Theology cannot spill over into history. This is the charge of New Testament critics and ancient historians who are convinced that the person who confronts us in the canonical gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) is a fictional figment of the Church’s theological imagination. Few would go as far as the mythicist route of denying […]

Anyone who reads the Old Testament with 21st century Australian eyes will be confronted with a world completely alien to their own. The people, cultures, geographies, politics and religious practices of the Ancient Near East breed confusion for the modern reader. Perhaps most difficult to make sense of, however, is the deity who stands behind many […]

THE ARMCHAIR: A Wounded Traveller Visits a Christian Philosopher Moving to the second leg of my journey, suppose this wounded traveller is ready to ask some tough questions of the Christian faith. I’m disillusioned with the alternative answers I’ve explored. And yet, being an educated person, I know too well that suffering doesn’t just provoke […]

Much ink has been spilled in recent decades expressing the increasingly popular opinion that science has disproved God. Since Darwin’s publication of the Origin of Species in 1859, science has become a tool employed to develop alternative explanations to the historical Christian teaching of the origins of the universe (cosmology, physics) and the origins and […]

UNIVERSAL PROBLEM: Suffering Challenges Everyone’s View Christianity is not the only one on trial; suffering poses a challenge to every worldview. No matter who you are, you must make sense of suffering somehow. So let me begin with a question. How does what you believe explain and answer the expectations and experiences of the suffering […]

Do we really need another event? The evangelical scene is littered with conferences and events 365 days a year. Those wearied by this event culture tend to write it off as the product of a consumerist era, or as a fly-in fly-out whirlwind to stroke the ego of a speaker. They’re suspect as to whether […]

Objections abound concerning the truth and relevance of the Christian Bible. Isn’t it out-dated? Hasn’t the text been corrupted? Didn’t the church embellish the stories to suit their political/theological ends? Arising from the arenas of textual studies, history, psychology, science, metaphysics, anthropology, archaeology, ethics, or philosophy, myriad arguments are launched against the Christian claim that the […]

Here’s my story: I became a Christian through reading the Bible. After starting in the first pages of Genesis and laboriously trudging through a book that raised more questions than it answered, I eventually was captivated by the towering figure of Jesus of Nazareth in the four gospels. Coming to trust the credibility of Jesus’ […]