Acts 2: 40-42:
And with many other words he bore witness and continued to exhort them, saying, “Save yourselves from this crooked generation.” So those who received his word were baptized, and there were added that day about three thousand souls.
And they devoted themselves to learning to hear the voice of God in their heads, to the worship experience, to praise songs, and to working many wonders and signs, just like the apostles.
The articles I’ve been doing on the excesses of Bethel, and on the Charismatic Movement more generally, have attracted greater than average interest, as judged by the web stats. I’m not sure if this is because folks attracted by the titles were hoping to find the route to a more intense experience of the Holy Spirit (Charismatics always are), or whether readers are seeing the articles as the evidence that Garvey has finally lost his theological marbles – or whether, perhaps, people are finding resonances with their own with half-formed doubts that the increasingly experiential goals in their churches’ meetings are raising for them.
Continue readingOne of the reasons for my embracing Charismatic theology back in the day, despite certain misgivings based on the problems it caused, was that the spiritual gifts apparently exercised by Charismatics were in the Bible. I was never really convinced by the cessationist explanations that they had been withdrawn by God because no longer necessary after the apostolic age. To put it more directly, the Bible did not teach that they had, or would be, withdrawn, making the claim mere speculation. It seemed to me that, for instance, prophecies like those of Agabus, warning of famine or of the imminent danger for Paul, would be as useful today as then, and I still think so.
Continue readingLet’s start with a contemporary endpoint: the belief that God routinely speaks to Christians, assuming they learn to listen. It’s the basis of Bethel’s supernatural ministry school, is seemingly common in YWAM training (see video linked in my comment under last post), and is apparently taught to kids even in mainstream youth camps like Spree SW in my area. Furthermore, it has become inherent in the common dictum that “prayer is a two-way conversation.” But in point of fact nowhere in Scripture are we taught to expect God to speak to us in our routine daily prayers, and certainly not at our command, so that a teacher cannot demand that trainee-prayers feed back what God has told them after (say) a ten-minute session. But they do anyway. So where did the belief and practice come from?
Continue readingLeaving the Message is an excellent, and exceptionally prolific, YouTube Channel run by a survivor of William Branham’s Message cult, John Collins. You may or may not have heard of Branham, but you ought to have done, because his teaching underpins much of what is wrong in Evangelical Christianity today. To attempt a pithy summary of the channel’s aims, it is to prove the direct personal and ideological connections between the heretical Latter Rain Movement of the years after World War II, and the so-called New Apostolic Reformation of Bethel Redding, IHOPKC and so on that fascinates so many Evangelicals in Britain and elsewhere, and has virtually cornered the lucrative market in worship music.
Continue readingI chanced upon a guitar auction video today,and discovered that it mentions me by name, in connection with my buying a guitar off Gordon Giltrap in 1984, and selling it back to him in 1993. It’s an interesting story, and for those who like guitars, an even more interesting instrument. Here’s the clip.
Continue readingA video from a couple of years ago has been doing the rounds. The maker spotted a whole flotilla of inflated RIBs at Dover, each one with an official label showing that it had come ashore stocked with illegal immigrants.
Continue readingUntil I saw this video on the Hebrew Matthew’s gospel yesterday, I had no idea that there is a branch of Judaism, the Karaites, who reject the authority of the Talmud (which codified the “oral torah” of the Rabbis, the heirs of the Pharisees of Jesus’s time) in favour of the sole divine authority of the tanach, the Hebrew Bible. They separated in the 8th century, when the Talmud originated, refusing like Jesus to accept the rabbis’ claim to have solely maintained an oral tradition interpreting the torah correctly since the time of Moses. Sadly, numbering only 35,000, they are today vastly outnumbered by Rabbinic Jews (who are outnumbered by secular Jews!).
Continue reading…but sin is a reproach to any people.
Opponents of the Deep State both in the USA and here are wondering why President Trump has “turned on a dime” from demanding full transparency on the Jeffery Epstein affair to showing every sign of covering it up, from doctored prison videos to denying there is even anything to investigate. Lawyer and commentator Robert Barnes provides what, to me, is the most plausible explanation for the change here.
Continue readingIn March I wrote this piece, in which I questioned whether it was actually even possible now to obey all 613 Mosaic Commandments, as advocated by a Messianic Jew whose work I was reading. Deciding that it was too important a question merely to wing, I spent some weeks, after I finished reading his translation of a Hebrew manuscript of Matthew’s gospel, ploughing through the Pentateuch to answer that question.
Continue reading