Category Archives: Theology

Give us a break

Two buzzwords have been niggling at me recently. The first is “climate breakdown,” much used by Chris Packham to pretend that we, and not God, are in control of the weather and have completely spoiled it – but it’s a pleasant June day and the birds are singing anyway. The second is “spiritual breakthrough,” a term that has begun to be bandied about prodigally in prayers even at my own church, though I’ve noticed it occurring ubiquitously elsewhere for a year or two. You can be sure that when a non-biblical buzzword comes into fashion, somebody has been monkeying around with the theology, and that is true in spades for … Continue reading

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Old churches and the numinous

My pastor took an excellent line for his teaching on Pentecost Sunday last week. His main thrust was how the glory of God filled the completed Tabernacle in Exodus, and likewise the completed Solomonic temple, in 1 Kings, but after its judgemental departure (“Ichabod”) before the temple’s destruction by the Babylonians, it is not mentioned as filling the second temple built after the return from captivity. Instead, in fulfilment of the prophecy of Joel, at Pentecost God’s glory (later termed the shekinah) came to dwell within every believer born again in Christ. God is no longer represented in a sacred place, but in his sacred people.

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Luke’s gospel – some new thoughts

An ossuary discovered in Jerusalem a couple of decades ago once contained the bones of Joanna, daughter of John and granddaughter of Theophilus, high priest from 37-42AD, who was a son of Annas, and brother-in-law of Caiaphas, both implicated in the trial of Jesus. The discovery has led one apologist, Shane Rosenthal, to suggest that this Joanna might, in fact, be the same Joanna mentioned in Luke’s gospel, and only in Luke’s gospel, as a witness to the resurrection.

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The new importance of Josephus to Christian faith

In complete contrast, both in subject and mood, to Debbie Lerman’s book, which I reviewed in my last post, my other recent reading has been a new monograph by T. C. Schmidt on the passage in Josephus’s Antiquities about Jesus Christ. Published by Oxford University, in an incredibly enlightened gesture Josephus and Jesus – New Evidence for the One Called Christ is available for free download here. Presumably it is thought to be of interest only to nerdy academics. Maybe that’s me.

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Unsung saints

Two years ago I did a piece as an obituary to an old friend, Peter Loose, who though incredibly self-effacing made a great behind-the-scenes difference to many Christian enterprises both here and in the US. I described how I first got to know him in my home Bible Study Group based on the ordinary, if large, Baptist Church where we were both members. Today I hear news of the death of another member of that small (and unremarkable) group, whom I’ll call “K,” and although (or perhaps because) she had nothing like the kind of influence on the world that Peter did, I feel a eulogy is called for, because … Continue reading

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From Athens to Bedlam

Realising late in the day that I needed some holiday reading to supplement an Agatha Christrie novel, I hurriedly ordered the book that had been on my Amazon wish-list the longest, Prof. Stephen R. L. Clark’s From Athens to Jerusalem. To my surprise it went on the list as far back as July 2012, when I heard him speak at an Intelligent Design conference in Cambridge, hosted by the Philosophy of Religion branch of the Tyndale Fellowship. Time flies when you’re geriatric, doesn’t it?

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More on Christian music and church music

Thanks to those wonderful YouTube chaps, I’ve just discovered the fascinating and surprisingly contemporary-sounding music of PĂ©rotin, the thirteenth century composer of Notre Dame, Paris, who was the first to write choral music for four parts, eight centuries ago. I’m tempted to say I’ve developed PĂ©rotinitis, as it’s such good stuff.

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Is “moderate Charismatic” an oxymoron?

The reason for posing this question is that whilst the excesses of the “Hypercharismatic” megachurches are plain to see, and have been so for many years, they still seem remarkably attractive to the undoubtedly sane and generally sound Charismatics in most British Evangelical churches.

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The use and abuse of music

It has been truly said that modern revivals (of the Toronto Blessing sort, rather than the actual quiet revivals apparently going on in the UK or Iran) are not gospel revivals but music revivals. By that is meant that if you removed the loud and prolonged rock music from the proceedings, nothing would happen in the way of people falling on the floor, weeping, laughing hysterically and all the other features that convince people the Holy Spirit has turned up in force. I can well believe it.

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Hump author shakes the world of biology

Not me, you understand! My friend Sy Garte, one of the original writers here, who has moved on to various platforms of his own, is the lead author of a significant new paper. I confess upfront that I became aware it of through the ID Discovery Institute’s Evolution News and Views rather than Sy himself. His co-authors are Perry Marshall, whose 2015 Evolution 2.0 sought to bridge the gap between conventional evolutionary theory and Intelligent Design, and Stuart Kaufmann, one of the leading systems biologists and an advocate of “natural” self-organisation. A philosophically diverse trio!

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