No change in Week 5 - still waiting for those chicks to appear!

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Showing Tag: "bible jesus" (Show all posts)

Tithing and Full-time Ministry

Posted by Dyfed on Monday, April 23, 2012, In : Pagan influences

Is tithing biblical? After seeing Viola and Barna’s views in Pagan Christianity on so many other subjects it will not surprise you to learn that on this issue too they take a contrary view to most of the contemporary church. While tithing is certainly an Old Testament principle – and an important one at that – it does not feature in the life of the first century church as a requirement made of the followers of Jesus.

Tithing as tax

In analysing where the practice came from PC goes into so...

A Self-limiting God

Posted by Dyfed on Friday, March 16, 2012, In : Bible

One of the main objections to reading the creation accounts in Genesis as myth and not as factual truth is based on the view that it was God through the Holy Spirit who inspired the author(s) of the passage to write what they did. Taking their cue from 1 Timothy 3:16 those who say that these passages are factually correct argue that God would surely never have lied or misled the authors in such a way as have them write untruth.

Accommodation

This is a powerful argument but fails to take into ac...

Defining doctrines non-biblically

Posted by Dyfed on Friday, February 10, 2012, In : Bible

A few years ago when I was involved with co-leading a new church plant one of the first things I had to do was to form a ‘statement of faith’ for the congregation. This was a novel experience for me since as someone brought up a Baptist in Wales (I am still a baptist, by the way) I never had to think about such a thing before because Welsh Baptist churches never had a formal statement of beliefs. But as people felt we needed to be well defined in our theology (and there’s nothing wrong ...

Faith in a person not a book

Posted by Dyfed on Friday, February 3, 2012, In : Bible

What role does the Bible play in defining what a Christian is? Do we need to ‘believe the word of God’ before we can claim to be Christian? In certain quarters today you would think so. The Bible as the literal word of God to us has to be accepted. Any wavering on this and you would soon be condemned as being on dangerous ground.

But this has not been the case throughout church history. One German church historian noted the shift that happened during the first and second centuries C.E.:

Abo...

What did Jesus read?

Posted by Dyfed on Friday, July 16, 2010, In : Random

The temple in Jerusalem represented the six days of creation, with the Holy of Holies representing the first day, the veil representing the second and so on. This is one of the many new things I’ve learned from Margaret Barker in a book of hers that I’m reading at the moment – Temple Theology: An introduction (London, 2004).

She also says that there are basically two streams of thought in the Old Testament...