(The Neo-Pentecostal Playbook?)

Setting the Scene

Well, there’s no soft-soaping this commentary and even after considering the title for some time, it still landed as it has. If it feels abrupt and even pejorative, then it’s probably because is brushing up against an entrenched posture that has been reinforced ad-nauseum for nigh on 40 years in the now Neo-Pentecostal genre of Christianity. 

To set the record straight from the beginning, I am firmly and unabashedly a Proto-Pentecostal. The Pentecostal movement…

Arguably, the most effective proselytising agency the globe as ever experienced was the Wesleyan ‘Methodist’ movement. The architects didn’t start out to create a new Protestant denomination, rather to use an Anglican governance caveat to create a revitalisation Order within that church. What is even more remarkable is that the chief of those architects, at the start of this work, did not have a relationship with Jesus as either Lord or even Saviour, as time was soon to reveal – Not dissimilar in some ways…

When Machines Pretend to Be Gods: Why Superintelligence Can Never Be Divine

The existing reality of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and the now race to create, unleash or otherwise deploy, Super Intelligence (and to borrow a cosmological term) Event Horizon – has reignited an ancient theological question: can creation ever transcend its creator? 

As machines edge toward “superintelligence”—capable of mastering science, language, and strategy beyond human reach—the comparison to divinity seems almost…

The Frame

Before we ask and seek a genuine answer from the dominant school of Islamic thought and tradition, I wanted to table a, hopefully objective, synopsis of the operational and relational framework that surrounded the prophet Muhammad, the recipient and conveyor of the oral traditional of the Qur’an, during the military establishment of Islam as a religio-political power.

Ah, but first, some basic principles concerning perspectives. 

There is a widely understood sociological principle that goes…

The Frame

Persecution – A word, like so many in our post-truth culture, that is losing weight with various musings and misapplications, all trivialising or worse, hijacking it’s understanding to leverage (at the very least) outrage from some cohorts.

It has all too often been my experience that growing numbers of persons who conduct themselves ‘freely’ in this post-truth framework as behavioural wrecking balls, and when they are called out on it, cry foul. Rather than submitting to being critically and…

Working Out Your Salvation With…?

Just these last couple of weeks, something deep started stirring inside me—I got what I know to be a Divine Prompt, one I couldn’t ignore. So, after reflecting hard and praying long, I sat down and started to try and make some sense of recently raised questions, high profile theological actors musings and angsty conversations all swirling around one burning issue: How do I know I’m saved?

When I finally fired up the keyboard, thinking “maybe this will be a short post” (at…

Eric Metaxas’s book Is Atheism Dead? is a provocative and wide-ranging exploration of the ongoing debate between belief in God and atheism, framed as a response to the famous 1966 TIME magazine cover that asked, “Is God Dead?”123 Metaxas, a conservative radio host and bestselling author, argues that recent scientific discoveries, archaeological evidence, and philosophical insights have dramatically shifted the conversation, making atheism increasingly implausible and intellectually indefensible 24.

Main…

“If your eye causes you to sin, the pluck it out, if your hand causes you to sin, cut it off.”

Jesus The Christ
 

Now, if you have even the slightest inkling of the nature of God, then you know at least one thing, and that is Jesus doesn’t have ‘bad hair days’ or ‘hissy fits’ incongruent with His Divine nature - an uncharacteristic instruction uttered in a moment of unreasonableness? So what do we make of this unambiguous dictate? Could it be one of Jesus more ruthless moments? Even the most ardent legalist…

A long-time friend of mine recently sent me a link to a podcast that he thought was interesting and wanted my take on it. His interest was clearly piqued as my friend is not prone in any way to pass on much unless, in his mind at least, it has weight. 

Rarely has he disappointed, so I quickly engaged with the content, but in so doing I was experiencing a lot of de ja vu.

The podcast (which I will not name, it is in this context unnecessary) raised my eyebrows when they boldly purported that this platform was…

The author of what has been considered by many scholars as – ‘being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it’ – was written by Peter Forsyth, who fell in hard with the heterodoxy of Liberal Theology, the flavour of the day. Consequently, he was refused a number of appointments in his Congregational denomination for such theological leanings. However, Forsyth was an assiduous academic and loved the Scriptures and consequently delved - and I may add to use an A.W…