Category: The Bible

Dumb, Ignorant, Lazy or Just Plain Stupid?

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One of the most religious countries on the earth is also a nation of religious illiterates – Stephen Prothero

When he went ashore he saw a great crowd, and he had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd. And he began to teach them many things. (Mark 6:34)

The Greatest Book Never Read – evangelicals have become a religious tribe of biblical illiterates. The People of the Book revere the Bible – “but, by and large, they don’t read it. And because they don’t read it, they have become a nation of biblical illiterates.” For many an evangelical Christian , the word is more a brand than a faith. Evangelicals are identified politically more than theologically; simply another word for ‘Republican’. “This is what religion without religion looks like”, writes Shadi Hamid.

How did we get here?

There are plenty of reasons, and throughout this blog, I’ve been stuck writing the same thing over and over again on the manifold failings of evangelical leadership. We likewise need to examine the effect of those sitting in the pews.

A Christianity Today article entitled, Why Johnny Can’t Read the Bible, found an appalling scriptural illiteracy among the very biblicists who uphold its every inspired and inerrant word. Only about half of those who define themselves as professing Christians bother to read the Bible. Frankly, it belies a common American lack of curiosity about the known world, confirmed as I taught ninth grade world geography. I had to dumb things down and teach from a seventh grade textbook. Even then I had to soft-ball exams, with students answering, for example, that Hawaii was a country.  Jay Leno spelled out this embarrassing national ignorance on his Jaywalking segments.   

By and large, Americans are not well-read. And the same goes for evangelicals, where more and more, faith ignorance rules the day. Even at a evangelical seminary, a theology professor was astonished to find incoming students needed remedial training on Bible content. Its a damning confirmation of modern evangelicalism’s anti-intellectualism. It’s not that Johnny Evangelical can’t read the Bible. He’s just grown up in an environment where verbalizing the orthodox faith isn’t that important. This lack of Bible-reading explains why we supposed Biblicists assume we know the Bible, when we really don’t.

One could go further.  Many evangelicals come pre-loaded a scatter-text of Bible snippets, rather than an intimate relationship with Jesus Christ. Biblical literacy means more than winning a game of Bible Trivia – a cut-and-paste approach that looks to the Bible as one’s personal answer book. Bible literacy needs to be more than meeting our emotional needs. Rather than approaching the Bible as a “grab-bag repository of texts that reaffirms the reader’s prior commitments”, Christians need to be readers seeking the unfolding of God’s redemptive process. 

Sunday school is passé. Forget catechism – it’s is for Catholics! Feeling is Believing. Small group relational Bible studies are called inductive, but are more assumptive; weighted by with free-flowing devotionals that don’t force us to wrestle with our Christian belief and practice – or as Archbishop Thomas Cranmer put it, hear, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest the Scriptures . Today’s blind collectivism arises from little taste for “theology” in what has become a post-denominational movement inexplicably hung together by individual autonomies.

To my mind, foremost in the formation of disciples is having read the Bible cover-to-cover, and frequently. From Genesis 1 to Revelation 22, we see the arc of Scripture in Creation – Fall – Redemption – New Creation, with its centrality being Jesus Christ. That’s why I recommend against reading the Bible front-to-back. A serious Bible learner should start in the Gospels, which hang the larger narrative together in redemptive completeness.

Where do we go from here?

Americans have an innate quest for authentic spirituality. Even many who are “Dones” turned off by the institutional church remain, like the Bereans, eager to learn more about Jesus. Marva Dawn asked, “will we give away the Church and its gospel power by dumbing it down or by failing to reach out?”[1] One of my favorite writers, Dawn incisively begins at the heart of Christian community: worship.

“My major concern for the Church”, she continued, “has to do with worship, because its character-forming potential is so subtle and barely noticed, and yet worship creates a great impact on the hearts and minds and lives of a congregation’s members. Indeed, how we worship both reveals and forms our identity as persons and communities.”

Why do I paste a book on communal worship into a post on “dumbed-down” Christians? Because the Bible was meant to be read and discussed in gathered community. The locus of that gathering is koinonia, where we “experience God’s grace and power, informed by the written Scriptures, mediated by the Holy Spirit, and based upon the work of Christ on the Cross.”

I assign “dumbed-down” Christians two homework assignment: Buy a fresh Bible and immerse yourself in it. Then read Marva Dawn’s works and introduce her to your congregation.  

[1] Marva J. Dawn, Reaching Out Without Dumbing Down: A Theology Of Worship For This Urgent Time, (Grand Rapids: Erdmans, 1995), 12.

Trust and Obey

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As a young evangelical, although I grew up surrounded by fundamentalism, I didn’t know much about it. Until the first week at Wheaton College, when most of my dorm-mates used their evenings to attend a Bill Gothard seminar, known then as Institute of Basic Youth Conflicts. I didn’t partake in that extra-curricular exercise, but I glanced through the hefty notebooks issued to each student.

