A (Sort Of) Defense Of Joel Osteen

Mark this down because you won't see those words again. I don't feel a need to defend Joel Osteen as a brother in Christ, because he pretty clearly is not, but the attacks on him have a different motivation.

A lot of people, including me, poked at Joel Osteen because "his church" in Houston didn't open up to shelter people. My point was that Osteen was a heretic and a false teacher long before Hurricane Harvey but the reality of the story behind Lakewood church, including Twitter attacks and videos from guys who are pretty clearly homosexual and have an ulterior motive, is a little more complex.

Lakewood "Church" is just a giant auditorium. In a report that gets to the real story better than some angry ranting on Twitter, you read the following:

And considering that Houston officials had set up shelters throughout the city — including a massive location at the George R. Brown Convention Center just five miles from Lakewood — Iloff said that the church had planned to host people in the event that those locations were full or at capacity.

“We had warning with this storm, so they set up shelters around the city … that convention center is 5 or 6 times bigger [than Lakewood],” he told Faithwire. “They set that up with everything from the cots, food, triage.”

Iloff also noted that, while Lakewood was more than willing to make-do and house people, unlike the convention center, Lakewood has “no showers” and no kitchen, making the church more of an emergency shelter than anything else. Initially, the church waited to hear from city officials and planned to respond if needed.

So the city already has emergency shelters and Lakewood was willing to serve as an overflow. It isn't like there isn't historical evidence of what happens when you try to house people in mass somewhere that is not properly equipped.

This is the description of the Superdome in New Orleans in August of 2005, right after Hurricane Katrina, from a story in the New York Times, Superdome: Haven QuicklyBecomes an Ordeal.

They had flocked to the arena seeking sanctuary from the winds and waters of Hurricane Katrina. But understaffed, undersupplied and without air-conditioning or even much lighting, the domed stadium quickly became a sweltering and surreal vault, a place of overflowing toilets and no showers. Food and water, blankets and sheets, were in short supply. And the dome's reluctant residents exchanged horror stories, including reports, which could not be confirmed by the authorities, of a suicide and of rapes.

By Wednesday the stink was staggering. Heaps of rotting garbage in bulging white plastic bags baked under a blazing Louisiana sun on the main entry plaza, choking new arrivals as they made their way into the stadium after being plucked off rooftops and balconies.

The odor billowing from toilets was even fouler. Trash spilled across corridors and aisles, slippery with smelly mud and scraps of food.

Even a "church" like Lakewood is not equipped to handle even 500 displaced people. No kitchens, no showers, an staff untrained in dealing with medical issues and possible criminal behavior, it isn't really an ideal place to house people or even a suitable place except in case of emergency. Obviously when you have a building that cost tens of millions of dollars and is lavishly outfitted, you don't want hordes of people messing it up. That is a lesson for a different day, when your "church" is treated like a religious museum instead of a Kingdom outpost, that is a problem and one that is true at Lakewood, in fancy cathedrals and in many orthodox Christian churches alike.

There is an important message here. Even having a completely neutered "Gospel" is not going to insulate you from social media attacks by people with blue check marks and rainbow flags in their Twitter profile. Make no mistake, the guys tweeting and posting videos in the parking lot of Lakewood don't give a fig about the false teaching of Lakewood because they aren't there on every Sunday when heresy is being proclaimed from the stage. They simply see this as an easy way to paint "Christians" as hypocrites to provide cover for their own wanton sin and rebellion against God.

Again let me be clear. Joel Osteen is not a Christian as far as I can tell. He is a false teacher and espouses "another gospel" of the same severity as that anathematized by Paul in his letter to the Galatians. But the attacks on him by many people are aimed not at him but at genuine Christians being lumped in with him. While the church in America is mobilizing via volunteer and financial donations in a huge way, there are still those that will wag an accusing finger at Christians as well as religious non-Christians like Osteen and the Mormons and claim they are not doing their part. It is an obvious lie and one we should expect but a lie repeated often enough serves the dishonest better than the truth. By all means call out Joel Osteen for his heretical teaching but be careful about siding with unbelievers in your attack because often the real target is you.

If There Were An Award For Such A Thing

In the category of "Most Dangerous Theological Nonsense In A Single News Story", we have a very solid contender with this story that was plastered all over Facebook yesterday: "Pope Francis makes two children saints who saw Virgin Mary 100 years ago".

The title alone is nonsense. Mary doesn't appear as an apparition in visions and if she did she wouldn't be the "Virgin" Mary as she clearly is shown in in the Bible to have had children after the birth of Jesus. Jorge Bergoglio, aka "Pope Francis", doesn't have the power or authority to declare anyone a saint. The Bible again is clear on this, all Christians are referred to as saints. You become a saint when you are born again, not when a neo-Marxist religious leader declares you are based on a phony vision.

The story itself is enough to make me actually nauseous. Not in a hyperbolic sense but in a literal sense because of the spiritual deadness that accompanies this story that so many people seem to think is just wonderful.

FATIMA, Portugal – Pope Francis added two Portuguese shepherd children to the roster of Catholic saints Saturday, honoring young siblings whose reported visions of the Virgin Mary 100 years ago turned the Portuguese farm town of Fatima into one of the world's most important Catholic shrines.

Francis proclaimed Francisco and Jacinta Marto saints at the start of Mass marking the centenary of their visions. A half-million people watched in the vast square in front of the shrine's basilica, the Vatican said, citing Portuguese authorities. Many had spent days at Fatima in quiet prayer, reciting rosaries before a statue of the Madonna. They clapped as soon as Francis read the proclamation aloud.

How many people bowed before a statue, a graven image, rubbing beads and repeating rote prayers to a human being? The Mary of Scripture would be horrified to see people showing such slavish devotion to her instead of her Son. For the Scripturally literate Christian the very idea of this is heart-breaking and tragic but unfortunately far from unexpected. Humans have long turn to idols in place of the true living God.

"It is amazing, it is like an answer to prayer because I felt that always they would be canonized," said Agnes Walsh from Killarney, Ireland. She said she prayed to Francisco Marto for 20 years, hoping her four daughters would meet "nice boys like Francisco." ''The four of them have met boys that are just beautiful I couldn't ask for better, so he has answered all my prayers," she said.

Praying to a dead shepherd boy, who may or may not have even been a Christian in the first place, a boy who died almost a century ago and thinking that he somehow has the power to grant prayer petitions? This boy, Francisco Marto, was 9 when he allegedly had "visions" and died when he was 11. Then I came across this and even I was stunned by the paganism on display (emphasis mine)

Before the Mass, Francis prayed at the tombs of each of the Fatima visionaries. The Marto siblings died two years after the visions during Europe's Spanish flu pandemic. Lucia is on track for possible beatification, but her process couldn't start until after her 2005 death. 

At the end of the Mass, Francis was to offer a special greeting to the many faithful who flock to Fatima in hopes of healing. Many toss wax body parts — hands, hearts, livers and limbs — into a giant fire pit at the shrine as an offering.

Bringing a wax body part, presumably from a limb or organ you want healed, and throwing it into a fire while praying to Mary?! It is little wonder that so many Haitians are comfortable blending Voodoo and Catholicism because that is not really much different from sticking needles into a voodoo doll to hurt your enemies. Practices like this are right in line with things like transubstantiation, the practice of relics where people venerate body parts, items and even vials of preserved human blood and other pagan practices that go under the guise of "Christianity"

The parents of the boy who was allegedly miraculously healed, thus giving the seal of approval on the elevation of a"saint", said something similarly awful.

"We thank God for Lucas' cure and we know in all faith from our heart that this miracle was obtained with the help of the little shepherd children Francisco and Jacinta," Baptista told reporters earlier as the family broke their silence to reveal details of the case.

So we thank God for our son's healing but the miracle required the "help" of two deceased shephard children. I guess God can't do it alone and I guess Jesus is not a sufficient mediator, you need sub-mediators. That just does violence to everything we read in the New Testament.

I don't know what, if anything, these kids saw or didn't see other than being certain that they didn't see "the Virgin Mary". Satan was able to show visions even to the Christ (Luke 4:5) so simply claiming to have seen a vision doesn't carry much weight with me and especially having been formerly deceived by the successors to a charlatan who claimed to see visions which also contradicted or added to Scripture.

