Excluding others is frowned upon in New Zealand. Our Christianity runs the risk of amplifying the biblical theme of welcome and inclusion so much that other themes are drowned out. In the Gospel of Luke, sin remains a barrier to our access to God—but one that can certainly be crossed.
western culture
||Book Summary|| Johnson’s book tells the story of evangelicalism’s shift from a paradigm of “care” to one of “cure”, and the failure and damage caused by the latter.
||Short Article|| An observation of the way that one progressive Christian thinker has articulated a doctrine of sin, and a demonstration of how his presentation fails to account for how sin is an offense against God.
||Pastoral Passage|| Recognising that we are conditioned to treat time secularly should make us pause for thought and consider how we might think Christianly about time.
||Essay Summary|| A summary of David Bebbington’s 1994 essay “Evangelicalism in its Settings: The British and American Movements since 1940.”
||Book Summary|| A history of how it is that western culture has come to accept and defend the idea of a man trapped in a woman’s body, and the role of the church in such a context.
||Short Article|| Human beings are more than mammals; and better than brainy beasts. We are made with divine dignity and regal responsibility, and on that basis we have too much self-worth to merely reflect what we see on the Discovery Channel—we must reflect our God.
||Pastoral Passage|| The World, the Flesh, and the Devil are part of a Christian vocabulary that needs to be reinstated deliberately in the face of the differentness of the wider non-Christian society we live in.
||Pastoral Passage|| Forget the question of whether Vashti should have done as she was told. Ask whether the King should have told his wife as he did—and why most people today think he shouldn’t have.
||Pastoral Passage|| What characterizes New Zealanders? And how does that shape Christian faith in New Zealand?
Chris Northcott 