Here was the cult-like teaching of neo-fundamentalism, spelling out in no uncertain terms who’s in charge. Contained therein was an overdose of hierarchic control. Trust and Obey, For There’s No Other Way. Being under authority is one of (since disgraced) Gothard’s most central teachings. Through copious diagrams, he stresses that a woman is subject to her husband; if single, her father remains in charge of her life. The husband is like a High Priest in charge under Christ and the wife totally subservient to the husband; her access to God is through her husband. The mother in turn exercises authority over the children. Presumably, likewise the children over the pets as being the least significant members of God’s family system. Bad, sinful things happen when that divinely ordained chain-of-command is violated.

I think back to Genesis 2, where God made a woman from a rib he had taken out of Adam. It’s a fascinating story. One which makes me have faith not so much because of what the Bible says, but often in spite of it. But for neo-fundamentalist literalists, they not only believe the Bible, they know its true in every respect. Things happened exactly that way because the Bible and Ken Ham say so.

In essence, Eve was a mutant. God made a new being from somebody’s body parts. Most people familiar with Frankenstein would consider that as creating a monster. And that is how neo-fundamentalists (i.e. – evangelicals) view women. A monster which must be controlled; caged by her master. Bad things happen when the monster is let off the leash.  

H.L. Mencken once observed, “morality is doing what is right regardless of what you are told. Obedience is doing what is told regardless of what is right.” As religion, evangelicalism tends towards being a cult of (often blind) obedience. An old Gospel song recites, “Fix Your Eye Upon Jesus”. That’s great, except we need our peripheral vision to not bump into things. Or obstacles, like other people and their annoying problems and demands, disturbing our blissful, solo walk with the Lord. The boss takes no crap from underlings in a scheme where all the shit flows downhill anyway.

Take the family, for instance. Jesus said, “I have come to divide people against each other! From now on families will be split apart, three in favor of me, and two against—or two in favor and three against.” Most people interpret this as you suffering because of your faith.  I see as well as other family members suffering because of your faith. Especially today, when religious organizations use the euphemism “Family” to disguise the fact they are really Extreme Right Wing lobby groups. And Christian families cheering on Trump’s border separation of minors from their undocumented parents. Or like the six-year old looking forward to kindergarten until being expelled from the Christian school because her parents are gay.

I’ve covered a lot of ground here. Let’s just summarize by saying evangelicals put the “nuclear” into family, where rigid conformity to a fundamentalist Diktat is more important than spiritual damage being done to the family. Trust and Obey: use carefully. Among other regrets, I obeyed James Dobson’s advice as a Godly father in spanking the kids. As Mencken implied, a person can be utterly spotlessly religious and still be an asshole. I was that asshole. And I repent.

The (Not-So) Inerrant Bible

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The antediluvian world intrigues me. For what the Bible says about it, but more for what it omits. The Bible is the word of God. I get that. Meanwhile, the universe God created is given short shrift in the beginnings of Genesis. We read where He created the heavens and the earth. He had a lot of creating to do, of which much is left unsaid.  Frankly, I’d like to know what was going on in the 400 billion Milky Way stars, with 1-to-10 trillion orbiting planets. Not to mention the 2 trillion galaxies within our observable Universe. We are only beginning to understand things out there. Planet earth is but a grain of sand on endless miles of beach. Taking the Bible purely as an astronomy text makes for a very frustrating read. Apart from but a few brush strokes on a broad canvas, the Bible is silent. Let’s just say, there’s little help for cosmologists there.

Literalists don’t look at that as a weak point. Theirs is the conversation-ending “God said it. I believe it. That settles it.” The fact that there’s a lot that God didn’t say doesn’t deter literalists from presuming to know he meant. In The Lost World of Scripture, John Walton and Brent Sandy observe there’s a considerable “lostness” in how the Bible came into being. This is the literalist’s dilemma throughout the pre-flood account of Genesis. Christianity is great at reading between the lines; the most malleable religion of all. The materiality of the Biblical ante-diluvian world is as ineffable as Heaven, given that an epoch terminated by a cataclysmic worldwide flood defies outside scrutiny. Even God to have delivered all of that pre-history into Moses’ hands is not specifically stated in the Bible. Nor is it a sure thing that Moses even wrote the Pentateuch – which somehow doesn’t explain how he could write the account of his own death.

“What is man, that thou art mindful of him? And the son of man, that thou visitest him?, asks the Psalmist. The Bible soon segues into what was revealed to human beings, using anthropomorphic language. God walked in the garden of Eden. (Gen. 3). “There’s no definitive proof, but the passage’s implication seems clear to me”, writes evangelical defender Randy Alcorn. Implication, surmise, presupposition, conjecture. Literalists twist themselves into logical pretzels reading into the Bible what isn’t there, or simply talk godly twaddle like Sunday School teachers to their 3rd grades. “Evangelicalism is not fundamentally an intellectual organism”, Peter Enns writes, “but an apologetic one”. This explains why evangelicals cannot be silent even where the Bible is silent.

