Short pieces on Scripture, doctrine, the history of the church, and the work of ministry — from the faculty of Life Seminary.
These carry no dates. Nothing in them expires: the reasons the church reads the Old Testament, confesses the creeds, and goes after the one lost sheep are the same reasons in any year.
On the road to Emmaus, Jesus explains himself out of Moses and the Prophets. The church has never been able to read the New Testament without them: the covenant, the exodus, the sacrifice, the exile and the promised return are the vocabulary the gospel is written in. A reader who skips them is not reading a shorter Bible but a different one.
John opens where Genesis opens, and then says something Genesis does not: the Word who made everything took a body and lived among us. Every claim the church makes about salvation rests on that sentence being literally true - that God did not send a message about himself, but came.
A creed is not an addition to Scripture but a fence around how it is read. Nicaea did not invent the deity of the Son; it refused a reading of the texts that made him a creature. The creeds are the church saying, after long argument, which readings the words will not bear.
The hardest thing about grace is that it cannot be earned even a little. Every attempt to add a condition - a work, a feeling, a level of sincerity - turns the gift back into wages. Paul closes the door deliberately: so that no one may boast.
Ninety-nine is a good number. The shepherd in the parable does not think so while one is missing. Ministry that measures itself only by the size of the gathered flock has already lost the arithmetic Jesus is teaching.
The Psalter gives words to praise, and it also gives words to complaint, fear, and rage - and puts them in the mouth of the faithful, addressed to God rather than about him. Learning to pray from the Psalms is learning that nothing true has to be left outside the room.
Exiled five times over roughly forty-five years, Athanasius kept insisting that only God can save, and that therefore the Son who saves must be God. The argument was not academic: if Christ is a creature, then what met us in the incarnation was not God, and the church has been worshipping a creature.
One imperative, three participles: make disciples, as you go, baptising and teaching. Not make converts, and not make admirers. The command has an end built into it - teaching them to observe everything he commanded - which is why the church has always answered it with schools as well as with missionaries.
Peter writes to exiles scattered across five provinces and calls their hope living, because the one it rests on is. Christian hope is not optimism about how things will turn out; it is confidence in someone who has already come out the other side of death.
“All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.”2 Timothy 3:16–17
Everything taught here is downstream of that sentence. A degree from this seminary is not an end in itself: it exists so that someone already serving a congregation is better equipped to open the Scriptures to it.
Every degree plan begins in the biblical text. Doctrine, history, and practice are taught as disciplines that answer to Scripture rather than stand beside it.
Most of our students are already serving. What is taught here is meant to be preached, taught, and lived in a real congregation, not filed.
Students come from many traditions and many countries. The statement of faith is drawn where the ecumenical creeds are drawn, so they can study together without leaving their tradition at the door.
Compare theological degree pathways, published outcomes, prior-learning policy, and admissions requirements before submitting an application.