Exodus 20:4-5

Like the bogus "visions" reported by the founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith, I have no idea if these "visions" were the result of childhood imagination or mental/physical illness or were in fact visions of a demonic sort. The manner of their story does sound a lot like Joseph Smith's fanciful tale and even though they stuck to their story that proves nothing as Joseph Smith, David Koresh and other false teachers like Jim Jones stuck to their stories even when it meant their death. I am sure that both Smith and Reading the "revelations" of the "The Secrets of Fatima" they allegedly received even reads a lot to my eyes like the writings of Smith. I am not trying to create direct correlation between cultists like Smith, Koresh and Jones and these kids, just pointing out that claims of kooky visions are pretty common. The three "visions" themselves are an interesting story,

Lucia Santos recorded a vision of "hell" in the first vision which was revealed only in 1941 which seems odd to me, as was the second "vision", one which "predicted" that the first World War would end but if men were still offending God a worse one would "break out during the Pontificate of Pope Pius XI". It turns out that this very specific "revelation" was right! World War One did end and a new World War broke out when "Pope Pius XI" was in charge from 1922-1939. I am certainly not suspicious at all that these details were revealed in 1941, years after the first World War ended and the second began. In fact if I were a more suspicious sort I might think it was oddly convenient that she disclosed these specific details only after the details were known. If I were able to prophesy about events that have already come to pass, my prophetic batting average would be 1.000. The third vision is a rambling "vision" of a "Pope" where he is described as:

"...the Holy Father passed through a big city half in ruins and half trembling with halting step, afflicted with pain and sorrow, he prayed for the souls of the corpses he met on his way; having reached the top of the mountain, on his knees at the foot of the big Cross he was killed by a group of soldiers who fired bullets and arrows at him, and in the same way there died one after another the other Bishops, Priests, men and women Religious, and various lay people of different ranks and positions. Beneath the two arms of the Cross there were two Angels each with a crystal aspersorium in his hand, in which they gathered up the blood of the Martyrs and with it sprinkled the souls that were making their way to God."

First, people don't "make their way to God" because of the blood of Roman clergy being sprinkled on them by angels, the only way people are reconciled to God is by the blood of Jesus Christ. His blood is sufficient. Second, the Vatican in the summer of 2000 announced it would "reveal" the "third vision" which is when the details were revealed to the world. In the announcement letter posted on the official Vatican website, "Cardinal" Angelo Sodano strongly implies that the vision is about the attempted assassination of Karol Józef Wojtyła, aka Pope John Paul II, which coincidentally already had happened. Wojtyla apparently agreed:

After the assassination attempt of 13 May 1981, it appeared evident to His Holiness that it was "a motherly hand which guided the bullet’s path", enabling the "dying Pope" to halt "at the threshold of death" (Pope John Paul II. Meditation with the Italian Bishops from the Policlinico Gemelli, Insegnamenti, vol XVII/1, 1994, p. 1061). On the occasion of a visit to Rome by the then Bishop of Leiria-Fatima, the Pope decided to give him the bullet which had remained in the jeep after the assassination attempt, so that it might be kept in the Shrine. At the behest of the Bishop, the bullet was later set in the crown of the statue of Our Lady of Fatima.

Placing a bullet in the crown of a statue. That is just more, plain old simple primitive paganism. There are obvious issues with assigning this as a prophesy about an attempted assassination. First the "vision" speaks of "a group of soldiers". The would-be assassin, Mehmet Ali Ağca, was alone and not a soldier. He didn't kill Wojtyla, he just wounded him whereas the "prophecy" claimed "he was killed". No other "Bishops, Priests, men and women religious..." etc. were killed although a few by-standers were hit by bullets. The would-be assassin used a pistol, not arrows. Vatican City where he was shot is not a "mountain", it sits at the highest point at 250' above sea-level. But other than that the "prophecy" was spot on! One would think that a prophecy that was revealed 19 years after an event would do a better job of predicting the event but this one seems more likely to be a fanciful "vision" that was forcibly interpreted by a "Cardinal" as applying to a historical event to give it credence. Apparently the "Pope Emeritus" Joseph Ratzinger, aka Pope Benedict VXI, remarked at the time that "No great mystery is revealed; nor is the future unveiled". Ratzinger is probably my favorite recent "Pope" even though he is a heretic.

Modern Roman Catholicism as it is practiced in America is by and large a mostly innocuous, if damnably false, religion but the Catholicism of years past is a swamp of pagan mysticism dressed up in pseudo-Christian lingo. When all you know is St. John's Catholic Church down on the corner with parishioners that are neighbors, friends and family, holding carnivals and hosting weddings, it can seem like Rome is a little confusing and weird but otherwise is generally harmless. It is not.

My point here is not to "bash Catholics", many of which are family and friends, and my intent is not to score cheap laughs over the silly practices of Roman Catholics. I don't find them funny at all just as I don't find them innocent. They are deeply troubling, and I believe they need to be publicized, exposed and refuted because they are a barrier to people, many of whom are honestly seeking Christ but are instead being lured further and further away by false teachers and heresy that claims to be authentic Christianity based on having been around for a long time. Both Roman Catholicism and, from what I have seen, the "Orthodox" religion rely on mysticism, ignorance, co-opted paganism and claims that it is all OK because they make grandiose declarations of authority and have a reliance on their continued existence with tenuous and easily disprovable claims to an unbroken line of ecclesiastical succession. When people are rubbing beads and praying to statues or throwing wax body parts into a fire in the hopes of being healed, that is many things but it is not Christianity as described and practiced in the Scriptures. Those are just the most extreme examples seen in stories like the one I quoted above but the daily practices and rhythms of Roman religious life are just as troubling and dangerous. Claims of possessing the power and authority to transform a wafer into the body of our Lord and to present Him for sacrifice repeatedly on an altar is even worse than tossing wax body parts into a fire.

Despite the temptation to look the other way in the hopes of gaining allies in the struggle against secularism, the church must do the opposite and be more diligent than ever. We cannot pretend to share a faith with people who pray to statues and claim visions of apparitions and who claim to sacrifice Chris anew. Either the work of Christ on the cross was sufficient or it is not. Either Christ alone is the mediator between man and God or He is not. Either the Bible is correct about all Christians being saints or the Bible is wrong and Rome is right. These are not questions with gray areas or space for nuance. These are days when the church is being tried and tested and already too many have turned back from the way of the Cross. Keep your eyes open and on the Christ. Far too many wolves and false teachers are around for us to relax our diligence and chief among those wolves for 1700 years has been the man sitting on the seat of "Saint" Peter.

Happy Reformation Year And Why It Still Matters (And Matters Just As Much)

Happy Reformation Year!

2017 is the year which includes the date of the 500th anniversary of the "official" start of the Protestant Reformation on October 31st, 1517 with Martin Luther's nailing of the 95 Theses to the church door in Wittenberg. With that one seemingly innocous act, Martin Luther forever changed the course of Western and world civilization, in some ways for the worse but for the most part for the better. Those of us who cherish our salvation by faith through grace recognize the debt we owe to those God lifted up at great personal danger to shine the light of the truth through the oppressive spiritual darkness of the day.

While many Protestants and others celebrate or at least recognize October 31st as Reformation Day, this being the 500th anniversary year means a lot of additional attention will get paid throughout the year to Luther and what he started. It is of course worth noting that there were many other individual and group reformers who preceded Luther but they mostly ended up dead at the hands of the Roman leadership and their willing executioners and torturers in the state. Luther was notable in large measure because he managed to survive long enough to see the embers of reform burst into the flames, sometimes literally, of Reformation.

While I expect to talk a lot about the Reformation throughout the year, it seems fitting that my first post of the year focuses on the on-going need for Reformation. It is the erroneous belief in many parts of the evangelical/Protestant world that the need for Reformation is long past. We have moved beyond silly squabbles and instead have moved closer together, propelled by our common foe of secularism and our common defense of religious liberty against godless liberalism. When engaged in an existential fight like we are the enemy of my enemy is my friend. All well and good except the mission of the church is not to fight for religious liberty but to preach the Gospel, in season and out, when it is welcome and especially where it is not, making disciples and teaching them the commandments of Christ. We cannot do that with one hand while with the other we hold hands with those who deny that very Gospel.

