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There’s an interesting discussion on YouTube between two Christian apologists to Muslims, the American David Wood, and the English “Bob from Speakers Corner.” They agree on the need for the churches to “muscle up,” and they have good experience to back this view up, being far more aware than most Christians about the real threat to peace (and potentially to Christianity itself) from Islam. Their message may well find more general agreement than it would have a year or so ago, as ordinary people begin to sense the antisemitic and anti-christian militancy of many from a religion that now comprises 6% of the population, and that is increasing by hundreds … Continue reading →

I’ve been considering another unhealthy feature of Charismatic theology, but realised that it largely arises from a wider modern misunderstanding of the whole human condition. And that feature is the prioritisation of unrealistic supernatural expectations in children. In particular, I’m remembering how our kids were taught at a Well Known Bible Week held in Spring. Our bad for acquiescing in it.

So I was wrong in my recent post: I haven’t finished on Pentecostalism yet. I want to bring Jesus into the picture. Back in the early 1970s, Father Dennis Bennett’s Nine O’Clock in the Morning was required reading for us keen young Christians (though for some reason I never read it). Bennett is credited with making the Charismatic experience mainstream, after he announced to his Episcopalian congregation that, quietly in prayer with a couple of others in his living room, he had received the baptism of the Spirit and the gift of tongues “as a real language with grammar and syntax.”

Here’s an interesting and rather blunt quote, actually from a Hindu vocational adviser on Linkedin: The passion, in “following your passion”, is largely driven by interest. This interest is mostly floating and is largely influenced by the environment and current trends… Following your passion can be very misleading, many times it leads you to nowhere and a permanent state of unhappiness. Desire is born out of a passionate mind, the more you feed it, the stronger it grows, and when the desire is unfulfilled it agitates the mind. This seems to echo the biblical pessimism about “passions” I explored here. The source above, incidentally, goes on to advise young people … Continue reading →