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Category Archives: History
The pivot of history
At the purely geopolitical level, war in Israel is a highly significant and concerning matter. But if biblical prophecy is more than the fairy-tales the New Atheists loved to claim, without investigation, before their own demise as a movement, then war in Israel may be of cosmic significance. I have no intention here of going down the rabbit hole of placing the current situation of Israel in 2023 into the prophetic matrix of the Bible. Instead I want to take a look at the wider question of whether there is a basis for taking that matrix seriously, rather than airily dismissing it like the Gnus’ talk of “your imaginary friend,” … Continue reading
Posted in History, Politics and sociology, Theology
6 Comments
It’s always ther cloimate wot gets the blame
As I anticipated, our Harvest Festival had a significant section on failure of harvests in poor countries and how we need to help, in this case focusing on Uganda – a country where, but for providential circumstances, I might have worked. I voiced my reservations about the anthropocentrism of harvest thanksgiving nowadays in my previous blog, and I won’t labour the point. What I will mention, though, is another near-universal theme in the kind of video we were shown – that it is the poor who are already feeling the brunt of climate change, witness the increasing droughts being experienced by farmers in Uganda.
Posted in History, Politics and sociology, Science
11 Comments
Satan’s end game?
Our friend Levi introduced me to Rene Girard, whose writings on the way that crowds become mad, set in the context of the Christian message, certainly have something to say about the present experience of cancellation, censorship, and a lot more.
Posted in History, Philosophy, Politics and sociology, Theology
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Exploring the theological status of ancient man (3)
We left the last blog post with a simple “toolkit” from Genesis 1 which, whilst it may not “define” man in the way Aquinas sought to do, certainly describes him theologically in a way that enables us to interrogate the archaeological record for biblically human origins.
Posted in Creation, History, Science, Theology, Theology of nature
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Go J.F.K.
I’m not a pacifist, though I own up to two periods of pacifism; the first as young teen, when I was in considerable need of inner peace (to which Christ was the eventual answer), and the second during the nuclear escalation of the 1980s, when the idea of mutual annihilation seemed, as it does now, worse than the alternative of rolling over and becoming Soviets.
Posted in History, Politics and sociology
1 Comment
Unexpected livestream on my book
Months ago I was put in touch with Rob Rowe, who has a YouTube apologetics channel based in Australia. I heard nothing until yesterday, when on a couple of hours notice he set up a livestream to discuss The Generations of Heaven and Earth, which together with Q&A lasted over two hours. Fortunately I hadn’t forgotten too much of what I’d written.
Posted in Adam, Creation, Genealogical Adam, History, Science, Theology
2 Comments
Would you Adam and Eve it?
For Christians (and Jews and others) seeking to maintain the historicity of a first human couple, Adam and Eve, there are really three broad ways to proceed. My aim here is to cast doubt on one of them, from a biblical standpoint, and so I’ll break the usual pattern of such discussions by stating my own position first, and then leaving it to one side!
Posted in Creation, Genealogical Adam, History, Science, Theology
8 Comments
The danger of (post)modern syncretism
The Puritans are (and always were) misunderstood as believing that they were morally or spiritually purer than their fellows. But in fact their basic tenet was rather that there is such a thing as “pure religion,” in the sense of the original gospel of Christ and the apostles untrammeled by syncretistic additions from other religions. This, of course, was the basis for the Protestant Reformation. It is (as the first of Martin Luther’s Wittenberg theses stressed) a religion of repeated repentance leading to constant assurance of salvation.
Posted in Creation, History, Philosophy, Politics and sociology, Science, Theology
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Bombed churches – cui bono?
Whilst my internet connection was down last week, I missed being able to research the Easter missile strike on a village church in Komyshuvakha, Zaporizhzhia oblast, in Ukraine. The Presearch search engine (allegedly private, but evidently programmed for MSM) only gives me pages upon pages about the dastardly Russian outrage, all of course taken uncritically from official Ukrainian sources. That’s the consensus, then, but “the majority is always wrong,” and it just takes a little thought to prove that to be so in this case.
Posted in History, Politics and sociology
6 Comments
The astonishing Genesis 1-11
The word from my pastor is that our church will be basing its Sunday teaching for the next few months on Genesis 1-11 – the “Protohistory” (in Gordon Wenham’s usage) or, to quote another OT scholar, “the Old Testament of the Old Testament.”
Posted in Creation, History, Theology
6 Comments