I have friends and family who are Roman Catholic and this post, and all subsequent posts in 2017, are not intended to be an insult, simply a statement of what should be clear. I don't attend the Roman Mass not because it just isn't my cup of tea but because I believe what happens in the Mass and elsewhere in the Roman religious system runs counter to and is affront to the Gospel of Jesus Christ we see in Scripture. The vast chasm between Rome and the Protestant world was always very apparent until recently and it is neither loving nor honest to anyone to pretend that those differences have faded with time or are no longer important.

Case in point, Jorge Bergoglio, aka "Pope Francis" tweeted out this message to ring in the new year:

Let us entrust the new year to Mary, Mother of God, so that peace and mercy may grow throughout the world.

— Pope Francis (@Pontifex) January 1, 2017

Rather than putting together a response I am instead going to just reprint James White's response from a public Facebook post because he pretty much nails it (get it? nails it? 95 Theses?):

Why is the Reformation still important? Why is it proper for us to focus upon it this year in celebration of 500 years? Why do I pray that by the end of 2017 more and more of God's people will embrace the Reformation, and Reformed theology as a whole? Well, here is a tweet from the current Pope. He encourages Roman Catholics to "entrust the new year to Mary." Doing this, evidently, will result in "peace and mercy" growing throughout the world. And here I thought that could only happen as men and women bow the knee not to Mary, but to the Lord Jesus, in repentance and faith, trusting in His once-for-all work upon the cross as the perfect Savior. Rome's departure from the Gospel remains complete, and defiant. She continues to blaspheme the cross every time a man-made "priest" pretends to "re-present" the once-for-all sacrifice of Calvary upon a Roman altar. And she continues to enslave men with her endless gospel of sacraments and penances, which can never bring them peace. And in this tweet the Pope demonstrates once again the grossly idolatrous nature of modern Roman teaching concerning Mary.

How many non-Roman Catholics today understand why they do not bow the knee to Rome? In what is loosely called Evangelicalism, very few. One either has the wild-eyed bigotry of the Jack Chick variety anti-Catholicism, or the luke-warm "it's just a matter of taste" variety of synergistic Tiber-paddling that is so common today. May the number of those who knowingly, and out of a true commitment to sound biblical doctrine, reject Rome's pretensions, grow in this the 500th anniversary of the Reformation.

The fawning, fan-boy fascination many "progressive" evangelicals have for Jorge Bergoglio is not surprising while it is still troubling but many who would consider themselves "conservative" have no clue what the differences are between Roman teaching and Scripture. When so many in the church have no idea why they don't attend Mass instead of going to what are most often silly and vacuous "worship services", there is clearly a lot of work to be done. Likewise tens of millions of people are still caught up in the Roman system and have never even heard the Gospel presented clearly and these people are in the same need for hearing the Gospel as poor peasants in 1517 who had been taught that buying an indulgence with the money they could scrape together instead of buying food for their children would somehow purchase favor with God.

Do not for a second think the Reformation is unimportant in 2017 or that we have outgrown the need for what are considered petty theological squabbles or that winning political and cultural victories is critical enough that we ought to make common cause with enemies of the Gospel. As Jorge Bergoglio's tweet proves, Rome is still selling a false gospel that cannot save and only serves to obscure the true Gospel and preserve a corrupt religious system. I think that if Luther could see the church today he would marvel at many things but I also think he would desperately want someone to walk up to our own equivalent of the church door in Wittenberg, take out a hammer and a nail and declare boldly that the Gospel is the one place that we will not, that we cannot, compromise for the sake of any other issue. In the end, only the Gospel of Jesus Christ really matters.

Politics Makes Strange Bedfellows Or As The Bible Calls It Unequal Yoking (Or Why You Shouldn't Join Glenn Beck In Fasting For Ted Cruz)

Speaking of unbelievers, here we are again. The apostle Paul wrote in 2nd Corinthians or as Donald Trump calls it "Two Corinthians":

Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness? What accord has Christ with Belial? Or what portion does a believer share with an unbeliever? What agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the temple of the living God; as God said, "I will make my dwelling among them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. Therefore go out from their midst, and be separate from them, says the Lord, and touch no unclean thing; then I will welcome you, and I will be a father to you, and you shall be sons and daughters to me, says the Lord Almighty." - 2 Corinthians 6:14-18

This is usually applied, understandably in our culture, to believers marrying unbelievers but it goes much deeper than that. It applies in any sort of relationship where our relationship with God is tainted by unequal yoking with unbelievers. This temptation is especially powerful in the realm of politics where voters who are devout Christians will often make cause with those who are not to advance a political agenda. That is dangerous primarily when the political world bleeds over into the religious world, as often is the case in America.

I have often written on the danger posed by radio entertainer Glenn Beck. As a mormon who is ostensibly a political conservative, Beck says things that appeal to a lot of Evangelical Christians who are overwhelmingly also politically conservative. He also tends to lace his political talk with a lot of religious talk and often positions himself as part of the same faith as Christians, a linkage that far too few of my brothers and sisters notice or object to. Many Christians of various stripes have appeared on his show to express solidarity. Something else I have frequently commented on is the marketing shift by mormonism away from emphasizing the difference between mormonism and Christianity and now trying to point out alleged similarities. It has gone from "join us because we have a better religion" to "join us we have the same religion just better".

Anyway, Glenn Beck has endorsed Texas Senator Ted Cruz for President, a somewhat unusual move for a radio talk show host. Of the remaining candidates I probably like Ted Cruz the best although I don't care for his pandering comments about "rebuilding our military" and unquestioning support for Israel. Late last night after the South Carolina primary results showed a big win for Donald Trump and Ted Cruz coming in third just a hair behind Marco Rubio, Glenn Beck put out a call to fast for Ted Cruz, our nation and the upcoming Nevada caucuses to his listeners, viewers and social media followers:

Now fasting is a Biblical thing, right? So what is the problem? Well because I would say this is precisely the sort of thing Paul warned the church against, even though it happens in a fashion that he couldn't have imagined. Set aside the problem of Christians praying specifically for a political candidate. Should Christians be joining intentionally with a mormon to fast and pray? I would say unequivocally no.

Let me ask you this. Would the people who are claiming to be Christians and joining Glenn Beck in fasting be just as willing if the one calling on them to join he and his family in prayer were Muslim? Or Hindu? Probably not but those faiths are about as "Christian" as mormonism and a false god is a false god, whether the god of Joseph Smith's imagination or Allah or Vishnu. I find it abhorrent to fast and pray with someone who is praying to a false god.

Fasting is a very specific and frequently mentioned practice for Christians, not as a matter of ascetism but as part of prayer and worship of God through His Son Jesus. Fasting for mormons is a once a month ritual done primarily for the purpose of setting money aside to give to the poor:

Fasting is a commandment from the Lord where we humble ourselves before Him by voluntarily refraining from eating and drinking (see D&C 88:76).

In the Church today, one Sabbath day each month is set aside for the purpose of fasting. Members of the Church go without food and water for two consecutive meals in a 24-hour period and then contribute the money that would have been spent for that food to those in need (see Alma 34:28).

 (Taken from the lds.org webpage topic Fasting and Fast Offerings, February 21, 2016)

Notice that the support for this practice is taken from the mormon "scriptures". While reference is made to examples of fasting in the Bible and one brief mention is made of fasting not associated with donations to the poor, the manner it takes place in mormonism is very different from what the Bible teaches. I am all for giving to the poor. I am all for fasting and praying. What I am not for is yoking ourselves to an unbeliever and worse a pagan blasphemer in a religious act that seems to make an equivalence between the ancient faith of followers of Christ and a recent religious movement that sprang from  the vivid imagination of Joseph Smith. 

If you want to fast and pray for our nation and her leaders, by all means do so. Just don't hold hands with a heretic while you do it.

An Unbeliever And A False Teacher Walk Into A Bar...

