Monthly Archives: December 2017

Did Jesus Exist?

Well, of course I am going to answer that question in the affirmative because I claim to know Him personally. For myself, I’m in absolutely no doubt at all; I know many of my readers hold this view too and this piece is not really aimed at them, although they will find it encouraging.

But I appreciate that this faith position is not necessarily held by many people; for many today, the whole question of Jesus and His existence is irrelevant to life in today’s world. And I can understand that; I thought like that once too.

But the case for an historical Jesus is actually strong, in terms of documentary evidence. In this beautifully-balanced piece, Prof. Lawrence Mykytiuk presents the contemporary and near-contemporary evidence for the actual existence of Jesus. It’s very scholarly and you can go in as deep as you want to (with his comprehensive end-notes to the article) but it’s also easy to follow. I heartily recommend it.

Click the text/graphic below to go to the article.

(BAR referring to the ‘Biblical Archaeology Review‘ magazine)

Honouring the Bible

Over the last couple of weeks, it may look as if my blog posts have been hammering the Bible; the very Scriptures which are known and loved by billions all around the world – including myself.

But nothing could be further from the truth. As with all my posts that might appear critical of the Bible, I am simply trying to demonstrate the problems that occur when people – we everyday, ordinary humans – use and interpret the Scriptures in ways they were never meant to be used or interpreted.

You might rightly say, ‘Who are you to say that people are reading it wrongly? Surely they can read it how they like! Who’s to say what’s right and wrong?’. And I would agree. No one person or organisation has the monopoly on all the Bible’s meaning and truth.

Rather than demonstrating the futility of it all, instead it actually illustrates God’s wisdom in giving us such a broad book from which to draw our own spiritual conclusions. God hasn’t set it all down in black-and-white; if Scripture interpretation were that easy or if it was really that ‘plain’ in its meaning, then we would not have 40,000+ Church denominations, all of whom would claim to have the correct revelation and all of whom would call themselves Christian. So, here’s a piece by Richard Murray that hopefully wraps up the thoughts and ideas of the last few posts, on a positive note:

“Let’s avoid Bible bashing.

“It’s certainly okay to bash carnal man’s way of WRONGFULLY READING the Bible, but never the Bible itself.

“Don’t worship it either.

“But do honor and respect the supernatural promises it carries, the blood of the martyrs who died so that you could have it, and, most of all, the wondrous narrative imbedded in it which reveals the life of Jesus Christ through anointed “allegory,” terrific “types,” brilliant “shadows,” miraculous “metaphors” and spiritual “symbols.”

“Better yet, rescue the Bible from literalists by learning to read it by the Holy Spirit, the way the early church fathers did. You won’t be sorry. There is MORE to the Bible than meets the eye, not LESS.

“We have to be careful to not have a theology based on resentment. What you have resentment TOWARD, you will not be able to receive truth FROM.

“Don’t resent the Scripture.

“Revive it!”

–  Richard Murray

A 14-Point Rebuttal to The Nashville Statement

Some months ago, you may remember that a group in the USA published the ‘Nashville Statement‘, their statement on their position regarding human sexuality.

Unsurprisingly, their statement triggered a whole lot of controversy amongst Christians, especially (but not limited to) those – like me – who are affirmers of LGBTQ+ people and their relationships.

In September, I read an excellent rebuttal to the Nashville Statement, which I reproduce here for your upbuilding. It makes for excellent reading with its reasonable counter-arguments.

Here’s the article, written by Eric Reitan, quoted verbatim:


A 14-Point Rebuttal to The Nashville Statement from a Straight Cis Christian Man

In the wake of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood’s “Nashville Statement,” RD [Religion Dispatches, the website this article is from – Ed] published commentaries by Daniel Schultz, who called the manifesto “less of a theological statement than a Facebook post,” and Candace Chellew-Hodge, who argued that “this kind of damage has only been done to the LGBT community because we have given them the authority to do it.” Below, Eric Reitan opts for the point-by-point rebuttal that, we felt, might be of greater utility to readers with family or friends who find this sort of thing compelling. ⎼ eds

I am a straight cisgender Christian man, but for years I have listened to my LGBT neighbors, made LGBT friends, and vicariously shared in their struggles and triumphs. As an ethicist, I’ve wrestled with the lessons of those experiences—lessons that recently culminated in a book on same-sex marriage and Christian love. Based on that work, there is much I want to say to the authors of the Nashville Statement, who sought to reaffirm hostile conservative Christian views on the (presumably sinful) existence of LGBT people. But since the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood’s manifesto has 14 articles, let me limit myself to 14 points of my own.

