Anglican Down Under: New Year Resolutions

Thursday, January 2, 2014

New Year Resolutions

My first 'proper' post for 2014 is planned for 20 January when both annual leave and a house shift should be completed. However life continues to throw up stuff and I like to get the links sorted before they get harder to find on the net. I'll keep posting things on this one 'prelude' post which take my fancy, loosely packaged under the heading 'New Year Resolutions.'

(1) I definitely want to see Noah when it is in the cinema.And not just because there is a Kiwi in the title role ...

(2) I am going to be upbeat about NZ cricket and our chances in the 2015 World Cup, not least because of these two guys and their mighty deeds in posting the first and sixth fastest one day centuries yesterday.

(3) I am going to buy the two books on the 39A mentioned in this Oliver O'Donovan review article.

(4) I will continue thinking about 'sola scriptura', aided by thoughtful essays such as this one by James Ginther (my finding it prompted by a comment here re Grossteste, 12th century theologian and sola scriptura).

(5) I will attempt to read most of Wright's massive tomes on Paul and the Faithfulness of God while being very grateful for those who have slog-read before me, such as Doug Chaplin, and posted their summarising thoughts, as he has done here.

(6) I am going to learn heaps about Anglo-Catholic practice with the help of this newly discovered blog.

(7) I am going to resist stupidity and foolishness in the 'climate change' debate. As I write (6 January) news reports include both ships stuck in ice in the Antarctic, a massive and very, very cold Arctic storm bearing down on the US eastern seaboard, major sea storms crashing into the UK and news that 2013 was the warmest/hottest year on record in Australia. It was pretty warm in NZ too (thinking about a very mild winter). It is the height of folly to deny climate change. It may be the depth of folly to affirm it. What we need, surely, is some real science in our thinking, i.e. objectivity, not making-fun-of headlines on blogs.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...: Prayers on your moving, Peter - a very stressful life-event but a great opportunity to get rid of unwanted books! Nah, that's not gonna happen.

Martin; January 2, 2014 at 8:56 PM
carl jacobs said...: This year, I resolve to stop mocking the competitive version of "Waiting for Godot" known as Cricket.

...

Well, that didn't last very long, did it.

carl; January 3, 2014 at 7:07 PM
Peter Carrell said...: Hi Carl
Relations between NZ and the US have never been better http://www.stuff.co.nz/world/americas/9573748/Key-Obama-play-golf-in-Hawaii ... and not through cricket!; January 3, 2014 at 7:32 PM
MichaelA said...: Peter, great article on Grosseteste, and on Bonaventure and Aquinas too!; January 12, 2014 at 9:27 PM

Anglican Down Under

Welcome to this blog on Anglican, theological, biblical and other matters, mostly missional or liturgical (but I reserve the right to write about cricket and politics). It is grounded in some islands at the bottom of the world which, together with a large island to our west, constitute fabulous Down Under.

I have two related blogs which I post on less frequently:

Hermeneutics and Human Dignity

Resourcing Preaching and Worship Down Under

I am Bishop of the Diocese of Christchurch in the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia (ACANZP). I am trying to write in ways which contribute to the flourishing of the church of God - a church represented in the Anglican Communion, in the Anglican churches of these islands and, of course, in my Diocese. You will judge whether I am succeeding or not!

Pearls

Show us anything clearly set forth in Holy Scripture that we do not teach and we will teach it. Show us anything in our teaching or practice is clearly contrary to Holy Scripture, and we will abandon it.

Stephen Neill

For the glory of God is a human being fully alive, and the glory of humanity is the vision of God.

St Irenaeus

Fundamentally the Gospel is obsessed with the idea of the unity of human society.

Masure

We have returned to the Apostles and the old Catholic Fathers. We have planted no new religion, but only preserved the old that was undoubtedly founded and used by the Apostles of Christ and other holy Fathers of the Primitive Church.

Bishop Jewel

Preachers shall behave themselves modestly and soberly in every department of their life. But especially shall they see to it that they teach nothing in the way of a sermon, which they would have religiously held and believed by the people, save what is agreeable to the teaching of the Old or New Testament, and what the Catholic fathers and ancient bishops have collected from this selfsame doctrine.

Canon 6 from the 1571 Bishop’s Convocation

Kent: "See better, Lear, and let me still remain."

William Shakespeare

For the clarity that we are aiming at is indeed complete clarity. But this simply means that the philosophical problems should completely disappear.

Wittgenstein

Justice is eternal, and doesn't depend at all on human conventions.

Montesquieu

The real challenge of Islam to Western intellectual discourse is for us to ask ourselves whether our unprecedented modern experiment of conducting political life with no transcendent values is really working out as well as we once hoped.

Harvey Cox

The long-term happiness of a society depends on how individuals behave towards each other, how families hold together, and how leaders keep the trust of people.

William Hague

Where orthodoxy is optional, orthodoxy will sooner or later be proscribed.

John Neuhaus

To be an evangelical is not, first and foremost, about doctrinal correctness, but about a passion for the gospel of salvation from sin through Christ for eternity.

John Richardson

Neither may we ... lightly esteem what hath been allowed as fit in the judgement of antiquity, and by the long continued practice of the whole church; from which unnecessarily to swerve, experience hath never as yet found it safe.

Richard Hooker (Lawes, V.7.1)

The function of the Christian canon was to separate the apostolic witness from the ongoing tradition of the church, whose truth was continually in need of being tested by the apostolic faith.

Brevard S. Childs

Every word of God proves true. (Proverbs 30:5)

If the people of this religion are asked about the proof for the soundness of their religion, they flare up, get angry and spill the blood of whoever confronts them with this question. They forbid rational speculation, and strive to kill their adversaries. This is why truth became thoroughly silenced and concealed.

Muhammad ibn Zakariya Razi

Change comes through ordinary working people organising themselves to struggle for a better world day in, day out.

Morning Star newspaper editorial Tuesday 5 May 2015

"In the soft grey silence he could hear the bump of the balls: and from here and from there through the quiet air the sound of the cricket bats: pick, pack, pock, puck: like drops of water in a fountain falling softly in the brimming bowl."

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

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Thursday, January 2, 2014

New Year Resolutions

4 comments: