Biblical literalism could look like this if taken far enough!
Below I reproduce the parts of the statement of faith that are relevant to our concerns. There is however one caveat to make: A statement of faith, however literalist, doesn't necessarily imply fundamentalist attitudes in the fellowship itself. In any case it is quite possible that the statement was written by the fellowship's mentoring organisation and that the members themselves don't use it as a way of sharply distinguishing the sheep from the goats, the outsiders from insiders, as a fundamentalist would do.
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VINEYARD: #2 WE BELIEVE that God's kingdom is everlasting. From His throne, through His Son, His eternal Word, God created, upholds, and governs all that exists, the heavenly places, the angelic hosts, the universe, the earth, every living thing and mankind. God created all things very good.
MY COMMENT: No problem: The above, I think, is a fairly standard folk concept of God's ultimate sovereignty and cosmically comprehensive creative action. However, I wonder if Vineyard would accept Denis Alexander's interpretation of "all things very good" meaning "fit for purpose". I suspect that they wrongly interpret "very good" as connoting "perfection". In fact they probably haven't twigged the difference between connotative language and notational language.
VINEYARD: #3 WE BELIEVE that Satan, originally a great, good angel, rebelled against God, taking a host of angels with him. He was cast out of God's presence and, as a usurper of God's rule established a counter-kingdom of darkness and evil upon the earth.
MY COMMENT: Satan's rebellion and fall is well established Christian doctrine. But has Satan really established a counter kingdom on earth? In his vanity he might think he has (Luke 4:6) and try to act like a king (see Rev 13:1-2) but given the totalising nature of God's sovereignty it looks to me as if there is only room for one King in the cosmos! How can the power of such a King be "usurped"? As Daniel 4 makes clear in the case of Nebuchadnezzar, it is only God that rules even when vain kings try to act like God. See also Romans 13. Having a view of Earth as a kind of dark satanic almost hell like place is unbiblical and cult like. See for example the following quote from a Jehovah's witness with whom I corresponded over some years. He expressed his opinion on the subject of Satanic sovereignty as follows:
Jehovah has allowed Satan to rule this Earth and set up governments, knowing that a bad government is better than no government at all (anarchy). But he does not approve of the various governments, in fact he says through Jesus Kingdom will do away with all of man's governments See Dan 2:44. (February 1982)
If we read Dan 2:44 we see that this Watchtower Follower is reading too much into it. This reading is encouraged by the JW's who see themselves very much as a holy competing counter-culture marginalised on the edge of the much hated greater society. If one reads Daniel 2:44 we see that it is telling us that God is going to set up a new kingdom in place of the old corrupt kingdoms - that isn't to say that those old kingdoms weren't God's kingdoms: There are God's kingdoms albeit abused by Satan and human beings. Romans 13:1-2 makes it clear that God does approve of governments and in fact they have been established by the sovereign God himself:
Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves. (Roms 13:1-2)
Typically of a fundamentalist extremist our Watchtower follower has gone far too far in his assessment and understanding of the Bible which he interprets through the lens of the teaching of his spiritual superiors in the Watchtower. The world is still God's approved kingdom although many abuse their delegated power. Given that government is God's government it must be treated with respect and not despised as Satan's domain providing pretext to be used and abused according to corrupt selfish ambition.
I see Vineyard's statement of faith as coming too close to the Watchtower model that earth's governments are a Satanic counter-kingdom. I read that as evidence of a reactionary response of an increasingly marginalised christian culture which in consequence sees itself as something very other and contrary to the powers that be and has difficulty identifying with the wider social sphere. This is the realm of Trump popularism which all too easily lapses into conspiracy theorism.
VINEYARD: #4 WE BELIEVE that God created mankind in His image, male and female, for relationship with Himself and to govern the earth. Under the temptation of Satan, our original parents fell from grace, bringing sin, sickness, and God's judgement of death to the earth. Through the fall, Satan and his demonic hosts gained access to God's good creation. Creation now experiences the consequences and effects of Adam's original sin. Human beings are born in sin, subject to God's judgement of death and captive to Satan's kingdom of darkness.
MY COMMENT: This is the article James draws our attention to. Things start to go badly wrong here; see my reply to James below where I explain this more fully and also James comments on it: As we shall see a pathological Western Christian dualism shines through the above statement.
VINEYARD: WE BELIEVE that the Holy Spirit indwells every believer in Jesus Christ and that He is our abiding Helper, Teacher, and Guide. We believe in the filling or empowering of the Holy Spirit, often a conscious experience, for ministry today. We believe in the present ministry of the Spirit and in the exercise of all the biblical gifts of the Spirit. We practice the laying on of hands for the empowering of the Spirit, for healing, and for recognition and empowering of those whom God has ordained to lead and serve the Church.
