Katay clears the air

Great idea.

You wouldn't believe some of the baloney I've heard said about this guy over the years.

Article in National Times... on Artifical Life

Playing God?


The fun thing about this was that it was a facebook collaboration! I asked for help and got great insights and interesting links. Thanks to Chris Wark, Chris Stafferton and Mike Higton.

Unspeakable Comfort

Here's some Weekend Away talks I am planning. Happy for feedback- why else does one have a blog?


‘UNSPEAKABLE COMFORT’: The Sovereignty of God and the Christian Life
There is unspeakable comfort – the sort of comfort that energizes, be it said, not enervates – in knowing that God is constantly taking knowledge of me in love and watching over me for my good. – JI Packer

While our neighbours talk about luck or destiny, the usual response of Christians to a significant crisis in life is to appeal to God’s sovereignty. We respond to crisis or accident or disease with ‘God is in control’, as if that by itself were a comforting truth.

It is important to know that life is not “just a bunch of stuff that happens”, to use the immortal words of Homer J. Simpson. But if God is remorseless, or uncaring, or - worse – malevolent, then his being in control becomes anything but a comfort to us in affliction. After all, if God is in control, then how do we not blame him for my friend’s depression, or the fatal car accident, or whatever it is?

This series of talks will address one of the Bible’s greatest themes: the sovereignty of God. It will show what it means for us to say ‘God is in control’. We will think about how and where he has shown us this control; and we will see how it changes everything about the way we live.


1. The Comfort of Sovereign Love

2. The Grace of Sovereign Choice

3. The Peace of Sovereign Power

4. The Joy of Sovereign Hope

Article on John Foxe in Eternity Mag

Article on John Foxe in Eternity Mag

Crisis? What Crisis?

It would not do, if one were writing an apostolic letter today, to speak so imprecisely about ‘this present crisis’, as Paul does in 1 Cor 7: 26, and expect to be understood. The twenty-first century began with an act of violence that its perpetrators wished to invest with apocalyptic symbolism that was hard to misread. The decade since has been one of ‘wars and rumours of wars’. So-called ‘rogue states’ have started nuclear weapons programmes. The Global Financial Crisis of 2008, deemed worthy of and recognised everywhere by its own three-letter acronym (GFC), continues to unravel the world’s prosperity. Perhaps most ominous of all, human-induced climate change haunts contemporary politics and economics. There is no shortage of crises; and each doomsday scenario has its prophets who are willing to recount humanity’s collective sins and to point to the way in which our punishment is coming, and speedily. The question the contemporary world has to grapple with is not so much deciding whether or not there is a crisis but which crisis to confront as a matter of first priority.

While the language and tropes of religious apocalyptic have been commandeered
by contemporary prophetic movements, there is simultaneously a hostility to the use of apocalyptic and eschatological rhetoric in its original setting. In fact, the eschatological impulse from within religion is itself held in part responsible for a number of the impending crises. The secularist apocalyptic nightmare involves those inspired by religious visions of the future wreaking disaster on the present. Forty years ago, Jürgen Moltmann wrote that
Always the protest against the Christian hope and against the transcendent consciousness resulting from it has stubbornly insisted on the rights of the present, on the good that surely lies always to hand, and on the eternal truth in every moment.
It is now not merely that Christian hope ‘cheats man of the happiness of the present’ ; it is that Christian hope is accused, along with other religious accounts of hope, of making his present tenuous and fearful. An account of the good (and so, the good life) that places the human life in the context of the eschatological, and most especially in the realm of the apocalyptic, is unlikely to be recognised generally as such. This is the seriousness of the difficulty confronting the Christian ethicist today.

The Catechist launched!

An exciting new web magazine has just been launched by students from Moore College:

The Catechist.

The first issue is on "Forgiveness and Reconciliation in the Real World".

