Author Archives: Peter Kirk

Todd Bentley has remarried, probably

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It would appear that Todd Bentley has now married Jessa Hasbrook, apparently the “woman whom he had extramarital affair with”. This is reported by Rick Hiebert at the Shotgun blog of the Western Standard, an apparently reliable source, as well as other more dubious sources which I will not link to. I do not endorse all the comments reported in this post. But I will keep an eye open for Rick Joyner’s response.

Please, no comments which simply condemn Todd and Jessa. I will expect good arguments for any positive or negative assessments of the situation.

UPDATE: A new article by Rick Joyner confirms this news, and also announces that Todd has now started his restoration process. Please read this article; I have nothing to add to it except my prayers.

"Where people who are poorly go to get better" – heaven, but where?

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I hate celebrity culture. I could almost say that I hate celebrities, especially when they fund their addiction to fame out of my pocket through my TV licence, but in Christian love I have to renounce that hate.

But the story of one celebrity has touched my heart – that of Jade Goody, who is dying of cancer but has taken this opportunity to have herself and her two young sons baptised. Sally has written a moving post about this story, with this quote, Jade recalling a conversation with one of the boys:

When I told them I was going to Heaven, Freddie said to me: ‘Heaven is a bad place, it’s where people go when they die.’

And I said: ‘No, that’s not right. It’s where people who are poorly go to get better.’

I’m not sure how much Jade understands about the Christian faith. But it is clear that she trusts in Jesus and in God to take her to heaven when she dies, which could be very soon, and she wants her sons to do the same. I’m not much of a believer in baptism of those too young to make a clear Christian profession, but in this case I see the point of it. Jade’s Christian witness, even if imperfect, can touch the nation. Let’s pray that it does. Let’s pray also for her in what may be her last few days, and for her children as they face life without a mother.

But I can’t help wondering something. I agree with Jade that heaven is “where people who are poorly go to get better”. I also believe that the church is meant to be a foretaste of heaven on earth. Heaven is not so much where good people go when they die as the presence of God, which we can know here today among God’s people. So then shouldn’t the church be the place “where people who are poorly go to get better”? At the moment I don’t have much faith to pray for healing for Jade on this earth. But surely this is what we as Christians should be praying.

The danger of worshipping Darwin

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One might expect Christian authors to write articles condemning attempts to turn Darwinism into a religion. But this BBC article is interesting because its author, Andrew Marr, is apparently an atheist. After comparing how Darwin’s theories are presented today with religion, he finishes:

So where is the danger?

I believe Darwin was right and that as science advances, he is proved more prescient, not less.

But religions are absolute. They bring their truth and then repel all boarders. They divide mankind into the saved and the ignorant damned.

In this story, there is no us and them. Darwinism, as I take it, is a creed of observation, fact, a deep modesty about conclusions and lifelong readiness to be proved wrong.

I don’t say it offers everything that religion can. But I do say that, in this respect, it is better.

However we celebrate the old man, we mustn’t let his work crust into creed or harden to dogma.

Apparently this article is a trailer for a BBC2 TV series starting later tonight. You might like to watch it, at least in the UK. I am going out, so will miss the chance, although I could catch up on iPlayer.

Worship, cessationism, and Steve Chalke

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As I predicted in last week, I have been rather busy recently, so no time for an in depth post, just for some reflections on what I have been reading.

Today I have had some time for blogging, but have been distracted into an interesting conversation at TC Robinson’s blog New Leaven. The post that started it was on worship, and indeed ties up somewhat with my last post. But the discussion on it quickly got on to how worship might be affected by the alleged cease of spiritual gifts, or some of them, at the end of the apostolic age. The cessationists Richard and dvopilgrim seem to be arguing that the clearest biblical model for church worship, in 1 Corinthians 14, is no longer valid because prophecy and other gifts have ceased. Thus they set aside the specific commands of God through the Apostle Paul, starting in verse 1, because they conflict with a human tradition of teaching. At least, that’s my side of the discussion; read the comment thread for Richard and dvo’s responses.

Meanwhile David Matthias, who is an elder in newfrontiers, gives a positive report of a meeting with Steve Chalke. This makes a nice change from the attitude of his fellow newfrontiers elder Adrian Warnock (correction 6th March: Adrian is not an elder at his church, but he is a regular preacher there), who a couple of years ago in effect publicly cursed Chalke – and by extension myself. David doesn’t agree with Steve about the atonement, but he shows proper Christian love in his disagreement.

