John McArthur sends God to Hell!!!

The New Calvinism

This article was published in TIME magazine more than 6 years ago, and I am happy that it's still on their archives.

Just in case they take the decision to take it down, I am posting it here, for later reference.
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By David Van BiemaThursday, Mar. 12, 2009

If you really want to follow the development of conservative Christianity, track its musical hits. In the early 1900s you might have heard "The Old Rugged Cross," a celebration of the atonement. By the 1980s you could have shared the Jesus-is-my-buddy intimacy of "Shine, Jesus, Shine." And today, more and more top songs feature a God who is very big, while we are...well, hark the David Crowder Band: "I am full of earth/ You are heaven's worth/ I am stained with dirt/ Prone to depravity."

Calvinism is back, and not just musically. John Calvin's 16th century reply to medieval Catholicism's buy-your-way-out-of-purgatory excesses is Evangelicalism's latest success story, complete with an utterly sovereign and micromanaging deity, sinful and puny humanity, and the combination's logical consequence, predestination: the belief that before time's dawn, God decided whom he would save (or not), unaffected by any subsequent human action or decision.

Calvinism, cousin to the Reformation's other pillar, Lutheranism, is a bit less dour than its critics claim: it offers a rock-steady deity who orchestrates absolutely everything, including illness (or home foreclosure!), by a logic we may not understand but don't have to second-guess. Our satisfaction — and our purpose — is fulfilled simply by "glorifying" him. In the 1700s, Puritan preacher Jonathan Edwards invested Calvinism with a rapturous near mysticism. Yet it was soon overtaken in the U.S. by movements like Methodism that were more impressed with human will. Calvinist-descended liberal bodies like the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) discovered other emphases, while Evangelicalism's loss of appetite for rigid doctrine — and the triumph of that friendly, fuzzy Jesus — seemed to relegate hard-core Reformed preaching (Reformed operates as a loose synonym for Calvinist) to a few crotchety Southern churches.

No more. Neo-Calvinist ministers and authors don't operate quite on a Rick Warren scale. But, notes Ted Olsen, a managing editor at Christianity Today, "everyone knows where the energy and the passion are in the Evangelical world" — with the pioneering new-Calvinist John Piper of Minneapolis, Seattle's pugnacious Mark Driscoll and Albert Mohler, head of the Southern Seminary of the huge Southern Baptist Convention. The Calvinist-flavored ESV Study Bible sold out its first printing, and Reformed blogs like Between Two Worlds are among cyber-Christendom's hottest links.

Like the Calvinists, more moderate Evangelicals are exploring cures for the movement's doctrinal drift, but can't offer the same blanket assurance. "A lot of young people grew up in a culture of brokenness, divorce, drugs or sexual temptation," says Collin Hansen, author of Young, Restless, Reformed: A Journalist's Journey with the New Calvinists. "They have plenty of friends: what they need is a God." Mohler says, "The moment someone begins to define God's [being or actions] biblically, that person is drawn to conclusions that are traditionally classified as Calvinist." Of course, that presumption of inevitability has drawn accusations of arrogance and divisiveness since Calvin's time. Indeed, some of today's enthusiasts imply that non-Calvinists may actually not be Christians. Skirmishes among the Southern Baptists (who have a competing non-Calvinist camp) and online "flame wars" bode badly.

Calvin's 500th birthday will be this July. It will be interesting to see whether Calvin's latest legacy will be classic Protestant backbiting or whether, during these hard times, more Christians searching for security will submit their wills to the austerely demanding God of their country's infancy.

4 Blood Moons Half Price

It is interesting that today, when the second out of 4 blood moons has arrived, the book by John Hagee has been reduced half price!!!

Wait till next year, and nothing happens, still we will we see nothing happening. I would like to know beforehand what excuse they will come up with.

If you follow Hagee and the lot, you lost it!!

The Foundation for Pentecostal Scholarship

One of my very dear and honored person, Jim West, despises Pentecostals. He, like McArthur, throws everybody under the bus, and calls Pentecostals "Pentabablists".

Well, there's a lot of scholarship going on in the Pentecostal Camp, and it has answered its critics. What I don't like is that people like McArthur and West (wow, the two of them beside each other in a sentence!!) mark Pentecostals by the fringe groups and radicals that take all the TV time.

Well, for this end, I offer them, and you, this web, that will provide those in the Pentecostal camp with a lot of academic info.

The Foundation for Pentecostal Scholarship, which you can find here.

You will find a number of other volumes that are useful for the understanding of Pentecostalism, its practices and beliefs.