Indeed, evangelicalism has been afraid of intellectual honesty since the Scopes trial, which exposed the empty-headed, predetermined conclusions of their doctrinal beliefs. Like Ken Ham, where his concrete boat, The Good Ship Eisegesis, teaches there were dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark. There is much to unlearn at his Kentucky religious theme park, where a little embellishment of the Biblical text might be necessary here and there to properly defend it. Temptation lurks in an apologetic that goes beyond the sacred page, seeking to control the text rather than submitting to it. God’s history is wild thing, which we profanize by domesticating it.

It’s easy to have these apologists drag you down into their “never contradicts itself” weeds, but the broad contours of literalism have been pretty well covered by Scopes. Suffice to it to say, that since then plenary inspiration has been a fundamentalist axe to grind against “liberal” Christians who see the Bible trustworthy so far as it is necessary for our salvation, and that it is to be received through the Holy Spirit as the true rule and guide for faith and practice. Funny that two pillars of fundamentalism – Machen and Warfield – rejected literalism in favor of “theistic evolution.” It wasn’t until the first Cultural War first salvos fired by Harold Lindsell, and later sanctified (or embalmed) by the Chicago Statement, that it became a doctrinal hill to die on.

Gallup published a poll this week showing a declining proportion of the overall American population — now 20% — believes the Bible is literally true, word for word. (This is down from 49% in 2011). Half of evangelicals polled did not believe every word should be taken literally. Most evangelicals look to the Bible for answers – not questions. If evangelicals were the least bit self-aware, they might appreciate that NO ONE wants to adopt an anti-intellectual, anti-science and anti-educational faith that is so absurdly and proudly detached from reality. Personally, I can’t accept a faith – much less a supernatural faith – where I have to check my brain at the church door. And I find it distressing that, despite overweening confidence in knowing what the Bible clearly teaches, fewer and fewer evangelicals are able to articulate the essentials of faith in even an elementary way.

I recite the Nicene Creed each Sunday, believing God “spoke through the prophets.” I believe in the nearness of a personal God, under whose providence we have the Bible as the written history of salvation under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. And that the Scriptures are sufficient in fulfilling their purpose and function. Just as God had intervened in time and space, He was making himself known by history in story and story in history – a narrative unity inextricably linked to form what might be called true myth. That is to say, the Bible is to be read more as the history of revelation, than the revelation of history. It is sacred history, which Walter Bruggemann observes “stands some distance from what modern people might call history”. In that regard, “history” in the Old Testament is backgrounded to the metanarrative of love relationship between living God and broken creation. The subject matter of the Bible is God as He deals with His creation. Its attention is on Divine doing; the history of the hidden God gradually lifting the curtain on himself for the redemption of a fallen world.

The Bible is the word of God. Once again, I get that. I completely believe in it; except in the ways I don’t.

Naked Christianity

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A recent news article caught my attention: “Christians strip down at a South Texas nudist community”. It describes evangelical Christians who take it all off. Nudity is shameful, according to Focus on the Family. “From Genesis 3 onward Scripture seems to make it clear that, except in the case of sexual activity, it’s a shameful thing to ‘uncover one’s nakedness’”. I see just the opposite. Most people see nakedness as shameful because of sexual activity. “At Nature’s Resort, public nudity is not sexual,” the owner says. “The initial conception is that this is a sexual thing. People think we’re all out on the front lawn having sex with each other, swapping partners. In fact, if there is any overt sexuality, you see that gate open real fast and somebody is ushered out.”

“I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.” God, it seems, intended for humans to live in the nude. That it didn’t bother Adam before the Fall; it would seem that his fear arose more out of the new-found exposure to vulnerability rather than embarrassment.

Nudity was a taboo in the ancient Israelite society. Beginning with Adam’s sin, the Bible frequently associates nakedness with humiliation and dishonor. Noah’s drunkenness, Lot’s daughters – “uncovering nakedness” connotes inappropriate sexual activity. But there are other passages where nakedness has nothing to do with that. Jesus hung naked on the Tree. And we have St. John matter-of-factly reporting that Simon Peter put clothes on when he jumped into the water. In the pre-mechanized world, there were occupations where nakedness was (no pun intended) best suited – those predating physical contact with whirling industrial machinery. Juxtaposed with Jewish morality is a Biblical ambivalence to nakedness where sexuality is not at issue.

Not making a big deal about seeing someone naked is a difficult question for us, in which there is a tension between the modesty of Christians, and the hyper-sexualized, X-rated society in which we live.  That said, I point to C.S. Lewis in saying there is no absolute Christian edit concerning the unclothed human form. One would never think of banning C.S. Lewis as a smut author. But in Perelandra, he casually describes how clothes are unnecessary on inter-planetary visits.  Indeed, in Heaven we are clothed with garments of salvation and arrayed in a robe of his righteousness. (Isaiah 61).

