Heresy

Let’s Play “Spot the Heretic!”

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Balaam's Ass by RembrandtThis is the post wherein I make my secret confession before you all.

I've been a Christian for nearly thirty years. I've read a lot of books by a whole host of authors. And despite the fact that I'm fairly intelligent, graduated with high honors from probably the toughest Christian college in the country, and can use seven-syllable words with abandon, I don't read today's Christian writers much anymore.

Now I'm not speaking of Christian novels about young, chaste teachers coming of age on the Kansas prairie of 1880—aren't all Christian novels about that?—I'm talking about the non-fiction works of everyone from N.T. Wright to Brian McLaren.

If I were a proud man, I would attribute this to the lofty theological edifice I have constructed from bare rubble through my hard-won Christian discipleship. But I'm not a proud man; I'm simply a person like you who finds himself progressively confused by what passes for Biblical scholarship and discipleship lately.

Now with the Christian blogosphere filled from one end to the other with wild-eyed apologists, "remnant watchers," bell-ringers, deconstructionists, and self-christened "apostles for a time such as this," I've come to the conclusion that I simply can't parse it all. Yeah, this guy may be right and then he might not. She's got a good point, but arrived at it through a highly tortuous route that deviated through "Suspect City" to get there. And that guy in the corner always cries "Heretic!" over any idea that isn't his.

Sadly, there just isn't enough time in the day, so my only recourse is to ignore the vast majority of it. If it comes down to a case of discernment, perhaps the best discernment that a Christian in the 21st century can achieve is to always assume something's wrong unless it's been tested by time.

So that's my stance.

I used to help manage a Christian bookstore. I was the Bible and book buyer. Once you're in a position like that, you quickly attune your sense of smell to the stench of one lousy book after another grappling for bestseller status. I got adept at finding the stinkers before they found us. I attribute this to the Holy Spirit and to the spirit of our age.

The "spirit of our age" as I use it here is the quality of a book or set of thoughts that smacks of everything that is trending one way or another at this moment in time. Doesn't matter if it's right or wrong; in the end it simply won't last. Twenty years from now, no one will be referencing it for anything. It was dead on arrival, but the readers simply couldn't tell because the hype machine and word of mouth drowned out the naysayers.

Honestly, I think the Lord understands the dilemma of most earnest Christians today as they attempt to trudge through the mountains of half-baked theology and pseudo-spiritual tripe that get served to us on a sizzling hot platter—every single day. I believe that He knows it is far worse than in His own day when He battled the superstitions and mindless obeisance to the prevailing ethic of the land that relentlessly fought for the minds of His own disciples.

What is my out? Well, I'm hopelessly behind the times. I've said here before that most of the authors I read are dead. And that's my out. They're dead, no one is making big bucks off 'em, and yet their words last from one generation to the next. One set of Christians a hundred years ago read this stuff and found it spoke to the soul. And now another set today is reading it still because someone continues to be blessed. It won't crack the top ten on the bestseller list, or even the top ten thousand, but the words on those pages live. They give life and will do so until the day the Lord comes back—if, on that glorious and awful Day, He still manages to find enough people who take those old words to heart.

So I don't keep up with "New Think" for the most part. If I do mention a new book from time to time here, or mention a new blog that seems to have "it," then it's only because every reference in it goes back to someone from fifty years ago who could be trusted. I can tell you right now that Tozer, Ravenhill, Schaeffer, and a few like them can be trusted. Time's imprimatur has shown they can stand up and still speak the truth to a day and age where truth is so easily warped to be untruth that even the best of us can't always spot the mistakes.

I just can't filter it all; too much comes in. And while ninety-nine and forty-four one hundredths pure is good enough for soap, it's not good enough for the Gospel. As for me, I'm simply not smart enough or spiritually adept enough to mercilessly spot the 0.56% impurity that exists in today's writings.

Are you?

{Image: Detail of Rembrandt van Rijn's "Balaam's Ass" (1626)}

Mr. Spock Says, “Highly Illogical.”

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Mr. Spock--and the discerning of spirits?Everyone’s favorite Vulcan, Star Trek‘s Mr. Spock, was forced to deal with illogical humans on a daily basis. But as any casual observer of the show knows, Spock was routinely stymied by the fact that the illogical humans got results. He was even forced to think like them on occasion. In one classic episode, Spock blew the mind of some robots even more logical than himself by resorting to illogic in order to save the crew of the Enterprise.

In the battle over cessationism, I was thinking today about a piece of illogic that strains the credibility of those who champion cessationism. For those unfamiliar with cessationism, the proponents claim that the supernatural gifts of the spirit ceased with the deaths of the apostles. A quick reminder of those gifts:

Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of service, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who empowers them all in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the ability to distinguish between spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. All these are empowered by one and the same Spirit, who apportions to each one individually as he wills.
—1 Corinthians 12:4-11

Beyond the enormous issue of asking when the gift of faith passed away, the one that I am not getting is the logical assertion by cessationists that the gift of the discerning of spirits has passed away.

Any quick read of major cessationist authors reveals a loop of illogic that would probably send Spock into fits: the fact that cessationists claim to be able to discern that the spirit behind the modern charismatic gifts is not the Spirit of God.

Think about that for a second. If that gift has passed away, then what are cessationists using to discriminate the spirit that is fueling the charismatic excesses they despise? Are they using the very gift they claimed passed away?

Truly this is a loop of illogic that Spock would have had an aneurysm over.