No this is not a joke, just a comment on the ridiculous blow up last week in the carnival that is the American political scene. Last week the Republican primary process merged with the global religious scene when Jorge Bergoglio, aka "Pope Francis", opined that people focused on buildings walls are not Christians during a trip to Mexico. His exact quote:

"A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian."

That comment is clearly aimed at Donald Trump who has made a southern border wall a cornerstone of his campaign and probably the only issue where he has spoken specifically about what he plans. I found the whole thing hilarious. Here we have a man who is by any measure of orthodoxy a false teacher wagging his finger at an American billionaire, media presence, serial adulterer and Johnny-come-lately "Christian" who seems to be completely ignorant of Scripture and the Christian faith with an attack that was as clumsy as it was risible.

What really makes this amusing is that non-Catholic fanboy supporters of Mr. Bergoglio are in a pickle because on the one hand they love Jorge and think he is the best thing since sliced bread but on the other hand are adamant that one must never be "judgmental" and question the faith of another person, no matter if they believe in a false religion or believe in no faith at all. "No one knows another person's heart" they intone piously, no matter how unscriptural that is.

Unbelievers arguing about who is an unbeliever, especially when the issue at question deals with politics and questions of border integrity and controlled immigration, is a ridiculous spectacle. It is a pretty neat sample of the wacky world we live in. Someone who sleeps with anything on two legs, marries and divorces on a whim, someone who thinks that he doesn't need forgiveness because he has never done anything to be forgiven for is not a Christian. Someone who venerates to the point of worship the mother of our Lord, who sits atop an anti-Christian religious hierarchy, who brazenly takes for himself titles and authority given only to Christ, who believes (regardless of what they protest) that one must perform certain acts to be forgiven, who leads religious services in an opulent palace while scolding the people in this world who have actually worked heard for their wealth is likewise not a Christian. All the pious public acts and flowery rhetoric doesn't change that. Never has and never will. Words are cheap, public actions are as well but what and how one believes is what determines whether one is a Christian or not.

The kerfuffle would be bad enough if it were not so incredibly hypocritical and ironic. As I and many others have pointed out, Vatican City itself is surrounded by walls to keep out undesirables. While Mr. Bergoglio did not erect those walls neither is he taking them down. Why not? Well Vatican City is a sovereign state and only grants admission to those it wishes. It protects her sovereign borders like any state that wishes to survive does. Whether you agree with Trump's proposal to build a wall on our southern border to secure that border like most civilizes nations (including Mexico I might add), it isn't an issue that divides believers from unbelievers. There are genuine, born-again believers who hate the idea of a southern wall and integrity in citizenship process. There are also genuine Christians who believe that such a wall is necessary to protect the borders. Which position is correct or even the more Christian is debatable. I happen to think that there is merit in the idea. America has millions of people who can work and yet choose not to and in their place we have migrant workers, millions of them here illegally, working those jobs. As an example, one of our local processing plants that butchers livestock is backed up into May for butchering cattle because they have so much demand but can't find enough people who are willing to work hard and actually show up to work. Meanwhile our nation is full of people who don't work, not because there are no jobs because there are millions unfilled at any given time, but because they are incentivized to not work. Secure the borders and enforce the necessity of work to those who choose not to work and the need for the illegal immigrant shrinks. Just as important there needs to be focus not just on those here illegally but also those who knowingly hire them. Put the plant manager and head of HR for a packing plant in Nebraska in jail for hiring illegals and you won't see so many employers willing to break the law to save a buck.

The walls around Vatican City are another issue. Those walls keep people out and they also protect the incredible treasure hidden behind the walls of Vatican City, from architectural marvels to works of art to treasures uncountable. I doubt anyone really has a grasp on how much wealth is held behind those walls. Adding insult to irony, the treasures of the Vatican including St. Peter's Basilica was funded in large part by money stolen from simple lay people through the blasphemous sale of "indulgences", a practice that was one of the catalysts for the Protestant Reformation. When Mr. Bergoglio, champion of the poor, conducts Mass in St. Peter's, he is doing so in an opulent, magnificent building paid for by the sweat and simple faith of the very poor he claims to champion. Mr. Bergoglio and his predecessors consisting of a litany of corrupt popes live in a sovereign state on land granted by the fascist dictator Benito Moussolini and sit like a pseudo-pious Smaug the dragon on a horde of stolen treasures.

So let's not waste much time deciding who is "right" in this public spectacle. Two unbelievers fighting over which one is the less unbelieving is absurd and should be treated as such. The church has more important issues to deal with.

Anabaptist Amnesia

For a fairly small group Anabaptists have managed to divide themselves up into a ton of distinct groups, especially within the largest group, the Mennonites (although they are plenty of divisions within the Hutterites and Amish of course). Some Mennonites have decided that the evangelical model is the way to go. There are a couple of those groups near us, one that is basically a huge church that is indistinguishable from any other Evangelical group (they even took "Mennonite" out of their name) and the other a quasi-Charismatic mess. There are a number of groups that are marked more by concerns over holiness and being unspotted from the world where the men wear the traditional suit coat and the women wear plain dresses and headcovers. Then there are the "progressive" groups that focus on "social justice" and militant pacifism. I would suggest that most of these groups have forgotten their heritage, some (like the "progressives") more so than others.

This has gathered some recent attention from the mainstream media, always a group likely to totally mishandle a question of religion. Amid the Presbyterian Church - USA voting to celebrate sin last week, I came across an interesting article in the Atlantic of all places on a regional conference of the Mennonite Church USA, probably the largest progressive group in the Anabaptist tradition. The article, Gay and Mennonite, features a banner with the ubiquitous rainbow banner and a woman wearing a cap, which seemed odd because I am pretty sure that most Mennonites who wear the covering are not having conversations about embracing homosexual behavior. The essay looks at the recent decision of the Allegheny Mennonite Conference regarding member church who had normalized sinful behavior and how the conference should respond.

On a Saturday in March, the Allegheny Mennonite Conference met in Springs, Pennsylvania, to determine the fate of Hyattsville Mennonite Church. A decade earlier, the Maryland congregation had been formally “disciplined” for accepting gay and lesbian members. Now, there were three resolutions on the ballot: let Hyattsville back into the conference as a full member; remove Hyattsville from the conference altogether; or, if no agreement could be found, dissolve the conference.

This is probably not much of a spoiler but in the end the conference voted to retain fellowship with the church that embraced homosexuality to the point of sending delegates to the regional conference that were open homosexuals. That is not surprising but I found some of the quotes from those in attendance to be telling in this troubling situation. This is the first one:

During conversations like these, pastors and church members who object to same-sex relationships tend to return to certain passages in the Bible. At Springs, they quoted Leviticus 18:22, which states that “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination,” and 1 Corinthians 6:9-10, which says that “Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor men who have sex with men … will inherit the kingdom of God.”

For Christians who are gay, words like these could be taken as a direct assault on both their faith and their gender identity. But Miller said he tries to ignore them. “I don’t react very much any more—maybe an eye roll. Anything that biblical writers were addressing had nothing to do with modern same-sex couples,” he said. “Some people’s whole focus about gay and lesbian relationships is all about sex—thinking below the belt, and that’s not the totality of what our life together means.”

Ironically and tragically that is precisely what it is. When a man couples with another man by seeking to substitute the natural relationship between men and women with a disordered and perverse action it inherently makes the relationship "below the belt". We are not talking about celibate same-sex loving relationships but rather relationships which have at their foundation a sexual act. The Bible doesn't prohibit a man from loving another man but it does call sin a man having relations that are restricted to a heterosexual, married relationship with another man. This particular statement from that quote really gets to the heart of the entire debate:

Anything that biblical writers were addressing had nothing to do with modern same-sex couples

So here we have it. At least he doesn't try to pretend that the Bible doesn't say anything about homosexual behavior like some do but he states what many clearly believe: the Bible doesn't have anything to say about this issue to sinners today. I wonder if that would hold true for those who steal or those who murder? Maybe those don't have anything to do with our modern society either. That raises the question, does the Bible have anything definitive and authoritative to say on anything? The answer increasingly for people who claim to follow the Christ revealed in Holy Scripture is no.When you decide that your own opinion is sovereign and creatures get to dictate to the Creator where He can speak and where He must be silent, even when it comes to Him being the Creator in the first place. This is the essence of pagan idolatry, the rejection of a transcendent and absolute authority in favor of an ephemeral notion of divinity that is subject to change on a whim and that is why you cannot join the embrace of sin with the sin repenting and self-denying Gospel.