The book you see in this entry, is the book specifically written to John McArthur's wrongly intended conference "Strange Fire". This is the scholarly answer, to the lack of scholarship that was so evident in that conference. That conference has had a total contrary effect, Pentecostal have banded together, and responded in a very solid way.

Please, take your time to look at this important web.

Free Books from Amazon to your Kindle or tablet by Martin Luther and John Calvin

One must take advantage of this offers!!

Click on the pictures to be taken to Amazon. If you have an e-reader, this is a good chance.

Right Wing craziness. Supporting Israel, with lies and made up stories.

Last night, Glenn Beck traveled to Washington, DC to address John Hagee's annual Christians United for Israel conference where he delivered remarks that were predictably filled with Bible prophecy, doom and gloom, and dire warnings about the need to turn this nation back to God.

During his speech, Beck boldly declared that the United States was "established for the establishment of Israel," meaning that the United States was established by God specifically for the purpose of re-establishing the nation of Israel.

And, as proof that our Founding Fathers were well aware of this, Beck pointed out that even our dollar bill contains a Star of David, as well as representations of the cloud and fire that led the Israelites while they wandered in the desert.

It's not true, of course, but that is what happens when you get your history from people like David Barton:

Total disregard of Biblical and logical coherence. See the direct link here.

John J. Collin's Interview on the Dead Sea Scrolls

This is worth the listen to all who are into biblical studies, and even those who are not!!!

There are too many conspiraciones surrounding the composition and translation of the scrolls. It is about time that you hear it from someone who was personally involved in the process, and learn somethings about those who compose the texts found at the caves of Qumran.

Christian Zionism worships Israel not Jesus

Listen to Hagee saying in min. 3 that Israel is the focus of the Bible.

Is he a Christian anymore? Not even Jews think that, they consider God the focus of the Bible, and Jesus taught his followers that he is the focus of the Bible, Luke 24:27; John 5:39.

Well, if you don't believe me, listen to this heretic teacher yourself. 

Christianity must change or die, but not like Gene Robinson suggested

I've been told that the church must change in order to continue as a living organism. But the people who tell me that, usually belong to churches that are dying, exactly for implementing the changes they suggest to me.

Ross Douthat, has written a good piece dealing with this issue in the New York Times, where he deals with this issue. Liberals have been telling us for years that the church must change in order to stay alive, but the churches lead by liberals are the ones dying because of their misguided change.

Can Liberal Christianity Be Saved?IN 1998, John Shelby Spong, then the reliably controversial Episcopal bishop of Newark, published a book entitled “Why Christianity Must Change or Die.” Spong was a uniquely radical figure — during his career, he dismissed almost every element of traditional Christian faith as so much superstition — but most recent leaders of the Episcopal Church have shared his premise. Thus their church has spent the last several decades changing and then changing some more, from a sedate pillar of the WASP establishment into one of the most self-consciously progressive Christian bodies in the United States. 

As a result, today the Episcopal Church looks roughly how Roman Catholicism would look if Pope Benedict XVI suddenly adopted every reform ever urged on the Vatican by liberal pundits and theologians. It still has priests and bishops, altars and stained-glass windows. But it is flexible to the point of indifference on dogma, friendly to sexual liberation in almost every form, willing to blend Christianity with other faiths, and eager to downplay theology entirely in favor of secular political causes.

Spong was wrong then, and is wrong now. He wants to kill of Orthodox Christianity, so it doesn't stand in the way of his sinful life, but at the end, he seems to had inflicted a wound to his own type of christianity. The issue was then, and is now, that those who should have known better, did nothing, instead went on to dismantle the Episcopal Church in order to be in the good graces of today's society and culture.  So there's no interest in defending the truth of the Bible against a society that needs it so much, rather, picks up their political fights, which contradict the Gospel at its core.

Yet instead of attracting a younger, more open-minded demographic with these changes, the Episcopal Church’s dying has proceeded apace. Last week, while the church’s House of Bishops was approving a rite to bless same-sex unions, Episcopalian church attendance figures for 2000-10 circulated in the religion blogosphere. They showed something between a decline and a collapse: In the last decade, average Sunday attendance dropped 23 percent, and not a single Episcopal diocese in the country saw churchgoing increase.

Well, there's nothing they can offer but the same thrush that the young people are facing outside the church. We don't see a great increase in the audience they intended to target. In Australia, the Uniting Church, is experiencing something similar. Yet, the churches it was meant to replace, seem to either thrive (the Methodist), or at least survive (the Presbyterians).

