All Things Seen & Unseen

Dispensationalism 1 began at the time of John Nelson Darby (1800-1882) in the 1820s into the 1830s, a well-educated Anglican clergyman who became its chief systematiser. Darby had a life-changing experience in which he realised profoundly the importance of the scripture's teaching of being in union with Christ in 'heavenly places'. He concluded that the true Church was 'heavenly' in character.

Eschatology, What Is That? Eschatology 1 is a branch of theology that investigates how 'end' time events will occur. Why Is It Relevant To This Subject? To examine the question of T he One People of God, we have to look at a number of competing schools of eschatology which hold different views about 'end' events. This activity on our part is necessary because views about the Church, cultural Israel, their relationship and their present status before God tend to be correlated with different views about end-time events (eschatologies). What Different Eschatological Schools Exist? To simplify matters we could say three main groupings exist: Preterism, Historicism, and Futurism (with variations within each). Preterism claims that most of the book of The Revelation has already been fulfilled. Some within this group would even claim that Jesus returned in the judgement upon Jerusalem in AD 70. Doubtless, many will find Preterism to be an odd 2 view because most evangel...

I have been perusing a book lent to me with the above intriguing title (2008). It has been authored by an English senior psychiatrist, Dr Gaius Davies. He has done detailed studies on Christians well-known to most who although highly gifted in certain areas suffered from moderate to more extreme cases of what we would call mental-emotional disorders.  To carry out this task Davies examines the lives of Martin Luther (Protestant Reformer), John Bunyan (prolific writer), William Cowper (hymn writer), Lord Shaftesbury (social reformer), Christina Rossetti (poet), Frances R. Havergal (hymn writer), Gerard Manley Hopkins (poet), Amy Carmichael (missionary to India), C.S. Lewis (literary academic, apologist, extraordinary writer and poet), J.B. Philips (New Testament paraphraser), and Dr D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (preacher).   The treatment of Lewis' life by Davies is enlightening but I was particularly struck by the description given of Lewis in arguing against Naturalism opposed to E...

The People of God as One People These posts in this series are an att empt to deal with some of the complicated issues s urrounding the identity of the people of God as the one p eople of God . They examine how the Church and cultural Israel are related within the b roader scope of the s everal types of eschatology (end-time stud y ). For t he complexity of the issues has led to a multiplic ity of differing viewpoints that can be confusing without some road map : using some type of classification of views is one way to create order in an otherwise t angled scene.  

Often an author's main contentions, premises or lines of argument are laid down in the introductory pages which include any prefaces, forewords or introductions. Neil Postman ably displays this feature in his famous work: Amusing Ourselves To Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985) In the Foreword of his prophetic analysis of present-day Western society, Postman contrasts the famous novel 1984 by George Orwell (1949) with Brave New World (BNW: 1932) by Alduous Huxley. Both these novels are about controlling the masses: in 1984 it is done by pain, but in BNW by pleasure. Postman believed that BNW had got it right. According to Postman, people won't need Orwell's totalitarian 'Big Brother ' to keep them in line; rather they 'will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think' (p. vii) as in Huxley's BNW . In Orwell's nightmarish 1984 the truth is hidden by adapting it to fit ...

Although 'the-body-found-in-the-library' detective story is a cliche - and Agatha Christie knew that well - she creates her novel so that the body dead in the library remains a mystery throughout.  The victim just doesn't fit within the library's surrounding or within the house in which the library is situated. Her dress, her manner of being murdered, her class mean she is out of place, discordant. This anomalous crime and the failure of the police to make much headway provide much of the tension in this novel. Characters The characters and the plot of fiction stories are interwoven so it is hard to separate them as is done below. However, thought it would help understanding if this were done. I have grouped characters for clarity.   Jane Marple , amateur sleuth, who lives in the village of St Mary Mead; The Bantrys : Mrs Dolly and Colonel Arthur who reside at Gossington Hall; and the servants (of the Bantrys'). Police investigators who seem unable to solve the...

Agatha Christie (1890-1976) was an prodigious writer with around 80 detective novels and other collections of stories published , giving us sleuths of the calibre of Jane Marple and Hercule Poirot .   She also wrote, The Mousetrap which holds the record for the longest-running play ever (60 years and 25,000 performances in 2012). Her works have sold an astonishing four billion items with her sales eclipsed only by the Bible and Shakespeare's works. What is usually not so well known is that Christie was a Christian (Church of England) who took her faith seriously enough for a reader to detect it within her works. However, her writing is not evangelical for her vocation was detective novel-writing for the glory of God. One of her major theme-ideas was the often hidden but nevertheless real sinfulness of men and women. 1 This sinfulness was also to be found in English villages which romantic writers liked to think pristine and wholesome. Next time we will look at Christie's The ...

I confess that I went through school being largely unaffected by books and the reading of them. Perhaps Shakespeare's, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Macbeth ; and a few pieces from the Victorian Education Department's justly famous 'readers' 1 stayed with me but only just. In secondary school, I was earmarked for the 'science' stream which further cut me off from reading literature. After school, I worked as a trainee industrial chemist for three years but then left to train as a primary (elementary school) teacher. In second-year teachers' college, we were taught English Literature by a grumpy, bitter, 'old' lecturer who transformed my indifferent outlook on literature and reading to one of excitement. (Although  a scarey man in class, Mr D. was a kind and gentle man on a one-to-one basis .) As I write this now, I hear the thunder of his first lecture from 45 years ago: 'Art is not Nature; Nature is not Art'. He scorned the suppositio...