In Mere Christianity, Lewis opines that: “The Christian rule of chastity must not be confused with the social rule of ‘modesty‘”… While the rule of chastity is the same for all Christians at all times, the rules of propriety change. Even Pope John Paul II remarked that “nakedness itself is not immodest”. Context matters. I think of native tribes who lived naked for eons, until missionaries came to inform them it was evil.  Or, my elementary school experience, where we third grade boys didn’t think anything wrong in having to swim naked during pool time.

A stay at a German hotel might shock American tourists, with a sign at the indoor pool saying “No Bathing Suits Allowed”. Whenever I visited friends in Helsinki, we men would nonchalantly head into the sauna –sans clothes, of course.  I was too Puritan-minded to chance a mixed-gender sauna, also a common Finnish practice. In explaining how freeing the experience was, it was incomprehensible to American friends , who asked me whether/why I went to a gay bathhouse! Somehow, Finnish bathing culture escaped our remnants of Victorian prudery.

What person has never dreamed of bathing naked? I’ve done it! I was swimming at a sparsely-occupied beach on the Adriatic. What a sense of non-conformant liberty it brought. Or, at least partially. I kept my trunks on until in the ocean, and tied them tightly around my ankle – in constant fear of the knot becoming untied. And yes, I did pee in the Ocean!

“Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I will depart,” says Job. Maybe there exists a “naked and without shame” setting in-between where God wouldn’t get mad if you did the same. You don’t stop being a Christian just because you happen not to be wearing any clothes.

I condone a group of naked Christians, who aren’t gathered for an orgy. Those who patronize a naturist retreat on Saturday, and sit in the front pew on Sunday. We are fearfully and wonderfully made. But looking in the mirror, I see almost seven decades of beauty-robbing decrepitude. Believe me, there’s nothing there there. I probably would not accept an invitation, especially since I wouldn’t go unless my wife came with. And that, my friends, would never happen!!

The Perils of American Christian Theocracy: Then and Now.

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During last week, I read the bulletin for the upcoming holiday weekend, and decided to skip church. It reeked of patriotic religion, starting out with “My Country ‘Tis Of Thee”. Don’t get me wrong; I am a patriotic veteran, but Christian Nationalism has overtaken America– and the church is no exception.

If St. Paul could boast, “Brethren, I am a Pharisee, descended from Pharisees”, then I am an American of Americans. My direct ancestors escaped religious persecution in England during the Puritan Great Migration. Within their Puritan circles, they lived the “City On A Hill”. The Massachusetts Bay Colony was founded as a Christ-optia, essentially a theocracy. The Puritans pursued policies of rigidly policed morality to enforce a spiritually-correct society, guarding the purity of the ordinances of God against “tolerations of divers religions, or of one religion in segregant shapes”.  Religious intolerance made the Puritans the original Christian Taliban.

The Puritans tried, but soon failed, to be a monolithic religious body. Their Guiding Lights held a monopoly on spiritual and political power. The Puritans had a unitary vision: “one godly ruler, one godly church, and one godly path to heaven, with puritan ministers writing the guidebooks.” But they were a fissiparous crowd who disputed who had the correct Biblical world view. It wasn’t long before theocrats saw flaws in the theocracy of others. “It turns out that even puritans were not always sure who was puritan. They were much better at figuring out who was not, but even that could be difficult”.

Doctrinal disagreement soon broke up the godly elect into factions who deemed the others less godly. Amidst the ideological purgings, a great exodus ensued. Rev. John Davenport removed his church to New Haven Colony. Rev. Roger Williams was banished for “diverse, new, and dangerous opinions”, and took his congregation to Rhode Island. Rev. Thomas Hooker led his parish (including my 7th great grandfather) away to Hartford, Connecticut. Longstanding arguments over the “evidences” of conversion eventually split the Massachusetts Puritans in 1662, by way of the Half-Way Covenant. “All sides saw themselves as besieged by satanically inspired enemies, and Massachusetts nearly fell apart.”

“Intolerance was the way in which Puritan magistrates and ministers governed the colony.” My forebears sat at the heresy trial of Anne Hutchinson. Believing that God spoke to her by “an immediate voice”, Hutchinson is possibly the first recorded Charismatic in America. My ancestors presided over the death sentences at the Salem Witch trials. (Including my 2nd cousin 8 times removed, minister of Salem from 1680 to 1683 – the only clergyman executed for witchcraft.)  Coerced virtue led to punishments greater and lesser, including criticizing a minister, Sabbath-breaking, or talking during a dry hour-and-a-half sermon.  Repeat pew-sleepers were sentenced to be severely whipped. Worse were in store for “cursed sects of Christian heretics” like Quakers or Baptists who threatened to contaminate the purity of the colony. Intolerance of religious outsiders led them to be arrested, fined, imprisoned, branded, whipped, sold into slavery, or hanged. And from 1633 on, the Puritans bought, sold, and held enslaved Africans. They engaged in a terror campaign against the indigenous Pequot tribe. In one assault they killed 500 Pequot men, women, and children. A remorseless Puritan John Underhill quoted Old Testament verses to justify the slaughter, declaring that “sometimes the Scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents”.

