Bishop Frederick Henry of Calgary is facing at least two official objections to his public statements along with expensive hearings before the Alberta Human Rights Commission for expressing his biblical views on same sex marriage.
If you are a member of a small group or class, I urge you to make a group covenant that includes the nine characteristics of biblical fellowship: We will share our true feelings (authenticity), forgive each other (mercy), speak the truth in love (honesty), admit our weaknesses (humility), respect our differences (courtesy), not gossip (confidentiality), and make group a priority (frequency).
In every genre of biblical literature and every stage of biblical history, God is seen pouring out his grace on his people for the sake of his glory among all peoples.
The biblical assertion that women are created in God's image and Boaz's advocacy for Ruth and Naomi necessarily mean women, then and now, have inherent God-given rights. This surely means the church should be at the forefront of advocating for women's rights - not merely political and legal rights, but as in the case of Boaz moving beyond the letter of the law to exceed how any culture regards women.
The biblical story of Noah can be found in the book of Genesis.
Guilty as charged. We are very much supportive of the family - the biblical definition of the family unit.
The concept of downsizing so that others might upgrade is biblical, beautiful. . . and nearly unheard of. We either close the gap or don't take the words of the Bible literally.
How many times have you struggled with the interpretation of certain Biblical texts related to the time of Jesus' return because they did not fit with a preconceived system of eschatology? Russell's Parousia takes the Bible seriously when it tells us of the nearness of Christ's return. Those who claim to interpret the Bible literally, trip over the obvious meaning of these time texts by making Scripture mean the opposite of what it unequivocally declares. Reading Russell is a breath of fresh air in a room filled with smoke and mirror hermeneutics.
There's an awful lot of biblical ignorance, and the church perpetuates that ignorance.
I love The Purple Book. It continually helps reinforce the only foundation worth building upon— a biblical one.
Those issues are biblical issues: to care for the sick, to feed the hungry, to stand up for the oppressed. I contend that if the evangelical community became more biblical, everything would change.
The Louvre! The Louvre has me in its clutches. Every time I'm there rich blessings rain down upon me. I am coming to understand Titian more and more and learning to love him. And then there is Botticelli's sweet Madonna, with red roses behind her, standing against a blue-green sky. And Fiesole with his poignant little biblical stories, so simply told, often so glorious in their colors.
What we are left with then is the present, the only time where miracles happen. We place the past and the future as well into the hands of God. The biblical statement that “time shall be no more” means that we will one day live fully in the present, without obsessing about past or future.
I became one of [Moses Mendelssohn] defenders. But then I heard the words "Biblical criticism" again. And, of course, afterward, I studied it more closely.
Leadership in the church is not entrusted to successful fund raisers, brilliant biblical scholars, administrative geniuses, or spellbinding preachers. . . but to those who have been laid waste by a consuming passion for Christ - passionate men and women for whom privilege and power are trivial compared to knowing and loving Jesus.
We're remembering each other's heroes, too. We are learning each other's songs. We are reminding ourselves that we are a global family praying together. We're all trying to live in the light of the history that shines through the biblical narrative.
The so-called Christian nations are the most enlightened and progressive. . . but in spite of their religion, not because of it. The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetic in childbirth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against Eve. And every step in astronomy and geology ever taken has been opposed by bigotry and superstition. The Greeks surpassed us in artistic culture and in architecture five hundred years before Christian religion was born.
We are not to make the Torah into God Himself, nor the Bible into a "paper pope. " The Bible is only the result of the Word of God. We can experience the return of the Word of God in the here and now, the perpetual return of the actual, living, indisputable Word of God that makes possible the act of witnessing, but we should never think of the Bible as any sort of talisman or oracle constantly at our disposal that we need only open and read to be in relation to the Word of God and God Himself.
The greatest proof that the Bible is inspired is that it has stood so much bad preaching.
When biblical material touches on the natural world, we can legitimately use the tools of science. Sometimes that shows us - no shock here - that biblical writers didn't know as much as we now know about the natural world - but God knew that when he picked them, so that alone tells us that "doing science" that would satisfy a 21st century - and beyond - audience wasn't what God was interested in with respect to the enterprise of producing Scripture for posterity.