John Launchbury

John was born in Birmingham, baptized in North London, married in Oxford, had children in Glasgow, and (just recently) became “Opa" in Portland, Oregon. In Bible study, he seeks to make the complex simple, while still retaining the majesty and impact. He loves praise songs, especially if he also gets to play his 12-string or bass.

Articles

The Pharisee Fallacy

"Here we have Jesus zeroing in on the Pharisee fallacy: the mechanisms of rules have become elevated over any original purpose those rules may have had, and even negate those purposes. He calls this hypocrisy.”

Sin and the Poverty of Law

“We are going to see that the force of sin is so powerful that lawmaking is ineffectual before it. If all we have are rules and laws, we are doomed. Salvation will require more than a religion based on rules.”

The Awakening

“Adam and Eve were just like us. They had a susceptibility to temptation, to selfishness, and to rebellion against God. But they were ignorant of their situation. They thought they were rich in their communion with God. But actually they had no idea how far they were from being one with the divine spirit. And so God set about waking them up from their stupor.”

Discerning the Body

“This is a meal of fellowship: sharing thoughts, experiences, worries, encouragements, moments of doubt, moments of faith. Gatherings like this have the potential to deepen the spiritual connections between us, where we come to learn to trust one another more and more deeply, to be willing to be more real in the things that we discuss.”

Textures of Faith

“Faith is risk. If I rely on God and he doesn’t come through, I lose everything. This is what Paul meant when he said that if there’s no resurrection of the dead then we’re to be pitied more than anyone – we are absolutely depending on God to fulfill his promise. So faith is not just risk. There’s a deep emotional element as well. Faith is willingly allowing ourselves to be vulnerable.”

Physicalism and Faith

“So I had started to wonder. Perhaps God was just an idea people made up? Maybe that’s enough for there to be some kind of meaning? But I was stuck. I still loved the scriptures with their teachings and narratives, but I didn’t know how to square them with the physicalist assumptions I had silently taken on board.”