For those of you perhaps unfamiliar with the title phrase, the four horsemen of the Apocalypse in the Bible (Revelation 6; Zechariah 6) were (1) conquest on a white horse, (2) war on a red horse, (3) famine on a black horse, and (4) death on a pale horse. Since almost every era of history—from Egyptian to Roman to the American Empire—has witnessed conquest, war, famine, and death, one may wonder, What’s new? Well, the Book of Revelation tells of a seven-year period called the Tribulation or the Great Tribulation, and the four horsemen of the Apocalypse signal the beginning of that catastrophic End-time event. During their ride, a quarter of the earth’s population will perish.

Not long ago I saw a rerun of Prophets of Doom (History Channel), formerly aired January 2011. Six men sat in an austere, dark basement talking about their vision of the future. They were Michael Ruppert (former policeman concerned with peak oil), Nathan Hagens (former hedge fund manager thinking economics), John Cronin (interested in a shortage of freshwater), James Howard Kunstler (journalist concerned with peak oil), Hugo De Garis (futurist interested in artificial intelligence), and Robert Gleason (editor concerned with nuclear threat and terrorism).

Assuming, evidently, that concern for the future was age-related, the narrator informed us that each pundit was at or near sixty years of age. It was the six men themselves who brought out the point that, generally speaking, people—younger people, I guess—were asleep and that the timing of these issues—economic chaos, peak oil, dearth of freshwater, nuclear terrorism, artificial intelligence—was apocalyptic. I don’t want to go into all they mentioned, but simply look at some things that concern thinking people today who agree with their general assessment: that we are living in the Last Days.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gi53kq4vzY Video

GLOBAL WARMING

“There will be no polar ice by 2060…Somewhere along that path, the polar bear drops out.” ~Larry Schweiger, President, National Wildlife Federation

In some circles global warming is a joke. “The whole global warming thing is created to destroy America’s free enterprise system and our economic stability” (Jerry Falwell). “The more the case for man-made warming falls apart, the more hysterical Gore gets about an imminent catastrophe” (Fred Barnes).

Churchmen, commentators, correspondents, and even weathermen laugh. Especially when the temperatures plunge, and snowstorms bring whiteouts. However, the truth is that the average temps worldwide are rising incrementally—about 2.0°F since the Industrial Revolution—but even a few degrees can make a difference in a closed system.

Years ago I had an aquarium in the foyer of my home and another one in my classroom, along with a terrarium (which creates its own environment). An aquarium requires a charcoal filter, a pump, a heater, fresh (nontap) water, and a scavenger (shark or barracuda) to keep the tank clean. Occasionally when I brought home a goldfish or a guppie, I arose the next morning and found some fish missing. Where did they go? Simple: the scavenger (barracuda) ate them. Sometimes the fish got sick. The solution? Turn up the heater. Normally the temp in an aquarium is 71°-86°F; to treat parasites, the upper end. A few degrees more, say 90°, and fish die. Such is the delicacy of an aquarium.

The earth is no different. Turning up the average heat, a few degrees, can adversely affect its delicate balance. Since temps can fluctuate a couple degrees in a given area, someone asked, “How do you get the average?” I’m not a scientist. I don’t do the math. But it’s the tally of the official weather stats, per town or airport. You know, those temps your local weatherman throws up on the TV screen—not what your thermometer reads on your back porch. Meteorologists keep meticulous records. Calculating the official highs and lows is how they arrive at the average temp, for any given city, which you will find in a good road atlas or at Accuweather.com (see link below).

Along with the earth’s rising temps comes things like red tides, colony collapse disorder, melting glaciers, etc. (In fairness to scientists, I don’t know that anyone has tied together colony collapse disorder and global warming.) Though I don’t know how it’s all linked, anyone can see that the world around us is changing. Honeybees are dying. Fish are disappearing from coastlines—the only place fish live. The USA no longer cans sardines and is buying its seafood from Asia. Fishermen are going global looking for fish, even invading the waters of other countries.

Glaciers are melting. Scientists have photographed images showing what glaciers once looked like and what they look like today. I’ve been to the Columbia Icefields in Alberta and seen markers indicating where the Athabasca Glacier was at various years and where it is now. The photos alone should be enough to convince die-hards, but evidently not.

Permafrost is thawing. In Alaska and the far North, where civilization itself is constructed on permafrost, buildings are sinking, utility poles are toppling, and roads are turning to mush. Further, underneath the melting glaciers and thawing permafrost are carbon dioxide and methane gas, the latter about twenty times most potent in trapping solar heat.

My personal theory is that carbon dioxide from the respiration of seven billion people is causing global warming. If so, then the world needs more carbon sinks (trees). If the UN or USA wants a seven-year moratorium on logging, I think that’s a good idea.

“Climate change…presents a dire challenge to humanity. Damage to ecosystems is already taking place; flooding, destructive storms, increased drought, and polar ice melt are causing loss of life and property” (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists).

http://www.accuweather.com/ Accuweather
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/indicators/ Climate Change
http://bit.ly/hjJcPO/ Dead Fish
http://usat.ly/sV45FU/ Red Tide
http://bit.ly/t9tev4/ Dead Bees
http://reut.rs/dZwUDX/ Dead Bees
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/search/ Melting Glaciers
http://wapo.st/vDqxXE Thawing Permafrost
http://bit.ly/aH2ASI Methane gas

DROUGHT

“Our farmers and ranchers have never faced as many problems as they do today with drought, range fires, high gas prices and an ever tightening budget on agriculture subsidies.” ~ Michael McCaul

If you look at a drought map of the world, you will see that there is almost a worldwide drought. This has been going on for several years, maybe a decade. I’ve driven the Taconic Parkway, in New York, and witnessed the same brown grass and trees that I’ve seen in Maryland and Virginia. Even fir trees are turning brown. In Maryland, near Antietam National Battlefield, last year, I was shocked to find mile after mile of parched corn. The US Department of Agriculture, in 2010, designated 22 counties in Maryland natural disaster areas because of crop losses from drought and excessive heat.

