Scholarship • Serving • Ministry – Ian Paul
I have posted a version of this every Advent since 2013. There are signs the message is getting through (though there is also some resistance!), but the stable will still be preached from pulpits up and down the land, so here it is again. This year I have rewritten my previous pieces, drawing the different …
It is fascinating to see the way that traditions have grown up around the celebration of Christmas, and how many of those traditions are not merely absent from the Bible, but in fact contradict not only the content of the Bible, but the heart of its message. Somehow, where the birth narratives in Scripture are …
One of the problems about the development of traditions around Christmas is that people writing hymns or plays set Jesus’ birth in their own world rather than in what we know of the first century. In particular, many assume that Jesus was born in winter, since Christmas is celebrated in winter in the northern hemisphere. …
Every year, in the northern hemisphere, and especially in Northern Europe, we are apparently caught by surprise as the evenings draw in, and the morning light comes later. It always seems surprising, even though it is the same every year. And every year, I brace myself for the repetition of the ill-founded claim that Jesus …
The lectionary epistle reading for the Fourth Sunday before Lent in Year C is 1 Corinthians 15.1–11. Paul here offers a summary of the gospel that he has both received and passed on to the Corinthians—and it has some fascinating features. What is the role here of the ‘gospel tradition’? What are the key elements …
What do you find most irritating about this time of year? The drawing in of dark and cold nights? The hideous adoption of that consumerist import ‘Black Friday’? People putting up Christmas trees when we have only just started Advent? Being urged to spend more money by means of schmaltzy human interest mini-dramas? For me, …
The Lord’s Prayer must surely be the central devotional text in the Christian faith. Tom Wright (in his short book The Lord and his Prayer) comments: When Jesus gave his disciples this prayer, he was giving them part of his own breath, his own life, his own prayer. The prayer is actually a distillation of …
When I became an Anglican (from a background of a different church tradition), 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 …
It is fascinating to see the way that traditions have grown up around the celebration of Christmas, and how many of those traditions are not merely absent from the Bible, but in fact contradict not only the content of the Bible, but the heart of its message. Somehow, where the birth narratives in Scripture are …
What do you find most irritating about this time of year? The drawing in of dark and cold nights? The hideous adoption of that consumerist import ‘Black Friday’? People putting up Christmas trees when we have only just started Advent? Being urged to spend more money by means of schmaltzy human interest mini-dramas? For me, …
Christmas is a time for celebration, for feasting and for relationships. But it is also a time for a mild engagement in iconoclasm, as we peel back the layers of accreted tradition and recover the origins of the Christmas gospel—something which needs to happen every year, it seems. In that spirit (and Spirit) I offer …
