When I was at theological college I was at a gathering of young adults from my church when the discussion focused on the consumption of alcohol. This was a big taboo for Christians in my church tradition. One of the young adults had recently started attending a different church and confidently declared that when the Bible says Jesus turned water into wine it was non-alcoholic. “It’s...
Sometimes I wonder if the Christian church would do well to read nothing in the Scriptures but the Gospels for the next twelve months. No Moses, no Isaiah, no Paul, no Peter. Just Jesus. It seems to me that one of the more detrimental consequences of a high view of the Bible is that we tend to treat every part as having the same status. If Leviticus is the word of God, then I expect it to be as...
What will God do now? That’s the question swimming in our heads when we get to the end of Genesis chapter 11. In eleven brilliantly constructed chapters the writer of Genesis sums up the human predicament: created to construct communities of faith, justice, generosity and grace as we multiply and fill God’s earth, we instead create communities of faithlessness, injustice, greed and...