Category Archives: Theology

In G K Chesterton’s enigmatic tale, The Man Who Was Thursday, a central theme is the sinister spymaster who turns out, in the end, to be not only a metaphor for Christ, but within the mythos of the book Christ himself. But before this denouement there is a piece of dialogue, in which characters discuss the spymaster, which Chesterton clearly intends to carry great weight: When I see the horrible back, I am sure the noble face is but a mask. When I see the face but for an instant, I know the back is only a jest. Bad is so bad, that we cannot but think good an accident; … Continue reading →

Teaching the Book of Revelation, as I am at the moment to a home group, always raises interesting questions of the type “Things I always wondered about, but was afraid to ask”. In the context of Revelation it’s not surprising, because being cryptic and aimed at providing insights to 1st century persecuted Christians with a Jewish background, rather than to twenty-first century Gentiles, it tends to get left on the shelf, and the questions it raises in people’s minds left unaddressed too.

I’ve mentioned before something of my enthusiam for the metaphysical poet Thomas Traherne. The Eclectic Orthodoxy blog has a piece which is just a fairly lengthy quotation from one of the better known parts of his Centuries of Meditations. Read, enjoy and meditate.

I decided to read some of the earliest Christian writings again, a decision triggered, I guess, by the discussion of New Testament “oral texts” in The Lost World of Scripture, which I recently reviewed. First up in my Penguin edition is the first letter of Clement of Rome to the church in Corinth.