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Today I sat the second of my regulatory exams, on securities and financial derivatives. The results will come through on Thursday, but I’m being cautious about whether I passed or not at the moment as having a cold over the weekend didn’t exactly help me study effectively. Tomorrow might be a bit of a shock to the system as I switch back to getting up at 6am.

Interesting to see that The Register’s ad hosting company was serving up ads containing a virus that could infect Internet Explorer — just browsing a popular news website could, through no fault of theirs, result in your PC being infected! Sounds like yet another reason to follow CERT’s advice and switch to Firefox.

People following the Steve Chalke debate might be interested in reading the statement recently released by the Evangelical Alliance. The statement concludes:

For these reasons, we do not believe that penal substitutionary atonement can be rejected as it is rejected in The Lost Message of Jesus, and as Steve has persisted in rejecting it since. While affirming the many gifts which Steve has to offer, we urge him, as a much-loved brother in Christ, to reconsider both the substance and style of his recently expressed views on this matter.

On Friday, we had Dave and Rach over to stay for the night, and had a great time catching up with them. They’re the first people we’ve had to stay since getting married. Earlier I had spent most of the day at a Community Links voluthon, where our team from Barclays Capital won a prize for raising the second-largest sum of money donated in the Voluthon. Part of the prize was a copy of a new book they are publishing called Change the world for a fiver, which has some useful tips on simple things people can do to make the world better (e.g. “Learn basic first aid”, “Give blood”, “Recycle your old specs”) and some less useful ones (”Seize the moment” — nice, but pretty vague).

On Saturday, after Dave and Rach left, Rhianon came round briefly to get a flat contract witnessed, before we headed over to Andrew’s flat for lunch. Tom was there too, and after lunch we headed off to the London Aquarium with them. The aquarium was a little disappointing, with only two big tanks (one of which was full of Atlantic fish, and considerably less interesting than the shark tank). The plus side was a tank, obviously more intended for children, where you could touch the backs of stingrays as they swan around.

When we got home we finished watching Star Wars: A New Hope (having got the trilogy boxed set on the day of the release).

This morning we went off to church as usual, and should see Andrew again at St Helen’s this evening.

A couple of people have posted comments on the Lost Message of Jesus review and I think their objections to the review are similar to other viewpoints I’ve heard expressed in other contexts. The two main ideas I want to challenge are the idea that Christian leaders should not attempt to oppose teaching that appears to contradict the Bible; and that the worth of Steve Chalke’s book can be judged by its effect on individual people’s lives. I want to show that the Bible clearly teaches that one the prime responsibilities of Christian leaders is to oppose false teaching (especially false teaching about the cross); and that no matter what positive effect Chalke’s teaching has it must be opposed.

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This review is written by Andrew Sach and Mike Ovey from Oak Hill College in London, and was originally published in the June 2004 edition of Evangelicals Now. It is republished on this site by permission of the authors.

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