The Puritans left England, persecuted by a state church intertwined with the government – and proceeded to repeat systematic religious intolerance in America. State-established religion and religious persecution go hand-in-hand. Theirs was a “Sweet Land of Liberty” – perhaps for them, but no others. The steady drumbeat of Puritan hyper-Calvinism left many in continuing doubt about their salvation, questioning whether their “works” were of God or the devil. What began as ascetic piety evolved into hypocrisy and appearance of righteousness.

The Puritan theocratic experience offers many forewarnings of what an America would resemble if Christian Rightists were to succeed in enforcing society’s conformance to divine rule. Whether a top-down capture of the 7 Mountains à la Dominionists, or over-stuffing institutions with Christian chiefs via Rushdoony/North Reconstructionism, the likelihood is that Trump or one of his fervent acolytes will take office in 2024. Intolerant Christian Rightists are on a victory roll. The survival of democracy in the near future makes the question urgently problematic. The next post will discuss this modern day Christian Taliban.

Franklin Graham, Ukraine and the Biblical World View

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It wasn’t hard to suss out what Billy Graham believed. A self-defined premillennial dispensationalist, his Crusade sermons usually featured some disaster or tragedy he clipped from the newspaper. The world was going to Hell. His steady drumbeat was “accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior” right now before its too late. The late Michael “iMonk” Spencer called this house- on-fire tactic, “wretched urgency”. Graham’s political theology was highly influenced by two prominent Presbyterian churchmen: his father-in-law and oil magnate J. Howard Pew, who stood up his career. Both were John Birchers whose anti-communist End Times paranoia fed into conservative politics and evangelical religion. The Birchers are back. And they’re winning.

In the 1960’s, Graham’s creation, Christianity Today, had nothing positive to say about Rousas Rushdoony and the fledgling Christian Reconstruction movement. It was still bent on revivalism in saving America one soul at a time. Dispensationalism held sway, and Russia was foreign enemy #1 of the USA. Even Reagan said that Gog must mean the communist Russia that set itself against God. Anti-communism was a useful scaremongering resource that filled many ministry coffers. “We are like people under sentence of death, waiting for the date to be set. We sense that something is about to happen… We are now on a collision course”, warned Graham. Back then, the Soviet Union was the anti-Christ. Once scorned, Dominionist theology that Christians are ordained to rule and reign is embraced by a majority of evangelicals. “Rushdoony provided a way to sacralize these ideas”. And Putin’s Russia is the darling of the Religious Right. Funny how far evangelicalism had come.

Following Reagan’s “tear down that Wall”, evangelicals began to look inward for enemies of Christ. And there were plenty of domestic targets. Billy Graham maintained that if all of us could come to the cross, Christ is the solution to all the problems that beset America. But evangelicals began to realize slow motion-saving people from the satanic End Times wasn’t immediate enough to bring America back to its founding Christian principles. America’s strongest adversary was itself: abortion, homosexuality and trans-genderism were the sins destroying the national fabric.

The Bible hasn’t changed since the 1960’s, but the evangelical biblical world view has. Jerry Falwell emerged from fundamentalist isolation to wonder, that if a super-majority of Americans still believed in morality, why is America having such problems? “We must look for the answer to the highest places in every level of government.” Falwell – with his “I Love America” rallies –, Pat Robertson, and a host of others set in motion a pro-family political machine, creating partnerships between Christians who never had talked to each other previously. “There are bigger issues now,” as his son, Jerry Jr. explained. “We can argue about theology later after we save the country.” Previously other-worldly focused evangelicals started to contemplate the biblical reordering of society, which would lead to the Second Coming of Christ. Raised on a steady diet of liberal humanist conspiracies, this was an existential war against the satanic control of America. The centerpiece strategy was to seat Christians into the hands of power. Or usurp it, as in the Capitol insurrection – “marching under Jesus’s banner to implement God’s will to keep Trump in the White House.”[i]

“As the process of dominion extends the authority of Christians over more and more areas of life,” wrote Gray North, “we will see the creation of a comprehensive theocracy.” Francis Schaeffer claimed he didn’t want a theocracy. But at the same time, as his son Frank recounted, “we were calling for civil disobedience, the takeover of the Republican Party, and even hinting at overthrowing our ‘unjust pro-abortion government.’”[ii] Sara Diamond rightly recognizes Schaeffer as an early influencer of dominion theology.[iii] Rushdoony, once a bête noir had now become the éminence grise of theocratic Christian Right politics.

