Search
-
Recent Posts
- Give us a break 15/06/2025
- Old churches and the numinous 14/06/2025
- Luke’s gospel – some new thoughts 12/06/2025
- The new importance of Josephus to Christian faith 04/06/2025
- Tying a few (or a lot of) COVID loose ends 02/06/2025
Recent Comments
Post Archive
Category Archives: Theology
Societal revival
My last blog picked up on the widespread talk of Christian revival in this country, and discussed how true revival is far broader than the usually-held idea, recalling the Great Awakening, of big meetings accompanied by spectacular spiritual and/or psychological phenomena. As was actually true in the eighteenth century too, the key thing was a general realisation that the current religion was failing, and a God-given hunger directed at biblical salvation in Jesus. The rest was contingent detail.
Posted in History, Philosophy, Politics and sociology, Theology
Leave a comment
Revival v. Revivalism
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.
Posted in History, Politics and sociology, Theology
1 Comment
Putting on the agony, putting on the Lifestyle Christianity
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.
Posted in Politics and sociology, Theology
Leave a comment
Humanity – of one blood and polyphyletic?
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).
Posted in Adam, Creation, Science, Theology, Theology of nature
Leave a comment
The blood is the life thereof
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:
Posted in History, Theology
Leave a comment
To save Judaeo-Christian values, or to be saved?
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.
Posted in History, Politics and sociology, Theology
2 Comments
To Law or not to Law?
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.
Posted in Theology
7 Comments
The tradition of magical thinking in Darwinism
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.
Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Science, Theology of nature
Leave a comment
Soft sacerdotalism
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.
Posted in Theology
2 Comments