MY COMMENT: I wouldn't say I have a big issue with any of this but it betrays something I have always maintained QUOTE: We believe in the filling or empowering of the Holy Spirit, often a conscious experience, for ministry today UNQUOTE: Regarding the latter I note this: Presumably given "often a conscious experience", it follows that the empowering of the Spirit is often not a conscious experience! As I point out in this blog post, Charismatic Tony Higton also admitted that "Baptism of the Holy Spirit" doesn't necessarily entail a conscious experience. Therein lies the rub: Many who seek of the "Baptism of the Spirit" expect it to be accompanied by some kind of epiphany ushering in a spiritual power game changer. This may not always happen thus causing disappointment to be internalised and suppressed. Moreover, subsequent to this spiritual non-event the promise of spiritual power is not always be very noticeable: False prophecies, failed healing, authoritarian leadership, spiritual spin, young earthism and prosperity teaching are all presided over by fellowships which claim to be under the auspices of so called privileged charismatic power!
VINEYARD: #9 WE BELIEVE that the Holy Spirit inspired the human authors of Holy Scripture so that the Bible is without error in the original manuscripts. We receive the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments as our final and absolute authority, the only infallible rule of faith and practice.
MY COMMENT: "The Bible is without error in the original manuscript"!!. That is often the refrain of fundamentalists; They know that in the transmission through history copies and translations of the Bible will accumulate errors if only small errors and therefore can't be absolutely error free. But for the fundamentalist mind anything less than 100% truth tends to register as nothing short of 100% error! And so there is a need to posit the "infallible original manuscripts"; (as if anyone reads them!). What they don't acknowledge is that this immediately tips the whole discussion of what is "God's Word" into the domain of human reasoning and debates about historical provenance: For who is going to decide what are the original manuscripts and by what criteria? Such a decision will depend on our fallible extra-biblical historical knowledge and understandings. Just what constitutes the "originals" will be arguable. In any case aren't the original documents the texts generated by the inspired writer before they underwent any copying? If not then how many copying processes are allowed before a text is deemed not to be original? Is the humanly developed understanding of information redundancy allowed to be invoked to show how it can be used to recover truth in the face of error? But worst of all for the fundamentalist doctrinaire concept of infallibility is that large portions of Biblical meaning are transmitted not via notational language but by connotational language; that is, text which is just a trigger or key opening up huge domains of cultural association; in this process the recipient is highly proactive in assigning meaning. It could be argued that only the texts in their original language "hold" the right connotational meaning because connotational language is highly culturally specific and therefore the source text must be packaged together with its source culture before any infallible meanings can be arrived at. If so then the fundamentalist mindset would suggest that our much copied and translated bibles, set as they are in our own culture, are of dubious value since it is impossible for them to be infallible. This is especially so because so much biblical meaning is derived from a proactive connotational reading, a process largely driven by the fallible recipient and his fallible cultural mental resources. But to regard the highly complex biblical reading process as too error prone to be of value is an absurd conclusion which naturally follows on from the fundamentalist tendency to equate anything less than 100% truth as nothing short of 100% error! The fact is our Western Bibles and the Western culture providing the lens through which we recover biblical meaning are clearly fallible channels, but that doesn't prevent those channels delivering truth about salvation; it's just means we have to be little less epistemically arrogant about our grasp on Biblical truth. The embattled fundamentalist mind seeks to anchor indisputability & infallibility in a revered static object, but given that information involves propagation and a highly proactive interpretation by the recipient we start to understand that "God's Word" is much more a process than it is a static material object.
Hand waving jesters in the direction of so called "final and absolute authority and infallibility" are used by authoritarian fellowships in an attempt to settle disputes about meaning in an authoritarian way, completely oblivious to the implicit epistemic uncertainties in their position. These fellowships really do need a lesson in epistemic humility. Since the "extraction" of Biblical meaning entails information transmission, the resources of cultural thought forms and connotational processes entailing much heavy cognitive lifting done by the human recipient, there is no room for the arrogance of infallibility that we so often see in fundagelical fellowships. The incoherent doctrine of "infallibility" is there to give embattled fellowships the secure authoritarian barriers behind which they can feel both epistemically safe and find a pretext to condemn outsiders for heresy.
