Contentment as a countercultural virtue
One of the many joys of my role as principal of Vose Seminary is that I fairly often get sent complimentary copies of books from publishers who hope I will put in a good word for their publication. Sometimes that is possible, at other times I read a few pages of the book, push it to the one side and diplomatically say no more. Happily, Simon Carey Holt’s book Heaven All Around Us: Discovering God in Everyday Life (Cascade, 2018) is definitely in the first category. Actually, it’s sensationally in the first category – an absolute delight to read, deeply thoughtful, often...
Read MoreArtificial Intelligence, the Future of Work and What it Means to be Human…
Have you ever asked at what point technology will have so advanced that the input of humans into life’s tasks will rarely be required? And what does that mean for the future of work? And what does it say about what it means to be human? A personal anecdote. My family and I had recently arrived in New Zealand from South Africa. In the South Africa we left, the rubbish was collected by a van which rode down each street, the driver being supported by a team of four runners. Those runners would divide into teams of two, one for each side of the road. One would pick up the bag of rubbish and...
Read MoreProtestants, Reformers or Transformers…
As the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation draws near (it is usually dated from Luther posting his 95 theses on the church door in Wittenberg on 31 October, 1517), it is worth asking if we are now primarily protestants (from protestors) or reformers. The Protestant Reformation involved both protest and reform. It was a protest against a corrupt religious system, and some of its particular practices, such as the sale of indulgences. Later it was a strong protest against the April 19th, 1529 reversal of the August 27, 1526 German Reichstag decree allowing each individual government...
Read MoreWhy Grenz matters…
You may or may not know (and may or may not care) that I did my PhD on the theological method of Stanley J Grenz. “Why?” I hear you ask. Without trying to reproduce my PhD (which can be downloaded for free from the University of Auckland’s research site), let me give you a simple explanation for why I think Grenz is an important theologian, and my reasons for arguing that his work continues to be relevant and worthy of study. A committed evangelical, American born but Canadian based Grenz (1950-2005), sensed that the postmodern turn in society had significant implications...
Read MoreTradition and traditioning…
I grant you that most people don’t spend lots of time wondering about tradition and particularly the tradition of the Church, and if they are being true to it or not. But if you have ever had a bright idea of yours shut down with a “It’s not going to happen. We’ve never done it that way before”, or if on the opposite end of the spectum you’ve felt a little uneasy that you might be about to embrace something that humans have only really been doing for the last 5 minutes of their existence, and which doesn’t bear any correspondence with all earlier...
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