external linksHoly Scripture Searchable Online Bibles And Other Resources Biblios Bible Gateway Blue Letter Bible Christian Ministry Text and Audio Messages of the Prophet / Evangelist William Marrion Branham ChurchAges.com Living Word Broadcast Literary Resources Texts broadly relevant to the Christian heritage and worldview Christian Etherial Classics Library |
Friday, March 23. 2012What Is The Word Of God ?
When Christians of the English-speaking world refer to the Word of God they conventionally mean the sixty-six canonical books of the King James Bible of 1611. It is considered the Word, the whole Word, and nothing but the Word – complete, nothing lacking, nothing superfluous. It’s statements are taken as the inspired, veritable, infallible utterances of the Almighty. Very truth of very truth. And that settles it, as some are wont to say.
But wait a minute. The devil, too, can quote scripture, as well we know. In his mouth then surely it’s dubious – it might be the truth. Or it might be misconstrued, subverted to satanic ends. This might readily explain the many conflicting ideas about the meaning of scripture, even where approached with best intentions. Meaning, in turn, is taken to be a matter of interpretation – of biblical hermeneutics as scholars call it. And this verily may be the problem – the idea that the Word of God needs to be interpreted. Of itself the Bible states that ... the prophecy came not in olden times by the will of man, but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. In other words, it did not come by human intellect or rational surmise, but the intimation of a higher mind. This being so, can we expect the human intellect to be its arbiter of meaning? Can we expect a rational interpretation of the mind of God? Can rational interpretation be the basis of the Christian life? Or would the reader need to be similarly inspired, at least to embark upon the same holy ground, as when the prophet encountered the burning bush and a voice that spoke from it? Spiritual things are to be spiritually discerned, St Paul admonished the Corinthian church and, again, we are to compare spiritual things with spiritual. Addressing the same community, he asks rhetorically, who has known the mind of God, stating that we have the mind of Christ – the Holy Spirit which, according to the Saviour’s own words, will lead us into all truth. Similarly to the Corinthians, who evidently were carnal in understanding, Paul put it that his preaching was not delivered in word alone, but in the demonstration and power of the Spirit. This is made even clearer in that the Spirit spoke by the prophet Isaiah: So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it. The metaphor is that of rain upon a seed. Here is the entire passage from Isaiah 55: Seek ye the Lord while he may be found, call ye upon him while he is near: Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts: and let him return unto the Lord, and he will have mercy upon him; and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater: So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it. For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace: the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands. Instead of the thorn shall come up the fir tree, and instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle tree: and it shall be to the Lord for a name, for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off. Let us take this literally and posit that the Word of God – when it is the Word of God – speaks directly to the heart, and in such a way as to be not merely incontrovertible, but producing of itself the desired result. To use a systems metaphor, the Word of God thus understood is executable information, transforming of itself the human soul, its reach necessarily extending into realms which far transcend the intellectual grasp. For what says the scripture – Job 28 – Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding. How does this differ from the scholarly idea of understanding which is right interpretation! What indeed is theology, but an intellectual placeholder in the absence of revelation. All this is perhaps inconsequential where the Bible is considered no more than an ethical prescription, a kind of spiritual education program to transform society. But understood for what it is – the information abstract of the spiritual body of Christ – its necessary transcendence of the merely human grasp is fully apparent. For it is not by human intellect that the natural body is formed in the womb, brought to maturity and sustained in its organic functions. Neither is it within human ability to construct the temple of God, the spiritual body which is in heaven. Yet the information is in us. It is in the seed, and in every cell, encoded in the genetic language of DNA, to speak again of the physical body. Similarly it is the spiritual DNA in the Word of God which produces the spiritual body, the theophany or dwelling of God, which is eternal. Herein then is apparent the necessary agency of a higher mind, which mind is the mind of Christ. This is comforting in that it takes the burden out of the Christian life. For, if we are born a human being, in the providence of God, we will possess a human body. So likewise, if we are born a Christian – born of water and the blood according to the scriptures – our spiritual birth will produce the body of Christ. Friday, March 23. 2012If our Gospel be Hidden
