Views, News and Pews

Quasi-Religion Creeps into Atheism by Stealth

2012-01-28T07:04:00.000-08:00

God is pictured as a kindly old bearded gentleman all in white, seated on a throne surrounded by light and who lives upon high.

(Picture from http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimshannon/3823248802/)

This is a curious post by PZ Myers. The post tells us about fellow atheist Alain de Botton who suggests atheists build “temples for atheists”. PZ Myers, need I say, is none too pleased; it’s sailing far too close to the winds of religion for PZ to feel comfortable! PZ links to this web page, where we can read:

De Botton's most recent book, Religion for Atheists, calls for unbelievers to copy the major religions and build grand architectural masterpieces to inspire a sense of perspective in people. He argues that a temple doesn't need to be dedicated to a religion: "You can build a temple to anything that's positive and good. That could mean: a temple to love, friendship, calm or perspective".

He added: "Why should religious people have the most beautiful buildings in the land? It's time atheists had their own versions of the great churches and cathedrals. A beautiful building is an indispensable part of getting your message across. Books alone won't do it."

As I have remarked before, when atheists want to introduce a blend of communal celebration and mysticism into their beliefs they have little choice but to raid religion for ideas*. Trouble is, in my experience atheist mysticism and crowd celebration always comes over as affected and intensely embarrassing; what is to be the focus of atheism’s mysticism and celebration? Humanity? Science? Our ontological context that makes science effective? But the self, the known and the insentient make poor objects of worship. Authentic worship and celebration thirsts for the transcendent

Whether one regards religion’s objects as real or not, it seems that humanity has an innate appetite for the transcendent and the mystical and only religion has the wherewithal to satiate this appetite. No surprise then that something resembling religion worms its way back into atheism at the first opportunity. That’s going to make a zealous atheist like PZ Myers very unhappy indeed: He may sense that conceding the existence of an appetite for religion, even amongst atheists, especially among atheists, might register as evidence relevant to the question of God's existence. If Myers' aim is to suppress religion I think he has got his work cut out!

Footnote:
* My previous quotation re this subject: "when organised atheism in the form of communism has attempted to provide a public rationale for celebration it has created cult figures, demigods and a quasi-religious sense of mystical collective destiny."

Further Notes on "The Mouth of God"

2012-01-17T05:11:00.000-08:00

There is an all too human temptation of pride in thinking of one’s self as part of an exclusive righteous elite, a spiritual remnant who hold tightly to “absolute truth”. The epistemological focus of this kind of devotion is on “The Word” and/or internalized epiphanies. A concomitantly fideist tendency to reject science (The Mechanics of Providence) as mere “man’s knowledge” is taken as an expression of devotion. Above all sectarians know that their words are “right” and everyone else is “wrong”, even other Christians; in fact especially other Christians! As I have indicated in my last post, this apparent epistemological arrogance surfaces in the mind of the sectarian as the epitome of humility because he, in his opinion, is conforming to Divinely revealed “blueprints” and simply mouthing God's words. That such “blueprints” have to be appropriated, read, interpreted, evaluated and implemented by the fallible mind of the sectarian never seems to enter the sectarian’s arrogant and proud head. He will claim that The Bible and/or The Holy Spirit underwrites all he says; thus are logos and mythos horribly abused to underwrite an epistemology of arrogance. Oh the irony of it all!

Strong sectarians have little regard for serious relations with “outsiders” for their own sake – outsiders are considered evangelism fodder and the sole reason for seriously relating to them is to get them into the sect. Relations are severed when it becomes clear to the sectarian that an “outsider” is argumentative and/or a lost cause. The sectarian may become sullen and belligerent toward the dissenting outsider whom he considers to be opposing God's very words spoken through his mouth.

Such are my unpleasant experiences with those on the sect-cult spectrum.

The Mouth of “God”

2012-01-03T10:34:00.000-08:00

Sectarianism: All mouth and blind obedience.

The January issue of “Christianity” magazine has an interview with Christian palaeontologist Mike Taylor. During the interview Taylor comments on the polarised quarrels in North America between Creationists and Evolutionists. Viz:

They are a complete waste of time and energy. Scientists who should be doing valuable work are distracted into refuting frankly loony ‘science’. Worse still Christians who should be spreading the love of Christ are distracted into a fruitless argument that has nothing to do with the Gospel, and can only be a hindrance to scientists who might otherwise be open to Christ. It really is the most appallingly pointless and destructive conflict – all the more so because it’s between two sides that aren’t even opposed, as they would realize if they’d only listen to each other.

I’m certainly sympathetic toward Taylor’s impatience! The time of professional scientists (not to mention tax payer’s money) is clearly not well spent refuting the crank-science of fundamentalists. I’m also sympathetic toward Taylor’s regret at the pointlessness of it all, especially when the quarrel is between Christians. However, I think Taylor is rather too hopeful in his assessment that it’s between two sides that aren’t even opposed, as they would realize if they’d only listen to each other. For many fundamentalists this issue is very much bound up with their version of Christianity and they have a world view that obliges them to proactively crusade against Christians whose views differ from their own. Young Earth Creationist Ken Ham, need I say, is my textbook example; you won’t get him to accept that this is a fruitless argument. For him it is the stuff of the Gospel and those who do not share his views he thinks of as compromisers who are turning people away from church and the true gospel. Given extremism of this intensity any reasonable Christian who respects science and reason will find themselves in conflict with fideist fundamentalists whether (s)he likes it or not.

If we should have any doubt that Ham’s concept of the gospel is inextricably linked to his Young Earth Creationism (YEC) we only need read his blog post of 28 December and entitled A No-Literal-Adam Evolutionary Christmas “Gospel” Message. In this post he refers to a Christmas message from Faraday institute director Dr Denis Alexander as an “anti-gospel message”. Further, in a blog post dated 30 December and entitled Which Jesus Do You Really Believe In? we read the following:

Steve shows that today many Christian scholars who identify themselves as theological conservatives and evangelicals are preaching a Jesus different from the Jesus of the Bible. In order to accommodate their personal belief that millions-of-years-evolution is true, they are essentially re-writing major doctrines and accounts in the holy Scriptures from beginning to end. Many no longer believe in a literal Adam and Eve, a literal sin in a literal the Garden of Eden, a literal Ark and Flood, or that the Jesus created the world as recorded in the Old Testament and as He says He did in the New Testament

Consistent with a sect that is reacting to a hostile world by hardening its position in order to prevent its message being compromised, YEC philosophy is now getting explicit recognition in the statement of faith of those who attach themselves to it. In Ham’s blog post dated 26 Dec and entitled President of Creationist College Visits Museum with Family we read:

The college, which started in 1968 and is now a Bible/liberal arts school, has the following sentence in its statement of faith: “We believe in . . . Six creation days of twenty-four hours each.”

The sentiment is clear: For Ham salvation demands a belief in a creation period of literally 6 x 86400 seconds; essentially the core message that Ham’s Answers in Genesis organization is preaching – in his view to deny YEC is to deny Jesus and perhaps even jeopardize one’s salvation. This consolidation of the collective identity of a religious group in a ritualized gathering around a particular set of proprietary observances thought to be bound up with salvation (in this case YEC) interests me greatly; it is a stage in the formation of a cult.

***

Since my first identification with the Christian cause I have given a certain amount of time to the study of Christianity’s many sub-sects and cults. Let me be frank here. After being happily and merrily “converted” in the mid seventies my subsequent soon after discovery of the numerous cultish and sectarian expressions of Christianity was a big and unexpected shock; yes I really was naive enough to think that all was going to be sweetness, light and harmony in Christian circles. After all, I was given to understand that the radical message of Christianity was that faith wasn’t about an uptight and jealous guarding of proprietary religious observance and practice, but rather the acceptance of a very embracing message of grace, repentance, forgiveness, and relationship followed by a clear conscience. But here were people who were reintroducing no end of finicky observances and proprietary beliefs back into church, by using the Bible as if it was a collection of legal articles. They left little doubt that if their views were not followed whole heartedly it could endanger one's salvation. For them the guilt trip was very much back on the pilgrim's itinerary and constituted the coercive means by which they eased in their beliefs. I have to say that as far as I was concerned these people were (and still are) the biggest challenge Christianity faces to its authenticity and truth as one can find and so I threw myself into a study of the subject.

Below I provide a list of some of the partisan Christian groups I have been acquainted with. They occupy different places on the sect-cult spectrum and have varied degrees of social integration, strictness and recognizable identity; some have a fuzzier definition than others and some are movements within movements. However, they are all marked by offering particular observance novelties and/or spiritual elixirs that they regard as at the very least helpful to salvation, if not essential to it. The list below is roughly in the chronological order of my acquaintance with these movements. The bias toward protestant sects is a sign of my being in the protestant West.

Children of God.

Strict and Traditional Brethren

Jehovah’s witnesses

Mormons

The Christadelphians

Strict and Traditional Evangelicals

Herbert Armstrong and the Plain Truth

The Jesus Army

Restorationists

Gnostic and fideist charismatics

The Snake Handlers sect.

Potters House

Toronto Blessing revival

Barry Smith: Millennium Bug prophet

Gold dust and angel feathers Charismatics.

Extreme orthodox groups.

Answers in Genesis.

Strict and Particular Baptists

Todd Bentley’s Lakeland revival

The Witness Lee Brotherhood

The Geocentric Christians

Christian Flat Earthers (Now defunct?)

Real Catholics (Michael Voris)

William Tapley, end of world prophet 2010

Harold Camping, end of world prophet 2011

I don’t think anyone needs to be told that this list is by no means exhaustive. If one looks hard enough new species of Christian cult or sect, each with their own specialized hobby horses, will creep out from under every stone one turns. When presented with such a smorgasbord of types one seeks general ideas and themes to simplify and explain the phenomenon. To this end we can identify commonalities in the social dynamics that exists amongst the sects: The observations I have made above about Answers in Genesis are a case in point. Here we find a group whose specialist message is being rejected by the vast majority of Christians. In fact the 1960s “restoration” of YEC beliefs seems to be running out of steam and Christians are failing to accept YEC’s travesty of science. The reaction of those who have huge stakes in the movement (like Ken Ham) is to get more strident and extreme in their pronouncements as they find a need to derive an inverted self esteem from an increasing awareness of themselves as a "peculiar remnant" people. Thus, isolation leads to entrenchment and in turn a clearer definition of an eccentric faith. This seems to be the common polarizing dynamic that is a precursor to the sectification and ultimately cultification of a Christian movement; either that or the movement bombs because only unshakeable and proactive self-belief can survive marginalization by the rest of the Christian community. There is an inverted pride in being a small vociferous purist movement that sees itself as an uncompromising anchorage of truth in a sea of error.

There is another commonality I have noticed from my experience with sects and cults that I would like to share here and which is relevant to Taylor’s otherwise admirable sentiment that the two sides need only listen to one another. Listen to one another? Forget it! In the sectarian mind failure to enthusiastically and uncritically embrace the uncompromising sectarian message, whether it is about the latest form of restorationist teaching, blessing, or revival, is to play fast and loose with God and risk Divine displeasure. In this sense, then, sectarians think of themselves as God’s mouthpiece that must be obeyed. Therefore an attempt to negotiate with them will register as a failure to respond adequately to their message and will be regarded as at best a sign of spiritual impediment and at worst manifestation of willful sin. Their message is non-negotiable. They therefore harbour a deep suspicion of the motives of all who disagree with them and they find it difficult if not impossible to accept that anyone can dissent and still have a clear conscience; dissidents are likely to be thought of as consciously and deliberately resisting the Holy Spirit.

It is this hardline attitude of the sectarian toward prevaricators that unfortunately makes Taylor’s desire for conciliation unlikely to be fulfilled. The out and out sectarian takes himself very seriously indeed and if his views are not taken on board he will, after a time, retreat in sullen righteous indignation; neutrality is simply not an option with him and even an impartial noncommittal attitude is equated with rebellion against God. He will feel every right to echo divine anger toward the dissenter; you can sometimes see it in sectarian faces. As effectively “God’s mouthpiece” sectarians have no pride problems with making claims of breathtaking arrogance and yet, paradoxically, at the same time think of themselves as humble, devout, unquestioning vessels of the Almighty’s purposes. Whenever I deal with sectarians who make a show of their piety I always think of an epitaph that one can find on a tomb in St. Stephens church in Norwich:

A scholar without pride, a Christian without bigotry, devout without ostentation.

St Stephens Church, Norwich, holds a lesson for sectarian Christianity.

Crank Conspiracy Theories: What in the World are They Spraying?

2012-01-03T03:32:00.000-08:00

Caution: Please approach this with Poe's Law in Mind. Note ambulance siren in the background - the men in white have the situation in hand.

Don’t Play this at Home:

2011-12-23T11:11:00.000-08:00

The obscenities in this video tear through the sentimental and schmaltzy fabric of Xmas with the sound of a low flying jet over a soft Kincaidian landscape. The message is that Santa gets all the accolades (and gets to look charitable to boot) whilst the beasts of burden (the reindeer) and the small men (elves, pixies and dwarfs) do all the work. Given that Santa is patron saint of Xmas capitalism, the video reminded me very sharply of the days when I used to read the stridently Marxist newspaper "Socialist Worker". The video expresses that paper’s vision of society to a tee: In raucous and harsh tones it forever condemned middle class capitalist acquisitiveness at the expense of working class wealth producers. “Stuff the Bosses”, “Stuff the Tories!”, “Stuff the Royals!” were the kind of headlines that often graced the front page.

I myself, however, was as cynical toward this Marxist message as the Socialist “Workers” were to the society that sustained them in sufficient freedom to express their opinions. Theirs was a materialist version of an archetypical eschatology that promised worker salvation on the great and terrible day of Revolution. Thence on the workers would own the means of production ushering in a supposedly classless society where everyone’s interests coincided and therefore all would live in peace.

But as the video says: “What a croc of ****”. A successful society depends on differentiation and specialization, thus implying classes, thereby setting the scene for potential conflicts of interest. Potential conflicts of interest are a fundamental feature of social existence. The so-called “dictatorship of the proletariat” is a cloud cuckoo land concept that in practice leads to an elite ruling class who stifle all debate and dissention under the pretext that in a (fictitious) “classeless” society no conflict would exist and therefore by definition dissenters are reactionaries.

How many times have we seen the failure of this sort of cloud cuckoo land social philosophy? The Christian cults and sects do exactly the same: They are so sure they have found the secret to a social and spiritual utopia where (wo)man is at one with fellow (wo)man. But they fail to get the right balance between positive and negative democracy; accordingly their uncompromising effort to usher in a new unified and free Christian community has exactly the opposite effect. Their zeal, conviction and misplaced confidence in the rightness of their proprietary vision of community betrays them and they end up creating a social nexus ten times more oppressive than what they aim to replace; a nexus where censorship and compulsion are the norm and imposed by a (self) righteous elite. As the video says: “What a croc of ****”. Oh the pathetic irony of it all!

No social restructuring of community and society will ever relieve us of the basic challenge we face day by day; namely, that of finding the strength of moral character to meet the demands of gainsaying self in favour of our neighbor. There is no uptopian society so structured that the moral choices we should make come effortlessly and naturally. This age old challenge is as much with us today as it always has been:

And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God. (Micah 6:8)

Whether you believe the Christmas story is a myth or to signifies deep ontological realities, the values and challenges it embodies are timeless and for all: It is a story of a double condescension by Deity: One:That of giving our contingent and suffering world the power to allow its emergence out of the platonic realm of possibility into reality. Two: Of that Deity giving up all to visit this graciously reified world and identifying with it to the point of death:

1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning. 3 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. 4 In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome[a] it.

9 The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. 10 He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. 11 He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. 12 Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God— 13 children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.

14 The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

Whether as a myth or as an “in fact” reality the Christmas story, in beauty, meaning, depth and grace, surpasses all.

More Nonscience From Ken Ham

2011-12-14T06:05:00.000-08:00

Education without integrity

In a blog entry dated Dec 13th and entitled “We Love Science” Ken Ham continues to delude himself that Answers in Genesis isn’t an organization committed to delivering ~~nonsense~~ non-science to an ignorant and gullible Fundamentalist Christian public. I don’t want to spend too much time on the self delusions of this anti-science nincompoop, but if I were to expand upon just why Ken’s Answer in Genesis organisation is busily subverting science I would critique the following fundamental philosophical fallacies we find amongst the likes of Ken and his cronies:

1. The view that one can fundamentally distinguish between the “You weren’t there” historical sciences and the “repeatable” sciences: The motivation here is to undermine the historical sciences like evolutionary theory. As I have said elsewhere: All science, “historical” and otherwise, in varying degrees depends on historical documents and an assumed rational repeatability in the universe. There is no experiment that I can do, no historical investigation I can embark on, that doesn’t depend on documents and a posited rational repeatability. In short Ken’s philosophical fuax pas embodied in the quip “You weren’t there” undermines both Science and the Bible.

2. Ken’s Mature creation theory: I have addressed this at length here

3. The view that the Bible is the exclusive epistemic “lens” with which we see the universe: One cannot read and understand the meaning of the Bible without a “boot-strap” epistemic “lens” already in place – although of course the Bible effects one’s epistemic lens. What is being missed here is that epistemology and ontology have a two way coupling: Epistemology leads to knowledge of ontology and knowledge of ontology in turn modifies epistemology.

4. YEC failure to do justice to the equation “Meaning = Text + Context”: I have looked at this subject here.

5. An obsolete view of uniformitarianism that fails to understand power law catastrophism.

There are a lot more reasons I could find for pinning an anti-science charge on AiG, but really this unreasoning and bigoted fundamentalist group have consumed too much of my time already. It is irony that AiG’s position is liable to undermine all of science and history and would ultimately put irrationality on the throne. The vehement atheist and professional scientist PZ Myers has little patience with anyone who so much as entertains the subject of deity, but there is no need to unnecessarily antagonize an already very sore atheist with the anti-science bilge we get from Ken Ham. It is clear from the posts here and here that PZ Myers fully understands why Ken Ham’s junk science is the road to irrationalism and why it would lead to the ultimate demise of science and history as disciplines of hope and intellectual integrity. What an irony that secularist PZ Myers understands the role of rationality, intellectual integrity and hope in science but Ham’s organization doesn’t.

More Good News From Ken Ham.

2011-11-18T10:25:00.000-08:00

(The first lot of good news can be seen here)

The Sectarian World View

In a blog post dated 17th November and entitled “World Wide Epidemic Threatens Church” we find Answers in Genesis’ Ken Ham riding on a wave of euphoria after attending “The All-Asian Creation Conference” in Malaysia. Over a 1000 attended the conference and Ken sold out of AiG resources in minutes. According to Ken he is amazed how God has used and taken AiG’s (false) message around the world. Ken also says he is thrilled to hear the testimonies of people who have been led to the Lord through AiG’s (false) message. As I have remarked before, this sort of talk, given that it is based on AiG’s fundamental errors really debases the language of Christian testimony. I’m sure the Jehovah’s Witnesses with their 7.5 million affiliates and the Mormons with their 14 million followers are equally as ecstatic after their huge rallies.

But, and this is the big “but”, 1000+ attendees is but a drop in the ocean. Ken really understands this and when he sobers up he comes back down to Earth with a bump. The following quote from Ken’s blog is an indication of just how marginal YECs are even within the Christian world. I have italicized the text where it is clear that Ken understands how relatively insignificant the YEC movement is even though it is 50 years since the “YEC reformation” started in the early sixties. I have also emboldened terms that indicate how badly Ken thinks of those who don’t hold his views; especially Christians. Ken is man on a very particular mission (i.e. to spread Christ plus YEC); but then particularity applies to the proprietary doctrinal idiosyncrasies of every Christian fundamentalist sect between here, Brooklyn and Salt Lake City. Here is my quote from Ken:

But something has stood out to me more than anything else at this conference, and it burdens me so deeply.

After I spoke a person came up to me and said, “Please bring a conference to Indonesia—most of the pastors there believe in evolution.” Then another person said, “Please come to my country—most of the pastors believe in evolution. Then another said, “Please come to my country—most of the pastors there believe in evolution.”

There were 20 countries represented at this conference, and I think I have now heard from people from nearly all of them pleading for a creation conference in their country. They have all have said to me something like, “most of the pastors—Christian leaders—seminary professors—believe in evolution and millions of years.”

Friends, disbelief in the book of Genesis is a worldwide epidemic. Satan has used millions of years and evolution to permeate the church around the world. What a mission field we now have to the church. And in particular, what a mission field we have to reach the “shepherds,” the Christian leaders and pastors around the world to call them out of compromise and back to the authority of the Word of God.

I think this one conference has made me realize even more than ever how the pagan religion of millions of years and evolution has so permeated the church around the world! What a mess! And sadly, countries like the USA and England have sent missionaries around the world teaching this compromised message because they were trained in compromised colleges and seminaries.

This makes me more burdened than ever to challenge these compromising church leaders.

And you know what else this conference in Asia has shown me? There is a real hunger among the people—hunger for the truth. It is a hunger for answers. When people who do have a respect for God’s Word are given answers and taught the importance of not undermining biblical authority in Genesis, they get it. They really get it! And then they are set on fire to go back to their country and be a missionary for creation evangelism.

Please pray for the Lord to open more doors so we can deal with this compromise epidemic that is undermining God’s Word worldwide.

Each and every sectarian thinks they’re uniquely placed before God. If anything, then, the small size of their community gives them the pride of being part of a select spiritual elite, the remnant through which the Almighty is working to enlighten humanity about looming apocalypse. Moreover, they take consolation in their work of proselytizing; they always believe they are in with chance as they seek to convert those who are beyond the pale of their strict and particular beliefs and practices. But in the face of unbelief and lack of response to their message they look for scapegoats to accuse of courting Satan and sin; especially fellow Christians who don’t quite see it their way. These sects may be in a small minority but their clownish extremism gets them an audience out of all proportion to their size; Harold Camping (amongst many others of similar ilk) has shown us that.

Lessons in Authenticity

2011-11-12T05:16:00.000-08:00

Christianity magazine is nothing if not painfully honest about the Christian life. In keeping with this ethos the magazine published an article by Jeff Lucas (October 11). In this article Lucas tells his readers about a church he visited where the preacher “Painted the Christian life as endlessly epic”. The whole article is worth reading, so here is a photo of it (click to enlarge):

Clearly Lucas isn’t fooled by the extravagantly superlative terms of the Christian triumphalists. The excessive use of such language inflates its shock value; more and more of it is needed to achieve its desired effect of intimidating the faithful into belief and wrenching from them an emotional reaction. Ergo, this language gets increasingly empty of meaning and the affectations of the rank and file as they try to follow what they hear from the pulpit ring hollow. Jeff Lucas (like most of the writers for Christianity magazine), on the other hand, comes over as entirely genuine and above all self-critical – any claims that he makes about being a witness to the epically miraculous feel that much more authentic. He's a man one can take seriously.

Knock, Knock .... Who's there ? ... the Je-who-vah’s Witnesses!!

2011-10-01T06:18:00.000-07:00

I concocted the following imaginary conversation between a Jehovah's Witness and a mainstream evangelical Christian pre 1995, sometime in the 1980s. I have resisted the temptation to hone it some more as it is a long time ago that I studied the Watchtower Followers. When I created the imaginary dialogue below my conversations with the JWs and the contents of their books (on which the dialogue was based) were still fresh in my mind. I have on occasions attempted to place the dialogue before evangelicals but apart from when they are a captured audience in a home group they stay well clear. The fact is that apart from some obvious unorthodoxy such as the notoriously difficult and contentious questions over the nature of Christ in relation to God, the JWs can make a statement of salvation that approximates very closely to the evangelical one. However, there is definitely an observance based streak in the JW's concept of salvation. But to be fair my contact with fundagelicalism has also revealed a very observance based faith; they are very scathing about the standing before God of those who do not assent to their verbal formalisms and practices to the letter. Hence I'm as sympathetic to the JWs as I am to many a sectarian fundagelical.

***

What do you do when someone like this knocks on your door ?; I'm sure it will ring a bell with you ....

A :(Knocks on door & door opens) Hello. I have just been discussing with your neighbour the present state of the ...

B: Are you a Jehovah's Witness?

A: Yes, how did you know?

B: Sorry, but I'm a Christian and I don't believe what the Jehovah's witnesses say.

A: But what we say is only what the Bible says.

B: That's not true.

A: Can you give me an example?

B: Well, the Jehovah’s Witnesses have said the world would end and it hasn’t. That couldn’t have been from the Bible!

A: We have never said that.**

(...Pause. Bill knows that he can’t prove it so he tries again)

B: Er... Well, you don't believe in the Trinity.

A: You won't find any mention of the Trinity in the Bible. Jesus couldn't have been God because he said "The Father is greater than I am"

B: But Jesus said "I and the Father are One" (John 10:30).

A: Look at John 17:22. The disciples were "one", but they weren't one person: it just means that they were in harmony with one another.

B: What about John 1:1 where it says "The Word was God"?

A: Look at verse 18 of that chapter; it says "No one has ever seen God" -but men have seen Jesus, so he can't be God. This is why the Greek text actually says "The word was divine" and not "The word was God". Further proof can be found in Colossians 1:15 where it says "He is the firstborn ..". This shows that Christ was created and therefore couldn't be God.

B: (silence)

A: What religion do you belong to?

B: I.. err... am a Christian.

A: Do you go to a Church?

B: Yes.

A: What denomination is it?

B: It's the Vineyard fellowship, but we're not denominational.

A: Do you use God's name in your services?

B: What do you mean?

A: If you write a letter to a person do you address it with their name?

B: err ... yes.

A: Then do you think that during your worship you should address God by his name Jehovah?

B: What is wrong with addressing Him as father as mentioned in Romans 8:15?

A: You have to remember to whom that reference applies. Who was the Old Testament written for in the first place?

B: The Jews.

A: Do you think then that the sacrificial practices should apply directly to us?

B: No.

A: In the same way most of the New Testament is not directly applicable to us but only to a little flock with a heavenly hope. These are the 144,000 mentioned in Revelation 7:4 who are anointed by the Holy Spirit, and who are resurrected to heavenly life as spirit creatures as Jesus was. This is why you can't apply Romans 8 to us now - unless you are one of those few Christians anointed by the Holy Spirit and therefore a member of the 144,000.

B: If most of the New Testament doesn't apply to you, what is the basis of your salvation?

A: The basis is Christ's ransom sacrifice. Jesus willingly laid down his life in sacrifice for us. Let me read 1 Peter 2:24 ... "He Himself bore our sins in his own body upon the stake in order that we might be done with sins and live to righteousness." That is a marvellous expression of God's love for mankind. Let me also read John 3:16 "God loved the world so much that he gave his only begotten son, in order that everyone exercising faith in him might not be destroyed, but have everlasting life". By exercising faith in this Ransom we can enjoy a clean standing before God and come under His loving care. In Revelation 7:9 it says "before me was a great crowd that no-one could count standing before the throne and in front of the Lamb". Jehovah's witnesses are the great crowd who have exercised this faith.

B: So Salvation is only available to Jehovah's Witnesses - I can't find that in the Bible.

A: What you have got to do is identify the marks of the true worshippers of God. One of their marks is the widespread publishing and honouring of his name. If you are to gain salvation you must honour the name of God. What religious group is most prominently publishing the name of God? If you were to talk to your neighbour and refer repeatedly to Jehovah, with what organisation would they associate you?

B: Why does that prevent salvation being available to those who have nothing to do with your group?

A: Surely if you follow the Bible commands you must be in one organisation. In the Old Testament there was only one channel of truth and that was Israel. Today it is the Jehovah's witnesses. What other religious organisation have the identifying marks of true discipleship. Are there any other organisations of which you could say that all members are in unity, love one another and teach the same things ?

B: Well, what about the Mormons and Moonies?

A: But they aren't in agreement with the Bible are they?

B (After a pause): It seems to me that this debate has missed the point. Faith is not based on academic opinion, or logical or illogical human reasoning; but on fact and reality; God can actually be known in real experience; what's important is whether we know him.

A: I agree, we need to know God and His working in our lives and through His organisation, and if we know Him we will know the truth.

