David Hare interviews Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams

Read here.......

Veli-Matti Karkkainen on Wolfhart Pannenberg

Small review that I wrote almost a few years ago. 

"No other theologian on the contemporary scene has labored so untiringly to establish the intellectual credibility of Christian theology, nor shown a wider intellectual breadth in dialogue not only with biblical, historical, and contemporary Christian views, but also with philosophy, science, history of religions, and cultural disciplines. This is in keeping with his advocacy of a coherent theology of truth. Everything is to be related to the whole." Page 124, Wolfhart Pannenberg: Trinity as "Public Theology".

That is one of the quotes that Veli-Matti Karkkainen makes about Systematic Theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg in his book The Trinity and Global Perspectives. Being outside of America for the last 2+ years I've had the privilege of seeing the world with my own two eyes and have experience breaths of fresh air being in the new heartland of Christianity. Also with those privileges, I've been able and open enough to study European theologians and read some of the best Pentecostal theologians also.

Even though I am Reformed, Reformed theology and theology in general isn't confined to a certain group of individuals from California who act like small popes. Theology is never healthy in a vacuum. With that said, cessation isn't accepted by the majority of scholars around the world, but only in certain pockets.

To conclude, it's been a joy to work through Pentecostal theologian Veli-Matti's books.

Institutes of the Christian Religion Book 1

Some books aren't meant to be read fast and that goes for Calvin's work. No pastor should be pastoring without having the Institutes. Calvin packs so much in every well thought through sentence that is an invaluable resource to have when starting out in ministry. 

One thing that Calvin's Institutes isn't is a Systematic theology. You will have to go other places for that, but what is left in Calvin's work is a Spiritual theology that can be preached from with his examples both in history and the situations he encountered. 

Simply put through out Book 1 is the Reformer's God who is for us. We only know the Triune God in relation of what he did for us through the suffering, death, resurrection of his Son and the giving of the Spirit. He wasn't a God who died outside of us like sometimes developed in later Reformed theology, but he brought his elect with him. When Christ died, we died to sin, and when he rose for our justification, we also rose with him to newness of life. In other words......Union with Christ. 

So if you haven't read Calvin in a long time or maybe you have just read his work through what has been rehashed through American Reformed theology, then this is the time for you to get back to the Reformer's own thoughts on the Protestant Reformation.

Ken

Mind, Spirit, Soul and Body by N.T. Wright

‘Mind, Spirit, Soul and Body: All for One and One for All

Reflections on Paul’s Anthropology in his Complex Contexts’

By the Rt Revd Prof N. T. Wright

University of St Andrews

An exegete among philosophers! I don’t know whether that is more like a Daniel among the lions or like a bull in a china shop. We shall see.

When I was teaching in Oxford twenty years ago, I had a student who wanted to study Buddhism; so I sent her to Professor Gombrich for tutorials. After a week or two he asked her to compare the Buddhist view of the soul with the Christian view. She replied that she didn’t know what the Christian view was. He wrote me a sharp little letter, saying, in effect, ‘You’ve been teaching this young woman theology for a whole year and she doesn’t know what the soul is.’ My reply was straightforward: we had spent that first year studying the Old and New Testaments, and the question of the ‘soul’ simply hadn’t arisen.

Now of course that was a slightly polemical stance, but I still think it was justified. The problem is that there are a great many things which have become central topics of discussion in later Christian thought, sometimes from as early as the late second century, about which the New Testament says very little; but it is assumed that, since the topic appears important, the Bible must have a view of it, and that this view can contribute straightforwardly to the discussions that later thinkers, up to the present day, have wanted to have. The most striking example of this is the referent of the word ‘justification’: as Alister McGrath points out in his history of the doctrine, what the great tradition from Augustine onwards was referring to with that word is significantly different from what Paul was referring to when he used the word. That’s fine; we can use words how we like and, with that character in Alice in Wonderland, can pay them extra on Thursdays; but we must then be careful about importing back into our reading of scripture the new meanings which we have assigned to technical terms which, in the first century, simply didn’t carry those meanings. We should also pay attention to the question of whether the word may, in its original scriptural context, carry other meanings which we may simply be screening out.

Read more.....

Holiness and the Reformed Faith by Douglas Kelly

Listen....

The Pursuit of Holiness

I took some divergence from my other reading and started reading The Pursuit of Holiness by Jerry Bridges, which has been such a blessing. Jerry was at our church a few years back, but I was back home in the U.S at the time so my wife was the only one in my family to see him. So, this week I decided to read one of the books that she picked up, which has been sitting in my library since then.

I highly recommend this book.

Ken

I believe in the Communion of Saints by A.W. Tozer

"I believe in the communion of saints."-Apostles' Creed
THESE WORDS WERE WRITTEN into the creed about the middle of the fifth century.
It would be difficult if not altogether impossible for us at this late date to know exactly what was in the minds of the Church Fathers who introduced the words into the creed, but in the Book of Acts we have a description of the first Christian communion: "Then they that gladly received his word were baptized: and the same day there were added unto them about three thousand souls. And they continued steadfastly in the apostles' doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers."
Here is the original apostolic fellowship, the pattern after which every true Christian communion must be modelled.
The word "fellowship," in spite of its abuses, is still a beautiful and meaningful word. When rightly understood it means the same as the word "communion," that is, the act and condition of sharing together in some common blessing by numbers of persons. The communion of saints, then, means an intimate and loving sharing together of certain spiritual blessings by persons who are on an equal footing before the blessing in which they share. This fellowship must include every member of the Church of God from Pentecost to this present moment and on to the end of the age.
Now, before there can be communion there must be union. The sharers are one in a sense altogether above organization, nationality, race or denomination. That oneness is a divine thing, achieved by the Holy Spirit in the act of regeneration. Whoever is born of God is one with everyone else who is born of God. Just as gold is always gold, wherever and in whatever shape it is found, and every detached scrap of gold belongs to the true family and is composed of the same element, so every regenerate soul belongs to the universal Christian community and to the fellowship of the saints.
Every redeemed soul is born out of the same spiritual life as every other redeemed soul and partakes of the divine nature in exactly the same manner. Each one is thus made a member of the Christian community and a sharer in everything which that community enjoys. This is the true communion of saints. But to know this is not enough. If we would enter into the power of it we must exercise ourselves in this truth; we must practice thinking and praying with the thought that we are members of the Body of Christ and brothers to all the ransomed saints living and dead who have believed on Christ and acknowledged Him as Lord.

Read more....