||Sermon Summary|| While we struggle with life in the body in the present, God’s promise of resurrection gives us anticipation of better things and anchors our pattern of living outside our experiences of the present.
Category Archive: Short Articles
||Article|| The MCU’s 2021 Eternals film presents two conflicting visions of human purpose. Does humanity exist for itself, or for something bigger? Eternals echoes and affirms a popular cultural response to this question.
Christians in high places can do a lot of good for God’s kingdom, but they can also do a lot of damage. There is a risk that Christians in places of power end up becoming a liability to the gospel.
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||Technical Article|| In the face of the unchallenged claim that the emperors ruled supreme, Paul begged to differ, shaping his Christology to offer an alternative world-ruler, sent not only to rule but also to redeem the Creator’s wayward world.
||Article|| Christians (and others) who ultimately refuse to get vaccinated and acquire a vaccine-passport face being made maligned and marginalised members of New Zealand for the foreseeable future. Whatever their rationale, they will not be doing it lightly, and it is not the role of vaccinated Christians to make life harder for them.
||Article|| As you read this, I would like you to imagine how things might be different today if the ideas here were widespread in churches 30-40 years ago. It is unfortunately common for churches to be slow to respond properly to difficult social issues – too often the response has been silence, reactionary, or capitulation. Nevertheless, “late” is better than “never” and churches are increasingly taking these kinds of ideas on board.
||Short Article|| Reception history provides a useful and exciting set of new tools for studying the Bible, which I am confident will be a much more fruitful and satisfying endeavour than studying the film-texts that make up the Marvel Cinematic Universe!
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||Short Article|| Anthropology shapes ethics. In other words, what we believe about the human person shapes what we think are appropriate behaviours. Our nature as divine image-bearers puts us in a special relationship with our Creator which comes with unique privileges, duties, and responsibilities.
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Christians have a distinctive view of the world and a particular, Christ-centered spirituality. It is in light of this that we would like to reconsider the appeal of euthanasia. We have identified five reasons – five fears – why people, Christians included, might wish for assisted dying, and shown how the hope we have in Christ confronts these fears. All of them are understandable, and forgivable, yet none of them are so dark that this hope cannot sustain his people through them.
Chris Northcott 