Gregory of Nyssa - On Perfection

It's clear by now that I'm very interested in Gregory of Nyssa, the Fourth Century bishop and theologian. My absolute favourite of his writings is On Perfection. It's been referred to Gregory's Christology, and this is because he goes to great lengths to display how the name "Christian" is derived from "Christ", and so the characteristics of a Christian are those that we see in Christ. Here is a selection of some of this work. I hope you see why I love his writing so much.

Time for a change of appointment?

OK.

Confession time.

Did you come to this wondering if I was about to reveal that I am about to receive a change in appointment? If so, I wonder if you've just emphasised the point I'm hoping to make here. That being, that I think the current system of appointing Officers needs to be discarded as it no longer remains best practice. In fact, the current system actually promotes gossip and voyeurism more than it does our mission objectives.
I'll come back to that momentarily.

Gregory of Nyssa on Slavery - Audio Recording

I presented at the St Andrew's Patristic Symposium on Gregory of Nyssa on the 14th September, 2011. My paper was entitled "'Neither Slave nor Free' - The theological foundations of Gregory of Nyssa's polemic against slavery". The recording of this is available here.

I would appreciate your feedback on this, particularly as I'm working on writing this paper up for publication.

Tough Questions - Guest Post from Vanessa Kohler

Vanessa Kohler is a cadet at the School for Officer Training. She shared this last week in our worship time, and I've asked her if I could post it here. 
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By my very nature, I’m a bit of a question asker. I am the queen of questions. How do we do this? Why does this happen the way it does? Am I doing this right? One of the important things I’ve realised in my 2 years at the School for Officer Training is that the more I know, the more I realise I don’t know anything at all.

This has been a place where I have asked many questions. Questions such as

• Did the creation story in Genesis really happen, or was it just a myth?
• Am I really doing the right thing being here at the School for Officer Training at this stage of my life?
• What kind of Officer do I want to be?
• How do I know what is truth and what isn’t?
• How do we do church?
• Is there really a person called “Satan”, or is he something that has been constructed by the church and bible translators?
• Who is Jesus? Really?
• Who is Vanessa Kohler?

Book Review: Christ's Resurrection in Early Christianity

Markus Vinzent, Christ's Resurrection in Early Christianity and the Making of the New Testament, (Surrey: Ashgate, 2011).

One of the critical aspects of Christian thought is the belief in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Belief in the risen Christ lies at the heart of Christian faith for, in the words of Paul, "If Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain." (1 Cor 15:14). This is why Markus Vinzent's Christ's Resurrection in Early Christianity and the Making of the New Testament will make waves of tsunami proportions throughout Christian scholarship. To be clear, Vinzent's research is not about whether or not Christ rose from the dead. Rather when, how and to whom did it become important to confess the risen Christ? Vinzent's answer to this question is, to be frank, startling:

Had Marcion [of Sinope]... not picked up Paul's letters and put them together with a Gospel, the Resurrection of Christ would presumably never have made its way into the Christian creed. The myth of God incarnate gave way, though only slowly and never fully, to the other myth of Jesus, the Risen Christ. (pg 2)