"B", (call him Bill) certainly fails to do justice to himself and his faith in this confrontation with "A" (call him Andy), the Jehovah's Witness and appears to readily fall into the traps long planned by the JW doorstep evangelism system. But Bill is in fact a stooge placed to illicit some of the stock of preprogrammed responses of this system enabling us to put it under the microscope. Perhaps, DV, we can, at some later stage, consider in detail some of the puzzles and questions that the above dialogue raises like: Can a cult member be a Christian? What is faith? What is unity?. What is a church ? What is wrong with JW theology? And certainly not least: How ever do you witness to cult members? In the meantime any of your own reactions and comments to the above are welcome. (I never got any comments! - ed)

Footnote

** This is misleading. There is much documentation drawn from old Watchtower sources to indicate that their attempts to predict world events, based on their reading of the Bible, have failed. Many doorstep JWs are not aware of this documentation and of course do not know that the Watchtower has made significant false predictions. Therefore these JWs can genuinely deny that such predictions have been made by the organisation. This strategy is largely unconscious, but it clearly enhances the organisation’s survivability in a hostile environment. (see The Spiritual Rat Run for a discussion on the similarity between cults and organisms)

c. T. V. Reeves, September 1995

McDowell lays it on with a Trowel

2011-07-22T15:09:00.001-07:00

Should Christians build protectionist barriers?

PZ Myers has written a gleeful blog post about this article in “Christian Post”. The article reports the comments of Christian apologist Josh McDowell. In the article McDowell admits that his version of Christianity will find it difficult to survive amongst young people given the environment of information laizzez faire brought on by the internet. If, as McDowell is effectively saying, Christianity will struggle outside the bounds of its tradition epistemic play pen, then this is hardly an advertisement for the authenticity of the faith; in fact it sends out the signal that the Christian world view can’t cope with the latest influx of information; that could be construed as saying that as a world view it is bankrupt. No wonder atheist PZ Myers is so pleased about McDowell’s comments. Here are some quotes from the “Christian Post” article:

Atheists and skeptics now have equal access to our children as we have, which is why the number of Christian youth who believe in the fundamentals of Christianity is decreasing and sexual immorality is growing, apologist Josh McDowell said. What has changed everything?” asked the apologist from Campus Crusade for Christ International as he spoke on “Unshakable Truth, Relevant Faith” at the Billy Graham Center in Asheville, N.C., Friday evening. His answer was, the Internet. “The Internet has given atheists, agnostics, skeptics, the people who like to destroy everything that you and I believe, the almost equal access to your kids as your youth pastor and you have... whether you like it or not,” said McDowell.

McDowell, who lives in southern California with his wife Dottie and four children, said atheists, agnostics and skeptics didn’t have access to kids earlier. “If they wrote books, not many people read it. If they gave a talk, not many people went. They would normally get to kids maybe in the last couple of years of the university.” But that has changed now.

Around 15 years ago, the apologist added, when Christian youth ministries were raising money for youth projects, the big phrase was, “If you don’t reach your child by their 18th birthday, you probably won’t reach them.” What is it now? “If you do not reach your child by their 12th birthday, you probably won’t reach them.”

The Internet is weakening Christian witness and “we better wake up to it because it’s just beginning.”

My Comment: If the Christian world view can’t weather a blizzard of information then it’s worth less than tuppence. Removing the walls of the epistemic play pen can only be a good thing for any Grand Narrative that is really worth its salt. A successful sense making narrative feeds on raw data and has no need to insulate itself from challenges. Mcdowell, however, clearly doesn’t believe that internet laizzez faire will actually support a Christian World view; in fact he thinks it will do precisely the opposite and support other world views. Let me repeat: Mcdowell is sending out the very worst kind of signal about Christianity: For if Christianity finds it difficult to survive in an environment of free flowing information then that suggests it simply doesn’t work as a world view. Typically, Mcdowell gives little credit or trust that young people, in the fullness of time, can and should come to their own opinion on things: He regards a young person as all but lost if they haven’t succumbed to early years indoctrination. This looks to me like a return to the Jesuit concept of an institutionalized faith propagated by child rearing.

I made the statement off and on for 10-11 years that the abundance of knowledge, the abundance of information, will not lead to certainty; [My Bold] it will lead to pervasive skepticism. And, folks, that’s exactly what has happened. It’s like this. How do you really know, there is so much out there… This abundance [of information] has led to skepticism. And then the Internet has leveled the playing field [giving equal access to skeptics].”

While 51 percent of evangelical Christians did not believe in absolute truth in an earlier survey, the percentage escalated to 62 in 1994. In 1999, it jumped to 78 percent. “You know what it is now?” asked McDowell. “One of the most staggering statistics in history of the church… 91 percent said there is no absolute truth apart from myself.”

My Comment: Note McDowell’s reference to “certainty” in the foregoing. My recent exposure to fundamentalism tells me that postmodernism and relativism are becoming such frightening ogres to fundamentalists that they are confusing skeptical and critical attitudes with a lack of belief in absolutes; to fundamentalists anything less than certainty in their kitschy world view smacks of relativism. Fundamentalism offers a false dichotomy between a toy town certainty and the slippery slope of relativism. With only this dichotomy available in the minds of fundamentalists, they are liable to classify skepticism and uncertainty as postmodernism.

McDowell proposed three ways to deal with the problem. “First, we have to model the truth. If you don’t model what you teach your kids, forget it. If they don’t see it, they won’t believe it… Second, we have to build relationships.” Just as truth without relationship leads to rejection, rules without relationship lead to rebellion, he said. “Kids don’t respond to rules. They respond to rules in the context of a loving, intimate relationship.” And third, he said, we have to use knowledge. “You better arm yourselves to answer your children’s and grandchildren’s questions…no matter what the question is…without being judgmental.” Kids’ greatest defense, he said, was the knowledge of truth.

However, McDowell said, as many as 85 to 90 percent of the evangelical Christian parents in America are not equipped to handle their kids. Christians, he urged, needed to understand the time, quoting 1 Chronicles 12:32: “Of the sons of Issachar, men who understood the times, with knowledge of what Israel should do...”

My Comment: Not surprisingly McDowell’s solution is didactic; give kids “answers” in a controlled and authoritative way rather than inculcate a probing, analytical faculty allied to an uncompromising integrity and honesty that strives for truth. It is ironic that the religious right favours epistemic protectionism rather than the free market of ideas. They are unwilling to apply their “Libertarian, small government” ethos to epistemology.

***

I don’t think militant atheism is the ultimate enemy of Christianity; laizzez faire atheism’s critical freedom and lack of superstition is far too sanitized to present any real “dark side” threat to Christianity. Moreover, atheism has difficulty connecting with some of humankind’s deepest emotions and provides little or nothing to celebrate publically - unless it borrows from religion: Viz: when organised atheism in the form of communism has attempted to provide a public rationale for celebration it has created cult figures, demigods and a quasi-religious sense of mystical collective destiny.

But the postmodern nihilism that often accompanies laizzez faire atheism may simply be the pendulum pull back prior to an almighty reactionary swing into the black depths of cult religion. Maybe the house is being swept clean ready for all manner of nasties to re-inhabit it; my guess is that those nasties will be fundamentalists of some sort. Fundamentalism, as I have said elsewhere, appeals to deep seated instincts in way that laizzez faire atheism has little hope of doing. Religion is capable, therefore, of unleashing some of the strongest motivations known to man. The real danger to Christianity is not gnu atheism and the internet but something far more insidious.

Rico Tice and Christianity Exploded

2011-07-15T03:20:00.000-07:00

Is hell for those who offend Deity or for those who offend humanity?

Evangelical Rico Tice is to the “Christianity Explored” course as Nicky Gumble is to the “Alpha” course. Tice and Gumble have conceived and implemented their respective introductory courses to the Christian faith and left the hallmark of their particular Christian subcultures on their creations: If Christianity can be regarded as a combination of stick and carrot then I don’t think it is an over simplification to say that Tice is more drawn toward the stick of eternal damnation than is Gumble. It therefore comes as no surprise that in the July edition of “Christianity” magazine we find Tice justifying his strong promulgation of the doctrine of eternal torment. He is quoted as follows:

The reason I believe in hell is that hell tells me that an infinite God can be infinitely offended. If the punishment for murdering my neighbour is £100, it immediately diminishes my neighbour. The punishment for hurting other human beings in this life, if I don't find rescue with Jesus, is eternal torment, because that's how valuable they are. They're made in God's image, and they're very valuable. I don't have a problem with eternal torment, because it tells me that people are incredibly valuable and how you treat them is a very serious thing.

Tice is sugaring the bitter pill of eternal torment by invoking God’s love: According to Tice human beings made in God’s image are so incredibly valuable to God that He is infinitely offended if they are sinned against. It follows, then, that the perpetrators of sin deserve eternal torment. In short, according to Tice, God’s love is so expansive and His offence is consequently so great that hell becomes a kind of creation of God’s love! Love and hell are two sides of the same coin, according to Tice.

Sounds good doesn’t it? Tice can slip in the bitter pill of hell amidst soothing talk of God’s love. This is certainly an advance on the more mediaeval take on eternal torment. Here the Glory of God is thought to be so infinitely above lowly human beings that a slight against His awful presence deserves eternal torment; such a justification sits well with a feudal system and its hierarchal systems of worth, but not a modern ethos that likes to hear about self worth.

In shifting the emphasis away from sin as an affront to a high medieval tyrant to an offence against much loved humanity, Tice’s justification for eternal torment works by distraction: In bamboozling us with God’s love for humankind one little point may pass unnoticed: That is, the identity of the nameless entities who have sinned against those incredibly valuable human beings. Those entities are, of course, none other than those valuable much loved human beings! Tice passes over this fact without comment.

Tice’s verbal sleight of hand hides a nasty conundrum and paradox: If those human beings are oh so valuable and oh so loved, they are clearly not so valuable and loved that this prevents them from being consigned to eternal damnation if they should commit a sin against their fellows. But if they are not that valuable how then could sinning against them be so offensive to God? Does sin somehow subtract from their value in a kind of mathematical way, viz: Value = Value – Sin? Unlikely since sin and love-value are incommensurable; someone can sin against you but that doesn’t necessarily reduce their value to you.

Hugely valuable human beings but huge offence: An impasse that is perhaps well addressed by the Christian doctrine of a self sacrificing Deity whose love is so great that He resolves the contention between the immoveable object of justice and the irresistible force of Divine love with His own self sacrificial act. This might make sense if all are saved, but given that Tice represents a Christian culture where it is thought that only a self defined remnant will benefit from God’s grace, then for the broad swath of humanity the conundrum and paradox of eternal torment remains in place: Valuable and much loved human beings are being consigned to hell in large numbers. According to Tice countless average human beings are going to be eternally damned for sinning against other humans. To complete the experience of eternal damnation there will be one last cruel irony for them: They will find the majority of those incredibly valuable human beings they have sinned against occupying hell along with them!

Whatever the realities behind the age old archetypical concept of hell, Tice’s attempt to sugar the pill is a piece self deception that fails to allay the deep moral distaste for this doctrine.

The Farce Goes On: Ham Fisted Prophets

2011-05-23T13:11:00.000-07:00

"Hey you, we've got a monopoly franchise on this business!"

We all know about the above "prophetic" farce. As in all the best farces we find earnest blockheads like Camping, with their wacko projects, played off against knowing and terminally cynical characters. In the latter role we have, of course, PZ Myers and his rabid raiders. The whole fundagelical business just wouldn't be so funny without PZ Myers and co to witness and react to it. And do we need the medicine of a little black humour, for in many ways the extreme antics of the fundamentalists, which they carry out with a straight faced seriousness of purpose, are really no joke at all.

In this blog post PZ brings together the Camping affair with his other favourite buffoon, Ken Ham. The post links to one of Ken Ham's facebook pages. As a rule fundamentalists never see themselves mirrored in other fundamentalists; they are egotistical enough to think of themselves as somehow different and set apart with a monopoly on truth. They continue to show no coyness or embarrassment about themselves; they remain as ebullient and irrepressible as ever: On Ken's facebook page one of his admirers says: "Thank God for true prophets like Mr. Ham!!!;-)

No End to End of World Predictions

2011-05-11T10:02:00.000-07:00

PZ Myers blog is required reading if you want to keep up with the weird and wonderful world of fundagelicalism. His latest catch of a strange fish can be seen here. Basically it’s yet another fundamentalist (lauded by gullible followers) predicting the end of the world; in fact 10 days from today on the 21st May. The man at the centre of this latest prediction is someone called “Harold Camping”. More details are available here. Let’s give Camping some leeway: This is probably his best shot at making sense of life. But like a large swath of religious humanity he is spiritually egotistical enough to be absolutely sure he is right and can write off as damned so many individual human stories of experience, hope, endeavour, aspiration, seeking, encounter etc. without so much as a second thought: “My way or the damned way” says the fundagelical with bullet proof confidence.

Keep an eye on this blog if you want to find out the latest news on the end of the world. On the 22 May I’ll up date you on whether it has happened or not – provided you haven’t been raptured, that is. When the rapture does come there's a chance atheists might get raptured too: God will hardly be able to blame them for not believing in Him given that the Christian world is suffused with the fallible utterings of the Harold Campings of this world......and the William Tapleys, the Weatherbill7s, the Barry Smiths, the Gerald Coates...... etc.; its all down to a toxic mix of egotism, spiritual elitism, authoritarianism, Biblical legalism, wish fulfilment, gullible followings, fideism, and spiritual spin - a list of all too human failings that provide a very plausible basis for a belief that religion is nothing but a quirky human foible. But it's going to be tough on the atheists if they are raptured: The're going to have to spend an eternity worshipping "Jebus" with some of the world' most egotistical spiritual pundits. In short heaven's going to be hell for them.

Fundie Argument Clinic Part 4: Summing up

2011-03-24T11:49:00.000-07:00

He hasn't met the Christians who Jesus really, really, really loves

Christian Fundamentalists, by definition, believe they have a very direct connection with the Divine. Consequently they are very sure of their respective spiritual positions, positions which will be based on some blend of gnosis and Biblical legalism. Convinced of the divine authority of their own opinions they will presume to speak in the name of the Almighty, readily condemning those they perceive to be heretics. They are likely to feel uncomfortable with Harries Formula “Meaning = Text + Context”, because for them divine meaning is unambiguous and clear, demanding little in the way interpretative context, a context which in any case they will probably identify as a corrupting influence. (And yet they themselves must make use of contextual resources in order to interpret texts!) For fundamentalists “compromise” is a dirty word and consequently when fundamentalists holding conflicting versions of “revelation” meet it is a meeting of the irresistible force and the immoveable object; the subsequent contention can be short, sharp and acrimonious....

STOP! I’m really sick and tired of this subject and it is not really what I would like talk about…what I would really like to talk about can be found here on my Physics blog.

Fundamentalist Argument Clinic Part 3

2011-02-25T13:57:00.000-08:00

The following discussion thread, which I reproduce below, first appeared on the Christian web site Network Norwich and Norfolk, although it has since been censored. The thread is, in my opinion, instructive and I hope in due course to draw out the lessons in a later post.

In the last part of this series it would appear that a geocentric Christian fundamentalist has convinced a YEC fundamentalist that geocentricity is the teaching of the Bible. I was confounded by this outcome as I had always assumed that fundamentalists are extrenely unreasonable and not open to persuasion especially by other fundamentalists. However, as we shall see business returns to normal in this section of the thread.

As you read this thread you need to be mindful of "Poe's Law" which states that parodies of fundamentalism are all but indistinguishable from the real thing.

Lord Ipsulot (Guest) 12/11/2010 12:43

Hi g.s.

At least you are not trying to hijack the brilliant discovery made by Mr. Charles Darwin like some, by trying to involve god in it.

My Comment: Our simple minded atheist commentator would much prefer that all theists were as simple minded as GS. The atheist dogmatist's job would then be as easy as shooting fish in barrel.

geocentric believer (Guest) 12/11/2010 16:37

Yes, Darwinism and God must be kept in holy separation. To you Ipsulot Darwin is holy and therefore must be kept separate from unholy religion. I agree, except that you have got your holiness and unholiness categories switched round. But Ispolute, my son, you have correctly perceived the need for separation. Perhaps you are more spiritual than you think, much more spiritual than James Knight who mixes up God and evolution.

My Comment: Like Ipsulot our fundamentalist geocentrist (GB) hates a three or four cornered gun fight. They much prefer a simple polarised world view of "us vs. them"

Mike 2 (Guest) 12/11/2010 17:10

Hi Lord Ipsulot,

Depressing to read this nonsense isn't it? You know, when I see stuff like this, I sometimes think there's no hope for the human race and that eventually reason will give way to the stupidity of religious dogma. It seems as though it doesn't matter how clearly and demonstrably wrong something is, these guys will just go on believing it just because its written in the bible. They will stand there and tell you that black is white all day long.

Where have they gone wrong in their lives to become so obsessed. Has our education system let them down, or have they been got-at from an early age by some over-zealous religious fruitcake? The nutters of Network Norwich eh!

My Comment: You can hardly blame Mike 2 for being well and truly put off religion. When I look in this "mirror" I sometimes wonder why I call myself a "Christian".

geocentric believer (Guest) 12/11/2010 17:42

I think you will find mike 2, my son, that you have availed your self of the opportunity to publish on Network Norwich far more than us geocentrists. To me it looks more like the "atheists and compromisers of Network Norwich"!

My Comment: GB shows typical egocentric fundamentalist arrogance; everyone is rotten through and through except him and his sect.

Lord Ipsulot (Guest) 12/11/2010 23:46

Greetings Mike 2.

The level of irrational nonsense displayed on this site is indeed quite astonishing. Mind you, I am not so sure about "geocentric believer". Seems to me he is only joking about the whole thing.

Mike 2 (Guest) 13/11/2010 08:35

Yes, I am also suspicious that he is a wind-up merchant and that poor old g.s. is the target of his humour. After all, why else would he write such nonsense?

My Comment: Cue "Poe's Law"!

geocentric believer (Guest) 13/11/2010 10:15

...I write "such nonsense" because it is the clear teaching of Bible. As g.s. must surely see his devotion to the Bible requires his assent to geocentricism.

This is not humour, it's about following the clear teaching of the Bible. I don't expect you to understand Mike 2 because you are not born of the spirit and don't understand the things of God.

Have you looked at that web set yet Mike 2? If you do you'll realise that it's not nonsense, but serious Biblically based science. http://www.geocentricity.com/

My Comment: Appeal to the inner light of the Holy Spirit is the fundamentalist and fideist way of dodging a reasoned engagement. Basically it's a form of Christian gnosticism. (See my introduction in part 1)

Lord Ipsulot (Guest) 13/11/2010 18:57

Yeah sure.

My Comment: Read that as "I'm Ipsulotely clueless about the fundamentalist mindset, so where do I go from here?"

geocentric believer (Guest) 14/11/2010 11:44

Yes I am sure; just like you my good Lord Ibsulote. We have quite a lot in common in an opposite sort of way don't we?

My Comment: ....he's probably right: Ipsulot is likely to be as epistemically arrogant as GB.

Mike 2 (Guest) 14/11/2010 17:10

Then if you're not a wind-up merchant geo-b, then I truly feel sorry for you. I think you need a bit of one-to-one with the good James Knight.

My Comment: The atheist Mike 2 is not a bad guy at all. He can see that there is theism and theism just as there is atheism and atheism. James Knight, by the way, is a Christian who writes for Network Norwich and Norfolk.

geocentric believer (Guest) 15/11/2010 16:59

Ahh! So you are a bit of a fan of James Knight! Like I said this site is full of atheists and compromisers.

My Comment: ...meaning that James Knight is the sort of "compromiser" GB despises. In GB's books "epistemic humility" is likely to be identified as compromise.

Lord Ipsulot (Guest) 16/11/2010 16:27

Geo, yes, I believe we do have a few things in common. g.s., is it getting too much for you?

g.s. (Guest) 17/11/2010 13:10

My Comment: GS is lost for words (as usual). It is not a case of it getting too much for GS because it always was too much for GS

(Guest) 21/11/2010 17:15

Well thats the end of anythig interesting and radical debated on here now that "Big Brother" and the powers that be insist you are on the membership list and can censor you if you do not agree with their questionable spiritual practices. Mind you its been like that for years not just here but among the various groups. R1 R2 legacy of self appointed apostles and pastors heavy shepherding of the gullible still in tact here in Nowich.

What else would you expect when its run by the Wimber-ites and those that have an endless history of splits and division,jelousy who desire to be kings.. "facilitate christian fellowship", yes as long as its on certain ones terms, accompanied with trumpet blowing.

So watch this site for yet more back slapping pseudo spiritual claptrap masquerading as a move of God.

Timothy V Reeves (Guest) 23/11/2010 19:46

Hello Brother XXX old son!

(Guest) 23/11/2010 19:53

xxx is dead. Long live guest!

Timothy V Reeves (Guest) 23/11/2010 20:23

..well that rather clinches it doesn't it, as only xxx would know whether or not xxx is "dead" - as if that very characteristic line of forthright rhetoric wasn't enough to clinch it! No look here Brother XXX, you may have some interesting points there, but why on this thread? You see I was thinking of doing one of my blog entries on this particular thread as it's content intrigues me. Trouble is, now that you have made an appearance there is a distinct danger that Brother Keith will get "deleter's delirium" and bang goes my thread!

(Guest) 25/11/2010 13:38

That raises an interesting question about consciousness after death.

Would xxx know if he was dead or not? What about soul sleep? What about the two parts of Hades, Abrahams bosom? The souls of the martys under the alter "how long" etc etc. Ooppps I digress, is that deleters digit deliberating above us?!

One thing is clear, Christ is raised from the dead and so are we. We are already in ressurection.

Timothy V Reeves (Guest) 25/11/2010 21:37

Interesting questions? My foot! "Guest" simply meant that the label XXX was dead! XXX has simply been re-badged!

My Comment: A joker in the pack suddenly makes an appearance; namely, "Brother Triple-X" from the Witness Lee Brotherhood, a fundamentalist sect who (of course) want to "recover" the whole church to the Witness Lee way of doing church. Their enhanced sectarianism gives me a "professional" interest in them; hence I've made an appearance here in order to draw Brother Triple-X into the fray giving us a five or six cornered gun-fight! For Triple-X all this is beneath his hyper-spirituality: To him the "soulish" GB and GS are badly in need to being "recovered" to the true spirituality of the "blended" brotherhood. He is probably making a very frustrated appearance here after having no doubt been censored by the moderator on another thread.

g.s. (Guest) 04/12/2010 15:57

All Christians must refute Darwin's ideas, and offer the truth of the gospel to everyone. Thus saving millions from the fires of hell.

My Comment: That's so extreme that I'm feeling the effects of Poe's Law at this point! GS wants to get back to the subject. I can't imagine why because he is so utterly out of his depth. But then like Triple-X he is so utterly assured of his own brand of fundamentalism that he knows the Holy Spirit is testifying to both apostates and heathen of the truth of his version of unreason. Thus, he "assists" the Holy Spirit by threatening hell and damnation.

geocentric believer (Guest) 05/12/2010 21:59

But don't forget g.s. Copernicanism came first. It demoted God's place for the Earth by removing it from the spatial origin of His Creation, just as the claimed billions of years removed the Earth from the temporal origin of Creation. Copernicanism paved the way for an Old Earth and Darwinism. What you should be saying is: All Christians must refute Copernicanism, and offer the truth of the gospel to everyone. Thus saving millions from the tortures of hell.

My Comment: This point (which GB keeps repeating) is interesting and telling. I will be coming back to it as I have already said.

g.s. (Guest) 06/12/2010 17:25

Copernicanism is not the issue here. Besides, it is not in conflict with the Scriptures.

geocentric believer (Guest) 06/12/2010 21:50

I gather, then, that it was "another" g.s. who said:

"So it seems therefore you are correct geocentric believer. Thanks for the link."

We are back to square one with you disobeying God's Word and compromising with science. Let me warn you for the second time: The Bible implies that the Sum moves - Ecclesiastes 1:5 says:

"The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose."

Once again, over to you g.s. Let me advise that you start using scripture to prove your points.

geocentric believer (Guest) 08/12/2010 15:56

Yes it does matter: How can you make claims to discovering the accuracy of the Bible if you subscribe to Copernicanism? Have you got any scriptures to support Copernicanism? I think you know the answer to that question g.s. - No! In fact do you use your Bible at all other than to parrot what other people tell you it says?

geocentric believer (Guest) 08/12/2010 18:07

...how can you ask people to refute evolution when you are not also asking them to refute copernicanism which is clearly against the word of God? This looks like hypocrisy to me g.s. and atheists will see through it as hypocrisy.

My Comment: We are well and truly back on track: This will make any argument clinic proud: We are going round in circles again!

g.s. (Guest) 08/12/2010 18:26

So you are an atheist.....thought so.....explains it all.

My Comment: Even a fundamentalist can feel the force of Poe's law!

geocentric believer (Guest) 08/12/2010 18:41

You're getting desperate if that crass response is anything to go by. Have you looked at that link I provided? Can you start using the Word to justify your Copernican position? For the third time:The Bible implies that the Sun moves - Ecclesiastes 1:5 says: "The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose." For the third time, over to you g.s. Third time lucky? I doubt it, I don't believe in luck any more than I believe in hypocrites

geocentric believer (Guest) 08/12/2010 22:53

BTW g.s. you will find that geocentrist scholar Dr Gerardus D. Bouw agrees with me about your hypocrisy (See herehttp://www.geocentricity.com/ba1/fresp/index.html):

"Evolutionists, atheists, and agnostics in the know can easily shame creationists on the issue of geocentricity by simply pointing out the hypocrisy of their insistence that the days in Genesis 1 are literal while the rising and setting of the sun is not."

Are you now going to accuse Dr Bouw of being an atheist?

g.s. (Guest) 08/12/2010 23:20

I never asked you to bring in this "copernican" stuff. Let us concentrate on the fallacy of Darwinism. Like I asked before: when did anyone witness a monkey giving birth to a human? Going on the theory of evolution such a thing must happen every now and again, right? But so far no one has ever seen it happen. Yet evolutionists insist on holding on to this nonsense. They just invent the irrational presupposition that species simply "evolved", and that therefore the Bible must be wrong. Yet they fail to produce one bit evidence to support their assumption. I feel that there is something different at work here; something very sinister, which has more to do with satanism than with science. Sadly, there are also some Christians who pander to this abhorrence by suggesting that the Holy Scripture and evolution are both true. By doing so, they give some level of credibility to atheism. We must stay true to our faith at all times, our Lord demands no less. Evolution is incompatible with the Bible.

My Comment: Heck, GS has written a whole paragraph. GB must be getting to him. But notice once again, it's just sheer ignorant assertion. In his own words he fails to produce one bit evidence to support his assumptions !

geocentric believer (Guest) 09/12/2010 18:59

As I have tried to make clear above, Copernicanism, in subtly devaluing the pinnacle of God's creation here on Earth is the thin end of the Satanic wedge. It paves the way for Darwinism in devaluing man's place in God's plan. Therefore we cannot proceed with a critique of Darwinism without a critique of Copernicanism. The two go hand in hand. In any case as I have said above to hold to Copernicanism and yet to reject Darwinism is hypocrisy. So g.s. stop sitting on the fence.

BTW: I'm no evolution buff but even I know that evolutionists are not saying that a monkey one day gave birth to a human. You really need to get your facts straight first.

My Comment: GB keeps repeating this same point about a link between Darwinism and Copernicanism. The dimwit GS just won't engage it. This is the point I will come back to in due course.

g.s. (Guest) 09/12/2010 23:38

I still don't understand why you keep bringing up this copernicanism stuff; it has nothing to do with it.

Do you or do you not agree that evolution is basphemy against God?

My Comment: Of course GS doesn't understand, he's all but brain dead.

geocentric believer (Guest) 10/12/2010 00:20

In answer to your question: Yes. Now will you please answer my question: Do you or do you not agree that Copernicanism is basphemy against God? Depending on how you answer that question you will then understand or not understand, as the case may be, why I keep bringing up this "Copernicanism stuff"

geocentric believer (Guest) 14/12/2010 18:31

Four days and still no answer from g.s.

My Comment: GS obviously had to think long and hard about this one:

g.s. (Guest) 16/12/2010 17:30

It is the popular believe that there is no centre in the universe. This has not been proved or disproved. To Christians it is clear that Gods reation (relation?) is the centre. But the question of the earth's physical position is less important than the spiritual reality of God's love for his people. If nothing else, the earth is the spiritual center of the universe.

My Comment: Ironically a similar argument could be invoked in regard to GS's YEC philosophy.