This decline is the latest chapter in a story dating to the 1960s. The trends unleashed in that era — not only the sexual revolution, but also consumerism and materialism, multiculturalism and relativism — threw all of American Christianity into crisis, and ushered in decades of debate over how to keep the nation’s churches relevant and vital. 

Traditional believers, both Protestant and Catholic, have not necessarily thrived in this environment. The most successful Christian bodies have often been politically conservative but theologically shallow, preaching a gospel of health and wealth rather than the full New Testament message.

My sentiment as well. But I wouldn't call prosperity Gospel people "traditional believers". They are as far from the Gospel as the Mormons or Jehova Witnesses. They have a total different religion. These churches thrive, not because they are Gospel driven, rather, because they are money driven. People want money and wealth, so they go to these churches to get a hand of how to obtain it, or make it.

But if conservative Christianity has often been compromised, liberal Christianity has simply collapsed. Practically every denomination — Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian — that has tried to adapt itself to contemporary liberal values has seen an Episcopal-style plunge in church attendance. Within the Catholic Church, too, the most progressive-minded religious orders have often failed to generate the vocations necessary to sustain themselves.

Not all Methodist, Lutheran or Presbyterians are going the way of the dinosaurs, but those denominations that have adopted the Episcopal way, are going the way of the Episcopal church.

Both religious and secular liberals have been loath to recognize this crisis. Leaders of liberal churches have alternated between a Monty Python-esque “it’s just a flesh wound!” bravado and a weird self-righteousness about their looming extinction. (In a 2006 interview, the Episcopal Church’s presiding bishop explained that her communion’s members valued “the stewardship of the earth” too highly to reproduce themselves.) 

Liberal commentators, meanwhile, consistently hail these forms of Christianity as a model for the future without reckoning with their decline. Few of the outraged critiques of the Vatican’s investigation of progressive nuns mentioned the fact that Rome had intervened because otherwise the orders in question were likely to disappear in a generation. Fewer still noted the consequences of this eclipse: Because progressive Catholicism has failed to inspire a new generation of sisters, Catholic hospitals across the country are passing into the hands of more bottom-line-focused administrators, with inevitable consequences for how they serve the poor. 

 Liberals don't want to accept their peril. As we see in the case of Katherine Jefferts Schori, she wants to window dress their declining numbers by passing it as a way of "stewardship of the earth". This type of denial would not be allowed in other quarters. And in the case of "progressive" Catholicism, it just won't get people inside their orders. If some progressives nuns wants to affirm somebody's homosexuality, why would, they in turn, would quit being a lesbian in order to turn into a life of celibacy?

But if liberals need to come to terms with these failures, religious conservatives should not be smug about them. The defining idea of liberal Christianity — that faith should spur social reform as well as personal conversion — has been an immensely positive force in our national life. No one should wish for its extinction, or for a world where Christianity becomes the exclusive property of the political right.

May the Lord deliver us from the right to take the face of Christianity!!!!

What should be wished for, instead, is that liberal Christianity recovers a religious reason for its own existence. As the liberal Protestant scholar Gary Dorrien has pointed out, the Christianity that animated causes such as the Social Gospel and the civil rights movement was much more dogmatic than present-day liberal faith. Its leaders had a “deep grounding in Bible study, family devotions, personal prayer and worship.” They argued for progressive reform in the context of “a personal transcendent God ... the divinity of Christ, the need of personal redemption and the importance of Christian missions.” 

Today, by contrast, the leaders of the Episcopal Church and similar bodies often don’t seem to be offering anything you can’t already get from a purely secular liberalism. Which suggests that per haps they should pause, amid their frantic renovations, and consider not just what they would change about historic Christianity, but what they would defend and offer uncompromisingly to the world.Absent such a reconsideration, their fate is nearly certain: they will change, and change, and die.

I wonder then, how these "liberals" couldn't pass on their faith to the next generation. There's still much we have to learn. 

Calvin on bold preaching

Some people have taken "offense" that when I preach, I look like I am sure of what I am preaching, as if this is a bad quality. Well, I leave you with the words of John Calvin on the subject:

[H]e [the preacher] should not speak uncertainly as if he were giving out comments of his own, but he should be able to speak out confidently without hesitation in the name of God; just as Jeremiah in this passage [Jer 1] demands to be heard because, as he declares, God has put his words in his mouth.
We can be sure that whatever comes from man’s own cleverness may be ignored. God demands for himself alone the honor of being heard in his church (as I said yesterday). Hence it follows that none should be recognized as servants of God, none should be counted just and faithful prophets or teachers, unless God is speaking through them, unless they invent nothing by themselves and teach nothing by their own will, but preach only what God commands. -- John Calvin

Happy B'Day Calvin

Well, it is surprising the him and me were borne in the same month, ten days apart.