But if our gospel be hidden, it is hidden to them that are lost. 2 Corinthians 4:3
Is the gospel of Christ hidden? I suggest that it is. At least two layers of obfuscation obscure its truths from the common view – one overt and one subtle. The overt obstruction is self-evident and basically clear-cut. It consists of all availing counterclaims – as of atheism and agnosticism, of other religious and philosophical systems – in short, of the vast range of competing ideas in the cultural domain. Two further problems may here be subsumed. The first is simply the confusion and distraction of too many contending voices. The second is misrepresentation of the gospel, whether unintentional or deliberate, resulting in its widespread misapprehension. Here one might reflect on the common notion that – whatever it is, this gospel of Christ – it is essentially understood, regardless whether a scholarly or folkloric understanding of the Bible is being referenced. I mean, legion are the quasi intellectuals who imagine that a science or humanities education qualifies the incumbent to render a verdict. Perhaps even more numerous are the men and women who believe they have heard it all. This brings us to the second, and more subtle, obscuration of the gospel of Christ – the church. Yes, indeed – the church, in all its historic and cultural manifestations, is not only a more subtle, but far and away more pervasive, source of relevant misunderstanding. Christianity is not to be equated with Christendom, this is to say, nor Christ with the church. Yet legion are the confessed Christians which fail to understand this – not to mention their critics, who take their creeds and confessions as representative of the faith. And – seriously – if confessed Christians misrepresent the gospel, what chance have critics and contenders in the atheist camp who view the subject through foggy binoculars? What did Terry Eagleton say of these Christians? They got the Ditchkins (the Hitchens and Dawkins) they deserve. What, moreover, can we say to all this, except that the whole thing is a muddle? To the Bible then, our source of clarity and illumination. St Paul, in leading up to our quoted verse, speaks of the veil wherein all spiritual truth is veiled. That veil was upon the face of Moses, and later upon the hearts – upon the understanding – of his spiritual heirs. In other words, the spiritual tradition is itself the veil, where today it is the traditions of Christendom which hide the truth. What does the scripture further say concerning Jerusalem, which in Bible symbolism represents the church? Revelation 11:8 ... the great city, which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt. That’s shocking, but that is the Word of God. It kinda puts a different complexion on things. Friday, March 23. 2012Another Earth – A ReviewThe cinematic feature Another Earth by director Mike Cahill is somewhat austere in its almost documentary point of view (my personal sentiment), but it deserves recognition as a visionary masterpiece, which effortlessly and seamlessly merges psychological realism with the notion of a twin to planet Earth, complete with replicas of our individual selves. On one level it is a straightforward tale of personal guilt, forgiveness and redemption, and while not exceptional in this regard, it still makes for compelling drama. Its genius lies in the manner of treatment, which is to say, in the contextual envelope of another Earth appearing in our local universe. This idea, on the surface oblique and removed from the film’s ostensible theme, is intriguing insofar it succeeds in surreptitiously insinuating itself as central, with the human drama somehow secondary, and one suspects that this is because a truth about the human condition is being symbolised by the planetary twin. We do live in two different worlds with two different selves. Yet the effect, paradoxically, is not to minimise the significance of the human story, but rather to intensify, as in a hall of mirrors – the self beholding the self – with all the ideas of projection, identification, creativity, transcendence and ultimate mystery this entails. In the end it is the lightness of touch, the absence of an overt embodied point of view, which bespeaks the artistic assurance with which Mike Cahill and his collaborator the co-writer / actress Brit Marling tell their story. The locus of meaning appears elusive. It is out there somewhere to be grasped, suspended in the void between two Earths which are separated in space, but also somehow tantalisingly close – entangled, in the language of quantum physics – their destinies entwined. As Marling remarks, the image of the other Earth provokes a primal reaction – a sense of recognition perhaps, breaking through the fog of familiarity, making for a lucid moment. Tuesday, March 20. 2012Christianity In The Cultural Balance
Critics of theism contend that Christianity has been a culturally regressive phenomenon. But the case, as argued elsewhere, is one-sided and overstated. Jürgen Habermas, the German atheist philosopher, redresses the balance in that he wrote:
