PENTECOSTALISM: Some needed questions are asked about Todd Bentley!

Life After Lakeland: Sorting Out the Confusion - Fire In My Bones

In his latest "Fire In My Bones" column, J. Lee Grady asks some needed questions of his faith family ... but I've grown weary of reporting on the embarrassing lives of the Pentecostals and the Episcopalians, so go to Grady's column and read it for yourselves.

I will, however, post the questions so you'll have them in your mind before you get there.

1. Why did so many people flock to Lakeland from around the world to rally behind an evangelist who had serious credibility issues from the beginning?

2. Why didn’t anyone in Lakeland denounce the favorable comments Bentley made about William Branham?

3. Why did God TV tell people that “any criticism of Todd Bentley is demonic”?

4. Why did a group of respected ministers lay hands on Bentley on June 23 and publicly ordain him? Did they know of his personal problems?

5. Can anything good come out of this?

Grady answers his own questions but they leave me as repulsed as did Bentley's original snake oil pitch.

The answers to these questions won't be found in Grady's article, they are simple answers and are found elsewhere! Do you know where?

Christianity, Heresy, Hubris,
Pentecostalism, Religion

CHURCH DECAY: Leave the ruins to the Muslims!

CHURCH DECAY: Leave the ruins to the Muslims!

LORD TEBBIT: If the head of our church can't uphold the standards that shaped us, what hope is there? | Daily Mail Online

A British Lord takes issue with the Church of England's main man, who happens to be Anglicanism's main man as well. He says,

Who am I to criticise the Archbishop of Canterbury on the matters of theology, doctrine or what the scriptures mean? [...]

I am, however, a 'fellow traveller' and it is fellow travellers, whether of political parties or churches, whose opinions should be listened to most carefully by the powers that be. If the politicians or bishops offer confident, reasonable leadership, we follow them. If they look lost, confused and out of touch, we leave in droves.

And oh how they have been leaving. The issue of ordaining non-celibate gay & lesbian priests has fractured the Worldwide Communion of the Anglican body ...

There is, of course, nothing new about homosexuality or homosexual priests and I suspect that most people these days will say 'so what?'

But the Church of England still has a role to play in upholding the standards and beliefs which have shaped the society in which we live. And for the leader of that institution to appear confused by his moral standpoint is surely disastrous.

I'll not waste your time with theological nit-picking here, but our "fellow traveler" does go on to make several excellent points.

I fear that the leaking of Dr Williams' letters [revealing a bifurcated theology on the issue], even if they are from eight years ago, will give more comfort to those who see the church as a leftover from the past than to those who would like to see it stand up boldly for the values on which it was built. For a while, the traditionalists will rally ... but the fellow travellers will drift away leaderless, with neither a church nor a political party prepared to champion their views and beliefs.

And we see it in the visible church everywhere; the Emergents and the Seekers being two not so wonderful examples.

So who is left? Watch out for the challenge from the mosques. An Islam with a modern face will soon begin to present itself as the natural home for those who long for moral certainty and a new sense of discipline within society. [...]

The task for the imams will be to exploit the fatal weakness of the multicultural society and replace a Christian church that has lost its sense of history and direction with a Mosque that has a strong, ingrained sense of both.

Once again I am led to prophetic implications ... what about you?

Anglicanism, Christianity,
Homosexuality, Islam, Religion

CULTURAL DECAY: Breck Boy's dalliance doesn't disturb dems!

Democrats Shrug Off Edwards' Affair, Paternity Questions | FOXNews.com

... yet he could have been second in line for the Clinton bordello ... heck if it weren't for Hillarious and Oh-mama, he might have been elected to the Lewd Lewinsky Oval Office this November.

Edwards said in 2007 that he doesn't like to advertise his faith ... but this can't be a good substitute, can it?

Check out the dirty laundry list of the MSM, the NYTs, and the Democrats here.

Christianity, Democrats,
Edwards, Religion

MEGA-ANGLICAN ANGST: A family reunion that's not!

Quarter of world's Anglicans boycott conference - Yahoo! News

When 25% of a royal family's princes stay away from a once each century family reunion ... you've got a regal knot in your imperial breeches!

Church officials said that 230 of the 880 bishops in the Anglican worldwide communion were staying away from the Lambeth conference being staged in the English cathedral city of Canterbury, spiritual home of the deeply divided church.

Referring to Gene Robinson, the queer Bishop from New England, who was forced to stay away from Lambeth, and remains the catalytic issue for the boycott, Reuters said ...