Well, I suppose I shouldn’t expect newfrontiers elders all to be of one mind, as I certainly wouldn’t expect that of Church of England ministers. Indeed recently I have been getting to know and working well with one of the elders of our local newfrontiers church here in Chelmsford. I have no idea of this man’s attitude to Steve’s teaching. But it is somewhat ironic that this church meets in Adrian’s old school but uses the same name as Steve’s Oasis organisation.

Loving Jesus with all your heart

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David Ker has posted another rant about “Jesus is my boyfriend” type songs, in this case specifically “Let My Words Be Few” by Matt Redman. (Is it something about the Mozambique air that makes David rant? At least he withdrew his one about Tutu.) In a comment in reply I threatened to write a post “Jesus really is my boyfriend!” This is that post, but I have reconsidered the title as I don’t want people to think I am female or gay.

So, is it right for Christians (male and female) to relate to God, as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, in the same way as a girl relates to her boyfriend, or a boy to his girlfriend? Is it proper to sing in worship “Jesus I am so in love with you”?

I would suggest to start with that if that is not actually an improper statement it is wrong for any Christian to criticise other Christians for choosing to worship in this way. If it is not helpful for you as an individual or for your church to worship with such words, then you are not obliged to do so, and can ask your church’s worship leader not to choose this song. But if the words are proper worship of God, and presuming that at least one person, the songwriter, found them helpful for his worship, then I really don’t think it is right for anyone to criticise or mock.

In the case of this particular song, as Ferg noted in a recent comment on this blog, Matt Redman has stated that he regrets including these particular words because of the misunderstanding they have caused. I think the remark is in this interview (thanks to Eddie for the link) (but I can’t check just at the moment as I have to be quiet after midnight).

So, to get back to the question, is it proper to sing in worship “Jesus I am so in love with you”? The starting point here must be that we are commanded to love God with all our hearts and souls, indeed with our whole beings, not just with our minds. I know that the Greek and Hebrew words used for “heart” didn’t refer to the emotions in quite the same way as “heart” often does in English. But the conclusion is inescapable that our love for God should involve our emotions as well as every other part of us. And as Jesus is God incarnate we are surely called to love him in this same way, that is, with an emotional love and not just a cerebral or a practical love.

The Old Testament image of God as the bridegroom and Israel as his bride is taken up in the New Testament with the church as the bride. In Ephesians 5:25-33 the love of a husband for his wife is seen as a reflection of Jesus’ love for the church, a love which led him to the cross. Paul doesn’t explicitly teach that wives should respond in love to their husbands (rather, he uses the controversial word often translated “submit”), but this is surely the implication of the teaching elsewhere that the church should respond with love to Jesus’ love on the cross.

The Song of Songs is a beautiful love song in which a man and a woman express their love for one another, in emotional language, even showing romanticism although that word is anachronistic. There is a long tradition in the church of applying parts of this to the love which the church should express towards God, effectively turning it into an expression of “God is my boyfriend”. Isaiah 5:1-7 is explicitly called a love song, but is in fact God addressing his people, so this gives biblical justification for using this genre of love between God and humans.

So it seems to me that Christians should feel in their hearts love towards God and Jesus – a love which I feel. Indeed I would suggest that someone who does not have any feelings of love towards God or Jesus has not really grasped what it is to be a Christian. If this is true it is surely right to express our feelings of love in singing to Jesus love songs, mirror images of the song of Isaiah 5. What better words for such a song than “Jesus I am so in love with you”?

And if our song is a love song, it will of course have what David calls “Trance-like melody… ooshy-gooshy lyrics … Repetition”, which are part of the genre of modern and ancient love songs – look at the Song of Songs, but of course we don’t know its original melody. Just as a boy and girl who are truly in love will not time their embraces, no one who has true and deep feelings of love for Jesus will want to ensure that their love song is “only four minutes long”.

I wonder, if we men restricted our expressions of love to our wives and girlfriends to four minute cerebral recitations of their character, how much would they appreciate that? Instead what they want is expression of true love from the heart, in which we indeed “let our words be few”, little more than “I am so in love with you”. And if that is how we please our human loved ones, surely that is a part of how we should show our love to our God.

Golden crowns

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This morning I watched the film Finger of God, which was shown at my church as part of a course that I am doing. The film is full of testimonies of healing and many other wonderful things which God is doing around the world.

