Last year my eldest brother gave a speech at my father’s funeral. My other siblings and I had rhapsodised about Dad’s virtues. But my elder brother talked about Dad’s imperfections. He recognised that Dad was flawed like the rest of us. But the thing that impressed him about Dad was Dad’s determination to be a better man. He was a good man, but he wanted to be more than a...
As I survey the Australian church it seems to me there are three portraits of Jesus commonly found. I call them the forgiving Jesus, the empowering Jesus, and the just Jesus. These portraits shape our values, our mission, our ethics, our piety, our worship and our engagement with the world around us. So the portraits matter. My contention is that when we tend toward one or the other of the three...
When I was growing up the death of Jesus Christ on a Roman cross was the defining centre of my understanding of Christianity. Jesus’ death was God’s solution to the estrangement between humankind and God that was caused by our sin. Our wrongdoing demanded punishment of the most severe kind – eternal death. As long as that sin was unpunished it was impossible for anyone to share...
2011 was not a good year for my health. It began with the diagnosis that I have Parkinson’s disease and closed with the discovery that I also have Chronic Lymphoctic Leukemia (CLL). At age 45 I was considered young to have acquired both these diseases. Parkinson’s is a movement disorder which has so far caused a tremor and muscle stiffness in my right hand and leg. Over time these...
Jesus invites us to relate to God as "our Father". In this sermon series we explore what this means. In the latest sermon, March 4 2012, we ask what it is for God to be our disciplining Father.
Remember the Poor by Bruce Longenecker is a brilliant piece of work that comprehensively dismantles the notion that care for the poor was a marginal concern for Paul and convincingly demonstrates that it was rather a distinctive feature of Christian living in the Gentile Jesus communities. In the first section of the book Longenecker explores the place of the poor in the Greco-Roman world of the...
Listening to the public environmental discourse at the moment I hear a lot about climate change and little else. The reality is that climate change is but one of many serious environmental challenges confronting the world today. My attention was drawn to this by a 2009 paper “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity”. A collaborative effort by a group of leading earth scientists, the paper...
Many aid agencies have radically changed the way they run child sponsorship programs. Fifty years of experience has helped them see that the older model has some glaring weaknesses. New models seek to avoid those weaknesses and are proving much more effective.
A proper regard for animals is arguably a significant blind spot in contemporary Christian thinking. It is a blind spot Rev Dr Andrew Linzey, a member of the Faculty of Theology at Oxford University and Director of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, has spent his life trying to correct. Linzey has written twenty books and over one hundred articles on the ethical treatment of animals. Creatures...
What is a Christian sexual ethic and how does it inform our approach issues such as defacto marriages and homosexual partnerships? This paper introduces the key issues involved in developing a biblically shaped sexual ethic, overviews different approaches and explores the ways key biblical texts are interpreted.