This post is a reflection on some Facebook correspondence I found helpful. The starting-point was the quotation from the fourth-century Christian theologian John Chrysostom, pictured here.
Some people responded by condemning him for his antisemitism, and attributing to his influence some of the antisemitism around today. Here I argue that we shouldn’t allow that to block our ears.
Just how nigh is the end? The lectionary’s epistle for this coming Sunday contains this sentence from one of Paul’s epistles:
Now concerning the times and the seasons, brothers and sisters, you do not need to have anything written to you. For you yourselves know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night (1 Thessalonians 5:1).
Protests. Source:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Israel-Hamas_war_protests
It’s dreadful. Whichever side you are on, the most appalling atrocities have been committed by the other side. Absolutely inexcusable. Your side has a history of countless innocent peace-loving people being killed in the name of a vicious ideology. You want to stand up against that evil.
Where do we go from here? What does God think about it?
The lectionary readings for this Sunday include one of Matthew’s six (!) references to ‘a weeping and gnashing of teeth’. All over the world churchgoers will be hearing about gnashings. Unlike the other gospel writers, Matthew loves a good punishment.
How should Christians feel about punishment? This post focuses on punishment by the state, and asks what kinds of punishment, if any, Christians should support. It’s my own take. Whatever you believe, you can find a biblical text to support it.
In June we said the progress that we’ve seen recently on cutting emissions will not take us to the 2030 target. We’ve been cutting emissions by about 1% per year, outside of the power sector, the one sector we’ve been doing well. That needs to quadruple over the next eight years… We need to do more. There’s no real question of that… So, yesterday was not about doing more, it was about doing less.
So said Chris Stark, Chief Executive of the Climate Change Committee. This week’s U-turn by the British Government, abandoning key environmental targets, united environmentalists with business leaders, who need to know the regulations in advance – and anyway are also concerned about global warming.
A Dominican and a Franciscan reject offerings from usurers. From a Parisian bible, c. 1250.
Interest rates are such a central part of our economic life that it seems difficult to imagine what life would be like without them.
Yet for most of its history, Christianity was fiercely opposed to them. Why? How was its opposition overcome? And what replaced the Christian value system?
Jesus walking on water. 10th century manuscript. Codex Egberti, fol. 27v.
Jesus walked on water, according to a story read in churches last Sunday.
Did he really? If you really believe he did, does that make you a good believer in Christ? If you believe he can’t possibly have done it, does that make you a good believer in science?
Heatwaves. Wildfires. Massive destruction in one country after another, caused, as even the fossil fuel companies now have to admit, by human industrial actions warming the planet up.
So what are the most powerful people in the world doing about it? Continuing to warm it up. Rishi Sunak, British Prime Minister, plans to ‘ max out ‘ the country’s fossil fuel reserves with a new round of drilling for oil and gas. He is encouraged by the anti-environmental vote which seems to have saved him one seat in the recent by-elections; and, even more ominously, by Keir Starmer, the Leader of the Labour Party, who has responded in the same way. Why does anyone think this is a sensible thing to do?
Marriage of Zeus and Hera, Naples. It’s a bit unclear but in the circumstances maybe that’s just as well.
This is another post on marriage. A recent post used the story of Isaac and Rebecca to illustrate how marriage in biblical times was very different from today.
This one describes marriage in the early Roman empire. One thing that hadn’t changed was that the big decisions were still being made by men. Otherwise things were very different. Whereas Isaac and Rebecca lived in a rural society keen to keep the population up, the Roman empire was run from cities where there were many unwanted babies.
Painting by Fikos, 2012
This post is a reading of Jesus’ Parable of the Sower ( Gospels of Mark 4:1-9; Matthew 13:1-9; Luke 8:4-8; Thomas 9), mainly drawing on Bernard Brandon Scott’s Hear Then the Parable and John Dominic Crossan’s In Parables.
It is the only New Testament parable that comes with an interpretation. But the interpretation came later. Here I focus on the main parable and ask what Jesus may have intended to convey.