At the Easter Vigil, the journey along the paths of sacred Scripture begins with the account of creation. This is the liturgy’s way of telling us that the creation story is itself a prophecy. It is not information about the external processes by which the cosmos and man himself came into being. The Fathers of […]
Today is Resurrection Sunday – Jesus is alive and we’re just barely beginning to understand what that means and how it touches our lives. I didn’t hear much of today’s sermon, thanks to Little Rogers, but the text from Luke 24 got me thinking – “He is not here, he is risen”. Yesterday was Holy Saturday, […]
I travelled into London for “An Evening with Rob Bell”, organised by Greenbelt. I tweeted a few things while I was there and I’ll stick them all at the bottom of this post. One question and the responses have stuck in my mind particularly. I was chuckling along as Bell avoided “pinning his colours to […]
In John 10, Jesus is explaining his shepherd care for Israel. They don’t understand, so he changes metaphor: Jesus said again, “Very truly I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep… They will come in and go out, and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come […]
Get this: 1937, a Russian Orthodox theologian in France: Is there a ladder between heaven and earth and do the angels of God ascend and descend upon it? Or is this ladder only a convenient emergency exit for those who wish to be “saved” by forsaking the world? Is our Lord’s Ascension into heaven the […]
The big ‘Christian’ story of 2011 so far has been the release of Love Wins, Rob Bell’s new book. Twitter followers (@jonrogersuk) will have seen my tweets from each chapter, which are all below. No doubt there’ll be loads more things for me to blog about the book and my responses to it since my […]
In Matthew 5:39, Jesus tells his followers in the Sermon on the Mount “do not resist an evil person.” Of course, Jesus didn’t say it quite like that, and Matthew didn’t record it in the English of the NIV. Matthew uses the word αντιστηναι in greek – ‘antistenai‘. If I tell you that ‘stenai‘ means to […]
I’m glad to say that no-one in the seminar balked or said ‘nothing at all’! Creativity is key in expressing our own ideas in new ways and must not be left only to the worship leaders in Church. In Bloom’s Taxonomy, Creativing is the highest level thinking skill and includes synthesis, which is something that […]
In the weeks since Nathaniel was born, Jane and I keep seeing buggies everywhere we go. I’m sure they weren’t there a couple of months ago, but now we see them round ever corner! We’ve even got to the point of walking along and just saying ‘buggy’ (no points involved, sadly). It’s amazing how simply […]
I probably don’t have the time or place in my course to investigate this question properly, but it’s a really interesting one. What happens when the Emperor becomes a Christian? First of all, some of the assumptions that I’m making. Jesus primarily teaches groups, not individuals (the exception that proves the rule – John 3) […]