Category Archives: Theology

Who will lead an apostolic counter-reformation?

Posted on 16/08/2025 by Jon Garvey

Leaving the Message is an excellent, and exceptionally prolific, YouTube Channel run by a survivor of William Branham’s Message cult, John Collins. You may or may not have heard of Branham, but you ought to have done, because his teaching underpins much of what is wrong in Evangelical Christianity today. To attempt a pithy summary of the channel’s aims, it is to prove the direct personal and ideological connections between the heretical Latter Rain Movement of the years after World War II, and the so-called New Apostolic Reformation of Bethel Redding, IHOPKC and so on that fascinates so many Evangelicals in Britain and elsewhere, and has virtually cornered the lucrative … Continue reading →

Posted in History, Politics and sociology, Theology | 1 Comment

Karaite and Rabbinic Christians

Posted on 06/08/2025 by Jon Garvey

Until I saw this video on the Hebrew Matthew’s gospel yesterday, I had no idea that there is a branch of Judaism, the Karaites, who reject the authority of the Talmud (which codified the “oral torah” of the Rabbis, the heirs of the Pharisees of Jesus’s time) in favour of the sole divine authority of the tanach, the Hebrew Bible. They separated in the 8th century, when the Talmud originated, refusing like Jesus to accept the rabbis’ claim to have solely maintained an oral tradition interpreting the torah correctly since the time of Moses. Sadly, numbering only 35,000, they are today vastly outnumbered by Rabbinic Jews (who are outnumbered by … Continue reading →

Posted in Theology, Uncategorized | 8 Comments

Righteousness exalts a nation…

Posted on 04/08/2025 by Jon Garvey

…but sin is a reproach to any people. Opponents of the Deep State both in the USA and here are wondering why President Trump has “turned on a dime” from demanding full transparency on the Jeffery Epstein affair to showing every sign of covering it up, from doctored prison videos to denying there is even anything to investigate. Lawyer and commentator Robert Barnes provides what, to me, is the most plausible explanation for the change here.

Posted in History, Politics and sociology, Theology | 2 Comments

More on the 613 Commandments

Posted on 02/08/2025 by Jon Garvey

In March I wrote this piece, in which I questioned whether it was actually even possible now to obey all 613 Mosaic Commandments, as advocated by a Messianic Jew whose work I was reading. Deciding that it was too important a question merely to wing, I spent some weeks, after I finished reading his translation of a Hebrew manuscript of Matthew’s gospel, ploughing through the Pentateuch to answer that question.

Posted in Theology | 2 Comments

The pen is mightier… but words will never hurt me.

Posted on 29/07/2025 by Jon Garvey

“The pen is mightier than the sword.”“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”These can’t both be right, surely?

Posted in Politics and sociology, Theology | 2 Comments

On singing Bethel songs in church.

Posted on 24/07/2025 by Jon Garvey

“O.K. Listen up, Guys. I’ve got a song for the worship band to do. It’s from Ike Watts’s new album.” “That’s good, His ‘O God, Our Help in Ages Past’ is glorious. But isn’t he – well – a little… old? That song must have been written back in the 1990s.”

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Sola Scriptura works – while you let it.

Posted on 23/07/2025 by Jon Garvey

Another week’s break between posts here, and once more it’s not because of sunning myself on the Jurassic Coast, nor even our upcoming Golden Wedding Anniversary this weekend (“…and it don’t seem a day too long…”), but because of further digging into the highly interesting history of my own Baptist Church. I spent a morning at the Exeter records office photographing the Church proceedings book we kept from 1653 until 1795, when it was borrowed by John Rippon, of hymn-collecting fame, and not returned for over a century. I spent most of the last week transcribing the archaic handwriting and spelling, correcting the chronological order, all garbled for several contingent … Continue reading →

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If it ain’t in the Bible…

Posted on 14/07/2025 by Jon Garvey

…it ain’t biblical. In my research on the English Civil War founders of my own church, I came to the conclusion that a single aberrant doctrine – Fifth Monarchism – had caused our Baptists in particular, and other Puritans more generally, a lot of trouble with both Royalist and Commonwealth governments that might, perhaps, have been avoided by more critical biblical thinking. It taught me the importance for every church’s leaders to “watch your life and doctrine closely,” which in this context means watching what your church believes or practices that might diverge from biblical teaching, with bad consequences. That responsibility is not, of course, limited to leaders.

Posted in Theology | 2 Comments

A bit more on NDEs

Posted on 11/07/2025 by Jon Garvey

I closed my previous post with a quotation from Jesus in which he states that Scripture is sufficient for salvation if people are willing to believe God, and that even someone returning from the dead (he clearly means primarily himself, but it applies equally to the rich man or any NDE experiencer) will not convince evil men.

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Near death experiences

Posted on 09/07/2025 by Jon Garvey

I laid myself open when I preached on the Ascension last Sunday. I majored on one of the things I find most wondrous – that there is an embodied Man in heaven, ruling all things on the throne of God. I unpacked scriptures around that. In passing, I warned people against the hundreds of YouTube videos along the lines, “God took me to heaven, and gave me this message for the world…” Even the apostle Paul was told to keep quiet about what he heard and saw, whether in or out of the body he knew not, in his one view of the third heaven.

Posted in Philosophy, Theology | 1 Comment