In Texas the drought this year, 2011, was so bad that ranchers had to sacrifice 600,000 head of cattle, 12 percent of their herds, which puts an immediate glut of beef on the market, but means a shortage in coming years. “Texas’ and America’s farmers are suffering,” observed Rep Michael McCaul. “As the Member of Congress representing the 10th Congressional District of Texas, I have traveled throughout our area and have seen first-hand how the drought has affected our agricultural communities….Texas has been hit especially hard this year by a continuing drought, threatening high winds and increasingly destructive range fires. Simply, these conditions have led to extremely adverse conditions in the agriculture industry.”

In northern Mexico, a region parched by the same drought as Texas, five states are suffering from lack of drinking water. Crops are withering in the fields; 1.7 million cattle have died of starvation and thirst; and the government is having to truck in food and water. In Australia, water is rationed; persons can take only five-minute showers. Singapore is recycling waste water for drinking water.

Jonathan Falwell, pastor of Thomas Road Baptist Church, through a project called Miracles in the Desert, is trying to assist Israel with desalinization—“Without water, everything will die. The dream will be over” (Anonymous). Considering how wealthy Jews are, this sounds a little like “carrying coals to Newcastle.” The point is that the Middle East is hurting for fresh water. Jordan, for instance, is the fourth-thirstiest country in the world; desalinization is its only hope for survival.

In Europe the drought is so severe that the Danube and the Rhine, the longest rivers in Europe, are too shallow to allow ships to pass. This has paralyzed shipping (in Austria shipping is being done at only 25 percent of normal) and negatively affected tourism (passengers are being taken off river cruises and bussed to the next stop). In Bulgaria the Danube is at its lowest level in seventy years. “There is just no water. The situation is critical not only here on the lower Danube but also upriver in Hungary, Austria, Germany,” said Ivan Ivanov, deputy chief of Bulgarian River Shipping.

The Czech Republic is having its worst drought in over two hundred years. In Serbia hydro-power supplies are running low, leaving part of the country without electricity. Bosnia is suffering from a deficiency of drinking water. In Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary crops and utilities are threatened. East Africa is experiencing the worst drought in sixty years.

http://bit.ly/sxq2aA World drought map
http://lwf.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/hazards/2011/12 NOAA Drought
http://bit.ly/ta0my8 2011 Drought
http://bit.ly/tICiBN Maryland 2010
http://bo.st/vHKYOf Mexico 2011
http://www.landofpromise.com/miracles/ Miracles in the Desert
http://bit.ly/u2iqoo Jordan’s water
http://tgr.ph/vBSnJX Cargo ships stranded
http://bit.ly/teIJaI Power shortage Balkans
http://bit.ly/s2CX8K Drought Balkans
http://bit.ly/unV4UC Power shortage Romania
http://on.msnbc.com/qVtH55 Drought East Africa

FAMINE

“There is a lot that happens around the world we cannot control. We cannot stop earthquakes, we cannot prevent droughts, and we cannot prevent all conflict; but when we know where the hungry, the homeless and the sick exist, then we can help.” ~Jan Schakowsk

There is growing concern that a drought in South America could tighten grain supplies the world over. US wheat, oat, and barley crops have been poor the past couple of years. In northern Mexico the government is trucking in food for five suffering states. In Uganda families are eating one meal a day. Large parts of East Africa, including Kenya, are experiencing food crises. In Somalia, where the UN has officially declared a famine, thousands have died from lack of food.

http://bit.ly/vrX1hp South America drought
http://reut.rs/qJWnZ5 Wheat USA
http://allafrica.com/stories/201108190282.html Uganda
http://bit.ly/puY4jC Somalia
http://huff.to/ru9Quy Somalia
http://bloom.bg/opRXbQ UN on Somalia
http://www.unocha.org/crisis/horn-africa-crisis Horn of Africa Crisis http://www.mercycorps.org/hornofafricahungercrisis Horn of Africa
http://bit.ly/p8vZI6 East Africa

PEAK OIL

“What’s going to happen is, very soon, we’re going to run out of petroleum, and everything depends on petroleum….This is the end of the world.” ~Kurt Vonnegut, Jr

Evidently, the same persons skeptical of global warming are also skeptical of peak oil. “I believe that global warming is a myth. And so, therefore, I have no conscience problems at all, and I’m going to buy a Suburban next time” (the late Jerry Falwell). If that sounds oxymoronic, as well as irresponsible, consider that Falwell was not alone. “When the President was asked about global warming at a public appearance yesterday, he responded by talking about America’s addiction to oil. You make the connection” (Gwen Ifill). The only connection may be that the Industrial Age parallels the Oil Age, and together industrialization and oil-fueled machinery have contributed to global warming.

The fact is that the world now consumes 30 billion barrels of oil a year, 85 million barrels of oil a day, 40,000 gallons a second, and demand is growing exponentially. In 2009 the UK Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security said, “The next five years will see us face…the oil crunch.” Last year, 2010, the US Department of Defense (DOD) said that by 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear.

