Category Archives: Theology

What’s wrong with the mark of the beast, anyway?

Posted on 15/09/2023 by Jon Garvey

It’s generally thought that the earthly reality behind the book of Revelation’s “mark of the beast,” the infamous 666, was the imposition of emperor-worship by Nero, whose name is argued to add up numerologically to that number. For the Christian, it meant the compulsion to own any other god than the true one revealed by and in Christ.

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More on soul as the sole reality

Posted on 09/09/2023 by Jon Garvey

I eventually worked through Joshua Farris’s The Creation of Self, as mentioned recently, and have to say I felt it improved towards the end.

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The sole soul

Posted on 23/08/2023 by Jon Garvey

the Apologies for sparsity of posts just now, but it’s both the B&B season for visiting grandchildren, and the labour-intensive mowing period for our hillside wild-flower meadow. Nevertheless I’ve had reason, whilst raking a hill-full of grass, to ponder the matter of the human soul.

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National priorities

Posted on 16/08/2023 by Jon Garvey

Two current statistics: Britain has the tenth biggest economy in the world, according to IMF: and one in 7 British households (around 11 million people) lack food security, according to Trussell Trust, which organises a majority of our food banks.

Posted in Politics and sociology, Theology | 11 Comments

Pandemic religion – a lab leak?

Posted on 12/08/2023 by Jon Garvey

I well remember, as a student, going to the home of another guy to pick him up for some evangelistic work we were doing. For interested Brits, it was actually street-theatre in North Wales with a group called Breadrock, later to become Riding Lights, Britain’s first Christian theatre company, which is still going strong although its co-founder and Artistic Director, my good friend Paul Burbridge, sadly died this April. RIP Paul – see you in glory, with many a laugh.

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Satan’s end game?

Posted on 02/08/2023 by Jon Garvey

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.

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Exploring the theological status of ancient man (3)

Posted on 31/07/2023 by Jon Garvey

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.

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Exploring the theological status of ancient man (2)

Posted on 29/07/2023 by Jon Garvey

Let’s start our exploration by considering the scant information Genesis contains on what it took to be a human being “in the beginning.”

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Exploring the theological status of ancient man (1)

Posted on 28/07/2023 by Jon Garvey

When I wrote The Generations of Heaven and Earth, whose central theme is the Genealogical Adam and Eve paradigm, I spent some pages discussing the status of those people “outside the garden,” on the assumption that an Adam and Eve around the Chalcolithic period, as suggested by the text, would have had many contemporaries. By that time, after all, and indeed very much earlier, human traces are known from all around the world.

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Humpism, not ID, is the real enemy of Science™

Posted on 21/07/2023 by Jon Garvey

What’s the connection between Nigel Farage and the the Intelligent Design Movement? Well none, directly, or else it would certainly have appeared in his Coutts Bank Dossier and been used as further evidence of his unsuitability to be their customer. But conceptually there is a connection, in that what first made me aware of the prevalence of propaganda, disinformation and cancellation in our society was the way that ID was treated by mainstream scientists, their progressive Evangelical acolytes in the form of BioLogos, and broader societal organs like the press and judiciary.

Posted in Creation, Politics and sociology, Science, Theology of nature | 4 Comments