Our biblical theology must depend on our exegesis, not vice versa. If we allow our exegesis to be controlled by theologoumena, we shall quickly find ourselves involved in circular reasoning. I have friends who say, 'Well, yes; but then all theological reasoning is circular; let us simply make sure that we get into the right circle.' I have no wish to accompany them on this magic roundabout.
If we as historians seek to understand how people in the distant past made sense to each other, then we have to work hard to reconstruct their world, not to project upon them concerns from ours. . . . . The dead are not our contemporaries, and if we think they are, we are not listening to them, but talking to ourselves.
[P]eople who are worried about the end of the world are people who are not prepared for the end of the world.
[T]he assumptions, arguments, and acheivements of the famous few must never be treated as the only history that matters. In every age, it is through the faith and witness of the vast innumerable ranks of ordinary Christians that the gospel has been lived and encountered.
I often say that what lies at the heart of most lovers of literature is a single impulse: “Let me read a story about someone who is unique and interesting, someone just like me.” Ego-centrism, to a great extent, is the highest form of literalism.
This is a reason why I increasingly view evangelicalism as two movements rather than one. We are like ships passing in the night even though we both call ourselves evangelicals and stand in that movement’s historical trajectory. Wesley and Whitefield have been pitted against each other. Indeed. Thank God they could both serve as catalysts for the Great Awakening, but their profoundly different views of God largely kept them apart. Wesley’s hermeneutic was captivated by God’s love revealed above all else in Jesus Christ. Whitefield’s hermeneutic was captivated by God’s glory revealed above all else in God’s sovereign election of individuals to heaven or hell.
The Jesus of History is valueless and unintelligible unless He be experienced and confessed by faith as the living Christ. But, if we would be true to the New Testament, we must at once reverse this judgment. The Christ of faith has no existence, is mere noise and smoke, apart from the reality of Jesus of History. These two are utterly inseparable in the New Testament. They cannot even be thought of apart … Anyone who attempts first to separate the two and then to describe only one of them, has nothing in common with the New Testament.
The Pauline denunciations of prostitution are usually coupled with denunciations of extortion, but churches have usually been more keen to exclude unrepentant prostitutes than 'venture capitalists.'
There are four kinds of writing: bad, mediocre, good, and great. The difference between bad writing and mediocre writing is discipline. The difference between mediocre writing and good writing is editing. The difference between good writing and great writing is miracle.
The church in North America lives too much by borrowing and creating nostalgic moments; too much of our worship events are media-driven uses of nostalgia to create moments of personal experience in a crowd of strangers. Too little does it live into the memory of its story; it is largely forgotten by most who come to church buildings looking for moments of spiritual engagement to resource the thinness of their disembedded, fragmented lives.
The text, in its very utterance, in its ways of putting things together, is completely unfamiliar to us. The utterance of the primitive God of scripture is an utterance that is in unfamiliar mode. Let me say what I mean.
Hebrew, even for those who know it much better than I do, is endlessly imprecise and unclear. It lacks the connecting words; it denotes rather than connnotes; it points and opens and suggests, but it does not conclude or define. This means it is a wondrous vehicle for what is suggested but hidden, what is filled with imprecision and inference and inuendo, a vehicle for contradiction, hyperbole, incongruity, disputation. Now the reason this may be important is that in a society of technological control and precision, we are seduced into thinking that if we know the codes, we can pin down all meaning, get all mysteries right and have our own way, without surprise, without deception, without amazement . . . without anything that signals mystery or risk.
Reading a manuscript to the people can never, with any justice, be termed preaching.... In the delivery of the sermon there can be no exception in favor of the mere reader. How can he whose eyes are fixed upon the paper before him, who performs the mechanical task of reciting the very words inscribed upon it, have the inflections, the emphasis, the look, the gesture, the flexibility, the fire, or oratorical actions? Mere reading, then, should be sternly banished from the pulpit, except in those rare cases in which the didactic purpose supersedes the rhetorical, and exact verbal accuracy is more essential than eloquence.
In a world where physical health, appearance, and convenience have gained almost idolatrous prominence, God may be calling Christians to demonstrate the glory of the gospel by being joyful and content while enduring pain and hardship. People who are unfulfilled after pursuing things that do not satisfy may be astonished to see Christians who are joyful and content after depriving themselves for the gospel. This may be a new way to demonstrate the glory of the gospel to this hedonistic culture.
Developing Christians - people who love God and desire to live in the way of Jesus - is not primarily a cognitive endevour . . . but for hundreds of years the church has treated it as such. The act of becoming a Christian is the actual practising of being a Christian, over and over again. One does not become Christian by sitting in a room in a church hearing a Bible story. This is part of it, yes, but one becomes Christian by being immmersed in God's story everywhere it is told, living with God's people, and repeating the symbolic acts of the church, as well as repeating acts of loving neighbour and denying oneself, over and over again. This form of education . . . cannot be regulated to a few hours a week spent learning inside the walls of a church.
When I deny inerrancy I am not necessarily denying anything many inerrantists believe. It may be, and I think is the case, that I am only denying that the word “inerrancy” is the most helpful or accurate term for what they and I believe in common.Go here for the full article, well worth a read, HT Chris T.
Happiness is the sense of peace and joy that stems from knowledge of and union with the one who created us and who loves us infinitely. We will attain it fully in heaven, but we can achieve it to a significant extent beforehand by battling our desire to remain independent of God, ignoring the voices that label religion boring and unnecessary, and better acquainting ourselves with truth through study and prayer.
Of course, it would be scurrilous (and ad hominem) to point out the irony of professional, hence interested, literary critics arguing for the political utility of their discipline because it exposes the hidden interests of others. It would not in any case invalidate their analysis. However, one does wish to flag the question of at what point this methodology balances hermeneutical suspicion toward other persons, structures, and systems with interpretative charity and self-criticism. This question is pregnant at several points in an otherwise fine volume.
for you Jesus Christ came into the world
for you he lived and showed God's love
for you he suffered death on the Cross
for you he triumphed over death
rising to newness of life
for you he prays at God's right hand
all this for you
before you could know anything of it
In your baptism
the word of scripture is fulfilled:
"We love, because God first loved us."
