Monthly Archives: March 2024

Far-Right Now (the single)

Still on a musical theme, here’s a bit of satirical fun I’ve just put up on YouTube. Enjoy it until the thought-police come round to get you.

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Sample simony

There’s a really annoying historian on the occasional archaeology TV series Digging for Britain, who, whenever there’s an item on an ecclesiastical site, manages to interview some librarian to show cynically how it was nothing but a cash-cow for money-grabbing churchmen. It happens every time he appears, it seems.

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O Absalom, my son, my son!

The result of a year long consultation by the Baptist Union came out this week, in the form of a statement by its council. It arose after a few Baptist churches lobbied for a change in the Ministerial Recognition Rules to allow ministers to be in same-sex marriages. What is noteworthy is that the Council, after deep consultation and consideration, concluded that the rules should not be changed – making British Baptists the first major denomination of which I am aware to have bucked the LGBTQ+ bandwagon.

Posted in Politics and sociology, Theology | 7 Comments

Towards critical thinking on Charismatic theology (3)

My conclusion from the thought experiment in the last post is that what we actually see in the Church nowadays is more consistent with Pentecostal/Charismatic theology being profoundly mistaken than with its being correct. I base this on the fact that after, 120 years, the churches are not settled comfortably into Charismatic doctrine and practice, but are still chasing the rainbow and wondering why they never reach its end. The extreme example of this is, of course, the Word of Faith variants promising to bring heaven down to earth in ever more dramatic ways, but instead producing a pattern of financial acquisitiveness and irregularity, spiritual and sexual abuse, blatantly false … Continue reading

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Towards critical thinking on Charismatic theology (2)

If you’re a member of one of the hyper-charismatic megachurches, the very idea of applying critical thinking to the theology around spiritual gifts and related matters is anathema, as it implies a lack of the faith that enables believers to heal any and every disease as Jesus did – except that they never can. Even the super-apostles have to fake leg lengthening on an industrial scale to inflate the numbers.

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Towards critical thinking on Charismatic theology (1)

Not long ago, an elderly friend of mine prayed that his church would, in the future, begin to “move in the spiritual gifts” of 1 Corinthians. And I began to think that, since he became a Christian as a teenager, maybe 65 years ago, at the very start of the “Charismatic Renewal” in Britain, and has always been in churches that were open to this movement, it was an odd kind of prayer to have to make.

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Divided we stand

I’ve not written much about the Israel-Gaza conflict, my excuse being that it’s a complicated matter. But that is really an excuse – the real reason is that unlike most of the other components of the Omnicrisis, this issue has divided people along rather different fault-lines, and it has been confusing to see people whose opinions one generally trusts taking diametrically opposite tacks from each other. I find this uniqueness significant.

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The Pauli Principle

In this case I’m referring to the British Principle Trial of Ivermectin, which was pauli planned, pauli executed and pauli applied. Excuse my spell checker.

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