Ben Hunter is a plumber. More precisely, he’s husband to Charlotte, father to Josiah, Lydia and Nathanael, a graduate of Sydney Missionary and Bible College (SMBC), a most-of-the-time plumber and a part-time TAFE chaplain. (In Australia, ‘TAFE’ stands for Technical and Further Education, and TAFE colleges provide a wide range of vocational tertiary education courses.) (more…)
The Holy Spirit
Sinclair B Ferguson
Inter-Varsity Press, Nottingham, 1996. 288pp.
“Why are you scared of the Holy Spirit?”
“The Trinity you believe in is God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Bible!” (more…)
What could be stranger than stranger evangelism?
‘Stranger evangelism’ is a misnomer. Forget the comparative; we should use the superlative instead, for isn’t it the strangest evangelism?
Martin Shields offered a series of very thoughtful concerns in response to the last post in my series on impassibility. In the process, he raised a bunch of key issues to do with how we read the Bible. His concerns are profoundly important questions that affect far more than the issue of impassibility. So I’m going to offer in these four posts what I think is at stake in Martin Shields’s concerns and why I disagree with him in the hope that the debate might stimulate all of us forward as we live in the knowledge of God.
In some missiological circles, if ‘evangelism’ is a ‘boo word’, then ‘interfaith dialogue’ is a ‘hooray word’. Evangelism is so one-way, so high-and-mighty, so two centuries ago. Interfaith dialogue doesn’t assume one ‘faith’ is better or more enlightened than another; nor does it mean that one is telling the other, for it is an attempt at a two-way mutual sharing, and its aim of ‘mutual understanding’ sounds so much better than the ‘conversion’ of another.
I guess Elijah’s encounter on Mount Carmel with the prophets of Baal wouldn’t be a ‘prooftext’ for such dialogues, nor would Jesus’ uncomfortable words, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” (John 14:6).
We have been turning our attention to the question of whether God is impassible—that is, that God is in no way affected by the creatures he has made, and cannot die or suffer. Last time around, we explored how impassibility was a key element in the early Christian understanding of creation—that God made everything from nothing, and did so as a free choice out of pure goodness. This time around, we turn our attention to God’s law. (more…)
(Read part 1.)
We have been looking at the question of whether God is impassible—whether God is ever the object of other people’s actions or only ever the subject of his own—whether he moves others but is never moved by them. As I suggested last time, this often raises the question for people of whether God has emotions—whether God is moved by what happens to us, good or bad. As it seems to us fairly obvious that God has to have emotions to be able to love, the notion that God is impassible is a prime contender for the ‘Most Unbiblical Abstract Philosophizing Award’. We just know that emotions are everything.
(more…)
Who would you regard as the more significant influence upon your Christian life and thinking: John Stott or Mark Driscoll?
In Sydney, where I live, nearly everyone over the age of 40 has only one answer to that question: through his books and articles, and his occasional visits over three decades, John Stott shaped a generation of Sydney evangelicals. If we add other names like JI Packer and Dick Lucas, it is uncontroversial to say that English evangelicalism has had a profound influence on the thinking, practice and ‘culture’ of Sydney evangelicalism over the past four decades—much more influence than, say, North American evangelicalism, even including the contributions of men like Billy Graham and Bill Hybels. (more…)
The Trellis and the Vine: The ministry mind-shift that changes everything
Colin Marshall and Tony Payne
Matthias Media, Kingsford, 2009. 196pp.
Paul Grimmond: What’s it been like to write your first book? (more…)
Martin Ayers has recently published his first book, ‘Naked God’. Paul Grimmond caught up with him recently to talk about what motivated the book and what it’s like to be an author for the first time (MP3).
I have never really been 100 per cent behind the ‘point of contact’ view of evangelism. Leaving aside the pretty stark dichotomies in the Scriptures (e.g. “what fellowship has light with darkness?”—2 Cor 6:14b), which appear to suggest that there is absolutely no common ground between truth and error, it just seems to be filled with all kinds of problems.
Spock vs. Data
Star Trek, in all its reincarnations, is a great show. It is so pretentious in its aspirations to say something meaningful and so inane in its working assumptions, that it works as an almost perfect mirror of the values and concerns of the society that existed when it was televised. The highly evolved and civilized Federation of the future almost always reflects the concerns of the slightly left-of-centre-leaning portion of North American society who were the target of the show’s producers. The ‘Federation’ is simply ‘the Democratic Party writ large’. And so the show acts like a great expression of the cultural intuitions of the societies to which we belong and live and minister in. (more…)
