Monthly Archives: May 2024

When a cult leader is not a cult leader (2)

The complex web of people I examined in my last post seems to show that the leaders of extreme Charismatic and Pentecostal movements share a similar profile as well as a personal network- indeed, a profile that also matches the ancient historical originators of heterodox cults like the Montanists or the Valentinians. This may be summarised by saying they are con-men who appear to have become so detached from truth that they partially believe their own hype – deceiving and deceived, as Paul says in 2 Timothy 3:13.

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When a cult leader is not a cult leader (1)

So I was wrong in my recent post: I haven’t finished on Pentecostalism yet. I want to bring Jesus into the picture. Back in the early 1970s, Father Dennis Bennett’s Nine O’Clock in the Morning was required reading for us keen young Christians (though for some reason I never read it). Bennett is credited with making the Charismatic experience mainstream, after he announced to his Episcopalian congregation that, quietly in prayer with a couple of others in his living room, he had received the baptism of the Spirit and the gift of tongues “as a real language with grammar and syntax.”

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The Church and (spiritually) radical politics

There’s an interesting discussion between journalist Roman Balmakov and Christian commentator Eric Metaxas here. They discuss Metaxas’s call to metaphorical arms to the American Church to rescue their nation from the rapidly escalating decline, on the basis that the Church is the only institution that has a coherent enough ideology not to have been completely captured by the various totalitarian tendencies with which we have all, apart from the most obtuse, become familiar since 2020.

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Why “Charismatic” always tends to become “Hypercharismatic”

When I put up my three part offering on Pentecostal/Charismatic theology in March, I had no idea it would lead to such a long series (twelve posts prior to this one). That’s how relevant issues multiply when you start researching something.

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