  1. You do not speak for all Christians. In fact, there are many faithful Christians, across denominations, who strongly disagree with you. And although you write your manifesto with the kind of confidence that suggests you can’t possibly be mistaken about God’s will, that confidence doesn’t make you right (but does raise important questions about humility and hubris).
  2. The Christians who disagree with you cannot be dismissed as nothing but sell-outs to secular culture. In my book, The Triumph of Love: Same-Sex Marriage and the Christian Love Ethic, I argue that Christian support for same-sex marriage flows from nothing less central to Christian faith than Christ’s command that we love our neighbors as ourselves. I’m hardly the only Christian LGBT ally who thinks so. You may think we’re wrong, but if so you need to wrestle with our Christian arguments rooted in Christian values, not caricature us as cultural accommodationists.
  3. You cannot hide behind the “love the sinner, hate the sin” mantra. Of course we can love people who do sinful things. But the question is whether things like same-sex marriage and gender-affirming surgery are among those sinful things. Sometimes it’s unloving to take something to be a sin in the first place. Can I love my diabetic neighbor properly if I think it is sinful for her to use insulin? Of course not. If our condemnations leave a trail of dead bodies and broken lives, they might be out of sync with the law of love.
  4. The first act of Christian love is compassionate, empathetic attention. This was the first thing the Good Samaritan did on that Jericho road: he paid attention to the robbery victim. Likewise, we must listen to our LGBT neighbors. We must hear their stories. And we can’t shrug off this demand because we think we already know the truth based on what the Bible teaches. When teachings we support lead our LGBT neighbors to cry out in suffering or outrage or despair, love does not permit us to plug up our ears with Bible verses.
  5. And love does not permit us to use the Bible to slam people down. C.S. Lewis once warned that “we must not use the Bible (our fathers too often did) as a sort of encyclopedia out of which texts…can be taken for use as weapons.” It is tempting, when LGBT persons and their allies challenge inherited teachings, for conservatives to pull out “clobber passages” to beat their critics into silence. Anyone who cares about the law of love would do well to avoid this temptation.
  6. Speaking of the Bible, human theories are always subject to error—and that includes your theory that the Bible is not subject to error. Let’s return to our friend C.S. Lewis, who had a high view of Scripture, but was no biblical inerrantist. In his Reflections on the Psalms he insisted that the “human qualities” of the biblical authors show through in the text in the form of “naivety, error, contradiction” and even wickedness. There are many Christian theories about the Bible. Your theory needs to be weighed against the alternatives.
  7. There is more than one interpretation of the “proof texts” invoked to condemn same-sex intimacy and impose rigid gender expectations on those who feel strangled by them. Biblical scholars, trained in the original languages and adept at reading texts in their cultural and historical contexts, do not all agree with your interpretations. Oh, and you might want to wrestle more deeply with that “In Christ there is neither male nor female” bit.
  8. There is more than one interpretation of the Genesis creation story, in which God created Adam and then fashioned Eve to be his companion. The lessons you draw from it imply that gay men, unsuited for the kind of helpmate God created for Adam, must go through life without any helpmate, and lesbians, similarly unsuited for the kind of helpmate God gave Eve, should go through life alone. That’s an interesting take on a story in which God says, “It is not good that Adam be alone”—but it is neither the only one nor the most plausible.
  9. Paying attention to scientific research about human sexuality and gender is not putting science above God. When scientists explore these topics, they are turning their attention to our neighbors with the aim of accurately reporting what they find. Science can help us see our neighbors more honestly, without biases and prejudices. And that’s an important part of loving our neighbors as ourselves—something Jesus lifted up as a core piece of living in accord with God’s will.
  10. Based on the weight of the evidence, social and behavioral scientists overwhelmingly agree that trying to change a person’s psychologies and dispositional structures to conform to rigid social expectations is not a realistic option for LGBT people. Conservative Christians tout a few studies that say such change is possible. But even if we trust them (and there are reasons not to), what these statistical outliers show is that the vast majority of, if not all, attempts to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity will fail. What’s more, as those who have survived such “change efforts” attest, any change that does occur is merely behavioral—little more than an attempt to escape abuse by adhering to conservative norms through repression and self-denial, rather than undergoing some religious revelation that prompts a lasting internal identity shift.
  11. If you say that every same-sex relationship is sinful, consistency demands that whenever it falls within your power to do so, you work to break up every loving, monogamous, faithful same-sex couple, and encourage your community to advocate for broken relationships, broken homes, and people stripped of things that bring meaning and joy. Perhaps that is the true intent of this statement. But if that’s the order you’re giving to your congregants, you must honestly confront the fact that your LGBT neighbors will experience this in exactly the way that loving, married heterosexual couples would: as an assault on their family, freedom, and happiness.
  12. In your statement, your understanding of “heterosexual immorality” offers heterosexuals a place to express their sexuality: in marriage. But the categorical rejection of “homosexual immorality” condemns any expression of a homosexual orientation at all, ever, even in the context of a lifelong partnership of loving fidelity that may well be rooted in a Christian understanding of God’s divine plan. To treat every expression of someone’s sexuality as immoral is to impose on them a burden of self-repression enormously heavier than any you would ever dream of placing on your straight neighbors. If you love your LGBT neighbors, you will pay attention to how this burden affects those who actually try to bear it. You might learn the effect can be soul-crushing.
  13. If you have a theory about human sexuality and gender and you learn that communities teaching this theory have driven LGBT persons to despair—in fact, that acting upon this theory is a leading cause of the astronomical rates of substance abuse, homelessness, and even suicide among an entire swath of God’s people—then you may want to rethink your theory. And if you care about your theories more than you care about the lessons of compassionate attention to your LGBT neighbors, you may want to rethink your claim that you love them. And if extracting rigid gender and sexual requirements from the Bible (or natural law traditions) matters more to you that living by the law of love that Christ laid down, you may want to ask whether that comes from your allegiance to Christ or from some other motive.
  14. If you’re going to make public pronouncements about the lives of your LGBT neighbors, you should first immerse yourself in their struggles. Break bread with them. Form enduring friendships—and not just with those who, like abused children hungry for scraps of parental approval, are putting on a brave front while carrying the weight of “costly discipleship” you require. Maybe you should also break bread with the parents of all those gay and trans Christian teens who killed themselves. You know the ones. They believed you when you said “the pardon and power” of God’s grace could heal them of their “sinful” desires. But when those desires didn’t go away, they decided God must have rejected them. And so they rejected themselves in acts of final self-obliteration.

