And talking of le meme chose…

Back on the Charismatic theology wagon, a podcast I did with John Collins of Leaving the Message is now out on YouTube, and seems to have mainly positive feedback so far. It’s here. I’m actually recording a follow-up in January, so we’ll see what that’s all about when we get there.

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C’est chaque fois la même chose

It was a writer on COVID, which one I’ve forgotten, who recently pointed us to this 1898 book by the great Alfred Russel Wallace (co-discoverer, with Charles Darwin, if you’ve forgotten, of the theory of evolution by natural selection, though he was far better than Darwin in realising its limitations). So I’m reinforcing that modern writer’s application to the present here, rather than discovering anything new myself.

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Nativity edification

I anticipate our church’s annual Nativity Service with the trepidation probably shared by anybody not having angelic, or at least haloed, children in the church, and undoubtedly less anxiety than those adults roped in to dress up in tea-towels for the grown-up lines. But this year’s, yesterday, was actually an uplifting surprise.

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One more on Whitehall carols

The Church Times’s downbeat report of the evangelistic carol service in Whitehall last Saturday, to which I’ve addressed the last two posts, quotes “the C of E’s co-lead bishop for racial justice, suffragan Bishop of Kirkstall Arun Arora”:

Referring to Mr Robinson by his real name, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, Bishop Arora said that he was “delighted” that he had “recently come to faith in prison”, but suggested that “having embraced and accepted God’s welcome he can’t now restrict it from others who may be equally lost.

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Post-christians and post-post-christians

And so on my return from a family gathering last Saturday, I flicked through the YouTube footage of the Whitehall Carol Concert, as organised by Tommy Robinson, real name unknown to all but himself since his conversion in prison (see Revelation 2:17).

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Strange bedfellows

In a comment on my most recent post reader Steve links to a reply to an open letter apparently signed by the entire religious Establishment of Britain, condemning “Christian nationalism” in the form of the spontaneous expressions of Christian faith at the Tommy Robinson rally a couple of months ago. Since my blog mentions the forthcoming mass carol concert in London, also organised by Robinson’s people, it’s worthy of further comment.

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The wrong kind of revival

Twenty-two years ago I came to the conclusion that the perennial Evangelical (and Pentecostal) hunger for revival is, in effect, an attempt to put God in a box shaped like the First Great Awakening under Wesley, Whitefield and Edwards two centuries ago. In fact, in my view, this was a unique work of God for a particular time and circumstance, and not a biblical template for the renewal of Christianity. Indeed, like every work of God in history, it was in large part a psycho-social, as well as a spiritual, phenomenon, which was both a good thing and a bad thing in God’s providence.

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Was Einstein wrong?

Every once in a while, some sciencey YouTuber posts a video about a new scientific discovery that casts doubt on Einstein’s theory of relativity. I’ve no idea whether any of these have validity, but instead I want to ask whether scientific progress has refuted his view of God – that is to say his theology rather than his relativity.

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Experiencing God God’s way

In my long exploration of the Charismatic takeover of Evangelicalism, here on The Hump, I’ve come to the tentative conclusion that one core issue is that because Evangelicals lost many of the legitimate sources of knowing the emotions of joy, peace and love in Christ, it has appeared to them that the only way to know these things is through the direct, mystical, experience of God through the “Pentecostal experience.” This “blessing,” as we’ve seen, is not only absent from Scripture, but in effect deifies human passions or, worse, taps into some other spiritual source, if that’s what “kundalini energy” is. In the end it must disappoint.

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Conversion experience in Acts

In my last post I showed how the Charismatic “second experience” can be traced back, through John Wesley, to the Moravian conversion/justication/sanctification first experience taught by Count Zinzendorf. I also examined what seems to be a separate tying of conversion to a particular emotional experience by the English Puritans, the foundation of which (I would conjecture) was Martin Luther’s near-pathological sense of guilt. By God’s grace, his dread of damnation led to his rediscovery of salvation by faith alone, and consequent doctrine of assurance, albeit balanced with a life of continual repentance for indwelling sin.

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