For decades the USA has taken for granted Saudi Arabian oil; but the mother load of oil in Saudi Arabia is almost depleted. The number-one exporter of oil in the world is now Russia. If you were the USA, how would you like to be dependent on Russia or Venezuela for oil? Maybe you can see, then, why the USA is going after the Middle East. “We need a new law,” suggests Jello Biafra, “that owners of SUVs are automatically in the military reserve. Then they can go get their own…oil.”

Did you know that the country possessing the world’s number-two oil reserves is Iran?Maybe you can see, then, why the USA is going after Iran. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards are preparing for war. Further, already allied with Russia, they are generating growing ties with Latin America.

More on Peak Oil
http://bit.ly/sV4x25 Where oil is
http://bit.ly/t8lP59 Saudi oil declining
http://bit.ly/hvl05H Saudi Arabia cannot pump enough oil to keep a lid on prices
http://bit.ly/i5b7Ne We are asleep at the wheel | Jeremy Leggett
http://bit.ly/h2zcZc How much oil does Saudi Arabia actually have? | John Vidal
http://bit.ly/rTsHOo Peak oil is past tense
http://yhoo.it/undRIP Russia oil spill wreaks havoc
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=106199 Facing peak oil and peak gas
http://bit.ly/tJyGU2 Peak oil clock
http://bit.ly/tAJ638 What peak oil looks like
http://onforb.es/r0C2N9 Peak oil comes to non-OPEC world | Forbes
http://bit.ly/bAx8si World already past peak oil | National Geographic
http://www.oildecline.com/ Oil consumption

ECONOMY

For my take on the economy, you can read my blog “The Future of Money—and How It Impacts You.” http://bit.ly/s2Yw5N

WORLD WAR

“War does not determine who is right—only who is left.” ~Bertrand Russell

Did you know that both the USA and Russia have warships in the Persian Gulf? In the Mediterranean Sea, off the Syrian coast, are several Russian ships including the aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov as well as the American Sixth Fleet, and the aircraft carrier George H W Bush. In November the US tried to give the impression the George H W Bush Carrier Strike Group was anchored off Marseilles, when it was spotted in the eastern Mediterranean opposite Syria. After that the George H W Bush, whose access to Syria or Lebanon had been cut off by new weapons reaching Syria, departed to parts unknown, while the USS Carl Vinson Strike Group took up a position opposite Iran.

Moscow has also been playing hide and seek with its only air carrier Admiral Kuznetsov. It was announced the ship would set sail for the Mediterranean on 6 December 2011; but 25 November it was seen passing Malta—then, Cyprus—en route to join a flotilla of Russian guided-missile destroyers anchored off Syria. Moscow rushed to Syria’s defense by airlifting, to Damascus, missiles capable of hitting naval targets 300 kilometers away.

Would either the USA or Russia have concentrated two powerful fleets in the proximity of Syria and Iran unless a military conflagration was imminent? Who knows? While Washington, Moscow, Tehran, Tel Aviv, or Damascus could step back from the brink of war, at the moment, there is no sign of this happening. If anything, just the opposite.

US special forces are massing on the Syrian border. Russia is in Syria inspecting missile bases. Egyptian and Turk navies are joining together to conduct maneuvers. Iran is planning to hold war drills in international waters, an exercise that could bring it into close proximity with a US fleet. Both China and North Korea want in the game and are angling for position. North Korea is testing missiles capable of hitting the USA. The North Korean military is “helping” the new leader, Kim Jong-un, lead the country. China, which claims the South China Sea, through which passes one-third of global sea trade, is urging its Navy to prepare for military combat and is talking World War III. Putin has told his generals to prepare for Armageddon. While America is watching football and being entertained, the world stands on the threshold of thermonuclear war.

“The world stands at the brink of a second nuclear age. The United States and Russia remain ready to stage a nuclear attack within minutes, North Korea conducts a nuclear test, and many in the international community worry that Iran plans to acquire the Bomb” (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists).

http://www.debka.com/article/21543/ USA and Russian ships in Persian Gulf
http://bit.ly/rE69t3 World on the edge of disaster
http://bit.ly/tgtzAL US Special Forces Syrian Border
http://apne.ws/vPExLs Iran War Drill
http://bit.ly/rrFQA4 Iran War Games
http://www.debka.com/article/21587/ Iran Dangerous Game
http://tgr.ph/tzkVcE US Ready to Take on Iran
http://bit.ly/vTUIEQ We Can Attack Iran
http://bit.ly/vgtgxs Russia in Syria
http://yhoo.it/vqrqkn North Korea Test-fires Missiles
http://reut.rs/t1HEah Military Sharing Power With Kim
http://bit.ly/rC2iSr China Beefing Up Presence Indian Ocean
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/213760.html China World War III

“War is never a solution; it is an aggravation.” ~Benjamin Disraeli

POLICE STATE

“It is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state.” ~Bruce Schneier

I do not know exactly what is going on—I am not an investigative reporter, I am not on the scene—but perhaps through the little I do know, I can peak your interest enough that you will check it out for yourself.

The story is the Federal government is activating camps for incarceration. Army Regulation AR 210-35 (2005) provides for a Civilian Inmate Labor Program and Prison Camps on existing US Army bases. The buzz is that these are not unlike the forced labor camps in Russia’s gulags or China’s (láojiào) reeducation camps.

