Check out those Love Jugs

You’ve heard of the idea of love languages right?

Basically it’s the idea that we understand love given and received in a certain form better than others.  You might give and receive love in terms of touch.  You might give and receive love through helping out – serving people.  You might understand love communicated through kind words, quality time & attention or possibly even through giving and receiving gifts.

Love languages.  They’ve helped my wife and me understand and communicate our love better.  I think they’re great but let’s not get stuck in one metaphor.

Studies: Scripture and Authority

Here’s the question of the week:  if the Bible is a story, in what sense can it be authoritative?

This is my first ever class in academic theology and I was slightly underwhelmed.  My first reflection was that it was rather a bizarre reflection on the philosophy of language, the way in which God might or might not guide our behaviour and the destruction of some fairly feeble straw men.

We got tied up in knots discussing whether God dictates the Bible or in some other sense fixes every iota of the text in some magical way.  We felt good about ourselves for dismissing the demythologising of the likes of Spinoza, Kant and Bultmann.

There was a fairly frustrated discussion about the degree to which the church creates or discovers the Scriptures. And we had fun ridiculing the ESV for fixing their translation for all time after a couple of pretty controversial translation edits in the final version.

I’m no academic theologian – at least not yet – but I’m a Pastor and practical theologian by trade.

My sense is that people need to know they can trust the Bible as authoritative – but they have no idea quite what that means.  This class did little to reinforce or clarify but it did allow for some interesting exchanges.

For what it’s worth – probably nothing in an academic sense – my answer to the authority question is fairly simple.  It’s all about Jesus.