canon

Should we always obey the government?

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Donald Trump’s ‘zero tolerance’ policy on immigration, leading to the separation of children from their parents at the US/Mexico border, has dominated the foreign news in the UK this week. As with all such news items, it is much more complex than at first reported, and we need to understand carefully what has been going … Continue Reading

What is worship?

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When I became an Anglican, I was at first quite puzzled by the choice of Scripture passages that Anglican (that is, Church of England) services kept coming back to—the Benedictus (Luke 1.68–79) in Morning Prayer, the Magnificat (Luke 1.46–55) in Evening Prayer, and the Nunc Dimittis (Luke 2.29–32) at night. For one thing, all these … Continue Reading

Five essentials of Biblical Interpretation no. 4: content

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I previously wrote about the first three ‘essentials’ of biblical interpretation in 2013, reposted in 2016—but never finished this series on reading scripture well and wisely. The first related to reading in canonical context, that is, attending to the place a text comes within a passage, a chapter, a book, a testament and the whole … Continue Reading

Does Scripture need the Church?

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I’ve recently had two very interesting discussions on the question of whether we can interpret Scripture faithfully and look to Scripture itself to guide us, or whether we need some sort of control on interpretation by the institution of the Church. What was particularly interesting was the fact that these two conversations happened on two … Continue Reading