Mike 2 (Guest) 17/12/2010 17:27

Yes g.s., and what's more the dinosaurs also believed that to be the case some 60 million years ago. The truth of it was revealed to them just seconds before the impact.

My Comment: Worthy point Mike 2, but you are wasting your time here I'm afraid to say!

geocentric believer (Guest) 17/12/2010 18:22

...and such imaginary scenerios show us why Copernicanism stinks and g.s. won't admit it. Copernicanism set us up for all this rot about us being just an accident in a remote and obscure corner of the universe with no special status to protect us from apocalyptic meteor impacts. And g.s. foolishly thinks it's unimportant.

g.s. (Guest) 17/12/2010 23:57

You have a very narrow-minded world view geo.

My Comment: A case of the pot calling the kettle black I think!

geocentric believer (Guest) 18/12/2010 17:02

But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it - mat 7:14

In any case I am sure there are many on this web site who would accuse you, g.s. of having a narrow-minded world view. What's wrong with being narrow? But how narrow is "narrow"?

(Guest) 22/12/2010 00:04

Network Norwich. Shame on you. Keith. John and John.

You are not what you think you are.

geocentric believer (Guest) 22/12/2010 00:33

Don't tell me Mr. XXX, another of your forum threads has been nuked by Keith and co? Now look here my man, me and brother g.s are having a nice civilised Christian discussion and the last thing we want is another "Local Church verses all them others" fight breaking out on our nice cosy peaceful thread. Next thing you know, all our comments have gone to thread heaven.

My Comment: Triple-X uses this thread to make his protest after being censored elsewhere; in fact it is probable the whole thread he was contributing to was deleted - clearly a destiny that GB thinks is likely for this particular thread now that Triple-X has appeared. Triple-X is, needless to say, as dismissive of "all them others" as are GB and GS. Consequently, the vitriol arising when Triple-X and his brothers engaged posters, especially ex-WLB members, made threads unmanageable and they were often deleted wholesale. This vitriol is comprehensible when one understands that the WLB considers that all who are not with the sect to be, by default, against it; the WLB demands ultimate acquiescence or else. ("Local Church", by the way, is another name for the Witness Lee Brotherhood)

***

And that folks, was the end of that! As GB predicted the thread suddenly disappeared for unaccounted reasons. Its destruction seemed to come out of the blue just like that meteor which Mike 2 spoke of. As if they were its lumbering dinosaur inhabitants GS, GB and Triple-X went the way of the thread. And yet the thread is such a gem, such a microcosm of fundagelicalism. The wallahs at NN&N deleted it presumably oblivious of just what this thread was trying to tell us about the state of modern fundagelicalism.

...to be continued

GB feasts on GS, but something comes along to spoil the party.

Of Dragons and Unicorns

2011-01-20T10:28:00.000-08:00

The screen shot below is taken from an Answers in Genesis facebook page. Ken Ham, AiG Supremo, is asking for some (favourable) testimonies regarding the ministry of AiG and in particularly his Kitsch Creationist Extravaganza, the Creation “museum”.

(Click to enlarge)

The visceral spiritual superlatives come in thick and fast:

“God bless your ministry”, “One of the most peaceful places I know” “I’m am so blessed by …YOU”, “Praise God for your ministry and good example”, “I could feel the presence of God” , “God made sure I stood firm in trusting a literal Genesis as a sure foundation”, “This is the proof that the Holy Spirit leads us into truth”, “it is an amazing place and the anointing is very strong there”.

Clearly these people went in with their expectations and hopes fulfilled thrice over. The world they have come to believe has been made palpable by a stunning spectacle of foam rubber, glass fibre, and plaster exhibits with a backdrop of painted wooden facades and atmospheric lighting. The cosmos of their imagination has thus been brought to life; they can almost touch it: But smell it? No.

But we must set beside this testimony the fact that many Christians don’t believe in a Ken Ham’s Young Creationist cosmos. To them the glitzy Bible Disneyland of AiG is to the Earthy Biblical World as a Star Trek convention, with its plastic phasers and communicators, is to Astronomy.

Having said that we now have to grasp the nettle: There is a contingent of Christians out there who are fundamentally mistaken about the nature of the physical world and yet they are able to dress up their error in the language of intense devotion, ecstasy and epiphany. That they can be so utterly vehement, so utterly sure they know the Divine Will and yet so utterly vacuous debases the first person language of religious testimony almost beyond recovery; almost....

The Fundamentalist Argument Clinic. Part 2

2011-01-16T09:19:00.000-08:00

We are at the start of an argument between two fundamentalists one of whom is accusing the other of compromise on issue of geocentricity. Strange though it may seem there are still Christians out there who, based on their view off the Bible, believe in a geocentric cosmos. The geocentric believer ("GB") has just accused a Young Earth Creationist ("GS") with compromise. It was GS who actually started the thread by accusing Christian evolutionists of courting blasphemy. (See part 1) It is the turn of our YEC, GS, to reply to GB

g.s. (Guest)

That is a different matter.

My Comment: GS is man of few words; he can only assert, he cannot or will not reason. Given that he accusing Christian evolutionists of something tantamount to blasphemy you would think that the least he could do would be to take the trouble to get some Biblical evidence together to support his case. His short reply to GB betrays a desire to get off a subject that is likely to confound him and get back onto to familiar ground. For GS this is all a very annoying distraction.

geocentric believer (Guest)

No it isn't. Copernicanism is as evil as Darwinism. In fact Darwinism is just another type of Copernicanism applied to the animal Kingdom, making man insignificant, just like Copernicanism does. Copernicanism came before Darwinism and is the thin end of the wedge that takes us away from the Word of God. If you believe in Copernicanism you are a compromising the clear Word of God.

My Comment: Ironically I agree there is conceptual link between Copernicanism and Darwinism; I will be coming back to this matter in another post.

g.s. (Guest)

If you read the Bible properly, you will see that the scriptures are in harmony with the copernican world view. Evolution is an entirely different thing. It is at odds with the word of God. It is a blasphemous theory, and deeply offensive towards Christians.

My Comment: GS has managed to get to together all of 3 sentences, but once again it’s sheer assertion; in spite of all the vehement affirmation about what the Bible says GS seldom uses it. He is just parroting the line put out by his sect

geocentric believer (Guest)

Clearly .. you are not reading the Bible properly. The Bible teaches the Earth is stationary. Joshua 10:13 says: "And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies. Is not this written in the book of Jasher? So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day."

As I keep trying to tell you g.s. Darwinism is linked to Copernicanism. In belittling God's created Earth Copernicanism paved the way for Darwinism. Christians like yourself who have compromised with the first blasphemy of Copernicanism have only got themselves to blame for the blasphemy of Darwinism.

My Comment: To give a robust and clear meaning to such terms as “the sun stood still” would require quite a technical discussion about motion. But GB is likely to think this as entirely unnecessary because to him everything is crystal clear and he takes it for granted that his mindset about motion is up to the task of spiritually indicting someone – as does GS. GB thinks his position is so obviously corroborated by the "plain teaching" of scripture that anyone who disagrees must have a bad conscience. However, let’s take a little pleasure in the fact that GS is getting a good dose of his own medicine!

Lord Ipsulot (Guest) 06/11/2010 13:47

Hi g.s., how nice to read another one of your contributions again. So, here it is: I accept the theory of evolution to be accurate (as against "believe"). Moreover, I think the bible is a load of old bunk, made by people who were - at best - not too well informed. Am I a blasphemer now? What will happen to me?

My Comment: This is an atheist who calls himself “Lord Ipsulot”. Although more articulate than GS he too only indulges in “argument clinic” assertion. His attempt to make a distinction between “accurate” and “belief” fails given that his sentence is naturally rendered as “I believe the theory of evolution to be accurate”!!

Mike 2 (Guest) 07/11/2010 16:18

Well well well. It seems that the bible is the authoritative text on just about everything then. I don't know what to say other than It Must Be Wrong Then Musn't It?

My Comment: Up pops another atheist called Mike 2 (to distinguish him from Mike 1 if you wondered). He’s usually a lot better than Lord Ipsulot at engaging, but at the moment he seems gob-smacked and “I don’t know what to say…..” really sums things up for him. Who can blame him.

geocentric believer (Guest) 07/11/2010 20:42

g.s. does not obey the clear geocentric teaching of the bible. He is compromising with science.

http://www.geocentricity.com/

My Comment: Yes, we've already heard that GB. Interesting, however, is the link to the geocentric web site. It’s the same site I considered on my physics blog here.

g.s. (Guest) 08/11/2010 12:48

This so-called geocentric idea is at variance with the Bible as I read it, just like evolution.

My Comment: This is now looking like an argument clinic exchange, the kind of “oh yes it is / oh no it isn’t” stuff you get at the pantomime.

geocentric believer (Guest) 08/11/2010 17:34

Then you are clearly not reading the Bible correctly. Where in the Bible does it say the Earth moves round the Sun?

My Comment…well you’ve got to concede it – he’s got a point in that last sentence!

g.s. (Guest) 08/11/2010 17:56

Where in the Bible does it say that the sun moves around the earth?

My Comment: … GS has let himself in for it now…look at this:

geocentric believer (Guest) 08/11/2010 18:41

Easy; the Bible implies that the Sun moves - Ecclesiastes 1:5 says:

"The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose." Over to you g.s.

My Comment: Advantage GB! GS really ought to learn to use his Bible! Whatever do they teach him at his fundangelical chapel?

Mike 2 (Guest) 08/11/2010 19:20

That may be so, but just because it is written in the bible, it does not mean it is correct. The bible is well known to be wrong on many counts. Nor does it mean that relative motion is precluded. Wake up man, the universe runs on relative motion. It is impossible to say that you have no motion unless you devise some method of measuring your dopler shift relative to the 3K background radiation which appears pretty constant in all directions. Your standpoint is demonstrably rediculous, so why do you persist?

My Comment: Good points Mike 2 but you are wasting your breath – these two Biblical sectarians are not in the least bit interested in science – they debunk it as “man’s reasoning". The riposte from GB is all too predictable:

geocentric believer (Guest) 08/11/2010 19:33

..because I believe the Bible and not science; unlike g.s. who merely claims he believes the Bible, but in fact disobeys it and follows the blasphemy of copernicanism.

Mike2: If you want to find out more about absolute motion, follow the link I have provided.

My Comment: Re: the Geocentricty link. GB feels he can leave all his scientific problems in the hands the incorrigible Dr Bouw, a geocentrist; although I hesitate to call him a "geocentrist scientist". GB is effectively saying: “I don’t do science – go and see Dr Bouw”. He is thereby relieved of the responsibility of defending the technical merit of his position, and he can then thoughtlessly mouth off scripture, tacitly assuming he knows what it means, thus giving him the pretext to accuse “compromisers” of heinous sin.

g.s. (Guest) 08/11/2010 23:08

Whenever the science and the Bible are at variance, it is the Holy Bible that is correct at all times. So it seems therefore you are correct geocentric believer. Thanks for the link.

My Comment:....am I seeing things? Surely GS isn’t acquiescing that easily? In fact is this the real uncompromising GS we've all grown to love?

Mike 2 (Guest) 09/11/2010 07:31

Then you both live in a world of phantasy. How sad that you cannot even attempt to reconcile science with your religion.

My Comment: Poor old Mike 2 is in despair!

geocentric believer (Guest)

So g.s. do I take it that you are in agreement that the whole universe revolves round the Earth in one day?

My Comment: I don’t think GB can believe this is happening ! Must admit, it does look fishy.

g.s. (Guest)

If that's what it says in the Bible, then yes.

geocentric believer (Guest)

..and do you believe the Bible says that?

g.s. (Guest)

If the Bible says it, it settles it for me.

My (Whispered) Comment: I'm not sure GS is entirely convinced; he is being evasive.

geocentric believer (Guest)

g.s.: Congratulations on joining the geocentrists! Spread the message about the blasphemy of copernicanism, the precursor of Darwinism!

My Comment: This apparently lame outcome certainly wasn’t expected. So is it really all settled with two uncompromising fundagelicals actually managing to come to an agreement? Not in a month of fundagelical Sunday Services, as we shall see…

The Fundamentalist Argument Clinic. Part 1: Introduction

2010-11-27T09:31:00.000-08:00

STOP PRESS 24/12/10: Network Norwich and Norfolk appear to have censored the thread that is the subject of this blog post. I had prepared for this not unexpected eventuality by copying the entire thread and will in due course be presenting it on this blog . NN&N appear to delete forum material regardless of whether or not it breaks their house rules; in fact in this particular connection I saw no violation of the house rules. The underlying and unarticulated policy seems to be one of suppressing contention. Thus my policy is to keep a close watch on NN&N and grab the gems as soon as they make an appearance. This material is too precious to leave in the hands of those who find themselves under pressure to censor it.

This discussion thread on the local Christian website Network Norwich & Norfolk is noteworthy for reasons that I hope will become clear. I have copied the comments of the main protagonists and I will be reproducing them on this blog over the next few posts. The creator of the thread is someone who signs in as “g.s.” - I shall call him GS. GS is a fundamentalist. He appears to be unwilling or unable to sustain a reasoned argument over more that two or three sentences and instead engages in strong but bald assertions and accusations of wrong doing against God. He is a man of few words, a kind of evangelical terminator who well earns the term “Godbot”. A couple of sensible commentators attempted to redeem the thread from what was basically a cesspit of intellectual debauchery, but to no avail – I will not be publishing their particular comments as the thread is unworthy of their contributions.

The key to understanding the Christian fundamentalist approach to reasoning is their concept of the Holy Spirit. The fundamentalist may make a token effort to back up his assertions with appeals to his proprietary interpretation of the Bible, but in the final analysis the fundamentalist has a low view of reasoning of any kind regardless of whether or not such reasoning employs Biblical references. In fact, as I have said, in the extreme case of GS supporting argument is almost completely absent (even absent of the use of Biblical references). What inclines the Christian fundamentalist to a low view of reasoning is that he believes the Holy Spirit is arguing for the truth of his bald assertions in the privacy of the nonbeliever’s heart. Thus, the fundamentalist is released from the work of arguing – he can just assert his conclusions and leave the rest up to the Holy Spirit if needs be. He can walk out after he has dropped his slanderous spiritual bombshells knowing that those who don’t agree with him are in complete darkness, have bad consciences and at worst are knowingly blaspheming the Holy Spirit. This not only relieves the fundamentalist of the responsibility of making reasonable representations, but it also gives him license to abuse his antagonists with spiritual insults; to him those antagonists must have heard the promptings of the Holy Spirit in their hearts and therefore must be disobeying God. It also allows the fundamentalist to condemn those he has never met or listened to: “If you are not with us you are against us. If you are against us you are against God”; “It’s our way or the blasphemous way”. As with the Islamic Jihadists the world beyond their legalistic sectarian community is thought of as a Satanic domain of war, conflict and contention upon which God’s judgment rests; the fundamentalist therefore has a prerogative to despise it. The tactic of exploiting the name of the Holy Spirit to underwrite a form of gnosto-fideism is common to the whole of the Christian fundamentalist scene – from the wacko charismatic sects through the Mormons and JW’s, to the traditional strict and particular evangelicals, they are all quite capable of asserting black is white if they believe the Holy Spirit is testifying to it!

Anyway, without further ado let me set the scene by reproducing the first two entries of the thread in question. (See italics below) I have added my comments in non-italics underneath the entries. Just one note of caution: The contributor GS has proved such a caricature of fundamentalism that there has been some doubt as to whether he is real or just a troll. I have reason to believe he is the genuine article, but draw your own conclusion.

Believing in evolution is blasphemy against God

To observe the great creation of which we are a part, and then to attribute that to evolution, is a vile form of blasphemy against God.

g.s. (Guest) 04/11/2010 11:10

So we’re off to a flying start, straight in with an accusation of blasphemy, the worst sin any one can commit. Too dull to be subtle GS can’t work up to it in stages but presses the nuclear button right away. Fundamentalist spiritual insults, especially directed toward Christian evolutionists, don’t come much stronger than this. Interesting to note that he conflates “evolution” with the whole of creation and not just biological change. But what makes this thread really notable is the comment that now follows:

geocentric believer (Guest) 04/11/2010 17:22

You are a hypocrite g.s. How can you claim to be following the word of God when you don't believe the Earth to be stationary?

Wahey! This is going to be exciting! Looks like we’ve got a fundamentalist vs. fundamentalist death match on our hands. Fundamentalists often have huge egos – they will both be assured that the Holy Spirit is especially on their side and this will lead to a classic “immoveable object meeting the irresistible force” altercation.

Pastor Kerney Thomas is a Scream

2010-11-16T03:43:00.000-08:00

Here is Pastor Kerney Thomas whose efforts to get God on the move bring down not just the roof but the whole of the heavens with it:

..and if you want the essential Pastor Thomas without the boring bits, the video below is the one for you:

SuperHero WeatherBillZero Saves the World!

2010-11-03T04:50:00.000-07:00

In my last blog entry I posted a YouTube video by SuperSoylent on failed prophet Weatherbill7. Weatherbill7 predicted that during August and Early September California would be devastated by a tidal wave and mega earthquake. He had had, he claims, seven warnings of disaster; hence the "7", I assume. But needless to say not one of his warnings have materialized into anything real; that’s why he is better referred to as "WeatherbillZero". I’m not interested in the details, but WeatherBillZero’s prognostication methods involved what he called “casting lots” with a deck of cards. In the video below he appears to be facing up to his abject failure as a prophet by burning his ~~tarot~~ playing cards and admitting that he was just “plain old deceived”.

OK, so having faced the plain old painful truth about himself, does WeatherBillZero go back to being plain old Mr. Small Guy and try to forget all about it all? Not a bit of it. The humble, wimpy, nerdy looking WeatherbillZero doesn’t exactly cut a dash like one of those brash, suave, loud mouthed alpha male evangelists with a Death Star sized ego armoured with 24 inches of high carbon steel; but let’s not underestimate the power of the mythology that WeatherbillZero is tapping into, a mythology that presents the player with an attractive win-win option; in effect a game of "heads I win, tails you lose". For it seems that the above video was not the beginning of a restoration of integrity, but just a blip, a temporary crisis of confidence in an ego that, it now seems, is well back on track, as the commentary WeatherbillZero has added to his video indicates:

This is the deck of cards I've had for sometime now. Through these cards, I had casted lots. I thought, after the September 3rd mega quake did not come to pass, that I had been deceived, but I have come to realize, this was a judgement that was held off by The Call's (thecall.com) 14,000 Christian brethren who had prayed for God's mercy. God had answered and boy, do they not realize what they have done! They have stopped massive devastation on California! Praise God and the proof of this, is the more than 17+ sources at the web site, earthquake2010.org, who were given amazing signs that this was going to take place.

My accusers do not beleive in the power of prayer, so naturally, they are going to mock, ridicule and belittle all of this. To my accusers, I say, MAKE MY DAY! I am a man without reputation! I will preach the gospel in the face of my tormenters. No one is going to stop me! BTW, there is some wonderful worship music here on youtube at weatherbillmusic. Have a blessed day !

So weatherbillZero only thought he had been deceived when in fact he had achieved nothing less than help save America from destruction by getting thousands to pray and stop the catastrophe. In short WeatherbillZero has managed to reinflate his ego! The feel good factor has returned to his life.

The heroic fight against evil continues in WeatherBillZero's fantasies

Don’t you know There’s a (World) War On?

2010-10-26T03:21:00.000-07:00

..at least according to self proclaimed "YouTube prophet" William Tapley who runs a “ministry” called “Third Eagle Books”. According to Tapley’s YouTube video posted this month on 10th October the War started on 13th October. However, I recommend that you actually watch the version of the video below because it contains accompanying comments that help interpret the ministry of Prophet Tapley. Tapley, of course, has irrefutable proof that he is a prophet of God: He reasons that because he attracts opposition this must prove he is God’s prophet under Satanic attack! (See this video for criticism of that claim). This means that any attempt to prove the ministry wrong has the opposite effect of proving it to be right! How many times have we heard that sort of defense from those with an unshakable faith in their faith?

Given that World War III has not exactly started with so much as a single bang, a more likely hypothesis is that Tapley is yet another “prophet” whose over blown delusions and/or bloated ego are inflated by a gullible following. Ministries and prophets like Tapley are two a penny out there, all of them claiming to be the agent of the latest definitive Word of God. The only consolation is that they at least provide us with roars of laughter.

________________________________________________________________
For a bit of perspective it is also worth watching this video on failed prophet "Weatherbill7":

(Acknowledgements: Videos by SuperSoylent)

Healer Dealers

2010-10-16T14:16:00.000-07:00

Miraculous Healers: Be careful that no one puts the wool over your eyes.

Christianity magazine (see christianitymagazine.co.uk) specializes in a very candid take on the Christian faith. One of the themes treated frankly in the October issue of Christianity was healing.

Broadcaster and Christianity help page columnist Steve Chalk gives advice to a correspondent “crushed” by the experience of nine months of prayer and fasting by a church for a cancer victim who eventually succumbed and died. Moreover, this wasn’t done in a corner and apparently the local community was aware of the prayer effort. Steve was really only able to offer the correspondent empathy because, to cut a long story short, Steve's been there and got the T-shirt. But he does plead for honesty and points out that as far the public community is concerned openness, vulnerability and the resilience of the fellowship are “compelling”.

The next healing story comes from an ex-tabloid reporter who writes in Christianity pseudonymously under the name of “Ruth Roberts”. Ruth admits to wrestling with questions about healing and miracles. She says that at her (charismatic) church they pray a lot for healings and miracles but in spite of really wanting to believe she doesn’t think she has seen a real, proper cast iron one. She confesses that she (cynically) groaned one day in church when her pastor said he felt there were people in the congregation that God wanted to heal. What's this pastor think he is doing given that week in week out what he claims "God wants" doesn't come about in "a real proper cast iron" way? He must be deluding himself. Ruth ends the article with Lord, please show me a miracle.

My last healing story is provided by Jeff Lucas on the last page of Christianity. He says he believes God heals today, but he then tells us of a case where a claim of miraculous healing certainly proved false. He is also implicitly critical of those who see healing being willed by the power of their belief and those who refuse to concede that healing has not come. He also frankly tells us the story of how gut wrenchingly hard it was when he himself had his own serious health scare.

Well, these columnists get full marks for being honest people and full of faith. You certainly cannot criticize them for lacking faith; their's is the sort of faith that remains in place in spite of…. Anyway, all credit to Christianity magazine for publishing these candid columns. It is worth comparing these ground zero accounts with the accounts coming out of the heady meetings of the healing evangelists who appear to heal on an industrial scale (except amputees). I have to say that I have yet to be a ground zero witness of a genuine miracle - although I do occasionally hear those messages coming out of a healing ministry production line, but more often than not they have travelled a long way through the rumour mill before these accounts reach me! Any attempt to probe these rumors by asking for solid evidence is often greeted at best with askance looks and at worst with less than subtle hints about "blaspheming the Holy Spirit" and questioning the work of the most high God who sits on Heaven's throne and judges us. What these spiritual bullies fail to realize is a) the question mark is not over God, but rather the human ability to provide reliable reports in an exhilarating and intoxicating crowd atmosphere and b) discouraging critical validation actually works against the very claims of healing that this discouragement, in its perverse way, is seeking to support, because it suggests that gullibility rather than criticism is the mode of validation.

Many of the rumours of miraculous healing that have come my way have propagated themselves much like one of those threatening chain letters that we used to get in the post before the days of viral email scams: “Pass this on or else…” was the subtle and sometimes not so subtle subtext, a subtext that on occasions exploited mankind’s instinctual fear of the numinous and the unknown. As Lovecraft said: The oldest and greatest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and greatest type of fear is fear of the unknown.

Do I believe in healing? Of course I do: So far I have been healed of every illness I have had (although not miraculously). But one day I will have my last illness…..

Michael "Hell-Fire" Voris is Back With a Vengeance

2010-08-18T10:01:00.000-07:00

Angry Catholic Voris: Just look at the picture top right: Heronymus Bosch would be proud. Need I say more?

After publication of his Catholic Dictatorship video on militant atheist PZ Myers' blog (See my last post) it seems that Real Catholic Michael Voris is none too pleased with his foul mouthed treatment by PZ Myers' coarse speaking "raiders". But poor PZ will find that he and his raiders' puny anti-superlatives are utterly out classed; after all, they can only resort to an assortment of body parts, excretions and private acts to use as insults. This school boy invective pales compared to the spiritual "invective" the Michael Vorises of this world can muster from a deep supply emanating out of what in some people's books is a terrifying world view. They can call on the gravitas of eternity and presumed knowledge of the human spiritual predicament to insult, condemn and above all curse, really curse. And don't forget that they really mean it and believe it; it therefore carries far more anti-value and is far more cathartic than saying something like "You w*nker!". Here's just some of it transcribed from the above video; it sounds a lot like some of the protestant fundagelical language of spiritual condemnation I have heard, and which I myself have also been on the receiving end of:*

They hate the Catholic church and what she teaches because they hate themselves...They are in love with evil. They are entrapped by it and enslaved by it and rage against the good....adulterous...money worshipping...power hungry, attention crazed, pride filled, promiscious lives...chained by their passions and fears...they will die in their sins...deep down they know the spiritual ship wreck their lives really are or will become...monarchy of hate...who do you prefer for your monarch, Christ or Satan? (and the following is really ironic - ed)... you really need check your hate speech, it is way too revealing...

It's no surprise that in the depths of the Middle Ages the Catholic church, in its dungeons, knew just what to do with some of those body parts that PZ and his raiders speak so lightly of; and, moreover, it "knew" it had the right to do it!

Characters of the Wild Web: PZ Myers dreaded raiders strike again, but when it comes to Real Cursing the Real Catholics provide a much more professional service.

* For reference read the book of Jude.

One Ring to Rule Them All

2010-08-17T03:25:00.000-07:00

(Note: 18/8/10: The Real Catholics have pulled the video: Perhaps to spite the people they thought were "wrenching it out of context to try to make a weak point" to use the words of one of my detractors)

When I watched the above video on PZ Myers’ blog my first reaction was that it must be a trolling spoof or at least a tongue in cheek production with the aim of baiting the PZ Myers of this world. But seemingly not: The man in the Video, Michael Voris, a Catholic who talks and sounds very much like a fervent Protestant fundagelical, has a series of YouTube videos promoting Catholic religious hegemony. Nothing unusual about that you might think given that this blog is always criticizing the authoritarian spiritual hegemony of some Protestant sectarians. So what’s new here?

Voris tells us that “Our nature is fallen” and is “self absorbed”. Fair enough, I can go along with that; its core Christian doctrine. But then suddenly out of the blue we get this:

….Only virtuous people should be allowed to vote! … Limit the vote to faithful Catholics…. Only true Catholics look at God. …. When true Catholics vote they cast them with an eye to what God desires not fallen human nature …. Democracy is doomed to failure… The only way to run a country is by benevolent dictatorship – a Catholic monarch.

Surely this man can’t be serious! He must be having us on! The last time I saw a very similar looking manifesto was when I read “Mein Kampf”. It is difficult to credit that anyone, in the light of Western History, can still hold such views.

Isaiah Berlin has made us very conscious of the difficult balancing act between positive and negative liberty that must be maintained in a democracy. Given the human nature that we all share, both extremes of positive and negative liberty have undesirable consequences: Positive liberty can drift toward dictatorship; negative liberty drifts toward market chaos.

The problematical question that never occurs to anti-democrats is this: Just who is going to decide who is virtuous enough to rule autocratically? Who is going the “morally bootstrap” the first virtuous autocratic government? Can fallen beings trust themselves to identify, let alone implement, the absolute government of the virtuous? Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Voris ought to learn the main lesson of that famous book by fellow Catholic J. R. R. Tolkien where the tempting and corrupting effects of absolutism find an excellent metaphor in the One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.

Oliver Cromwell did away with the crypto-catholic dictatorship of Charles I and consolidated parliament. Trouble was, Cromwell himself didn’t understand or know how to handle parliament. He was repulsed by the cacophony of voices of competing (self) interest that was the English parliament and so he effectively dissolved it and became dictator; although credit to Cromwell, true to his beliefs, he was probably a reluctant dictator. Cromwell blew his chance and failed at the test of getting the balance between positive and negative liberty right. The Protestant Cromwell, like the Catholic Voris, was of the opinion that once you’ve got rid of “all them others” somehow the rule of the virtuous and Godly would just emerge. But it didn’t: Parliament became a forum of argument and counter argument expressing the inevitable balance of interest of a democracy; that is what authentic parliament is all about - we must simply accept it and run with it. But the puritanical Cromwell couldn’t accept it. The only solution Cromwell could think of, like Voris, is to enforce the autocracy of a self-righteous and probably self-appointed oligarchy. However, we have to make all due allowance for Cromwell: In the history of Western government Cromwell was breaking entirely new ground without the hindsight of past models to go on. Voris does not have that excuse, and ought to know better.