Christianity has functioned for the normative self-understanding of modernity as more than a mere precursor or a catalyst. Egalitarian universalism, from which sprang the ideas of freedom and social solidarity, of an autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, of the individual morality of conscience, human rights, and democracy, is the direct heir to the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the object of continual critical appropriation and reinterpretation. To this day, there is no alternative to it. And in the light of the current challenges of a post-national constellation, we continue to draw on the substance of this heritage. Everything else is just idle postmodern talk. History would seem to bear this out. Nations which passed into modernity with the humane institutions we nowadays value – democracy, due process of law, healthcare, education, and so on – are those which in which Protestant Christianity found a welcome home. We must needs emphasise Protestant Christianity in that by Christianity proper we mean a biblically authentic derivation. This is not to imply that the reformed traditions are perfect in this respect – far from it – but historically they are the nearest we possess. Catholicism, by contrast, usually charged with subverting human progress for a dark one thousand years, represents the total repudiation of the biblical doctrine. The same holds for religious imperialism and cultural genocide. Irrespective of the Christian institutions involved – and here the Protestant denominations share a burden of responsibility – the imperial, expansionist, colonial attitude is entirely without justification in the scriptural canon. As to the ongoing destruction of archaic, tribal or magical cultures this would seem to be a historically distinct phenomenon, pursued for a variety of ideological reasons. So far as Christianity has been complicit, we may state paradoxically that Christianity is not Christianity. That is to say, the visible historic manifestations of Christendom are not coextensive with the Christian faith. Indeed in large measure the institutional church has persecuted its own, that is, the true exponents of that faith. Thus we see that the subject is historically complex, making it difficult, if not impossible, to render an accurate delineation of relevant circumstances. A case can be made on definitional grounds, that authentic Christianity – which is the Spirit of Christ in manifestation – cannot be destructive of the cultural good. Yet, all this conceded, it may be that a more essential, more fundamental, point is still overlooked. The suggestion is that the appearing of Christ in first-century Palestine produced a fundamental change in the quality of human consciousness – that indeed it gave rise to the reflective self-awareness intrinsic to modern human consciousness. This is a notion, subtle as it is profound, difficult to define as it is to prove. But the evidence, circumstantial though it be, is intriguing. In The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind the Princeton psychologist Julian Jaynes makes a case for the novel theory that human consciousness in the ancient world was radically other than is commonly experienced by moderns. Indeed the ancients were not conscious in the modern sense of possessing a self-reflective ‘I’ – so the theory – but they perceived thought and impression as the objectified oracle of the gods, which is to say, as voices in the head. Without examining the idea in depth, there is arguably a measure of corroboration in the evident cultural discontinuity, say, between the modern rational mind and the so-called dreamtime consciousness of magical or tribal shamanism. Again, a vast shift in human sensibility appears to have occurred over the roughly one thousand years centred on the Gregorian year 1, and so, on the advent of the Mind of Christ. This is principally apparent in that the modern rational construction of intellect is commonly traced back to the thinkers of classical Greece – Archimedes, Euclid, Pythagoras et al. No such reference, however, is widely made with respect to ancient Egypt, from which Grecian science and culture derives. The nigh explanation and point is this – that the Greeks are familiar and recognisable to us in their mode of thought. The Egyptians, by contrast, appear to us utterly alien. Indeed so incomprehensible is the Egyptian opus to the modern sensibility that archaeologist tend to play down its genius, to deny its palpable scientific eminence, even while the celebrated classical cultures represent but a pale shadow of the ancient grandeur. Here we may also cite the magical empires of the Americas – the Olmec, Toltec, Maya and Inca, to name but a few – and we confront the theory, as elaborated by Graeme Hancock et al, of a primordial or prehistoric high civilisation of global extent. It is a further question whether the ancient paradigm change which ushered in the classical age is causally dependent upon, or merely coincident with, the advent of the Saviour. While the cultural transition, as from a magical to a rational paradigm, extended over some one thousand years – circa 500 BC to 500 AD – the advent of the Christ consciousness, likewise, need not be understood as confined to the earthly incarnation of Jesus of Nazareth. The man, Jesus, rather represented the culmination of a prophetic lineage, thereafter giving rise to an apostolic lineage which lasted until around 325 AD and the Nicene