Author: David Ellis

Don: The juxtaposition of faith with doubt troubles many believers. Personally, I have never seen, nor heard of, anyone wither a fig tree or cast a mountain into the sea. Such an event would surely be noticed. What could Jesus have meant by this passage? Perhaps he was speaking metaphorically. At some point in our…

[Transcript note: The first 30 minutes, consisting mainly of Don’s introductory remarks, were unfortunately not recorded. Don repeated much of the material from previous sessions, so not a lot was lost. In addition, the scriptural references Don made during his opening remarks were captured and are appended to the beginning of this transcript, as a…

Don: The story of the barren fig tree is told in Matthew and Mark: In the morning, as he was returning to the city, he became hungry. And seeing a fig tree by the wayside, he went to it and found nothing on it but only leaves. And he said to it, “May no fruit…

Don: When cleansing the temple of moneylenders and the like, Jesus said that a house of prayer should be for everyone. This idea has not hitherto been associated with the idea that God does not want everyone to see Him in a uniform way. If He had, the argument goes, He would surely have shown…

Don: God is the God of all mankind, and His body is the temple—the portal to God. How does this affect communal prayer in a humanity that manifestly holds multiple—perhaps thousands—of different views of God? Men and women throughout history have believed in the existence of a supernatural force or entity. It follows that they…

Don: The incident in which Jesus overturned tables in the temple was intended to be a teaching point: And He began to teach and say to them, “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have made it a robbers’ den.” (Mark 11:17) His…

Don: The possible explanations for the apparently out-of-character actions of Jesus in disrupting the money changers in the temple are either that his humanity overcame his divinity, or that his divinity overcame his humanity. In both cases, he was expressing righteous indignation and distress at the merchants’ activities in his Father’s house. God the Father…

Don: Among the synoptic gospels, there are slight differences in the story in which Jesus rebuked money changers for plying their trade in the temple. For instance, John puts it near the end of Jesus’s ministry while the others put it near the beginning. To me, this and other minor discrepancies are unimportant; what is…

Don: We are discussing whether doctrine helps bring us closer to God. In the Gospels—which contain the teaching, the doctrine, of Jesus—doctrine centers around the two great Commandments to love God and to love one another. For Protestant Christians, doctrine grew out of the Reformation, when Martin Luther developed a view of salvation different from…