"We are travellers…not yet in our native land" – St. Augustine
Last week I started a series in which I was commenting on an article written by a girl who regrets remaining a virgin until her wedding night. In my previous post I made some distinctions between abstinence and chastity which I think were lacking in her formation. In today’s post I would like to continue my discussion of Samantha’s article and look at the teaching she received concerning sex and marriage…
This is exciting news 🙂 My friend Jenna has been accepted into the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, an order of nuns who care for terminal cancer patients who can’t afford care. I’ve known Jenna for over three years now and, trust me, she’s going to be a seriously epic kind of nun:
Before Jenna can join the nuns, however, she has to expunge her student debt. So, if you’d like to help get her to the convent, I’d invite you to visit the website below, read her story, look at the pictures and make a donation:
As one of her friends put it, the sooner we can get her to the convent, the sooner we can get her praying for us and the sooner we can get holy 😉
The article Get thee to a nunnery first appeared on RestlessPilgrim.net
I’ve been mulling over the best way to start this blog. There’s so much to say about my decision to quit my job and to start working for an American company; so much to say about my nomadic life and eventual move to the United States…but I’m getting ahead of myself. As Glinda, the Good Witch Of The South, would say, it’s best to begin at the beginning…
Although in some ways the seeds of this adventure had been planted earlier, things started to come to the fore in 2006. I had been living in Cheltenham for about four years. I had moved there following university, after a brief, false start in Salisbury (my employer went bankrupt three days after I joined). There was nothing wrong, per se, with my life in Cheltenham; I had good friends, a lovely church and a great place to live, but I couldn’t shake my feeling of unease. Life just seemed a little bit too….predicable and, well, comfortable. There was nothing in my life which was pushing me out of my comfort zone. I had recently passed into my mid-twenties and it felt like I was just getting old and boring before my time…
I was at a loss as to what I should do to get out of this funk. I considered changing careers. I thought about becoming an IT trainer (I’ve always enjoyed telling people what to do). I also gave serious consideration to resurrecting my sign language and training to be an interpreter. I considered moving to another town or city in England. The trouble was, after living in Cheltenham, pretty much everywhere else appeared ugly, boring or had limited job opportunities. I did consider moving abroad, but that just seemed far too scary!
This week I heard a talk on the Gospel of John by Dr. Michael Barber at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church.
In the early part of his talk, Dr. Barber discussed the question of authorship of the Gospel. He mentioned how modern sceptical scholars often say that the Gospel was originally anonymous, and that the text “The Gospel according to John” was a later addition. I have often heard claims such as these, so I was delighted to hear Dr. Barber present some potential problems with this position…
The main issue in asserting that the Gospel was original anonymous is that the manuscript evidence does not support this hypothesis at all. Where the manuscripts survive, we find the text present. Not only that, there are some other problems which flow from this…
If the original Gospel was anonymous and the association with St. John was a later development, why don’t we find divergent attributions? Since St. John is not identified as the author within the narrative itself, surely one would expect many divergent attributions to develop? Why was the Gospel never associated with, say, St. Peter? The obvious answer is that the text “The Gospel according to John” was in there from the beginning.
If the sceptics are right, the text had been copied as an anonymous Gospel and distributed throughout the Empire. Why is it that manuscripts from all these different regions bear the text claiming Johannine authorship? It would have been an impossible task to gather up all these different manuscripts retrospectively in order to “fix” them with an agreed-upon author, particularly since they were in different languages (Greek, Latin etc). Once again, the simplest explanation for consistency in all these manuscripts in all these areas in all these languages is simply that the text “The Gospel according to John” was in there from the beginning.
These reasons, coupled with the universal testimony of the Early Church Fathers, should give us great confidence that, from the very beginning, this Gospel opened with the words “The Gospel according to John…”
As I mentioned before, I’m currently updating the New Testament questions and answers which I run through at the beginning of every Bible study. Today I’d like to cover the questions surrounding Colossians:
58. What was Paul’s situation when writing Colossians?
The evidence seems to point to the same situation as the other captivity epistles (Ephesians, Colossians, Philemon and Philippians). He is in Rome under house arrest in approximately AD 62.
