Phill Sacre

Tag: bible

  • Steve Chalke and the Bible vs Hebrews

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    Steve Chalke wants to start a global discussion about the Bible – see the video here or the document here. You may remember, he made his views on same-sex marriage clear last year, and I commented then that I didn’t agree with his understanding of Scripture. He’s gone one step further this time, but I don’t want…

  • The Bible and Clarity

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    I’ve had a few conversations recently about epistemology (how we know what we know), especially when it comes to knowing what we know about God. People are becoming suspicious of talking about the Bible being ‘clear’ on any particular issue – Rachel Held Evans’ blog post The Bible was ‘clear’… demonstrates pretty well this kind of…

  • Sermon: The Witness of John the Baptist (John 1:19-34)

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    This is the text of a sermon I preached last Sunday morning at Christ Church Cockfosters. The audio isn’t available on the website (which means it may not have been recorded) – if it does appear I will update this post. The theme was a traditional one for the third Sunday in Advent – “John…

  • Don’t rely on one Bible translation!

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    Quick bit of obvious advice today: Don’t rely on a single translation of the Bible when you’re doing some serious Bible study. Today I was preparing a sermon on John 1:19-34. And, because I’ve been learning New Testament Greek over the last couple of years, I feel like I needed to get my money’s worth…

  • The Story of the Jews

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    One of the things which interests me about modern-day Judaism is how different it is from my understanding of the Hebrew Scriptures (i.e. the Jewish Bible or the Christian Old Testament). Given that Christians and Jews have so much shared Scripture (most of the Bible – 75% or thereabouts – is the Hebrew Scriptures) –…

  • Biblical Ethics and Sexuality

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    A couple of times lately I mentioned to people that I’d try to write something vaguely coherent about the Bible and sexuality – in particular about homosexual relationships. Were the Bible writers simply writing within their culture? Now that attitudes to sexuality are changing, can Christian attitudes change with it? I’ve been putting off writing…

  • Sermon: Psalm 1 – The Righteous and the Wicked

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    Quick post! I was preaching at Christ Chuch Cockfosters this evening on Psalm 1. My sermon has already been uploaded, and you can hear it online on the Christ Church website.

  • John 19: Jesus’ Trial and Crucifixion

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    As alert readers will no doubt be aware, I have been studying John recently (you can read my previous blog posts on the subject here and here). I promised in my last post that I would blog about John 19, and I thought this would be as good a time as any – particularly while…

  • Saul to Paul: A few thoughts on Acts 13

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    One of the things which struck me about our New Testament course this year was the idea of narrative criticism, i.e. reading the text critically (analytically that is – not ‘critically’ in the popular sense) as narrative. I’d never really thought about the gospels in that way before, and it’s been colouring the way I see…

  • The Raising of Lazarus

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    As I mentioned in my post on the woman at the well, I’ve been doing a class on John’s Gospel the past couple of months. It’s probably been my favourite class of this year, which is no small feat! John is such a rich gospel, and it’s been a real privilege to spend some time…