To all my Neo-Calvinist friends, I hope you remember that your denomination's founder was borne today.

Anyway, Happy B'Day Calvin, and thank you for your contribution to Christianity:

Word of Comfort

All I can say, that even though I disagree with Calvin in so many things, it is good to see him used by the Lord to bring to me a word of comfort and hope:

The design of the Lord is to exercise the patience of his servant by adversity; Satan endeavours to drive him to despair-  John Calvin

A persecutor on the topic of persecution: John Calvin

If, while conscious of our innocence, we are deprived of our substance by the wickedness of man, we are, no doubt, humanly speaking, reduced to poverty; but in truth our riches in heaven are increased: if driven from our homes we have a more welcome reception into the family of God; if vexed and despised, we are more firmly rooted in Christ; if stigmatised by disgrace and ignominy, we have a higher place in the kingdom of God; and if we are slain, entrance is thereby given us to eternal life. The Lord having set such a price upon us, let us be ashamed to estimate ourselves at less than the shadowy and evanescent allurements of the present life. -- John Calvin

Good on Calvin. He also persecuted some Anabaptists in his day. I just want to see how things go in heaven when he sees the brothers and sisters he sent to heaven, thinking they were going to drawn at the bottom of the Rhone river, and be silenced for ever.

Oh, how wrong you were Calvin!! Still, I like you.  You were a good theologian, but treated some of your brothers with utter contempt. 

John Calvin's on other people's salvation

God speaks to you that you may make the right decision. But God does not satisfy our curiosity as to what happens about other men who do not decide for Christ. What will be the ultimate fate of other men is not your concern; we may not and are not to know that, except in so far as we must realize that it is our duty not only ourselves to remain loyal to the way of Jesus, but as far as possible to help others to find the way that leads to life. It is not the consequence of our superior merit that we ourselves have found this way. We have not come to it because we are better than other people. It is the grace of God which has set our feet in that way. -- John Calvin 

Pastor taking ex member to court far reviewing her past church

I just found out that the "pastor" is associated with John MacArthur.

This guy, says he preaches graces, yet advices a guy to take a home mother to court, and sue her and her daughter.

Never liked the guy, and I feel that I am confirmed in my dislike of him. It was confirmed when my cousin, who studied at his seminary, wanted to go back, yet, was refused, and all doors closed, because he had found Amillennialism more biblical. 

Seems like he is truly an abusive pastor, or not him, but the people under him, do his dirty work. 

Stand Firm | Same-Sex Marriage in Medieval Irish Churches? Boswell Sinks to a New Academic Low

Check how low some will go in order to proclaim that gay marriage has been held in the past by the church.

This is an example of how people, who are supposedly scholars, want to portray Christianity as having always accepted and suported gay marriage. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Read the link, and be amazed.

Stand Firm | Same-Sex Marriage in Medieval Irish Churches? Boswell Sinks to a New Academic Low

The Logos March Madness shows the who is who of evangelical authors

Logos is doing a competition between scholars, and the one that wins, gets its titles reduced (how would the proper scholar feel about that?) up to 75% off a bundle of his books.

This is a very good way to see what authors are having an impact in the evangelical world. It seems that McArthur is not pulling up the punches many would expect.

Piper lost to Packer, and I was expecting Piper to win over Packer. Seems that Packer still has a lot of fans. It is interesting too that Lloyd-Jones beats Spurgeon.

It is telling that in Division 4, where Wright was placed, he battled against ancient people, the likes of Aquinas, Cranfield, and Kuyper. Wright is the only modern/recent scholar who could move to the finals. I would have like to have seen maybe Bauckham also reaching that place, since he is such a good scholar regarding the deity of Jesus, and the identity of God overall.

In Division 3, Calvin fell at the feet of Spurgeon!!!!! This is extremely telling!!!! In my view, this is a reflection of the Neo-Calvinists, that quote Spurgeon time and time again, believing that they are really quoting Calvin through Spurgeon.

Well, vote, have fun, this is a very enlightening ordeal.

John Piper to step down as pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church

John Piper has been an inspiration and example to many young pastors throughout his years as pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church.  Now it has been announced that the church's elders are letting Piper go to a greater ministry, away from the tasks of being a pastor.

