Worship-is-us, yeah?

Posted on 23/05/2023 by Jon Garvey

Someone at church suggested a new song for Sunday services, and being in the band I went to YouTube to look up how it goes. The clip was of the writer singing his own song. He was a young man with a strange haircut, tattoos and an expensive Gibson J45 guitar. He stood on stage amid well orchestrated lights, accompanied by a band of equally young chaps and young blonde ladies, all looking worshipful if they weren’t actually playing instruments, in which case they just looked like musicians. Somewhere, I suppose, there was a congregation. “It’s all about you, Jesus…”

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Posted in Music, Theology | 7 Comments

Would you Adam and Eve it?

Posted on 19/05/2023 by Jon Garvey

For Christians (and Jews and others) seeking to maintain the historicity of a first human couple, Adam and Eve, there are really three broad ways to proceed. My aim here is to cast doubt on one of them, from a biblical standpoint, and so I’ll break the usual pattern of such discussions by stating my own position first, and then leaving it to one side!

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Posted in Creation, Genealogical Adam, History, Science, Theology | 8 Comments

The heavens declare the crisis in mental health…

Posted on 18/05/2023 by Jon Garvey

Before the age of atheism, the natural human response to the beauties of nature was to see in them the power and wisdom of God, just as Romans 1:20 reminds us. The perennial danger was to worship the creature, rather than the Creator. But the pagan hunter feeling the wind on his skin as he looked across the veldt, the Saxon poet weaving birds and beasts into his measures, Francis Bacon attesting that the closer one studies nature the more God’s hand is perceived, or the peasant woman toiling to collect water from the stream, and pausing at the bejewelled kingfisher passing by… the common heritage of all these was the steady backdrop of creation’s awesome peace, against the sinful chaos of human affairs.

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Posted in Creation, Politics and sociology, Theology of nature | 1 Comment

God’s purposes in creation – inscrutable or logical?

Posted on 16/05/2023 by Jon Garvey

I’ve just bought the new book God’s Grandeur – The Catholic Case for Intelligent Design. It’s edited by Ann Gauger, whom I befriended over at Peaceful Science a few years ago, before she was hounded off by the constant sneering of the resident militant anti-theists there. Having brought back to mind my longstanding interest in biological origins, I thought before getting into it to do a blog on the surprisingly uncertain support for Darwinian evolution in the fossil record. Indeed, the more I’ve looked at the evidence over the last decade, the more I’ve come to the conclusion that the evidence itself, freed from materialist metaphysical preferences, points more to some form of progressive creation than anything else.

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Posted in Creation, Science, Theology of nature | 2 Comments

The case of the random cyber attacks

Posted on 09/05/2023 by Jon Garvey

I can’t speak for the experience of other bloggers, but from time to time my experience is that the site gets inundated with showers of phantom “hits” from specific countries, for no reason I’ve ever been able to fathom. The latest such phenomenon is that, since 24th April, I have had literally thousands of hits from the usually uninterested city-state of Singapore. In fact, Singapore’s hits have more than doubled the total visits over the last month, though they seem not to have actually read any of the articles.

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Posted in Politics and sociology | 2 Comments

The Sabbath was made for man

Posted on 07/05/2023 by Jon Garvey

One of the insights I gained when writing The Generations of Heaven and Earth was what theologian Claus Westermann wrote about the command given to Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. He suggested that it was only the command that made relationship possible between man and God, thus enabling true human freedom. As I summarised it in my book:

“The freedom of this relationship arises only from the command; without the command there would be no freedom.”

Now this is a particularly bold statement in that Westermann has just quoted Gerhard von Rad’s words about the preceding permission to eat from any tree of the garden:

“God begins by allowing man complete freedom.”

It is true that the first words of God’s address, about freedom to eat from any tree, give the man his first taste of “autonomy”—and autonomy is how most people nowadays regard “freedom.” But Westermann argues that because this permission is so utterly reasonable in freeing the man from any risk of privation, it is not freedom at all. It is the “unreasonable” command to abstain from the tree—only intelligible through trust in God that eating it will, in fact, lead to death with no understanding of why or how—that actually creates a meaningful relationship with God. And that is because obedience must be based on trust, with freedom either to bestow that trust on Yahweh or not. And the basis of the trust is that it is placed in the same God who created both Adam and the tree. It is faith.

Jon Garvey, The Generations of Heaven and Earth, p.126
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A personal valediction

Posted on 05/05/2023 by Jon Garvey

I’m of that age when my friends and heroes alike begin to be seriously thinned out by death. The most recent hero was Ray Shulman, writer and multi-instrumentalist in the band Gentle Giant, once described as “the greatest bass player you’ve never heard of.” He died a week or two ago. Then last month I came across an obituary about my closest childhood friend, who started school the same day as me, then followed me in a move to another school, as well as being in the same Wolf Cub pack. Eventually we were only separated by the eleven-plus exam, and he went on to become a sub-editor on a national newspaper, whilst I ended up as a doctor.

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Britain’s life of excess

Posted on 04/05/2023 by Jon Garvey

From time to time it’s important to draw attention to the kind of stats I was reviewing regularly during COVID. That’s because, with the “emergency” ostensibly over, the studied blindness towards the damaging effects of the COVID response by all our “institutions” becomes more of a running sore. But like a real running sore, or an ongoing war of attrition, it becomes a lot easier for those institutions to bury the bad news as non-news.

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Posted in Medicine, Politics and sociology, Science | 8 Comments

The danger of (post)modern syncretism

Posted on 28/04/2023 by Jon Garvey

The Puritans are (and always were) misunderstood as believing that they were morally or spiritually purer than their fellows. But in fact their basic tenet was rather that there is such a thing as “pure religion,” in the sense of the original gospel of Christ and the apostles untrammeled by syncretistic additions from other religions. This, of course, was the basis for the Protestant Reformation. It is (as the first of Martin Luther’s Wittenberg theses stressed) a religion of repeated repentance leading to constant assurance of salvation.

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

The world’s bent cop?

Posted on 24/04/2023 by Jon Garvey

September 28, 2022

The US ambassador to Sudan has warned of consequences if the northeast African country allows the establishment of a Russian military base on the Red Sea coast.

In an interview with the Tayyar newspaper, John Godfrey said “there are some reports that Russia is trying to implement the agreement it signed with ousted President Omar al-Bashir in 2017 to establish a military base along the Red Sea.”

He warned that such a move will isolate Sudan from the international community and undermine the country’s interests.

“All countries have a sovereign right to decide which other countries to partner with, but these choices have consequences, of course,” Godfrey said.

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