Category Archives: Individuals

Salvation is not deliverance from hell

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The furore about Rob Bell’s book Love Wins has drawn a lot of attention to hell. But surely we Christians should be focusing our attention elsewhere. For John Wesley, by Nathaniel Hone, oil on canvas, circa 1766John Wesley was surely right when he wrote (as quoted by John Meunier):

By salvation I mean, not barely, according to the vulgar notion, deliverance from hell, or going to heaven; but a present deliverance from sin, a restoration of the soul to its primitive health, its original purity; a recovery of the divine nature; the renewal of our souls after the image of God, in righteousness and true holiness, in justice, mercy, and truth.

— From John Wesley’s “A Further Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion”

Sadly far too many people still have this “vulgar notion”, coupled with an unbiblical longing for a Rapture to take them quickly away from this world. Our biblical calling is quite different: not just to seek the personal restoration which Wesley writes about, but also to work towards the restoration of our world according to biblical principles.

Evangelical Alliance responds to Rob Bell "Love Wins"

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Rob Bell: Love WinsThe Evangelical Alliance (here in the UK) has just published a response to the publication of Rob Bell’s new book Love Wins. The response is in two parts: a review of the book by Derek Tidball, and a Statement which reads like a press release.

I mentioned this book in my post of a few days ago Heaven, Hell and Bell. I still haven’t read the book. But both the review and the statement seem to be a very sensible take on this controversial issue.

It was interesting to read, in the Statement section of this response, a summary of the conclusions of the Evangelical Alliance’s 2000 book The Nature of Hell. I particularly liked this part of the summary:

absolutist assertions that these and other categories of non-professing people are saved risk being at least as arrogant as absolutist assertions that they are damned. The destiny of such people is God’s to determine, and it is determined by his grace alone.

The Rapture? Why I want to be Left Behind

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Ian Paul writes on his blog Psephizo Why I want to be Left Behind. He refers to Matthew 24:36-41. This is one of the main passages used to support the teaching on the Rapture, the idea that at some time before Jesus returns to earth all Christians will be taken away from the earth – and those Left Behind will suffer the worst of the Great Tribulation.

But Ian notes that in this passage the teaching in verses 40 and 41 that some “will be taken” seems to parallel “the flood … took them all away” in verse 39. Thus the ones who “will be taken” are not the ones God is rescuing from disaster but the ones subject to his judgment. So not surprisingly Ian concludes that when this happens he wants to be left behind. So do I!

I note that in the original Greek the parallel is not quite so clear as different verbs are used for “took … away” and “will be taken”. This explains Dick France’s earlier caution about this interpretation, mentioned by Ian. But the parallel seems clear to me even if it is conceptual more than verbal.

Meanwhile the other passage used to support the idea of a Rapture before the return of Jesus teaches no such thing, in fact precisely the opposite. In 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17 it is very clear, from the Greek word epeita “After that” which links these two verses, that it is only after “the Lord himself will come down from heaven” that “we who are alive … will be caught up”. There really is no biblical basis for the popular idea of a secret pre-Tribulation Rapture, which was in fact first put forward clearly as recently as the early 19th century.

So Tom (N.T.) Wright, as quoted by Ian, is surely right about the Matthew passage when he writes:

There is no hint, here, of a ‘rapture’, a sudden supernatural event that would remove individuals from the terra firma….  It is a matter, rather, of secret police coming in the night, or of enemies sweeping through a village or city and seizing all they can.

Thanks to Simon Cozens for the link, in a comment on Eddie Arthur’s post The End of the World Is Nigh (or Is It?).

Whatever happened to Todd Bentley?

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Todd Bentley at LakelandWhatever happened to the enfant terrible of North American revival evangelism, Todd Bentley? He rose to international prominence with the Lakeland outpouring starting in April 2008. By August that year he had resigned from his ministry over an inappropriate relationship. By March 2009 he and his wife had divorced, and within days he had remarried. And then he gradually disappeared from public view.

On this blog I posted no less than 73 times in the category Todd Bentley, before my latest post and this one. Some of these posts quickly received thousands of views and hundreds of comments. But it is nearly two years since the most recent of these, with one exception which mentioned Todd only in passing. Yet there are still, over the last year, hundreds of people searching the Internet for his name and finding posts on this blog. So what has happened to him since he went out of the spotlight, at least for me, two years ago?

