I happened to notice as I came to write that this is my 150th post on this blog. It’s just going to contain the same ramblings as I had in mind anyway, but I thought I’d make note of it anyway! Today also saw the highest number of unique visitors reading my blog since I added in a counter, with 54 when I last looked, beating my previous record of 53 on 9th February 2005.
I’ve just got back from CU Open House, where Ian had his head shaved. He foolishly promised while on houseparty to submit to this indignity if £500 pounds could be raised in donations to the Mission. With such an incentive, it didn’t take long to raise this sum, and so Ian had to bid farewell to his fine head of hair!
The talk in CU was really good this evening. Ian Parry was talking on “The Return of the King”. Swithun’s head dropped in disappointment when Ian said he took an amillenialist view, but I thought Ian did a good job of focusing on the big picture without getting into all the details of pre or post trib and the like. He really did a good job of emphasising that it isn’t just our souls that are being redeemed, but all of creation, and that’s something massively exciting! I agreed pretty much with every word, and in cross-referencing to the rest of the Bible, especially when it came to application, Ian Parry referred to the some of the same passages that I immediately thought of when he introduced the point. It’s good for me to be challenged with other views, of course, but it’s also nice to have something to agree with wholeheartedly!
Speaking of disagreement, as I walked back from Open House with Matt Bater, he said that last week’s talk on the Body of Christ was one of the few talks in CU that he’d had problems with. The speaker (whose name I’ve forgotten) was laying heavy emphasis on the issue of . Ben Carswell brought up the importance of truth in a question at the end, but I don’t think his exchange with the speaker made things very clear. I tried to get them to clarify by asking “What is truth important for?” Truth is important, but we need to be clear how that applies.
For example, doctrinal correctness is not a criteria for whether or not someone is a Christian – what makes someone a Christian is faith in Jesus Christ. There are certain beliefs you need to hold before you can put your faith in Jesus, such as in his lordship, that he rose from the dead and will forgive sin. But it is the faith in him that saves, rather than mere mental assent to those facts. Christianity is about following a person, not a set of beliefs.
Similarly, whether someone holds true beliefs and doctrine or not has no bearing on whether we love them. But it may have a great deal of bearing on what Christian activities we are able to do with them. From a purely practical point of view, it’s hard to co-operate in evangelism if there is disagreement on the fundamentals of your message.
Also, the Bible is clear that right teaching is vitally important, because we need the right knowledge in order to have the right living. Christian love and unity means confronting error, not avoiding it. The balance of things is “speaking the truth in love”, and you cannot seperate one from the other and be living rightly as a Christian. The speaker last week was very strong on the love and unity side of things, but perhaps not enough on the importance of truth and purity. It’s another example of Christians not being extreme enough – we need to go to both extremes of love and truth at the same time.
Another highlight of the evening was the video of the houseparty. Three quarters of the way through the compilation of video and photo from the houseparty, I thought I was going to get away with just a brief appearance in a photo. But no such luck – they did of course include my leading the audience of the Talent Show in singing “Dem Bones”, just as I got to “The back bone’s connected to the bum bone!”