And so, finally, back to the original question. What is Franklin Graham’s “Biblical World View”? His father was a Johnny-one-note revivalist. Praying that God will save the nation has nothing to do with old-fashioned revivalism. Franklin’s focus has shifted towards the “new normal” mandate to take dominion. Dominionism is “being used to bring together a new and determined Moral Majority for the 21st century.” And Franklin is a believer: “Speaking of regime changes—we need one in this country!”

“The issue is FREEDOM, the freedom to make our own choices.” Franklin was hailing the Canadian truckers’ convoy as “riding against oppression”. His father, on the other hand, preached freedom in Christ:  “Have you honestly faced the truth of your so-called ‘freedom’? You see, in reality you aren’t free; instead, you are ruled by your own lusts and desires… Instead give your life to Jesus Christ and discover what it means to be truly free.” It’s quite a jump from saving souls one at a time to saving America, and truckers’ “freedom”. Somewhere along the line, Franklin’s biblical world view lost the simple purity of the Gospel message.

“They shut the churches down. This is what the communists did in Eastern Europe”, Graham warned.  Speaking with Todd Starnes, Franklin reminded him that thousands of pastors and priests were slaughtered under the Soviet Union. The same could be said for today, as the horrors of Bucha come to light. Hospitals bombed, civilians executed, children shot, women raped, churches under siege. Russian soldiers running amok, mercenary death squads, abduction and mass graves, intentional terror targeting – like the train station massacre with “for the children” scribbled on the rockets. Shutting down of churches and killing of pastors – apparently Franklin cannot see that this is happening now!

But hey, who cares? Not Franklin; he’s been as quiet as a mouse over war crimes committed by Russia. And yes, a minister – the Dean of the Slavic Evangelical Seminary in Kyiv – was among the hundreds of murdered civilians. Yet Franklin is preoccupied with refugees coming into America. “What’s going on at our southern border is out of control.”

In 2015, Franklin tried to find some silver lining in Putin’s heavy-handed assistance to the Assad government – which included attacks on civilians using cluster bombs, chemical weapons, and thermobaric weapons. “What Russia is doing may save the lives of Christians in the Middle East,” Graham said. The truth is different. “Russia’s military intervention contributed to untold suffering for millions of Syrian civilians”.  The same war crimes are being committed daily in Ukraine.

Interesting which sides Franklin Graham’s moralistic worldview picks. Graham has made several “non-political” trips to Moscow, to have photo-op chats with both Putin and Orthodox prelates, and came away asserting that “many Americans wished that someone like Putin could be their president.” Just before the invasion was underway, he made a plea to pray for Putin – neglecting to solicit prayers for Ukraine. Graham intends to make up for that omission with a trip to preach in Ukraine. (He’s billed it as an Easter service. But it’s not Orthodox Easter (April 24); just another grim day of misery and violence that Ukrainians have suffered for two months. And the days to come will get much dirtier, with the arrival of Russian general Dvornikov – dubbed the Butcher of Syria. With his appointment, many fear “a significant escalation and deliberate ‘terror campaign’ in Ukraine.” Russian media assures its viewers that genocidal vengeance –  a “final solution” – is in the plans.

This is not just total war – Ukraine is a Holy War, with Patriarch Kirill urging true patriots to eradicate scum and traitors. Putin’s war is about the survival of a totalitarian dictatorial regime. Dominionists want to defeat their democratic regime. Graham and Kirill are attempting to reach the same goal from opposite poles. Both, as Kirill defined it, “are talking about human salvation, something much more important than politics.”

Which is why, at Graham’s “Easter” celebration, we’ll hear a hearts and prayers sermon, preaching that sinners need to come to Christ. Meaning everyone aside from Franklin, and his rationalizing and minimizing criminal wrongdoing by Trump. Years of soft-peddling murderous Putin should grieve him deeply as well. Graham praised Putin as inspirational. Either he didn’t listen to Putin’s rhetoric threatening Ukraine since the 2014 Crimean take-over, or chose to ignore his barely concealed hatred – that the “Ukrainian authorities are illegitimate and Russia has to be prepared to act to protect compatriots”. If it were me praising Putin’s high moral standard, I’d be embarrassed to show my face in a Ukraine victimized by a hero who embodies his own Christian values. This is not just a shooting war; there is the second, fundamental war of ideas that drove it. It’s impossible to express remorse for one without repudiating the other. As Mark Silk points out, “as for his issuing a prophetic denunciation of Russia, I’m not holding my breath. It would mean disavowing an alliance he has been involved in for years.”

More fundamentally, it would clash with his Dispensational/Bircher/Dominionist-inspired “Biblical World View”. Ukraine shows us how, that if his theology were realized, it would lay waste to our own country. Maybe the one we should be praying for most fervently on Easter is Franklin himself. And, our future as a democracy.

