It is disturbing to come across evangelicals whose default position when they hear the expression ‘good works’ is to go into a somewhat aggressive attack on them. This is by no means unknown in Sydney evangelicalism, and Stephen Westerholm tells a joke – perhaps rather inadvisably – about the Lutheran …
We have been reminded yet again that we live in a creation which has been cursed (Rom.8:19-25). The devastating earthquake in Nepal on 25 April (2015) has had a sobering effect on us all as we have witnessed from afar first the loss of 8,000 lives, then a series of …
Today the Christian has the sense of fighting on one front, then another opens up, and if one is not careful, one can devote all one’s energies to a series of battles and be weighed down by a foreboding that one is not really winning any significant wars. The fact …
Often we see things more clearly through the use of contrasts. The white may look whiter against a jet black background, or the rose may appear lovelier for growing in a rubbish dump. In the epistle to the Galatians, Paul has been fighting tooth and nail against false teachers who …
Human beings are morally fragile creatures, prone to every delusion under the sun, and nowhere is this more obvious than in the celebrity cults that dominate life in the modern world, including the modern church. Back in 1956 Nikita Khrushchev denounced the cult of personality associated with Joseph Stalin. In …
The world has always been rather bewildering, but it is tempting to think that it has recently become more bewildering. The Islamist attacks in France have led to mass demonstrations of people, including European political leaders, proclaiming ‘Je suis Charlie’. In one sense, that is understandable after the brutality of …
It is easy to be unfair, but it does not appear obvious to many evangelicals today that the message and the methods of modern evangelism are somewhat removed from what we find in the book of Acts. A comparison between the two is therefore quite in order. We will look …
How faith relates to reason, and how the spiritual world relates to the physical are issues that lead to much angst and confusion these days. Back in the seventeenth century, in defending the Copernican view that the earth revolves around the sun and not vice versa, Galileo made the claim …
Don Watson has called this the age of ‘weasel words’, although the term is not exactly new, as Theodore Roosevelt saw it as an established expression when he used it back in 1916. Hardly anything now means what it is supposed to mean, and so there are clichés and jargon …
People who believe that truth cannot be known often appeal to the story of the six blind men who come across an elephant. There are variations of the tale, but they are rather similar in the end. One touches the elephant’s underside, and thinks it is a wall; a second …