In 2006 Kellogg, Brown, and Root (KBR)—a Halliburton subsidiary—was contracted to build detention centers to deal with interning large numbers of people. In 2008 plans were made for thousands of US troops to be stationed inside the USA to deal with “domestic terrorism.” According to the National Emergency Centers Act (2009), HR 645, emergency camps are to be made available for the Department of Honeland Security (DHS). The National Guard has been recruiting military police, corrections officers, and internment specialists. Even now, the NYPD are staging “mobilization exercises” to deal with civil unrest, and the Department of Defense (DOD) is distributing $500 million military gear to local police ($200 million military gear was given to local police in 2010). Over 17,000 local law enforcement have ordered $2.6 billion worth of tools. “They’re setting the stage for violence in this country” (Ron Paul). According to now-retired four-star Gen Tommy Franks, the next step will be “martial law.”

The Senate recently passed the National Defense Authorization Act (2012), S 1867, which allows the Federal government to arrest and imprison “terrorists,” including American citizens, without charge or trial. Section 1031 declares the whole country a battlefield and allows American citizens to be arrested on USA soil and incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay. “It puts every single American citizen at risk” (Rand Paul).

Further, the FBI is teaming with the DOD to create a biometric tech center. In late July 2011 the House Judiciary Committee passed HR 1981, “Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011.” Basically this means that persons wanting to log onto the internet will have to submit their credentials to a government agency and register their ID. Consumers will then use their universal ID stored in a smart card. Some are calling this an “ecosystem ID.”

Our passports are now infected with RFID; some persons have enhanced drivers licenses with RFID; soon we all will. For years speculation has been that we’d be barcoded or required to have a subcutaneous RFID. However, in India, a new biometric system, Unique ID or Aadhaar, is already in place. It is a 12-digit number issued by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI). The number alone is proof of identity and address. Without papers or RFID. The number, which is good for driving, banking, and government services, is unique to an individual, costs nothing, and remains valid for life. Interestingly, in India, a Hindu country, it is a random number, devoid of any classification based on caste, creed, religion, or geography. Soon every country will have the same system.

During the Iraqi War the US assembled a massive biometric database on Iraqis, who have been referred to as guinea pigs for what the US plans to do in this country. A couple of years ago the FBI awarded a $1 billion 10-year contract to Lockheed Martin to develop and deploy the Next Generation ID System: fingerprints (“nature’s barcode”), palm prints, iris scans, and facial recognition images (biometrics). The US and the EU now collect all ten fingerprints of foreign visitors. Employees are clocking in with thumbprint scans and being tracked by iris scans. All new employees must be approved by DHS via E-verify. At airports preregistered international travelers can bypass conventional security lines by scanning their passports and fingerprints at a kiosk.

Have you noticed that US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) has a new name? In 2003 it was triangulated into the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and was placed under the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Services (DHS), just as are the US Coast Guard, US Secret Service, US Customs and Border Patrol, Transportation Security Administration (TSA), Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and National Cyber Security Center (NCSC).

http://bit.ly/uPjUSv Government FEMA camps
http://bit.ly/ev05Gh Civilian Inmate Labor Program (pdf)
http://www.hrichina.org/content/3701 China’s reeducation camps
http://bit.ly/uNkb5U KBR Project Overview
http://goo.gl/wYeBH Jonathan Turley on NDAA
http://usat.ly/tgNYmF US database on Iraqis
http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=36685 Ecosystem ID
http://epic.org/privacy/biometrics/ Biometric identifiers
http://bit.ly/wkQLQW Next Generation ID (NGI)
http://uidai.gov.in/ India’s biometric system Aadhaar
http://www.topazsystems.com/products/idindex.htm Biometric signature pads
http://www.dhs.gov/index.shtm Department of Homeland Security
http://www.dhs.gov/e-verify E-verify
http://www.uscis.gov/portal/site/uscis US Citizenship and Immigration Services

“I’m tired of living in a police state.” ~L Neil Smith

GLOBAL PANDEMIC

“We keep encouraging countries to develop a plan because a pandemic is inevitable.” ~Dick Thompson

The Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) is calling for synagogues, mosques, churches, and other faith groups to team with Walgreens to “influence” people to get a flu shot. If you get an annual flu shot, this may not bother you. You may even see it as a convenience, like having bloodmobiles in church parking lots: go to Sunday school and get your flu shot. However, some of us have a different take. Why is the government pushing this? Why is the government preparing for—planning for—a crisis? The Bible does talk about End-time plagues (Revelation 16), but this takes place during the Great Tribulation. I don’t think it will happen before then.

http://1.usa.gov/vqW2Oo Faith-based partners with DHHS
http://bit.ly/vsFqFt Flu a Bioterror Weapon?
http://ind.pn/ssKSv9 Dutch Lab Creates Killer Flu

“Frankly, there will be a pandemic, sooner or later.” ~Dr Nabarro

CONCLUSION

“The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without.” ~Dwight D. Eisenhower

The Bible foretells a Battle of Gog and Magog (Ezekiel 38-39). The general interpretation is that Russia (Gog), together with Iran, North Africa, and former Soviet satellites (Magog, or those with him) will confront Israel and its allies, the West (Europe, USA, and Saudi Arabia). In this battle five-sixths or 83 percent of the Russia-Iran group will be destroyed.

Afterward, it will take seven months to bury the dead; persons spotting the dead will place a marker, then burial details will pick up the deceased. This suggests the battle may be nuclear, requiring special handling of casualties. Also afterward, it will take Israel seven years to dispose of all the weapons left behind. That seven years could be the seven-year Tribulation period.

