Anthony Buzzard’s (and hence the Restora­tion Fellowship’s) posi­tion of retain­ing the vir­gin birth doc­trine hangs largely on this sin­gle verse.

Luke 1:35
The angel answered and said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will over­shadow you; and for that rea­son the holy child shall be called the son of God.

How­ever, if we read this verse in con­text we dis­cover a cou­ple of prob­lems with it as some­how it doesn’t fit into the con­text. (more…)

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When you talk to Chris­tians you often hear a lot of “Chris­t­ian talk”. They think they are talk­ing about Chris­t­ian liv­ing, that is, the appli­ca­tion of bib­li­cal teach­ing and not the­ol­ogy. How­ever, they don’t realise that their talk is in real­ity the­ol­ogy. The ideas about God’s grace, Christ stand­ing in the gap, the Spirit lead­ing, etc, were all worked out by the­olo­gians in the past, but these were preached so many times over and over again that peo­ple don’t think about the­ol­ogy any more, but they call them application.

In my view we need to be con­cerned about two things:

1. what does the text say (the­ol­ogy)
2. what does it mean to me in my every­day life (application)

No 2 depends on No 1, no ques­tion about it.

Sure, you can read the bible for your­self with­out hav­ing any bib­li­cal edu­ca­tion and get some­thing out of it. What you get out will depend on you, your ideas, cul­tural set­tings, whether you want to jus­tify what you do, etc. But Paul says the scrip­tures are not for pri­vate inter­pre­ta­tion. What does he mean? Maybe we need to make an effort to find out what it says and sub­mit our­selves to it.

But things are not so sim­ple. (more…)

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I often get told that the­ol­ogy is not really impor­tant and I should rather focus on appli­ca­tion. Sure, I can’t expect every­one to be a the­olo­gian, but I’ like you all to recog­nise that the way you inter­pret the bible DOES have an effect on your walk as a Christian.

I often heard from Chris­tians that “the bible says this and that”. But in real­ity they sim­ply read their ideas into the scrip­tures. Noone should make such a claim. Var­i­ous churches teach it var­i­ous ways. But if you get it wrong, will it not affect your con­duct, your walk with God? You might do some­thing that is actu­ally forbidden.

You see, faulty the­ol­ogy leads to a false sense of secu­rity. Dig­ging into the text HAS appli­ca­tions to every­day liv­ing. If, for exam­ple, it turned out that “faith” was a doing word rather than head knowl­edge, many Chris­tians would find them­selves in trou­ble. Sure, Mar­tin Luther read in Romans that “the just shall live by faith”, but he didn’t check where the idea orig­i­nates from in the Hebrew bible (OT) and whether it was cor­rectly trans­lated. (more…)

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I thought I need to write out some­thing to explain the prob­lems with the Keno­sis theory.

I sup­pose you are aware that the­olo­gians often speak about the Keno­sis (Gk for “emp­ty­ing”) of the prein­car­nate Christ in the Philip­pian passage.

Phil 2:
5 Have this atti­tude in your­selves which was also in Christ Jesus,
6 who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equal­ity with God a thing to be grasped,
7 but emp­tied Him­self, tak­ing the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the like­ness of men.
8 Being found in appear­ance as a man, He hum­bled Him­self by becom­ing obe­di­ent to the point of death, even death on a cross.
9 For this rea­son also, God highly exalted Him, and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name,
10 so that at the name of Jesus EVERY KNEE WILL BOW, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
11 and that every tongue will con­fess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

How­ever, if you search, you find many opin­ions in regards to what Christ emp­tied him­self from. Was it his deity, will or some­thing else? There is a lot of debate going on between the the­olo­gians of var­i­ous Chris­t­ian denom­i­na­tions, just google for “keno­sis” to see it for your­selves. (more…)

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This story puz­zles me. Maybe you have some ideas.

John 6:
“1 Some time after this, Jesus crossed to the far shore of the Sea of Galilee…
3 Then Jesus went up on a moun­tain­side and sat down with his dis­ci­ples. 4 The Jew­ish Passover Fes­ti­val was near.”

In the pre­vi­ous chap­ter he WAS in Jerusalem at one of the Jew­ish fes­ti­vals! Why did Jesus and the dis­ci­ples walk 100km to the north­ern side of the Sea of Galilee when the Passover was near? They should have stayed in or near Jerusalem. (more…)

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