This is a piece I wrote back in October 2020, almost exactly two years ago. I repost it here, partly so that the whole piece is available in one place and partly because, as we taste the bitter economic fruit of lockdowns this winter, just one variety in a whole orchard of acrid consequences of…

God the Father can have a shadowy place in our theology. The Lord Jesus Christ, his only Son, as the Creed names Him, feels up close, immediate. After all, he is the one who became like us. He, we are told, is able to sympathise with our weaknesses. The Father, on the hand, can feel…

In his significant book, Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, Carl Trueman pinpoints the work of Sigmund Freud as a turning point in Western thought. While others, notably Rousseau, had made psychology the centre of the human self, Freud made sex the centre of psychology. For Freud, the well-spring of all human action, the key driver…

I’m delighted that the good people at Primer have released an online version of the article that I wrote in Primer 08 called ‘Joining the Dots’ on the Scriptural basis for the Christian doctrine of God. At the end, after a fair bit of theological heavy lifting, I try to draw out some implications of…

In his discussion of the arch-heretic, indeed the heretic of heretics, Arius, Lewis Ayres makes a passing comment on Arius’ motivations. He mentions the theory of two scholars that Arius’ views on the divinity of the Son (he denied it) were driven by a particular view of how God saves men and women (soteriology). Apart…

Early on in my training for Christian ministry I was introduced to something called ‘the BRIE Diagram’. Based, I think, on Wesley’s quadrilateral (though this term was coined centuries after his death, Wikipedia tells me), the diagram is four quadrants each representing four potential sources of authority, the Bible, Reason, Institution, and Experience. The point…

This is the point of the year we are especially conscious of time. Calendars change, new diaries are opened, resolutions are made. Time, that most ubiquitous element of human experience, is always with us but the way we experience it fluctuates. In his provocative work, Why Liberalism Failed, the political scientist Patrick Deneen argues that the…

Sarah Gainham’s remarkable novel Night Falls on the City begins in Vienna on the day that the Anschluss, the unification of Germany and Austria under the Nazi regime, is announced. It centres on Julia Homburg, a beautiful, famous, actress, and her husband Franz. Franz is a writer, philosopher, a socialist politician and Jewish. Gainham traces the fate of…

Some fifteen years ago or so, I remember turning the final page of John Le Carré’s The Spy Who Came In From The Cold as my train rumbled its way to the end of Platform 9 at King Cross station on an autumnal Saturday evening. The story had a visceral, immersive effect, much more akin to watching…