Category Archives: Bible

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Why we don’t need to rebrand Christianity or reimagine church

With the ongoing mudslide of many mega churches and the grassroots attempt to rebrand Christianity, many believers are focusing on Biblically external corrective measures for the church.

However, the survival of the Christian faith and believers living a society-impacting church life, historically, has not depended on professional marketing or hip adaptations of Christ’s teachings to make them more relevant. These have hurt more than helped.

God’s word has prevailed during the last 2,000 years because of its essence- spirit (John 6:63). God doesn’t need us to breathe fresh life into a failing institutional system. He wants us to breathe God in as the Spirit through His word. God gives the Spirit without measure.

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The Ineffable Lightness of Being

“Giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you for a share of the allotted portion of the saints in the light; who delivered us out of the authority of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of the Son of His love.”

-Colossians 1:12-13

Your portion as a Christian is “in the light.”

Gothic architecture may have been founded on similar theological notions, but the religious, creative mind of the day, in its attempt to materialize this truth in concrete terms, stripped it of its full import. Beautiful stained glass windows diffracted light into a kaleidoscopic metaphor of God and a whole new genre of religious art flourished. Medieval man’s experience of this ‘lux nova’ was confined to basking in the colorful glow of physical light. The resultant concept was that man could rise to the contemplation of the divine only through the senses- a physical experience of an immaterial abstraction.

The far reaching ripples of this objective or physical experience of God lap upon the shores of modern Christianity.

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Sonship- an Organic Theology

I wanted to say more about the organic emphasis in what’s termed sonship or adoption. If not in popular theology, at least in the Bible there is a definite emphasis placed on our growth in and experience of God’s life. As amazing as reconciliation is, the Bible itself says that there is something “much more.”

Much more we will be saved in His life, having been reconciled.  -Romans 5:10

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Begotten of God or Adopted by God?

Psalm 2:7- You are My Son; today I have begotten You.

Since taking a New Testament Greek class, I have been more interested in comparing Bible translations and their underlying Greek text. The Greek language is very expressive and often the nuances of certain words are strained through translation. Which version of the Bible you use makes a big difference, yet most Christians probably couldn’t tell you why they use a certain version.

Henry Alford in the 1800s, working to produce The Greek New Testament, said he labored for the “demolition of the unworthy and pedantic reverence for the received text, which stood in the way of all chance of discovering the genuine word of God.” That may be a harsh critique but it gets the point across.

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