Ironically, anti-democratic leanings are also a recrudescent phenomenon among Protestants in spite of their Biblio-centric individualism. Hierarchal absolutism is not far under the surface of the mindset of some Protestants as typified by the following quotes taken from a ministry that shall remain nameless:

Some have wrongly taught that the local churches are autonomous, that once an apostle establishes a local church and appoints the elders, he is through with that church and should stay away…..The leaders in the church must take the lead in all things. They must be the leading sheep, the head sheep, in the flock. When the sheep at the head of the flock move, the rest of the sheep follow ….The elders should be regarded, obeyed, and honored by the saints.

The tempting and corrupting effects of the "One Ring" are, alas, as real in church government as they are in society at large (See my last post).

The two faces of English democracy:

Cromwell: The uncompromising face of positive democracy

Walpole: The compromising face of negative democracy

The fact is that truly democratic government will always have to emerge from an ongoing and contradictory tumult of voices, interests, perspectives and viewpoints that tug in different directions; such are the consequences of the ambiguities and sinfulness inherent in our world. Sir Robert Walpole, England’s first prime minister, well understood the underlying self interest that often motivated democratic rule and referred to it as “the natural state of human affairs”.

There is no one party that has a monopoly on righteousness any more than it has a monopoly on sin. As the good book says:

For there is no difference, for all have sinned and come short of the Glory of God (Rom 3:23)

****

During the last 'benevolent' Catholic dictatorship even dissenters were given a stake in government.

Disney Land Christianity

2010-08-07T13:34:00.000-07:00

Why doesn't Hinn just 'Jacket' in?

Two articles in the August "Christianity" magazine are notable.

The first article is about excess in some churches and is entitled “Money, Sex and Power”. Although the churches concerned are largely American Charismatic churches, it is usually not long before UK churches pick up the baton.

The article starts by dealing with the money and sex scandals that are now all too familiar, but my own opinion is that this is really a distraction from the main problem. Sex and money tempts people in all walks of life and a fall here can happen to anyone. When the Christian showman and “miracle” entertainer Todd Bentley came a cropper over his affair and divorce, some parts of the church reacted as if this was the only problem with his ministry. Some even tried to spin doctor it by making a virtue out of it: It was all down to poor brother Bentley’s “burn out”; poor guy, he was so over worked! Trouble was he was burning himself out peddling junk spirituality egged on by a gullible crowd who were baying for “more Lord, more…”. In fact as far as I’m concerned Bentley’s marital infidelity is the least of his sins and arguably could be excused as having mitigating circumstances. Basically fundagelicalism never learned from the “Bent Oddly” affair and never took the cue to take a good long hard look at itself. In fact by implicating sex and money fundagelicalism could get itself side tracked by putting it all down to a good old fashioned sin that is easily identified. But I’m of the opinion that the real sin is endemic to fundagelicalism itself. The problem will not go away unless fundagelicalism reforms itself.

The article in “Christianity” leaves the subject of power until last. This matter, I suggest, is much closer to the nub of the real issue than is sex and money. Under the subtitle of “The Abuse of Power” the article tells the story of a church where:

The issue was over the pastor’s teaching on a variety of issues including creation, tithing and the nature of spiritual authority. He insisted that these teachings were central to the faith and that dissenters from his line were in serious error that threatened their eternal destiny. It reached a head when one Sunday during a sermon the pastor launched into a personal attack on those in the church who disagreed with him. Naming them – and most were in the congregation that day – he called on them to ‘repent’ and then proceeded to pray for this to happen. During the prayer these people stood up and left the building. Within ten minutes other members of the congregation, some in tears and others heckling the pastor walked out. The meeting ended in chaos.

The article claims that this story is “the tip of the iceberg”, and like all such icebergs it is the “sea of faith” that is keeping it afloat: It is not a case of people occasionally (or even frequently) being tempted by the lure of power as they might also be tempted by sex and money. The problem is to be found in the underlying ethos of fundagelicalism, particularly charismatic and Pentecostal fundagelicalism. That ethos is one of a brash, positively affirming and assertive Christianity flowing naturally out of a culture that, as an affected reaction to its marginalization, is so totally convinced it speaks with the very words and authority of God. I suspect that the pastor referred to in the above quote was less tempted by sheer power per se than he was tempted by the common fundagelical delusion that he was the mouth piece of God. It’s not that this culture is necessarily peopled by the authoritarian, the arrogant, the gullible and the stupid, but the cultural mores of fundgelicalism helps feed authoritarianism, arrogance, gullibility and stupidity.

If the authoritarian, the arrogant, the gullible and the stupid start to populate institutions and sects whose ethos attracts them, then naturally enough one is going find them giving a very hyperbolic explanation of what they are doing. This brings me to the second article in “Christianity” by regular writer Jeff Lucas. In a column entitled “Mind your Language” Lucas acknowledges that many Christians give a fabulous account of their doings using a language of spiritual superlatives that raises the prosaic into an ethereal grandiose realm. Lucas kindly calls it “metaphor and shorthand” but a case could be made out for calling it “spiritual spin”. Lucas, in fact, gives an example that he himself is guilty of:

I used to describe prayer as a conversation, until, decades on, I came to realize that it could be misleading. ‘God spoke to me this morning’ I would announce breathlessly, perhaps suggesting that (a) I awoke to the sound of a booming voice that rattled the alarm clock and (b) I have an ongoing hotline to God and am enjoying happy little chats with him through each and everyday. In truth 99% of my praying is me doing the talking.

Lucas also says:

.. after a while we start to believe in the Magic Kingdom ourselves as I found out when I went to Disney land and actually approached Mickey Mouse and asked for an autograph. Only as I walked away did I realise that I’d just asked a sweating college student togged in furry fancy dress to honour me with a signature. I’d bought in to the myth myself.

Telling, truthful, candid, sobering stuff. But Lucas is taking a big risk: He could be in for some brickbats on “Christianity’s” letters page if the religious fanatics who speak for God decide to mobilize.

The following is an example of the output of one Christian sect very sure that it has an ongoing hotline to God, a line that needs no interpretation:

The all-inclusive Christ, who as the life-giving Spirit indwells our spirit, is everything to us. We must believe the clear Word in a pure way, saying, "Amen," to whatever the Bible says, and we should take care of our experience. There is no need to interpret. Simply take whatever the Bible says and believe it.

No need to interpret: That's right, no need to think about it, just get a direct download from the Almighty Himself and you're away; in fact no need to even bother to get the download as we have it already, so just come to us and we can tell you what to believe. One little problem though: A million and one fundagelical ministries, sects and cults, all with their proprietary and mutually inconsistent authoritative downloads, can't all be right.

Over confidence, over certainty, and spiritual arrogance are the inevitable products of the false belief that Christians somehow speak the very words of God, and this very naturally leads into the abuse of spiritual power and authoritarianism.

The Myth of God Incarnate

2010-07-21T03:28:00.001-07:00

Who needs a liberal theologian to interpret the Bible’s message when we’ve got Saint Paul here to do the work for us? (This picture of PZ Myers was taken while he was playing on the rides at the local creationist doctrinal bargain basement)

I was fascinated to see this post by militant atheist blogger PZ Myers. Myers says that he likes the liberal theologian’s metaphorical view of the Bible because:-

The idea that the Bible should be interpreted as a metaphor is a good one — because it melts the superstition away. The metaphor is a powerful tool.

And because (and this may be the chief reason):-

…opening the Bible up to metaphorical interpretation rips the heart right out of Christianity, and makes central dogmas of the faith untenable and painfully ridiculous.

Or does it? I personally might have a vestigial “superstitious” belief in a real God, a real incarnation and a real resurrection, but I would nevertheless go along with PZ’s view that much of what I would call the “Word of God” is compellingly conveyed through metaphor and many of the moral lessons of those metaphors stand regardless of the ontological significance one attaches to them. This means that the profound teachings inherent in those metaphors can be appropriated by theist and non-theist alike. And if these teachings actually constitute the core “central dogmas of the faith” then the heart of the faith remains in place. Moreover, the Good Book itself says:

Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law, 15since they show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts now accusing, now even defending them.) 16This will take place on the day when God will judge men's secrets through Jesus Christ, as my gospel declares. Romans 2:14-16

In other words the “Word of God” reaches the places in (wo)men’s hearts that our religions do not reach. For this reason I have never been at all keen on attacking atheists by suggesting atheist philosophy inclines people toward immorality. This kind of attack is especially rich in the light of the excesses of some very religious people. Believer’s and unbelievers have the same God given conscience that informs them about right and wrong and if unbelievers follow their consciences for good that is something to write home about.

Anyway, in his post PZ precedes to lampoon the literalism of the Ken Ham’s of this world, but then he embarks on a consideration of what is left if the Bible is interpreted metaphorically:

Of course, I'm a right cruel bastard, so when a liberal Christian tells me that Genesis and the sacrifice of Christ are metaphors, I just ask "Metaphors for what?", and then they usually stand there gape-jawed like a fish and flounder trying to figure out what I'm asking. Calling something a metaphor is not a get-out-of-jail free card. It means there's a deeper meaning to extract.

So let’s see what deeper meaning PZ extracts ( *1)

The book of Genesis is telling us that human beings are flawed, that we're all burdened with impulses and desires that are not necessarily good for our society: greed and selfishness, for instance, or violence and deceitfulness. (And also, to a patriarchal society, disobedience — conscientious objections don't seem to have much support in such cultures). The whole of Genesis, not just the creation stories, is about the natural wickedness of human beings, and how we have to be constantly chastised.

You won't find a single rational person who disagrees with that. (but you might find quite a few rational persons - and Christians - who don’t live up to it – ed) We are not angels by nature. We biologists would go even further and say that by nature, we're fractious, squabbling apes. Read that as the lesson of Genesis, and you'll find even us rabid militant atheists in full agreement that it is right. The mythological details are nonsense, of course, but they're just there to make it an interesting and persuasive story.

Excellent! So PZ is admitting that humanity by nature struggles with itself, with its self-centeredness and selfishness; intrinsic traits of human nature that are contrary to good society. That sounds suspiciously like the myth of original sin, yes “sin”, the word with the “I” in middle.

PZ then goes on to consider what he calls the “Jesus myth”. Given that PZ has identified humanity’s problem as being with its intrinsic nature (that is, with its “original sin”) can he now extract the essentials of salvation? This is what he says about the “Jesus myth”:

That's a hero story, a narrative about someone we should emulate, whose greatest virtues are self-sacrifice for the common good. We're wicked deep down as Genesis tells us, but we can also aspire to believe in humanity and give our lives over to charity and justice.

Again, this interpretation is not going to conflict with most godless values (well, unless you're an Ayn Randian, but those are psychopathological aberrations). We're combative apes, but our species also succeeds through cooperation; we have a 'higher' nature to which the best of us can appeal, which has and will help us succeed. Maybe believing in something greater, like sacrifice and hope, can help us be better people.

Not bad, not bad at all! We seem to moving in the right direction. OK, so PZ finds all the suffocating ontological trappings of piety surrounding this basic “myth” repugnant, and he believes these trapping to be dispensable as one would expect of an atheist. And yet look at the comments about Someone we should emulate, about wickedness deep down and above all that last sentence about the transforming power of sacrifice and hope. That’s core Christian values to my mind, or even, if you like, the “central dogma” of Christianity! It is precisely here that the “Jesus myth” is, in my opinion, unparalleled and compelling. That “myth” is about recognizing the “old nature”, repenting of that nature and putting on with hope the “higher nature”, the nature that Christ presents us with. Viz:

Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. 4Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others.5Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus:

6Who, being in very nature God,

did not consider equality with God something to be grasped,

7but made himself nothing,

taking the very nature of a servant,being made in human likeness.

8And being found in appearance as a man,he humbled himself

and became obedient to death—

even death on a cross!

9Therefore God exalted him to the highest place

and gave him the name that is above every name,

10that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,

in heaven and on earth and under the earth,11and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,

to the glory of God the Father. (Philipians 2:3-11)

This “myth” is a story about the greatest sacrifice imaginable: He who has most to lose voluntarily losing everything; God giving up being God and becoming a humble servant, obedient to the point of humiliation and death. This is the myth of the Grace of God that utterly flaws one’s own superficial morality and shows it up for what it is: Hypocrisy. But if we immerse ourselves in this myth it inspires us and proves to have the power to change our lives. It focuses our minds on the concepts of repentance, forgiveness, love, hope, and above all the Grace Of God. Now, I personally am still superstitious enough to believe that this life transforming myth about the higher nature was acted out for real in some higher plane. But perhaps the story of Christ has power to make us better people whatever our views on its ontological status.

The man from Galilee has one more challenge for us all before I finish. PZ Myers would not doubt regard with angry contempt the views of many Christians on the ontological realities associated with the above myth. Conversely there are many fundagelicals out there who treat PZ Myers as if he is the very distillate of the anti-Christ. These two sides, it seems, are beyond reconciliation. If we now set this implacable stand off against the words of the man from Galilee whilst He hung on The Cross we realise just how high the moral bar has been set:

Father, forgive them for they know not what they do. Luke 23:34 (*2)

Footnotes:

*1 PZ actually says “These are interpretations that liberal theologians make, but surprisingly, they're also perfectly copacetic with atheist and humanist ideals.” So it seems that the Liberal Theologians have achieved something!

*2 Some early manuscripts do not have this sentence

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more: Mythos versus Logos

2010-05-04T09:46:00.000-07:00

The following two videos are worth comparing. The first, which I found on PZ Meyers' atheist blog here, shows a passionate evangelical (?) Christian vehemently praying at a graduate congregation. She starts by repenting of the sin of worshiping the intellectual mind. The passion in her prayer increases until it reaches an orgasmic crescendo; she starts quaking, breaks down and faints. Some of the correspondents on PZ's blog think she shows evidence of nevertheless being in control and thus of consciously manufacturing this display of spiritual exhibitionism.

Here is the video:

The second video was linked to from the Intelligent Design blog “Uncommon Descent” (See here; the comments on UD are also very worthy of note too; one correspondent wonders if it is a spoof!). This video shows a group of people that the voice over tells us are an extremist ecology group called “Earth First”. To the Christians of Uncommon Descent these people are worshiping nature, but the activity of the group shown in this video looks all but indistinguishable from the passionate prayer of the fervent evangelical Charismatic. One of their spokespersons speaks of the debilitating effects of hi-tech industrial society on spiritual life. So here is my second video:

It is amusing to think of the atheist PZ Meyers and the theists on Uncommon Descent both triumphantly finding these examples of “kookiness” respectively caricaturing what they despise most.

No doubt the Ontology of God accepted by the two groups in these videos are very different, but ostensively their relationship with the mystical entities they are praying to bear striking resemblances. Both are fine examples of a “mythos” religious reaction against the hi-tech, hi-cerebral “logos” society; both express great diffidence toward the intellect and its products. It is ironic that PZ Meyers and Uncommon Descent should stand together in relation to these similar hi-mythos, hi-passion expressions. And of course both accuse one another’s communities of harboring these irrationally religious elements!

I have written many times on the mythos/logos tension in our society. See here, here and here for example.

a Generous Or+hodoxy: Part 2

2010-02-22T04:48:00.000-08:00

Mclaren: Taking the rough with the smooth

I had never read Brian McLaren up until I read “a Generous Or+hodoxy”, therefore given that I found so much in the book echoing my own feelings and thinking (I filled it with underlinings) it is likely that there is some underlying commonality of philosophy, experience and temperament that has caused this concurrence. One commonality seems to be that McLaren has stepped back to look at the Christian scene as whole in all its historical and contemporary messy reality. Moreover, I suspect that McLaren, like me, has secretly asked himself the probing question that, when all is said and done in Christianity are we left with an authentic phenomenon? Towards the end of his book (see chapter 19) he defines the concept of Church Emergence as a process which like tree ring growth includes and embraces what his gone before: In other words McLaren is not one of those many disillusioned Christian sectarians who bin the past, clear the ground, and start rebuilding yet another bespoke realization of Christianity. And yet he is all too aware of the failings of both historical and contemporary Christianity; else why embark on such a deep reappraisal of the phenomenon?

McLaren says he is a post-foundationalist, (see P206) and by implication a postmodernist, and yet he is not a relativist (P324). I do not think of myself as either post-foundationalist or postmodern but nevertheless I think I can run with McLaren here because, as another emerging church leader once put it, his is the kind of postmodernism that equates to “epistemological humility” rather than relativism – and that I would want to applaud and encourage: No human expression of Truth, whether based on biblical interpretations or other is ever ultimately authoritative or constitutes an absolute foundation. All human understandings and expressions of the Truth are subject to critical scrutiny, further honing and/or possible revision. On page 316 McLaren succinctly describes the “stages of faith” by which one appropriates this important “postmodern” lesson: “simplicity, complexity, perplexity and humility”.

McLaren doesn’t assume that his or anyone else’s particular Christian cultural splinter has all the right answers, or for that matter all the wrong answers. This means that he doesn’t write off any particular cultural expression of Christianity as damned. But although he looks as though he is the sort of person who is able to negotiate with most Christian communities, I get the impression that for McLaren self-criticism is a non-negotiable feature of his Christianity and therefore for him healthy Christianity is in the business of constantly reappraising itself. He warms to the concept of “continuous reformation” (P213), an idea that is close to my concept of continuous rival.

At his own confession there is a streak of cynicism in McLaren. Like myself, therefore, he is suspicious of restorationism; that is, the claim by countless start-up denominations, sects and cults that they have cleared the ground to create a restored church untainted by human foibles and sinfulness. “Oh yeah?” has always been my response to this sort of thing and I think McLaren’s response would be similar (P140)

As I said in my previous post it is difficult to distill McLaren’s views down to simple formula; he is too intellectually mature for that. He knows that unlike the world of the physical sciences where much can be captured in simple formulae, the socio-religious world is a world that is necessarily rife with narrative intense metaphors. Thus, it is difficult to pin the label of heresy on McLaren just by quoting a few sentences on, say, his views of hell and other religions, because there are always qualifications further into the text.

EPC (evangelical, pentecostal, charismatics) sects often require one to swallow whole and digest slowly; that is they require you to eat in one sitting everything on the platter they serve; it won’t do to leave any of it to pick over later, let alone refuse to swallow something altogether. This is where I believe Mclaren wins outright over much of “modernist” EPC; for his twin methodology of acquiring historical perspective and his soft postmodern epistemological humility is scientific in as much as he only allows us to establish what we feel we can establish in our own good time.

Do I disagree with McLaren on anything? I think it is less a case of disagreeing with him than it is taking issue with him where I think he lacks an emphasis. In this connection I feel that he casts the mold too much in terms of dichotomies: modernism vs. postmodernism, mechanism vs. mystery, reductionism vs. intuition – basically similar expressions to the fundamental dichotomy of logos vs. mythos that I keep banging on about. In my view these dichotomies require synthesis and not polarization; or at least be kept in paradoxical tension. In the face of this lack of emphasis by McLaren, I am not surprised that the emerging churches I’m acquainted with tend to resolve the tension between Mythos and Logos in favour of mythos. For someone such as myself who is temperamentally wired up for analysis and articulation and reared in the enlightenment traditions I find such fellowships (which may be full of ex-charismatic refugees) far too touchy-feely for my taste. But I must stress the subjectiveness of my term “taste”; this is not say that those who engage in such fellowships don't do well in them. At least they are free of that “swallow whole and digest slowly” tyranny.

The Suffocating Trappings of Piety

2010-02-01T06:17:00.001-08:00

A Christian journalist by the name of H. V. Morton visited the Holy Land between the wars and subsequently wrote a book entitled “In the Steps of The Master”. Here is his reflection after visiting the Mt Calvary of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher:

....Calvary, the holiest place on Earth. I looked round hoping to be able to detect some sign of its former aspect, but that has been obliterated for ever beneath the suffocating trappings of piety... I went away wishing that we might have known this place only in our hearts.

In summer of 1997 I was on business in Israel. During that visit I managed to squeeze in a “Jerusalem pilgrimage” and for a day I became a “pilgrim” doing the usual Holy sites. I too was left with my own reflection on “the suffocating trappings of piety”. Here is a short passage from the story of my visit

The religious mentality has something about it that renders it unselfconscious. Perhaps this is a consequence of devotion so intense that it becomes lost in itself. But whatever the cause, this context blindness means that this extreme devotion leads to an inability to stand back and examine itself. Thus in its obsession with devotional minutia it is unable to see the aggregate effect of its activity, and is thus unaware of the incoherent and implausible jumble its religion has become. One man's iconic elaborations are another man's blasphemy. And so there is a tendency for these elaborations to be repeatedly destroyed and remade as people wipe away the elaborations of their forerunners or contemporaries and start all over again with the construction of fantastic new cultural forms, forms often thought to represent a return to genuine and original simplicity. Thus, the ground is successively cleared and replanted and the net effect is that there springs up a thick undergrowth of diverse groups.

The generic concept here is summed up by the word “Restorationism”. Freedom permitting, Christians (and in fact religious people in general) are forever rebuilding their faith in reaction against the other believers around them, thus restoring or returning to what they believe to be the right way. This tendency is particularly marked in Protestantism where a power vacuum attracts self proclaimed authorities.

With this background behind me it was with a somewhat perturbed fascination that I recently noticed yet another form of Christian restorationism popping up on a Network Norwich & Norfolk thread (See here - this link no longer exists 20/2/10). This form of restorationism actually goes back a few decades and has its origins in the ministry of a Chinese Christian called “Witness Lee” whose views, in turn, are partly founded on the teachings of another Chinese Christian called “Watchman Nee”. Unlike the Christian house church restorationists of the late seventies the Lee sect doesn’t use the word “Restoration”, but a word like it: “Recovery”; it considers itself to be the Lord’s “recovered” church.

I have had a quick look at the teachings of Lee and Nee using links furnished by the NN&N thread (Especially the links provided by a correspondent called “The Terminator”). In order to assess a movement as quickly as I can, as a general rule I go straight to a sects publications dealing with leadership, authority and church. This is because the subject of church management will reveal any cult ethos, if it is to be found. In this case I focused on two publications called “Authority and Submission” and “Leadership in the New Testament”. To cut a long story short these publications suggested to me that we have here a group ethos with a very strong view of its spiritual authority. This was no surprise. Moreover, in the NN&N thread one of the sect members is caught in the act of trying to administer that authority online. Clearly annoyed by the obstinacy of The Terminator a sect member called “a believer in Norwich” does the equivalent of excommunicating The Terminator:

We are left with no other recourse but to follow our Lord’s directive to treat him/her, according to his /her own attitude, as those who are outside the realm of the people of God .

And this is carried out on the basis that The Terminator’s behavior:

reveals little care for the headship of Christ or the body of Christ

This online disfellowshipping is a rather a futile gesture as clearly “The Terminator” is not part of the Lee sect fellowship in the first place. What little gravitas this “excommunication” has comes about as a result of the sect’s view of spiritual demographics: The sect divides the world into three populations: the favoured “blended brothers” (sect members, it seems), the apostate church of “divided brothers” (all other sects and denominations of Christianity) and finally the pagans and atheists on the way to hell. It is to the latter group that the excommunicated Terminator has been consigned. The “headship of Christ or the body of Christ” referred to above is none other than the authority of the “recovered” church of Witness Lee: This much becomes clear when one reads the publications cited. It is this authority that has been exercised in excommunicating The Terminator. (I doubt the Terminator gives a damn). It was the basis of this authority that I expected to find and found when I started reading the sects literature; any sect/cult that maintains a strong sense of communal identity and belongingness requires an exalted notion of the group’s religious authority in order keep discipline. This notion of authority can be found in other sects/cults.

The Lee sect members who meet in a city call themselves the “Local Church”. This may seem a rather bland name, a name that is just about as uninformative as calling oneself a “church”; such terms are over allocated. Moreover the qualification “local” adds little distinction, since all churches, accept perhaps for web churches, are local. However, as is always the case with restorationist startups there is a hidden qualifier tacked on to the front of its prosaic and affectedly primitive self designation. In its view they are not merely “a local church” but “THE local church”.

All restorationist startups face one impossible logical conundrum. As an almost invariable rule they rail against the denominational divisions, but in a monumental and yet completely unself-conscious act of collective egotism they never see themselves as just another denominational start-up: They get round this by taking it for granted that unlike all those other corrupt and apostate churches they are THE church; church in its best and purist manifestation. They are, in their opinion, the church restored (or recovered) to what it should be; primitive and simple. This is ever the story one finds amongst JW’s, Mormons, house church restorationists and the like. They usually have novel elements found in no other contemporary or historic churches and thus they have little option but to explain themselves as a modern recovery of what should have been.

However, to talk of some of these restorationists as just another denominational start-up is to do great disservice to the average mainstream denominational church, because the restorationist churches usually have a much stronger sense of their identity and belonging than the average denomination. Moreover, that identity is maintained by the administration of authority, an authority wielded by a strong leadership. So in a sense restorationist sects are a form of deniminationalism++. But this takes us back to my introduction: Sect and cult members are utterly and genuinely unaware of themselves as just another division of Christianity and they too, in their elaboration of belief and practice, are tempted to bury the true Calvary under the suffocating trappings of piety, particularly the trappings of, submission, authority and control.

There is a story of tadpole that mocked frogs for their ill favoured looks and yet the tadpole himself grew up to be an ugly toad. This story is a fitting metaphor for the cult startups who forever criticize and denounce the denominations of the mainstream EPC (Evangelical, Pentecostal, Charismatic) community. But it is out of the EPC community from which many sects are spawned. The authoritarian parody of faith that we see in the cult-startups is often prefigured, albeit a less pronounced form, in EPC itself: Spiritual pride and elitism, anti-intellectualism, intense and affected spiritual expressions, haughty condemnations of sin etc. In some ways the restorationist sects are a mirror of EPC, a mirror that exaggerates its less desirable aspects. That mirror needs to be looked by into by the EPC community and the lessons learned. We currently have an opportunity to look into that mirror on the NN&N website.
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"a Generous Or+thodoxy": Part 1

2010-01-13T04:09:00.000-08:00

Can Brian Mclaren save Protestantism from the chaos monster?

I have at last got round to reading one of Brian Mclaren’s (the emerging church leader) notorious books - namely “a Generous Or+thodoxy”. Before I comment on this book I shall have to give some preamble.

Broadly speaking EPC (= Evangelical, Pentecostal, Charismatic) Christianity approximately clusters around two classes of groupings. If I am allowed to recycle two historical terms in order to designate more generic phenomena then I would describe these clusters as “The Gnostics” and “The Strict and Particulars”. “Gnostic” Christians are those who place a premium on spiritual intuitions, esoteric experiences and sublime initiations. The Strict and Particulars (Or “Straps” for short) are those for whom the spiritual premium is upon “Obeying the Word of God”, that “word” usually being identified with a bespoke interpretation of the Bible. Different fellowships and churches will show differing degrees of pronouncement of these two categories. In some cases a benign and happy mean may be settled for, but in my experience there is often a tension in EPC churches between proponents of these differing emphases on revelation. In fact, in extreme cases a belligerent sectarianism can result. Complicating matters further is the fact that it is also possible for a single sect to display both characteristics at once: A soft gnostic centre may be protected by a hardened shell of strict “Word of God” doctrine. When manifested in extreme form gnostic Christianity is akin to a kind of spiritual delirium whereas strap Christianity looks like a kind of spiritual autism; and I suppose it is also possible to have a form of delirious autism!

Gnostics and straps are not specifically an EPC phenomenon and one can find the same clusters in other religions. This clustering is what Karen Armstrong generically refers to as the Mythos or Logos manifestations of religion (See here for more details). My hunch is that the basis of this division is to be found in temperamental, psychological and other human factors. As I have remarked before, the divisions may have something to do with the left-right brain partitioning. EPC sects and subcultures will, needless to say, be very unlikely to admit that they are manifesting psychological traits beyond their control as they will much prefer to think of themselves as having made a choice in favour of what is absolutely true rather than succumbing to a human foible. EPC sects and subcultures are jealous defenders of their bespoke version of the faith and as a consequence they can be very partisan. Because these groups may regard their renditions of the faith as the last word in truth one finds not only finds gnostic vs. strap tensions, but gnostic vs. gnostic and strap vs. strap conflicts.

