Theology
Friendship
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- Written by: Peter Brain
Bishop Peter Brain proposes friendship as the challenge to our idolatrous exaltation of sex.
‘Friends will go anywhere with you, friends share the good and the bad,’ is a truth that resonates with us all.
Kenny Marks’s song squares with God’s intention, ‘It is not good for man to be alone’ (Gen 2:18), the proverbial wisdom ‘there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother’ (Prov 18:24), and the longing of every human heart for a ‘kindred spirit’.
My reason for writing this article on friendship is the long held conviction that friendships are the antidote to loneliness and the means by which God would meet our deep longings for intimacy and by so doing keep us from adopting the wrong strategy of seeking this intimacy in sexual relationships prior to or outside of marriage.
If we are to win the battle of encouraging sexual fidelity, we must demonstrate the wonderfully positive benefits of a whole range of friendships given to us by our loving Creator. In so doing we will understand the God given purpose of our sexuality, and the restraints he has put on it.
Homosexuality
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- Written by: Ben Underwood
Ben Underwood asks how Christians will respond to the way our society is thinking about homosexuality.
The youth minister at my church invited me to talk to the youth group about homosexuality from a Christian perspective. I think this is a serious topic, and since it is difficult to turn on the TV or read the paper without encountering something to do with homosexuality at the moment, it also seems to me that we should be thinking and talking about it in our churches. So, having done some renewed reading in the area, I went along to then youth group and talked for just under an hour about homosexuality to the upper high schoolers. Apparently they had never been so attentive. The following article is a (grown-up) version of that talk.
What is homosexuality?
Bookshop Blues
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- Written by: Sam McGeown
It should have been a simple enough task: Go to the Christian book and buy John Chapman’s book “Know and tell the Gospel” and John Stott’s book “Issues facing Christians today”. Walking into the Christian book shop I glance along the long avenue of books on my left displaying the Top 20 Best selling books. I wonder if there is something wrong with me. I’ve only read two of them and have no desire to read the other 18. I randomly pick up one, “The author of this book is the pastor of the fastest growing church in the United States.” I wonder why every pastor in America claims to be the pastor of the fastest growing or biggest or second biggest….? Who buys this stuff anyway? I-”
“Excuse me, can I help you at all?”
I’m rescued by a fresh faced smiling sales assistant.
“I’m looking for 2 books. The first one is by John Chapman.”Ethics and Evangelism
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- Written by: Chris Appleby
By Justin Denholm
Many people today think of ethics as a potential 'common ground' for dialogue between people with divergent worldviews. After all, if "we all agree murder is wrong", some would say, "maybe we can work out our differences?" In this kind of approach, often universal humanitarian ideals are appealed to in the hope that we can use them to realise that deep down, we're all the same.
Sometimes I find it tempting to take this approach; certainly it is 'nice' and often popular. For Christians, though, ethical action cannot be divorced from the gospel, and without a clear understanding of the relationship between the two, Christians cannot appreciate what ethics is and how it should be done.
To understand why ethics should be considered so closely linked to evangelism, we need to reconsider why we should act ethically at all. Why does it matter how we live?
Who Cares About Justification?
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- Written by: Jason Hobba
The New Perspective on Paul
1. What is The New Perspective?
The last twenty-five years has seen a paradigm shift take place in some quarters of New Testament studies by proponents of what is called "The New Perspective" on Paul ('TNP'). TNP re-frames the way we understand the issues Paul deals with in his letters to the Galatians, Philippians and Romans among others. At the heart of TNP is a change in the way we should understand Judaism leading up to Paul's time – called Second Temple Judaism – and the Pauline language of righteousness/justification. This change to represents a significant departure from the Reformation understanding, and has caused great concern amongst a number of evangelicals.
This article provides a brief introduction to TNP and outlines some ministry implications.
1.1 Second Temple Judaism
A dramatic shift took place with E. P. Sanders' Paul and Palestinian Judaism (1977). Sanders argued that Second Temple Judaism was a religion that relied on God's grace, not legalism or works as theologians of the Reformation onwards characterise it.