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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In Gen­e­sis 18 three men vis­its Abra­ham and promise that he would have a son through Sarah. Hear­ing this, stand­ing at the tent door, Sarah laughs.

Gen 18:
13 And the LORD said to Abra­ham, “Why did Sarah laugh, say­ing, ‘Shall I indeed bear a child, when I am so old?‘
14 “Is any­thing too dif­fi­cult for the LORD? At the appointed time I will return to you, at this time next year, and Sarah will have a son.”

Abra­ham appears to speak to only one of the men. Chris­tian­ity believes that this was the pre-incarnate Christ. (more…)

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There is no com­plete agree­ment among schol­ars regard­ing these groups of Jew­ish fol­low­ers of Jesus. From the Church fathers we can gather some ideas regard­ing their beliefs and prac­tices. It appears that the early Jew­ish believ­ers were known by both these names, but from the third cen­tury they became two dis­tinct groups, with the Nazarenes adopt­ing a more ortho­dox doc­trine, but the Ebion­ites either adopted or retained a quite non-orthodox one.

Let’s con­sider some of these quotes. (more…)

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Jesus said the fol­low­ing in Matthew:

Matthew 22:32 “I am the God of Abra­ham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? God is not the God of the dead, BUT OF THE LIVING”.

Did he mean that they were alive? To under­stand what he said, we need to con­sider Jew­ish thought. (more…)

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