The Divine Universe

There can be no doubt that Christmas is the favourite Christian festival of our secularised society as Santa Claus, in his Coca Cola coloured livery, struts around uttering humourless Ho Ho Hos. The festival of Christmas, instituted in the twelfth century, begins in the shops in late October, and the decorations don’t come down until [...]

Recently I watched a documentary about the trial in Victoria of some suspected Islamic terrorists. The State had limitless financial resources to construct their prosecution, while the pro bono defence worked on a shoestring and, not surprisingly, most of the suspects were convicted. One was sentenced to fifteen years goal. But they were not [...]

The LORD is a man of war. Exodus 15:3 (KJV)
It is hard to think of a single war in which God was not fighting for both sides.  At least, that is the impression one gets.  Even today, as World War Three gathers momentum, both the Coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Moslem fundamentalists [...]

 
In 325CE the leading thinkers of the church met at Nicea to settle a dispute about the nature of Jesus, whether he was divine or purely human. The majority finally decided he was divine. This is theology: an alien language in this secular, scientific age. In some respects, however, contemporary physics, with its new discoveries [...]

“Whoever comes to me will never hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst.” (John 6:35) Wouldn’t it be an amazing thing if the church were able to feed all the starving millions in the poorest regions of the world? Reading about the feeding of the five thousand (every Gospel reports it), one suspects [...]

You can say, that the resurrection is impossible, therefore it didn’t happen, or you can say it happened, therefore it must be possible. Most Christians would say the latter, but we tend to say it is a miracle beyond our comprehension. However, there are Christian scientists who are seriously exploring the bodily resurrection from a [...]

 
In John’s Gospel there is a long description of Jesus’ last meal with his friends: a Passover meal (John 13-17). I have been to a number of Passover meals with my nephew’s Jewish family (he married a Jewish lady) and, in spite of their religious and ritual nature, they have always been very light-hearted and [...]

 
The first time Jesus preached in his local synagogue people were amazed and also confused. Mark says they were actually offended. His teaching impressed them enormously with its erudition and insight but they knew him as an ordinary young man who worked with his father as a general handyman, fixing broken furniture, roof tiles or [...]

At the Council of Nicea in 325, it was decided to define God as three persons in one God. But we need to recognise that this formula does not objectively define what God is, that would be presumptuous; it describes how we experience God. It is a sophisticated example of making God in our own [...]

In 1945 an Arab peasant discovered some big earthenware jars hidden in a cave. They contained thirteen ancient Coptic codices (the first books). Scholars soon identified them as the writings of Christians called ‘Gnostics’, from gnosis is the Greek word for knowledge. The Gnostics’ knowledge was not facts and figures but a form of knowing [...]