I was about to write something about how evangelical authors (I was looking particularly at Chris Wright, in his “Mission of God”) do not take canon formation seriously, because if they did, then Chicago-inerrancy gets a bit fuzzy and then they realise they don’t have a magisterium. All die, oh the embarrassment.

And then along came this quote, which is superb: Read more about Biblical Inerrancy once again

In this category, top marks go for an example which quotes out of context in such a way as to negate the meaning of the original context entirely. For instance:

I'm (thoroughly enjoying) writing an IT strategy for a large church, and one of the things I want to get across is the benefits of openness with information, whether that means blogging, Twitter, engaging in discussions and forums about church teaching. This is an idea that the leadership are apparently unhappy about, since they want to keep fairly tight hold on authority for teaching and doctrine and what gets said in the name of the church, and if people start questioning what the pastor says in his sermons then where will we be. (In other words, all that unpleasantness in 1517 didn't change a bloody thing.)

Evangelistic meetings, at least here in Japan, are a funny sort of performance art.

Evangelicals, I mean, and specifically American ones.

So I just joined this rather fun Christian Century blogs network thing, and Gordon, who is the ringmaster of this bizarre circus, had this to say to me:

So I just joined this rather fun Christian Century blogs network thing, and Gordon, who is the ringmaster of this bizarre circus, had this to say to me: Read more about Me, a liberal!

I mentioned earlier that I was going to write something about the "Scripture interprets Scripture" school of hermeneutics. I may not succeed, but I'm going to try to see if I can explain some of the problems I have with it.

Yes, it's a heavy blogging day, but it's the only day of late I've had enough time and energy to put fingers to keyboard and get this stuff out of my head. So anyway, the other day I said:

Oh yeah, this one occurred to me a few years ago but I was reminded by a particularly muddle-headed sermon recently: (Any sermon which contends that God chose the Jewish people as His own Special Chosen People to work with for a few thousand years, just so that He could cynically use them to demonstrate to the rest of the world that they completely let Him down, and therefore they should all go to Hell for being unable to keep his utterly impossible Law, is going to end up in a big bucket of Fail as far as I'm concerned. Unfortunately, such a view is not so much widespread as omnipresent.)

I’m finding myself getting very busy and very tired these days; I have a lot of things I want to write about but I’m finding it hard to catch up. This entry has been sitting in my editor window for four days. Let’s see if I can finish it today…

Saturday was fantastic. I mean, fantastic. In the morning we headed into Kyoto’s Tofukuji, to join a meeting of a Kyoto deaf church. Henrietta and I both independently had an interest in deaf evangelism for a while now, and we’ve both come across more deaf people in the past year than one would expect. H took a course in sign language while she was at university; I always wanted to but never got to it. And last week, at the house church conference, we met an American couple who are working as evangelists to the deaf here in Japan, and they gave us an introduction to a church in Kyoto, and volunteered kindly to interpret for us. Read more about Say what?