"a Generous Or+thodoxy": Part 1

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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.

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?