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diff --git a/website/src/content/blog/2025/09/18/starting_msc.md b/website/src/content/blog/2025/09/18/starting_msc.md
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----
-title: Changing my ambitions
-description: >-
-  When I started my first degree, I had unrealistic and unhelpful ambitions. For
-  my second degree, I'm setting my sights on different targets.
-pubDate: 2025-09-18
----
-
-Is 'virtue' a terribly old-fashioned word? I don't mind either way. If I've run
-into you for more than three seconds in the last couple of weeks, you'll know
-that I've just started my second degree, and I'm very happy about it. I'm having
-a great deal of fun, and expect my studies to continue to be fun. But fun is not
-my goal. My goal is virtue.
-
-In particular, the virtues I'm striving after in my degree are a greater ability
-to ask questions well, and to answer them well; to write well, and to dispute --
-that is, speak with, listen, reason, discuss -- well. Insightfully, sensitively,
-humanely, intelligently, informedly, fluently: well.
-
-But what about all the starving children! I hear you cry. In the past, I myself
-have got myself stuck fearing that doing another degree would be ignoring some
-more immediate duty to do something about all the evil in the world. So, is my
-degree selfish? Or how can it not be? How can this be good?
-
-I believe it's precisely by abandoning that restrictive sense of public duty
-which has freed me at last to do something good. Let me explain.
-
-During my first degree, I had a great deal of ambition. I was genuinely
-convinced that I could find robust answers to big questions if I thought about
-them hard enough. I thought I was clever enough to make progress, or at least
-contribute. I thought I could, if I wanted to, get into a PhD programme and end
-up employed as Dean of Philosophy of Oxford, paid to smoke from a pipe all day
-in a tweed jacket with leather patches while quietly resolving all the world's
-burning intellectual issues.
-
-What's changed? If I were a pessimist, I might mention my encounter with that
-devil, reality. It turns out that I'm not actually the cleverest person in the
-room, that the biggest philosophical problems are pretty intractable, and that I
-can't get into Oxford -- and even if I could, it wouldn't necessarily be right
-to uproot myself from my friends, family and church community to pursue my dream
-career.
-
-All this did matter a great deal. It's what slowly convinced me to finally drop
-those unrealistic philosophical ambitions. It's why, a year and a half ago, I
-turned down the offer of a Master's in Philosophy at a excellent university
-(albeit not Oxford).
-
-But that's not the whole story. I'm not sat here with a sob story of broken
-dreams. After I turned down that PhD, I didn't feel deflated, I felt liberated.
-I haven't just dropped those ambitions, I've found new ones.
-
-My friends, family and church community ought to matter far more to me, I
-realised, than my career. So, turning away from academia, I turned towards love.
-
-This is what the gospel does. It's the most good story, beautifully true, which
-says to the human heart: since God so loved us, so also we ought to love one
-another.
-
-When I'm targeting virtue, I find it helpful to imagine a character who displays
-the virtues I'm after. So picture Helpful John. He's an encouragement. Whenever
-you talk to Helpful John, you come away feeling emotionally mature and
-intellectually confident, because his overwhelming respect wipes away your
-anxiety. He listens to you carefully, and insists on understanding you at more
-than a superficial level. When it's appropriate to do so, he can ask devious
-questions which unlock new possibilities you hadn't considered before. He knows
-lots of relevant and often surprising facts. He can compare your perspective
-with that of strange and subversive alternative perspectives. He doesn't like to
-tell people what to think, but when he speaks or when he writes, you pay
-attention, because you know he is capable of profound insight.
-
-Helpful John sounds great. A model to replicate, right? Not in every respect,
-necessarily. Helpful John might not be the life and soul of the party. He might
-not be the first person you go to for comfort in times of trouble. He might not
-be the most reliable person in the world, or the best with children, or the best
-with hand tools. Helpful John is a character, but he doesn't have to be good at
-everything.
-
-Helpful John is roughly my north star. I don't expect to become Helpful John.
-But with the Spirit's help, with me continuing to lean in to the process, I do
-intend for Useless Joe to become more like Helpful John in his most enviable
-respects.
-
-Is this selfish? Is this a shortage of ambition? Wouldn't you love to have a
-Helpful John as a friend? A brother? Across the table at small group at church?
-In your workplace?
-
-So forgive me if I'm old-fashioned: I believe virtue is a virtue. A better world
-is one full of better people.
diff --git a/website/src/content/blog/2025/09/24/creeds.md b/website/src/content/blog/2025/09/24/creeds.md
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-title: Why the creeds matter
-hidden: true
-description: >-
-  Plenty of Christians don't think the creeds are important for their faith.
-  Plenty others take the creeds for granted. But Christians ought to appreciate
-  that the creeds are a sophisticated, profound and essential foundation of the
-  church.
-pubDate: 2025-09-24
----
-
-<blockquote>
-  But you, man of God, flee from all this, and pursue righteousness, godliness,
-  faith, love, endurance and gentleness. Fight the good fight of the faith. Take
-  hold of the eternal life to which you were called when you made your good
-  confession in the presence of many witnesses.
-
-<cite>1 Tim 6:12</cite>
-
-</blockquote>
-
-Since the earliest days of the church, Christians have confessed their faith.