One of the miracles described in the film, in fact right at the start, is the miraculous filling of teeth. The director includes close-ups from inside the mouths of several Americans, including his own uncle and aunt, who have reportedly received gold teeth from God. They clearly have at the backs of their mouths several gold teeth, or crowns on their teeth. Personally I cannot be sure that they were put there by God and not by human dentists.

One might wonder why God needs to do such miracles in the rich USA. But given the cost of dental work there I can quite understand why poorer Americans need to rely on God rather than dentists to sort out their teeth.

As it so happens this afternoon I had to visit a dentist, for preparatory work for a crown to be fitted to one of my back teeth. This will be quite expensive, but thanks to the NHS affordable. But on the NHS I cannot get a white crown. I was offered a choice of gold or silver, in colour. As I don’t want to mislead people in my church into thinking that God has given me this crown, and as I already have silver fillings in my mouth, I chose silver.

One day I can expect to receive a golden crown (compare 1 Corinthians 9:25, 1 Peter 5:4, Revelation 4:4), but not on my teeth! Until that day the silver one will suffice.

PS I do not want to discuss in comments here the genuineness or otherwise of the miracles shown in Finger of God.

PPS Unlike some of my blog friends, I haven’t given up blogging for Lent. But my life has been full recently and looks like continuing to be for the next few weeks. So blog traffic is likely to be light.

Freedom and self-evident truths

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Are there really any self-evident truths? Yesterday I suggested there might be when I wrote:

It seems to me, as apparently to Dave, to be a self-evident truth that faith or belief is an act of the human mind and will.

Yes, it seems self-evident to us that we have freedom of will. But are such truths really self-evident? Any American is likely to be reminded by this phrase of the second sentence of the United States Declaration of Independence:

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

If these truths were really self-evident in 1776, they must still be today. But do people today hold them to be self-evident? I guess it depends on who exactly is included under “all Men”. The original drafters of this declaration may have intended this to apply only to male human beings, not to women. But in recent years its applicability seems to have become even more restricted, only to United States citizens, at least in the understanding of those citizens.

Even my friend David Ker, in his latest rant, does not seem to accept that the people of Iraq have the right to life and liberty. Indeed when in my first comment there I alluded to their rights I was accused of “pinko rhetoric”. It seems to me that to conservative Americans, including very many evangelical Christians, that famous sentence has been amended to:

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all US citizens are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, the pursuit of Happiness, and the right to deprive anyone else of Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

No wonder most non-Americans in the world hate Americans, and consider them to be hypocrites in preaching liberty while using their military and financial might to trample over anyone else’s liberty. Perhaps the only non-Americans left who love Americans are those who think they can gain power or money by sucking up them.

David, sorry for such a rant at you and your compatriots, but you did ask for it.

At least there is hope, that President Obama understands the issues here and will do his best to defuse them. So, despite David’s rant against it, I support Archbishop Tutu’s call (see also the full text) for America to apologise to Iraq, as a step towards averting

the risk of squandering the goodwill he says the US president’s election has generated.

As for self-evident truths, I think this shows that really there are no such things, that concepts that we think self-evident are just reflections of our culturally relative presuppositions. Or perhaps there is just the one such truth, which Descartes found: cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am”. For any truths beyond that we depend on what God, or our untrustworthy senses, have made evident to us.

Forced to faith: an oxymoron?

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I just came back to an interesting aside in a comment by Dave Warnock on his own blog, from a few days ago. Dave was replying to my own comment there, in which I wrote:

I hold that God does not force people to be saved who specifically reject it.

Dave replied:

I am with Peter in that I do not believe God will force anyone to come to faith (surely an oxymoron).

That word “oxymoron” caught my attention because it seems to go to the heart of why I reject the Calvinist, and indeed long before that Augustinian, position that God predestines certain people to believe, leaving them no personal choice in the matter. It seems to me, as apparently to Dave, to be a self-evident truth that faith or belief is an act of the human mind and will. Indeed this seems to be implied by this dictionary definition of “belief”:

  1. The mental act, condition, or habit of placing trust or confidence in another: My belief in you is as strong as ever.
  2. Mental acceptance of and conviction in the truth, actuality, or validity of something: His explanation of what happened defies belief.
  3. Something believed or accepted as true, especially a particular tenet or a body of tenets accepted by a group of persons.

If belief is an act or condition of the human mind, and if that mind has any kind of free will, it is indeed an oxymoron to suggest that anyone can be forced to believe anything.