MY COMMENT: I wouldn't say I have a big issue with any of this but it betrays something I have always maintained QUOTE: We believe in the filling or empowering of the Holy Spirit, often a conscious experience, for ministry today UNQUOTE: Regarding the latter I note this: Presumably given "often a conscious experience", it follows that the empowering of the Spirit is often not a conscious experience! As I point out in this blog post, Charismatic Tony Higton also admitted that "Baptism of the Holy Spirit" doesn't necessarily entail a conscious experience. Therein lies the rub: Many who seek of the "Baptism of the Spirit" expect it to be accompanied by some kind of epiphany ushering in a spiritual power game changer. This may not always happen thus causing disappointment to be internalised and suppressed. Moreover, subsequent to this spiritual non-event the promise of spiritual power is not always be very noticeable: False prophecies, failed healing, authoritarian leadership, spiritual spin, young earthism and prosperity teaching are all presided over by fellowships which claim to be under the auspices of so called privileged charismatic power!
VINEYARD: #9 WE BELIEVE that the Holy Spirit inspired the human authors of Holy Scripture so that the Bible is without error in the original manuscripts. We receive the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments as our final and absolute authority, the only infallible rule of faith and practice.
MY COMMENT: "The Bible is without error in the original manuscript"!!. That is often the refrain of fundamentalists; They know that in the transmission through history copies and translations of the Bible will accumulate errors if only small errors and therefore can't be absolutely error free. But for the fundamentalist mind anything less than 100% truth tends to register as nothing short of 100% error! And so there is a need to posit the "infallible original manuscripts"; (as if anyone reads them!). What they don't acknowledge is that this immediately tips the whole discussion of what is "God's Word" into the domain of human reasoning and debates about historical provenance: For who is going to decide what are the original manuscripts and by what criteria? Such a decision will depend on our fallible extra-biblical historical knowledge and understandings. Just what constitutes the "originals" will be arguable. In any case aren't the original documents the texts generated by the inspired writer before they underwent any copying? If not then how many copying processes are allowed before a text is deemed not to be original? Is the humanly developed understanding of information redundancy allowed to be invoked to show how it can be used to recover truth in the face of error? But worst of all for the fundamentalist doctrinaire concept of infallibility is that large portions of Biblical meaning are transmitted not via notational language but by connotational language; that is, text which is just a trigger or key opening up huge domains of cultural association; in this process the recipient is highly proactive in assigning meaning. It could be argued that only the texts in their original language "hold" the right connotational meaning because connotational language is highly culturally specific and therefore the source text must be packaged together with its source culture before any infallible meanings can be arrived at. If so then the fundamentalist mindset would suggest that our much copied and translated bibles, set as they are in our own culture, are of dubious value since it is impossible for them to be infallible. This is especially so because so much biblical meaning is derived from a proactive connotational reading, a process largely driven by the fallible recipient and his fallible cultural mental resources. But to regard the highly complex biblical reading process as too error prone to be of value is an absurd conclusion which naturally follows on from the fundamentalist tendency to equate anything less than 100% truth as nothing short of 100% error! The fact is our Western Bibles and the Western culture providing the lens through which we recover biblical meaning are clearly fallible channels, but that doesn't prevent those channels delivering truth about salvation; it's just means we have to be little less epistemically arrogant about our grasp on Biblical truth. The embattled fundamentalist mind seeks to anchor indisputability & infallibility in a revered static object, but given that information involves propagation and a highly proactive interpretation by the recipient we start to understand that "God's Word" is much more a process than it is a static material object.
Hand waving jesters in the direction of so called "final and absolute authority and infallibility" are used by authoritarian fellowships in an attempt to settle disputes about meaning in an authoritarian way, completely oblivious to the implicit epistemic uncertainties in their position. These fellowships really do need a lesson in epistemic humility. Since the "extraction" of Biblical meaning entails information transmission, the resources of cultural thought forms and connotational processes entailing much heavy cognitive lifting done by the human recipient, there is no room for the arrogance of infallibility that we so often see in fundagelical fellowships. The incoherent doctrine of "infallibility" is there to give embattled fellowships the secure authoritarian barriers behind which they can feel both epistemically safe and find a pretext to condemn outsiders for heresy.
VINEYARD: #11 WE BELIEVE the whole world is under the domination of Satan......
MY COMMENT: No, the world is not under the domination of Satan although Satan and (wo)man introduce much corruption; the world is under the sovereignty of God although that authority is the light touch of God's permissive will. This sort of article of faith is so easy to use to write off modern science in favour of a medieval fundamentalism and/or conspiracy theorism.
