The Divine Universe

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 [...]

  There have probably been faith healers and exorcists around for thousands of years, and we still have them today. The gospel writers all tried to show that Jesus was the greatest one of all. This was a large part of their argument that he was the Son of God, the Messiah. In fact, the [...]

In the late nineteenth century, Friedrich Nietzsche declared that God was dead. He then argued that, because our morality is based upon belief in God we have no valid reason to be moral. He waxed lyrical about the blessed state of those superior persons who are freed entirely from religion and morality. In Nietzsche’s time [...]

    Jesus told a parable (Matthew 25:14-30) about a man who planned a long trip away from his business and made arrangements to look after his liquid assets. Let’s try it in modern dress. These assests totalled $800,000. He gave his general manager $500,000 to look after, his assistant manager $200,000 and his chief [...]

BUSINESS IS BUSINESS   Jesus told a parable (Matthew 25:14-30) about a man who planned a long trip away from his business and made arrangements to look after his liquid assets. Let’s try it in modern dress. These assests totalled $800,000. He gave his general manager $500,000 to look after, his assistant manager $200,000 and [...]

 Where do Christian moral standards come from? We have the Ten Commandments and something that Jesus said was a more fundamental and all-embracing law: to love your neighbour as yourself. I don’t think anyone would quibble about the Ten Commandments. But the rest of the Jewish law books, the first five books of the Bible, [...]

There’s a story in Matthew’s Gospel (15:21-28) that raises the question. Jesus and some disciples were hiking through the region of Tyre and Sidon. It was a cosmopolitan region – people from all over the Eastern Mediterranean. On their way a Canaanite woman accosted Jesus, pleading with him to heal her mentally disturbed daughter. The [...]

I have been re-reading a book that caused a sensation in the Anglican Church some forty-five years ago. That was a time when Anglicans were more concerned about evangelism than sexual orientation. Bishop John Robinson believed that the Church had a deep-seated problem in presenting God to the contemporary secular society. He described the problem [...]

The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is often over-mystificated, but religious people should be mystified. A sense of mystery is an important element of religious experience. God is the ultimate mystery. Jews do not even attempt to speak his name. The ninety-nine names proclaimed by Moslems are abstract attributes; physical images are forbidden. Christianity, Michael [...]