It’s an exciting and empowering time to be doing theological study. We’ve made some striking discoveries in our first semester. If you’ve never thought about doing this kind of study, now is the time! Historical criticism Some Christians have rightly been nervous of theological study. For more than a century, […]
Stand-up comedy — ‘can anything good come from there?’ Well, yesterday we discovered Eddie Izzard. He must be the student’s comedian. History, religion, language, pop culture… His fabulous (!) 1998 stand-up, Dress to Kill, is an hilarious journey through European history. We loved his bits about church history http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ope-1Zb5t-k and […]
We recently watched the 2007 debate between Richard Dawkins and John Lennox. One topic they touch on, unsurprisingly, is the argument that an ideology can be discredited by implicating it in atrocities. Christianity caused the Crusades and the Inquisition, therefore Christianity is false or evil. Atheism caused the Gulag and […]
Today we did a performance for the Good Friday gathering at Christ Church Hawthorn. Tamie read through Isaiah 53 while I pitched blood and filth at a great white throne flicked clots of red paint at a white-sheeted chair. It was a straightforward but powerful symbol of Jesus’ suffering for […]
The other night I was zoned out in front of Van Helsing before flipping over to ‘The book that shook the world’. It’s a doco about The Little Red Schoolbook, by Danish teachers Soren Hansen and Jesper Jensen, published in Australia in 1972.
Last post, I identified the need for Christians to trust Jesus to build his church. However, the other side of the ‘train track’ in this case is that, of course, God’s church consists of people, their actions and the faith they claim as their own. In the cases of Athanasius […]
I’ve been indulging my history nerd ideals of late with a few books. The highlight has been Mark Noll’s “Turning Points: Decisive Moments in the History of Christianity’. You may know my advocacy of the idea of ‘train tracks’ (more theologically known as ‘compatabilism’) which is the idea that two […]
Meet Jesus at uni 