My understanding of the Christian faith is that it’s kernel idea, in contradistinction to the concept of a self help salvation, is that of the condescension of a God who reaches down to the human level (and beyond) in an act of saving grace thus adopting as spiritual children all those who are willing to become “sons of God”. Christianity is about an undeserved gift of salvation; a robust fault tolerant message of salvation for all those who, though they grasp truth imperfectly, have appropriated grace and are on the road to salvation by the sustaining grace of God revealed in Christ.

One would expect that the Christian message of grace would by its very definition be extremely robust and tolerant of the faults of its recipients. But it seems that this is not the view of many who, though they have appropriated the of Grace God in spite of themselves, then go on to attempt to take full control of the message; for they often suggest that God’s Grace is all but unavailable to those who do not share certain bespoke doctrines and gnostic blessings. For the erstwhile recipients of grace may be unwilling to accept that others beyond the domain of their bespoke practice and belief have the cry of “Abba Father” in their hearts. At best they may recognize them as inferior Christians and at worse consider them beyond the pale. Thus in a travesty of the very grace they themselves have accepted they are quick to deny that the (full) favour of God’s blessing is on to those who don’t share their numerous and ramifying particularities of faith. As a result there are often some pretty venomous inter sectarian altercations within EPC. EPC is very schizoid and the more extreme subcultures and sects within EPC will criticize one another from variety of a spiritual hobby horses: Restorationism, Young Earth Creationism, spiritual authority, fideism, conspiracy theory, right wing politics, bespoke revivals, blessings, miraculous healings and prophecies. (This list is not exhaustive!)

***

I have engaged on this rather long preamble because it seems that Brian McLaren has been subject to the kind of criticism I have referred to. Given my understanding of the gospel it would seem clear to me that Mclaren is, as far as his book “a Generous Or+thodoxy” is concerned, very much in the Christian fold: He understands and accepts grace, he understands that it’s Christ work and not his that brings salvation, and he knows God as father through Christ – read part 1 of his book. But as one reads McLaren one must be aware that he does not readily parrot EPC formulae and confessional quips; if one wants to verify that McLaren supports an EPC confessional formula one may have to read many pages in order to “distill out” that formula. Spiritual quips and cliché surfing, which are often required to authenticate one’s faith to one’s target Christian subculture and to win acclaim from that subculture, are not readily available in McLaren’s writings and this certainly brings a freshness to his work.

And yet on McLaren’s Wiki page one reads of one EPC commentator confidently declaring: “As kindly but as forcefully as I can, that to my mind, if words mean anything, both McLaren and [Steve] Chalke have largely abandoned the gospel”. From a movement that itself so often parodies the gospel of grace it is difficult to take statements like that very seriously. Whatever Mclaren might have said elsewhere, it appears from my reading of “a Generous Or+thdoxy” that his basic gospel credentials are assured. But if one is going to question McLaren’s faith this sets a precedent which prompts me to in turn question the Christian credentials of those sub cultures and sects in EPC (Perhaps like McLaren’s critic) who trammel the gospel with so many bespoke conditions and offer up a travesty of its message of grace. If McLaren has abandoned the gospel then so have many ungracious divisions within EPC. Commentators like McLaren’s critic are setting a very dangerous precedent indeed, a precedent that subverts Christianity to its core. People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.

As you can perhaps see from the foregoing, even before I started reading McLaren’s book I sensed I was going to find a lot in common with him: I held off the evil day knowing that if I got too close to McLaren I would be accused of abandoning “The Truth”. In fact as I stood in the queue waiting to buy my copy of “a Generous Or+thodoxy” I met a much respected minister acquaintance who jokingly said to me that the book set him on the road to wrack and ruin! But then one can hardly get much more ruinous than EPC culture itself, so what’s there to lose? Like myself, McLaren appears to have attempted to raise himself above the EPC scene in order to take in a wide breathtaking overview of the chaotic shipwreck that is EPC (and also of the broader sweep of Christian history) and then been prompted to ask: “What can we salvage from the chaos?”

To be continued….

Serpentine Logic

2009-11-29T14:13:00.000-08:00

That devolved legless reptile is doing its damnedest to stay in the picture

Interesting is this post on Uncommon Descent concerning ID guru William Dembski’s book “The End of Christianity, Finding a Good God in an Evil World”. This is what Dembski says about the book.

My book attempts to resolve how the Fall of Adam could be responsible for all evil in the world, both moral and natural IF the earth is old and thus IF a fossil record that bespeaks violence among organisms predates the temporal occurrence of the Fall. My resolution is to argue that just as the salvation of Christ purchased at the Cross acts forward as well as backward in time (the Old Testament saints were saved in virtue of the Cross), so too the effects of the Fall can go backward in time. Showing how this could happen requires extensive argument and is the main subject of the book. As for my title, “End of Christianity” involves a play on words – “end” can refer to cessation or demise; but it can also refer to goal or purpose. I mean the latter, as the subtitle makes clear: Finding a Good God in an Evil World.

The link to the interview with Dembski also worth looking at.

Some comments

1. Although he minces his words and hedges (Not surprisingly given his particular Christian sub-culture) my guess is that Dembski is an “Old Earth” believer; otherwise his attempt to explain pre-fall evil as a “retroactive” result of an anthropocentric fall would seem rather futile. (Note: If the act of God in Christ is a powerful symbolic declaration of covenant by God and revealed in the fullness of time, then its ability to dispense grace retroactively is less enigmatic, whereas I can make little sense of a retroactive fall in this light)

2. In line with Young Earth Evangelicalism’s world view Dembski assumes evil and suffering to be largely sourced anthropocentrically. And yet the serpent in Genesis 3 could be construed as a symbol of the presence of extra-human evil. The person(s) who penned Genesis 3, as is the wont of arcadian folk, would be ever aware of the lurking presence of evil in an unseen world. There is also the question over the interpretation of the enigmatic Romans 8:18-23 , a passage which hints that the cause of evil and suffering is not quite so crisp and clear cut as traditional Young Earth Evangelicalism would have it.

3. The problem Dembski is addressing comes out of contemporary Young Earth Evangelicalism’s world view and is thus very pressing in his own intellectual circles. Some of us, such as myself, who feel that there are deeper mysteries surrounding the source of suffering and evil have a less pressing need to explain pre-fall suffering. According to my concordance the word “good” of Genesis 1 is not quite the same as the word perfect (~ completion). I wonder what Dembski teaches his seminary students?

I have been a close witness of evangelical philosophy for over thirty years and its sometimes cursory and shallow treatment of suffering and evil is not its only short fall. So much about standard evangelical explanations fail to make sense of the world around us, not to mention its inconsonance with aspects of my own personal experience. It’s no wonder that when pressed the fallback position of many evangelicals is fideism: Viz: “Faith is not always logical, if it was it would not be faith.” In the fideist mind the ability of faith to accommodate mystery is conflated with the ability to swallow illogicality. But I’ll hand it to William Dembski, he is brave guy (and a nice guy as far as I can tell) and he is making a very valiant attempt at being be logical. Pity about some of his fellow pilgrims.

To P or not to P

2009-11-18T14:55:00.000-08:00

Just when you thought you could at last stand up and be counted as a man here are two up and coming students of theology who find profound exegetical problems with Pastor Anderson's theology of urination (see my last post). Can theologians please make this little conundrum a real priority issue as we in the church certainly need to have it sorted pronto; like before we next use the small room.

Modern Theologians are rethinking toilet training in the light of scripture

Feelings of Unreality

2009-11-18T01:43:00.000-08:00

Here's another case where am I at a loss as to whether we are dealing with a hoax, send up or the real thing! Anyone? Will this go down in history as the "Pissing Blissing"?

Forget Gideon; Pastor Anderson has a real test that sorts out the men from the girls.

The Pastor is my Shepherd.

2009-10-04T07:00:00.000-07:00

After a quick investigation on the web I wasn't able to determine whether the above was a piece of satire or the real thing. Then I thought to myself shouldn't I be able to tell anyway? Fact is, I can't tell the difference and that's a little bit worrying. The man pictured below might have something to do with it.

The God Father

2009-07-03T03:44:00.000-07:00

Virgo: Father to the Bride of Christ?

As I indicated in my previous post on emerging church, the Restoration movement came to my notice at the beginning of the 1980s. I was somewhat alarmed because their take on Church Unity seemed to be a rediscovery of the old social technology of the Christian cults whereby unity is maintained by the presumed spiritual authority of its leaders. For example consider the following quote taken from an article entitled “Unity: Is it Possible?” which appeared in the “Restoration” Magazine of July & August 1979 telling the story of three churches that “put themselves under the covering authority” of a Restorationist “apostle”:

The most significant element in the unity of the three churches was the recognition of Apostolic authority

The Berean tradition which acts as a bulwark against authoritarian leadership was also being challenged by Restorationist patriarch Arthur Wallis:

The Teaching or Interpreting of the Word of God is perhaps the most important way in which authority (i.e. Authority of Leaders) is exercised for doctrine determines practice.*

Thus, challenging a Restorationist leader from a Berean perspective was probably about as futile as challenging the Pope, because in both cases their interpretation of scripture holds precedence by virtue of its assumed authority; end of story.

One doesn’t hear about Restorationism anymore. The early days of a movement riding high on the crest of a wave of expansion are long since over, as are the optimistic pronouncements from leaders who, intoxicated by being on the growth part of the curve, were prone to triumphalism and hype. They proclaimed God’s new thing that was taking the Christian world by storm and they even went as far as suggesting that Restorationism was ushering in the Millennium rule of Christ. Today the Restorationist prophecies about a church restored and united under the strong leadership of authoritative patriarchs are now all but forgotten. Like so many other cheap and ephemeral throw way blessings that string along the faithful for five minutes at a time, the angst of failure has been lost in sweet forgetfulness.

With my memories of the history of Restorationism still clear in my mind I was very interested to read an article in the July “Christianity” Magazine about Terry Virgo. Terry Virgo was one of the leaders of Restorationism. I am not sure what has happened to the other leaders of the halcyon days of Restorationism, but apart from ex-restorationist David Tomlinson, Virgo is the only other leader I hear about nowadays. One of Virgo’s virtues seemed to be that unlike some of his fellow Restorationists of the 1980s, he was less up front about leadership authority. His emphasis was more on leadership than headship and that may be why his Newfrontiers group of churches seems to be the only prominent group around today that might still classify as a Restorationist group. Even so, reading the article in “Christianity” it seems the old doctrines of patriarchy are still a big theme with Virgo. For example he says this:

Paul clearly limits authoritative doctrinal teaching to elders who care for the flock and are gifted and appointed to do so (Act20:28)… Paul is making clear that becoming a Christian means being placed under the authority of Christian teaching. The teaching had authority to give form to the New Testament churches and shape to the life of the believers….people would subsequently be added to the church and come within the shepherding care of its pastors and teachers.

And that is exactly what the Restorationists were saying 30 years ago. Moreover, like the Restorationts of the 80s Virgo is adamant that women are not allowed to teach. I’ve never got into the argument about the role of women in church as I prefer to leave that subject in the very capable hands of women like Elaine Storkey who could no doubt tell Virgo a thing or two about the role of women.

The article in Christianity tells of a visiting speaker at a Newfrontiers rally who broached the subject of the aging Virgo conceding his leadership. In the words of Christianity magazine the speaker diplomatically likened Virgo to “…you (Virgo) taking Newfrontiers down the aisle, like the father of a much loved daughter”. That this speaker could talk of Virgo almost as a father to the bride of Christ is eloquent comment about Virgo’s God father status amongst Newfrontiers churches.

Quite apart from the question of whether Virgo has any authority to hand over what is not really his to give, he does seem to be rather “hanging in there”. Is he reluctant to pass his leadership on? Is this because he is anxious of what might become of his “daughter”? From Virgo’s perspective perhaps his anxiety is understandable; his “daughter” could go either of two ways: She may be given to a far more authoritarian patriarch than Virgo, such as was Bryn Jones one of the founding fathers of Restorationism. But perhaps even worse from Virgo’s point of view Newfrontiers might become a standard denomination; that is, a loose affiliation of local churches (and much better to my mind). That, I suspect, is in fact the destiny awaiting Newfrontiers, and I think Virgo knows it; as he says in “Christianity” magazine “I have asked our international leaders, When I snuff it will you all go your separate ways?”. Trying to get into the head of a Restorationist “apostle” that responsible and mature Christians don’t need authority to cooperate is like trying to teach a chimpanzee to do calculus. However, to Virgo’s credit I feel he hasn’t been authoritarian enough to extinguish the taste for the freedom and responsibility amongst his churches that is the birthright of all Christians.

* Unfortunately I can’t locate the source where Wallis penned this sentiment

More On Emerging Church

2009-06-22T12:37:00.000-07:00

The post is based on a short talk I gave on emerging church. I’m not an authority on emerging church, and the following is really a personal view based on my rather limited contact with the subject.

Shortly after my commitment to Christianity circa 1973 I started studying a variety of quasi Christian cults such as the Mormons, the Jehovah’s witnesses and the Children of God. As a result of this study my faith was later to receive a sharp jolt when the Restoration movement arrived in Norwich (in the form of Norwich Christian Fellowship) and came to my attention circa 1981. This movement majored in contending for the authority of Christian patriarchs to direct the affairs and beliefs of its followers. For me this potentially authoritarian ethos was too close to the cult model for comfort. During the study of some of Restorationist literature I came across the name of David Tomlinson, a leader in the movement. Amidst a movement that was still in its triumphal early days Tomlinson proved to be something of anomaly: I sensed even then that he may have been experiencing the first onset of diffidence toward standard EPC (=Evangelical, Pentecostal, Charismatic) Christianity. I flagged this suspected diffidence with a note in my file on the Restorationism and that note is there to this day.

Tomlinson’s name came up again in about 1995 when I read a review of Tomlinson’s book “The Post Evangelical”. By this stage I had witnessed the full spectrum of EPC manifestations from the lauded “Sound Doctrines” of strict evangelicalism, to the constant round of spiritual novelties delivered by Charismatic Christianity. To name but a few of the latter: Restorationism, the Toronto blessing, various failed healings and prophecies, authoritarianism, preliterate dualism, and above all large dollops of spiritual spin. In particular I had become disturbed by how close some charismatic expressions were to Gnostic elitism and fideism. By 1994 the strange objects that flitted by my window on EPC had taken their toll on my attitude and a measure of cynicism had set in. Not surprisingly, then, the title of Tomlinson’s book struck a chord with me, and without even reading the book I somehow felt that Tomlinson was thinking what I was thinking; enough was enough. Tomlinson had secured a following and set up his own church, but it seems that many Christians were taken by Tomlinson declaration of a post-evangelical era; perhaps it even started to assume the status of a kind of mini-reformation.

In my experience most post evangelicals are from charismatic fellowships. They are genuine and emotionally intense people who are looking for something real, but who have become somewhat disaffected by EPC authoritarianism, spiritual spin, hype, general lack of authenticity and the social pressures of the spiritual equivalent of the Emperor’s new clothes. They are less post evangelicals than they are post charismatics.

Post evangelicals find themselves caught in the middle of a triangle of three Christian movements:

1. Charismatic Christianity: this is the sub-culture from which disillusioned and disaffected post evangelicals have, in the main, emerged out of (for reasons already mentioned).

2. Conservative and Strict Evangelicals: Dowdy, ultra traditional, condemning, uncompromising and lacking the dynamism of charismatic fellowships. They are very ready to deny that God’s grace is available unless their idiosyncratic take on “sound doctrine” isn't followed to the letter, which needless to say limits that grace to their own spiritual subcultures. They seem confused about the difference between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law. They have a low view of Bible interpretation, taking it for granted that meaning resides intrinsically in the words themselves rather than being supplied by open ended cultural resources. The upshot is that they insulate and disconnect Biblical interpretation from the wider cosmic context. Their so called “plain teaching of scripture” usually means their traditional interpretations of scripture that have done the rounds for such a long time that they can think of nothing else. The look and feel of strict evangelical groups is often not very much different from countless other religious sub cultures for whom salvation is conditioned on a strict and narrow view of life’s cultural shape. The strict evangelical ethos can sometimes be found in a very toxic blend with Gnostic Christianity.

3. Liberal Christianity: The post evangelical may feel that Liberal Christianity is dangerously liable to throw the baby out with the bathwater resulting in a faith that is no longer recognizable as Christianity. Liberal Christianity may even go as far as to terminate in what, to all intents and purposes, is a form of atheism, an example being Don Cupit of “Sea of Faith” fame. Cupit’s God is a “constitutional” God in that like a constitutional monarch God is thought to only have a symbolic or metaphorical existence.

The post evangelical usually means business with God, so given the foregoing where does he go as he “emerges” from EPC Christianity? For a start, he has many questions buzzing around in his head. (At this point in the talk I illustrated this with a picture taken from “Christianity” magazine showing a Christian removing a suit and revealing a T-shirt with a giant question mark on the front –see the picture at the head of this post)

….well, he becomes an “emerging church” Christian. This doesn’t necessarily mean he has joined a group but has, in fact, ended up in the emerging church by default. Putting the best complexion on the matter the term “emerging” signifies a decentralized system where each bit is working independently and yet like the “boids” of system theory it is hoped that this decentralized ecology will, in God’s economy and timing, result in something fresh and worthwhile. The central notion (or rather hope) well expressed in the term “emerging church”, is that something good is emerging, something that has yet to run its course.

In spite of their radical pretensions, emerging church Christians hang on to scripture because they don’t want to lose what is good and stable from the past. But all in all tensions and contradictions are created that are often difficult to resolve. There is a mixture of a sense of betrayal, confusion, and a loss of focus and anchorage. A postmodern reaction sets in; the post evangelical is to evangelicalism as the postmodern is to modernism, in that there is a general pessimism about what at one time seemed so sound, bright, shiny, optimistic and full of hope. When emerging Christians do come together to form fellowships, they tend to adopt a contemplative form of worship in line with their largely touchy feely charismatic background, and yet they often look back to the pre-modern era for liturgical inspiration as they attempt to re-anchor their faith.

Summing up the character of emerging church:

1. Post-evangelical: They are seeking a religious authenticity that they feel is so often absent from EPC.
2. Reevaluating and reinterpreting scripture, but not wanting to over throw the Bible, they use scripture in an informal non-systematic way. Gone is dogmatic theology.
3. Postmodern: although they identify with the angst of postmodern disaffection, in most cases emerging church would not accept the hard postmodernist thesis which asserts with great paradox that life makes no absolute sense.
4. Experimental touchy feely meditative worship; a looking back to the Christian past for liturgy, context and perspective.
5. Political and Social: Loss of scriptural bearings leads to compensatory political and social action. Social concern and lobbying seems at least an uncontroversial component of Christ’s teachings.
6. Prepared to review some traditional alienating doctrines such as Hell and Christian exclusivism.
7. Personalities and leaders: The unassuming tones of Brian McLaren and Rob Bell represent a move away from the plastic, “knows what he’s talking about”, impassioned, formula spouting, cliché surfing preacher.

Pending Position Statement

2009-06-10T10:02:00.001-07:00

As a result of direct inquiries I intend to produce, at some stage, a position statement regarding my views on Christianity. However, I am currently absorbed with one two other matters that I am following up; hence this promissory note.

Postmodernism and Emerging Christianity Part 3

2009-04-20T07:11:00.000-07:00

In this third part I juxtapose the two articles on Emerging church in the April issue of “Christianity” with one final article that appears in the same issue. This article tells a story that has now become an almost dated cliché in EPC circles: That of the solid bible based traditional evangelical church which undergoes a “charismatic” revival/renewal….. except that it doesn’t actually have a revival at all, but rather a sudden membership turn over – non-charismatics out, charismatics in. Or at least that’s the admission of the article where it claims that the church concerned (which is in America) only retained around 25% of its original “conservative” membership.

The story is a classic: a restless pastor or group within the church, bored with what otherwise appears to be a successful if rather dry, stuffy and stolid church is looking for “more”. After the aforementioned congregational replacement the church is labeled “charismatic” and with the new temperamental cross section a new speak enters the church. We hear of healings, prophecies and even angelic visitations. The new members think in gnosto-dualist terms and the philosophy of the church becomes a de facto dualist philosophy which emphasizes the differences between the spiritual and physical worlds. It adopts a power vs. word paradigm of spiritual life, which is ironic given that so much of church life is now explained and reinterpreted by the “new speak”. The leadership is apt to become authoritarian, despising accountability for the simple reason that in the face of a catastrophic loss of support the leadership can no longer function with a consensus. The 75% majority of Church members who don’t go for the new speak have to be ditched. The new speak provides a ready explanation (or spin) for this situation; hemorrhaging membership is clearly down to fear and spirit quenching. The previous work of the church is evaluated negatively as at best “lacking in power” and at worse not being “in the Spirit”. Finally, the leaders of the latest blessing try to make inroads into the UK which they see as a plum ripe for the plucking. To this end these prophets of blessing may get a recommendation from some well known EPC figure in the UK.

I’m the very last person that should be labeled as “anti-charismatic” – I have no quarrel with those who believe they have had a sublime Christian epiphany which they may call, rightly or wrongly “Baptism of the Spirit”. But unfortunately the charismatic is often conflated with the gnostic, and my argument is with the elitism, dualism and fideism of the latter. Christian gnosticism thrives on those bored with their lives and who are looking for a “shake up” or the next big thing. They can make little sense of stark cosmic realities and by way of escape and compensation need a constant supply of rumors about the miraculous. These rumors do the rounds uncritically and their authenticity is utterly impossible to disentangle from spiritual spin, gullibility logic, spiritual bullying and authoritarianism. The lauded renewals are less revivals than a case of replacing a congregation with those who are sympathetic and/or susceptible to the new interpreting spin.

Significantly such moves make little headway amongst many traditional Christians who are, needless to say, regarded as Spirit quenchers. The failure of such “moves of power” to work other than by the self selection of a minority not only challenges the authenticity of such “moves” but, moreover, the very authenticity of Christianity itself. For if Christianity in the absence of one these vaunted “renewals” is regarded as just so much powerless marking of time, then that entails that a very large percentage of Christian work is lacking in spiritual vitality. This is a short step away from conjecturing that perhaps Christianity as whole is vacuous.

The final twist to this story brings me back to the theme of postmodernism in the church. Other authoritarian gnostic groups (like say Potter’s House) may well rubbish the latest revival because it has not happened amongst them and they, of course, regard themselves as being where it is at. Thus gnostic Christian groups form an inconsistent mass of believing partisans. No attempt is made to resolve the contradictions amongst them and such mutually inconsistent groupings may be regarded as being in the power of God simply because their conviction, vehemency, and spin are taken as self authenticating. If this insensitivity to inconsistency isn’t postmodern enough consider also the fact that April’s edition of Christianity magazine makes no attempt to resolve the apparent incommensurability between Emerging church and the revivalist churches, two Christian groupings who seem to be working with very different paradigms, spiritual weltanschauungs and agendas. Moreover, many “Emergers” in their search for Christian authenticity seem to be reacting against the hype and spin of the revivalists. But revivalist churches are apt to take the view that unless a church undergoes a gnostic revival, spiritual life is at best a preparatory period prior to full conversion or else a powerless marking of time. Thus, as far as the revivalists are concerned all the angst and hard thinking of the Emerging church is effectively down time between renewals. This is a serious charge and yet Christianity magazine doesn’t attempt to resolve the issue – it leaves the two community weltanschauungs as incommensurables. This, above all, is a very postmodern reaction – not postmodern in the soft sense of a humbled epistemology, but in the absolute sense that life doesn’t make sense, so don’t bother with any grand explanations that attempt to give it sense.

Postmodernism and Emerging Christianity. Part 2

2009-04-08T03:18:00.000-07:00

In the April edition of “Christianity” magazine there is an interview with Brian McLaren who, the article says, is in the vanguard of the emerging church scene. This scene, the article says, is “rejecting the religious culture wars between conservatives and liberals [and] want[s] to explore a third alternative theological movement that seeks to rediscover and express authentic Christianity in culturally relevant ways”. The operative word here is “authentic”; that speaks volumes about what emerging church Christians perceive themselves to be reacting against and in this connection one must recall that they are largely “refugees” from EPC Christianity. For example, McLaren says “I have a deep heritage as an evangelical in the Charismatic movement”. Whether the “Emergers” are right or wrong, it would seem that EPC Christianity has an issue of authenticity to address - Why is EPC coming over as lacking authenticity?

In the interview McLaren says many things that strike a chord with me. For example:

McLaren: “....I’m not doing that because I doubt what the Bible says, it’s because I doubt what we say the Bible says”

Comment: Those Christians who automatically equate their interpretations with Biblical truth have a bad habit. Some can’t even see that the Bible needs interpreting at all and so conflate their views with the very word of God. I first came across this kind of thinking amongst Jehovah’s witnesses.

McLaren: “When you raise questions religious people can be amazingly vicious..”

Comment: Vicious? If religious people think their views to be the very word of God then in their perception they have good reason to be vicious: “If you are not with us you are against us, and if you are against us you are against God and if you are against God you deserve damnation”. Not only that: Questions can threaten a play pen epistemology; the world beyond the play pen is thought to be at best not worthy of attention and at worst an evil not to be engaged except with righteous anger.

McLaren: “..I grew up in a somewhat fundamentalist sect. They were ready to say you weren’t a Christian if you disagreed on a very, very fine point of eschatology.”

Comment: Such sects have no choice but to give one account of doctrinal fine tuning not shared by other Christians: namely, that they are yet another very, very small “Christian remnant” splinter group who regard all other splinter groups as either badly spiritually substandard or bound for hell.

McLaren: "There’s a history of intense schism in lots of sectors of the church and I’ve seen it at close range. If we want to get better at this, the first suggestion I have would be to go learn church history… Somehow, getting the bigger historical perspective helps us to stop taking ourselves so seriously”

Comment: Well said Brian. Study history? Many Christians are not mentally set up to do any study at all, especially extracurricular study. Study may be regarded as irrelevant to the spiritual life, or mere “head knowledge”, or even “worldly knowledge” contrary to fideist sentiments. And so they cut themselves off from learning and remain in their epistemological play pens. If they do see themselves in perspective it might just look as though they aren’t, after all, the “new thing” that they thought themselves to be, and that in reality they are just another splinter group in the grand sweep of Christian history. Such perspectives would challenge their exalted view of themselves and their pride in feeling to be where it’s at. They don’t really want to know that “It’s happened before”.

I haven’t read any of McLaren’s books, but from the interview alone I at least get a good first impression of Brian McLaren.

Postmodernism and Emerging Christianity. Part 1

2009-04-02T07:33:00.000-07:00

The April edition of “Christianity” magazine has article on Emerging church (Another article contains an interview with Brian McLaren de-facto leader of the emerging movement, which I’ll look at in Part 2)

The article is by American emerging church theologian Scot McKnight. He lists five themes that characterize the emerging movement

1. Prophetic Language: Provocative use of hyperbole and exaggeration in order to provoke an engagement with an issue. McKnight claims this usage has Biblical authority.

Comment: Yes. Common language is an informal system that is a product of the fuzzy logic of that reactive and highly motivated association machine we call the human mind. It is clear then, that language is not merely a tool for couching formal propositional systems and/or a medium for the transmission and passive imbibing of information. Language is a cognitive toolbox that doesn’t just contain tools for measuring, recording, and transmission, but also for prompting motivated reactions.

2. Postmodern: McKnight says “Postmodernity cannot be reduced to the denial of truth. Indeed, it is the collapse of inherited metanarratives (overarching explanations of life) like those of science and Marxism. Why have they collapsed? Because of the impossibility of getting outside their assumptions”

Comment: Yes. The aficionados of certain metanaratives may effectively impose a cognitive hegemony by either failing to recognize or consciously opposing “meta-metanarratives”; they feel ill at ease if their metanarrative is scrutinized by a higher level meta-metanarrative and will either ignore it (mostly) or if they are of stenner stuff will try to annex it into their own narrative.

3. Praxis-Oriented: In search for authenticity of worship and fellowship, emerging churches have tried to move away from the pulpit centred churches of the traditional evangelicals and the huge worship platforms of the charismatic personality cults. In their experimental search for new expressive forms of worship emerging Christians have started raiding the past for its liturgical, meditative and ritualistic worship elements.