The second quote is just jaw dropping, even for a cynic like myself (emphasis mine):

The floor opened for debate. Almost immediately, a representative from Springs proposed an amendment: Hyattsville should be allowed back in, but “members of congregations who are living lifestyles not generally accepted in conference should not be eligible to hold an elected position.” This restriction would apply to anyone whose lifestyle wasn’t in keeping with the Mennonite USA confession of faith, he said.

The pastor from Springs, Eric Haglund, rose and said that he had helped draft this amendment and written the morning’s sermon with it in mind—the conference needed time to adjust, he said, and this offered a compromise. “We can’t put deadlines on the Holy Spirit,” he said. “We have all been so bound up, I’m not sure we could recognize the Holy Spirit if he came crashing through the roof.”

But as another woman pointed out, the amendment might have unintended consequences. “I stand here a sinner: I am divorced, and I am an adultress,” she said. “I would like us to consider the challenge that would be before the leadership council if they had to screen people of certain sin categories from the leadership council.” 

Wow and yet in a lot of religious circles that might not even get a raised eye-brow. Keep in mind that when the apostle Paul, patriarchal misogynist as some would label him, wrote to Timothy regarding the qualities that are non-negotiable in an elder (i.e leadership in the church) he said:

The saying is trustworthy: If anyone aspires to the office of overseer, he desires a noble task. Therefore an overseer must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, sober-minded, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not a drunkard, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money. He must manage his own household well, with all dignity keeping his children submissive, for if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how will he care for God's church? He must not be a recent convert, or he may become puffed up with conceit and fall into the condemnation of the devil. Moreover, he must be well thought of by outsiders, so that he may not fall into disgrace, into a snare of the devil. (1 Timothy 3:1-7)

Lest we think this is an anomaly, Paul wrote something very similar to Titus:

This is why I left you in Crete, so that you might put what remained into order, and appoint elders in every town as I directed you—if anyone is above reproach, the husband of one wife, and his children are believers and not open to the charge of debauchery or insubordination. For an overseer, as God's steward, must be above reproach. He must not be arrogant or quick-tempered or a drunkard or violent or greedy for gain, but hospitable, a lover of good, self-controlled, upright, holy, and disciplined. He must hold firm to the trustworthy word as taught, so that he may be able to give instruction in sound doctrine and also to rebuke those who contradict it. (Titus 1:5-9)

My point here is that leadership in the church in inextricably linked with a visible witness that is largely based on not sinning. So yeah, it might be a challenge in our world but we absolutely have to screen people based on certain sin categories. Of course the Bible also screens women from holding formal leadership in the church but that ship sailed a long time ago based on the number of "pastors" who are quoted in this story that are also women. A post revisiting the growing linkage between egalitarianism and embracing homosexuality is forthcoming. This is a pretty simple problem, namely that a lot of people don't want to be told that their own personal decisions and choices have ramifications for leading in the church. We live in an age of no accountability, of zero consequences and missing responsibility. I want to be an elder and I don't care if the Bible says that I can't.

The article points out that immediately a number of local congregations withdrew themselves, as they are unwilling to compromise the truth for the sake of a false unity. Good for them but they largely whiffed on the issue a long time ago. Many probably see their decision to leave as being inflexible but the decision to do so, like others who have split from progressive denominations, was forced on them.

This is a microcosm of the same conversation happening across the progressive Anabaptist sphere and one that has gone even farther in the "mainline" Protestant denominations. It is a "no going back" decision, once this door is opened it usually means the eventual wholesale departure of any contrary voices who can no longer be unequally yoked with their accommodating former brethren. This leaves the "progressive church" to sit around agreeing with themselves and affirming their error as they quickly die out.

Progressive Mennonites are, if not in the vanguard, at least part of the main host of the religious cultural accommodation movement. This flavor of Anabaptism is very in vogue these days for a lot of non-Anabaptists because they seem to have found an established, respected, historical movement that practiced non-violence and in turn have adopted and twisted what it means to be an Anabaptist.

This is where the amnesia comes in. Historically the men and women known as Anabaptists were not accommodating the culture, they were just the opposite and in turn were persecuted and killed for it. No one burned an Anabaptist at the stake or drowned them for agreeing with the powerful religious elites. When the rest of the religious world embraced a state church, the Anabaptists demanded a free church. When the rest of the religious world nonchalantly accepted war in the name of Christ, the Anabaptist chose instead the simple way of peacemaking. When the religious world "baptized" infants and bestowing purported membership in the New Covenant church on those who had not been born-again, the Anabaptists insisted on a believers church made up of the regenerate alone. This was radical, real radicalism, and non-accommodating and was as far as possible away from the movement to diminish sin, emasculate the Scriptures and embrace error. The historical ignorance by contemporary religious types who claim the heritage of Anabaptists is so counter-historical that it boggles the mind which is why I found this quote ironic:

Being a person of any faith means finding a balance between taught tradition and the moral imperatives of modernity. In the Mennonite church, the call of the past is particularly strong across the theological spectrum.

The first sentence  might be true of some religious traditions but it is not a part of Christianity and especially not Anabaptism. The second statement is sort of accurate but not across the theological spectrum. At all.

I tell people who are interested in the Anabaptists that they need to read the actual, historic Anabaptists rather than contemporary writers who cherry pick or flat out ignore what the Anabaptists taught and practiced. The historical ignorance and amnesia that infects a lot of "Anabaptism" has made the very notion into a fuzzy and empty feel-good religious club. If you want to be an Anabaptist you had better be prepared to stick to the Bible and not get too worked up when the culture doesn't like what you say, especially the religious culture, and be prepared for some suffering for your faith. It comes with the territory.

When ignorant journalism and bad theology mix

This is going to be a long one.

CNN ran a piece on their webpage that details the tragic story of D.E. Paulk, one time Pentecostal clergyman destined for greatness at the risibly named "Cathedral of the Holy Spirit at Chapel Hill Harvester Church "and the derailment of that path. The article, How The Ultimate Scandal Saved One Pastor, is supposed to be a predictable story that goes from tragedy to triumph but it really goes from tragedy to worse tragedy.

This story has everything. Junk theology, family secrets, lurid sex, power struggles, mushy pagan syncretism dressed up as "ecumenism", rejection of Scriptural truth, confused chatter about "justice". It reads mostly like an exceptionally bad Lifetime movie in a religious setting. Yet even in the midst of the mounds of malarkey there are some important points.

If you want to suffer through the rest of my post it continues after the jump....warning, you might want to keep one of those air sickness bags close at hand...

Greg Boyd's Unbiblical Condemnation of Elijah and Why It Matters

I ran across something from Greg Boyd by way of someone criticizing a recent pronouncement. Turns out that Greg thinks that Elijah, acting in the Spirit and the same Elijah who is taken up bodily in a chariot of fire by the Lord, was acing in an ungodly and even demonic fashion when he defeated the prophets of Baal. From his article Eye for Eye: That Time JesusRefuted An Old Testament Teaching (emphasis mine).

So Elijah, through faith calling down the wrath of God on the false gods of the world, is acting in an ungodly, perhaps even demonic, manner.

Yes, one of the most potent examples of the power of God and the utter helplessness of the false gods of this world where God Himself calls down fire is actually an example of demonic power. This event recorded in Scripture is usually thought of as a comforting and encouraging verse for Christians. Turns out we all missed the point. Or maybe not.

When you feel free to make pronouncements that are barely tethered in any sort of way to Scripture you eventually find yourself making statements that are not only not tethered to those Scriptures but are completely contrary to what Scripture teaches. God indeed calls us to refrain from taking vengeance but not because vengeance is demonic but rather because it is God who will wreak

vengeance on the ungodly. Apparently Greg thinks that God can be invoked to do evil for demonic purposes by a mortal against His will, as though He is little more than an impersonal power supply like The Force that can be used for good or evil depending on whether you are a Sith or Jedi (in his example Elijah is a Sith Lord). Given that Greg is a well known proponent of the error known as "open theism", I guess it isn't surprising that he would embrace "God as the Force".

