Category Archives: Theology

Worshipping in spirit and production values

Posted on 03/03/2021 by Jon Garvey

I had an e-mail today (as the “chief musician” of my church) from the organisation that licences worship music, headed “Enhance Your Worship With MultiTracks.” Coming off the back of recent leadership discussions after nearly a year of online lockdown virtual services, that seems worthy of comment.

Posted in Politics and sociology, Theology | Leave a comment

Good Creation revisited

Posted on 21/02/2021 by Jon Garvey

A couple of new reviews have appeared on my book Good’s Good Earth, in Studies in Christian Ethics and Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, the latter of which rolls it together with a review of Generations of Heaven and Earth. You can find them by linking to the respective book tabs on the menu above, and clicking on the “Endorsements and Reviews” links.

Posted in Adam, Creation, Genealogical Adam, Science, Theology, Theology of nature | 7 Comments

A sense of place

Posted on 16/02/2021 by Jon Garvey

I’ve just read two books to lift the heart above the media’s COVID monomania, albeit it in a bittersweet way. The second was Meadowland: the Private Life of an English Field, by John Lewis-Strempel, a birthday gift from my daughter. It traces the year in the life of a hay-meadow in Herefordshire as observed by its owner, which resonates with me because I own a hay-meadow in Devon.

Posted in History, Philosophy, Politics and sociology, Science, Theology | Leave a comment

Tragedy

Posted on 12/02/2021 by Peter Hickman

This is a guest post by Dr Peter Hickman, an experienced UK medical practitioner, and a regular commenter on The Hump. The phrase “every death is a tragedy” has been repeated multiple times by the Prime Minister and other politicians during the 2020/21 SARS-Cov-2 Coronavirus pandemic. What does “every death is a tragedy” actually mean, and is it a useful or appropriate thing to say?

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

When public truth becomes subjective

Posted on 09/02/2021 by Jon Garvey

In my last post I wrote about the subjectivisation of truth in the progressive programme. But it would be a mistake to think this is restricted to specific examples like race and gender, because the postmodern element of progressivism extends it to the whole of life. It is all truth that becomes subjectivised to a preferred narrative, not just particular instances. Needless to say, this has profound implications.

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

Why lockdown kills everybody

Posted on 31/01/2021 by Jon Garvey

I’m pretty sure a new word is soon going to become part of the English language: “zoomed-out.” I keep hearing the concept, if not always the phrase, used by people who are, ostensibly, doing reasonably well under lockdown. Whether it’s our own student pastor, doing all his church and college work on a screen, or historian Neil Oliver comparing dreary lockdown life with the buzz he felt from a live audience on a book tour before all this, or even my old school-fellow J. J. Burnel commenting ruefully on trying to compose a new Stranglers album via Zoom (having sadly lost his friend and keyboard player, Dave Greenfield, to COVID … Continue reading →

Posted in Medicine, Philosophy, Politics and sociology, Science, Theology | 1 Comment

On compromise

Posted on 28/01/2021 by Jon Garvey

Looking back on the Soviet era, what Christians do you remember? Richard Wurmbrandt, perhaps, tortured for Christ in Ceaușescu’s Romania. Or Brother Andrew, risking his life to smuggle Bibles to believers. Or the pastor Georgi Vins, allowed out of prison to the west after an intensive campaign by Christians here. Or Solzhenitsyn, whose multiple accounts of believers both widely known and nameless, inside and outside the Gulag, show how the Spirit of Truth suffered under, yet finally triumphed over, Communism.

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Bible Study: The finding of the Book of the Pandemic

Posted on 26/01/2021 by Jon Garvey

34 Boris was fifty four years old when he became king, and he reigned in London for four years… 3 In the third year of his lockdown the famine had become very great in the land, and he began secretly to doubt the advice he was getting from SAGE. In his fourth year he began to scour England and London for whatever remained of any value…

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How Christ released Prometheus (but not like Adam did)

Posted on 18/01/2021 by Jon Garvey

I’m reading a recent book by Carl Trueman, recommended by a Cambridge contemporary who read my e-book, Seeing Through Smoke (and generally liked it). It’s entitled The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. Trueman is a Christian historian who seeks to explain the origin of our contemporary moral confusion. To capture his theme, how did a sentence like “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body” come to make sense?

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

A prophetic word (maybe) from 2019

Posted on 10/01/2021 by Jon Garvey

One small effect of the events of 2020 has been to discredit the whole Charismatic prophetic movement, especially in the USA. The self-styled prophets foretold wonderful things for the year, entirely missing the slightly important COVID-19 outbreak, and then decreed with their pretended apostolic authority to cast it out, to absolutely no effect. Then they predicted a massive election win for Donald Trump, which whatever the election shenanigans were is now clearly false prophecy. They are blind guides – shun them.

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