Increasingly, the sort of Bible studies I attend go something like this (including the ones I lead – I just follow the trend!):

1. We read a short passage of the Bible – one verse each as is the custom in every Bible study group I have ever attended. This makes a rather quirky patchwork of translations as you usually have 4 NIVs, 2x the Message, 2x the Living Bible, 1 ESV (that me), 1 KJV (that’s the person who couldn’t find their regular Bible), 1 Amplified and a couple of others.
2. The Bible study leader announces three or four questions, and people get into groups to ‘discuss’
3. The people get into groups and chat about random stuff for a few minutes before remembering they were supposed to be answering questions
4. People answer the questions with whatever comes into their heads (after all, they’ve come completely fresh to the passage – they haven’t prepared or read it in advance). This leads to the following types of contribution:
a) basically correct but bluntly stated answers to the questions (e.g. “we shouldn’t sin”)
b) one or two embarassing hermeneutical blunders which hopefully are politely corrected, but often go undetected
c) a few discussions going off on a complete tangent that misses altogether the main point of the passage
d) hopefully, the odd genuine insight
5. Now we get back together into a big group. And guess what? Each group regurgitates everything they discussed for a second time. Hopefully some of the dross is filtered out in this process, but it still usually takes a considerable time for people to report back.
6. Time is virtually up, so the Bible study leader quickly blurts out the answers he was hoping people would give. A few “oh yeah’s” go round the room as people realise what the passage was actually saying.

OK, so I am exaggerating a bit, but you get the general picture. I am a firm believer in the importance of Christians meeting together in small groups. And I also believe that devoting some time to Bible study during those meetings is essential. The early church, amongst other things, devoted themselves to “the apostles teaching”. Now I know they didn’t have an apostle in every small group meeting, so what did they do? Did they have a “discussion” like the one outlined earlier? Or perhaps someone with a gift of teaching shared something for 10-20 minutes? Maybe the latter occurred and from that a discussion broke out, about the issues raised or questions people had.

I can’t help thinking that this might be a more appropriate model for small groups. For one thing, it would allow a lot more ground to be covered in the short time that is available. It does of course require that the person doing the teaching has something worth saying and is able to communicate it well. Making the change might also be controversial – I imagine that there could be quite a bit of resistance to people having to listen to a “sermon” when they were used to having a discussion.

I would be interested to hear from people who have tried different approaches to teaching in small groups. Do you preach a sermon? How important is it that everyone contributes to this part of the meeting? Does anyone want to defend the discussion model?

Its not that often that I hear an evangelical preacher choose one of the miracle stories from the gospels or Acts as a sermon text. The epistles (or if we must go into the gospels, the parables) are generally thought much more useful for basing expository thoughts on. But where I have heard them, they fall into one of two general stereotypes (depending on whether you are at a charismatic or noncharismatic church):

The Charismatic Miracle Sermon

1. This miracle happened and so did loads of other ones
2. Jesus is the same yesterday, today and forever so God still wants to do loads of miracles
3. Jesus said “you will do greater things than I have doing” which means we ought to be performing even more impressive miracles than raising the dead
4. Altar Call – Come forward if you are ill to get prayer for healing.

The Noncharismatic Miracle Sermon

1. This miracle happened to prove that Jesus is God
2. We’re not God so we can’t do miracles ourselves
3. The apostles were a special case because the Bible wasn’t written yet
4. Altar Call – Come forward to become a Christian

Better Miracle Sermons?

Having spent the last two years studying Mark, and also a year of studying Acts, I’m convinced that we can do better than this. The miracle stories are a small piece of a larger story, and the context they are in both illuminates and is illuminated by the particular passage being studied. So here’s a challenge to any of you who are planning to preach on a miracle – surprise us with something different.

I’ve had a rather busy week, writing some essays and researching how to PInvoke the ACM API using .NET. But here’s some of the interesting sites I’ve been looking at this week:

– My team leader in my previous job, Richard Abbott, spends much of his spare time studying Hebrew and related languages. He has a growing collection of resources on his Old Testament Studies website. His recent article on Balaam was interesting.
– Sven was in fine form last week, insightfully pointing out key areas for reformation in the church as well as the delightful charismatic book of modern prayer (I especially liked the opening verse of the processional hymn). On a more serious note, his N T Wright-esque kingdom / eschatalogy article is worth a read.
– Mark Robert’s excellent series on the TNIV is well worth tuning in to. 9 posts in and he’s only just got round to discussing some of the issues of controversy.
– Tim Challies provoked some interesting discussion with his post on Three Views of Sunday
– Another new version of the amazing .NET open source implementation Mono is out. Where do they get the time to do all this?
– Two new (and free) guitar amp VST’s appeared this week: Tubester and Cortex.
– And finally, Andrew Fountain from Toronto has a remarkable amount in common with me – as well as being a former student at ECS, Southampton University he is a Calvinist from a reformed baptist background, who now attends a New Frontiers church. Check his site out.

My church appears to be trying an experiment next Sunday (27th of Feb).

In the morning a family service is advertised with the special feature of doughnuts. It is also promised to be short, and have lots of puppet shows and dramas etc.

