are also contradict each other. This leads me to believe that there is only one definitive truth we can be sure of, that it’s impossible to have absolute knowledge of exactly who God is. We all have our own personal beliefs which we carry, which resonate and feel true for us, but we can’t know those beliefs are correct for certain, and so we can’t really judge the beliefs of others, which don’t resonate with us or feel true, to be wrong. We are all wrong...

Despite all the women who were actively and positively involved in biblical and church history, i t always comes back to Eve, and the fact that she was responsible for the fall of humanity. Even if you read the story of Adam and Eve as fiction, by analogy, the story still shows that it was Eve’s fault that original sin happened, that she was a weak woman who gave in to sin, and persuaded Adam to sin with her. Adam is complicit though, this is clear if you read the story, but many Christians see Eve's actions as being responsible for the fall of mankind, and the consequences of her sin, run through the whole Bible.   Many Christians see this culminated in Paul's instructions in 1 Timothy 2.   I desire therefore that the men in every place pray, lifting up holy hands without anger and doubting. In the same way, that women also adorn themselves in decent clothing, with modesty and propriety, not just with braided hair, gold, pearls, or expensive clothing, but with good wo...

  I am a man, and even though I might not like the stereotypical manly things like sport, action films, fishing, fast cars and sexism, I do like some manly things like eating meat, drinking beer, making things out of wood, and being in charge of a barbecue, proving that I am definitely a man, and there is no escaping that. As a man, I feel I’m in a weird position when it comes to talking about women and the Christian faith, after all, men have traditionally had the loudest voices when it has come to talking about faith, and my voice is just another rich male baritone, speaking about things I basically know nothing about. But maybe we need more men to present positive views of women in the church, because there are plenty of men who don't have positive views of women, they have biblical views of women, which invariably means that they accept that women are loved by God, and that they play an important role in the church, but that they shouldn’t really be trusted, or to put it a...

So, following from my last few posts, what do we do with prayer and the movement of the Holy Spirit?   Prayer and the movement of the Holy Spirit as individual subjects, both share a lot of similarities. They both concern how we meet with, understand and experience God, not theoretically, but in our real, everyday lives. We believe that prayer is the way we are meant to communicate with God, that in prayer we come before God with our thoughts, petitions, fears, and whatever else we have on our hearts, and by praying we hope that God will speak into our lives, into our failings, and into our uncertainties, and that things will change through God’s power and grace. At the same time, we also believe that the Spirit of God is the agent that helps to bring about change in our lives. We call upon the Holy Spirit to meet with us, and we believe that our encounters with the Spirit, however they look, can change who we are, spiritually, physically, emotionally, and intellectually. Our u...