Monthly Archives: October 2018

Does Jesus judge the nations?

Somebody’s leading a discussion on Christian gratitude and generosity. He cites Deuteronomy 6, where Moses reminds people, once they arrive in the promised land and have cities they didn’t build, houses they didn’t provision, cisterns they didn’t dig, and crops they didn’t plant, not to forget the Lord who brought them there from slavery in Egypt. But one man, an older Christian, says he has a problem with that, because these things were taken from the Canaanites, sometimes by violence.

Posted in Creation, History, Politics and sociology, Theology, Theology of nature | 2 Comments

Free will and final causation

In a Peaceful Science thread continuing the discussion of the view mentioned in my last post, John Harshman criticises what he calls the incoherence of the very idea of free will.

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

The noble savage

A guy called Jeremy Christian has posted his own view of “Adam and Eve and all that” on Peaceful Science, delighted to find something in Genealogical Adam that mirrored thoughts he’d been having for a long time. I’ve not interacted much with him there, but would like to discuss one area of agreement and disagreement in more depth here.

Posted in Adam, Creation, Genealogical Adam, Politics and sociology, Science, Theology | Leave a comment

Still on politics (and the Church)

I’m not usually much of a political animal, but my last post has set me off on a track. I first encountered radical politics first hand when I saw this daubed over a shop front in my home town of Guildford, Surrey, probably in 1967: “Long Live The Great Victory Of The People’s Glorious Proletarian Cultural Revolution!”

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

What the Bible should have said #13

As he was setting out on a journey, a man ran up to him and knelt before him, and asked him, “Good Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?”

Posted in Politics and sociology, Theology | 1 Comment

The Indus Valley and randomness

YouTube, somehow tapping into my brainwaves, suggested this video to me, about the effort to interpret the alphabetic inscriptions of the Indus Valley civilization.

Posted in Creation, Genealogical Adam, Science, Theology | 3 Comments

Another loose end on sequential Genesis 1-2

Does Genesis 2 follow on, or expand on, Genesis 1? I believe the former, and it was discussed a while ago at Peaceful Science, my own most recent argument being here.

Posted in Adam, Creation, Genealogical Adam, Theology | Leave a comment

Denying creation

Writing on the gender differences in the account of the Fall in the garden prompts me to reflect on a factor in the modern (or actually, postmodern) zeitgeist that profoundly affects our reception of the whole biblical doctrine of creation, let alone Adam and Eve. This arises from my old bogey of Promethean thinking, spelled out at length in God’s Good Earth but in brief here, but which has its own peculiar manifestation only in our times.

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

What should Adam and Eve have done?

This is about “federal headship” and all that, though it raises interesting questions about biblical teaching on authority, accountability and so on.

Posted in Adam, Genealogical Adam, Theology | 10 Comments

The happiness of creation

My wife was preparing for a Bible study yesterday, and we were discussing whether “blessed” or “happy” is the better translation in the beatitudes of Matthew 5. It turns out to have some relevance for the understanding of the theology of nature.

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