Comment: I’m not a bells and smells man myself but this emerging reaction is a healthy challenge to the implicit and unconscious assumptions of traditional EPC Christians (EPC = evangelical, Pentecostal, Charismatic) who need to start seeing their movement in an historical perspective.

4. Post-evangelical: McKnight says: “The emerging movement is a protest against much of evangelicalism as currently practiced… the church must always be reforming itself”. But “The vast majority of emerging Christians are evangelical theologically”. “God didn’t reveal a systematic theology but a storied narrative…” “..the emerging church loves ideas and theology. It just doesn’t have an airtight system or statement of faith”

Comment: McKnight has taken the words right out of my mouth. But I would like to add that in my limited experience a large number of emerging church Christians are disillusioned charismatics.

5. Political: McKnight says: “In the US they [Emerging Christians] are Democrats. And that spells “post” for conservative-evangelical-politics-as-usual”. “I lean left in politics” “…centralizing government for social justice is what I think government should do”.

Comment: Yes, that can’t be bad (if he is talking about accountable central government.) But McKnight warns against the adoption of the social gospel at the expense of the spiritual gospel.

Final Comments: On balance I don’t find McKnight’s views untoward. McKnight says “What attracts me is [emerging church’s] soft postmodernism (or critical realism)” Yes. Although the anti-foundationalism of extreme postmodernism leads to a confused relativism, soft postmodernism acknowledges that the logic of life is far more fuzzy and problematic than many a toy-town theorist allows. Soft-postmodernism is self humbling and that can’t be bad.

Summing up McKnight says “All in all it is unlikely that the emerging movement will disappear anytime soon. If I were a prophet, I’d say that it will influence most of evangelicalism in its chastened epistemology (if it hasn’t already)…” I would like to think that McKnight is right about the influence toward a chastened epistemology, but frankly I haven’t seen much sign of this amongst unself-critical EPC Christians; the latter are still by and large living in spiritual cloud cuckoo land. Like many an atheist materialist they seldom venture beyond the bars of their epistemological play pens and ignore large chunks of challenging experience and narrative. And not only that; sometimes their cultures explicitly prohibit an engagement with the outside world.

Floored Minister

2009-02-15T06:52:00.000-08:00

The February edition of Christianity magazine contains a news item with the latest comments from various Christian sources on Todd Bentley’s extramarital relationship, his divorce and his subsequent demise as leader of the Florida “Lakeland Outpouring”

As these Christian commentators try to explain to themselves what happened at Lakeland we hear them tell of a frenetic pace of meetings seven days a week causing fatigue, burn out and pressure on Bentley’s marriage. We also hear about the need for accountability and the wrongs of one-man ministries. Mark Stibbe, vicar of St Andrews Chorley Wood, says “… it is also now clear that there came a time when Todd Bentley fell into the classic traps of money, sex and power”. Money sex, and power gets us all to a lesser of greater degree and it is not uncommon for leaders in quite standard ministries to fall in this respect and so I think Stibbe’s comments fail to do justice to the proprietary aspects of Bentley’s ministry.

I suggest that these commentators are skating over the surface and that the causes of the Lakeland debacle go much deeper. Not a single commentator remarks on aspects of Bentley’s ministry like, for example, Bentley’s claims to angelic visitations, Bentley’s “Jesus is old hat” message, Bentley’s “e-mail resurrections”, Bentley’s unsubstantiated claims of healings, the bizarre Toronto style blessings, trancelike crowd hysterics, and the susceptibility to gullibility logic and spiritual spin. So presumably in the opinion of Christianity Magazine’s commentators these things were OK and that if Bentley’s marriage had stayed intact, then such features of the Lakeland Outpouring would have been alright to continue. In fact in Rev Stibbe’s words “I am in no doubt that the Lakeland meetings were in the early days, a move of God’s Spirit”. I wonder why these apparent wonderful moves of God’s Spirit are so easily corrupted? Is Satan that good at his work?

“Lakeland teaches us many lessons” says Stibbe. It sure does, but frankly it looks to me as if absolutely nothing has been learned from the Bentley affair. Consequently I suspect that we are in for quite a few more unauthentic spiritual showmen, spiritual shamans and charlatans who serve up sensational spiritual junk food for those with tacky spiritual tastes. Leaders like Bentley are the product of hysterical irrational crowds who have a rapacious appetite for the latest spiritual spin and have the responsibility for putting leaders like Bentley in their position of influence. My conclusion is that unless the real lessons are learned the days of Christian personality cults, one man ministries, sex scandals, power patriarchs, and big money seven nights a week are far from over. And calls for accountability are next to useless if its only accountability between spiritual patriarchs. Mark Stibbe ends the article in “Christianity” by saying “… the culture of Christain Celebrity is now over”. I hope he is right but my guess is that Stibbe has got it wrong again; the next bizarre ministry will pop up again in few years time when memories have faded somewhat and spiritual boredom has set in; in any case isn’t Stibbe himself one of those lionized Christian celebrities?

Some of Bentley's followers? No these are Bentley's leaders!

Why Dualism?

2009-01-01T13:52:00.000-08:00

Cartesian ghost in the machine dualism is a very prevalent philosophy of human nature: One has to be mentally proactive in order to be able to think round it, and unless a determined effort is made to unthink it, it is the default philosophy of many religions and the prototype of a wider cosmogony of spirits and matter.

In preliterate societies spirits are not just about ghosts in human machines but also about entities that haunt and inhabit rock and tree. In fact preliterate animism is returning to western societies in the form of neopaganism. Amongst Evangelical, Pentecostal, and Charismatic (=EPC) Christians the ‘ghost world’ is also an extended and elaborated affair that goes well beyond a belief in the ghosts encased in human bodies. EPC Christians envisage an Earth populated by numerous spirit beings haunting the material world and yet distinct from it. EPC Christians are likely to distinguish themselves sharply from all forms of paganism and yet there are aspects of their doctrine, particularly fundamentalist EPC doctrine, suggesting a subliminal connection with it.

Fundamentalist versions of EPC Christianity are never really very clear about the created status of Satan and the so-called spirit world. Anyone who believes the early chapters of Genesis to be a comprehensive literal account of creation has little to say about the fall and creation of Satan or of a spirit world in general, simply because the first chapters of Genesis say next to nothing about these subjects. Moreover, if one believes that the history of the world doesn’t extend much further back than 6000 years there is little room for the creation of a spirit world and its presumably checkered history. In fact in fundamentalist circles it is usual to believe that it is only the fall of man that has corrupted the world of created matter and not Satan. The creation Cosmogony of Christian fundamentalism, then, goes straight in with an up running spiritual world of angels, demons and Satan. Effectively the fundamentalist Christian believes the spirit world is uncreated and thus distinct from created man and matter thereby blurring the distinction between divinity and spirits as in the preliterate model.

Thus in some ways, then, fundamentalist Christianity is not so far removed from a preliterate weltanschauung. And yet there is great inconsistency here. The New Testament Biblical picture is that only God is uncreated and all else is created, spirit beings and all - see Colossians 1:16ff. The essential NT dualism is one of God verses everything He creates and not a spirit verses matter dualism; if pressed, however, the Christian fundamentalist will admit this. But why is the effective belief in a spirit versus matter dualism so prevalent? Why does it seem to reign supreme in the religious world? As a world view what is it trying to come to terms with? What is it trying to explain and make sense of? What needs does it satisfy? Please excuse me at this point as I swap into a mode that involves some anthropological hand waving as I attempt to guess the answers to these questions.

I think there are a variety of reasons why matter/spirit dualism is so favored and some of those reasons revolve around attempts to come to terms with the problem of suffering and evil (cf. gnosticism). Also, the left/right brain dualism of accountable and reducible cognitive processes versus unaccountable irreducible intuitions may have a bearing. But there is one factor that, in my opinion, stands out above the others and this is that sentient humanity perceives itself as standing over and against an apparently insentient surrounding world of phenomena and noumena. Preliterate societies come to terms with this dualistic discontinuity by associating sentient spirit stuff with everything around them and thus maintain a semblance of homogeneity in their worldview. However, for us in the industrial west the apparent insentience of matter has been thrown into sharp relief with a mechano-instrumentalist paradigm that sees matter in terms of the patterned behavior of insentient yet autonomous elementary material noumena. This paradigm has become so developed and successful that it now looks to have the potential of giving us the very opposite of the preliterate diet of spirits with everything: instead the materialist turns the tables and views human sentience as an illusion and an aspect of material insentience thus bringing about a different kind of continuity of ontology. This, of course, won’t do for the religious mystics who have simply reacted by reaffirming with even great vehemence their dualism and assert the existence of a competing spiritual world, thus throwing the matter vs. spirit dichotomy into such sharp relief that it echoes the Gnostics loathing of matter and a belief in a material world controlled (if not created) by a Satanic spirit who competes with God’s Spirit.

As a fairly conventional Christian theist I accept what I believe to be a fundamental New Testament form of dualism; that is, God versus the created order. But apart from that and within the created order itself I’m inclined to reject a matter versus spirit dualism. I have always been attracted to positivist, phenomenological and idealist philosophies, and believe mind stuff to be the primary ontology. There are therefore other ways of removing the awkward discontinuity between mind and matter.

A Hemisphere Short of a Brain.

2008-11-09T15:38:00.000-08:00

In 1995 I sent a rather tedious article to the leaders of my church entitled “The Lie of the Land”: it related religious expressions to the left/right partitioning of the brain (Note to self: Don’t bother next time). The left/right brain split is a scientific icon that has entered popular culture and has become a rather distorted caricature of the actual situation. The true picture is a little more complicated than the icon suggests. However, the notion of a distinction between an analytical left brain and an intuitive right brain is an apt symbol and metaphor for a pervasive cultural and temperamental division, a division that I’ve tried to express in a thousand ways: e.g. knowledge verses feeling, interpretation vs. face value, head vs. heart, rationalism vs. fideism, Morlocks vs. Eloi.. etc. In my article I related this partitioning to the split in Evangelical Christianity between charismatic and non-charismatic. A mildly charismatic ethos now actually pervades mainstream evangelicalism; the traditional strict and particular evangelical remnant having gone their own way. The latter have a tendency to gather themselves into small puritanical enclaves who dignify their self marginalization with thoughts of being the protestant heroic last stand against the Roman antichrist conspiracy of the end times.

Since 1995 I hadn’t seen anyone else relate left/right brain structure to the contemporary Christian scene until I read the Book “Saving Christianity” by Hilary Wakemen. Wakemen is a liberal Christian who believes the traditional Christian doctrines that place a premium on a belief in the miraculous should be raided only for their symbolic meaning rather than any assumed literal meaning, a meaning that for many fundamentalist Christians has become a Shibboleth. Wakeman is what I call a ‘constitutional’ believer: Just as a literal monarch no longer exists in the UK and has been replaced with a symbolic constitutional monarch, likewise many of the literal Christian doctrines have been replaced by symbolic meanings in the minds of liberal Christians.

Liberal Christians are usually more self aware than EPC (Evangelical/Charismatic/Pentecostal) Christians. (EPC Christians often make a virtue out of an unquestioning non-reflexive gullibility and equate criticism with cynicism. In fact recently an EPC leader stated that he much prefers gullibility to ‘cynicism’). So I wasn’t surprised to see that Wakemen was aware of the left/right brain metaphor. Neither was I surprised by the ironic way she applied this metaphor: For her EPC, with it doctrinal shibboleths, is too left brain oriented! This didn’t surprise me because Liberal Christian Don Cupitt made a similar ironic plea against the traditional ‘propositional faith’ way back in the early 80s in his 1984 book “The Sea of Faith”. In fact Cupitt is so ‘constitutional’ in his faith that he is arguably an atheist! But why are Wakeman and Cupitt being ironic here? : because EPC, with its very ‘right brain’ swoon for Jesus worship has had a tendency to accuse the intellectual liberal Christians and their careful scholarship of precisely the same over emphasis on ‘head knowledge’ - that’s their term for left brain stuff! (sorry I can’t cite anyone here, but it’s something I have become aware of).

But there is more irony to come. The post evangelical, post charismatic emerging churches are also very wary of a ‘left brain’ Christianity, and are inclined to indulge in the same irony of accusing EPC Christians of being too left brained! See this thread on the Network Norwich web site where I had a brief encounter with what I guess to be an emerging church Christian. This Christian took issue with Network Norwich columnist James Knight (a Christian who attends the very Charismatic Proclaimers church) for portraying a faith that is too taken up with competing truth claims and propositions. Emerging church, with their touchy-feely postmodern communal neo-ritualism, are seeking to connect with the Divine with their ‘right brains’ rather than their ‘left brains’. And yet to compound the irony James Knight, in a later article, considers an authentic faith in the Divine to be over and above a mere propositional apprehension of God!

So everyone is accusing everyone else of being too left brained, too intellectual in their faith and blaming the poor old enlightenment for our religious angst and of “emptying the haunted air and gnomed mine” (Keats). The ironies here are exquisite, but all in all it’s hardly surprise, surprise. Religious leaders, especially EPC leaders, are hard put to it to interpret the meaning of contemporary science. Ostensibly science paints a mechanical picture of the world, or at least a world reducible to mathematical patterns of elementals: a seemingly a mindless dehumanized cosmic weltanschauung in which the mystique traditionally accorded to humanity looks to a spurious anomaly. Many religious and mystically minded people instinctually feel that there is something missing from this worldview and their knee jerk response is to retreat into the non-analytical, the holistic and the apparently irreducible world of the intuitive; In short the ‘right brain’.

For myself I have always been in favour of a) Understanding the conflict between ‘left and right brain’ expressions b) Looking for some kind of synthesis rather placing a premium on one over and above the other. However, I have always had a soft spot for a ‘nuts and bolts’ mechanical view of the cosmos (comes from too much play with Meccano as a child), and yet I believe the Philosopher John Searle to have a very compelling point when he suggests that the cosmos has present in it an irreducibly first person ontology.

As far as unraveling these tricky issues is concerned I don’t think EPC is going to be much help as long as it continues to glory in an uncritical unselfconsciousness. Although one doesn’t have to be stupid to be an evangelical, sometimes it helps. The largely post-charismatic, post, evangelical Emerging church are still on their honey moon with a youthful postmodernism and are not likely to be of much help at the moment. The best bet probably lies with the liberals: They seem to be self aware enough and to have no guilt complex or shame connected with intellectualism. However, the constitutional God of Don Cupitt is too extreme for me and looks to be cop-out, and a road to nowhere.

In some ways the overall picture daunts me in other ways it excites me. It daunts me because the enigma of the relationships between mechanism and personality, and between noumena, cognita and dreams seem to present insurmountable problems. And yet the whole scene is exciting because of the sheer mystery of it all. Mystery, like food, is for devouring; but like food there must be an endless supply of it and it looks to me as if there is enough mystery here to last for an eternity. “Man doesn’t live by bread alone...”

The Continuous Revival

2008-10-29T12:19:00.000-07:00

A very interesting and revealing article in the November edition of ‘Christianity’ deliberates over the recent trend in EPC* of rediscovering and returning to the historic Anglo-Catholic, Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches. The article is not sure whether this is a ‘trickle or stream’. In this connection one should also include many emerging churches as they experiment with throw-back Celtic practices and proprietary rituals in an attempt to get a handle on the Divine through tangible artifacts of human creation but nevertheless imbued with sacred meaning.

What is the cause of this drift away from standard EPC? It probably has a complex of causes, but I wasn’t surprised to read this:

Many more, weary of hype concerning predicted revival about to head over the horizon, preferred a backward look to creedal faith and practices with firmer foundations than the shifting focus of the latest fad.

I well remember the day circa 1995 when I first saw the title of David Tomlinson’s book, “The Post-Evangelical”. He had come out of the Restoration movement of the 1970s and 1980s a disillusioned man. I had researched this movement myself and that experience was unpleasant enough. Moreover, 1994 was a bad year for my relationship with evangelicalism, but the worst was yet to come: Shortly after followed the Toronto Blessing and its bid for EPC spiritual hegemony. So, the mere reading of the title of Tomlinson’s book struck a chord with me. I never actually got round to reading the book but somehow I knew what Tomlinson was thinking or at least knew how he felt. I had sensed the onset of his disillusionment from the things he was saying even in the early eighties whilst he was still in the restoration movement.

All in all, then, this ‘trickle or stream’ is really no surprise because it is symptomatic of a deep malaise in EPC. The malaise may even have recently deepened as a consequence of the burst of religious histrionics seen during the ‘Lakeland outpouring’. I suspect that ‘false-dawn’ fatigue will ensure that Lakeland will amount to little more than a short lived squall of gullibility and never make the inroads into the mainstream church even achieved by Toronto. But, I suspect, as with Toronto, the gold fillings blessings, and various unfilled prophecies whose failures were at first covered up with spiritual spin, Lakeland will in due course be quietly dropped as if it never happened.

The article in ‘Christianity’ talks about C S Lewis’ concept of ‘Deep Church’ - the nearest equivalent I can find (apart perhaps from the concept of ‘the church invisible’) to my notion of the ‘Open Gospel’: the Open Gospel is by definition a message whose effects manifests themselves across a diversity of Christian subcultures in history. As the article in ‘Christianity’ asks: where was God during the times prior to our favorite Christian revival/reformation/movement? Can we really write-off hundreds of years of pre-reformation/pre-revival church history just like that? Surely their must be something deeper than particular cultural realizations of church?

If ‘Deep Church’ is the rationale for the latest attempt to fix a malaise by seeking the essence of church then this may be an antidote to the spiritual hegemony of those Christians who have a propensity to write the script for other Christians and foist on them either bizarre blessings, spurious prophesies , authoritarian leaders and all sorts of what, in the final analysis, are optional cultural elaborations; all eased through under spiritual duress. Yes, I said ‘spiritual duress’ - I can hear now the echoes of bullying spiritual clichés from the past: “Don’t touch God’s anointed” , “Don’t analyse it”, “Don’t commit the unforgivable sin”, “Don’t lack faith”.

In the NT we find the Apostle Paul tackling two sorts of error: 1) the attempt to articalise the faith - in Paul’s time this was the attempt to combine strict and particular law observance with Christianity. 2) The Dualist Gnostics for whom salvation from an evil material world was bound up with sublime spiritual initiations involving altered states of consciousness etc. We see similar imbalances in EPC today: The hyper orthodox evangelicals have hived themselves off into small marginalized ghettos of strict and particular observance. They are unwilling to speak to anyone else and think of themselves as the truest remnant manifestation of church. The Gnostics on the other hand, have distorted the charismatic message as they interpret the ‘baptism of the holy spirit’ in gnostic, exclusivist and elitist terms, limiting God’s spiritual gifting to a small subset of recognized behaviours. They too also think of themselves as the truest manifestation of church.

Believers so easily fall for an either/or ‘right brain’ vs. ‘left brain’ dichotomy rather than a both/and synthesis. Thus, observance is set against experience, head is set against heart, reasoning against intuition etc. The trickle or stream toward classical church may be good in that it helps sustain a cultural turnover amongst Christians; a turnover that helps break up and renew calcified assumptions. It effectively declares jubilee years that free captives from the bondage of authoritarian movements and constantly redistributes spiritual capital. The Gnostics may believe they have a mandate to spread their latest bizarre initiation rites or revival, but a seething cauldron of change and cultural slipping and sliding prevents any one party getting the upper hand. However, the move into to a traditional ritualized Christianity is neither necessarily good nor bad: It all depends on whether openness and reciprocity is favoured over against exclusiveness and hegemony. I was never keen on Chairman Mao’s concept of continuous revolution for a secular society, but it may well have an important role to play in the history of Christianity!

* EPC=Evangelical/Pentecostal/Charismatic Christianity

Bentley: Looking Rather Sheepish

2008-09-23T15:22:00.000-07:00

The October edition of ‘Christianity’ magazine reports the latest news on the Todd Bentley travesty. Bentley has left his wife for another woman and the disgrace has prevented him from using the platform of his own ministry. In this connection the October ‘Christianity’ focuses on the subject of ‘fallen leaders’. But isn’t this rather assuming that we are talking about people who are genuine Christian leaders in the first place? In Bentley’s case was there anything to fall from? His ministry survives using gullibility logic (“if it’s bizarre it must be from God”), the ultimate spin doctoring in all its resuscitating glory (30+ resurrections are claimed) and above all spiritual intimidation (“Don’t touch God’s anointed”). So does Bentley, along with his Angelocentric gospel, really classify as a leader of a Christian movement with integrity?

In any case succumbing to a good old fashion extra-marital affair is the least of Bentley’s faults in my opinion. His gullible followers have so quickly thrust him to the top of the social pile and with a little help from media like ‘Christianity’ the resulting pressures of exposure and public status has increased the temptation and opportunities for an extra-marital fling. I certainly would not want to judge Bentley harshly in this respect, especially as I am very unlikely to ever face this sort of temptation myself.

Those behind the Lakeland ministry want Christains to overlook its hornet’s nest of issues as mere human foibles in a genuine ‘move of God’. Their view is that the 'outpouring' has imperfections that are forgivable. For them gullible belief equals faith and a vehement expression of faith is self-verifying and considered to be far more compelling evidence of a ‘move of God’ than the fruits of solid evidence or any negative evidence. So don’t let lack of material evidence get in the way of a self-feeding delusion ...err.. I mean, faith, and stop you from being ministered to by God’s move at Lakeland.

But there is, of course, one sin that is not likely to be forgiven by Lakelanders, namely that of critically appraising the movement and deciding that it's not worth bothering to go to Lakeland or connecting with the ministry after all: that is regarded as the unforgivable sin of resisting the Spirit.

Bondage Fairies at the Bottom of the Garden

2008-08-27T11:17:00.001-07:00

In spite of giving a favourable review of Todd Bentley’s “Lakeland Outpouring” in the July edition of Christianity magazine editor John Buckeridge, in the September edition, asks “Where is the medically verifiable evidence of healing?” He then tells of his attempts to secure this evidence from Bentley’s organisation and how he drew a blank because a spokeswomen told him that for legal reasons medical records are difficult to make available.

Buckeridge concludes: “It seems that Lakeland is a confusing mixture of God and flesh, faith and hype, healings and tall tales, the presence of God and hysteria”

The same edition contains an article by a pastor who visited a related revivalist organisation in America in search of healing. He tells of “high levels of passion and expectancy” at the meetings. In spite of “the wacky stuff” he observed, like a worship leader who said “the dream fairy was coming into the meeting to give us good dreams”, he nevertheless claimed, “a powerful sense of God’s presence was enough to convince me that the trip was worthwhile”. The pastor came back from his trip unhealed.

So basically we have nothing: no evidence of healing, nothing but a pastor who felt a powerful sense of God’s presence and observed a high levels of passion and expectancy. The “evidence”, it seems, is simply high passsion and expectancy of evidence! That sounds like the hysteria Buckeridge is talking about.

As for the “wacky stuff” we are, of course, supposed to overlook that because “It’s all about the presence of God” as the pastor was told, a presence evidenced only by the unhealed pastor’s feeling that there was “a powerful sense of God’s presence”. That sounds like the hype Buckeridge is talking about.

In spite of all the wacky stuff, the hype, the tall tales and the hysteria we are supposed to overlook all these in favour of some scanty evidence. But I wonder if the supporters of these “ministries” are prepared to overlook a critical analysis of this latest “Move of God”? Doubtful, because if past experience is anything to go by it’s then that we start to hear spiritual threats like “Don’t analyse it!”, “Touch not God’s anointed!” and of “being in danger of committing the unforgivable sin”. These people know how to use the spiritual stick as well as the carrot of baseless expectancy and hype.

Large swathes of Christendom are at a very low ebb, intellectually impoverished, lacking in authenticity and integrity, and sometimes downright hypocritical.

The Same Old Line

2008-08-07T07:44:00.000-07:00

The comments on this Network Norwich thread about Todd Bentley seem to have at last dried up. Towards the end of the thread one commentator yearns for those “...THOUSANDS WHO HAVE NEVER EXPERIENCED OUR WONDERFUL GOD”. This writer probably comes from a Christian culture where there is a premium on communicating mood, emotion, and vehemence. This is, of course, not easily achieved in writing, and so unable to find any other way to articulate her emotions the writer resorts to capitals.

“...experienced our wonderful God”? Now that’s a telling phrase: If relations with other humans are the nearest models we have for relations with God, (after all Christ, the express image of God, is human) then isn’t this usage rather unusual? Do we say “I experienced my wife” or “I experienced my friend”. Would the disciples ever have said they “experienced Christ”. One might say, “I experienced my bosses anger” or “I experience my wife’s love”, but seldom do we say of the whole person “I experienced him or her”. Not that I would claim that an "experience of God" is necessarily invalid, but to habitually use this phrase does betray the skew of a contemporary mind set. A person is, in fact, a highly complex cluster of differing and interacting traits, and although one might validly talk about experiencing this or that single trait, such usage does no justice to the complexity and differentiation of personality if it used to refer to the whole person. Above all, it is wrong to talk of God in the same terms that one might talk about “experiencing” a fair ground ride. The language of Christianity in some quarters has become degenerated and debased and has lost the vision that relating to a person is an analytical act of knowing carried out by a vastly complex built in mental toolkit.

In the face of a cosmos that has apparently been demystified and reduced to impersonal elemental matter there is a great yearning to reintroduce the human and the sacred. In the great polarised retreat from the analytical and rational that hallmarks much contemporary religion the return to humanity and sacredness has been distorted and caricatured in an inarticulate dance with the irrational, the esoteric, the mysterious, the gnostic and the fideist. The word “experience”, a word of that hints of something that cannot be analyzed into parts, is the only word left for the Christian fideists. For them God cannot, in fact should not, be analyzed because that smacks of the profane world of science and head knowledge, the world of elemental matter, the world from which they are trying to disconnect in favour of the truly sublime. To them one isn’t converted until one has “experienced” God.

And yet as they seek authenticity of faith their yearning for humanity betrays them; the Gnostic Christian environment is so often at an intellectually low ebb and its supporting narrative is wretchedly debased by spiritual cliché surfers who use a restricted vocabulary and repeated phrases: “A move of God”, “The touch of God”, “experiencing God”, “more of God” etc. Their followers are like bad actors reading a bad script: they know all the terms, but their delivery is flat, unconvincing and unauthentic.

If God exists the signal of His personality is subtle, and sometimes difficult to pick up and interpret against the background noise, but search for Him we must. But for the fundamentalist interpretation of God’s signal is not what he thinks himself to be about, for the fundamentalist is fundamentally a copyist; For him, tuning into the signal of God is like a pupil copying from the teacher’s board, a pupil who doesn’t really understand what he is copying and so copies all the mistakes, rubbish and background noise as well, and declares it all to be sacred. And of course they expect us to copy them!

Bent Oddly Logic

2008-07-20T11:00:00.000-07:00

The Church in Norwich is getting just as dippy about Todd Bentley as the Staff of 'Christainity' magazine. See here. On the subject of Todd Bentley this guy provides an interesting and laughable insight.

The 'logic' of some church people seems to run along these lines:

1. God is infinitely wise.

2. Therefore what God does may appear to be stupid.

3. Conclusion: Therefore anything that appears to be stupid must be from God.

A non sequitur if there ever was one.

Celebrity Death Match: Dembski vs. Bentley

2008-07-13T10:02:00.000-07:00

The Swot

vs.

The Hulk

Here’s an unusual and novel juxtaposition of protagonists: see here and here. William Dembski, Intelligent Design guru, does a Todd Bentley meeting! It vaguely reminds of the spate of postmodern films that bring incommensurable super heroes into collision: e.g Miss Marple vs. The Terminator or something like that.

I didn’t know whether to put this post on “Quantum Non-linearity” or on “Views News and Pews”, so I’ve posted it on both. It is clear, as the second link reveals, that Dembski is was left with a very unfavourable impression of Bentley (I dread to think that it could have been otherwise). It’s interesting to see that Dembski made the very same observation that I made when I went to a Benny Hinn meeting: “…the exodus from the arena of people bound in wheelchairs was poignant.” But I hasten to add that I did not, like Dembski, travel many miles to get to my meeting: in order to save rental costs the financially savy Hinn organization, conveniently for me, decided to bring their show to Norwich football ground which is less than 20 minutes walk from my house. I certainly did not drag my family along; instead I went, as usual, in the capacity of an amateur researcher with camera and notepaper.

