SIMON PHIPPS

Welcome to the final part of my blog series on Dallas Willard's book "The Divine Conspiracy". Please look at the chapter list to move between the other parts of this series. What I learnt From This Chapter The final chapter is an attempt to create a vision of what the divine conspiracy is working towards. It is an incredibly powerful vision and speaks of a life that begins now and carries on into eternity. For me personally the conversation around materialism and the kingdom of heaven were very helpful (I particularly enjoyed the "God doesn't have a brain, and he has never missed it" line). I love Dallas's description of ourself becoming more christlike towards death and the end quote from Augustine's City of God is truly wonderful. Chapter List Introduction Chapter 1 - Entering the Eternal Kind of Life Now Chapter 2 - Gospels of Sin Management Chapter 3 - What Jesus Knew: Our God-Bathed World Chapter 4 - Who is Really Well Off? - The Beatitudes Chap...

We live in an age where mobile technology enables us to know almost anything that there is to be known in a matter of seconds. In our pockets, we have a device that holds more information than all the great libraries of the past. The same is no less true of our access to the bible. Within seconds I can be reading scripture in any number of translations and languages, as well as a multitude of commentaries and bible reading aids. When I was younger people would extol me on the virtues of memorising scripture lest I be thrown into solitary confinement under a communist state and am stripped of my Bible – but the older I get the more and more unlikely this seems. Therefore, with a bible ever at my fingertips, what could the purpose be of spending my time memorising scripture? The Complexity of Neurology When we think about the brain and memorisation we often think of it like a hard drive on a computer. When we memorise something it is like we are downloading a file in...

At the beginning of each month, I write a post about what I have learnt in the moth just gone. It helps me consolidate the information. And I hope that it also helps you to learn and find new resources. 😊 Here is what I learnt this month. Book - Evangelical Theology: An Introduction - Karl Barth * This book has been my long overdue arrival into the world of Karl Barth – Arguably one of the greatest theologians of the 20th Century. The work is based on a series of lectures that Barth gave at Princeton in 1962. It is worth noting that both the translation from German and the historicity of the book means that the term “ evangelical ” meant something rather different then that it does now . Now the term evangelical has come to mean a specific geographical/political Christian movement in America. Then it meant… well, let’s find out in the course of this post. The lectures are around the study of theology and the work of the theologian . I am not going to lie – thi...

A little while ago I listened to a podcast about Friedrich Nietzsche’s book " The Birth of Tragedy " . The speaker was discussing Nietzsche’s love of   Greek Tragedy . A form of play from over 2000 years ago that, in Nietzsche’s eyes, pulled back the veil of reality to give the viewer a glimpse of the chaos that lay behind. Greek Tragedy revealed the ultimate reality that life is meaningless , and that we are but froth tossed about on a cosmic ocean . Nietzche argued that art (in this case in the form of a play) created a safe way for people to explore this complete lack of meaning and total chaos in reality. Nietzsche hated the movement towards Platonism that took place just over 2000 years ago that believed that some kind of order lay behind life. Often times so much of life seems like random chaos . So much of life seems meaningless, and we are left to stare into the abyss, stare into the chasm that is left by so many tragic events. We ...

We recently passed the 100 year mark since the beginning of World War 1. The media was filled with stories of lives lost and destroyed through this tragic event. In the book of revelation, the final book of the bible we see two riders riding white horses. Each of these riders are identified as conquerers. I believe that we are meant to see these riders as juxtapositions. To notice the similarities, but more so to notice the differences. The first rider is followed by three others, war, injustice, and death. I believe that this first rider stands for Rome (or any other empires / civilisations). It set about to conquer, to win, and usher in the pax romana (the peace of rome). But each of its conquests brought with it war, injustice, and death. The second rider on a white horse is given a distinctive description that marks him out as none other than Christ. He is not accompanied by other riders, he stands alone and victorious. Christ’s methodology for conquering comes in direct con...

I grew up by the seaside town of Torquay; trips to the beach are some of my fondest memories. As a tourist destination, people would come from all over the country, just to be beside the ocean. In the book of Revelation , the last book of the bible, John is describing how he sees the world when it is remade into a place of peace.  In his description he adds that the ocean will be no more . To our western minds this is a negative thing, not a positive one; but to a 1 st century Jewish mind-set, the understanding of the ocean is altogether different. We in the west have a romantic view of the ocean. We forget about the countless lives it has claimed , or what it is like to be aboard a boat and be tossed around in a storm . This idea of chaos is the metaphor that John is using, that the ocean stands for the hatred , death and pain that covers the land like a flood. Tom Wright describes Christians as ‘ people of hope ’. This is what defines us, we look forw...