Love for your LGBT neighbors calls you to pay deep and sustained attention to them in all their rich diversity. Until you do, you have no authority to make pronouncements that impact their lives, and your platitudes about love ring hollow.

– Eric Reitan


For your reference, the Nashville Statement is here as a PDF file (on my servers), and here is the link to the original article quoted above.

And the link to the Nashville Statement itself is here.

An article I wrote about the tyrannical ‘Article 10’ of the Nashville Statement. This article contains links (at the end) to more articles about the Nashville Statement.

(All links open in new tabs)

 

Fourteen Months

This entry is part 21 of 38 in the series Fiona

I had a huge article written up for today, but now is not the time to share it*.

Fourteen months after losing Fiona, I am spending my second Christmas without her.

It’s hard. But life goes on. It’s not hard because it’s Christmas, as happens for some people. I actually don’t like Christmas, especially the commercialism. No it’s just hard because I feel like, I dunno, as if one of my legs is missing or something. Part of me that was extremely important to me has gone, at least for now. The light of her presence is no longer in my house.

And that’s what’s hard.

Just  for once, I have nothing else in particular to share. But wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, I pray God’s blessing on you today. It’s a privilege for me to share even these little posts with you 🙂


*[Edit]: The article I had planned to publish today is actually here

That Dratted Verse…

I have to be honest here. One of the verses I sometimes wish wasn’t in the Bible is the one found in 2 Timothy 3:16 . Here’s what it says in my favourite translation, the NIV (also including v.17 so that the sentence is complete):

You see, the reason I feel like I do is because that verse has been so abused and misued by people over the centuries that it has actually become the source of huge argument, pain, suffering and domination. In my opinion, it is definitely a candidate for the prize of the most destructive verse in the Bible. This verse alone validates all the Scripture-bombing, all the blasting people with Scriptures and weaponization of these sacred texts.

