Phill Sacre

Tag: bible

  • Creation / Evolution 5 – Ground Rules for interpretation

    This is part five in my (not-so-mini) series on “Creation, Evolution and Evangelicalism”. I’ve talked in previous posts (see that post for all the links) about why I think that so-called “Creationism”, more properly known as Young Earth Creationism or YEC for short, is not a sufficient explanation to account for both the Biblical and scientific data. Well, I’ve now done my assignment and the relevant reading for it and I think I’m in a position to at least move on slightly!

    In my previous post I looked at Genesis 1 and how we might understand that from an old-earth and, I believe, a Biblical perspective. We now come to looking at the rest of the Bible, specifically, what do we do with the question of Adam and Eve? What do we do with the fall? Now I should say at the outset that anything I say here is not going to be anything other than tentative. The long and the short of it is, at the end of the day we just don’t know exactly what happened.

    That said, I think there are a few points which we need to agree on before moving towards any kind of resolution.

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  • Sermon: Matthew 3:13-4:11 – “A New Israel and a New Adam”

    Tonight I preached a sermon at my placement church on Matthew 3:13-4:11. I don’t know whether it was recorded, I don’t know whether they have the facility to record there, so I’ve decided to upload the sermon as a PDF: you can download it below. That’s an approximation of what I said, by the way – I decided to preach from notes rather than a full script this time. (It seems to be working as well, my memory seems to be improving in that respect. It seems that you actually have to practice to improve your communication skills, who’d have thought it…)

    Matt 3v13-4v11 SermonDownload

    I had some positive comments on it after the service, so that was positive. I felt a bit more nervous about preaching there than I have done previously, probably because I didn’t really know people so well. When I was preaching at Fordham I did at least know most of the people in the congregation. Still, preaching to a group of people who I don’t know is something I will need to get used to, so it’s not bad to have some experience in that respect.

    Next week I’m preaching in chapel – it’s only a “Monday Meditation” (where basically the goal is to do as little talking as possible and get everyone to meditate while saying ‘Ommmm…’) but it’s still a pretty daunting prospect preaching to a bunch of people who are all studying theology and  training to work in Christian ministry. People who have, for the most part, probably got more experience and learning under their belt than I have. Still, hey ho, experience is experience.

    Hope you enjoy the sermon, if you read it. Let me know what you think.

  • Jehovah’s Witnesses and ‘Sola Scriptura’

    Sola Scriptura was a term that the reformers – such as Martin Luther – used to determine what they believed about scripture: it means ‘by Scripture alone’ – the doctrine that the Bible contains everything necessary for salvation, in contrast with the Roman Catholic understanding of tradition. Essentially, as I understand it, Roman Catholics understand Scripture and Tradition as two independent strands which contain the same truth. Anyway, how does this all relate to the Jehovah’s Witnesses?

    Well, recently Mrs Phil and myself have had a few conversations with them. One of the things which they have said in response to our appealing to church history is, “Why do you appeal to church history when you have the Bible?” In other words, they believe that their understanding of the Bible is correct, and there’s no need to look back as to how it’s been understood historically by the church. (In fact, they believe that the church fell into apostasy after the time of the apostles, so they can’t trust what the early church said.)

    The reason I’m mentioning all this is because it’s a topic we looked at in our Doctrine lecture yesterday. Why is it that we can’t just say that we have the Bible and forget about traditional understandings of scripture?

    The reason is partly because by putting faith in the Bible, you are putting faith in the people who compiled it. Now, I’m not saying here that the Bible was compiled in the sense that a bunch of people sat down in a room one time over a cup of tea and decided which books to put in the Bible out of hundreds of options. I don’t want to go into that discussion now! But the early church did seek to authenticate the books which we now have as part of the New Testament.

    Anyone who sees the Bible as authoritative – as the Jehovah’s Witnesses are claiming to do – are implicitly putting faith in the early church for the purposes of the New Testament canon. It becomes a very difficult thing, therefore, for them to claim that the early church were apostate – BUT they were right on with the Biblical canon.

    I’d never thought of this before, but it struck me yesterday. I put it up here as an awkward question to ask if you are ever involved in dialogue with the Jehovah’s Witnesses 🙂

  • Creation / Evolution 2: The problems with Creationism

    This is the second part of my series “Creation, Evolution, and Evangelicalism“. To be honest, it’s not the most snappy title I’ve ever come up with, but it will do for now.

    In this post I will be exploring the reasons I believe that Creationism is wrong. Creationism is the belief that Genesis 1-2 describe literal events, i.e. that the world was created in six literal 24-hour periods. You can find out more information about it than you’d probably ever want to know on the Answers in Genesis website. Now, I should point out before we start that the Answers in Genesis beliefs were my own up until relatively recently (well, 2003, which I will admit is not all that recent.) In my teenage years I used to get magazines which set out the standard Creationist arguments about flood geology and the like. I probably still have some of the magazines at my parents’ house, I should look them out at Christmas!

    Anyway, my contention is that there are problems with Creationism which aren’t just to do with believing in evolution per se. Let me try and explain a few objections which I have. Note that I’m not arguing here for evolution, I’m just arguing against a literal 6-day Creationism.

    What is a ‘Plain Understanding’ of the text?

    If you read through the Answers in Genesis section on the Bible, you will often find that they appeal to a straight or plain reading of the text. In general, if you believe that the ‘day’ of Genesis 1 is not a 24-hour, literal day then you are being influenced by external factors and not accepting the text as it is speaking to you.

    Now I think this is a wrong way of looking at it for several reasons:

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  • QI and Quirinius’ Census

    I was watching QI XL last night, and the topic of the Bible came up (you can still see it on the iPlayer at the time of writing – at 20 minutes in). Now, it should be pointed out before we start that Stephen Fry has been known to be wrong before – he is not infallible! And on this particular occasion, I think he was wrong.

    Stephen Fry and the panel made a few points about the census described in Luke 2:1-3.

    The points were, broadly speaking:

    1. There was never a census of the entire Roman world;
    2. People didn’t have to return to their home towns in a census.

    So the Lukan account of the census was put in only to account for the Bethlehem prophecy (i.e. Luke made up the gospel in order to account for all the prophecies). He (Stephen Fry) then went on to say “We’ve been cheated of books which should have been in the Bible”, and read an account from an infancy narrative of Jesus which happened to include dragons.

    I have to say, I find this disappointing: QI prides itself on getting its facts right. It’s a shame that such a programme would broadcast what is essentially misinformation. On the two points above, there are plenty of sources (that last one looking particularly at the Greek text and the dating of the census, and – if you read on – coming up with what I believe to be an interesting resolution). In short, what QI said is simply not true.

    This untruthfulness comes across again when they say it was basically a free-for-all when it came to which books were included in the Bible and which ones weren’t. Now this is such an incredible argument to make because it is totally false: It was used in the Da Vinci Code, for goodness’ sake, and we know how accurate that was! There is an article in my ESV Study Bible on the Canon of Scripture  (it’s available online but you have to have an account) which gives an interesting overview of the history of the canon of what we call the Bible. Essentially, the early church didn’t decide what went in and what didn’t in terms of their own agenda, and it wasn’t decided many years after the fact.

    The books of the NT were “self-selecting”, as it were; the books that were ‘chosen’ was simply a ratification of the books that already were in use by the majority of churches as authoritative.

    Anyway, it’s disappointing to see ‘research’ like this make its way onto our screens, especially on a programme which is watched by millions of people. It’s just sloppy. QI, you have gone down a little in my estimation.