In the evening, writer and theologian Dr. Sam Storms will be coming to speak. For an idea of his emphasis, see my recent review of his book One Thing.

Both meetings have been widely advertised, so now with bated breath we await to see what has the greatest crowd-pulling effect – doughnuts or theologians. No prizes for guessing which one I’m looking forward to the most. Will there, I wonder, be any visitors who come to both, or is this the beginning of the polarisation of the church into the eaters and the thinkers?

Over the last couple of years I have been doing a number of self-study theology courses with ICI (who badly need to find a more up to date photo for their homepage), which is the UK branch of Global University, a Pentecostal university. This last year I have been (very slowly) working my way through their course on Acts. As part of the coursework, I have to prepare my “testimony for a brief yet effective delivery of the gospel”.

In particular, I have to include three main points (you might notice hints of the strong Arminian bias of the course!):
– Though God made a perfect world, Satan persuaded humanity to sin, bringing bondage, disease and death to all (Rom 5:12).
– In spite of our sin, God loves us and made a way to save us by sending Jesus Christ, His Son, to take the punishment for sin (Rom 5:8; 6:23).
– God sets us free when we choose to believe and receive Jesus Christ as our Saviour and Lord (Rom 10:9-10).

Until now, I had refrained from pitching in to the considerable debate amongst Christian bloggers caused by Adrian Warnock posting his “simple gospel in 10 points”, but since I want to finish this coursework off properly, I plan to post my own slightly modified version of the ICI three point simple gospel some time in the next few days.

Two people have independently asked me whether it would have been possible for Jesus to have married and had children. (The idea behind the question being that there might be a theological reason why this should be unthinkable). This is the sort of question I don’t tend to bother answering, as hypothetical questions often cannot be answered with any degree of certainty, and the answer is in many ways quite irrelevant. But since I was asked, I provide a few thoughts here.

He Didn’t

The most important answer to this question is to say “he didn’t”. Thanks to books such as “The Da Vinci Code”, the idea that Jesus could have secretly got married and had children has far more credibility than it deserves (which is precisely none). As Craig Blomberg says in his review of the book “there is not a shred of historical evidence that Jesus ever married Mary Magdalene (or anyone else) or ever fathered children.”

Personal Reasons

There were, of course, some very obvious reasons why Jesus would not want to marry and have children. He believed he was sent by God on a mission to die. Caring for a wife and children in the way that God intended a good husband to do would not be merely inconvenient, but impossible. Also, he required that people loved him more than their own families (Matt 10:37). This would hardly be an easy thing for his own wife to put up with!

There is no reason however to suspect that Jesus was in any way anti-marriage. The marriage service famously takes Jesus’ miracle in John 2 as an endorsement of marriage, but even without this episode we have evidence that he believed it was good. His thoughts on divorce showed how seriously he took it, and he appealed to creation as its basis (Matt 19:4-5). He was fine with Peter being married, and happy to visit and even heal his in-laws (Mark 1:30,31).

What God Has Joined Together

So what are the potential theological problems that Jesus getting married might cause? The first is that we don’t know what it would mean for the incarnate Son of God to “become one flesh” (Mark 10:8) with a finite fallen human being. The problem is not with the Jesus “becoming flesh”. He had already done that (John 1:14). In fact John argues forcefully against those who found this idea unpalletable in his epistles (1 John 4:2, 2 John 1:7).

Neither is the problem that that the sex inherrent in “becoming one” is sinful. Though the Christian church may have been influenced by those who taught that the body was sinful and the spirit pure, this type of idea has no basis in Scripture. Sex was created by God, and is a good thing in the context of marriage. And the idea that Jesus should have close physical contact with sinful humans is also not a problem – he was a baby in Mary’s womb and nursed at her breasts. He touched the lepers and the children, he let a woman wash his feet with her hair and John lay his head on his chest. There was nothing distant about the way he interacted with humanity.

So it boils down to what exactly is meant by the husband and wife being “no longer two, but one”. This is more than just the oneness of a physical relationship – it is a joining by God, and somewhat mysterious. It is therefore not easy to say whether Jesus could theoretically have been joined to someone in this way. It is however, quite helpful that he was not, as Paul contrasts in 1 Cor 6:16-17 the ‘oneness’ that comes from having sex, and the oneness we have with Jesus. It would be awkward to say the least to have a wife that was “one with him” in one sense, and others who were “one with him” in another.

Grandson of God?

The second difficult issue is – what about the children? Would they be in some sense “divine”? Would they be born with “original sin?”. We might say that children born of sinners are sinners, just as people who touched an unclean man became unclean themselves. But Jesus had a power that transcended those normal rules. He touched the lepers and they became clean, rather than polluting him. And what would be the spiritual status of someone who was the son of the son of God? How would they then relate to both Jesus and God the Father as father? Answering these questions requires a good deal of unsubstatiated guesswork and I’m not even prepared to try.

Conclusion

So I’m pretty much back where I started. The important point is – it didn’t happen, and it’s probably a good thing. This means that all human beings must relate to Jesus in exactly the same way – as their Saviour and Lord. Salvation means for each one of us to become “one with him” and to be adopted into his family, relating to his Father as our own also, and to love him more than anything else.