This is in no way what St. Paul intended the verse to be used for, of course. Paul was very much a gentle man, converted completely from the Law-ridden, violent Pharisee that he had once been. Indeed, he was the Apostle of Grace, and more or less everything he wrote was linked with that Grace in some way. Remember, then, that this (what we call a) ‘verse’ is taken from what was just a simple letter of practical, pastoral support to Timothy, a young protegé of Paul. It was never intended to be used by bullying and manipulative people to assert that not only is Scripture itself always correct, but also [by some unexplained and unconnected twist of ‘logic’] that what WE are telling you that any given Scripture means is also correct and therefore you must believe what we tell you, and this to the exclusion of what you feel the Spirit is saying, all your reason, other reading, others’ opinions, logic, your conscience, and science especially, and so on.

Writing it down like this exposes this Scripture abuse for what it is. But still there remains the ‘problem’ of the verse – how do we interpret it; how do we use it for good and for our own (and others’) upbuilding?

Well, here’s a piece by Ken Fawcett, written in response to a Facebook post by Don Francisco, on the subject of Biblical inerrancy, where he quoted the C. S. Lewis passage I published on here the other day. Ken puts it really well; I really recommend what he says:


“There are so many problems with the way people interpret that verse [2Tim 3:16] to argue for inerrancy that you could write a whole book on that verse and it wouldn’t fit in this world!

1. Circular logic. If I wrote a book and said “these words are all inspired by God” would you believe me? You can’t just say “the Bible is inspired because the Bible says it’s inspired because the Bible…” you get it.

2. The verse does not have a verb. The “is” is placed arbitrarily in translations. It could also translate “all scripture that is god breathed is…” so depending on the translation the verse could be suggesting that some scriptures are god-breathed, and some aren’t!!

3. Even if the usual rendering of grammar is correct, the word “god breathed” does not mean inerrant or perfect. Humans are created by God’s breath but aren’t inerrant. The word “theopneustos” [which is the Greek word we translate as ‘God-breathed’ – ed] is not used anywhere else and we have no idea what the author meant by it. I find it comical that those who authored the Chicago statement on Biblical Inerrancy believe in the “sufficiency” of scripture, but in order to advance their inerrancy agenda had to come up with 19 Articles written in 20th century English to explain how the Bible is inerrant, and what inerrancy means and doesn’t mean. What do we do with passages that contradict each other? Scramble around to find a peculiar solution… What do you do with passages that contradict known historical or scientific facts? Oh those historians and scientists have an agenda to destroy Christianity… It gets ridiculous.

Furthermore, the word “theopneustos” is used only a few times in Ancient Greek literature and we don’t know exactly what it means. One can speculate by looking at its root, theos and pneustos, and infer “god-breathed” or “god-spirited” but it’s not definitely. Etymology does not confirm semantics, just like butterfly does not mean a flying butter and a chairman is not a crossbreed between a man and a chair. Moreover the morpheme “theos” is not a Christian monopoly word and is used in Greek for words that have nothing to do with the Christian God, often just meaning “very” or “really”. “Theobarelo” means a big barrel, “theoptochos” means very poor, and “theotrelos” means utterly mad. So “theopneustos” could just mean really really inspiring. It’s such an issue how it gets translated, but when it is used in a definitive way that shapes how we read all the rest of the scriptures, that is beyond any reasonable application demanded by this passage.

4. We need to address what “scripture” means. Even the Old Testament canon was likely not settled then (depends on when we date 2 Timothy and when we date the settling of the OT canon). The author certainly did not have in mind the 66-book Protestant bible. In fact the author a few verses earlier quotes from Targum Jonathan, an Aramaic interpretation of the Torah, when he mentions “Jannes and Jambles” taking on Moses. The author uses “graphē” for “scripture”, which literally means “writing”, rather than “graphais hagiais” (cf Romans 1:2, “holy writings”). This may suggest that author’s scope of “scripture” is broader. So, do we regard the Targums as also inspired? The Mishnah? How about the Apocrypha, which was canonised by the same church that canonised our “scriptures”? How about the Pseudepigrapha, which includes the Book of Enoch quoted by Jude? What measure do we use to determine what counts as scripture that is true to the historical and linguistic context of 2 Tim 3:16.

