How do we apply Acts with expectant faith to produce worship in our hearts, without either (a) absolutising and normalising astonishing one-off miracles or (b) historicising those same miracles and making them to be of purely historical interest such that we don't expect God to work mighty wonders today?
Read moreMiracles and Make-Believe and Acts 13
Feuerbach was an influential secularist whose thought was widely held to have demolished religion. He claimed to show that the Christian God and Heaven are merely the projection of our own best ideals. Therefore God only exists in as much as He is the object of our faith and mature reflection will reveal that to be truly human we need to replace love for God with love for Man and faith in God with faith in Man.
Read moreThe Message of Grace; Acts 14:1-7
the chief lesson from the narrative is that what was being opposed, and was also being confirmed by God with miraculous signs and wonders was the message of his grace. I take it that "the message of grace" in 14:3 and "the good news" in 14:7 are synonymous. The good news = the message of grace.
Read moreOpen but Cautious? Or Cautious and Closed?
Two trustworthy pastor friends recently told me they had seen God healing in response to their prayers and against their expectations. One is a charismatic, one isn't. The non-charismatic said a fascinating thing. I don't think this is proveable either way, but it is interesting:
"I wonder if we are seeing more of God healing at the moment because we are moving from a modernist phase in Western culture towards a more pagan phase. Might it be that in a Modernist phase a healing will be ridiculed and explained away, and therefore not act as a sign of the gospel, but that in a more pagan phase a healing may work more powerfully to the surrounding culture as a sign of the gospel?"
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