Early in 2009 Todd started a process of restoration led by Rick Joyner. I reported on the early stages of this, to the extent that it was made public. But then for a time, probably wisely, the process seems to have been taken out of public view. But more was revealed in 2010: Rick Joyner wrote a Special Bulletin in February about Revival and the Todd Bentley Restoration, with a follow-up in March and another in June. There is detailed material here about how Todd was gradually being restored, including biblical justification for the process. Rick promised many other bulletins on this matter, but these are all I can find on the MorningStar website.

The most recent information from Rick Joyner seems to be in a video from 8th November 2010. In this video Rick explained that Todd had been ministering effectively and powerfully in the local church, and that he considered it to be the right time to release him into a broader ministry. This 15 minute video is well worth watching, especially concerning the lies that have been told about Todd and the spirit behind them.

So it was to be expected that Todd would quickly return to public ministry. Nevertheless I was rather surprised to find that this is already the focus of the Canadian website of Fresh Fire (with the original Canadian domain name), as well as of their apparently identical US website. Fresh Fire is now based in Pineville near Charlotte, North Carolina, which is less than four miles from Rick Joyner’s MorningStar church just across the state line in Fort Mill, South Carolina.

It is good to see that Todd and his team have been involved in relief efforts as well as evangelism in Haiti. Over the next month or so Todd is taking his “Healing & Kingdom Tour” to Texas, Puerto Rico and Michigan. In May he will be in Alberta, Canada. And in July, 21st to 24th, he will be in Dudley, England, as I mentioned in my previous post.

I am pleased that Todd has been restored to a fruitful ministry, after Rick Joyner’s long and painstaking efforts. I hope and pray that this will continue to be successful. I am a little concerned that Todd has rushed so quickly into such a heavy schedule. I hope he now has the wisdom to pace himself and avoid another burnout. If so, we can look forward to the fulfilment of Rick’s prophetic word, on the video, that millions in the USA will come to Jesus through Todd’s ministry – and, we can hope, millions more around the world.

Todd Bentley is coming to Dudley, England in July

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Todd Bentley at LakelandI was interested to find, when researching for my post Whatever happened to Todd Bentley?, that not only has Todd resumed an international public ministry under the Fresh Fire name, but he has also announced a visit to Dudley here in England, on 21st to 24th July 2011. Fresh Fire writes:

This is not a conference. It’s a gathering of the Hungry & Thirsty from across the United States to see the OUTPOURING of the Holy Spirit and the Glory of God burning over our entire state. Bring the lost, bring the sick, bring those who are hungry and thirsty. Sound the Alarm, it’s time!

I guess this has been copied from the publicity for Todd’s US tour without being edited to be appropriate for England.

The venue announced is the home of Revival Fires, whose leader Trevor Baker invited Todd to England in 2008, but as yet there is nothing about this at their website. My wife and I recently attended a conference at Revival Fires, led by Lance Wallnau – audio recording of at least a part of this available.

There are of course a number of issues related to Todd Bentley’s return to public ministry, which I look at in my other post.

Heaven, Hell and Bell

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Over the last few months the blogosphere has been aflame with discussion of hell, sparked by Rob Bell’s book Love Wins: At the Heart of Life’s Big Questions. Indeed many bloggers cast Bell himself into the flames, even before they had read the book.

I haven’t read the book. I probably won’t. So I will refrain from any detailed comment on it. All I will say is that, as far as I can tell, Bell mainly asks questions, and those who condemn him do so on the basis of how they assume Bell would answer his own questions. That is not a Christian approach. Indeed to condemn anyone, with the kind of language I have seen in some places, is not a Christian approach.

At some point I would like to outline here my own position on heaven and hell. For now I will simply say that I have a lot of sympathy with N.T. Wright’s position, as I outlined it in an old post Heaven is not our home …

I am writing now mainly to draw my readers’ attention to Suzanne’s long series Blogging heaven and hell (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 – maybe more to come). Suzanne asked me to join the debate, but my thoughts have been elsewhere. She has many sensible things to say, as well as many useful links.

I don’t agree with Suzanne’s tentative universalist position. But I strongly agree with her that it is wrong to use threats of hell as a way to impose one’s will on others, in the church or in the home.

I would also be very cautious about using threats of hell-fire in evangelism. I’m not saying there is never a place for telling unbelievers that they will go to some kind of hell if they do not repent. But it is not a generally effective strategy today, at least in the western world – and it is not a general feature of the early Christian sermons in the book of Acts, so no one can claim that it is a biblically required part of a gospel presentation. Indeed, as I read somewhere recently, while Jesus spoke a lot about hell he did so mostly not to ordinary “sinners”, but to Pharisees and the like who claimed to be right with God but opposed Jesus’ message. So perhaps if we do preach about hell, it ought to be mainly within the professing church, to those who claim to be going to heaven but are not producing the fruit of good Christian lives.