So Greg's statement, taken in context, is foolish, un-biblical, contrary to the plain reading of Scripture, contrary to the historical understanding of the church and, worst of all, more than a little blasphemous and defamatory to the person of God. It epitomizes the sort of clumsy eisegesis that tends to characterize a lot of what Greg writes. 

So what, there are plenty of people who are tossing theological manure around the internet. Why does this bear mention?

The problem I have is that because Greg is so widely read and quoted, primarily among "progressive" religious types and also happens to espouse a form of non-resistance, when he says this sort of stuff  it paints those few voices who hold to more orthodox positions alongside non-resistance with the same heterodox brush. We already face an uphill battle against our culture and against hundreds of years of erroneous teaching on "just war". We really don't need Greg Boyd making statements that are not only foolish but also harmful to the greater cause of promoting practical peacemaking in the church. Guys like Doug Wilson easily blow apart this silly statement by Boyd and in doing so throws out stuff like:

So when you have painted yourself into an anabaptist corner, and your theology requires you to say that black is white, and that up is down, and that holy is unholy, and that God is the devil, and the devil is God, perhaps it is time to go back and review some of your foundational assumptions. You don’t ever want “I love the devil” to show up in your conclusions.

Wilson is scathing and correct about the error of Boyd on so many levels but Wilson also very neatly lumps Anabaptists as a whole and the entire stream of Anabaptism throughout history into the same camp as Boyd. I am not aware of any actual Anabaptists historically that would concur that Elijah called down the fiery power of God in an act of demonic pique. The more Anabaptists and their modern admirers welcome and embrace false teachers, the less the rest of the church is interested in hearing about actual, historic  Anabaptism and as I have written many times before that is tragic because the historic Anabaptists have a lot to teach the church to help prepare for the days to come.

There are also plenty of Boyd fanboys on the interwebs that will swallow his assertion about Elijah without question. It is fine to have well-known teachers that you appreciate but you have to also be able to read them with some discernment and call out when they are in error (like Al Mohler's statement on voting last week). If no one calls out people like Boyd they just keep going, deeper and deeper into error.

As I have written before, the impulse to overreact against tradition or fundamentalism or whatever is leading too many people, Christians and other generic religious folks, to welcome anyone who is perceived to not be a mean old fundie. The list of people peddling error is growing by the day, selling books by the thousands and getting invited to speak to the church. This is not a sign of progress, it is a sign of retreat. When the church fails to exercise any sort of discernment and the only sin is being too serious about the faith, it has ceased to be the church in any meaningful and Biblical sense. People like Boyd, even when he is close to the mark on an issue or two, who deny the fundamentals of the faith should be called out and called to repent, not celebrated and fawned over.

Religion gone wrong

I read one of the ugliest things about "Christian" religious groups this morning I have ever had the displeasure of being exposed to. Here is how the article, Twenty-First Century Excommunication, starts off...

When the Church of the Good Shepherd in Binghamton, N.Y., left the Episcopal Church over disagreements about what the Bible says about sexuality, the congregation offered to pay for the building in which it worshiped. In return the Episcopal Church sued to seize the building, then sold it for a fraction of the price to someone who turned it into a mosque.

It goes downhill from there. You may wonder why an ostensibly Christian organization would sue to take possession of a building only to sell it to the followers of a pagan religion? Simple. Conservative breakaway Anglicans compete with the Episcopal Church and the Episcopal Church is having none of that.

In 2009, breakaway Episcopalians in the U.S. and Canada formed the Anglican Church in North America, which now reports 100,000 members in nearly 1,000 congregations. This group has been formally recognized by some Anglican primates outside of the United States.

Bishop Jefferts Schori says this new Anglican group is encroaching on her church's jurisdiction, and she has authorized dozens of lawsuits "to protect the assets of the Episcopal Church for the mission of the Episcopal Church." The Episcopal Church has dedicated $22 million to legal actions against departing clergy, congregations and dioceses, according to Allan Haley, a canon lawyer who has represented a diocese in one such case.

Now the Episcopal Church has upped the ante: It has declared that if congregations break away and buy their sanctuaries, they must disaffiliate from any group that professes to be Anglican.

$22 million to legal action against other Christians. So much for 1 Corinthians 6:1-8. Ms. Schori has a unique read on the calling of a bishop (besides the whole gender thing)...

"We can't sell to an organization that wants to put us out of business," said Bishop Jefferts Schori, who added that her job is to ensure that "no competing branch of the Anglican Communion impose on the mission strategy" of the Episcopal Church. Indeed she has no complaint with Muslims, Baptists or barkeepers buying Episcopal properties—only fellow Anglicans.

Well I should think not! That is right in the "Pastoral Epistles" in the qualities of an elder: Guard your brand of Christianity against any other Christians who might be trying to "put you out of business". It is right there in the text, I am sure of it.

This is easy to poke fun at this even though it is not very funny. While it is a particularly grotesque example of it, we do see this same attitude reflected in far too many denominations and local churches that see fellow Christians as competitors that are trying to "steal their sheep" and "put them out of business". Just look at the marketing material many churches put out and change the religious terms into a consumer product and you get what amounts to little more than run of the mill marketing. Some churches tout their worship music or youth programs, others that they are "KJV-Only, Independent, Fundamental, Bible-believing, Soul-winning" churches, others that they hold to one of the Reformed confessions or the "Three Forms of Unity". All are marketing methods designed to get you to come to "their church" instead of "that church". Many of these groups see the problem with the methods of others but are quite blind to their own marketing methods.

When will we get to the point that we stop seeing our co-laborers in Christ as competitors to be viewed with caution and start seeing that the field is ready to harvest and there is plenty of harvesting to go around? There is no need for us to squabble over attendance and money, we should have plenty to keep us busy in reaching the lost all around us.

How can anyone learn if they are interacting?

This paragraph from a subtly titled post The Problem With Cell Groups elicited both a wry chuckle and a facepalm at the same time. 

In the typical cell group, no one actually teaches. Rather, one person will moderate a conversation. The environment created is typically one wherein everyone is encouraged to share his or her opinion and all ideas are considered valid. Should another member of the group actually critique another person’s contribution to the discussion, he is seen as being divisive. Rather than promoting Biblical fidelity, the typical cell group is actually promoting relativism.

Everyone is encouraged to share their opinion? Gasp! The horror!

Let me say first that in a way I get it. There is a lot of shallow study in the church. Frankly a lot of it happens within the four walls of church buildings. Lots of Christians have never advanced beyond the "milk" stage. Again, those folks have spent lots of time being sermonized and Sunday schooled. So yes we need more Biblical literacy, not less. Quashing discussion is not going to encourage that. I also would point out that the reason we have "cell groups" or small groups or Bible studies or whatever is that people are not getting fellowship on Sunday morning so maybe the problem is not cell groups but rather our church traditions. Just saying.

The bigger underlying issue is the paranoia of losing control. When a pastor preaches from the pulpit every week, he controls the conversation. There are no alternate views and there is no discussion. No one makes a mistake or says the "wrong" thing. When you control the medium, you control the message. Some pastors are OK with being questioned afterward but I have also met (and been) the kind of pastor who views that as somehow disrespectful. Now when you get small groups of Christians meeting outside of the control of the "leadership"...who is in charge? Who is making sure no one says the wrong thing? When the "laity" gets loose, chaos ensues and control is lost. So the solution is to hand pick certain men to teach (i.e. lecture) and then field questions in order to provide authoritative answers. Open discussion is straight up dangerous!

Isn't this just having a smaller scale sermon? One person "teaches" while everyone else listens? The answer probably would be an enthusiastic and unapologetic "yes!" because most of the church assumes that listening to a monologue is the best way of learning and this is especially true in Reformed circles where sermons are good and more sermons is better.

The church needs to stop being afraid of the laity, of open discussion, of questions. The church too often functions like the old Soviet Union when it comes to controlling the message. The result is a laity that is ill informed and immature. Guess what. They will never stop being immature if they are constantly coddled and spoon fed teaching. Pastors/elders need to remember that while they are called to watch over the church and be watchful for wolves, they are also called to equip the entire Body for ministry and mature faith.