In secular circles, not the Bible, it has been speculated that in the event of all-out thermonuclear war—mutually assured destruction (MAD)—the Northern Hemisphere would last 3.5 years; the Southern Hemisphere would last an additional 3.5 years; then Planet Earth would be history. This too is a seven-year scenario.

If any or all of this happens, then, the imminent Mideast war could indeed be apocalyptic.

“But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare” (2 Peter 3:10).

Posted Things Past 29 December 2011

“The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective.” ~G K Chesterton

Resolved:

• To be like Enoch who “walked with God” (Genesis 5:24).
• To be like Abraham who “called upon the name of the Lord” (Genesis 21:33) and “believed God” (Romans 4:3).
• To be like Joseph who refused to “sin against God” (Genesis 39:9) and let himself be “tried of the Lord” (Psalm 105:17-19).
• To be like Moses who chose to “suffer affliction with the people of God than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season” (Hebrews 11:25).
• To be like Aaron and Hur who “lifted up the hands that hang down” (Exodus 17:12; Hebrews 12:12).
• To be like Caleb who, trusting God (Numbers 13:30), said, “Give me this mountain” (Joshua 14:12).
• To be like Joshua, “strong and of good courage” (Joshua 1:9), who said, “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord” (Joshua 24:15).
• To be like Gideon who took God at His word: “Surely I will be with thee” (Judges 6:16).
• To be like David, “a man after [God’s] own heart” (Acts 13:22), who “served his generation by the will of God” (Acts 13:36).
• To be like Nehemiah who wept and prayed (Nehemiah 1:4-11), watched and prayed (4:9), and worked and prayed (4:17).
• To be like Esther who, fasting and praying (Esther 4:19), said, “If I perish, I perish” (4:16).
• To be like Isaiah who said, “Here am I; send me” (Isaiah 6:8).
• To be like Andrew, who brought his loved ones to Christ (John 1:41, 42).
• To be like John, who leaned on the Master (John 13:23).
• To be like Stephen, who interceded for those who did not know Him (Acts 7:59, 60).
• To be like Paul, who “forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forth unto those things which are before, pressed toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:13, 14).
• To be like Timothy, who studied “to show himself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15).
• To be like Jesus, who did the will of the Father (John 4:34).

“When we once begin to form good resolutions, God gives us every opportunity of carrying them out.” ~St John Chrysostom

THE AMERICA I KNEW

Youth and Idealism

Growing up, I was drawn to just about everything American. History. Literature. Music. Art. Norman Rockwell‘s Four Freedoms. Freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear—not exactly Constitutional, but pretty good.

Every schoolday began not only with prayer and Bible reading, but also with the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag and the chorus “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.” 

My favorite escape was the school library. I chose little blue-backed biographies of famous Americans: US Presidents, their wives, statesmen, military heroes, pioneers, explorers, inventors, authors….Here I learned about Francis Marion (the Swamp Fox); the Perry brothers, both Navy men—Oliver Hazard Perry (hero of Lake Erie) and Matthew C Perry (who opened the door to Japan)—the Clark brothers—George Rogers Clark (hero of Vincennes) and William Clark (of Lewis and Clark fame)—Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain boys; Clara Barton (American Red Cross); Molly Pitcher (Revolutionary War); Betsy Ross (American flag); Amelia Earhart (aviator), and many, many others.

“All history becomes subjective; in other words there is properly no history, only biography.”  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Maturity and Breadth

I still love to study history. Names, places, dates. Mentally I organize everything by dates. That is my way of filing the information in my head. A date is a peg on which to hang facts: it provides order. “History is a jangle of accidents, blunders, surprises and absurdities, and so is our knowledge of it, but if we are to report it at all we must impose some order upon it” (Henry Steele Commanger).  I learned the US Presidents sequentially by the year in which they were elected.  So I don’t understand persons who don’t like or appreciate dates.

As I aged, my reading matured. One of my favorite American writers has been narrative historian Bruce Catton—The Army of the Potomac, Glory Road, Mr Lincoln’s Army, Grant Moves South, Grant Takes Command, A Stillness at Appomattox, among others.  I don’t read Catton, a preacher’s kid from Michigan, necessarily because he wrote about the Civil War—in my Civil War period I visited all the battlefields—I’m over it now. I read him because he is mesmerizing. I love to hear his voice. In print, of course.

Even the most painstaking history is a bridge across an eternal mystery ~Bruce Catton

A few years back I was talking to a secondary school history teacher with a graduate degree. He had never heard of Bruce Catton—only of Ken Burns and Shelby Foote. Thinking he knew it all, he seemed annoyed that I, a mere substitute teacher, had mentioned someone he’d never heard of and probably not worth his time. What is wrong with today’s academicians? I wondered. They get their “truth” from TV like laymen. Soon there won’t be anyone around with real education.  But I knew that same history teacher would that night go home and look up Catton on the web. When he did, he’d learn that Catton was a Pulitzer Prize winner and the premier Civil War historian. I wouldn’t be looking so bad tomorrow.

Another favorite historian has been William Shirer, an American journalist, who wrote European history: Berlin Diary, The Nightmare Years, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and The Collapse of the Third Republic.

There is also Peter Matthiessen, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (1992).  I’ve read only the one book.  I mention him only because I find his intelligence and depth fascinating.

