Archives: thought
Podcast: Naked God: An interview with Martin Ayers
Audio
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).
The God of love (1): Star Trek and the impossibility of impassibility
Thought
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…)
Apostasy and God’s faithfulness
Thought, Sola Panel
The National Director of the Australian Fellowship of Evangelical Students (AFES), Richard Chin, has begun preaching through 2 Timothy at our church. When he covered chapter 2, we received a couple of questions. I ended up answering them as the pastor here.
Question: 2 Timothy 2:13-14 says, “if we are faithless, he [Christ] remains faithful—for he cannot deny himself”. Can you explain to whom is God faithful?
God, the universe and all that: Part 5
Thought, Sola Panel
God, the universe and all that: Part 3
Thought, Sola Panel
God, the universe and all that: Part 2
Thought, Sola Panel
In the second instalment of a five-part series, we contemplate the extent of our significance in the universe.(Read part 1.)
We’ve been looking at Psalm 8, and we’ve discovered that stargazing helps us to see how insignificant we really are.
Just think about the size of space for a moment. Imagine you could get into the fastest jet on earth (last time I checked, this was the SR-71 Blackbird). Its official speed record is almost 2,500 miles per hour. Now imagine you could speed it up 100 times to 250,000 miles per hour. Then imagine that you could take it on a trip to space. It would take you an hour to get to the moon—that’s pretty reasonable! It would take you eight days to get to Mars, the closest planet to Earth. It would take you four months to get to the planet Saturn (remember, we’re travelling 100 times faster than the fastest jet ever built). It would take you a year and a half to get to the planet Pluto at the edge of our solar system. To get to the closest star to the sun, Proxima Centauri, it would take you 12,000 years. To get to the centre of our own Milky Way galaxy, it would take you 80 million years. To the next closest galaxy, Andromeda, it would take you seven billion years. To get to the edge of the visible universe, it would take you 40 million million years. And they think that the size of the non-visible universe is vastly huger than this: that would take you a million million million million, etc. years.
God, the universe and all that: Part 1
Thought, Sola Panel
Note: this is the first instalment of a five-part series.
I’m a fan of space. I don’t actually know much about the details of astronomy or cosmology or astrophysics; I just think that the space is really cool.
If there are any real scientists reading this, I want to say thanks. I know that most of your work involves boring and tedious searching, collating and number crunching. Thanks for doing all that stuff so that I can see those fantastic pictures of nebulas on the internet and wonder at it all.
For example, I’m a fan of millisecond pulsars. A gigantic star, millions of light years away, explodes in a huge supernova. It creates a fireball ten million billion billion times bigger than Hiroshima. In its ashes, it leaves behind a neutron star made of dense atomic nuclei, squashed together at a density 10 trillion times greater than steel. A teaspoon full of neutron star weighs about the same as Sydney Harbour. Sometimes this neutron star will steal stuff from a nearby star and start spinning. Some neutron stars spin hundreds of times a second—a whole star rotating as fast as an idling car engine. Many of these super-dense, revving stars send out pulses of electromagnetic radiation, milliseconds apart. And we might be able to use these millisecond pulsars as standard cosmological clocks to help us detect gravitational waves, explore space-time bending, and understand more about the tiniest particles in the universe.
But apart from the wow factor, what’s the point of learning about space?
Countercultural rebellion
Life, Thought
Podcast: Countercultural rebellion: An interview with Carl Trueman
Audio
Paul Grimmond catches up with Carl Trueman, Academic Dean and Professor of Historical Theology and Church History at Westminster Theological Seminary, to chat about the local church, evangelism, ministry training, evangelicalism, the uniqueness of Scripture and Anglicanism (MP3).
Why I’m still sayin’ nuttin’
Thought, Sola Panel
Do we pass on more error than we realize?
Thought
In every culture, stories are begun (and go on to prosper) because they explain something important to us. In Christian circles, it’s often the best sermon illustrations that are passed on, from one to another. But I’ve come across two illustrations that preachers regularly use that are untrue. What should we make of them?
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Silence about the Spirit
Thought, Sola Panel
I’ve been enjoying Paul’s series on lousy arguments. At the risk of stealing Paul’s thunder, I’ve got another argument to add to the mix: the Argument from Silence. The Argument from Silence is rather simple, often wrong, but sometimes spot-on. The Argument from Silence happens when you listen to a speaker, or read a blog or book or article, and notice that they don’t mention some particular topic. You conclude that, since they didn’t mention that topic, they are ignorant of it, or it’s not important to them. To give an example that I’ve been thinking about recently, what should you conclude when you don’t hear much about the Holy Spirit in your church’s preaching program, your Bible Study series, your favourite podcast, etc.? (more…)
The goodness of God
Thought
What is goodness? What does it mean that God is good? Do we really believe in a good God, and if we do, how can we even begin to talk to other people about him? Paul Grimmond investigates. (more…)
Improve your biblical and theological word power 5: Imputation
Thought, Sola Panel
Today we are going to conclude our series on biblical word power with something slightly different: a brief introduction to imputation. ‘Imputation’ is not actually a word used in the Bible. Nevertheless, imputation is still a very important word, because it can help us to plumb the depths of the issues surrounding the Bible’s use of words like ‘righteousness’ and ‘justification’, which we looked at in previous posts.