A Hemisphere Short of a Brain.

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UK and has been replaced with a symbolic constitutional monarch, likewise many of the literal Christian doctrines have been replaced by symbolic meanings in the minds of liberal Christians.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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!"

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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.

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

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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.

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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!

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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:

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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.

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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

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

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 be 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 Christians 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

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.

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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."

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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.