Adrian Warnock reopens comments

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It is more than three years ago that Adrian Warnock closed his blog to comments. I was very critical of this at the time. My main argument was that a blog without comments lacked any kind of accountability. In fact it was a monologue rather than a blog.

So I am very happy to see that Adrian has now switched comments on again on his blog. He is using a new Facebook comment system, which I guess is open only to Facebook members. We’ll have to see how that works in practice.

I hope Adrian doesn’t have the same problems with comment wars that caused him difficulties back in 2007. I will try to restrain myself from stoking up any such battles. But I do intend to start reading the blog again, and commenting from time to time.

I hope to remain friends with Adrian, and not just in the nominal Facebook sense. After all, I am much less critical of his thinking than I was having read, and reviewed, his excellent book Raised with Christ.

The wrath of God, or the inevitable consequences of sin?

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Sam Norton, an Essex vicar, has written an insightful short series of posts on the wrath of God: part 1, part 2, part 3. He starts with this seeming contradiction, and then goes on to explain it:

There are two things that I believe about wrath: that the phrase “the wrath of God” refers to something real but also that, as Julian of Norwich taught, “there is no wrath in God”.

First, he clearly distinguishes the pagan idea of sacrifice from the biblical concept. The pagan idea is that

there is an angry god who has been offended and needs to be appeased

but the biblical concept, as shown at the Day of Atonement, is that

it is God who is active, who moves towards the sinners.

Sam continues, in part 2, by showing how the idea of the wrath of God developed into the New Testament. He makes the interesting point that

In Paul for example, it is a theme in Paul’s writings, but there tends to be “wrath” rather than “the wrath of God”. Of some twenty to twenty five references to wrath, only two or three are to the wrath of God. Mostly Paul refers to wrath as a concept. …

So what is a properly Christian understanding of wrath? Wrath is when we experience the consequences of our own sin.

Now I want to inject a word of caution here. In my post The Maltese Cross, or the Christian one? I argued against the position, which I consider sub-Christian, that “justice” is some higher authority than God which can oblige God to act against his character of love. Similarly I would reject any idea that “wrath” is a separate concept which imposes obligations on God. But Sam carefully avoids that danger by explaining that wrath, in the sense of experiencing the proper consequences of ones actions, is part of the consistent order of the universe which God created.

Sam continues in part 3 by suggesting that there is a human tendency to set up idols and to make pagan type sacrifices to them. This is true even today:

If the governing idol is Mammon, then the scapegoated minority will be the poor, who will be described as deserving their poverty due to some moral failing, such as laziness.

Thus Sam concludes:

Wrath is first and foremost about when we go against the natural order and suffer as a consequence, but it is also about the nature of who we are as a human society when we are fallen. If we do not focus our human society on the Living God then we will end up having this process of scapegoating and sacrifice repeating itself for ever.

This is an important contribution to a debate in which Christians have become increasingly polarised, in which an important figure like John Piper has apparently written off as non-Christian another, Rob Bell, on the basis of mere rumours that he is not sound on the matter of hell. See this discussion of the controversy. Bell may indeed have argued

that a loving God would never sentence human souls to eternal suffering.

But Justin Taylor is wrong to conclude, without even reading Bell’s book, that this implies “full-blown hell-is-empty-everyone-gets-saved universalism”. It doesn’t. There are other real possibilities. One, with some biblical support, is that hell is populated by those who have chosen for themselves to go there. Another, and this would seem to be Sam’s position, is that people go there as the natural consequence of their sin. There is room for proper debate here, but not if some people prejudge others without even listening to them.

No more broad bishops in London

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The Church of England has always prided itself on being a broad church. The Diocese of London has always been at the heart of that church (and my old home of Chelmsford was within it before 1846), and in recent years has become one of its success stories: from 2001 to 2008 church attendance there grew by 9.1%, compared with an average fall of 5.8% for the whole C of E. Part of the reason for that growth, I am sure, was that the diocese catered for the varied needs and preferences of churchgoers by providing a broad range of churches and services.

That breadth in the diocese was, perhaps accidentally, symbolised in the names of two of the suffragan bishops in the diocese: John Broadhurst, Bishop of Fulham, and Pete Broadbent, Bishop of Willesden. These two bishops with “broad” names also illustrated the breadth of the church: on the right, Broadhurst, who is also chairman of Forward in Faith, as a traditional Anglo-Catholic; and on the left, Broadbent as an evangelical who also calls himself a Christian Socialist.

