Bible Stories

The central Christian view of race is that there is only one race: the human race! As the apostle Paul said to the Athenians, ‘God created every race of men of one stock to inhabit the whole earth’s surface.’ At the pivotal points where God dealt with humanity -when he created us, Read more

The modern family differs very strikingly from families in ancient times. We talk today about the ‘nuclear’ family — the somewhat isolated unit of mother, father and children. The historical reasons for this are quite well-known. Read more

‘God created mankind in his own image: male and female he created them,’ says the writer of Genesis. In Greek legend Zeus first created a sexless being. Later, in a fit of divine anger, he split this into man and woman. The division of humankind into two sexes is thus understood to be an imperfect state, a weakening of mankind’s power, because the two sexes pull in different directions. Read more

Art has a lot to do with religion. Most of the ‘art-works’ unearthed by archaeologists link in with some religious practice or other. Until recent times the church was the most important patron of the arts. Contemporary artists regularly discuss their work in ’spiritual’ terms. Read more

We are ‘flesh‘, made of the ‘dust of the earth’. We are part of creation; we eat, excrete, procreate, suffer and die just like the other creatures. The very idea of ‘dust’ describes our creaturely status. No humanist could speak more definitely of our lowly origins. Far from making us too otherworldly, the Bible cuts us down to size: ‘You take away their breath, they die and return to the dust,’ says the Psalmist. But if the Bible writers are realistic, they are in no way negative. The Bible affirms life, and joyfully encourages us to enjoy life’s pleasures. It tells us that if God has seen fit to create us as physical beings there is nothing in our make-up or anatomy to be ashamed of. Read more

God’s true image

Humanity’s fall is not just a theological statement; human history and experience show us that the image has been defaced in us all. As Paul puts it, ‘We have all fallen short of God’s standard’. But does this mean that God’s image has never been seen in its fullness since the beginning? No, because Jesus Christ is the perfect image of God. That is the New Testament’s bold declaration. The task of his mission was to lead us back to God and to restore the image in us.

This is where the New Testament connects the study of Christ with the study of humankind. Because Jesus is both true likeness of God and perfect man, he is the promise of a renewed humanity. To be ‘in Christ‘ is to belong to a ‘new humanity‘, just as to be ‘in Adam’ is to belong to the old, sinful humanity. The apostle Paul wrote of the ‘new nature which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator’. As the ‘image of the invisible God‘, Jesus is the model of what men and women were created to be. Read more

In some ways we are no different from any other species on earth. We are creatures subject to the usual conditions of space and time. But we know that human beings ’stand out’ from other beings in several ways. Some of these are plain enough; they partly explain humankind’s superiority over other creatures: our creativity, our intellectual, linguistic and cultural achievements.

But the Bible adds a further and remarkable point. People stand out not by what they do but by what they are. This is expressed right at the beginning, in the creation story of Genesis 1. God said, ‘Let us make man in our image after our likeness.’ It is a theme taken up and developed in other parts of the Bible: we are not like the other creatures; we share God’s nature in a special way. Read more

One writer has confessed, the longer I live, the more faith I have in Providence, and the less faith I have in my interpretations of Providence.’

Providence is the care God takes of all existing things. So its range and depth are immense. The word itself is taken from

Abraham’s promise to his son Isaac on the way to sacrifice: ‘My Son, God will provide the lamb for the burnt offering.’ ‘There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow,’ says Hamlet in Shakespeare’s play. This is God’s rule as moral governor over all the universe.

There is also God’s forgiveness of the sinner. God’s great acts of salvation are all part of God’s activity in providence: Read more

Modern science developed in one place only, and over a restricted period of time. The place was Western Europe; the time, from the sixteenth to the seventeenth centuries. It is not immediately obvious why conditions were then particularly favourable. Much of the intellectual background of Western Europe at that time

“I have shown man the glory of your works, as much of their unending wealth as my feeble intellect was able to grasp.”

Johannes Kepler was not original — it was derived from classical antiquity. In technical invention, the Chinese had reached a higher level of sophistication than the Europeans, and at a much earlier stage. Why then was the decisive step to modern science not taken centuries before in Greece or China? Read more

The implications then of the opening words of the Bible, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth’, are immense, greater than anything we can conceive. The first words of John’s Gospel re-echo the words in the beginning‘. The beginning of what? The author of Genesis doubtless meant the beginning of the world, or better the beginning of God’s creative activity. It is a theme unimaginable to Greek philosophers or contemporary secular science.

Greek understandings of the beginning

Thoughtful Greeks, in the five or six centuries before Christ, had great interest in the question, in what sense did the world have a beginning? Read more