In Psalm 2, King David, or someone writing from his perspective, seems jolted out of complacency with a shock: the anointed leader is beset by enemies and mocked by them! (1-3) How does the writer imagine God responding? First, God laughs scornfully at the puny offence (4) and then in fury reaffirms the status of…
(Image from a Weslyan church group study) In John 15:13, Jesus claims that there is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for friends. I disagree. What’s more, I think that Jesus’ own actions show that his claim was wrong. His actions show an even greater love … because Jesus laid down his…
While reading the First Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians, I paused over something he wrote about peace. This letter, written about 96 CE, is one of the very earliest documents we have (other than New Testament texts) from the young Christian movement. Clement was bishop of Rome and was writing to encourage the church…
An unstated assumption that underlies a lot of my culture’s thinking is that evil deserves to be punished. As of today, I no longer believe it. That change of heart comes from a long line of influences. I read Butler’s Erewhon way back about 1985. It’s a humourous saga in the same genre as Gulliver’s…
In Faith and Philosophy (July 2009), Mark C. Murphy poses the old question of just what it means for Jesus to die for our sins. He criticises the “penal substitution” view, not for its moral repugnance but its conceptual failure. Then he proposes a view of “vicarious punishment” which, he claims, is just as faithful…