5. Let’s assume we somehow arrive at an objectively valid frame of what counts as scripture and what doesn’t. But then, which stages of scripture are inspired? For example, Paul spoke his words and a scribe wrote it down. Were Paul’s spoken words inspired or were the scribe’s writing them down inspired? Also we don’t have any of the original autographs of any of the books. Are the copies inspired? There are so many discrepancies between the copied manuscripts, but are they all inspired? Are the translations we have inspired? If they are, why is there so much difference? If not, why aren’t they? Many inerrantists argue that the Holy Spirit inspired the scriptures to “preserve His Word” but what did he stop at the autographs, when obviously to preserve His Word He would need to have inspired it all the way down to the translations. And specifically about the Old Testament scriptures, was the Hebrew Bible inspired or the Septuagint? If it’s the former, why do Christ and the apostles consistently quote from the Septuagint? If it’s the Septuagint that’s inspired why do most modern translations use the Hebrew? And also I’m sure you know that the Hebrew did not have vowel markers. The vowel markers were added in the 10th century to complete the Masoratic text. A different vowel marker can change the meaning of the whole text and subsequently our theology. Are the vowel markers inspired? Why, or why not?

These are points that must be considered and answered if you want to take 2 Tim 3:16 as proof that all scripture is inerrant and God’s Word.” — Ken Fawcett


Thanks, Ken. Superb stuff.

St. Paul says the Scripture is ‘useful’. He doesn’t say it’s ‘essential’, ‘binding’, ‘Law’ or any other such thing that implies that we must follow it to the letter, despite what this passage appears to say on the face of it. And remember that Paul is not God. What Paul writes can be seen as suggestions, guidelines, and yes lots of sound ideas and doctrine too. But he was not God, and as such was not in a position to issue any commandments or Rules to be added to the ‘Ten Commandments’ given to Moses, and nor would he have wanted to. Paul was all about getting away from being crippled by the Law of Moses and instead basking, indeed resting in the fulfillment of that Law in Christ.

Remember also that Paul was likely only writing about the Hebrew Scriptures (what we now call the Old Testament (OT)), which were the only Scriptures available at the time (and even then, not easily available like they are today where you can go down to any bookshop and buy yourself a Bible). At the time that Paul wrote this letter to Timothy, the Hebrew Scriptures were undergoing a process of reinterpretation, by Christians, in the light of the total revelation of God’s nature in Jesus Christ. No reading of the OT can ever be complete without interpreting it in the light of Jesus, or ‘through the lens of Jesus’, if you like. To attempt to read the OT while ignoring the facts of the Incarnation, life, ministry, death, Resurrection and ascension of Jesus, and the consequent pouring out of the Holy Spirit upon ordinary humans – to attempt to read it without taking all that into consideration is bound to lead to ‘error’, at least in terms of harmful opinions and attitudes. We humans, especially those from a religious background, have a very strong penchant to want to live by Rules, and then to impose those Rules on others too. It gives us a sense of security. But this is the time when God must be our Security; indeed if we find our security anywhere else than in God, we are not really as secure as we think we are.

And that brings me full circle, back to our verse, 2Tim3:16. “All Scripture is God-breathed…” Do you see how that little verse appears to give us full certainty that all we need to do to feel secure in life is simply to read our little book of God-breathed Rules and follow it? In that way, we find our security in that verse, and in the Bible – with all its different translations and contradictions, rather than in the One Whom the Bible reveals (Jn 5:39-40). That’s quite a shaky foundation to be on. The one Rock is Jesus, not the Bible. Build your foundations on Jesus, and on Him only. He’s the one Who is unshakeable.

Grace and Peace to you all.

Questioning Hell

Here’s a great new blog by a gentleman who, like me, isn’t afraid to put his head above the parapet and ask awkward and important questions. The blog is called ‘Encounter Culture’.

My regular readers will know that I have a tremendous problem with the libellious idea that God would punish people for eternity in a roaring furnace, just for (what boils down to) being born in the wrong country.

Just, no.

And I know I’m far from being the only person who thinks that.

Here’s new blogger Michael Coller, with his great debut post about questioning the existence of ‘Hell’. Keep up the good work, Michael 🙂

Click the graphic below to go to the article:

Don Francisco on the Bible

Gospel singer Don Francisco has ministered God’s Love and Grace to countless millions of people all over the world. Using his tremendous talent for songwriting, coupled with his superlative guitar skills, Don brings to life familiar Scripture stories and tells them in a gripping and moving way. All of Don’s work is based on his relationship with Jesus, Who called him with an audible voice some decades ago. Over those decades, Don has also grown in wisdom, and has written some excellent thoughts on theology, some of which I have featured in my blog before. Here’s a short prose from Don, on balancing the ‘inerrancy’ of the Bible with the reality of God and His Love; a great piece and well worth reading.

