Category Archives: Theological Issues

Posts on theological issues not in other categories

A further implication of Christianity being cross-cultural

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I wrote yesterday that Christianity is cross-cultural and cross-linguistic (see also my follow-up post). This evening, for a quite separate reason, I found myself reviewing the series I wrote last year on The Scholarly and Fundamentalist Approaches to the Bible. In Part 5 of that series I quoted several times from How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth by Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart (this link is to the current edition, not the one I quote). I note now that these quotations, and the explanation I wrote of them, show how the cross-cultural nature of Christianity has important implications for understanding and applying the Bible. So I repeat here part of what I wrote there.

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Christianity is cross-cultural and cross-linguistic

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Blogger Iyov asks Why are Christians satisfied with English-only Bibles? He contrasts Christians with Jews, whose liturgical books almost always include the Hebrew original text as well as a translation, and with non-Arab Muslims, for whom the Qur’an usually includes the Arabic text as well as a translation.

There are various answers I could give to Iyov. For example, I could berate him for his intellectualism in assuming that ordinary Christians have the leisure time and interest to learn the original languages. Certainly most non-Arab Muslims don’t understand the Arabic text in their Qur’ans; if most American Jewish children actually learn Hebrew, that is an indication of the social situation of the American Jewish community. But I will concentrate here instead on another angle.

From its very start at the Day of Pentecost, Christianity has taken a different line from Judaism and Islam, to become a faith which crosses linguistic and cultural boundaries. Continue reading →

Mark Driscoll head to head with Joel Osteen

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Adrian Warnock has posted an interesting video (ten minutes long) of two well-known American preachers head to head. The video is basically part of a sermon by Mark Driscoll, but it includes a long clip from a sermon by Joel Osteen. Driscoll is one of Adrian’s favourites, and has had some generally not so favourable mention on this blog; nevertheless I respect him for his no-nonsense approach. Osteen is, I understand, well known in the USA for his prosperity teaching on TV and radio, but is not so well known here in the UK.

Adrian’s main point in posting this video is to present it as “a model of gracious rebuke”, of Osteen by Driscoll. And indeed it is this. If only Adrian and his other favourite speakers had treated Steve Chalke with this same grace, rather than accusing him of heresy! Then the whole atonement debate would have been a lot less bitter. I too need to take Driscoll as an example of how to show gentle wisdom over such issues.

But I want to look more at the different approaches represented here by Osteen and Driscoll. Continue reading →

Muslim leaders call for peace

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As Ruth Gledhill among others reports, 138 Muslim leaders are calling for peace between Christians and Muslims, but are also warning that if there is no peace

The “survival of the world” is at stake.

How should Christians react to this call? The issue is not a simple one because the Muslim leaders are calling for this peace to be based around “the common essentials of our two religions”. Continue reading →

Following the Wild Goose

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I just discovered an interesting post from Sally Coleman about Celtic Christianity. She manages to present this in a very attractive light. I’m not quite sure about how she uses it to build bridges to the pagan or neo-pagan community – but then I don’t think there are many of them around here, although there may be where Sally lives, nearly 100 miles north of me.

But I was especially struck by her picture of the Holy Spirit as a wild goose:

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Complegalitarian

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My blogging is branching out in yet another new direction. Just a week after launching qaya thoughts, I have agreed to be a contributor (and in fact I seem to have also become an administrator) to Wayne Leman’s new blog Complegalitarian. This is intended as a spin-off from Better Bibles Blog, where I have long been a contributor, as a forum for discussions of gender issues, especially the debate between complementarians and egalitarians over gender roles in the church and at home.

I have just made my first post at Complegalitarian, Michael Kruse on “head” as a metaphor in Greek.

Does the Gospel change our lives?

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This is the basic question to which Joe Dongell is trying to answer in a pair of lectures posted at Ben Witherington’s blog.

Too often the Christian message is presented along the lines that if we believe and/or do the right things now, everything will turn out all right for us after we die, but that we should not expect anything to happen to us before that. We should of course attempt to stop sinning and do good Christian things like going to church. But the only changes in our lives will be what we bring about ourselves; God does nothing for us, at least nothing which we can perceive, until the day of our death.

Dongell argues for a very different version of the Christian gospel, in which believers can expect God to act in their lives to make a real change in them. Continue reading →

Why I am not a Calvinist

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I’m sorry if I lost some of you my readers in my previous posts about five-point or TULIP Calvinism, including the one about the spoof that wasn’t. I know that for some of you these are burning issues which you know all about. But I’m sure that there are others among you who have little knowledge or interest about these matters.

I will here state openly that I am not a Calvinist, neither five-point nor anything else. A post today by Ben Witherington has reminded me of why not. If God has predestined everything, the fundamental basis of the Calvinist picture of reality, this implies that he has predetermined all the kinds of disasters which are so common in this world, and indeed every bad thing which happens. This makes him the author of evil. But this picture of God is in absolute contradiction to the biblical picture of the character of God who is both just and loving.

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