Yet I am very aware that this understanding of faith or belief conflicts with one which can be traced right back to Augustine in the 4th-5th century, as he wrote (in On the Predestination of the Saints, Book I, chapter 3):

the faith by which we are Christians is the gift of God.

I am also aware that there is more to Augustine’s position than this, but I don’t want to be distracted by the details from my main point in this post.

There are nuanced versions of Calvinism, which embrace compatibilism and are not accepted by all Calvinists, according to which human free will is real but also compatible with determinism and divine predestination. I do not reject such descriptions. On this basis it is possible to hold both that God decides who he will give faith to and that each human being decided whether or not to believe.

Indeed the idea of faith as a gift can be found in the Bible, as it is listed in 1 Corinthians 12 as one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit. But it seems clear that this is not about saving faith. It is often understood as referring to faith for miracles or healing. Nevertheless this does suggest that there is something in the idea that God gives to people the ability to believe.

So is it perhaps impossible for the human mind to believe or have faith in something beyond its normal experience, such as in the saving death of Jesus Christ or that a miracle is about to happen, apart from a special gift of God? Or can it believe such things with sufficient effort and practice? Was Alice or the White Queen right in this exchange?:

Alice laughed. `There’s no use trying,’ she said `one ca’n’t believe impossible things.’

`I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. `When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. …’

Then, can the human mind be forced to believe something against its own will? I am thinking here not so much of the Calvinism that teaches that people cannot believe and be saved without God’s help, as of the universalism that teaches that everyone will believe and so be saved. Yes, one day

at the name of Jesus every knee [will] bow … and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord …

Philippians 2:10-11 (TNIV)

But that will be when faith is no longer necessary because all will see the risen Jesus. Will it then be too late to believe? Will the owners of every knee and tongue still be able to benefit from this promise?:

If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

Romans 10:9 (TNIV)

I don’t know. But I feel sure that there will even then be some who, even though seeing the reality of the Christian message and of the fate in store for them if they do not accept it, will still choose to reject Jesus and the salvation he offers. In fact Jesus himself seems to have predicted just this, at the end of the story of the rich man and Lazarus, when he put these words into the mouth of Abraham:

If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.

Luke 16:31 (TNIV)

God our Saviour … wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.

1 Timothy 2:3-4 (TNIV)

But he chooses not to force people to be saved, and so the inevitable result is that some will choose not to be. We can simply hope and pray that in the end only a few people will not be saved, and by repenting and believing in Jesus be assured that we will not ourselves be among that number.

Women are the prouder sex?

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Women are prouder than men, but men are more lustful, according to a Vatican report which states that the two sexes sin differently.

This is the start of a BBC report entitled Two sexes ‘sin in different ways’. As this is supposedly based on a survey of confessions, it should be understood as an assessment of reality within certain (unspecified) cultures, certainly not as a theological pronouncement about how men and women should differ, nor as an attempt to promote a stereotype. But I can’t help wondering if the difference is more that women confess to being proud but men are too proud to confess to it!

Will carrier pigeons make the Internet obsolete?

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This may sound unbelievable, but there does seem to be some truth in it: according to this article (thanks to Sam Norton for the link) there are actually circumstances in which carrier pigeons can do a better job than the Internet, and their advantages look set to increase. To simplify the calculations, this is the current situation: a carrier pigeon can carry a 2 GB memory card; on a regular broadband Internet connection it takes four hours to transfer 2 GB; the pigeon can transport the data up to 200 km in that time; and so for shorter distances pigeons do better than the Internet, at this one task of transferring bulk data. The prediction for ten years’ time is that memory cards which pigeons can carry will have a capacity of 2 TB (terabytes). This means that for the Internet to keep its advantages over the pigeon regular domestic connections will need a speed of 8 gigabits per second, which seems unlikely even with fibre optic connections.

It is easy to see that if a carrier pigeon carrying one gram can compete with the Internet, a van carrying a tonne of memory cards, that’s a million of them, leaves the competition in the starting blocks!

Of course this doesn’t mean that the Internet will go away. It can’t be beaten for instant access and interaction. But these calculations do have real implications for the way some services are developing:

For example: is the internet suited for the large scale distribution of high resolution movies or television programs? Many people see this as the future, but it seems not so plausible. It might turn out that it will always be faster, cheaper and more practical to send high-res movies by postal service than by internet …