[i] An online petition calling for Graham’s firing collected more than 24,500 signatures, claiming Graham spread “discredited election conspiracy theories” and “white nationalist terrorism,”– which it contended  led to the riot at the U.S. Capitol. https://julieroys.com/petition-franklin-grahams-firing-capitol-riots/

[ii] Ken Kersch, Conservatives and the Constitution (London: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2019), p. 281

[iii] Sara Diamond, Roads to Dominion, (New York: Guilford Press, 1995) p. 246.

I’ve Been So Wrong About The Rapture.

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One of the most conspicuous End Times preachers was Jack Van Impe. For 30 years, he hosted an attention-grabbing television program, on which he translated disturbing headline news into a drip feed of conspiracy-tainted suspicions and fear. Van Impe had a commanding delivery, made even more compelling through a rapid fire recitation of Bible verses like he was a walking concordance. As a premillennial dispensationalist, Van Impe became known as a Prophet of Doom. But not for his end times-hooked listeners, eager to hear his reassurance that they will escape the cataclysmic end of the world by being raptured to Heaven.

Van Impe, who died in 2020, had plenty of company in the Darby/Scofield doomsday school of prophecy: Lindsay, LaHaye, Hagee, Dallas Seminary, and Moody Church to name a few. A cursory review of apocalyptic televangelist John Hagee’s popular titles is telling: The Battle for Jerusalem, Earth’s Final Moments, Attack on America, From Daniel to Doomsday. These folks have long had their fingers on the pulse of their evangelical audience, and most importantly, the monsters they’re told that hide under their beds at night. Since Van Impe’s death, the hurry-up Armageddon flames have been fanned even hotter with the Ukraine invasion. Evangelicals have a counterpart to the so-called “Doomsday Clock” – with a Rapture Index now up to “fasten your seat belts” level.

I am not a Tribber. Meanwhile, I chip away on a non-monetized blog, when I could be buying business jets and collect fat royalties from Simon & Schuster like Hagee, if I started peddling my own rapture porn novels. The Rapture pulp fiction oeuvre is one proven money-shaker I would like a slice of. Shoddy prose aside, these books essentially write themselves. Let me briefly outline the prophetic story line  behind my future-casting proposal:

March 2022, and the Ukraine “special operation” continues to bog down. Putin sacks some of his surviving generals and purges his security service of officials blamed for incompetence. Putin dismisses peace overtures and doubles down, and the war segues into bloody urban fighting either mitigated through Berlin-type city-busting, or Syria-style chemical or biological attacks. But the Biden administration has pinky-promised that Ukraine will not fall.

Putin has warned of “consequences as you have never before experienced in your history” if NATO becomes more involved. Russia has already raised the level of their version of DEFCON. This raises the potential for a nuclear duel (triggered accidentally or otherwise), although some analysts conjecture World War III may have already started. Regardless, both sides are digging in for a protracted war. For the servile Russian political machine, nothing is off the table. The Russian “message is not just about Ukraine,” a political scientist in Lithuania stated. Putin has already threatened Sweden and Finland. The Baltic states are wondering, are we next? Moldova feels threatened, as well. One Duma member demands the return of Alaska. Another suggests launching a nuclear missile at the U.S. to ‘send a message’. Another famous dispensationalist, Pat Robertson, is waving the American nuclear flag. “Well, if you do that, we’re going to escalate…We have the firepower to wipe out every Russia city.”

Robertson was once again waxing prophetic about the end-times. This time drawing a dark line connecting Putin (The King of the North) and his Ukraine invasion as fulfilling specific end times prophecies.  “He went into the Ukraine, but that wasn’t his goal. His goal was to move against Israel, ultimately”.

All this bravado and bluster is great material for my book. But detonating nuclear bombs across Eurasia and North America would yield a half-billion dead. That would make my book a very short one, indeed. Better that I stretch the pre-Trib Rapture eschatology out a little bit. All wars end at some point. Let’s assume a stalemated war continues through 2024, when Donald Trump is once again elected President. He’s prided himself on enjoying collegial relations with Vladimir Putin. In this scenario, Trump campaigns on negotiating a peace treaty. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said peace talks between Ukraine and Russia should be held in Jerusalem. It’s a holy city revered by both Trump and Putin – both have prayed at the Wailing Wall.

A third Holy Temple “will play a key role at the end of days.” For some time now, an Israeli council of Jewish rabbis – a modern-day Sanhedrin – has appealed to Trump and Putin to join forces in the rebuilding of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. “I don’t want to build a (Third) Temple in one or two years, I want to build it now,” declares the leader of a right-wing party growing in popularity. If he were still alive, John Walvoord would agree. He repeated a popular urban legend that “500 railroad carloads of stone from Bedford, Indiana, are already en route to Israel” to erect the Temple.

