Scholarship • Serving • Ministry – Ian Paul
Is Christian faith about an affective encounter with God, or about becoming convinced about the case for Christianity? You will immediately be crying ‘False dichotomy!’—but it is worth reflecting on the balance between these two ideas in contemporary expressions of faith. There was a time when the tradition of rational enquiry was most influential, but …
Have you ever sat and read through the gospel accounts of Passion Week, and tried to work out chronologically what is happening? And have you done that with the four gospels? (It is easiest to do that latter using a synopsis, either in print or using this one online.) Why not do it as part of …
The violent texts in the Old Testament create challenges for all readers of these texts, whether Jewish, Christian, or unbelieving. Charlie Trimm, who is an Associate Professor of Old Testament at Biola University, has written a very helpful short book on the different ways we might engage with the texts, The Destruction of the Canaanites: …
The Feast of the Epiphany in the church’s liturgical calendar is based on the events of Matt 2.1–12, the visit of the ‘wise men’ from the East to the infant Jesus. There are plenty of things about the story which might make us instinctively treat it as just another part of the constellation of Christmas traditions, …
Is Christian faith about an affective encounter with God, or about becoming convinced about the case for Christianity? You will immediately be crying ‘False dichotomy!’—but it is worth reflecting on the balance between these two ideas in contemporary expressions of faith. There was a time when the tradition of rational enquiry was most influential, but …
The lectionary gospel reading for this Sunday is either the Ephiphany in Matt 2.1–12, or the readings for Christmas 2 in Year C, which is John 1.1–18 or John 1.10–18. If you are using the readings for Christmas 2, I commented on most of this text earlier in the year, since John 1.1–14 was the …
The two brief accounts of the death of Judas, in Matt 27.3–8 and in Act 1.18, are often used as a test case in the coherence and consistency of the NT documents. Many ‘critical’ scholars are confident that the two comments are irreconcilably contradictory, and (as I pointed out in a reflection on this a few …
If the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth from the dead is the most important and foundational truth of the Christian faith, how come the New Testament accounts of the resurrection and Jesus’ appearances are so contradictory? That is a relatively widespread response in atheist/apologetic circles, and I think amongst Muslim critics of the Christian faith. …
Have you ever sat and read through the gospel accounts of Passion Week, and tried to work out chronologically what is happening? And have you done that with the four gospels? (It is easiest to do that latter using a synopsis, either in print or using this one online.) Why not do it as part of …
Savvas Costi writes: It’s been almost a year and a half since historian Tom Holland released his book, Dominion; The Making of the Western Mind. Since then, there seems to have been something of an influx of interviews and articles relating to the enduring influence of Christianity, or at least the need for it in …
The Feast of the Epiphany in the church’s liturgical calendar is based on the events of Matt 2.1–12, the visit of the ‘wise men’ from the East to the infant Jesus. There are plenty of things about the story which might make us instinctively treat it as just another part of the constellation of Christmas traditions, …
