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The Problem of Suffering and How We Approach it

The topic of human suffering is a subject many Christians struggle with, and is an issue many theologians have written about over the centuries — so it's definitely not something I can fully address in a single blog post! But there are some general principles we can find in Scripture that many Christians can/do accept, which should act as a starting point to addressing this subject, such as: We live in a fallen world due to sin (Gen 3), and so things aren’t perfect and neither are people, therefore suffering can happen from illness, nature, and human action (or inaction). Not all suffering is necessarily “bad”, from a Christian perspective. For exam...

Women should be silent?

...ion) - if some men and women, and some denominations in general, are taking Paul so literally on these points, do they sit in silence? And I mean TOTAL silence? Do the wives wait to get home to talk to their husbands about the service? Because remember, it's shameful otherwise (though, interestingly, not a sin per se). What if you're not married? Do single women just have to go with their questions unanswered? Why is this passage only directed at the married, whereas the other one isn't? What if 1 Timothy 2:12 was translated with the same marriage logic as 1 Corinthians 14: I permit no wife to teach or to have authority over her husband; she is to kee...

What was so good about Good Friday?

...eem to be some evidence to suggest that by the 2nd Century, early Christians were celebrating Easter, it sometimes feels like the Modern Church has placed more emphasis on Jesus's birth in terms of celebrations and events, than it does for his resurrection. Though that's probably partly due to Western culture and the so-called "War on Christmas" making some churches push Christmas harder. I digress. Paul makes his view on the resurrection, and thus the whole point of Christianity, quite clear in 1 Cor 15:12-19 (emphasis mine) — Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is n...

Power Cuts and the Fear of God

...The other week we had a series of power cuts in our town. It doesn’t happen very often here where I am, but there was particularly bad weather recently which damaged some cables; but sitting in the dark winter evening, my phone low on battery power, it made me realise just how much we rely on electricity for nearly everything these days. We don’t even have a gas supply so we were completely cut off from doing anything! Now it might sound obvious, but it’s easy to forget how dependent we are on modern conveniences until it’s suddenly taken away and you’re sat in the cold surrounded by tiny little tea-light candles. The following Sunday, the sermon at c...

The Gospel of Jeffrey Dahmer

...There’s a new Netflix documentary out at the moment which has hit the news recently about the infamous serial killer Jeffery Dahmer. I haven’t watched it, but I knew of him as a serial killer though I didn’t realise just how horrific his crimes were until I read the Wikipedia article about him! Not for the faint of heart, that’s for sure. But this post isn’t really about Dahmer, not entirely, but rather the reactions to some recent social media posts about him and the (often vitriol) responses they’ve got. Here’s one example: Dahmer is probably in heaven and experiencing eternal joy. If this bothers you, you don’t know the depths of your o...

Lent: Day 10 - Ignatius to the Smyrnaeans

...; not, as some were saying, that “He only seemed to suffer”. To these, Ignatius says that they “only seem to be [Christians]” because of their false teaching! He defends the resurrection by telling of how the Apostles ate and drank with, and touched the risen Christ since “He was still possessed of flesh”, but to this he also adds that he believes Jesus is still possessing a body of flesh, whilst being spiritually “united to the Father”. I'm not sure if he means this in the same way we might today when we talk about the glorified/resurrected bodies, since you don't often hear people say they are “flesh”, but it's probably just a semantics is...