“I believe that the Bible is the greatest of all books, not the inerrant Word of God. Jesus– and only Jesus– is the inerrant Word of God. Some of the Bible’s writers have told us what they knew of Him in the hope that we, too, would come to know Him. Jesus Himself said, “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life– and they testify of me. Yet you are unwilling to come to me that you may have life.” Trying to replace the living Son of God with a book is idolatry, just as much as bowing down before one of the Baals.

“The Bible was written by many different people, people who disagreed– sometimes violently– about whether God is an angry judge, requiring sacrifice to be appeased, or is loving, gracious and forgiving. You are the one who must choose which of those gods is real in your life; patching together a god from two “inerrant” testaments only results in one who’s frighteningly schizophrenic. Trying to use scriptures to prove you’re right doesn’t work, either– there are just as many “inerrant” scriptures that will say you’re wrong.

“Those who knew the Old Testament best were the ones who murdered Jesus on Calvary, and they justified their deeds with their scriptures. In his second letter to the church at Corinth Paul called those same scriptures “a ministry of death” and “a ministry of condemnation”. Moses and Paul weren’t both right– one of them was very wrong about the character of God, and the choice is ours. I believe that those who are committed to the Bible as the inerrant Word of God, besides being involved in idolatry, are being intellectually dishonest with themselves as well: “Don’t confuse me with facts! My mind is already made up.”

“Both Jeremiah and Paul wrote that the truth is in our hearts. What does your heart say? Can you hear it? In the end, we will all stand (or kneel!) before God with nothing in our hands, not even a book.

“For those of you who couldn’t hear what I said above, let me put it another way. Here are two of the most obvious Biblical contradictions, one from each Testament:

“2 Samuel 24 says that God moved David to number Israel; 1 Chronicles 21 says that Satan did it.

“Matthew 27 tells us that Judas threw the 30 pieces of silver into the Temple and went and hanged himself; Acts 1 says that Judas died by falling headlong in a field that he’d purchased with those same 30 pieces of silver.

“If the the Bible’s authors couldn’t get such simple facts straight, why do we swallow much more important concepts whole and unexamined?

” ‘Come now, and let us reason together,’ says the Lord. ‘Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall be like wool.’

“He didn’t say to hack each other to pieces with well-sharpened Bible verses. Why not have a conversation? Afraid you might be wrong? It happens to the best of us… and it’s forgivable.” — Don Francisco

C. S. Lewis on Inerrancy

I do believe that the doctrine of ‘Biblical inerrancy’ – that everything written in the Bible is 100% factually and historically correct – is incorrect.

In this quote, the great C. S. Lewis explains his standpoint on the Inerrancy idea:

” “My own position is not Fundamentalist, if Fundamentalism means accepting as a point of faith at the outset the proposition ‘Every statement in the Bible is completely true in the literal, historical sense’. That would break down at once on the parables. All the same commonsense and general understanding of literary kinds which would forbid anyone to take the parables as historical statements, carried a very little further, would force us to distinguish between (1.) Books like Acts or the account of David’s reign, which are everywhere dovetailed into a known history, geography, and genealogies, (2.) Books like Esther, or Jonah or Job which deal with otherwise unknown characters living in unspecified periods, and pretty well proclaim themselves to be sacred fiction.
Such distinctions are not new. Calvin left the historicity of Job an open question and from earlier, St. Jerome said that the whole Mosaic account of creation was done ‘after the method of a popular poet’. Of course I believe the composition, presentation, and selection for inclusion in the Bible, of all books to have been guided by the Holy Ghost. But I think he meant us to have sacred myth and sacred fiction as well as sacred history.”
— C.S. Lewis, in a letter dated 5 October 1955

It’s Beginning to Look A Lot Like Star Wars…

Well, after a two-year wait since Episode VII – The Force Awakens, it’s at last  time for us to pick up the story of Finn, Rey, Poe Dameron, Kylo Ren and Luke Skywalker once again. First screenings of ‘Star Wars Episode VIII – The Last Jedi’ begin here in the UK today.

I’m going to see it in half an hour’s time. I won’t post any spoilers, nor will I even say whether I enjoyed it or not, since that too would be a spoiler.

If you go see it yourself, I sincerely hope you enjoy it!

Until then, may the Force be with you!