-That is to say, we have declared what we believe to each other and to the world.
-For the vast majority of the world's Christians, this frequently takes the form
-of one of two fixed texts, respectively, the Apostle's Creed and the Nicene
-Creed. The Nicene Creed in particular unites almost all Christians worldwide,
-including the Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic denominations and almost all
-Protestant denominations. Despite celebrating its 1700th anniversary this year,
-and despite all the ways in which the global church is sadly divided, the Nicene
-Creed stands as a symbol of Christian unity and a faithful summary of what
-Christians believe.
-
-Yet not all Christians fully appreciate their creeds.
-
-Perhaps you're familiar with the creeds from your church's form of worship, or
-maybe you've heard it used at baptisms. You might have even confessed one
-yourself at your own baptism. But if you've never given it much thought, you
-might have assumed the creeds are simply neutral summaries of Christian belief,
-abstracted out of any historical context. You might think it dates to a
-primitive time in the Church's history, before the Church went through the
-refining fire of advanced theology.
-
-In fact, in the fourth century, when the text of the Nicene Creed and the
-ancestor of what became the Apostle's Creed was fixed, the creeds were
-formulated in response to some very particular challenges of that time. They do
-not represent primitive Christianity, but on the contrary, they exist in the way
-they do precisely because of the need for exact, exclusive theology.
-
-In the fourth century, the Church was straining within itself to understand what
-the revelation of Jesus Christ revealed about God and his purposes.
-
-For an earlier generation, the main threat had been that Christians might adopt
-ideas from the gnostics, a mystical religious community which probably formed
-about the time of Christ. In some respects, gnostic ideas cohered nicely with
-the revelation of Jesus. But the fusion of gnostic ideas with Christianity also
-meant mutilating the New Testament and ditching the Old altogether. It meant
-giving up on the idea of a God who cared for his people and was willing to die
-to save us. It meant dividing the world into people who were by nature
-spiritual, and those destined for death. And it meant giving up on the hope that
-the world might be redeemed, settling instead for a future where those lucky
-enough to have the magic spark within their souls could escape the world and
-leave it for dust.
-
-The first generations of Christian theologians fought to steer the church away
-from these harmful ideas, including Irenaeus, Justin Martyr and Origen. In so
-doing, they made a huge contribution to the fundamentals of our faith.
-
-We can see the influence of this battle in the creeds. For example, the first
-article of the Nicene Creed asserts that God the Father created the heavens and
-the earth. This corrected the gnostic notion that a truly good God would never
-have anything to do with something so rotten as creation. Instead, the creed
-reminds us that God made the world good, that despite its fallen state, it still
-bears his likeness, and through his unfolding plan, he intends to make it
-perfect.
-
-By the fourth century, the main controversy was over the ideas of an Alexandrian
-Christian teacher called Arius. He claimed that Jesus Christ, the Son of God,
-was not truly divine, nor an eternal Person of the Triune God, but rather a
-created being.
-
-This might sound like a technical issue, but the consequences are massive. If
-Jesus is not God, then he has no power to save us. The Christian hope is that
-God came down to bring his life to a dead world. But if he isn't truly God, but
-a lesser being, not much more than an angel, then he doesn't possess God's life,
-so he can't do any of that.
-
-The Nicene Creed was formulated to try and specify exactly what was wrong with
-this view. Thus we get the assertion that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is of
-one substance with the Father, light of light, very God of very God, who for our
-sake and for our salvation was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary,
-and was made man.
-
-But maybe none of this is new to you, and perhaps all this chat about heresy is
-summing up for you exactly why you aren't into the creeds. If it's just a tool
-for manhandling fourth-century heretics, then why should I care about it today?
-
-Well, I could point out how the same heresies have repeatedly re-occurred
-throughout church history, including the present -- but instead, I'll highlight
-that the creeds are not in fact just a stick for bashing heretics with. Some
-words are surgically inserted to force Arius to make a choice, yes. But that's
-not the whole story.
-
-Large parts of the Nicene Creed were not up for discussion at the Councils which
-formed them. For example, nobody questioned the basic trinitarian form: 'We
-believe in God the Father ... and in Jesus Christ, the Son of God ... and in the
-Holy Spirit.' So something else has to be playing a huge role here.
-
-Indeed, we have evidence that the trinitarian formula was one way that
-Christians had been confessing their faith at their baptism since the early
-second century. By the time of the Nicene Creed, it was probably dominant. So
-the Nicene Creed isn't just a list of things Arius can't say: the bulk of it
-comes from an existing tradition built up within the church from its earliest
-days, for Christians to affirm to other Christians the basics of what we
-believe.
-
-Furthermore, the creeds are far from unimportant. Even if you're not part of one
-of those denominations, representing an overwhelming majority of global
-Christians, which use the creeds to aid their worship, the creeds should matter
-to you. They are formed in large part from material from the New Testament. They
-represent apostolic and catholic teaching. And they remain the best symbol of
-what Christians believe both within the church, and to the world outside the
-church.
-
-As for me, I'm trying to memorise the Nicene Creed. If you don't know it
-already, I'd recommend you do, too!