But now the Diocese of London has lost both of its “broad” bishops in one month, and in doing so has abandoned its broad bent. (Has anyone else managed to get those two words into a sentence together? 😉 )

It was in October that Bishop Broadhurst became one of five Anglican bishops to announce that they would join the Roman Catholic Church and its new Ordinariate. This implied his resignation as Bishop of Fulham, but that was announced officially only in early November (effective from the end of December). A major reason for Broadhurst’s move seems to be his dissatisfaction over exactly how the Church of England plans to introduce women bishops.

Then this Tuesday the Bishop of London asked Bishop Broadbent “to withdraw from public ministry until further notice”, because of his comments on the forthcoming royal wedding, which I mentioned in a previous post.

Now personally I think that Broadhurst did the right thing, because the position he and his fellow “flying bishops” held in the Church of England was always untenable, and this was becoming all the more obvious as the church moved towards accepting women as bishops. On the other hand, I consider that Broadbent has been very badly treated – and I have joined a Facebook page to support him. I also read that former Archbishop Carey has supported Broadbent – this has not been noted as widely as it could because sadly the Murdoch group has chosen to hide content in The Times behind a subscription wall.

But my point in this post is not to debate the issues. Rather it is to note how symbolically the Diocese of London has lost both of its “broad” wings and as a result has become much narrower. Is this the way the Church of England is going? Now that the Anglo-Catholic troublemakers have been edged out, is the same to happen to evangelicals who rock the boat? While Broadbent has not opposed women bishops, he was “one of three serving bishops in the Church of England to refuse to attend the 2008 Lambeth Conference”. While that is not of course the immediate reason for his suspension, it would have been all the easier if he was already in disfavour in high places.

In April this year I reflected:

I think it was Wallace Benn who suggested that a wrong decision on [women as bishops] might lead to the Church of England losing both its evangelical and Anglo-Catholic wings. I couldn’t help thinking of the Church as an airliner in the air … The airliner has lost power … and is gradually losing height. If it wants to continue to fly it needs to restart its engines – and it can do that only by turning to God. But the worst decision it could make is to cut off both its wings. Without them it cannot even glide to a relatively soft crash landing; its only hope is to plunge straight to disaster. So please, Church, let’s avoid that, stop bickering about side issues, and look to God to regain the power to fly.

Well, the Church of England has already lost much of its “broad” right wing, with the departure of the “flying bishops” (who can no longer fly apart from the airliner!) and their supporters. Perhaps it could continue to fly on “a wing and a prayer”. But the worst thing it could do is to cut off its “broad” left wing for the sake of balance.

However, I write this as someone who has effectively jumped off the threatened left wing – that is, the Broadbent rather than the Broadhurst one. In September, when my wife and I moved to Warrington in the north of England, we started to attend Oasis church in the town, which is outside the Church of England and flying its own independent course. Perhaps as the Church of England pursues its relentless course towards a crash we should all be looking for other ways to keep aloft and moving closer to God.

A royal wedding and a glut of holidays

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Breaking news:

Prince William and Kate Middleton will marry on Friday 29 April at Westminster Abbey …

Prime Minister David Cameron said it would be “a happy and momentous occasion” and would be marked by a public holiday.

Congratulations to William and Kate! They will have a lot to organise in just five months, as my bride and I discovered last year.

Now I don’t want to be at all negative about this happy occasion, or to get into the kind of trouble that Bishop Pete Broadbent got into for his critical comments about it (and which brought this blog a surge of hits because I have written about Broadbent on quite unrelated matters). I am sure that these young people know what they are letting themselves into. They have not rushed into anything, and I am confident that their marriage will last far longer than the ten seven years that the Bishop predicted – at least if the media are responsible and don’t dedicate themselves to tearing the couple apart.

But I do wonder if a public holiday is appropriate. If, as I assume, this is to be an addition to the already announced holidays for England and Wales, we will be enjoying four extra days off in less than two weeks, two successive four day weekends with only a three day week in between. That is even more time off than we get at Christmas and the New Year. Can our economy cope with more time off? Has proper account been taken of how this will disrupt all kinds of activities from education to refuse collection?

I expect that many people will take the chance to cross the Channel, not so much for Broadbent’s suggested “party in Calais for all good republicans who can’t stand the nauseating tosh that surrounds this event” as to find spring sunshine and stock up on cheap booze.