Category Archives: Theology

Come and join the celebration

Posted on 14/12/2018 by Jon Garvey

I’ve been thinking about the rarity in our lives, overall, of moments when we can really celebrate some triumph. I mean the champagne, flag-waving kind of celebration that you get from winning an Olympic Final, or that an old-fashioned army got returning from a victorious battle before war became politically complicated as well as efficiently bloody.

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Before the powers went bad

Posted on 12/12/2018 by Jon Garvey

Daniel Deen (aka Philosurfer), over at Peaceful Science, has just reviewed a chapter by Brian Curry in the book Christ and the Created Order. The chapter is interesting in focusing on the role of the “powers” that are so prominent in New Testament teaching, but so completely absent from science-faith discussion generally.

Posted in Creation, Genealogical Adam, Theology, Theology of nature | 2 Comments

Final causes and Brexit

Posted on 05/12/2018 by Jon Garvey

I think what irks me most about the scientistic mindset is how much it takes for granted about the world, as if needing no explanation – things like logic, reliable human faculties and so on.

Posted in Creation, Politics and sociology, Science, Theology | 2 Comments

Final causes and salvation

Posted on 03/12/2018 by Jon Garvey

Here’s some theological musing inspired by the discussion we’ve had on “final causes” connected with the last couple of posts.

Posted in Philosophy, Theology | 2 Comments

No computation without teleology

Posted on 26/11/2018 by Jon Garvey

Support for the suggestion in my last post, that we are likely to be missing significant biological truths by not recognising Aristotelian formal and final causation, comes from a philosophical direction in a recent article by Thomist analytic philosopher Ed Feser .

Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Science, Theology | 16 Comments

More on Molinism

Posted on 18/11/2018 by Jon Garvey

Molinism has come up for discussion again on Peaceful Science. Although it’s popular nowadays with significant Christian thinkers like William Lane Craig, it seems to me to be a complicated philosophical way of failing to solve the problems for which it is designed, whilst creating more.

Posted in Creation, Theology, Theology of nature | 4 Comments

Curses, Moriarty

Posted on 16/11/2018 by Jon Garvey

Here’s a thought that would have gone into my book, had I thought of it earlier. One of my minor theses there is that the “curse on the ground,” usually invoked to support the “fallen creation” teaching, actually applied only to Adam’s immediate descendants, and was abrogated in Noah’s covenant. I’m pleased to find overt support for that in Brian Curry’s chapter in the book I’m helping review at Peaceful Science, Christ and the Created Order, where he writes: But even within Genesis this curse lasts only until the end of the flood and is later canceled by God (Gen 8:21). Further, it exercises no systematic relevance within the rest … Continue reading →

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Of real and allegorical kings

Posted on 14/11/2018 by Jon Garvey

It seems to me that to those who see the Eden narrative as “allegorical,” that is denying an historical Adam of some sort, it is mainly a kind of mythic aetiological tale about the univerality of human sin. And so, if sin arose by some evolutionary process, or by a mini-fall in each self human life, it doesn’t much matter because evil’s present existence is real.

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Intertextual Adam

Posted on 06/11/2018 by Jon Garvey

I think one of the main reasons why the existence of an historical Adam and Eve is considered unimportant (or unlikely), at least by Christians who generally take the Bible seriously, is that references to Adam are apparently so sparse throughout Scripture.

Posted in Adam, Genealogical Adam, History, Theology | 7 Comments

Politics, if Adam had not sinned

Posted on 05/11/2018 by Jon Garvey

I’m always struck by the way even the best of us can easily impose on Scripture what we want it to say because of our cultural prejudices. Egregious examples are the libertarian, non-judgemental Jesus shown to be a parody of the rather more gritty biblical Christ in my last post, or the even more radical post-modern Jesus imposed only by interpretive contortions on the real person we find in history (satirized here).

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