Ecclesiastical Council which marks a pivotal point in the historic subversion of Christianity. Arguably, and this strikes me as the best hypothesis, a grand synchrony in the mind of God unites these seemingly disparate developments, linking cultural and spiritual cycles with cosmic phenomena such as precession and the passage of astrological ages. We are left then with the intriguing suggestion that the historic ingress of the Mind of Christ is essential and intrinsic to the evolution, the construction or formation, of modern human consciousness. Related questions here arise – equally intriguing – concerning the philosophical problem of ‘other minds’. It is generally assumed – by a tacit largess, it would seem – that the quality of human consciousness is, by and large, a universal constant. The experience of being human, so the surmise, is common throughout humanity in terms of its essential constituents – i.e. not in the content of consciousness, but in the fact of human consciousness itself. But can even this notion be sustained in view of the demonstrable variation in human sensibility and genius? Could we entertain the heretical notion that some individual ‘others’ are not at all conscious in the way we understand the term? By corollary, could it be that, compared to others yet again who are even more aware, it is we who are unconscious? From our own subjective experience we must necessarily concede that consciousness – in its day-to-day manifestation – is a highly variable phenomenon. And when I hear of scholars, as of the materialist persuasion, who would minimise the significance of consciousness – well, then I really have to wonder. Monday, March 19. 2012Where Is He ? – Finding Jesus and Recognising Him when You see Him
Sir, we would see Jesus, and, where is he that is born King of the Jews? – that was the cry in the first age, when the saviour first appeared upon the earth. And it has been the cry in every age, insofar as those who have heard of him want to see him. According to his promise, moreover, that he would be with his disciples to the end of the age, he is yet on earth today.
But how would we find him? Even more to the point, how would we recognise him if he was standing right before us? Many who claimed to be looking for him in the time of his first appearing failed to recognise him – that he was indeed the awaited messiah. His family failed to recognise him – his own brother James did not know him – not, that is, until he appeared to him having risen from the dead. That should give us pause. How would we know him if he appeared in our midst today? What should be expect? A man in a robe? (Of course there are plenty of those.) Or would that be an anachronism? Should we perhaps expect him to be dressed as he was then – in the common attire of the age? No doubt, many failed to recognise him because he was in many ways undistinguished from his peers. So, once more, how would we know him? The answer, I suggest, lies in who he is, and according to scripture he is the Word. John 1 states that the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. Christ is the Word then – the whole Word and nothing but the Word – where the Word is the Word of God, the holy scriptures. But how does that help us? The internet is awash with claims of scriptural authority; all churches essentially claim as much – we have the Word, He is among us. Yet many of them contradict one another, showing many of the claims to be necessarily false, as Christ cannot contradict himself. More accurate then it is to say that Christ is the prophetic Word – the Word of God to the age, the specific age in which he appears – and here we hark back to our earlier statement that God has his witness in every age. This is significant as, in his first coming, he was missed by those – notably the Pharisees – who referred to the Word of another age. They held to the teachings of Moses, and in the messiah perhaps they expected a Super Moses. Similarly, when we look for him today, we cannot expect to find him in the doctrines of Martin Luther, of John Wesley, or in any other of the great Reformation creeds. That was manna for another age. And we cannot find him in Pentecostal doctrine – so far as the Pentecostal denominations are concerned. For this is another prophetic age – the age of the Word in its fullness, of the spiritual seed come to maturity. It is the age of Malachi 4 and Revelation 10. Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord ... and ... in the days of the voice of the seventh angel, when he shall begin to sound, the mystery of God should be finished ... It is the age of the Word unveiled, in the words of St Paul, of seeing face to face – of the logos beheld, as one contemporary put it – and as Job also framed the matter, I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee. This we should look for in his appearing today. Monday, March 19. 2012Christianity’s Cultural Cringe
Since Old Testament times, when God called a people to bear his name, there has been persistent tendency to identify the Judaeo-Christian prophetic legacy with a particular cultural style. Cultural, not spiritual, determinants define the resultant faith of which modern dominion theology is an extreme example. (Dominion theology – the idea that ostensibly Christian culture and values should be imposed by political means.)