Elders, the church is not a seething mass of potential heretics to be afeerd of. The are your brothers and sisters in Christ. The best defense against heresy is not to control the message, it is to equip and empower the entire Body. By definition a mature Christian is not a heretic so lets stop treating our brothers and sisters as if they are guilty of heresy until proven otherwise.

House churches and heresy

Felicity Dale answers this oft asked question about simple/house/organic churches: Aren't house churches susceptible to heresy and false teaching without a trained clergyman to protect them?

For some reason people seem to think that a hierarchical institutional church is some sort of defense against heresy but you don't have to look very hard to see that is not true (see: Protestantism, Mainline). Check out her answers in her post Heresy in the house (church) . I agree with her, the best defense against heresy is a body of believers that are equipped and empowered to study the Scriptures for themselves and who are willing to raise their hand and ask questions when something they hear sounds squirrelly.

Another point to make is that when people ask about "heresy" I wonder what they really mean. Denying the trinity? Rejecting justification by faith alone? Or is it more likely a disagreement on a secondary issue that doesn't rise to the level of heresy by any rational or reasonable measure. I think we are a) too soft on actual heresy in the church and b) too likely to label something heresy that doesn't rise to that level.

When calling some a heretic is heresy

I still feel OK enough to read and link to good blog posts and Alan Knox has a good one today. Alan posted a brief post looking at the question of the “H” word, I know you’re a heretic, but what am I?! and makes the salient point that accusations of heresy can actually be…heretical!

We separate over many disagreements even though, in Scripture, disagreement is not disunity. Irony of all ironies, when we allow disagreements to lead to disunity between brothers and sisters in Christ, we are actually the heretics!

What?!?!

It’s true. In Scripture, “heresy” refers to separating from other Christians. If you separate from someone who you consider to be a Christian, then you are a heretic.

As someone who has dropped more than a few “H-Bombs” in my time, this hits too close to home. This isn't to say that there aren't heretic, there ceratinly are. Joseph Smith was a heretic. Jim Jones and David Koresh were heretics. Modern day false prophets and kooks like a certain cultic group in Canada are heretics. The brother in Christ I disagree with regarding secondary issues, even ones I feel strongly about? No.

Can someone be a believer and be a heretic? Can someone who is truly a heretic be a believer? If the answer to both is “no”, then we are in serious trouble when we label someone a heretic who we simultaneously acknowledge as a brother in Christ.

Check out Alan’s blog, he gets points for good blogging and extra points for using “you’re” correctly! I had to deduct a few points for the very disturbing picture on the post though…

Dr. Mohler weighs in

Al Mohler has a lengthy essay regarding Rob Bell’s book and he correctly places his review in light of the larger historical context. As the title of his essay states, We Have Seen All This Before: Rob Bell and the (Re)Emergence of Liberal Theology, we have been down this road before. There is nothing new under the sun and those who seem convinced that they have found a new and innovative theory are always merely parroting a very old heresy.

I loved this paragraph (emphasis added)

Like so many others, Bell wants to separate the message of Jesus from other voices even in the New Testament, particularly the voice of the Apostle Paul. Here we face the inescapable question of biblical authority. We will either affirm that every word of the Bible is true, trustworthy, and authoritative, or we will create our own Bible according to our own preferences. Put bluntly, if Jesus and Paul are not telling the same story, we have no idea what the true story is.

Paul and Jesus are on the same team people! When we start to carve up the Word based on what we find palatable, we may as well chuck the whole thing, claim to have received a special revelation that trumps the Bible and follow the path of Joseph Smith. This holds true in so many places: hell, justification by faith, gender, etc. and there are plenty of people willing to take a Sharpie to certain passages and a highlighter to others. I don’t think any of us are immune to this but that doesn’t excuse us from continuing to study the Word and hold what we believe up to the light of Scripture.

This conversation is not really about Rob Bell at all, although his book is the trigger. Long after Bell has faded into obscurity and been replaced by someone new, more winsome and more hip, these conversations will continue because they get to some core issues about the authority and sufficiency of the Scriptures, about the sovereign nature of God, about the urgency of the Gospel in light of our brief lives and a limitless hell. These are conversations we must have and not so that we can find a lowest common denominator. All of Christian life must start with solid doctrinal footing. When the footing is squishy the results will be bad, no matter how well intentioned they may be. While I think that (based on the reviews I have read) Rob Bell’s book Love Wins sounds like a dangerous work for the Scripturally unsound, I do appreciate the conversations and thinking that it has spurred.

Give Dr. Mohler’s essay a look, it makes for deep and intellectually stimulating reading as all of his works do.

A word of caution

I read an interesting review of The Shack by Dan Walker at the New Testament Reformation Fellowship, a group I think has a lot of important ideas to offer to the simple/house church conversation. What I really like at the NTRF is that they seem to strike the right balance between core doctrines and Biblical ecclesiology. As Dan points out in his review with the catchy title of Shack Attack — One More House Church Disaster, the author of the Shack is a "house church guy" but that doesn't shield him from criticism. I have found that the "house church" or more broadly the simple church movement is a lot like the Reformation era Anabaptists. We run the gamut. Many of us are orthodox in theology like the mainstream leaders of Anabaptism. Some of them are more like the Zwickau Prophets unfortunately.

Please note I have not read The Shack and have little interest in doing so. Nor is this post even about that book. I am more interested in what you think about this statement:

But there are far too many house church Christians who don’t know where to reign in their criticism of the institutional church. When house church Christians start throwing bombs at the foundations of orthodox belief, when they deny Hell, when they use the one-man pastor’s unscriptural appropriation of authority to himself as an excuse to start chiseling away at all hierarchy and authority, when they pooh-pooh the Holy Scriptures as a guilt-edged rulebook, when they embrace a leveling egalitarianism and feminism that would, were mankind dumb enough to embrace it, destroy life on the planet, that is when I feel sorely tempted to write a check to Bob Jones University, along with an apology for all the bad things I’ve said about them for fifty years.

I think there is some wisdom here and some vital cautions. Maybe a bit over the top but nevertheless. There are many, many things that are wrong about the institutional church but not everything the institutional church believes is wrong because it is taught from a pulpit. As I said, there is a pretty big tent that people who question the institutional church fall under and I often am concerned that major deviations from orthodoxy seem to spring up in our circles. Granted that is true in the institutional church as well (see: Protestantism, Mainstream) but there is a real danger that when you start tossing rituals and traditions overboard, you might also start tossing orthodoxy aside. I don't care how swell your fellowship is if the Gospel gets lost along the way.

What do you think, is this criticism/concern warranted or is it over the top?

A Florida fool

I have avoided saying anything about that fool with matches in Florida but now that the day has come and gone, I thought I would pass on some observations.

In the aftermath of the “will he/will he not” Quran burning fiasco that elevated a crackpot to the level of a prophet we rarely see outside of Punxsutawney Phil, many people are providing all manner of post-mortems on what happened (or didn’t as the case may be). A lot of these center on the idea that we (i.e. America, Christians, etc.) were afraid of offending Islam and that we were collectively bullied into calling for “pastor” Jones to cancel the Quran burning.

I can’t speak for others but I am not concerned about “offending Islam” at all. Quite the contrary, I fully expect that the Gospel will be offensive to many people and that in fact it is completely in character with faithful Gospel proclamation to expect that it will lead to offense, persecution and often even death. So it is not the offense of the Gospel I and others were concerned with but instead it was a completely different sort of offense. It was the offense to the teaching of Scripture to engage in this sort of tawdry showmanship and blatant act of ignorant hatred in the name of Christ. It was also a case where the offense of the cross that tells sinners that they stand condemned without Jesus is replaced with offensiveness of the most banal kind. Jesus responded to the hatred of those who were His enemies by dying on a cross for them, reconciling them to the Father by His love and His blood. Jesus didn’t burn Caesar in effigy, He died meekly. Burning a Quran does nothing to thwart Islam or promote the cause of America or the Gospel (two polar opposites that Mr. Jones and far too many others cannot distinguish between).