The Holy Temple will be the earthly dwelling place for the Shekhinah, the Divine Presence of God. “For Orthodox Jews committed to reestablishing the Temple, both the present problems of the world and the problems faced by the Jewish people will be solved only by rebuilding of the Temple. This is in total alignment with the pre-Tribulation period that figures prominently in dispensational eschatology:

“The Third Temple will be built before the Antichrist comes to power and takes control of Europe and the surrounding Mediterranean nations. Satan will spiritually defile the Holy Place of the rebuilt Temple by directing his Antichrist to violate the Holy of Holies at the beginning of the last three and a half years of the Tribulation. The False Prophet, the Antichrist’s partner, will then demand that the Antichrist be worshiped as “god” in the rebuilt Temple.”[i]

Trump has been hailed as a King Cyrus figure, enabling the Jewish diaspora to return to Jerusalem.  As with Cyrus, Trump is the Lord’s shepherd to lay the foundations of the Temple. “The Jewish people in Israel love him… like he’s the King of Israel. … he is the second coming of God.”  Trump may revel in his power as God’s man, but is clueless about his prophetic destiny in the unfolding of these last days. “Let its foundations be laid.”’ – Ezra 6:3.

On the other hand, Putin also has supernatural help. He assumed the mantel of emissary of God to restore the unity of Russian civilization with Russian ethnicity, language and traditional spirituality. To the Russian Orthodox church, Putin is “the chosen one” leading the “self-purification of society”.  “God is inside Vladimir Putin,” according to Russian Orthodox activist Dmitry Tsorionov. “Vladimir Putin becomes a living temple.” As the leader of the Third Rome, Putin has the messianic destiny to reign over Christendom from Moscow and throughout the world.

Trump and Putin: “By the way”, Donald Trump Jr. mentioned, “my father had a great relationship with Putin.”  The President was smitten with his Russian counterpart, who “said nice things” about him. And then there is Trump’s son-in-law and confidante, Jared Kushner (an observant Jew). Many have tried to broker the Peace of Jerusalem to no avail. But Kushner made progress in shifting the tectonic plates. Could he be the False Prophet of Revelation 13?

The Anti-Jesus will sign a seven-year covenant with Israel. But it seems we currently have two Messiah/Anti-Christs. [ii] I can use the template from the Book of Daniel to write one man of lawlessness out of the script: “The two kings, with their hearts bent on evil, will sit at the same table and lie to each other, but to no avail, because an end will still come at the appointed time”.  It’s problematic, however, whether either of these two anti-heroes could represent the protagonist of a novel based on good versus evil. I’m leaning towards Mr. I-Alone-Can-Fix-It Trump.

So far, I have my story’s skeleton. I have my character archetypes – careful to disguise the real persons to avoid legal action taken as potentially libelous. Sinclair Lewis’ Buzz” Windrip could do as a good template. A narrative is in place, with the Antichrist and the False Prophet already having appeared on the world stage.

All these years, Van Impe has been preaching a certain truth. It took Trump to make it revelation. It will take me to write the book.  

[i] Grant R. Jeffrey, The New Temple and the Second Coming,  (New York: Penguin, 2009), p. 8.

[ii] Daniel 11:27

Old Age Senility and an Inerrant Bible.

~ phroneticchristian ~ Leave a comment

Person, woman, man, camera, TV. Donald Trump bragged that he aced a “difficult” cognitive test by remembering five words and reciting them in order. Nikki Haley, former U.N. ambassador – and strong evangelical – who resigned under good terms with Trump carries a Republican gravitas. She recently alluded to President Biden, noting “anyone above a certain age in a position of power… should have some sort of cognitive test”. She parrots many right-wing pundits who insist the lights are out and nobody’s home in the White House. (Of course, they skip over the previous President, who many in his own administration (and his siblings) believed had early onset Alzheimer’s.)

Conservative evangelicals like Ken Ham believe that if Moses didn’t write the Pentateuch, it calls into question the truth of Scripture. One question Mr. Answers in Genesis has never asked is, did Moses ever take a cognitive test?

Exodus 7 informs us that Moses was eighty years old when he challenged Pharaoh. Did we get the Torah from a Moses suffering from old age dementia? It seems that if we can question a 78 year-old President’s mental acuity, what conclusions can we draw from Sinai? Here we have an elderly, perhaps senile, man who trudges up a mountain and comes down saying he saw G_d. Couldn’t the rhetorical argument be made that an aged, maybe hallucinatory, Moses saw something that wasn’t really there?

Conservative evangelicals believe the Bible’s divinely-inspired authority is not limited to spiritual, religious, or redemptive themes but includes its assertions in such fields as history and science. I believe the miracles of Exodus and agree the Bible is infallible in terms of faith and practice. But the same can’t be said for the accounts in Genesis being historically, scientifically, and factually inerrant. And conservative evangelicals believe the first five books were all written down by Moses.

I’m not a geriatric physician diagnosing Moses’ cognitive impairment. I’m merely pointing out that making reckless age-ims about President Biden’s mental acuity logically leads to places where conservative evangelicals are loath to go.