SIMON PHIPPS

Welcome to part 4 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 beatitudes (Matthew 5:3-12) of Jesus are often very misunderstood. Dallas does an amazing job of clearing up many misconceptions, and perhaps the greatest one for me was his statement about how we often take Jesus out of our treatment of the list. The beatitudes only work when we understand who Jesus is and his role in the availability of the kingdom of God. 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 Chapter 5 - The Righteousness of the Kingdom Heart: Beyond the Goodness of Scribes and Pharisees Chapter 6 - Investing in the Heavens: Escaping the Deceptions of Reputations and Wealth Chapter 7 - The Commu...

Welcome to part 3 of my book notes on the book "The Divine Conspiracy". I will be releasing a new part each week, with each part looking at a different chapter. The contents section below has links to all of the different parts of the series (as I release them it will be updated). What I Learnt From This Chapter This chapter was extremely powerful for me. A lot of my theological reading had been in the vein of the "crucufied God" perspective; centring on that idea of a suffering God, and a deeply aggrieved God at the tragic situations of human affairs. The idea of God as the most joyous being ever took me by surprise. To be completely honest it took a lot of time to sink in, with me working towards some kind of synthesis between the idea of God as a suffering God, and God as truly joyous. Once I had come to that place of acceptance it makes perfect sense to me. There is indeed suffering, but there is also great joy in life, and if God is the one who feels suffering ...

Philosopher Alvin Plantinga called the problem of suffering “the only good objection to God”. The often quoted argument goes:  “if God is all good (all benevolent) then God has the desire to end suffering, and if God is all-powerful (omnipotent) then God has the ability to end suffering. Therefore if God does not end suffering, then God is either not all good, or is not all-powerful, and is therefore not God”. As Christians, we need to be able to answer this objection to God, to enable us to “give a reason for the faith that we have in Christ Jesus” (1 Peter 3:15). To this end, I want to try and answer this question to help anybody who finds the problem of suffering to be a sticking point or an obstacle in their faith (an argument to explain the problem of suffering is called a “theodicy”). To begin with, I want to go back to the beginning of it all and look at God. Who is God and what is God like? It is worth noting here that this argument takes as given the f...

Often when I am reading a book, I am thinking " who else was writing around the same time? ", "what other works would the author be aware of? ", " what ideas might they have been building on? ". It takes a lot of time and a lot of googling to find this information out. I started to think about how to make this kind of information more easily available and hit upon the idea of a timeline. Lots of google searching and experiments later I came across time.graphics . From here I have created an interactive timeline of the major works of western theology and philosophy over the last 2500 years - From Plato to N.T. Wright I decided not to include works of eastern theology / philosophy: a. due to my lack of knowledge and b. it would be more difficult to see the aforementioned links due to the inaccessibility to original authors of works from far away) With regards to the works, I have chosen only one work from each author (usually the work they are...

THEOLOGY | 8 Min Read Each month I share some of the things that I have been learning, and the resources that I am using. My hope is to inspire you in your own personal learning and point to some helpful resources. This month I learnt a lot – from lots of different places. Therefore, rather than going through the individual sources I used to learn, I have decided to draw together some common themes from those resources. Please note that any book links within this post are affiliate links. This means that if you purchase anything through these links then I receive a small percentage of the purchase price. Resources C.S. Lewis This month has been quite a C.S. Lewis month. From his works I read Mere Christianity , The Screwtape Letters , The Problem of Pain , The Great Divorce , and Miracles . I thoroughly enjoyed every single book. If you want to get into C. S. Lewis and don’t know where to start then I highly recommend checking out C. S. Lewis Doodle on Youtube....

Last month I started a new section on my blog called ' What I Learnt This Month '.  It is a great place for me to catalogue what I have learnt. I hope that it is also a great place for you to find great new resources to aid in your learning . This post covers what I learnt in December 2017. *Please note that the book link in this post is an affiliate link. This means that I receive a small percentage of the book cost if you buy it through the link* Course - Ancient Philosophy: Aristotle and His Successors This course was created by Pennsylvania University and I completed it through Coursera. The type of course is called a MOOC (Massive Online Open Course). This means three things:       1.  A lot of people are taking it at any one time. 2. It is entirely online. 3. It is entirely free. If you have never heard of a MOOC or never taken one then I highly recommend it. The main three MOOC providers are Coursera , Edx and Udemy . ...