Travel and Experience

Besides my reading, I’ve traveled America and exhausted most US national historical sites and national parks, even lighthouses and major college campuses.  When you’re standing there, at a place like the Old Manse, Concord, Massachusetts, for instance, you hear the spill from a tour guide, who sometimes tells you more than you ever would have known from mere books—like the romance between Sophia and Nathaniel Hawthorne (Sophia etching their initials in the glass with her diamond wedding ring).

And sometimes more than you wanted to know—at Sagamore Hill, Oyster Bay, Long Island, New York, the tour guide turned out to be a family relative, and he was going on and on about the romance between Teddy Roosevelt and his second wife, Edith (his first love). At that point I had a date with a ferry at Montauk Point and was more interested in the clock than the revelation.

When I visited the Mark Twain House, Nook Farm, in Hartford, Connecticut, I lucked up and got one of the best tourist guides I’ve heard anywhere. Almost as eloquent as a speaker from Toastmasters. I appreciated him even more when I was going downstairs and heard a light-headed tour guide coming upstairs.

Unbeknown to me, next door to Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) was the home of Harriet Beecher Stowe, daughter of Lyman Beecher, sister of Henry Ward Beecher, and a known author (Uncle Tom‘s Cabin).  I learned how the two related as neighbors, something I’d not known before.

THE AMERICA THAT WAS

The thing I like about early American history, the Colonial Period, is simplicity and aestheticism.  I like their architecture, their Cape Cod houses, their austere rooms, neatness, and daily habits, even their stories of adventure.  Our nation was founded by men who believed in God, in decency, in morality, and in personal responsibility.

The earliest European immigrants came to Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607—about the time the King James Version of the Bible (1611) was published—but a few years later two distinct groups came to what would become the Greater Boston area.

The Pilgrims were Separatists: believers who wanted to separate from the Church of England and return to first-century Christianity. Calvinist in doctrine, they became Congregationalists and, like Anabaptists, believed in adult baptism and living a godly life. They came in 1620, aboard the Mayflower, a small ship, with about 100 passengers; their governor was William Bradford.

The Puritans were Dissenters: believers who wanted to stay within the Church of England (Anglican) and purge it of the vestiges of Romanism. They came in 1630 under charter as the Company of Massachusetts Bay in New England, with an 11-ship fleet, carrying 700 emigrants; their governor was John Winthrop, who came on the Arbella.

Since both Pilgrim and Puritan are 7-letter words beginning with P, since both came to Colonial America about the same time, seeking religious freedom, and believed about the same thing, and since both leaders were roughly the same age, and both called governor, it is easy to confuse the two Massachusetts groups. It is also easy to confuse them with another P word, Pharisee, if you want to denigrate Christians.

Cotton Mather (1663-1728), Puritan minister and grandson of John Cotton, said that “History is the story of events, with praise or blame.” He wrote biographies of both men: The Life of William Bradford and The Life of John Winthrop. Further, both Bradford and Winthrop left behind works of their own. Bradford wrote Of Plymouth Plantation (its history 1621-1646), et al. Among his several writings, Winthrop contributed to the history of the Colonies with his sermon “A Model of Christian Charity” (1630) and his Journal of John Winthrop, also called The History of New England.

The Pilgrim William Bradford (1590-1657) was self-educated, but that did not mean he was intellectually inferior—many persons of that time were educated at home. According to Mather, Bradford had a gift for languages. He could speak English, Dutch, and French and had taught himself to read Latin and Classical Hebrew. He was also well acquainted with history, antiquity, philosophy, and theology. Bradford, Mather said, was “a person of more than ordinary piety, wisdom, and courage … of well-tempered spirit … but the crown of all was his holy, prayerful, watchful, and fruitful walk with God.”

The Puritan John Winthrop (1588-1649), educated at Trinity College, Cambridge University, where his father was director, was born to privilege and wealth. “He was by nature a man at once benevolent and just … of unspotted integrity … excellent spirit … a governor in whom the excellencies of Christianity made a most improving addition unto the virtues … a very religious man … as he strictly kept his heart, so he kept his house, under the laws of piety; there he was … constant in holy duties” (Cotton Mather).

In 1633 Cotton Mather’s grandfather, John Cotton (1585-1652), a graduate of Cambridge and long-time English clergyman, because of his dissension with the ruling Anglican hierarchy, sailed for America. Cotton became pastor and leading religious figure for the Massachusetts Bay Colony. For almost twenty years, he was a contemporary of Bradford and Winthrop. When the Westminster Assembly of Divines met to restructure the Church of England, Cotton wanted much to go and be a part of it. Winthrop, with his dry wit, checked him: he couldn’t see the point of going 3,000 miles to agree with three free men. In 1646 the Church of England adopted the Westminster Confession of Faith; among some groups it was accepted and modified as the Savoy Declaration of Faith, the main difference being church government. It became pretty much the doctrinal statement for both Pilgrims and Puritans.

According to Mather, Winthrop drank water, not wine; he was charitable toward the needy and saw himself, as well as others, as responsible for the welfare and maintenance of the community. His family would even go door to door asking anyone if he needed anything. During a particularly hard winter in Boston, when told that a poor man had been helping himself to Winthrop’s firewood, Winthrop said angrily, “Go, call that man to me …. I’ll cure him of stealing!” When the poor man presented himself, Winthrop saw his pitiful condition and said: “Friend, it is a severe winter … wherefore I would have you supply yourself at my woodpile till this cold season be over.” Then, merrily to the tattler: “There. Didn’t I cure him of stealing?”

