House Group
We formed in May 2025 to study together. Dealing with a theme normally takes us an hour a week for six weeks.
The first topic we chose was how we interact with the ancient documents we find in the Bible, written over a period from about 2,000 to 3,000 years ago. We cannot simply lift words off the page. The question we asked was ‘What must the truth have been if it appeared like this to men who thought like that?”. We endeavoured to bridge the gap in time, space, knowledge and culture. How much is time bound and what is timeless?
We went on to engage with several of the OT prophets, taking the view that prophets are insightful about their own present rather than making predictions for years hence. Sure enough, a few specific expectations do exist e.g. that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem. For the most part prophecy should have a ‘best before’ date. All of the prophets we studied wrote within 100 years or so of the Jewish Exile in Babylon, modern Iraq, a real event that happened around 590 BCE.
Our last foray was to explore the genuine letters of St Paul, who for some has a terrible reputation for misery and misogyny. We have seven preserved in the New Testament and none outside it. There are letters to specific christian communities, circular letters to groups of churches, and one to an individual. We owe it to St Paul for enabling non-Jews to become Christians without having to adopt Jewish practices. He was in fact very even handed between the sexes. He was against exploitative relationships. We don’t know, in fact, what he would have made of loving same-sex relationships.
What next? Not sure. Maybe Aquinas, 'God is not a being, but being itself'. Whatever it is will be announced here.
Martyn Evans