Robinson, whose decision to be open about his homosexuality provoked so much Anglican angst, agreed it was time for the church to stop being so self-obsessed.

"With young men knifing each other in the streets of London [a reference to the "growing knife" culture of the capital city] and a billion or more people going through life on less than a dollar a day, what a shame , what a waste it is for the Anglican communion to be tearing itself apart over two men or two women who want to make a Christian family together," he told Reuters.

How magnanimous!

Your denomination has just certified you a heretic in the least offensive and most unofficial-official way possible (like a director of a corporation being excluded from the firm's annual meeting by the other directors) and you wax eloquent about their corporate failure to stop English violence and global poverty. Not a word about the cause of it all: your personal failure.

Simultaneously, you reveal an extremely low opinion of Scripture's infallibility and inspiration, dissing (by extension) the Creator of the Living Word, thus disparaging the nature and magnitude of it, and ignoring two thousand years of biblical scholarship, as-well-as the collective wisdom of the men and women who were motivated to that scholarship.

Wow! What arrogance!

Apparently Robinson and the Reuters reporter did combine to forecast one likely outcome ...

... it will end with a typically fudged Anglican consensus, [the Gay cleric] said "It will drive the press crazy. There will be no resolutions, no proclamations, no lines drawn in the sand."

And this is a once in a century conference ... ho-boy! Forgive us all sweet Jesus, Your heart must be heavy these days.

Anglican, Christianity, Heresy,
Gene Robinson, Lambeth, Religion

SANCTITY OF LIFE: Apparently the concept of "sanctity" escapes some!

Prominent Abortionist Admits Abortion 'Cancels' Souls| Christianpost.com

I can't do this story justice, you'll just have to go over there and read it for yourself.

Dr. William Harrison, notable for being Hillary Clinton’s former OB-GYN as well as for performing over 20,000 abortions, has admitted in recent a e-mail exchange with a prominent Christian psychologist that abortion “cancels” a human soul.

“Anyone who has delivered as many babies as I have, and has seen hundreds of living and dead embryos and fetuses being spontaneously aborted as have I, knows exactly what we are doing when we provide an elective abortion for our patient. We are ending the life of an embryo or a fetus,” Harrison wrote in an e-mail to Dr. Warren Throckmorton, associate professor of Psychology at Grove City College in Pennsylvania.

What can we possibly say? The rest of the story is incredible.

Abortion, Christianity,
Religion, Sanctity of Life

EVIL: Must the Bride fall in order to rise again?

I write this post under a deep conviction that the Bride of Christ, as she is manifested in the West, is horribly ill and perhaps terminally so!

****

It is strange to realize you're a soul-brother with a man you don't know; especially on a controversial subject like evil. But that seems to be the case. Theodore Dalrymple admits to a fascination with books dealing with "evil." I too am fascinated with this subject ... even before becoming a believer.

Recently, Dalrymple read a book by Phillip Cole [a philosopher], The Myth of Evil, and was impressed with some, but not all, of Cole's arguments. The author's principle point is that the word evil is useless in a civilized society.

[Cole] uses as an example the notorious and brutal murder of the two year-old James Bulger by two ten year-old children, John Venables and Robert Thomson. Both of the culprits came from highly disturbed and indeed sordid backgrounds, in which there was a lot of violence, emotional instability, excessive drinking, etc. The statistical connection between such a background and violent criminal behaviour is clear; but what the two boys did was nevertheless exceptional (murder by children, even from the worst circumstances is very rare).

In Dalrymple's words ...

[Cole] argues for the uselessness, indeed the harmfulness ... , of the concept of evil. And I confess that, though I have sometimes had a strong sense of being in the presence of evil, I have had some slight difficulty with the meaning of the concept myself. What exactly does it mean? Can we, ought we, or must we, do without it, philosophically, ethically, psychologically and sociologically?

Notice the absence of the spiritual realm.

Cole argues that the concept is redundant both as a description and as an explanation of human conduct. In fact, he says, its main use or function, when stripped of its unsustainable pretensions to describe or explain anything, is to frighten populations into acquiescence to the extension of power over them by ruling elites whose legitimacy might otherwise be called into question. For it is not common values or characteristics that unite political entities such as states in the modern world, he says, but common enemies, who are either wholly imaginary or whose power and malevolence are much exaggerated.

It is true that fear, as a concept and a reality in Scripture is used to elicit our acquiescence to the person and power of God. Yet, only the fool would suggest He uses it to avoid questions concerning His legitimacy.