Both Bradford and Winthrop suffered harships. Bradford left his only son behind in Amsterdam. Bradford’s first wife died in the New World—Winthrop successively lost three wives, several children, and his wealth. Winthrop received no salary for his work; until, during a financial crisis, Colonists insisted he take it. Further, sympathizers raised £500 for his support.

When it came time for Bradford to leave this life, God so filled him with rapture concerning the world to come that Mather exclaimed, “Oh, that such an end of life might come to me!”

As he lay dying, Winthrop, who took literally James 5:14, 15, called for the elders of the church to come, lay hands on him, and pray for his recovery. The whole church fasted and prayed. Still, like David (Acts 13:36), he “fell on sleep,” into the arms of God.

Bradford’s and Winthrop’s legacy of good works is the early heritage of our European forefathers, if not the nation. “What the Puritans gave the world was not thought, but action”  (Wendell Phillips). True, by the time of the Declaration of Independence (1776) and the US Constitution (1781), many leaders were Deist, not Christian, but still instilled with the Judeo-Christian ethic.

THE AMERICA THAT IS

The first time I heard the eye-opening term “post-Christian” was about forty years ago—from Francis Schaeffer, a philosopher-theologian living at L’Abri, in Huémoz-sur-Ollon, Switzerland.  Schaeffer, and others acquainted with the Old World, were saying that in Europe Christianity was history.  The light of the gospel of Jesus Christ was growing dim, or had already gone out, and it was only a matter of times until darkness circled the globe, including America.  Since the 1970s were the heyday of the PTL Club and the 700 Club, and all kinds of public figures were climbing aboard the born-again bandwagon, I was a hard sale—It may have happened in Europe, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen here.

Of course, now it seems Francis Schaeffer was precocious.

We have come a long way since the Pilgrims and Puritans—near a half-millennium. If you had told me over a half-century ago that America would slip from its moorings and become the travesty it is now, I would never have believed it.  My contemporary David Jeremiah has expressed as much in his book I Never Thought I’d See the Day! (2011).  Today decadent Americans sit around and poke fun at our religious beginnings; but whether we as a nation survive depends upon whether we can revive our moral and spiritual strength.

As early as World War I, an outspoken critic of Puritanism, the anti-God, anti-Christian H L Mencken, began leveling the early leaders of Colonial America. Mencken couldn’t get off the subject. In A Book of Burlesques (1916), Mencken denigrated Puritanism as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” In Notes on Democracy (1926): “the Puritan yearning to browbeat and injure, to torture and terrorize, to punish and humiliate all who show any sign of being happy.” In The Vintage Mencken (1956): “There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness—to bring him down to the miserable level of ‘good’ men; i.e., of stupid, cowardly, and chronically unhappy men.” Mencken had a habit of bad-mouthing anything decent and good because he himself was flagrantly bad. As if they had heard all this before, and took it as gospel, many have joined his chorus. Others, without saying a negative word against our forefathers, are yet living out Mencken’s sacrilegious assessment.

There is more criticism of Puritanism, and more distance from Christian morality, than there has been before. ~Susie Bright

More appalling today than the noise of the bad people is the silence of the good people. The morals of our leaders are low because the morals of our people are low. Ultimately, nations reap what they sow. Few, if any, have ever been conquered from without that were not rotten within.

The question is not whether America can be saved but whether America is worth saving. Only the moral deserve to be saved. We cannot oppose evil by compromising with it.  “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!” (Isaiah 5:20).  Christianity is not broadminded; it is as narrow-minded as the compass, radar, the multiplication table, the boiling and freezing points of water….“Study everything between quarks and quasars and you find structure, motion, order, a lawful stability, arrangement, and design” (McCandlish Phillips).  “Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way” (Matthew 7:13, 14).  If we want to survive, then we have to change.  We have to return to “the God of our fathers.”

“If the past has been an obstacle and a burden, knowledge of the past is the safest and the surest emancipation.”  ~John Acton

“The church has a right and a responsibility … to impose mandatory standards on its ministers.” ~Stephen Taber

By underwriting the churches, via the tax code, the Federal government is controlling the churches.  Their man—not God’s man—is filling the pulpit.

(1) Let’s say a mid-sized church west of Chicago calls in a pastor from Malibu, California—as if coming from the West Coast qualified him for life in the Midwest. The man is not too bright to start with—what with all that sun and surf, his brains are fried, if not on acid, at least on all that intoxicating salt air. A physical education major, he did not grow up studying Scripture: his seminary was the streets of Los Angeles. But being a pastor sounds like an easy, cushiony job to him—he would like to give it a try.

So Mayflower shows up at his door and packs up the family’s stuff, loads, and leaves. A car-hauler rolls up and picks up the couple’s two vehicles for transport cross-country. All the man and his wife, and two children, have to do is leisurely take their luggage to the airport, hop a plane, and fly worry free to his new post in that comfy suburban area west of Chicago. No sweat.

When they land at O’Hare, a deacon greets them warmly, as if they were VIPs, scurries them away to a motel, where they will stay until their stuff arrives from California. Sunday the man preaches—well, you would not call it preaching exactly, after all, he has never been in a pulpit too much before, but he figures he will get the hang of it after a while. How hard can it be? Today’s message has to do with surfing, which he associates with life-affirming principles.

After church, some of the church council treat him to dinner—at church expense, of course; this is business. So far, he has not paid a dime for anything, and he will not, because he is now the ward of the church, and they, Godlike, will see to it that all his needs are met.