Here is my original reply to James:
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Here is my original reply to James:
It is difficult to interpret 4 as unambiguously young earthist, but I suspect that young earthism is the view they hold, although I hope I am wrong. However, I can do business with young earthists as long as they don't make it a faith test, unlike extremists such as Ken Ham.
What I do see here, however, are hints of dualism. Well OK, there is the dualism of God vs his creation. But superimposed on that by Western Christianity is a dualism in the created world. i.e a "spiritual world vs matter" dichotomy. Sometimes this "spiritual" world is all but elevated above creation. e.g. notice that in the Vineyard statement of faith it is not clear that the world of Satan is part of the created order: It goes straight in with the fall of Satan and his Angels without making it clear they must be created beings and that their disobedience represents a pre-Adamic fall in the created world order and who knows what effect that had on creation. Notice that the Vineyard's points on the Satanic fall come before the doctrine on creation expressed in point 4. Moreover, notice that in 4 we read: "Through the fall, Satan and his demonic hosts gained access to God's good creation. Creation now experiences the consequences and effects of Adam's original sin". Access to God's good creation? But didn't Satan and his Angels have access to creation anyway because they were also created beings? Hence there is no recognition that the fall of Satan and his angel had any effect on creation or that they are created beings. There seems to be a taken-for-granted subliminal assumption here that Satan and his cronies live in a separate world and that they only had access to the created world via man's fall. Does that make them uncreated "gods" then?
This is dualism, bordering on gnosticism. This is where I find the origin of many of the problems of contemporary Western Christianity: I suspect that it helps motivate a young earthist doctrines. For them, matter is seen as somehow "inert" and often bordering on the profane, part of Satan's kingdom, recalling somewhat the gnostic ideas of a creative demiurge. It also explains why Western minds cannot make any sense of the paranormal: "Billiard ball" matter is not supposed to have the properties such as we see in hauntings, UFO events, crypto-zoology etc. The paranormal starts to fall into place if we see the created world as consisting of differing modes of conscious cognition akin to the difference between a rational waking state and a dream state.
That the kind of dualism implicit in Vineyard thinking is an error is suggested by Colossians 1:15-18 where we find that Christ created all things and that includes Satan.
I further suspect that there is a tendency in Vineyard toward leadership authoritarianism and the usual "holy spirit" Christians vs non-holy Christians dichotomy.
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Below is James reply to my reply, which I include because it adds materially to the case in view; in particular James noting "the absurd idea (occasionally posited in some extremist circles) that there was no death of any kind in the world until Adam sinned, as per this Vineyard quote" is very significant and probably clinches the case that we are dealing with Genesis literalists.
Hi Tim,
Yes indeed - thanks for the reply.
I agree. I don’t detect any unambiguous alarm bells ringing for me here, but a couple of cautionary observations. Number 4 looks like an inferred nod towards a rigid Biblical literalism and a creationist doctrine. However, like you, I too can do business with folk like that, as long as they remain outside the ‘my way or the wrong way’ camp, and don’t take creationism as the exclusive sine qua non of Christian faith.
Like you, I’m also somewhat unclear what this is all about -- “Through the fall, Satan and his demonic hosts gained access to God's good creation. Creation now experiences the consequences and effects of Adam's original sin".
If it’s to do with the absurd idea (occasionally posited in some extremist circles) that there was no death of any kind in the world until Adam sinned, as per this Vineyard quote - “Under the temptation of Satan, our original parents fell from grace, bringing sin, sickness, and God's judgement of death to the earth” - then we are dealing with a ridiculous, although probably internally harmless, viewpoint, as it obviously isn’t true.
“Through the fall, Satan and his demonic hosts gained access to God's good creation. Creation now experiences the consequences and effects of Adam's original sin".
I don’t know what to make of this statement, especially the “access to God's good creation” as it’s rather ambiguous. This ambiguity is quite common when you take Paul’s obviously non-literal exposition in Romans 5:12 and turn it into an historical commentary - it gets rather muddied. Satan and all his demonic hosts are part of God’s creation too - there is a strict category distinction between God and everything else, including the demonic world, as St. Paul reminds us:
"The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy.” Colossians 1:15-18.
Given the foregoing scripture, it makes little sense to talk of Satan and his cronies “gaining access to God's good creation” because they were always part of God’s good creation to start with, until they fell through pride (see Ezekiel 28:15–17 and Isaiah 14:12–14). It could be just a bit of harmless doctrinal sloppiness, or it could be a rabbit hole into some more perturbing beliefs, but I guess we’ll find out in due course.
Best Wishes
James
