theology

Moral relativism is not enough
Everyone will, like the Dalai Lama, find the death of Osama Bin Laden “understandable.” They will think his demise broadly desirable, and hope it draws a line under a particular strand of Fundamentalist militancy. But the manner of it, which is not entirely clear, raises disturbing questions for many people [...]

{ 0 comments }

I haven’t had much time recently to post anything, but I thought I would at least re-take Theological Worldview Quiz from Quizfarm. There are holes in the test that could probably park a thousand cars or more, but possibly where the quiz has been taken a few years apart it might indicate at least [...]

{ 18 comments }

Ben Myers tells how and when God made his full and final revelation
The Revelation took place on a Sunday, the evening of February 28, 1983. The sky was bright and clear that Sabbath night – almost supernaturally clear, as one TV weatherman remarked the following day, with scarcely a cloud in sight anywhere across the [...]

{ 0 comments }

Ben Myers offers a ’sequel’ to his theses on sadness: Twelve theses on joy
Joy is itinerant and can be visited in many places, but its regular venue is friendship. Friendship is the love of difference. The face of the friend is the mirror in which the joy of one’s own difference shines.
The [...]

{ 1 comment }

Food for thought from Ben Myers
5. When the church’s theological rejection of sadness was secularised, sadness became a pathology requiring medical intervention. The medicalisation of sadness is the final cultural triumph of the Protestant smile. If Luther or Kierkegaard or Dostoevsky had lived today, we would have given them Prozac and schooled them in positive [...]

{ 1 comment }

Angela Shier-Jones issues a clarion call: Theology first!
The sad truth is of course that some sections of the British Methodist Church have long since lost Wesley’s love of theology and have managed (with Conference’s consent) to reduce most of the Church’s theological output to a compulsory second section in some Conference reports (and now for [...]

{ 2 comments }

Ben Myers on George Herbert’s ‘Prayer’

{ 4 comments }

Ben Myers quotes Karl Barth. It bears repeating here, I think. It’s from his commentary on The Epistle to the Romans
Those who urge us to shake off theology itself and to think – and more particularly to speak and write – only what is immediately intelligible to the general public seem to me to be [...]

{ 8 comments }

“To what may we liken [the] distinctive theology [of Karl Barth]? It has a character of its own. To come upon it is like entering a light and roomy and beautiful church with wide-open windows and open doors that invite an entrance and welcome the everyday world…. He was convinced that the [...]

{ 4 comments }

Ben Myers explains why he still confesses the filioque
In theology, Eastern Orthodoxy is the new black. These days it’s harder and harder to find any serious Protestant commitment to the western confession of filioque. The denomination in which I’m teaching, for instance, omits the filioque from liturgical confessions of the Nicene Creed.
In recent Protestant theology, [...]

{ 3 comments }

I wonder if you know the tv comedy Open All Hours. British readers certainly will, though I’m not sure how widely travelled it has been. (It was filmed in my home town and I’ve got a particular soft spot for it)
In the show, the incomparable Ronnie Barker plays Arkwright, a stuttering shopkeeper whose meanness is [...]

{ 1 comment }

Tim Chesterton reflects on “the fellowship of the Holy Spirit”
I’ve often thought that we drain the lifeblood out of the third part of the phrase - ‘the fellowship of the Holy Spirit’ - by over-spiritualising it. Fellowship in the early church didn’t just mean warm feelings at the coffee hour - it meant that those [...]

{ 9 comments }

Christians in Context asks a hypothetical question about baptism that every hospital chaplain will recognize
One night, you’re in the sleep room; it’s 2am, and you get an urgent page to the intensive care nursery. Not knowing what to expect, you hurry to get up to the unit on the 12th floor. When you step out [...]

{ 24 comments }

On where we find our hope, and the things we do to ourselves and each other, in its name.
A guest post by Wood Ingham
I have these notebooks; I write in them in no particular order, picking up the nearest one to hand and taking it with me on the off chance. Each entry is dated. [...]

{ 9 comments }

That’s women in theology. So says Micky Youngson, and I’m not arguing.
But she isn’t content to wait around, so she’s set up a WIT Facebook group as a beginning, “for women who want to talk about, think about, write about God, what they believe about God, the Church, life. What’s out there in terms of [...]

{ 1 comment }

At Faith and Theology, Kim offers 10 Propositions on Darwin and the deity.

{ 0 comments }

Ben Myers offers a thoughtful (and beautifully written) theological obituary of John Updike

{ 2 comments }

From Ecumenical News International
Brazilian liberation theologian Leonardo Boff, once a thorn in the side of the Vatican, is now on a mission to convince humanity of the desperate need to change its relationship to the environment. “We cannot go on. We have to change,” Boff, a 70 year-old former Roman Catholic priest, said in a [...]

{ 0 comments }

The Methoblog says God wants you to buy this book. I don’t know whether that’s true or not, but strangely my copy came from Amazon this very morning. When I’ve had a chance to look at it, I’ll let you know what I think.
One of the things that concerns me about the Methodist Church is [...]

{ 0 comments }