59. Had Paul ever been to Colossae?
No, but he had stayed in nearby Ephesus for three years.
60. Who founded the Church at Colossae?
A Colossian native called “Epaphras” appears to have been converted through Paul’s ministry and first taken the gospel to Colossae.
61. So why did Paul write to the Colossians?
It seems Epaphras visited Paul in Rome and asked him to write to this nascent congregation to speak to the various heresies attacking the Church in Colossae.
62. What were the heresies with which the Colossians struggled?
They appear to be several, but they included issues surrounding circumcision, asceticism, the person of Christ, secret knowledge and human wisdom.
63. Who are the opponents in Colossae?
This very much depends on how one interprets the heresies described, but scholars suggest either Jews, Pagans or early Gnostics.
64. What is noticeable about the way in which Paul speaks about Jesus in this letter?
We call it “High Christology”, since Jesus is described as “the image of the invisible God”, “the firstborn of all Creation”, “in him the fullness of deity dwells bodily” etc.
65. What does Paul say about suffering in this letter?
He describes himself as “complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions”.
66. During the letter Paul speaks about a hidden “mystery”. What is it?
That Jesus came for us…all of us, both Jew and Gentile
67. What Sacrament does Paul speak about in this letter and in what terms does he describe it?
He speaks about baptism, describing it both in terms of circumcision and death.
1-16 | 17-27 | 27-42 | 43-52 | 53-57 | 58-67 | 68-71 | 72-81
All Questions
We are now drawing to the end of my suggested Do’s and Don’ts of leading Bible study (Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4). Let’s pick up where we left off yesterday..
DON’T: Shoot people down
Sometimes you’ll ask a question or someone will be sharing and they will say something which is just objectively incorrect.
Love is patient, love is kind, …
I just had a very strange interaction on Facebook… A friend of mine posted the following video of the Protestant evangelist Todd Friel:
One of his friends, a man called Simon, responded with the following curious assertions:
His response struck me as a strange for several reasons, but first and foremost because it demonstrated very clearly that Simon was rather unfamiliar with the New Testament! I responded by pointing out that Jesus would absolutely call other people wrong. In fact, at times He could be quite mean, even to the point of calling people names:
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites… You fools and blind men… For you are like whitewashed tombs which on the outside appear beautiful, but inside they are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness. Even so you too outwardly appear righteous to men, but inwardly you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness… you brood of vipers”
Matthew 23:15, 17, 27-28, 33
He was even known on occasion to flip tables!
And making a whip of cords, he drove them all, with the sheep and oxen, out of the temple; and he poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables – John 2:15
John 2:15
Naturally, there are many other Scripture passages which I could have quoted, not least Jesus’ exclusive claims about Himself:
“I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
John 14:6
With wearying predictability, rather than adjusting his statement, Simon immediately accused me of “judging” him. Some folks really love to jump to play the victim card even at the mildest of challenges. I wonder if he would have said exactly the same thing if I had pointed out an error in his arithmetic…
Amusingly, he then tried to quote Romans 2 to me:
You, therefore, have no excuse, you who pass judgment on someone else, for at whatever point you judge another, you are condemning yourself, because you who pass judgment do the same things. Now we know that God’s judgment against those who do such things is based on truth. So when you, a mere human being, pass judgment on them and yet do the same things, do you think you will escape God’s judgment?
Romans 2:1-3
At this point I suggested to him that, while I’d be happy to discuss that passage with him, it probably isn’t a good idea to quote the Bible at a Christian right on the heels of making a demonstrably false statement about Jesus. He then said that he didn’t want to discuss his beliefs with me any more, so I closed by saying that hopefully I had at least disabused you of the notion that “Jesus would never call other people wrong”. I concluded with a passage which denies this explicitly:
“[Jesus said] ‘You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God'”
Matthew 22:29
…and, for good measure, I also included a passage where Jesus teaches His followers about judgement:
“Stop judging by mere appearances, but instead judge correctly”
John 7:24
Needless to say, he wrote with the following:
…and then thirty seconds later deleted the thread.