Category Archives: History

Today is Palm Sunday, when the promised Messiah son of Joseph was acclaimed by his people as he came to Zion, but subsequently, in fulfilment of Scripture, was slain in saving them, and was even rejected by the nation (though ascending to God), leading to a new exile for Israel until the coming of the Messiah son of David as a conquering king, inaugurating the eternal kingdom of God.

Our church sermon and Bible-study series on the Book of Acts has reached chapter 12, and the miraculous escape of Peter from Herod’s prison.

Last week dealt another blow to the hypercharismatic movement, through a long (6 hour!) video by Mike Winger, exposing both the fakery and sexual and psychological abuse by yet another leg-lengthening false prophet, whose name I can’t be bothered to remember, and his relentless promotion as a prophet of God by the leadership of Bethel, Redding.

I’m re-reading Köstenberger and Kruger’s 2010 book The Heresy of Orthodoxy, which disposes of the unaccountably popular views of Bart Ehrman et al. that orthodox Christianity was always just one of many diverse versions of Christianity that evolved by oral traditions until (very postmodernly) the brute power of the orthodox suppressed the rest.

In my long exploration of the Charismatic takeover of Evangelicalism, here on The Hump, I’ve come to the tentative conclusion that one core issue is that because Evangelicals lost many of the legitimate sources of knowing the emotions of joy, peace and love in Christ, it has appeared to them that the only way to know these things is through the direct, mystical, experience of God through the “Pentecostal experience.” This “blessing,” as we’ve seen, is not only absent from Scripture, but in effect deifies human passions or, worse, taps into some other spiritual source, if that’s what “kundalini energy” is. In the end it must disappoint.

In my last post I showed how the Charismatic “second experience” can be traced back, through John Wesley, to the Moravian conversion/justication/sanctification first experience taught by Count Zinzendorf. I also examined what seems to be a separate tying of conversion to a particular emotional experience by the English Puritans, the foundation of which (I would conjecture) was Martin Luther’s near-pathological sense of guilt. By God’s grace, his dread of damnation led to his rediscovery of salvation by faith alone, and consequent doctrine of assurance, albeit balanced with a life of continual repentance for indwelling sin.