Mark Keown

The Bible begins with the statement, 'in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth'. Now this to me is axiomatic and worthy of dying for. That is, Christianity is based on the notion that a brilliantly intelligent cosmic being is behind the created order, it is the product of his creative brilliance. Beyond this Christians disagree, and with a great degree of strong feeling. There are those who are absolutely convinced that the Genesis account must be interpreted literally and that God created the order in exactly six 24 hour days in exactly the manner described in Gen 1-2. Other Christians are not so sure and are happy to accept some of the notions of science including an older earth. They reject that there is a need for six literal 24 hour days noting that the Hebrew for "day" is used differently through the OT, that the sun and moon were created on the fourth day, and that there is clear symbolism in the text. They thus accept the general outline of Gen 1...

So what makes something essential and non-essential? Those things that are essential to me are those broad themes and truths that are self-evident to anyone reading the text of scripture. Of course, that presupposes that Scripture is the first essential of Christianity (in some way) and I will discuss this in the next blog. But assuming this, the essentials are those elements of the Christian message that are utterly critical to the faith. To illustrate from the world of sport. Critical to rugby is the lineout and ruck/maul (i.e. point of continuity). If I take the lineout out of the game, it ceases to be rugby and becomes more like league. If I take out the ruck/maul and replace it with a play the ball, despite there being a few rule differences, it is essentially league with 15 players in it. It is probable that we can grade levels of essentiality actually. Some things are essential for salvation others are not. How created the world to me is not an essential in this regard. Tha...

One of the things I have been considering lately is this question, 'what would I be prepared to die for?' I am not talking about causes here, but in terms of elements of Christian belief that are totally indispensable, things that are so essential to my belief that were I taken captive by terrorists, I would take a bullet for. This is no academic exercise. The history of Christianity is full of the imposition of all manner of things as 'essential' to the faith. We have fought wars over some of them. People have been put to death for elements of belief. Churches have split continually over such things. As we go about preaching the gospel, we need to seek to be as certain as possible about these things, to ensure that we preach the gospel authentically. If we do not, we may sell people a lie, we may impose on them things they do not need to believe, telling them they are imperative, when in fact they are not that certain. This was an issue in the early church. Should...