Indeed, [Cole] continues, the concept of evil is responsible for much harm ... in the world. The reason for this is clear. When we say of someone that he is evil, we are saying that he is a being of a quite distinct category from ourselves, such that normal ethical limits and restraints do not apply in the way that we must deal with him. For evil is the ultimate – well, evil, and must be destroyed by any means possible. Without the concept of evil, then, we would be much less likely to treat people evilly.

I detect a hint of Reagan and Bush bashing in Cole's argument above; remember the "evil empire" and "the axis of evil," respectively?

Of course authentic believers know the question of evil was answered by God Himself long ago:

Out of the ground the LORD God caused to grow every tree that is pleasing to the sight and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. [Genesis 2:9]

After analyzing Cole's forensic weaknesses, Dalrymple offered the following penetrating thought ...

... on the larger point on [the Bulger] case, Dr Cole is surely right: to have dismissed them as irredeemably evil, or possessed by evil, would have been mistaken and cruel, as is proved by the fact that the children subsequently turned out well, much better in fact than they would have done had they never committed the murder, for they received intense and humane attention thereafter.

Herein is nurture and justification for the Age of Accountability doctrine.

As the writer of a book on the case, Blake Morrison, put it (I quote from memory), ‘It was a pity they had to murder James Bulger to get an education.’ I don’t think I have read a more succinct and damning indictment of a society and its educational system than that, and no doubt it does not apply only to Liverpool, England. [New English Review]

This is such an excellent metaphor for the Good News. I might paraphrase Morrison's words in this way: "It is a pity we had to murder Jesus of Nazareth to get understanding." But it is true ... isn't it? What would man have learned about evil had not the ultimate innocent died?

Like Dalrymple, I don’t think we can find "a more succinct and damning indictment" of man and his systems than that.

Likewise,

Dr Cole extends the lessons of [the Bulger] case to all human evil ... . Venables and Thompson were redeemable precisely because those who looked after them thought they were redeemable and did not consider them as evil by essence; by extension, everyone else who commits evil is redeemable, though perhaps with more difficulty.

Sinners all (Romans 3:23), we "were all redeemable precisely because [God made us] redeemable " and considered evil as "evil by essence." I believe Dalrymple inadvertently tells us an eternal truth: "by extension, everyone ... who commits evil is redeemable, though perhaps with more difficulty."

Is that not what God put in man at his creation ... His own image? Thus the concept of "evil by essence" must be mitigated with the Imago Dei.

Christianity, Church,
Evil, Redemption, Religion

Paulk: A question for all Christians

The heretics of divine deception continue to rack up headlines for the secular media. It's bad enough the Bride is bloodied from without but now she's being unmercifully battered from within.

Add to the embarrassment of Senator Grassley's intent to investigate six huge mega-ministries and the continued slipping and sliding of our Episcopalian and Lutheran "brethren," Pentecostalism's penchant for heresy and debauchery ... specifically the brothers Paulk.

When all is said and done, which will be the greater contribution of the Paulk ministries ...

The number of souls delivered to Heaven and the Throne of Grace
or the number of souls delivered to Hell by their total disgrace?

This fiasco will end with the damnation of thousands as a result of the Paulk's heresies, debaucheries, deceits, immoralities, chicaneries, and continuing churchwide denials? Read the latter - SIN! Something we're all guilty of but not to the degree or with the flagrancy of these sons of Belial!

Will the tally of those rescued by their labors be sufficient to exceed those lost by their lies? Do we really believe God reckons His ledger in that manner?

The eternal question will be: How it is that congregations allow these things to happen?

RELATED CRIB POSTS ON OTHER HERETICS AND APOSTATES:

BEAM
CHARISMA
PAULKS I
PAULKS II
PAULKS III
PEARSON
PENTACOSTALISM
WHITES I
WHITES II

Apostasy, Christianity, Heresy,
Heretics, Paulks, Pentecostalism

WORDS: And their relationship to the homosexual choice!

I am told that words have meaning. Language is designed or has developed with that understanding. I understand that to mean when we originate a word (not just use a word) that it has a definitional purpose.

Take the words natural and unnatural for example.

natural - nat·u·ral [nach-er-uhl, nach-ruhl] – adjective

1. existing in or formed by nature (opposed to artificial): a natural bridge.
   
2. based on the state of things in nature; constituted by nature: Growth is a natural process.
   

This word tells me historically there was a universal belief in the existence of something we referred to as nature. Nested in that belief was the understanding that some things existed naturally or that they were constituted by or out of the natural process.