Bethlehem Baptist is one step closer to commissioning John Piper from the local church pastorate to greater involvement with Bethlehem College and Seminary and to a wider ministry nationally and internationally through Desiring God.

The Bethlehem elders are announcing to the congregation their candidate for Associate Pastor for Preaching and Vision and, God willing, John Piper's eventual successor as the church's senior pastor.

Yet another pastor who is giving up, or being forced to take leave of pastoral life, and being pushed/induced into academic life. Among those in this group are N. T. Wright, Rowland Williams, and John Piper seems to be joining this trend.

 But to be fair, this is not something that the elders are pushing Piper to do, rather, Piper also wants to do:

There is an ever-increasing pull on my life to be involved in ministry outside Bethlehem. Much of this feels strategic to me for the cause of Christ. While I felt competent and energized to formulate plans for the structures of Bethlehem, this outside pull was secondary. But I sense that this is changing. It seems to me that the Lord is saying: "You have led Bethlehem to this point; it is time to hand off the internal leadership labors to another; I have a few other things yet for you to do."

Well, I hope that the Lord gives him a lot of years, so he can fulfil what he feels that  the Lord has called him to do.

Lowering the flag has lost all its meaning if we don't do it for real heroes

I have not blogged about Whitney Houston's dead because most people that I know have saturated their blogs, Twitter feeds and Facebook Walls talking about her dead as it's the end of the world. Well, I am sorry, I liked her a lot, but it's not the end of the world.

But when you elevate Whitney, or any other celebrity to the level of a soldier, who fights for the freedom of a country, and sacrifices his life for it, that's disgusting. I would do have great respect for fire fighters, cops, and even some doctors, but not Whitney Houston. She died, as Jim West  has already said,

It cheapens the meaning of the respect duly shown to those who have died in service to others.  Whitney Houston died, and it's a tragedy, but she didn't die on some field of battle or fighting some horrible blaze: she died from excessive self indulgence.  That hardly merits the same respect soldiers and patriots are shown.

But read at what a parent of a fallen soldier did upon hearing what the Governor of New Jersey ordered to remember the death of Whitney Houston:

When John Burri heard that New Jersey ordered flags flown at half-staff to honor Whitney Houston, he drove to his local Flags Unlimited store, bought a New Jersey state flag, brought it to his Michigan home, and burned it on his outdoor grill. "It was $12.95 and it was the best money I ever spent," says the father of Army Spc. Eric Burri, who was killed in Iraq in 2005. Michigan's governor ordered that state's flags flown at half-staff for one day to honor Burri's son, and it's an honor that should be reserved for those who died in the line of service, Burri says.

This type of events should be guarded, so they don't lose their cultural meaning. If we start to lower the flag for someone who dies of a drug overdose, or too much drinking, or indulging themselves, we are cheapening the act. What did Whitney fight for? I liked her music, but I don't think she deserves to be put on par with those who have given the ultimate sacrifice.

For New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to order the same honor for Houston is "a slap in the face," Burri tells the Detroit News. "It cheapens the meaning of lowering that flag. They're watering down the meaning of a hero." His action was a legal one, a law professor notes, since the Supreme Court has ruled that the burning of a US flag is constitutionally protected speech—and those decisions would also apply to state flags. Christie was criticized by others for his decision, but he defended it last week, calling Houston a "cultural icon" of whom New Jersey residents are proud.

So "cultural icons" get the same honour as those who put their lives on the line? Despicable way of thinking, and Gov. Christie should apologize to those he has offended. 

Whitney, I liked you, but you have no place among the real heroes of this world.

Who is your best friend, the world, or Jesus?

It is very easy to be a friend of the world, isn’t it? The world offers us everything we want, material things, entertainment, and sometimes even some sentimental things. But we read that if we are friends with the world, we become enemies of God!

Sometimes, we can come to the conclusion that the world is a better friend than God. The world doesn’t seem to required or demand anything from us, rather, seems to be very good at giving if we accept its way of thinking and living. Jesus may look to be a very demanding person, cf. John 14:15 “If you love me, you will keep my commands”. Isn’t friendship a two-way relationship? Well, it seems if you are a friend of Jesus, you must not be a friend of the world.

What can the world offer us that is better than what Jesus offers? Jesus offers to us eternal life, and he offers us real peace, not temporal and illusory peace, cf. John 14:” ²⁷ Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.”

What the world offers us is temporal, Jesus offers us eternal life, and his love, that fulfils way more than what the world does. Let’s be friends with God, since it will pay up in this life and the next.