Category Archives: Theology

More on “Civilisational Christianity.”

Posted on 12/12/2023 by Jon Garvey

The two pieces I recently did, inspired by Bret Weinstein, were not intended to do him down, since the piece I quoted from him was essentially apologising to Christians that the New Atheism movement, by denigrating them, had sidelined important allies against the same enemies of truth and morality. My main point was that he has failed to recognise that faith in God is the foundation of that morality and truth, not an unfortunate superstitious add-on.

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

Christ and Creation in three prepositions

Posted on 11/12/2023 by Jon Garvey

Here’s a little hermeneutic gem from Richard Bauckham’s excellent book Jesus and the God of Israel.

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More on Bret Weinstein’s evolutionary distorting mirror

Posted on 08/12/2023 by Jon Garvey

Yesterday I critiqued Bret Weinstein’s proposed rapprochement of “science” with Christian morality, pointing out that he misunderstood the foundations of Christianity, and merely tried to replace them with an inferior, naturalistic evolutionary, narrative. In fact the problem is worse than that, because it’s not simply that his proposal hides the shaky metaphysical foundations of naturalism, but that even in materialist terms it is pseudoscientific. And that is because societal morals are demonstrably non-evolutionary. As I will now demonstrate.

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Bret Weinstein’s evolutionary mirror

Posted on 07/12/2023 by Jon Garvey

Bret Weinstein has been one of the good guys regarding not only COVID, but the woke phenomenon that targeted him and his wife when he was working in academia. But he’s also an evolutionary biologist, and likes to frame everything from the viewpoint of random change and natural selection. That’s useful when dealing with the micro-evolution of viruses, but less so when dealing with human values.

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

One of my occasional posts on occasionalism

Posted on 27/11/2023 by Jon Garvey

How God works in the world is often regarded (and is indeed) a deep philosophical question. But it actually matters in real life, which is why the Bible says a lot about it. Because it doesn’t do so in a systematic analytical way, but through narrative, poetry, historiography and so on, its importance is often missed by those academics who like systematics.

Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Science, Theology | 6 Comments

Bad theology exposed in the tabloids

Posted on 24/11/2023 by Jon Garvey

A story in the Daily Mail today caught my attention. Essentially the piece is in the genre “human interest hit job on religious cult,” the cult in this case being “Bigoted Fundamentalist Christianity.” But I noticed it because the strapline included “Guildford County School for Girls,” in my hometown, so I wondered if the youth club that changed her life for the worse might be the one I went to.

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A perfect jihad

Posted on 20/11/2023 by Jon Garvey

Outside observers like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Andy Ngo (now based in London) point out the perfect storm of violence and cultural disaster now brewing across Europe, not least in England. This has been brought into focus, for those with eyes to see and ears to hear, by the crude antisemitism evident in the response in Britain to the current Middle East war, combined with the (to say the least) easy ride given to Hamas amongst our British intelligentsia. One concerning thing, to me, is how these attitudes are shared even by many in the sceptical community.

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

Congregational singing is not karaoke

Posted on 16/11/2023 by Jon Garvey

One of our guys at church has just come off the sound team, and after a break of a decade is getting back into playing flute for our church band. “As I get deeper into practising,” he said, “I’m finding that a lot of the new songs aren’t written for worship, but performance.”

Posted in Music, Theology | 2 Comments

The religious apologetics of naturalistic materialism

Posted on 09/11/2023 by Jon Garvey

James Tour, as many of you will know, is a noted chemist who wears his Christian faith on his sleeve, unashamedly engaging in apologetics alongside his groundbreaking research, particularly that involving nano-particles.

Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Politics and sociology, Science, Theology, Theology of nature | Leave a comment

Divine geopolitics is individual

Posted on 27/10/2023 by Jon Garvey

I was walking Charlie the dog, and idly wondering about a common Evangelical saying I’d recently heard again somewhere, which runs: “If I’d been the only sinner in the world, Jesus would still have died for me.“

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