The word nature would also be important to understand.

nature – na·ture [ney-cher] - noun

1. the material world, esp. as surrounding humankind and existing independently of human activities.
2. the natural world as it exists without human beings or civilization.
3. the elements of the natural world, as mountains, trees, animals, or rivers.
4. natural scenery.
5. the universe, with all its phenomena.
6. the sum total of the forces at work throughout the universe.
7. reality, as distinguished from any effect of art: a portrait true to nature.
8. the particular combination of qualities belonging to a person, animal, thing, or class by birth, origin, or constitution; native or inherent character: human nature.
9. the instincts or inherent tendencies directing conduct: a man of good nature.
10. character, kind, or sort: two books of the same nature.
11. characteristic disposition; temperament: a self-willed nature; an evil nature.
12. the original, natural, uncivilized condition of humankind.
13. the biological functions or the urges to satisfy their requirements.

I've included the long version of this definition so you can work your way through its meaning.

unnatural - un·nat·u·ral [uhn-nach-er-uhl, -nach-ruhl] – adjective

1. contrary to the laws or course of nature.
2. at variance with the character or nature of a person, animal, or plant.
3. at variance with what is normal or to be expected

Word smiths are going to have to give us some new natural science definitions if we as a culture continue on this path or relativism.

Christianity, Homosexuality

CAPTIAL: Of the public kind!

I was noticing the Republican debates are on tonight ... with a huge yawn I moved on. Then I thought ... the reason I'm yawning is that neither party has any public capital with me.

• There isn't a "candidate" in either party that could give me the sense he/she is a people's president.
• In fact other than Fred the DA I can't think of a singe politician I have any respect for (perhaps the reason Freddy resonates with many is that he is not a politician).
• There isn't a "candidate" in either party that has any public capital to spend on me.
• There isn't a "Dirty Harry" in the whole bunch; either side of the aisle.
• There is not one - Christian, Jew, Muslim, Atheist or Agnostic - that inspires me with their worldviews, their morals/ethics, their commitment to whatever, or their zeal for what they believe.

We are like sheep being led to the slaughter. The Apostle Paul tells us ...

Every person is to be in subjection to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those which exist are established by God.

Therefore whoever resists authority has opposed the ordinance of God; and they who have opposed will receive condemnation upon themselves. For rulers are not a cause of fear for good behavior, but for evil. Do you want to have no fear of authority?

Do what is good and you will have praise from the same; for it is a minister of God to you for good. But if you do what is evil, be afraid; for it does not bear the sword for nothing; for it is a minister of God, an avenger who brings wrath on the one who practices evil. Therefore it is necessary to be in subjection, not only because of wrath, but also for conscience' sake.

Romans 13:1-5

Man, we've done some REAL evil, cause I'm scared spitless!

2008, Leadership, Politicians, Politics, Romans

WESTERN CIVILIZATION: Sweet & Sour News!

No source links on this post, just this morning's news.

The SOUR report tells me Western Civilization is doomed and the Muhammadans are right!

The Japanese love technology so much that now even sex toys are on the cutting edge, according to a report ...

The “gPod”, a phallic-shaped vibrator, is designed to respond automatically to sounds picked up by an accompanying handset, which can plug into anything from a telephone to a music player to a television.

... .

“You can use it in many ways, for example hooking it up to your mobile phone,” said Ichiro Kameda, the machine's inventor. “The dildo vibrates through the same waves as a voice. So one of the ideas is that you can use it here in Tokyo when your boyfriend in New York is talking to you on the phone.”

So if you're discussing business with your secretary and her eyes role and she seems to be drifting off ... you should fire her!

Then again, sometimes we see SWEET news that gives us hope ...

A Painesville, Ohio, judge known for dishing out quirky sentences is making no bones about what he sees as a fowl crime.

Municipal Judge Michael Cicconetti has ordered three men accused of soliciting prostitutes to wear chicken suits in lieu of a 30-day prison sentence, the Houston Chronicle reported.

... .

The alleged johns will also have to carry a sign saying, “No Chicken Ranch in Painesville,” a jab at the “World Famous Chicken Ranch” whorehouse in Nevada, the Houston Chronicle reported.

"We're trying to send a strong message that we won't tolerate this activity in the city," said Painesville probation supervisor David Washlock told the Chronicle.

The irony of the name of the town is priceless! Go girl, go!

Degeneracy, Justice, Sin,
Western Civilization