Stephen’s speech is not an evangelistic sermon, and I’m willing to say it contains the gospel but is not gospeling itself, and the reason I say that is that the ending is not a call to repent and believe and be baptized, as is the case with other gospeling sermons. Instead, Stephen’s speech comes off as a trek through the Bible/Israel’s Story to show that Jesus is the Messiah but it turns, rather powerfully, to an indictment of those who... Read more
Chapter 11 of Simon Conway Morris’s book Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe is titled Toward a Theology of Evolution, and to this we now turn. Conway Morris suggests that the view – common among many educated westerners steeped in enlightenment ideals – that the world is ours for the taking, to be bent to our pleasures or whims is a recipe for disaster. We need to recover a broader view of the world. First, we need to... Read more
The most serious issue about the emerging church, at least in the eyes and minds of its critic, is is relationship to postmodernity. The standard criticism of “emergent” is that it is “relativistic” and “denies the Truth” and has a “bankrupt epistemology.” These are serious words, especially if they are true, which they aren’t — at least most of the time. Jim Belcher, who has a PhD and during which time he worked hard on postmodernity, has examined this very... Read more
Not a few of us are concerned about the President’s administration supporting escalating conflict and war in Afghanistan, and I’m wondering what you are thinking. I’m particularly concerned to hear from those who voted for Obama and who were hopeful that his administration would bring a more speedy resolution to the Middle East. Here are few lines from CNN.com’s article today: “[The Obama administration] inherited the perception that Afghanistan was the good war, and they took over largely bipartisan support... Read more
The speech of Stephen is quite the speech in Acts. It illustrates both how the gospel was conceived as the climax of Israel’s Story and how the early Church read the Bible from beginning to end. But first we’ve got to get Stephen, one of the deacons, arrested so we can get him to his gospeling/speech! 6:8 Now Stephen, full of grace and power, was performing great wonders and miraculous signs among the people. 6:9 But some men from the Synagogue of the... Read more
Last week I wrote that the driving question behind economics is this: Given scarce (i.e., limited) resources, what should each of us do today and how will we coordinate billions of projects? Today we identify two modes of economic analysis: positive and normative. Positive Economics is concerned with understanding and describing what is. Theories are articulated, hypotheses formed, variables identified, and experiments run, to clarify how the world actually functions. Normative Economics incorporates value judgments about what ought to be. Those value judgments can... Read more
Just who is in your list of “saints”? One could pull out a list of those who have been officially “sainted” (examined, beatified and canonized on the basis of exemplary virtue and miracles and intercessory powers) in the Roman Catholic tradition. Or, one could list those who have not been officially sainted but who are still held in very high esteem by Protestants. Or, one could include a mix. One of the secrets to Chris Armstrong’s new book, Patron Saints... Read more
While PW, our guest blogger who is a “pastor’s wife,” alludes to the reality that some in the younger generation don’t have a problem here, the reality in the wider church is much different. She talks here about the pastor’s spouse’s occupation, and this one mostly concerns a spouse who is a wife. (Right?) Here’s PW: I met a couple PWs in the last couple of months, and I realized that they were both school teachers. What are some of... Read more
The mission of God focuses on Jesus Christ, God’s Son and now Lord over death as a result of the resurrection and ascension. Attempts to snuff out this fledgling movement fail, and this has been seen both in attempts to imprison and in attempts to silence. But within the new work of God through God’s Spirit in the Church are seeds of discontent — we saw them in chp 5 with Ananias and Sapphira and we will see the same... Read more
Several weeks ago we began a series looking at Simon Conway Morris’s book Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe. After a brief hiatus I will come back to this book with two final posts; today a discussion of the force of his argument from convergence (Ch. 6-10, pp. 106-310), and in the next post a discussion of his chapter: Towards a Theology of Evolution. Conway Morris is the Professor of Paleobiology at Cambridge University. His research is focused... Read more
Jesus Creed
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In