One of the commentators on Uncommon Descent takes Demsbki to task for even giving Bentley’s ‘healing miracles’ the slightest of credence from the outset. Fair comment except that Demsbki has a severely autistic son, and was so he was understandably vulnerable to the ‘clutching at straws’ effect. Typically of this kind of Christian scene there is an exploitation of the emotions associated with the unknown, especially fear of the unknown. It’s all to easy to follow a false trail for something you really want: you hope against hope that the next corner or the next horizon will reveal the vista you are longing for. It never comes, but whilst you are in a state of ignorance the sheer hope strings you along. And when the carrot of hope fails to lead you up the garden path, there is the stick of fear, fear that an inscrutable and unknown god might just be revealing himself in the utterly unpalatable and who knows what displeasure he will visit upon those who do not swallow it. It’s all a very Pagan view of God: it is a ministry that trades on fear, ignorance, numinous dread, submission, and above all on the notion of an unaccountable angry god whose actions are to all intents and purposes arbitrary. Pagan practices down the ages have thrived on this: I'm reminded of a burial site next to the Cursus in Dorset where a Neolithic woman and children were found buried by archeologists who had a sneaky suspicion that they were uncovering a tragic story of human sacrifice: what satanic things humans can screw themselves up to do when they believe they are sanctioned by the Divine.

Is there a connection here with Intelligent Design theory? I hope not. I respect the efforts and faith of Dembski and his many followers who are carrying out a valuable critique of evolution and are presenting worthy challenges to people who think they believe in evolution. However, one of my niggles with ID theory is that introduces an arbitrariness. In ID theory “Intelligence” is used as a kind of wild card or black box notion: “Intelligence is as intelligence does”. The broad sweep of paleontological change, which at least presents a prima facie case for evolution, then fails to cohere; it is like a story that seems to be a story but of which we are told is no story after all. I have yet to find out how ID theory accounts for paleontological history and so far ID seems to be a theory of negation, a case of showing that evolution isn’t possible. After that it’s the old the shrug of the shoulders, the appeal to the inscrutable and the wild card, and sometimes there is the dark hint that anyone asking deeper questions are rushing in where angels fear to tread.

Bent Oddly

2008-06-28T04:04:00.000-07:00

Whilst cable channel surfing I happened upon the God channel where yet another revivalist, Canadian Todd Bentley, was doing his stuff. I was peculiarly fascinated as to how it was that this performance, which to me came over as unreal, contrived and phony, could be taken seriously by anyone. The crowd was working itself up into a state of trance like excitement and Bentley, no doubt immensely pleased with his effect, was having a whale of time occasionally giving grunts of delight (yes, he has the idiosyncrasy of jubilantly grunting). He worked his way down a line of blessing seekers, shouting out “Bam!” and “Kapow!” as they successively and submissively collapsed at his touch. Occasionally Bentley would come across someone who had failed to catch on and was stupid enough to believe that this really was an involuntary act and did not fall without Bentley helping with a firm push. There is such a fuzzy distinction in these believers minds between being open to a “move of God” and showing faith in that “move” by moving one’s self, that they could attain a thoroughly genuine belief in a scene they themselves had voluntarily created. “Who was manipulating who?” I thought. This man Bentley believes in himself because the crowd believes in him, and the crowd believes in him because he believes in himself and because of the effects they are delivering at his call. It might have been billed as a revival fire meeting but the camera was not picking up any of the tongues of fire mentioned in Acts 2!

In the following days I forgot all about Bentley as I have lost count of the number of times I have seen a gullible crowd serving up the performance the speaker is looking for, thus entrapping the ego of the speaker in their delusion. But when my July issue of “Christianity” magazine came through the door there he was, Todd Bentley gracing the front of the Magazine. I have no idea why Bentley, amongst many other tacky religious showmen, should have been singled out, except that the editor of the magazine had just happened to start watching God TV and caught Bentley performing. The editor, John Buckeridge, says of Bentley’s meetings “Many believe a significant movement of Holy Spirit is taking place” – well I could have told you that John; just ask the thousands of Bentley’s followers, or the followers of any other stirring religious figurehead choosen at random. How many other “moves of the Spirit” have we missed because John Buckeridge didn't look at cable TV? However, John has reservations; or does he? He is unable to dismiss Bentley because in his opinion Biblical prophets sometimes did bizarre things – or at least in John’s 21st century eyes separated by millennia from the context and symbolism of the times in which those prophets lived.

So here’s the lesson folks: never question at all what a crowd-preacher coupling serves up no matter how bizarre because you never know it might be from God. In the threatening words of Rev Mark Stibbe who has been to “catch the fire” at Bentley’s meeting (what fire?) “Be very careful not to commit the unforgivable sin – namely blaspheming against the Holy Spirit”. Great! That means just about anything goes and that is music to the ears for the Rev John Bilgewater of Twerpington who instigated the infamous ‘times of release blessing’ during his services. Basically this blessing involves releasing bowel wind, preferabley loudly, in order to release bad spirits and show submission to the Lord. According to the members of Bilgewater’s church the bowel gas loses its bad smell as evil influences are expelled. As was reported in the April 2003 paper copy of VNP, according to Bilgewater you can’t have serious Christainity until the whole personality has had a good dressing down from top to bottom, so to speak; The blessings of the Spirit can only be experienced by those who radically relinquish the right to dictate the terms of their conversion or hold any dignity which Bilgewater always equates with pride.

So Mr John Buckeridge Sir, please can you do an article in “Christainity” on John Bilgewater and spread the word about the latest revival at Twerpington?

Spiritual Spin

2008-05-16T07:41:00.000-07:00

I have just had a look at the web site of the Mega Personality Ministry that was the subject of my last post. Sure enough this man is a master of Spiritual Spin. However, I am sure he is entirely genuine; the best spin doctors believe their own spin. Here is some of that spin accompanied by my interpretation of it:

Spiritual Spin: All lack is on our end of the equation. The only time someone wasn't healed in the Bible (gospels) is when the disciples prayed for them. If someone isn't healed, realize the problem isn't God, and seek Him for direction as well as personal breakthrough (greater anointing for consistency in healing). It's also not wise to blame the person who is sick.

Interpretation: Failed healings? There is always some one we can blame to explain it away: If it’s not the person who is sick then those who are praying are likely to lack in someway such as not having enough anointing. We can string believers along with the notion that all spiritual impediments are fixed by seeking more and more anointing. They can either seek more or blame themselves for not seeking enough when things don't work out. God is a steam age power paradigm God with whom 'more' always means 'more', plain and simple. God comes in simple undifferentiated chunks of power. Stuff all this information age nonsense about complexity. Come to me to get more big chunks of God.

Spiritual Spin: There's a difference between a miracle and healing. Miracles happen in an instant and healing happens over time.

Interpretation: As a vast number of people recover naturally from illness and sickness anyway there is plenty of opportunity for my ministry to claim the credit for healings.

Spiritual Spin: Pursue the men and women of God who carry an anointing in their lives for the miraculous. Such an anointing can be transferred to others through the laying on of hands. If you want to kill giants, hang around a giant killer. It rubs off.

Interpretation: Work hard at hanging a round with big name preachers like me, and you will get more anointing. The power personality cult is the essence of power Christainity; get connected to a power ministry if you want more of God's power; Just 'God and you' alone doesn't work.

Spiritual Spin: I must look for the sick and tormented in order to pray for them. And if they are healed, I give God the praise. If they aren’t, I still give God the praise, and continue to look for people to pray for. I learned a long time ago that more people are healed when you pray for more people!

Interpretation: The more people we pray for the more we can claim credit for what is in any case natural healing. As for those who aren’t healed we just forget about them because we must only remember what God does, not what He doesn’t do. We only remember when we win, so it feels like we are winning all the time. (Technically, this is called the 'selective perspective'.)

Spiritual Spin: If you don't know people who see miracles, find them. Don't try to learn from those who only have the theory of miracles.

Interpretation: Hang around with people like me, but don’t ask too many subtle theological/theoretical questions about my ‘miracles’, which might expose them as shams. In any case I much prefer to minister to the gullible because the gullible "Don't analyse it!"

Spiritual Spin: Life doesn't come from revelation it comes from the from the encounter brought about by revelation... Bible study without Bible experience is pointless.

Interpretation: We're gnostics. Unless you have had a gnostic experience of God your faith is pointless.

Spiritual Spin: If you’re afraid of reading about those who later fell into sin and deception (some of these people ended in disaster), stay away from Gideon, Samson, Solomon’s Proverbs, and the Song of Solomon. The author of those books also ended in tragedy.

Interpretation: The initial excesses of power preachers is not evidence that their ministries are rotten to the core in the first place with their later sins a manifestation of problems that were there all along.

Spiritual Spin: How can I come to your Church to receive ministry? We suggest coming for a weekend visit.

Interpretation: Come and help build my spiritual empire, the more the better. Forget your own powerless church. Looking forward to receiving a generous contribution from you, the more the better. More Lord more!

Yes, he's bowling googlies all the time. It is instructive to compare some of the above sentiments with the opinion that Charles Taze Russell (founder of the Jehovah's Witnesses) had of his own ministry and writings. Of his 'Studies in Scriptures' he wrote this:

People cannot see the Divine Plan by studying the Bible itself. We find also that if anyone lays the Scripture Studies aside, even after he has become familiar with them, if he lays them aside and ignores them and goes to the Bible alone, our experience shows that within two years he goes into darkness.

Membership, connection, central kingdom rule, and personality veneration are the power concepts of the religious cults. Not for nothing does the Watchtower call it's meeting centres 'Kingdom Halls'.

For a religious group to create a meaninful scene, a strong sense of collective identity, an identity which may revolve round the presence of strong figurehead personalities, is a requirement. Without this group phenonmenon to help pressure the supply of 'right' intrepretations needed to raise otherwise prosiac events into the realm of the sublime it seems that the 'faith' of many would perish.

"The Big Preacher Guy" Phenomenon

2008-04-06T14:18:00.000-07:00

No sooner had VNP been hailing a mellowing of evangelical attitudes than an article in an evangelical magazine pops up introducing its readers to the latest American Christian mega patriarch whose reputation is starting to make inroads into the UK. He was being compared with that Charismatic personality of the eighties and nineties John Wimber.

Wimber and his ‘Vineyard’ cluster of churches were associated with the so called ‘Third Wave of the Spirit’ - a ‘move’ of the Spirit that was supposed to unify charismatic and non-charismatic, a wave whose actual existence is, in fact, debatable. But there was this to be said for it: in Wimber’s mind this move was to be a complimentary union of the best from Charismatic and orthodox evangelical cultures – Wimber was the kind of personality who recognized that his own Christian culture needed other Christains. Moreover, Wimber wisely distanced himself from the bizarre and predatory Toronto Blessing of the nineties. His wife is quoted in the article warning against the kind of faith that sees the world through vehement and positive acclamations bordering on denial. Although Wimber and his Vineyard churches never really succeeded in breaking the mold of a Gnostic version of Charismatic Christianity, Wimber’s ‘Signs and Wonders’ healing ministry was tempered by attitudes of reconciliation, complimentarity, reciprocity, and frankness.

Unfortunately this latest big name import from America looks to be far less reciprocal and compliant. His take on the Gospel is that it majors on ‘kingdom’ – that is, for him the gospel is about membership and not message – the Christian cults would agree. He is a product of the Toronto Blessing, and readily employs those familiar cognitive resorts used to explain away the suffering and evil of our world: healings fail because those praying for it lack faith, or those receiving it are too accommodating towards the problem of pain. And if spiritual spin fails simply select out the conceptually less amenable facts of reality and forget them: “Celebrate what God is doing not what he hasn’t done”, and least of all don’t accept that God ever ‘wanted’ a world of suffering and evil. This is the time honoured gnostic disconnection from reality.

That the article writer presumably felt it appropriate to publish the warning from Wimber’s wife is ominous. If reality is difficult to come to terms with one ‘solution’ is to simply train yourself to ‘see’ a new reality using a mixture of denial, attitude, selective perspective and spiritual spin. With the spiritual excesses of the nineties receding into history we now have a clutch of gullible Christians who either never saw those excesses or have forgotten them. The time may be right for another religious quack.

Spiritual Artifice

2008-02-28T15:22:00.000-08:00

The latest edition of ‘Christianity’ runs an article on the state of charismatic churches in the UK (“Hands down”, March 2008). The overall verdict of the article is that charismatic churches have mellowed in the way they express themselves. For VNP, which always tries to stay ahead of the game, this is hardly news: (See here):

Evangelical Christianity, like scientific triumphalism, has had to adjust to a more sober assessment of its expectations. ….with the discomfiture of evangelicalism, there is a mellowing and an embracing amongst evangelicals of a more open concept of the Gospel.

This may not new news at VNP, but it is good news. Let me say from the outset I have always avoided making demands and assumptions about how God should or might be working in the lives of other Christains or how they should express their faith. In contrast, however, many charismatic Christians have been only able to identity the work of the Spirit in a very circumscribed set of ‘showings forth’. These ‘manifestations of the Spirit’ have often been so badly contaminated by failure, pride, and human contrivance that they have been all but indistinguishable from background noise sourced in religious self-deceit. Christians who have not hurried to embrace the artifacts of charismatic expression have been cast as spiritual dunces lacking in faith.

A spurious category of ‘becoming Charismatic’ has been foisted on the church, a category that uses a proprietary estimation of what constitutes the gifting of the spirit. A consequence is the practice of “in-church conversion” whereby non-charismatics and also charismatics whose blessings have become dated and stale, have become targets for conversion to latest spiritual fad. The result is a ‘blessing culture’ that needs constant feeding on the next arbitrarily designated supernatural manifestation.

The word ‘gnosto-christianity’ sums it up for me – an elitist form of Christianity that only rates its own expression of faith. Much about gnosto-christianity has been so difficult to distinguish from human fabrication that the very veracity of Christianity has been challenged. The giftings and character of many Christains have been left unrecognized and marginalized in the face of a concept of the supernatural that is artifice. Perhaps now, those Christains have a chance of shinning through.

No Question About It

2008-01-14T06:57:00.000-08:00

I know some people are praying for me with my less than enthused reception to some aspects of evangelicalism, but save your prayers for a rather desperate prayer request which has just come to light. November's survey results have been returned from Schmaltznegger ministries inc., the organisation run by Rev Randle J Schmaltznegger, the ebullient American spiritual dynamo, counselor extraordinaire, evangelist supreme, and bigot-hearted Christian patriarch. Not a terrific response from VNP readers, mind you, but these are postmodern times so we can make it up as we go along.

The survey has revealed a clear need for urgent prayer. Rev Schmaltznegger comments on the results: "Where ever I go I find there is a great thirst for an outpouring of God's Spirit and this survey proves it. People just want to know God's initimate touch. If questioned on the need for God's power today you cannot but say 'Yes!'. However, I was very burdened in the Spirit when I noticed that not all survey respondents answered 'yes' to all questions as they should have done. One person actually answered 'no' to one of the questions. I advise that person to make himself known so he can receive some Spirit filled counselling and I can lay my hands on him to receive the power of God and have his spiritual blockages unblocked. As a reader of VNP he could be holding up the whole work of God at VNP and this may explain why this blog is not receiving the rich blessing it so desperately needs."

Clearly then, we have a deep spiritual need here at VNP that should be prayed about. Or alternatively we may have someone here who is just fed up with being blackmailed by manipulative spiritual demands that don't admit a negative response without incurring spiritual recrimination and therefore just wants to protest.

Emerging Chaos

2007-11-28T08:27:00.000-08:00

The back panel of the latest issue of the ‘Reachout: ministry to the cults’ newsletter advertises two books. The first is ‘Faith Undone’ by Roger Oakland. The advertisement for this book reads:

Is the emerging church just a passing fad, a more contemporary approach to church, or the discontented grumblings of young people looking for answers? Grounded in a centuries old mystical approach, this movement is powerful yet highly deceptive and it draws practices and experiences that are foreign to Biblical Christianity. The path the merging church is taking is leading right into the arms of an interfaith perspective….

The second book is called ‘The Other Side of the River’ by Kevin Reeves (definitely no relation!) and this book tells of one man’s experience with a movement that calls itself ‘The River’ and this claims…

… to be spreading the kingdom of God through signs and wonders. Sometimes referred to as the River rival, the Third Wave of the Latter Rain, this movement is marked by bizarre manifestations, false prophecies and esoteric revelations. Warnings of divine retribution keep many adherents in bondage; afraid to speak out or even question those things they are taught and are witness to. The Word faith movement, Holy Laughter, Emphasis on the humanity of Jesus over His deity and experience versus scripture are just some of the topics discussed in this book.

I don’t know whether Reachout did it deliberately but these two books are manifestations from the same underlying malaise. My experience of charismatic evangelicalism is that ‘Later Rain’ restorationism is just an extreme manifestation of something that can be seen, albeit in less intense forms, in many charismatic connections. Emerging church is, in my opinion, a reaction against some of the excesses of Charismatic Christianity. A case in point is a leader like David Tomlinson of ‘Post Evangelical’ fame whose ideas are linked with emerging church. Tomlinson came out of the Charismatic restorationist movement after reacting against its authoritarianism and its management by 'spin'. (e.g. 'Sin Spin' - the practice of explaining away failure by accusing someone of lacking faith or causing 'spiritual blockage')

So why didn’t those who emerged out of charismatic excesses see ‘the light’ and fall into the arms of the traditional and strict and particular ‘Bible based’ evangelicals? They, of course, have their own problems: legalistic, didactic, traditional, stuffy, dowdy, out dated, unwilling to change their conception of ‘biblical’ worship or give countenance to people’s experiences, and above all, only too willing to limit God’s Grace to their own culture. The emerging church Christians had nowhere to emerge to but into their own experimental churches. In short, evangelicalism had sold them short. There may be dangers in what they are doing, (particularly their mysticism – probably a hang over of Charismatic days), but it cannot be any less dangerous than the extremes of evangelicalism that limit God’s Grace.

Heart Researching

2007-11-19T09:43:00.001-08:00

Rev. Randle J. Schmaltznegger, the ebullient American spiritual dynamo, counselor extraordinaire, and evangelist supreme, and big-hearted Christian patriarch has recently devised a spiritual litmus test for churches and Christains. A spokesman for Schmaltznegger says of the test: "Rev Randle’s test consists of a series of carefully crafted and subtle questions about the role of the Holy Spirit in the Christian’s life. Its heart searching depth will challenge the quality of spiritual life in today’s spiritually dry churches that do not benefit from contact with Rev Randle’s anointed ministry"

As I am, of course, anxious to test the spirituality of VNP readers I have, with permission of Schmaltznegger ministries inc., reproduced the test here. Please answer the questions below with either a ‘yes’, ‘no’ or ‘don't know’:

Do you want a massive revival of the Holy Spirit in your church?
Are you looking for a fresh imbuement of God's Spirit?
Do you want to be filled with the Holy Spirit?
Should there be more evangelism in the power of the Holy Spirit?
Do you want the Holy Spirit to come in power to your church?
Should you spend more time praying in the Spirit?
Should all church activities be in the power of the Spirit?
Should your church have more meetings where the power of the Spirit can be received?
Do you need a fresh touch of God's Spirit?
Should you study the Bible more?
Do you need to be more readily guided by the Holy Spirit?
Do you want God to do a new thing in your church?
Do you think we would have more miracles if we were truly in the Spirit?
Do we need the rain of the Spirit to end spiritual dryness?
Do you need a Spiritual blessing?
Do you have a spiritual inferiority complex?
Do you need the Rev. Randle J Schmaltznegger to set aside time to pray for you?
Would you like to contribute to Rev. Randle J Schmaltznegger’s ministry?

This carefully devised survey will certainly sort out the sheep from the goats and provide hitherto unsuspected insights into the Christian community. That's the beauty of research; always discovering things you don't already know. Email your answers to me and I will send them onto to Schmaltznegger ministries where the spiritual lessons will be teased out by a crack army of spiritual guides who have trained under Schmaltznegger. (Please don't forget to include a money order for $100.00) This will help identify spiritual markets... err… issues, that need to be exploited ...err… addressed, by the Spirit filled ministries of Randle J Schmaltznegger, the ebullient American spiritual dynamo, counselor extraordinaire, evangelist supreme, and bigot-hearted Christian patriarch.

Death by Sermon

2007-10-01T03:57:00.000-07:00

A recent interesting Christian event took the form of a sponsored service and sermon-a-thon involving participants sitting under the back to back ministries of a variety of vicars, pastors, evangelists, and heavy shepherds. The organisers of the event naively thought that the chief challenge faced by participants would be that of trying to stay awake during tedious theological discourses, and therefore sponsorship was on the basis of how long participants could go without slipping into a comatose state. In the light of Acts 20:7-9 the organisers felt this would at least be a Biblical response to sermons. But, of course, things have moved on since days of the days of Acts and the likes of Spurgeon. The buzz words now are congregational involvement and blessing. Consequently, the participants were kept wide awake by vigorous action songs and mid service work outs that got the adrenaline flowing again. Attempts were made to Baptise the congregation in the Holy Spirit no less than six times. Some pastors even tried out some entirely new and as yet unheard of blessings such as the “involuntary yodeling blessing” and - it had to happen eventually - the Belching Blessing. (touted as a sign of spiritual infilling and satiation). The walking on water blessing (which made baptisms very difficult), was followed by the renewing of soles blessing (Yes, I meant “soles” as in “shoes”) – sometimes referred to as the “Cobbler's blessing”, which I suppose just about sums things up nowadays.

In the end the whole thing had to be called off. The local hospital had to put aside beds for a spate of broken limbs caused by the rigours of action songs, workouts and the effects of people being leaned on by heavy shepherds. Some people had to undergo counseling for post traumatic stress syndrome and some ran off into the wild blue yonder never to be seen again.

Clearly, acting as passive blessing fodder during a service is bad for your health. Much better to go back to those Biblical long tedious sermons that, provided you're on the ground floor, are far more healthy: At least you can come out at the end fully refreshed, after a really good nap.

Couch the Problem

2007-08-13T15:09:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I feel I have rather overworked the caricature of contemporary Christianity as a touchy-feely, hyper-feminized, anti-analytical subculture; no longer able to connect with or make sense of ‘materialistic’ science it is engaged in a great gnostic retreat into the ‘deep soul’, and consumes workers whose skill set is skewed towards the ‘inner life’ at a prodigious rate: spiritual guides, pastoral workers, homiletic patriarchs and an army of counselors. News has just come in, however, suggesting that this picture is indeed no exaggeration

When I heard that there was going to be a lecture in Norwich by a former professor of the University of East Anglia challenging militant atheists like Richard Dawkins I was anxious to see what was afoot. I eagerly followed a blink to an event advertised on Network Norwich, the local Christian News Web site. What did I find? That the lecturer was a professor of physics? That he was a mathematics scholar? Or perhaps even a philosopher, political scientist or a historian? No! The lecturer was the former professor of counseling studies at the University of East Anglia!

So, the battle with scientism is being tackled as a counseling problem! If you’ve only got a hammer every problem looks like nail! Or rather, if you’ve only got a hammer, you've got no choice, every problem has to be fixed using the hammer!

The church sees itself as a custodian of ultimate cosmic mysteries. Therefore, while mysteries remain about the human heart the church may feel that it still has an edge in this area, its last bastion of credibility and authority. But until the church ceases to make the ‘head knowledge – heart knowledge’ distinction and a host of other dualistic assumptions, that bastion itself will be threatened.

Emerging Church – Yet again

2007-07-02T08:29:00.000-07:00

I have just received Reachout Trust’s, (the Christian ministry to the cults) latest newsletter containing their second article on Emerging Church. Not unexpectedly they are concerned that Emerging Church’s experiments with very different cultural containers for worship may lead to unorthodoxy. Although Reachout doesn’t automatically equate these experiments with unorthodoxy, it is very suspicious. It quotes from Pages 52-53 of the book “Emergingchurch.intro” by Michael Moynagh, where a call is made for “new interpretations of the Bible”. It is conceivable that our current interpretations are wrong and in need of reappraisal, but for Reachout, who don’t make the vital distinction between what the Bible really means and our interpretations of it, this is tantamount to a serious drift in theology, a drift they crudely identify with “man’s ideas and not God’s”. Having had long experience of Christians using that kind of phraseology, I read that to mean “man’s ideas and not my ideas (which of course are God’s ideas)”. Reachout also notes Rick Warren’s links with Emerging Church. Once again Warren’s willingness to share platforms sets him up for accusations of “guilt by association”. Reachout goes on to publish a quote by Rick Warren where he claims that “fundamentalism” is a very narrow and legalistic view of Christianity. Reachout do not comment on this quote as if it is condemning enough by itself.

However, this reference to fundamentalism is, I believe, a vital clue to the emergence of Emerging Church. As I have suggested before Christian fundamentalism has a propensity to slide into intellectual and cultural bankruptcy and it is apt to compensate with an irrational noisy vehemence and arrogated claims. This has lead to some ugly parodies of the faith which have not only alienated potential Christains, but also many Christians themselves – the latter have been forced to review their faith because they are loathe to identify with Christian fundamentalists with whom they have very little in common. As Christains have reacted against affected displays of contrariness the search for authentic worship has partly driven the emergence of EC. If this revisionism does lead to a loss of faith, the run-down state of Christian fundamentalism will bear much of the responsibility for this loss.

Frankly Reachout seem rather out of their depth on this subject. EC is not a conventional cult phenomenon but is rather an issue internal to Christianity. Take for example Rick Warren. As the confluence of a variety of Christian influences from Southern Baptist, through Charismatic, to Emerging Church, Rick Warren is the de-facto symbol of Christian evangelicalism in all its contradictions. He himself is difficult to back into an unorthodox corner, and yet his teaching is cryptically subversive of both charismatic and dispensationalist Christianity. For some evangelicalism’s dissonant muddle is just too much to bear and their solution is to attempt to purify evangelicalism by bowdlerizing their doctrines and disowning one another with screams of blasphemy. This has simply had the effect of adding to the apparent incoherence of evangelicalism. Out of this seething caldron of contention Emerging Church has emerged. It is the eye of the storm.

EC is a product not just of postmodern anti-foundationalism but is also a reaction to the excesses of Christian fundamentalism. To understand EC it is therefore to necessary to turn the spot light onto Christianity itself as well as postmodernism. After all (and this is ironic), Christian fundamentalism with its gothic expressions of faith and denial of reason is itself a very postmodern phenomenon.

As I have already remarked new interpretations of the Bible are acceptable provided it can be shown why the old interpretations are wrong and why the new one’s are right. But if EC takes postmodernism to its illogical conclusion then it will be in danger of rejecting the categories of ‘right and wrong’ as being themselves ‘wrong’. Moreover, although Reachout’s consideration of EC is not very penetrating they do, toward the end of their article, touch on concerns that I myself share, namely the gnostic logic of EC: if we lose the notion of ‘truth’ (and by implication its opposite of ‘error’) faith collapses in on itself as it searches for gnosis in the mysterious inner depths of the soul.

But that’s hardly new – in fact it is closely related to the anti-physicalism and fideism one finds already abroad in Christian fundamentalism. Although I support much of EC’s project of reviewing evangelicalism, I cannot support irrationalism if it merely changes its name.

The I-Con

2007-05-28T11:36:00.000-07:00

Since the SPCK has been bought up by the Eastern Orthodox Charity, the St. Stephen the Great Trust, the stance of this Orthodox Christian Ministry has begun to interest me. Like all good Christains, they have their own idiosyncratic ideas about just where we are going wrong and why we aren’t getting rival. This is what the charity’s web site says:

St Arsenius of Farasa (commemorated on October 28), who baptized Elder Paisios the Athonite, said that Europe will return to Orthodoxy when its people pray to the saints of their land. We in Britain have many Orthodox saints to intercede for us. Let us fervently ask these saints to intercede to the Holy Trinity for this land and the salvation of her people! (see www.ststephentrust.org.uk)

The Church Times web site comments on the sale of the SPCK and makes this claim about the St. Stephen web site:

Text on the website has been amended since the Church Times published the report announcing the partnership. References to the “misguided beliefs” of those who turned to the Roman Catholic Church, and other references to the Orthodox Church as “the only Church true to the Word of God, and therefore the only one that offers true salvation and eternal life”, have been removed. (see http://www.churchtimes.co.uk/content.asp?id=29834)

Come on, givesa break, how many times have I heard that sort of thing? Of course, removal of text from a web site doesn’t mean to say that its intention has been removed from minds! However, this exclusiveness is not an exclusively Eastern Orthodox malaise. When I wrote the following under the heading of The Open Gospel, I actually had the Western Church in mind.

