Disciplesplanet

A familiar example is Abraham’s trial when he was ordered to sacrifice Isaac. At this moment I am concerned with the obvious question, ‘If God is omniscient he must have known what Abraham would do, without any experiment, why, then, this needless torture?’ But as St Augustine points out, whatever God knows, Abraham at any rate did not know that his obedience could endure such a command until the event taught him; and the obedience which he did not know that he would choose, he cannot be…

The Christian way is different: harder, and easier. Christ says, “Give me All. I don’t want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want You. I have not come to torment your natural self but to kill it. No half-measures are any good. I don’t want to cut off a branch here, and a branch there. I want to have the whole tree down. I don’t want to drill the tooth, or crown it, or stop it, but to have it out. Hand over the whole natural self, all the desires which you think…

When they came for the Alt-right mouth breather I did nothing but smile gleefully as such sub-humans do not deserve to even breath the same air as the rest of us. 

When they came for the Fundamentalist naïve realist Christ followers, I did nothing, as they really are socially unpalatable and culturally inept to a cringe-worthy degree. 

When they came for the Conservatives, I did nothing, because they are irrelevant and in the way of progress. 

When they came for the Pentecostals, I did nothing, as their…

In his small, but potent book, The Problem of Pain, Clive Lewis looks at the visceral notion of revenge, the following is one excerpt, 

“Revenge loses sight of the end in the means, but it's end is not wholly bad - it wants the evil of the bad man to be to him what it is to everyone else. This is proved by the fact that the avenger wants the guilty party not merely to suffer, but to suffer at his hands, and to know it, and to know why. Hence the impulse to taunt the guilty man with his crime at the moment…

“Stigma and Shame are bad – toxic man! We must erase them from our culture, right?  Like, you know, no one should be made to feel bad about themselves or their choices, it’s bad for your mental health!” 

Author? Pretty much any millennial raised by the pop-culture. 

What is becoming more disturbing is that this previous statement is no longer simply an innocuous…

Let us be perfectly clear from the very outset of this post – God is love, not ‘love is god’!   

Before the universe existed, before time itself, God is. 

The Triune community of Three Persons – One Deity, existed in perfect union, harmony, and communion. Only the Judeo-Christian world view and theological framework has both love and family existing and in play before the universe was created – and from that source, that community – was spawned not merely the material, but Divinely infused humanity. 

…

In the now more vulgarly apparent ‘cultural dichotomy’ that has aggressively burgeoned in the past 5 years (and accelerated in past 5 months) over the so called ‘Progressive’ and so called ‘Conservative’ positions, I found myself pondering where I may fit? 

The divide has seemingly abandoned any continuum mode, and for ‘cancel culture’ to work, it must create silos with gapping chasms between. 

Because of my Evangelical Christianity (so labelled by non-Christians and those who want to claim the title, but…

I understand that the idea of the ‘image’, as in Genesis 1:26-28, to mean that humans are designed to function like angled mirrors. We are created in order to reflect the worship of all creation back to the Creator and by that same means to reflect the wise sovereignty of the Creator into the world. Human beings, worshipping their Creator, were thus the intended key to the proper flourishing of the world. “Worship” was and is a matter of gazing with delight, gratitude, and love at the Creator God and…

Jesus Christ   

Power, Profile, Position and Posture 

The history of the church is peppered with theological conflagrations, but none more so than those around the identity of Christ, particularly in the Trinitarian context. 

For…

It is always fascinating to watch claims, and counter claims to ‘righteousness and justice’ in the marketplace. If the ‘divine’ is invoked, it invariably is about affirming the ‘god’ of our choosing throwing ‘its’ lot in with our clearly worthy cause. Of course, in the atheistic narrative such invocations are not possible, although the cult-like fervour that such ‘rightness of cause’ is claimed by these groups can make many religious zealots blush. Of course, without the claim of a transcendent narrative…