Here’s why trinity matters…

Thought this was relevant to the triune creation stuff I’ve been blogging.  This is what you get when you mess with “Let us“… It’s also a good reminder not to make “nothing” into a big black something.  To say that God creates out of nothing is not to imagine a gigantic, universe-shaped hole into which [...]

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Creation and Salvation – Irenaeus and Athanasius 3

…continued from here… Creation Where has creation come from?  There are three popular options. 1) Maybe it’s come out of some problem in the heavenly realms.  Perhaps it’s the body of a slain monster as in the Babylonian myth Enuma Elish – literally a monstrosity.  Perhaps, as the Gnostics would have it, creation arises after [...]

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Creation and Salvation – Irenaeus and Athanasius 2

…continued from here… To know Christ is to know the ‘one Lord… through Whom all things came and through Whom we live.’ (1 Cor 8:6).  Therefore, without a Christological doctrine of creation, it is not simply that Christ’s work will be incomprehensible, Christ Himself will be blasphemed. Thus, against the heresies of the sub-Apostolic era, [...]

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Creation and Salvation – Irenaeus and Athanasius 1

Famously Adolf Von Harnack asserted in the History of Dogma that much of Christian theology betrayed the “work of the Greek spirit on the soil of the gospel.”  Now to be fair, the old liberal didn’t have much gospel himself but the observation has something to it. On the one hand we have the Scriptures [...]

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Happy Friday

You can watch whole episodes of the IT Crowd here. .

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Christ: Our Substitute and Representative

Mike Reeves talks about Adam and Christ in these great audios on sin and evil.  Once we frame creation and salvation as the story of two men we see things much clearer. For one thing we’re able to honour Christ not only as Substitute but also as Representative.  And we need both. You see Christ [...]

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Seething civility [Thawed out Thursday]

Here’s a terrific excerpt from One Million Tiny Plays About Britain by Craig Taylor.  It was a Guardian column that sadly was never allowed to reach its goal… . Two old women finish their tea at a cafe in Lichfield. One holds the bill… Anna Oh, you. Now don’t be so utterly ridiculous. Eva I [...]

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Warning

My wife’s just bought me a Fender Stratocaster for my birthday. This could spell the death of the blog…

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Resisting the devil

Just playing around with some thoughts.  Comments welcomed… Jesus Christ crushed the head of Satan (Gen 3:15); drove out the devil (John 12:31) and disarmed the rulers and authorities, putting them to open shame and triumphing over them (Col 2:15). How? Through dying on a cross. He didn’t come down from the cross to bust [...]

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But we’re not all evangelists, are we?

Ok, so Christians and evangelism.  Is everyone supposed to look like this guy? Or do we send those few nut-jobs out on the street so that we can get on with the the kumbaya’s, the marshmallows, oh and “building the kingdom” (insert meaning here). Well blog du jour seems to be modelling community on the [...]

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Evangelism from the Psalms

I’d love to do a whole pile of teaching on evangelism from the Psalms.  But right now I’ve only got time for a sentence. Evangelism Psalms-style means joyfully declaring the true LORD of this world and His mighty deeds. In other words it is praise.  And conversion happens when they join in. We can get [...]

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Feeling on top of the world? Hebrews 12:14-29

Hebrews 12:14-29 Sermon.  Audio here.  Text below. Mountains are often thought of as spiritual.  A mountaintop experience is a spiritual experience.  People say they often feel closer to God or closer to spiritual things when they’re on a mountain. And the bible begins in Eden which is described in Ezekiel 28 as “the holy mountain [...]

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Happy Friday

Good news.  Broadband back.  280 items in my Google reader.  And I’ve “read” them all with the click of a button.  Aint technology marvellous. .

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Talk amongst yourselves

My broadband’s down for a while so I’m just emailing this in from my phone. I won’t be able to write or respond for a bit but I will be getting your comments. So why don’t you help me out with something I’m thinking through: How should we go about enthusing Christians for evangelism? Any [...]

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The Way to Frame the World – Perichoretically

PLEASE NOTE:  John Frame is not ‘a baddie’.  It would be hard to find a contemporary systematic theologian as engaging, clear and humble-hearted as Frame.  He is very easy to like.  And my beef here is down to a certain way of doing trinitarian theology and a certain dislike of scholastic theology and of the [...]

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Approaches to counselling [Happy Friday]

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Responding to sin [Thawed out Thursday]

How should we respond to sin in our lives? One response is to think ‘Come on Glen, I’m better than that.’ Another is to think ‘Come on Glen, Christ is better than that.’ The first may produce a very moral life.  But the devil is more than happy to concede to you a Christ-less morality.  [...]

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The Way to Frame the World – Not Perspectivalism

When I was at Oak Hill, John Frame’s “Doctrine of the Knowledge of God” was referred to by students as ‘The greatest book in the world ever’.  Oak Hill was that kind of place.  But more and more, through people like Tim Keller and Mark Driscoll, I’m hearing Frame’s stuff – particularly his perspectivalism – [...]

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