But the attitude is arguably at its most glaringly apparent in the common Christian cringe concerning that assortment of curiosa, esoterica and exotica, loosely labelled ‘the occult’. Um ... what’s that, you might ask – the occult? Good question. According to the people who ‘know’ these things it is the cultural products – the arts and sciences – which derive from a paradigm other than the rational, post Enlightenment view which consolidated around 18th century Europe, thence to make its spiritual home in the Protestant New World. It is the archaic, the exotic, the mystical and magical. It is emphatically yoga, acupuncture, shiatsu and tai chi – meditation, psychism and parapsychology – Shamanism, Ayurveda, Taoism and Zen – astrology, geomancy and vibrational medicine – it is pagan and traditional lore, it is New Age therapies ... in short, it is anything unfamiliar, strange or mysterious, namely to the mindset of a culture-bound post-Reformation Protestant Christianity. The ‘forbidden’ list is encyclopaedic as offered for guidance by the relevant ‘discernment’ ministries, and it would be easier to state what is excluded – if one could think of anything. A devil or antichrist is of course required in the Christian worldview, and it would seem to be the gods of pagan and exotic tradition which comprise a convenient target for the applicable projections. The Christian is accordingly warned that here lurk the powers of darkness, that involvement may result in spiritual harm with the possibility of extreme danger to physical and mental health. For this is where the enemy is said to reside – this is the empire of evil, the archrival of all that is God and godly. Believers of this persuasion accordingly wage insect battles with the dark forces of the occult, while career ex-occultists in the church regale the faithful with lurid tales of spiritual wickedness, both appeasing their hunger for the supernatural, and providing a rallying call for a spiritual war mentality. So what is wrong with this picture? Is the Christian required to walk a cultural minefield of satanic deceits? Does Satan reside in ‘the occult’? Or are the essential battlelines misconceived? The attitude is wrongheaded, I submit, firstly because it is Jesuitical or Pharisaical in outlook in that it takes a laundry list approach to putative sins. Whatever we might say about discernment of spirits, it should not be complicated – subtle, yes, but not complex as involving a checklist. Secondly, it is inquisitorial. It belies such scriptures as, the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, and, be careful for nothing. It is at odds with a natural theology, and denies the largess which St Paul extended to the Athenians: The God whom you ignorantly worship, him I declare unto you. But there is a deeper philosophical or, if you will, theological error at the basis the attitude in question. It is the mistaken idea that demonic spirits adhere preferentially to the artefacts, the practices and traditions of archaic or non-Western cultures – that they congregate in the ‘occult’ and ‘cultic’ in the Hollywood sense of these terms. Beware, therefore, of African figurines, but not, say, the mannequins in fashion stores. Condemn the fetishism of tribal stigmata, but condone a Christian woman painting her face. Such would be the attitude. Needless to say, this line of thought is absurd, and its advocates demonstrate nigh total lack of insight concerning their subject. While each case must naturally be taken on its own merits, a spiritual reality or dimension is intrinsic to all phenomena, to all activity, to all thought and belief – from the workplace and supermarket to the pews of the church. Things which are seen were not made of things which do appear, as we read in Hebrews. The battlelines are therefore misdrawn; the balance of truth is seriously askew. The inconsistency is perhaps most apparent in that denunciation of the magical / mystical paradigm often coincides with obsequious deference to modern science. That is, Christians will likely demonise the astro-mysticism of the Magi, prepared the while to tweak the Bible on the basis of two years of college biology. The irony here is compounded in that the materialist paradigm of modern science is further removed from the biblical worldview than any other belief system in the history of humankind. As an aside – and this I find more puzzling still – many modern Christians, seemingly indifferent regarding the occult controversy, happily proceed on the basis of a broadly rationalist scientific synthesis, in utter contradistinction to the emphatically magical and mystical worldview which their sacred book inhabits. While confessing to belief in God, they appear at the very least agnostic with respect to a wider spiritual reality. Ultimately there is no cultural style or paradigm which has the preeminent option on godliness. All cultural artifice, all art and science – whether archaic or modern – derives from the same tree of knowledge, the fruit of which is death. While all human culture is thus antichrist to some extent, the antichrist of biblical reference is not culturally identified. In other words, the satanic throne does not principally reside in the pagan, the archaic, the mystical or