Sorry about the delay over the past three weeks. This was caused by two things. First, on week 5 the battery let us down on our recording device so the talk was lost! This means that at some point, one of us is going to have to record it for you to get a sense of completeness. (Or was it that it was an Act of God, to prevent us speaking a load of nonsense about the Reformed view of the church on the Internet?) Either way, it is our aim to put this one right … eventually. (Remember that we both have jobs and lives to be getting on with so it will take time.)

Then there was the wonderful Greenbelt festival, which took both of us away for a long weekend – leaving both of us with a backlog at our respective places of work.

But excuses over … The final talk, on the Worship of the Church, is about to be posted tonight. In our opinion, it’s one of the best in the series.

With the numbers of available downloadable talks on this site growing, and the fame of The Bluffer’s Guide Series spreading, we’re struggling with our limited bandwidth. As is well-known, Simon and Paul are a pair of skinflints, who would far rather spend their limited financial resources on books and beer than on paying for a more expensive podcast server. We have also experimented with the MP3 compression to shrink the files down a bit. However, we are already starting to worry about the cumulative effect of folks downloading the forthcoming series. We would rather not reduce the forthcoming MP3s to the point where quality is noticeably affected, but we may have to do so to prevent a rush of downloads from exceeding our hosting capacity.

There may be another way however … If there is anyone nice out there who has access to webspace with a decent bandwidth capacity who would be prepared to host the MP3s, if only for a limited period, we’d be really grateful it if you contacted us. (You can use the comment form: your email address would not be published.) We would only ask that you do not charge downloaders for the service, and that we retain the Creative Commons rights on the material. Thanks in advance.

According to Dan Brown’s book The Da Vinci Code the Gnostics were a bunch of right-on feminist liberals who preserved the secret original Gospel in which Jesus and Mary Magdalen got it together, that she was the embodiment of the Divine Feminine, and that all of this is contained in the Gnostic Gospels, hidden until 1945 until discovered at Nag Hammadi. Yeah, right.

Find out who the Gnostics were, why they were people of their time, their lasting influence on the theology, structure and spirituality of the Christian Church. Oh… and whether Jesus ever used the toilet.

All this awaits you in the first of the new series of The Bluffer’s Guide to Heresy. 7.30pm, Wednesday night at the Bristol Folk House in Park Street. Or podcast later on this website.

Now what’s the phone number of the Metatron…

An amazing, one-off chance to learn a 4th century worship song will be just one feature of tonight’s Bluffer’s Guide to Christian Doctrine: Jesus – who is he? The venue and time are the same: 8pm tonight, Bar III (the Mauritania) , Park Street, Bristol. You will also discover how Christian theology blows fuses. As usual, the podcast will be up by the weekend!

OK, the podcast feed now works. Now I guess some people are wondering ‘how on earth do I use it?’ This is a step by step instruction for pointing Apple’s iTunes to receive the podcast.

1. You will need a broadband link.
2. You will need an up-to-date version of iTunes (version 4.9 or later). You can download this here.
3. Once you have iTunes running, select from the menu: advanced – subscribe to podcast
4. In the box that opens up, type the following into the box marked “URL”:

http://virtualtheology.net/wp-rss2.php?category_name=podcasts

(Note, if if your browser is displaying the above bit of code on more than one line, *don’t* put a line break in that URL box, just keep typing it all on one line, but don’t worry if it automatically wraps in the URL box, just don’t press the return key when you type it in)

5. Click “OK”
6. On the left hand panel of iTunes (Source), you should see one called Podcasts. Click on that. You should see the podcast from virtualtheology.net in the list.
7. Click the “Update” button on the top right of the screen, which will get the latest podcast from virtualtheology.net. Of course, if it hasn’t been updated since you last did this, nothing will happen, but if a new podcast has been uploaded, you will see it being downloaded into iTunes.
8. Then either play it from your computer using iTunes, or further upload it into your iPod or other portable MP3 player.
9. You can revisit your Podcast source in iTunes to check for updates, or configure iTunes to check it in the background every hour or so.

Hopefully, that will work.

Who are we? A handful of theologians who want to make Christian theology accessible to people. We do not believe theology should be the preserve of a few, but the heritage of all people of faith. To believe means to be a theologian. Sadly, theology is too often regarded as the irrelevant speculations of people locked in academic ivory towers. But we think this is bad theology. Good theology should emerge from the life of faith seeking understanding (Anselm, 11th century). That means it should have everything to do with the rest of life, everything to do with the experience of trying to be faithful to God. That’s why we’re doing this experiment in open access theology. At the moment, we’re not sure where this journey will lead us. But we hope that you join us, and take part in the fun.