Kingdom Ready Blog

For those that subscribe to Anthony Buzzard’s wonderful monthly newsletter “Focus on the Kingdom“, you have undoubtedly seen several announcements for the 2012 Theological Conference (the 21st) that will occur next week May 3rd – May 6th in Atlanta GA. I will be making my way there for my 3rd straight year!  It truly is a wonderful conference where Biblical Unitarian/One God Believers from all over the world can hear speakers, make new friends, and fellowship with one another.  Last year we had people from Europe, South Africa, South America, Australia, Canada, and from all over the USA.  Hope to see you there too!

This is an exclusive interview by J. Dan Gill with Jaco van Zyl of South Africa. Jaco, a former Jehovah’s Witness, talks about his experiences as a Jehovah’s Witness, his leaving the movement and coming to his One God faith today.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9s35gPxYYcI&feature=player_embedded

(Installment #4 in the series.)

Biblical Common Sense – Jesus – The Anointed of God

The term Messiah is the English translation for the Hebrew word “Moshiach” (or “Mashiach”), which means “God’s anointed, or “the anointed one (of God)”. The term was used to describe anyone who was “anointed” with holy anointing oil (e.g. Israel’s Kings, prophets, & priests) to signify being chosen for a task ordained/authorized by God. And in a deeper eschatological sense, Messiah also stood for the coming of THE final “Moshiach” from the Davidic line who would usher in the Messianic age (the “Olam Ha-Ba” or “the world to come”) and whose “kingship” would reign forever. 

As an attendee and presenter at this year’s Theological Conference put on by Sir Anthony Buzzard and the Atlanta Bible College, I guess I’m qualified to write a brief review of what went on and how things went.  With so many of us that post here on Kingdom Ready there in attendence, I would have thought that somebody would have beat me to  it already.  But maybe everyone else thought someone else would write something too.  So here goes.

Joel Hemphill was a presenter/speaker at this year’s 19th Annual Theological Conference held in Atlanta, GA 4/25-4/28.  Joel did a terrific presentation on the need for “Removing Greek Philosophy From Christianity“.  If you’d like to view a video of it recorded there at the conference, you can watch it for free at Dan Gill’s wonderful 21st Century Reformation website: http://21stcr.org/multimedia/removing_greek_philosophy/removing_greek_philosophy.html.  On that same page you’ll find a down-loadable PDF version of another one of Joel’s tracts – this one about some “Shocking Admissions” from various Trinitarian scholars. I like it so much, I thought I’d publish it here in the KR blog.  I hope you enjoy as well.

If you subscribe to Anthony Buzzard’s excellent monthly newsletter “Focus on the Kingdom“, you probably are aware this year’s version of his annual Theological Conference (the 19th) is coming up at the end of next month.  KingdomReady’s very own Sean Finnegan has attended in year’s past, though his busy Masters school schedule will keep him away this time around.  However I’m planning on attending for the first time, and I wanted to invite all of you to attend if you have the opportunity.  There are so few chances for fellow truth-seekers like ourselves to get together in person and learn from one-another, fellowship, and hopefully build lasting friendships in our all-too-small (but hopefully growing) faith. Below is a nice overview from Anthony’s last newsletter.  Hope to see you there!

I was looking through some old copies of Anthony Buzzard’s “Focus on the Kingdom” newsletter today and re-read an article in it that I enjoyed reading all over again (though it has been over six years since I first read it).  The following is from a woman who attended the 2004 Theological Conference in Atlanta GA and presented the story of her own personal faith journey during the yearly segment that centers on that subject and allows people in attendance to tell the audience their own stories. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did.

My Spiritual Journey

A few weeks back our Australian brothers and sisters held their first Theological Conference for those who believe in the gospel of the kingdom and the creed of Jesus. A participant and coordinator of the conference, Paul Herring, emailed me a link to the audio files and papers (click here). Since the audios were in .wma format and many iPods cannot play this file type, I have converted them to .mp3 and produced the table below. I have only listened to the first talk by our esteemed colleague, Greg Deuble, and enjoyed it very much. On a technical note, the first and sixth talks had to be extracted from the video recording so there is a bit of room noise on them but they are still quite intelligible. If you have a moment, visit their site, called Restoration Fellowship of Australia. Also, for a detailed schedule of the conference, including pictures of the presenters as well as abstracts of each of the talks, click here.

I’ve been a bit steeped into the conference lately, having written all those stream-of-conscience reviews of the papers.  I was particularly struck by Ray Faircloth’s paper on predestination in Romans 9.  It gave a very vivid and nuanced understanding of predestination based on the three metaphors/stories in the chapter.  I would encourage all to check out the lecture and paper, as I would for all the presentations.  Lennox’s presentation was also very pointed and well done.  Between his and Chuck Jones, the conference was well balanced with pertinent pastoral information as well as theological truth.

As the conference was in progress, JohnO and I were live-blogging and uploading the audios. However, I thought it would be helpful to have all of the talks in the same place under one post. In addition, I now have many of the actual papers which are useful to follow along with while listening to the audio. DVDs of this conference are available for a fee by ordering from Restoration Fellowship. Unfortunately, the questions did not come out on many of the audio recordings, however, the DVD version should have them. In addition, Michelle Cox has put together a slideshow from the conference with lots of pictures (click here).