{Photo of “Mr. Spock” copyright Paramount Pictures}

Who I Am & Why Cerulean Sanctum—Part 4

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In what is hopefully the final entry in this last month’s series covering my life’s journey, we come back to where we left off—at the Vineyard in 1989.

I came to the Vineyard after most of the leadership left the Presbyterian church I had been going to. Many of my friends and some of those leaders wound up at the Vineyard and I followed them there.

Now this does not mean that I was unfamiliar with the Vineyard. In fact, I"Fog in the Redwoods" by Dan Edelen had been listening to the worship CDs they had and loved the purity of what the Vineyard was trying to accomplish, recovering a worshipful attitude. I even recommended the church to some friends, so it was not a difficult leap for me.

It seems like an eternity ago, but at one time the Vineyard was highly controversial. Sadly, this was largely due to some poor choices the Association of Vineyard Churches (AVC) made in their attempt to remain on the “cutting edge” of the charismatic movement. But I’ll get into that later.

I started teaching classes at my new church and was heavily involved with the prayer team, the latter being a natural outgrowth of my desire to be an intercessor. Still, I was beginning to realize I had some unfinished business elsewhere.

After a few months at the Vineyard, I felt a calling to finish my education, eventually getting on at Wheaton College in the Christian Ed department. I attended a Vineyard church at Wheaton and encountered actual persecution for doing so. To this day, Wheaton acts like the AVC doesn’t exist. Being a charismatic at Wheaton was definitely no fun. The Kansas City Prophet movement blew up while I was there and I was forced into defending it by some profs who liked to put the lone charismatic on trial. The whole movement gave me the heebie-jeebies actually, so it was no fun trying to keep others at the school from throwing out the charismatic baby with the prophetic bathwater.

Truth is, Wheaton was stifling. I found the lack of openness to anything but what people grew up with to be a grind on me spiritually, so it was nice to get back to my Vineyard home church with my degree and my love for the Lord intact. In the earlier days of the AVC, there was a great emphasis on grace, and that was healing.

But what started with the Kansas City Prophet movement showed the dark underbelly of the Vineyard, too—an unwillingness to scrutinize “new moves of God” more fully before jumping on board with their imprimatur. The worst part was that when these new moves fizzled or their leadership fell into error, no one in the Vineyard would stand up and try to explain to the people in the seats what happened and why.

I met my wife, whose background was Evangelical Friends (the same denomination John Wimber had come from), in 1994 and she started coming to the Vineyard, too. I think it was a good thing for her, but we would not stay in that church for long. After getting married in 1996, I took a job with Apple Computer and we moved from Ohio to Silicon Valley.

Finding a church in California was something we thought would be easy, but we had a false start at one Vineyard church there before finding another Vineyard in Palo Alto that was a good place for us. We were at that church for almost four years.

Before we left for California, I asked the pastor of our Vineyard in Ohio to not let the church become a clone of Willow Creek. While at Wheaton I had done a year-long study of the Willow Creek ministry model and had come away seeing that what others were billing as the model of the future was actually an emperor with no clothes. I viewed that model as lowest common denominator Christianity and the last thing I wanted to see was that model being adopted at our Vineyard church. Little did I know how prophetic my warning would be.

After returning to Ohio in 2000 to address the ill health of my parents, we found our old Vineyard church had swallowed the Willow Creek ministry model hook, line, and sinker. Seeker sensitivity had become the new mantra and everything that had been good about the church had been dumbed down and laminated in order to not offend anyone.

But the Gospel is offensive to many people and you lose something by trying to take the cross and sin out of the equation. When my wife and I moved later to the far eastern portion of Cincinnati, we were now faced with an hour-long drive to the church. I’d just buried both my parents and we’d had our first child. After moving, we lost our primary source of income and were truly in the pits. When we needed to hear about the Lord most, we were instead getting sermon messages about self-esteem.

Things got better for us as we looked past our church for the spiritual strength we could not get there any longer. We also realized the importance of being local, so after a long withdrawing period we finally split from the Vineyard after fifteen years and have recently found a wonderful, small non-denominational charismatic church just a few miles from where we now live.

And that’s the whole story!

As for Cerulean Sanctum, this blog was actually born out of another blog I started in 2001 (does that make me a blog pioneer?) that looked at current events from a Christian perspective. But out of my dissatisfaction with the direction our Vineyard church in Ohio had taken, I felt a calling to change the blog to reflect the growing unease many Christians were feeling with the church growth movement, spiritual deadness in many congregations, foolishness in the charismatic movement, and “mega-Churchianity.” Many of us are reading the Bible and thinking, How come churches today are not like the one we see in Acts? That’s a very good question that we show much reluctance in addressing.

I want to tackle these issues because we cannot ignore them. The future of the Church in America depends on us using God’s wisdom to be strong and wise.

My heart is for the Church as it is expressed in America. I know where we can be because I’ve seen glimpses of how astonishing the Church can be when we are living out the truth of Jesus Christ in its fullness. But rather than this being the norm, too many Christians are settling for something far less. My prayer is that Cerulean Sanctum can be a nexus for people who are looking for more than lowest common denominator Christianity. I hope to inspire people to think more critically about many of the fads in Christian circles and to call us back to the true heart of the Lord.

Some would classify that as prophetic and perhaps it is. But that is why I am here. I hope you can be edified by the discussion here, and that together we can grow to become the Church God has always desired us to be.

Blessings on you all. Thanks for stopping by.