Whether we are talking of the decorative trappings of ritual and vestment, or obsessions with mystical gnosis, or strict adherence to fancied biblical ordinances, or interpretations which use the Bible to contrive rigid blueprints for arranging life and church, we have here behavioural forms which, whilst they may not be absolutely wrong, are often championed by those who protect them with a jealous religious zeal. Thus, Christians who live beyond the religious subcultures defined by these behavioural forms may find themselves being bullied by sectarian Christian zealots who will accuse them of being disobedient to the Divine order

Looking at the absolutist management instructions SPCK staff are now receiving from those of a religious tradition that never knew the separation of church and state and who only seem to feel secure when asolutely everything is under central control, "bullying" is the name of game. In the same article I also write:

Thus, it is exceedingly difficult to enforce monopoly claims upon the Gospel, even under conditions favouring such claims. Clearly the Good News is out, and groups who maintain they have exclusive rights to it can simply be ignored by other groups who have taken it to heart and made it their own, in all its fullness. Some Christian sub communities will undoubtedly retain their mutual prejudices toward one another and express a partiality as to who can or cannot claim to possess the fullness of Gospel truth, anointing and gifting. But The Word is like a seed borne on the Wind of the Spirit; who can control either? What God gives no man can take away. (I John 2: 20 & 27).

That said, I have one word for the St Stephen the Great Trust and all you Protestant exclusivists and Christian cults out there who can't get enough spiritual hegemony:

.....................Tough!

Fragrant Flatulence Blessing

2007-05-14T04:52:00.000-07:00

I once heard of a minister who handed out helium balloons at the beginning of a service in order that members of the congregation might indicate when they had been blessed during the service by releasing their balloon. But juvenile shows of devotion of this kind are not radical enough for some: The inner circle fellowship in the village of Twerpington, England, have also taken to releasing quantities of gas during their worship. The Rev. John Bilgewater has encouraged members of his congregation to break wind loudly during his services as a sign of humility. So-called “Times of Release” have become an established and regular part of worship. "The idea", says Rev. Bilgewater, "is to break down inhibition, British reserve and pride. Children regularly break wind without embarrassment and the Bible says we must be like children. The Bible contains lots of references to wind. It also provides a means of releasing spirits of bondage, and as these are released the unpleasant odors are replaced with fragrance”.

The inner circle fellowship at Twerpington used to be part of the Baptist Union, but the Union became concerned about the Minister’s authoritarian style of leadership and finally broke their links with the fellowship over disagreements with Bilgewater’s views on sanctified flatulence.

After the Toronto blessing, with its outbreaks of hysterical laughter, grunting, roaring, barking, quacking and other noises (collectively referred to as “Old MacDonaldisms”) it might be thought that the gamut of strange and degrading sounds in worship had been exhausted, but as events at Twerpington have shown there is always new ground, if not wind, to be broken in this respect.

The above article was published in the first copy of VNP dated April 2000. At the time of writing one of the Christian groups I had at the back my mind were the snake handling and poison drinking fellowships found in America. They base their bizarre practice on Mark 16:18. There is a very general lesson and warning here about the perversity of belief and practice that some people are driven to in the name religion. History tells us that religious ritual can be even more perverse than I can imagine or the snake handlers have invented. Some of those rituals are too unpleasant to even mention.

Rick Warren - Again

2007-04-12T09:43:00.000-07:00

My church recently completed its lent studies of Rick Warren’s book “The Purpose Driven Life”. In spite of the occasional lapse into a “just so” spirituality and quip theology, I was, in the main, left with a very favorable impression of this book. If there is a single word that encapsulates my reasons for this, that word is “Inclusiveness”. Let me explain.

I have to confess that there has been and still is much mutual discomfort, sometimes bordering on deep repugnance, between evangelical Christianity and myself. Looking back that tension started the day I was converted. There were and are many reasons for this, but one major of cause of this conflict is encapsulated in one word “Exclusiveness”. Rick Warren’s inclusiveness implicitly undermines this exclusiveness and yet he does not stray beyond the traditional doctrinal shape of Christianity.

I can find many examples of Warren’s stealth attack on Christian exclusivism: Here are some examples:

“The most common mistake in worship is seeking an experience rather than seeking God” (P109). “Too many equate being emotionally moved by music as being moved by the Spirit” (P102). “There is no one size fits all approach to worship .... you don’t bring glory to God by trying to be someone he never intended you to be” (P103). “God made introverts and extroverts. He made some people love routine and those who love variety. He made some people thinkers and others feelers. Some people work best when given an individual assignment while others work better with a team” (P245). “Because God loves variety and he wants us to be special, no single gift is given to everyone. Also, no individual receives all the gifts” (P236). “There are no definitions of spiritual gifts given in the Bible, so any definitions are arbitrary and usually represent a denominational bias.” P250. “The Bible is filled with examples of different abilities that God uses for His glory” (P242).

The latter half of the twentieth century witnessed the intellectual impoverishment of large sections of the church. Unable to make sense of the ascendancy of science and reason there was a great Christian escape into various forms of gnostic enlightenment, and this was especially manifest amongst charismatic fellowships. Gnosticism is a general religious phenomenon found in other religions and it is not specifically Christian. Consequently, it skews the personality demographics of churches.

On the other hand Warren’s approach is a much-needed antidote to the spiritual elitism, exclusivism, fideism and authoritarianism that has wracked parts of charismatic Christianity, and in all probability continues to do so today. Warren’s book subtly subverts gnosto-christianity; How is it that Warren can talk about spiritual gifts without any reference to ‘charismatic initiation’? How can he accept that Christains can be filled with the Spirit without speaking in tongues? Should he allow thinking Christians to ‘be in the Spirit’ without embracing some form of fideism? Warren’s vision of the church, as far as I can tell, is big enough to include a variety of personalities types, spiritual gifting, experience, traits and styles. However, many Christains have a high tolerance of inconsistency and incoherence and they achieve this by ignoring or not seeing cognitive anomalies, and so Warren’s book is unlikely to register as a challenge to the gnosto-christian status quo.

Fighting Christians: Again

2007-04-10T04:19:00.000-07:00

Further evidence that American evangelicalism is in disarray surfaced this month with a book review in ‘Christianity’. The book reviewed is “Thy Kingdom Come – an evangelical’s lament” by Randall Balmer and the reviewer is John Drane, senior professor at the School of Theology in Fuller Seminary, California. This is what Drane writes:

Fans of James Dobson, Pat Robertson and their ilk will hate this book. Randall Balmer argues that the religious right in America has trivialised the Gospel and made Christains a laughing stock: by campaigning on issues such as homosexuality and intelligent design (aka creationism) they have managed to persuade everyone that the gospel has nothing to say to the struggles of everyday life. In doing so, he believes they have denied the biblically-faithful evangelical heritage espoused by the founding fathers, and have become agents of oppression rather than redemption. ... It offers a stark analysis of what happens when ‘mission’ is reduced to complaint and condemnation....

This book adds to my colossal backlog of books I should be reading. If anyone gets to it before I do, let me know what you think.

Emerging Church: Again

2007-03-08T05:02:00.000-08:00

Reachout trust, the Christian ministry to the cults, has weighed in on the Emerging Church debate. In their spring quarterly newsletter they present the first part of a two-part article on Emerging Church. Let me say straight away that Reachout are usually fairly circumspect in their approach, and when they offer criticism it is likely to be after careful consideration of the evidence, Biblical and otherwise, and even then they don’t take their criticisms to automatically condemn a group as sub-Christian. This seems to be the pattern with their consideration of Emerging Church, and their article expresses reservations rather than outright condemnation of EC. For these reasons I usually respect the opinions of Reachout. Reachout’s measured tone would be well emulated by some other so called “discernment ministries”, ministries that consider anything less than their own views on a subject as tantamount to blasphemy.

Reachout’s article expresses two reservations. The first is based on the observation that The Church, by definition, consists of the converted and if that is the case then what goes on within the church is primarily directed to the ecclesia (that is, converted people), and hence Church is defined as the “communion of the saints”. Thus, Reachout reasons, church should not be a “postmodern” environment for generation Xers with the consequence that services become entertainment rather than God centered services. But whilst it is true that much of what goes on in church is for those who are already convinced believers, Christains cannot operate in a cultural vacuum and will therefore use the language, styles, issues and thought forms of their surrounding culture, and will naturally communicate using the media on which they themselves have been reared and with which they feel comfortable. Moreover, a church is at liberty to use its own premises as a venue for outreach and therefore if an EC church is adept at using its immediate locale to successfully communicate the Gospel within the parameters of its culture, I fail to see why that should be interpreted as just entertainment. Although I think Reachout has a point here in that in giving attention to the means of communion one can loose site of God being the focus of that communion, I feel that as long this hazard is acknowledged then the force of Reachout’s criticism need not apply.

The other concern of Reachout is Emerging Church’s emphasis on experimentation. Clearly the creation itself has an experimental component: God’s creatures, such as ourselves, experiment: we seek, we explore, we find, we hypothesize, we essay, we select, we test, we reject, we knock on doors, we update our knowledge, and correct our knowledge; these are all legitimate activities and, for me, come under the rubric of experimental behavior. However, Reachout quotes EC pundit Michael Moynagh whom, in his book “Emerging-Church.intro”, first remarks on the created trait of experimentation but then goes onto to say:

“Some theologians would go further. They would say that the experimentation we see in the creation reflects an aspect of God himself. God is an experimenter”

This latter point takes us into very deep theological water indeed, but I have say that at the moment I share Reachout’s concern that if this concept of an “experimenting God” is applied in anything other than a metaphorical way then it does seem to conflict with traditional views on the omniscience, omnipotence, and timelessness of God.

I eagerly await the next Reachout article. For me EC is certainly an area of serious study and my own feelings are still mixed. On the one hand the function of EC has been remedial in counterbalancing, challenging, and exposing some of the unauthentic excesses of evangelicalism. Moreover, I feel that a constructive and sympathetic attitude should be taken toward EC’s interesting experiments with church and church worship. And yet on the other hand I am very much a Grand narrative man myself and consequently I fear that a too close identification of EC with Postmodernism may lead to the loss of the doctrinal shape of Christianity. That doctrine is like the exoskeleton of an organism, and acts as a protective cover and gives the Church a requisite rigidity of form. In reacting against imbalances EC may be in danger of overreacting and thereby be prone to a loss of balance itself.

Ricks Ricks Ricks Warren

2007-03-02T02:46:00.000-08:00

My own church is currently working through Rick Warren’s book “The Purpose Driven Church”. When I heard that we were set to do this series my first thought was: “Ah! I wonder if this is going to be another formulaic presentation of Christianity, suffused with an upbeat American tone and riddled with ‘do this and you’ll get that’ remedies. Easy as ABC…!” Well, the book is nowhere near as bad as that, of course, and it does raise many interesting and important issues. But best of all is that when one looks into the Rick Warren phenomenon it opens up a window on the hot scene of American religious infighting – witness the picture of Rev Rick Warren accompanying this post, a picture I found on one lurid and hysterical web site that screamed hell and damnation to the good Rev all over my screen!

The controversy surrounding Rick Warren reached my ears sometime ago via Reachout Trust, the Richmond (England) based group that watches the cults. Much of the controversy, it seems, is sourced in America where evangelical subcultures vie with one another in a seething sea of claim and counter claim. To date my own contact with Rick Warren’s textual presence suggests that he holds fairly conservative doctrines that I do not myself find particularly disagreeable.

The American Evangelical furor over Warren seems not so much due to his doctrine as it is his association with causes hated by the American evangelical right. For example: his signing of the Global Warming Pact, his connections with the United Nations; his inviting liberal democrat Barack Obama to Saddleback to talk on AIDS, his sharing of platforms with New Age speakers, his use of suspect Bible translations, and his soft peddling of fire and brimstone preaching, have all lead critics to attempt to trace Warren’s taste for bad company back to doctrinal unorthodoxy. Out and out unorthodoxy has been difficult to pin on Warren and these critics, unable to square his apparent doctrinal conservatism with the sympathetic noises he makes to those beyond the conservative political pale, have simply thrown their hands up and accused him of “flip-flopping”. Perhaps a lot of it is down to Warren having a temperamental disposition toward inclusiveness rather than confrontation – a trait I have seen in some other Christian leaders. But whatever, for Rick its “guilt by association” in a country where the quality of one’s of faith is often measured by an expectation that the ramifications of Christianity inevitably lead to a right wing slant to one’s politics.

The following is a quote from one anti-Warren web site I visited and is evidence of just how vicious evangelical infighting can get. At the end of a garish and vulgar looking web page dedicated to rubbishing Warren it concluded with:

“Rick Warren has NO FAITH in Jesus Christ, only in his precious purpose-driven program and Peace Plan. His dirty, rotten, stinking, gnat-covered fruit is an abomination and stench to the Lord.”

These “discernment” ministries, as they usually think of themselves, tend to cancel out in a welter of mutual criticism. However, they are also in danger of canceling out true Christianity in the process. Thank God for the Open Gospel, which provides us with the conceptual framework to make sense of just why Christianity is so often plagued by fragmented squabbling factions. Most amazing of all is that God gives these screaming hysterical believers the grace that they are so unwilling to offer to their fellow Christains. Either that or Christianity is false.

On Emerging Church

2007-01-19T05:22:00.000-08:00

As my last post raised the knotty question of “Emerging Church” I thought I had better post something indicating my position on this matter. I could think of nothing better to do than reproduce a comment I posted on Monty's blog who was also thinking about the issue at the time. Frankly, I have to admit that I haven’t developed my thoughts on “Emerging Church” since I posted this comment (I really need to do a bit more studying):

On this emerging church business: I haven’t done much work on this matter myself but here are my first impressions, possibly to be corrected and enhanced by further study.

‘Emerging Church’ is one of those expressions that catches an underlying mood - probably a mood of disappointment/disaffection. That same mood might have manifested itself as far back as David Tomlinson - a defector from the quasi-cult restorationist movement - he emerged from that movement a rather disillusioned man and became the de-facto leader of “Post evangelicalism”.

Perhaps as a result of a quick succession of false dawns (involving various gnostic experiences, blessings, healings, prophecies, revivals, church structures, spiritual formulae, big personalities etc etc) crammed into living memory, a feeling of “we’ve tried all that, so where to next” prevails amongst Christians. I have seen quite a few spiritual restarts even in my time: that is, groups who attempt to clear the ground of the spiritual elaborations of their forerunners and remake church as they attempt to get back to a kind of contemporary primitive church – an oxymoron if there ever was one.

It’s not surprising, then, that the emerging church is a new philosophy of church that doesn’t want to look like a new overarching philosophy of church – after all, we’ve seen no end of them before. So the emerging church faces the logical conundrum also faced by postmodernism – how do you present a completely new philosophy without it looking like just another new philosophy? The result is a rather groping exploratory approach where the stress is on the journey rather than the destination, because all destinations, true to the postmodern sentiment, are thought to be end-of-rainbows. Sometimes there can be a downright evasiveness about just what the “new philosophy” stands for.

Emerging church knows what it isn’t, but sometimes I feel that it is not at all sure about what it actually is: Christian dissenters find themselves grasping the term “Emerging church” just as some disaffected evangelicals grasped at the term “Post evangelical” - terms that act as “rafts for the mind” when the mind is in the sea of confusing times. Thus under the umbrella of “emerging church” one can find Christains that make uneasy bedfellows – in short “emerging church” is a pastiche of views and a mixture of Christains that are trying to jump start a new kind of church, although some of them are still looking for the jump leads.

However, having said all that I find myself on balance sympathising with emerging church in as much as it is a reaction against, dowdy, strict, kitschy, plastic, corny, cosmetic, contrived, dated, out-of-touch, domineering, authoritarian, patriarchal, false, artificial, triumphalistic, pseudo, affected, unselfconscious manifestations of Christianity (if you want that in even more emotive terms see Ben). Fair enough we can all be a bit like any of those things at times, but when these tacky Christian styles come with a self confidence born of a conceited spiritual narcissism the product is very ugly phenomenon indeed, and I find myself in common cause with the emerging church people, in spite of being a “Grand Narrative” man myself.

Let me add that I do bulk at some emerging church counter reactions, reactions that may shows signs of the beginnings of a loss of grasp of the grand over arching themes of structured Christianity. Instead these themes have morphed into the shapeless blob of “God consciousness”. And the tremendous irony is that that is precisely where the affected touchy-feely narcissistic manifestations of Christianity, which emerging church is reacting against, was also taking us!

But I shouldn’t unfairly generalize on what seems to be a very variegated trend. On the matter of engaging society emerging church may have something to teach us and someone like Paul is probably the man ask about it. (and Ben!) I was fairly impressed by the authentic feel of the “Nooma” DVD’s (Rob Bell et al) and moreover there seemed to be behind them a gospel message that you and I, as fairly conservative Christains, would recognize and applaud.

“Evangelical Culture Disgusting” says Mega Church leader

2007-01-17T10:06:00.000-08:00

A few postings I ago I reported the rather strong words of the Rev Mark Stibbe who suggested that those Christains who did not fall for the 1994 Toronto Blessing were in danger of committing the unforgivable sin. Well, today I have just received my copy of the February edition of “Christainity”. In this edition Rob Bell, Pastor of an emerging mega church and creator of the Nooma series of DVDs, is reported as saying “Evangelical culture is terribly sick in America. It’s absolutely disgusting and it is in no way a representation of what Jesus had in mind. It’s actually anti-Christ in its orientation”. Now let me say straight away that my impressions of Rob Bell have generally been very favourable and he comes over as an unwilling Christian megastar who is acutely aware of the pitfalls of celebrity and heady Christian scenes. But is evangelical culture really disgusting? That accusation is no big deal: how many times have I wanted to sign a written complaint about this or that bizzare evangelical practice or belief with “Disgusted of Norwich”? However, the “anti-christ” charge is rather different: that’s as strong as accusations of theological sin can get and makes Stibbe look like a master of tact! Whatever the truth is here it is nevertheless clear that there is spiritual pathology in America, because at the very least this sort of contention is evidence that things are not at all right between some very influential American Christains.

I sometimes ask myself why do I have to take such an interest in the “negative” hotspots of the Christian community and immerse my self in the worst that that community can throw at me? Some Christains, it seems, opt for a subtle epistemological method that in one sweep fixes all the deep contradictions in their ontology – they simply don’t go looking for them or they ignore them when they come their way. They stay within their social and empirical playpen and this circumvents what are otherwise spiritually dangerous liaisons with circumstances that are difficult to interpret. And those puzzling circumstances can be excessively challenging: after all, some of the contradictions one finds within evangelicalism actually could be construed as evidence against the very veracity of Christianity (if such is possible)

Why don’t I lead the quiet life and use a playpen epistemology? I don’t think I could do that simply because, as any serious investigator is aware, it is those strange anomalies that don’t quite fit the categories which are signposts to deeper truths. For this reason, and for reasons of integrity, VNP is committed to facing up to the whole of reality without prejudice, even when those sense making interpretations are not readily to hand.

Make my day - give me an anomaly.

Signs and Blunders

2006-12-08T04:31:00.000-08:00

In 2001 I distributed the following bogus Press release at church:

FINGER LICKING GOOD

The City of Slough, which has been dubbed the most boring place on Earth, has been guest to strange events at a local Anglican church. St. Leonard’s, on Lime side, has witnessed a sudden increase in attendance since reports that communion bread and wine have started to taste like honey.

A church member said "It was wonderful: we had this really up lifting communion service, and when I tasted the bread I couldn't believe it - it was sweet!" Another said "I saw my communion bread just dripping with honey and the wine reminded me of the syrup of figs I used to have when I was young. I knew then that God was just blessing us."

When asked what was happening at his church the minister, the Rt. Rev. Verity Vaughan said "The Lord has just chosen to Bless us. Our God is a God of abundance. This blessing has just done marvels for people’s faith. One week we had communion every night. People are just flocking in and lives are being changed and Christ is just being glorified.

After communion people are seen licking their fingers to remove traces of the holy food. Some have said that the pews are getting tacky due to contact with sticky fingers. There are unconfirmed reports that people have been seen licking the pews and even the fingers of those communicants who have been privileged to receive honeyed sacraments.

One investigator, a member of the local Voltaire society, said of the sticky pews: "Yes they were sticky, but then the varnish on those pews is years old and is probably decomposing". He also said that there was a rumour of someone bringing in a Jar of honey but he was unable to confirm this. Several years ago he investigated a case not unlike it at an Eastern Orthodox church where it was claimed that Christ's face could been seen reflected in the wine, but the clerics didn't like it because the Wine took so long to distribute.

Father Patrick O'Rumme, priest of the nearby Catholic Church, said that he took the whole thing with a pinch salt: "These Charismatics are forever looking for some new miracle. The Bible says that the communion elements are Christ's body and blood, not honey and syrup". He declined to comment when asked if at his church they tasted of meat and blood.

A representative of Ebenezer Chapel on the other side of town said "Our corrugated iron premises are damp and cold and sometimes our bread goes moldy, but we're not worried. It's what it means that counts not what it tastes like. During the war we once had to use silage bread and red cabbage water".

The Bishop of the diocese, Dr. Tannington-Hyde, was unavailable for comment. A Spokesman said that the Bishop was chairing an ecumenical conference on feminist liturgical needs at this moment in time and his situation was sticky enough.

Esat@news Agency January 2001

More than one person was either convinced or unsure that the above report was genuine. I can hardly blame them. The only thing that gives the game away is the corny name of the Catholic Priest. Everything else is completely plausible.

The Open Gospel

2006-11-18T06:26:00.000-08:00

In March of 2000 I endeavoured to produce a pithy statement that summarised my view of the kernel of Christianity. Rather than annunciate an exclusive and purist formula defining some Christian sub-grouping I was anxious to forge an inclusive statement giving account of the hostile demeanor often adopted by Christains sub-cultures toward one another. I came up with the following statement. It is a bit formal and legal sounding, perhaps because I wanted to make it as bullet proof as possible.

The "Open Gospel" is a term I use to indicate that the common, defining, distinctive, and primary phenomenon of Christianity is not its patchwork of sometimes mutually hostile church subcultures but the underlying Gospel message, a message which, unbounded by cultural barriers, diffuses laissez-faire style through populations spawning a variety of church communities. These communities, which may or may not be independent of one another, display varying degrees of development, spiritual health and quality of culture. The net result is that no one group or subculture (Thank God) can claim to have privileged access to the Gospel message, or to have sole agency in its propagation, or to be the only group expressing the spiritual life and gifting that it gives. Inevitably, some Christian communities will vociferously claim that they are either the best and most faithful representatives of the Gospel, or perhaps its only representatives. Self praise is, of course, no recommendation and anyway such claims are little more than bluster because they are impossible to enforce: It is now five hundred years since the Roman Catholic church started to lose the power to enforce its claim to being the sole distributor and representative of the Gospel. But even at the height of Roman Catholic political power it would seem almost impossible to attain complete control of a message that can pass quietly from mind to mind. Thus, it is exceedingly difficult to enforce monopoly claims upon the Gospel, even under conditions favouring such claims. Clearly the Good News is out, and groups who maintain they have exclusive rights to it can simply be ignored by other groups who have taken it to heart and made it their own, in all its fullness. Some Christian sub communities will undoubtedly retain their mutual prejudices toward one another and express a partiality as to who can or cannot claim to possess the fullness of Gospel truth, anointing and gifting. But The Word is like a seed borne on the Wind of the Spirit; who can control either? What God gives no man can take away. (I John 2: 20 & 27)

The idea of the Open Gospel is, for me at least, a source of great consolation as it helps reduce the significance of the contentions surrounding parochial religious elaborations of particular cultural realisations of Christianity. Those elaborations are sometimes beautiful and fascinating, sometimes helpful, sometimes essential, sometimes relevant, sometimes indifferent, sometimes quaint, sometimes outdated, sometimes comical, sometimes bizarre, sometimes tasteless, sometimes tacky, and, unfortunately, sometimes malign. Whether we are talking of the decorative trappings of ritual and vestment, or obsessions with mystical gnosis, or strict adherence to fancied biblical ordinances, or interpretations which use the Bible to contrive rigid blueprints for arranging life and church, we have here behavioural forms which, whilst they may not be absolutely wrong, are often championed by those who protect them with a jealous religious zeal. Thus, Christians who live beyond the religious subcultures defined by these behavioural forms may find themselves being bullied by sectarian Christian zealots who will accuse them of being disobedient to the Divine order. These zealous Christians may even regard the testimonies of other Christians as void or at best substandard. But a high view of the Open Gospel allows one to rise above Christian infighting and to be less phased by Christian cultural forms whose sectarianism stands in ironic contrast to the message that has spawned them, a message which passes from ear to ear jumping the boundaries separating communities. The Open Gospel is a majestic vision of the essence of Christianity, a vision which not only sees the Gospel as being, at the very least, the world's best bet for a revelation of the meaning of life, the universe and everything, but also an allusion to timeless and lofty principles from which the vagaries of Christian ethos and culture do not detract.
c. T. V. Reeves March 2000

The Plain Truth

2006-11-17T05:37:00.000-08:00

With the apparent demise of the optimistic modernist belief in ‘Grand Narratives’, postmodern ‘Little Narratives’ abound. In fact narratives are getting smaller and smaller as is evidenced by the latest book from brilliant and innovative secular theologian Julian O'Gobstopper. O’Gobstopper has spent 4 years on a work entitled “The Nihilist's Bible”, a monumental tome consisting of 2257 pages of blank paper. “As a nihilist theologian and philosopher” says O'Gobstopper, “I have spent many years thinking about nothing and this book is the result. It is a definitive statement of today's progressive and utilitarian philosophy. It moves us away from the authoritarian and didactic assumptions that books should contain content. This book strongly affirms the ambiguity of everything. It leaves the plot open, free for the reader to complete within the parameters of his or her experience, and to impute whatever meaning and truths (s)he wants.” Asked whether the book classified as fact or fiction O'Gobstopper replied that the distinction between fact and fiction was itself a fiction.

Although not exactly a challenge for the presses, the spelling checker and the indexing software, the publication wasn't without its production problems. Proofreaders claimed the proofs gave them headaches and a variant of “snow blindness” as they checked the volume for typos, and page make-up compositors walked out angry that content-free books could set a precedent in publishing that may lead to a loss of jobs. A Union spokesman stated, “It was aw-right for the Luddites, at least they had sommit to smash, but what do my members do when there’s now’t to hit out at?”

O'Gobstopper's book:Starting (and finishing) with a blank sheet.

A sample page from O’Gobstopper’s scholarly work is illustrated below:

(This space has been intentionally left blank by VNP typographic staff)

(The above article was first published in the December 2004 edition of VNP)

Don’t Try this at Home

2006-11-03T08:00:00.000-08:00

Many churches will be impressed with the latest house group study book “Facing Up to Change”, with its full range of “In yer face” activities. In the introductory study the home group is asked to sit quietly and contemplatively in a room illuminated only by a candle. But the meditative peace is not long lived; the candle turns out to be, in fact, a disguised November 5th “howling thunderclap” and a short spurt of sparks is followed by a head splitting whistle terminated by a deafening report. Participants are then asked to continue to sit quietly and contemplatively until the acrid smoke clears and the sounds of the dying fades before considering some soul-searching questions. Now you might think that all this would be a great introduction to the manner of Christ’s return and our preparedness for it; but no, “Facing up to Change” gives anything that threatens to be a theological can of worms a wide birth and instead puts the inscrutable inner life of the heart under the spot light. Accordingly, as explosions are the most rapid form of change known to man, this is the cue for a series of probing questions on facing change:

Are you prepared for sudden and unexpected changes?
Did the firework disturb your comfort zone?
Can you maintain your cool in the face of change?
Does change make you feel nervous?

Other stimulating study-activities in the book include a custard pie fight (Study 3: “Taking the stick when you lobby for change”), a piano smashing competition (Study 4: “Putting up with discordance”) and a snail race (Study 7: “Getting those boring old f*rts moving”). At the end of the study book you will be sure to want change; at least a change from all those courses and talk about the need to change.

(The above article was first published in the June 2001 edition of VNP)