Union with Christ in Karl Barth

In Barth, the theme of unio Christi is not explicitly addressed until late in the fourth volume of the Church Dogmatics. He places it under the heading of ‘Vocation’. As is well known, Barth’s soteriology is profoundly christocentric. Reconciliation with God can only be found in Christ, who is the locus for all the themes of reconciliation: election, justification, sanctification and so on. For Barth, the role of union with Christ is circumscribed by his insistence on the actual moments of event, decision and personal encounter, on the one hand; and, on the other, his emphasis on the objective work and experience of Christ as opposed to the human response of faith and obedience.

Barth is no mystic, and so is determined to distinguish himself from the charge. He deploys the term ‘fellowship’. He emphasises that the Christian’s relationship to Jesus Christ is one of ‘encounter’ or ‘confrontation’ . ‘We have’, he writes, ‘and encounter in time between two personal partners who do not lose but keep their identity and particularity in this encounter’ (IV.3.2.547). Union with Christ does not involved an extension of the incarnation, but rather a response to the prophetic call of Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit. ‘The Christian’s union with Christ consists in this dynamic relationship of call and response, in which the Christian is voluntarily united with Christ in will and action, knows the self to be justified and sanctified in Christ, and awakens to his or her genuine humanity’ (Evans, p. 244). Barth’s objectivism – a response to the subjective experientialism of his forebears – means that he can only distinguish the Christian from the non-Christian by dint of knowledge of the work of Christ. Evans concludes:
...for Barth’s view of the unio Christi, act has replaced state and condition, reconciliation accomplished has to a considerable degree overshadowed redemption applied, and the extra nos has eclipsed the intra nos. In short, “union with Christ”... has been largely replaced by “reconciliation already in Christ”.

Charles Hodge and Unio Christi

In the midst of a battle for the very soul of American Christianity, Charles Hodge of Princeton was a defender of Reformed Orthodoxy over and against even Calvin, where necessary. In response to a subjectivism which emphasised the inner life, he pushed the elements of federalism to the extreme, especially by emphasising the extrinsic elements of the system. In speaking of original sin, for example, Hodge sought to make the federal union – that representative relationship – independent of hereditary considerations. Adam’s posterity is sinful by dint of his federal headship in which they are united, rather than the natural union of physical descent. The key notion is ‘imputation’, which for Hodge does not indicate either personal identity with nor mutual participation in. It is an extrinsic and legal issue.

In soteriology, Hodge is keen to affirm the central place that union with Christ has. Through union with Christ by faith the benefits of Christ are received by the Christian enture. This union is firstly a ‘federal union’ which has its basis in the pretemporal covenant of redemption between the first and second persons of the Godhead. This union is must be realised in the lives of the covenant people. For Hodge, then, ‘there is a federal union rooted in the eternal covenant of redemption, and the legal benefits promised by this covenant and merited by the work of Christ are imputed through faith to the believer in an extrinsic relationship. Any source or locus of legal of legal merit, such as the humanity of Christ, remains utterly outside the Christian. There is a vital or spiritual union, in which the believer receives the Holy Spirit as a representative of Christ, a Christ who is most certainly absent with respect to his humanity’ (Evans, p. 208).

As far as the ordo salutis goes, Hodge posits a temporal as well as a logical order in redemption. Regeneration gives rise to faith, which is then the legal instrument of a legal union with Christ (hence justification). Following this, the Holy Spirit is imparted which makes for the spiritual union with Christ experienced in sanctification. Justification is a single moment in time – whereas sanctification is a progressive work. Here is Hodge:

As soon, however, as it exercises faith, it receives the imputation of the righteousness of Christ, God’s justice is thereby satisfied, and the Spirit comes and takes up his dwelling in the believer as the source of all holy living. There can therefore be no holiness until there is reconciliation with God, and no reconciliation with God except through the righteousness imputed to us and received by faith alone. Then follow the indwelling of the Spirit, progressive sanctification, and all the fruits of holy living. (Systematic Theology, III:172)