The only upside to this whole sordid affair was the near universal condemnation of it by the church. We as God’s people have suffered far too many fools for far too long but in this case we finally see the church united to condemn a man who was seeking to exalt himself and bring shame to the cross of Christ.

If Mr. Jones really wants to take a courageous stand for the Gospel against Islam, he should pack up and go where Muslims are and be a witness to them, loving them even when they hate and persecute him in return and perhaps even being willing to lay down his life for the sake of the Gospel instead of pandering to the most base emotions of fear and hatred in the misguided name of religious nationalism.

Russ Moore nails it!

Great, great essay by Russell Moore: God, the Gospel, and Glenn Beck. This is too important to leave until next Saturday's Best of the Week entry. You need to read it and share it today. Dr. Moore takes evangelicalism's embrace of Glenn Beck and rightly describes it as liberation theology of a right-wing kind:

Too often, and for too long, American “Christianity” has been a political agenda in search of a gospel useful enough to accommodate it. There is a liberation theology of the Left, and there is also a liberation theology of the Right, and both are at heart mammon worship. The liberation theology of the Left often wants a Barabbas, to fight off the oppressors as though our ultimate problem were the reign of Rome and not the reign of death. The liberation theology of the Right wants a golden calf, to represent religion and to remind us of all the economic security we had in Egypt. Both want a Caesar or a Pharaoh, not a Messiah.

That is a devastating and valid indictment. Jesus didn't die for lower taxes or to preserve private property rights. I am heartened to see more and more Christians pointing out the obvious: Beck is a wolf in sheeps clothing and is far more of a threat to the church of Christ than Osama bin Laden or Richard Dawkins because he is deeply infiltrating the church and is welcomed in by those who are allegedly supposed to defend the truth. Too many Christians think the pursuit of the American dream is almost as important as the Gospel or worse yet cannot differentiate between the two.

Dr. Moore closes with this and I couldn't say it any better....

It’s sad to see so many Christians confusing Mormon politics or American nationalism with the gospel of Jesus Christ. But, don’t get me wrong, I’m not pessimistic. Jesus will build his church, and he will build it on the gospel. He doesn’t need American Christianity to do it. Vibrant, loving, orthodox Christianity will flourish, perhaps among the poor of Haiti or the persecuted of Sudan or the outlawed of China, but it will flourish.

And there will be a new generation, in America and elsewhere, who will be ready for a gospel that is more than just Fox News at prayer.

Amen!

The death of the Episcopal Church marks the end of the Reformation?

So an essay by Charlotte Hays suggests in the Wall Street Journal. Here is an interesting paragraph:

But Father Bergman not only predicts a mass movement toward Rome. He believes Anglican Use may mark the beginning of the end of the Reformation. There will be "a flourishing of this throughout the world," he says. "Wherever there are Anglicans, there will be people who want to enter Holy Mother Church." As he told a rapt audience at St. Mary's, "If we look at histories, heresies run themselves out after about 500 years. I believe we are seeing the last gasp of the Reformation in the mainline Protestant groups."

Mr. Bergman is a Roman priest who converted from Anglicanism. I would first like to point out the error of saying that heresies run themselves out after 500 years. After all Rome is still going strong after a millennium. I do think he is sort of right, although he is right for all the wrong reasons. I am not sure how much of a mass movement there will be. First of all, there aren’t a ton of Episcopalians anyway. Many of those who are outraged by the Episcopal Church’s wholesale abandonment of Scriptural authority have already left and formed a more conservative denomination. I would hazard a guess that many who are staying are staying precisely because of that same abandonment. Then there are those who are staying behind because that is just where they go to church.

More importantly, as the title of the essay suggests and as Mr. Bergman asserts, is this a sign of the end of the Reformation? In spite of many important areas where the Reformation and the Reformers fell short, the Reformation era was the most important era in the church since the apostolic age. The collapse of the “mainline” denominations is not a sign that the Reformation is over. Just the opposite. As the liberal denominations fall like dominoes, the line between Rome and the church is seen in more stark relief. As civil religion is abandoned and as the cost of discipleship goes up, the principles of the Reformation will become even more important. Far from being over, the Reformation may have been given new life.

(addendum: As soon as I posted this I saw that Al Mohler already addressed this essay. Four hours ago at 5 AM. Seriously. Check it out here)

The latest from Joel Osteen

Joel Osteen blesses Houston's new (gay) mayor Annise Parker

Annise Parker, the newly-elected happens-to-be-lesbian mayor of Houston was sworn in Monday and the opening prayer was given by ... Rev. Joel Osteen.

Well. Since he refuses to even use the "s" word (sin), why not?

(HT: Albert Mohler via Facebook)

More thoughts on TBN, MacArthur and money

I think Dave Black made a very valid point regarding the frenzy in the blogosphere over MacArthur's post about TBN (somebody please help Dr. Black format his blog so that we can link directly to his posts!):

I see it's "go after the prosperity preachers" week. I'm all for it -- if the purpose is to bring greater civility, clarity, and theological precision to the discussion. But there is a bit of a problem here. You see, we evangelicals have never found it easy to superimpose morality on others without coming across as a wee bit arrogant. There's nothing that ecstatifies us quite like burning witches and excoriating fools. Sure, the Reverend Ike types are building their empires off the hard-earned (and foolishly donated) money of the average, gullible evangelical. But they're not the only ones. Goodness, didn't anybody read that report about what the Christian CEOs of the largest NGOs are making?

I'm not saying that confrontation is wrong. I'm just saying that every honest Christian struggles with materialism -- the temptation to use our relationship with God to get more of this or that, whether it be physical healing or money in the bank. In fact, Jesus' apostles were remarkably materialistic. The age in which they lived was just as decadent as ours -- phallic worship, astrology, pleasure-seeking, and the grossest forms of materialism. The disciples followed Jesus for some good reasons and for some bad reasons -- like the hope of getting a business advantage (by sitting on His right hand!).

I could mention other things -- for instance, 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1 are clear that Christian leaders are to be free from the desire for sordid gain. But mostly I just want to say this: If we're going to point the finger at the money-grubbing health-and-wealth preachers out there and their so-called prosperity gospel -- and there are plenty of them to go around -- our own lives had better be free of materialism and the love of money.

I don't think "ecstatifies " is a word. But I digress. We certainly are in full "torches and pitchforks" mode. While the vile "gospel" preached by TBN and other deserves the indignation and vocal correction by John MacArthur, John Piper and others, I think Dr. Black makes an important point here. There is plenty of materialism and love of money in the most orthodox of churches and in many a pious Christian. That is not to minimize at all the damnable heresy of the prosperity preachers, on TBN and elsewhere, who tell the lost and elect alike that the cross is not enough, that we get to use God as our ATM with prayer as the pin number, that if we contribute enough God is required to bless us with money and heal our aches and pains. I stand by every word I said and agree with everything MacArthur said. I also have to say that we have plenty of issues with money and materialism in the church and if I may go a step further, the way we exalt and obsess about money in the church makes the job of these prosperity preachers far easier.

How have we denied ourselves, really sacrificed? The prosperity Gospel makes so much sense in America because it is what we see week to week. Not just in $130 million religious campuses or in megachurches. I am talking about the local church that spends tons of money to replace carpet that might be ugly but works, adding video effects to make the "worship" more meaningful, spending tons of money on staff and denominational bureaucracy. Granted it is not mixed in with the Gospel but when we justify frankly frivolous and/or pride driven giving and spending in the local church, we need to pay attention to our own materialistic hearts and attitudes and ask what role that plays in the spread of prosperity preaching.

TBN - Modern day Tetzel

There is an incendiary post from John MacArthur this morning, Unholy Trinity, comparing the Trinity Broadcast Network (TBN) to Johann Tetzel, the infamous seller of indulgences that helped spur Martin Luther to write his 95 Theses. Dr. MacArthur rightly points out the heretical teachings of TBN and also that their heresy targets and victimizes the poor. From founders Paul and Jan Crouch to "faith healer" Benny Hinn to the guy dressed like a camel (inside joke), TBN is spouting heresy across the airwaves and heaping condemnation upon their heads. I wish more leaders in the church would call this what it is: heresy.