Revival v. Revivalism

Posted on 18/04/2025 by Jon Garvey

In the past I’ve expressed scepticism about the whole concept of Christian “revival,” suggesting that this non-biblical word became fixed in the Evangelical mindset in a particular form through the atypical spiritual, sociological and psychological example of the Great Awakening of the eighteenth century. I wrote about this in Prophecy Today in 2003, in two articles which I later re-posted on The Hump, here and here.

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Posted in History, Politics and sociology, Theology | 1 Comment

Putting on the agony, putting on the Lifestyle Christianity

Posted on 13/04/2025 by Jon Garvey

Another week, and yet another miracle working apostle is exposed as a fraud and abuser. In this case, a bevy of YouTube clips tell me, it’s some dread-locked ex-addict called Todd White, who founded an outfit called Lifestyle Christianity but has now been exposed by his own people as living the lifestyle of Satan instead.

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Humanity – of one blood and polyphyletic?

Posted on 11/04/2025 by Jon Garvey

I’ve been revisiting the large Crossway Tome on Theistic Evolution of 2017, largely to see whether any of it affects me differently as my views on origins have developed since then. And partly to honour the memory of my good friend, the late Peter Loose, to whom the book is dedicated. The part that, when I first read it, seemed least convincing was the theological overview by Wayne Grudem (who did his PhD at Tyndale House, as a matter of recent interest).

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Posted in Adam, Creation, Science, Theology, Theology of nature | Leave a comment

The blood is the life thereof

Posted on 07/04/2025 by Jon Garvey

To follow on from my recent piece on the Mosaic Law, I got to thinking about the way that the apostles and elders recommended (rather than imposing!) some minimal parts of the Jewish law on their gentile brethren at the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15. Given that the contentious issue was a keystone of the Old Covenant, circumcision, these stipulations were not the most obvious components of the torah to retain.

You will remember that the stipulations were these:

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Tyndale House and me

Posted on 05/04/2025 by Jon Garvey

No, that’s TYNdale.

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To save Judaeo-Christian values, or to be saved?

Posted on 29/03/2025 by Jon Garvey

To the Messianic Judaism that informed my last post, I must add, firstly, a book I was recently lent on the importance of Christian Unity. The author, to me, seems a confused individual in that in stressing the centrality of unity, he condemns on nearly every page all those Christians who don’t, those who are lukewarm, those who aren’t really Christian (by whose definition?) etc.

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Posted in History, Politics and sociology, Theology | 2 Comments

To Law or not to Law?

Posted on 20/03/2025 by Jon Garvey

I’ve been working through an English translation of a Hebrew manuscript of Matthew’s gospel, called the Du Tillet manuscript. It is interesting in having a plausible claim to being closely related to Matthew’s original Hebrew autograph on which the canonical Greek version is based. The manuscript was published in 1555, having been confiscated from a Jewish scholar in Rome when the Pope passed an edict banning the Talmud, leading of course to the grabbing of anything in Hebrew, which few Gentiles could read. We know nothing of its prior provenance.

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Posted in Theology | 7 Comments

The tradition of magical thinking in Darwinism

Posted on 15/03/2025 by Jon Garvey

One way of detecting an ideological, as opposed to scientific commitment to a theory is when very obvious shortcomings are simply glossed over for long periods of time.

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Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Science, Theology of nature | Leave a comment

Music, the universal language

Posted on 10/03/2025 by Jon Garvey

When I was at school, I borrowed a balalaika (souvenir of a Russian school cruise) from another kid, in order to play a self-penned song called Boris and his Balalaika, which used the only three chords I knew on guitar in 1969. I reckoned it couldn’t be harder to play on three strings than six, and would be more authentic for the youth club social.

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Posted in History, Music | 2 Comments

Soft sacerdotalism

Posted on 03/03/2025 by Jon Garvey

Tom Wadsworth’s 2021 paper, The Shift, for the ETS (available here) gives a good account of how the New Testament’s primarily “horizontal” concept of “meeting for mutual edification in the Spirit” became a vertical “meeting to serve God in worship” by the fourth century. Essentially, the Christian assembly became temple worship redividus despite the destruction of the Jerusalem temple, and the culprit was sacerdotalism.

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Posted in Theology | 2 Comments