magical. The enemies of Christ in first century Palestine were not Cabalists or Pythagoreans, they were not the cohorts of Mithras, Hermes, or Apollo, nor any other expatriates of the polymorphous, syncretic, pan-Babylonian diaspora. No – those who instigated the murder of Christ were incumbents of the religious orthodoxy, who claimed to be heirs of his prophetic lineage, who claimed to be looking for him, awaiting his appearing. It was so then. And it is so now. Reference: http://www.spiritual-research-network.com/dangerouspractices.html http://www.christian-faith.com/forjesus/occult-check-list http://www.christiananswers.net/q-eden/edn-occult-defn.html http://www.creationists.org/reiki-energy-healing-is-spiritually-dangerous.html http://www.spiritualwarfaredeliverance.com/occult-occultism-deliverance-healing/html/what-is-the-occult-definition.html Monday, March 19. 2012Heresy of Heresies
O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, which killest the prophets, and stonest them that are sent unto thee ... Luke13:34
Since Reformation days of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries a broad evangelical consensus has emerged, a pervasive orthodoxy which, while accommodating certain doctrinal variants, tends to unite the greater Protestant community in a common faith and spiritual worldview. Perhaps it is this consensus, this sense of strength in numbers, which fosters the assurance that we have it essentially figured out, that we know our God and his Word, the Bible, and that we have no need that anyone should teach us a different way. Sure, it will be conceded, there is a work to be done, but it is considered mere fine tuning – the finishing touches, so to speak, on the spiritual temple. Christ is set to appear and whisk his faithful into the sky – or however his coming is envisaged. But if that is so, where is he? Where, among us who call ourselves by his name, is Jesus today? Where is the angelic presence in the form of the pillar of fire that accompanied the early church? Does there not remain a yawning gulf between modern Christianity and its biblical prototype as depicted in Acts and the epistles of Paul? Where is it happening? Oh, it is sometimes spoken with baited breath – it’s happening in Latin America, or China. Well, perhaps it is. As for the rest, why are all ‘traditional’ churches in decline? Why is the ‘emergent’ and ecumenical crowd at pains to reinvent the faith from the ground up? Can we actually conceive that the Protestant synthesis is seriously flawed, namely in the sense of being yet far from complete – far, that is, from having accomplished a full restoration of biblical verity? Or is restoration accomplished, having quietly passed by the religious orthodoxy – unrecognised – as it has in every age? Those who would doubt either proposition should reflect that most of the ‘church’ was wrong about most things for most of history. What makes our age special and exempt from radical misapprehension concerning the prophetic doctrine? I know thy works ... (Revelation 3) Because thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked ... Perhaps nowhere is this attitude exemplified so perfectly as in certain so-called discernment ministries as maintain a presence on the worldwide web, functioning as a kind of Christian thought police to judge what the faithful may and may not believe. Firmly ensconced within the orthodox mainstream, these issue ex cathedra verdicts – as from the assumed high ground of biblical authority – denouncing as heresy whatever they happen to dislike, or what doesn’t resonate with the constraints of their worldview. The attitude, of course, is historically familiar. It is the inquisitorial, pharisaical attitude par excellence. Yes, the Bible states that we ought to be discerning – namely concerning the spiritual realities of our own experience. As to the role of grand inquisitor, it has no biblical precedent or legitimation. What did the Master say concerning the tares in the field? Leave them alone lest you also pull out the good seed. If, moreover, we take the Bible as our model – as of how the world works – we see that traditionally, historically, invariably, it is the orthodoxy which is apostate, the godly branch, the while, appearing as a marginalised, discredited, often persecuted minority. Yes, but now things are different ... now we are enlightened. Um ... since when? If indeed it were otherwise, it would break all the biblical types, the examples presented for our instruction. For what says the scripture? Blessed are we, when we are persecuted for the sake of God’s truth. Blessed are we if we can say with Paul, in the way which is called heresy, so worship I the God of my fathers, believing all things which are written in the law and in the prophets. |
QuicksearchArchivesCategoriesCalendarSyndicate This BlogArkangelArkangel is the weblog of writer Harald Kleemann, specifically regarding his work on biblical Christianity. Readers’ comments are naturally their own and their appearing on this site should not be taken to signify approbation by Arkangel, which is to say, its author. The same applies to linked material offsite, which should be taken on its own merits.
Readers may note that comments and trackbacks are not presently enabled. |