Posts tagged as:

tradition

Ox and ass and we three kings: Christmas harmonies and evangelical humbug

December 12, 2009

A couple of days ago Ben Witherington posted on the Christmas story. In all sorts of ways it is a very good example of a typical evangelical “back to basics” approach to Christmas. Essentially the Christmas story needs stripping of all its later accretions, and then the meaning will be clearer. Lurking somewhere unstated in [...]

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The new Protestantism: tradition rules

November 1, 2009

In a very quick trawl of the blog postings I’d missed while on a short break, I noted that Mike Bird, Darrell Pursiful and Ken Schenk had all blogged (yet another) student split.
The split this time is because Washington students think the IVF leadership is too lax: it allows association with Roman Catholics. (This is [...]

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Scripture and tradition: a circular faith

October 4, 2009

(This post is one of a sporadic series on the Church of England’s Thirty-nine Articles)
The two articles about scripture are followed by a short one on the creeds.

VIII. Of the Three Creeds

The Three Creeds, Nicene Creed, Athanasius’s Creed, and that which is commonly called the Apostles’ Creed, ought thoroughly to be received and [...]

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Frost and the fences of tradition

September 19, 2009

One of my favourite poems is Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” – and it’s one a great many Christians (among others) could learn from. I quote a couple of excerpts, but I hope you’l go off and read the whole:

There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I [...]

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Keeping religion away from the BIble?

June 19, 2009

There’s an interesting conversation going on between (among others no doubt) Doug Mangum, Phil Sumpter and Ken Brown about (historical) objectivity and (religious) interpretation of Scripture.
There was a time, many moons ago, when I believed there was an (essentially singular) objective and original meaning to texts which should control our interpretations, and that we could [...]

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