Soon he and his family find a place in Oak Park, Illinois, one of those heads-up, safe, sleepy, spacious neighborhoods with wide boulevards and mature landscaping. With his salary he can afford something stately. The church is paying him $150,000 a year, but only $115,000 is salary—$35,000 is tax-free housing allowance. Every two weeks his secretary gives him his regular paycheck, plus, once a month, he receives a separate check for his housing allowance. That second check is under the table; it is never reported to the IRS as income, nor, according to the IRS code, need it be. In time, if he buys his own place—most preachers do—he will have a $500,000 stately mansion, west of Chicago, paid for with tax-free money.

Meanwhile, the church has added his wife as co-pastor. She is facilitator for a Wednesday night video class and nominal head of the Women’s Ministry. Since she is not ordained, she does not receive a tax-free housing allowance, but the church is giving her a $60,000 a year salary, plus $10,000 a year expense account. From her salary, the secretary or comptroller deducts withholding (Social Security and income tax). From the pastor’s check, there is no withholding because he is considered self-employed for income tax purposes, which means he can subtract as business expense the cost of commuting to and from the church, the cost of his Bibles, books, periodicals, professional journals, postage, professional fees, etc. All legally tax exempt.

These are not taken out of his expense account—he saves that for education and travel. Greater Chicago is filled with colleges, seminaries, and universities. He is taking Bible courses; the church is paying. Soon he will have a seminary degree at no cost to himself, fully paid for by his congregation. He travels regularly, it seems. So far, he has earned bragging rights to being in 48 foreign countries and almost as many US states. All at church expense. At the end of the fiscal year, if all of his expense account is not used, he will find a way to gobble it up—buying breakfast, lunch, or dinner for himself and his staff, or expensive Christmas gifts for privileged persons, because if the account is not exhausted at year’s end, the church council might think he is overpaid and cut back. So if he wants to keep what he has, and maybe more, he has to make his expense account look depleted.

The pastor and his wife are covered with top of the line auto, medical, and life insurance. Now that they have risen up in the world, he drives a Lincoln Navigator; she, a Honda Odyssey. At the church they have his and hers parking slots; if anyone usurps their place, well, they have a special wrecker on call: it is a tow-away zone. No mercy. In the spring when his accountant does his taxes, he makes sure to set aside up to a third of his “income” (his $115,000, her $60,000) for their 401K, SEP, and IRA. Together he and his wife have so much money, he sometimes publicly contributes $100 in the offering. Of course, he could give $10,000 and never miss it; but the people do not need to know that. It is the people’s responsibility to give, not the pastor’s—that would be circular, since he is the one receiving.

Sunday he preaches only the morning service, and occasionally ministers Communion. Sunday evening is focus groups: staff and laity take care of that—he does not even have to show up. Wednesday are more classes; sometimes he hangs out in his office in case someone wants to talk. Sometimes he does not even come. He rarely visits door-to-door or home-to-home. He does not even know most of the congregation. Staff, like the male administrative pastor, pray with the sick, visit in the hospital, and preach funerals. He does not fool with stuff like that. Occasionally he does officiate at weddings, work the crowds at large gatherings, lunch with the mayor, or appear at photo-opts with political candidates or local college heads. He has learned how to network and fraternize, which is the best way to get a good deal on a car or a house.

Sometimes he keeps office hours, but on a slow day he is out of there. Not much his staff and secretary cannot take care of. Monday is his off-day. He has an annual membership at the local country club. A little expensive, but, in the long run, well worth the money, considering the shoulders he gets to rub ….

(2) In the congregation are a young attorney and his wife, a college instructor. Both have graduate degrees—and school bills. He has a job with a law firm making $42,000 a year; she, $35,000. Together $77,000 gross; $60,000 net (after Social Security and income tax). Eventually, he hopes to make more when he becomes more experienced; she could do better at a state university, but she prefers teaching at a Christian college.

Meanwhile, each month, out of their $5,000 bring-home pay, they are paying out $1,600 for their apartment, $200 utilities—not counting cable, phone, and internet—$400 medical insurance, $179 lease on his VW Jetta, $199 on her Hyundai, $400 car maintenance (fuel, insurance, upkeep), $400 food (groceries, fast food, restaurants), $500 tithes and offerings, $300 IRA (a necessary tax deduction), and a whopping $600 school bills, which leaves only $200 a month for clothes, haircuts, sundries, books, magazines, postage, etc., which is precious little these days for young urban professionals (yuppies).

They have credit cards, but they are afraid to use them, because they do not want to go into debt. So they use them merely for convenience at gas stations and restaurants, then pay them off each month. Travel and membership in the country club are out of the question. Occasionally the attorney does play golf and eat at fine restaurants, but only as a guest of the boss. Occasionally he does get a new suit, tie, or pair of shoes, but only as a Christmas or birthday gift. Their budget is so tight, it squeaks when massaged. And the only way they could save would be to live as freeloaders on their parents.

They would like to have a baby, but right now they cannot afford it—probably will not be able to afford it until their school bills are paid, they get a promotion, or they buy a house and get a mortgage big enough to absorb the other debt. She cannot afford to quit work; babies cost too much—nursery, layette, diapers, doctor bills, child care or nursery school … How do people make it? ….

(3) A friend in the church is a registered nurse with three children under age five. Since her job pays so well, she has to work. She and her husband cannot afford child care either. So he stays home with the kids: Mr Mom. He is a musician, a keyboard artist, and a piano repairman. They have a mortgage on an older split-level in a tired neighborhood—three bedrooms and bath upstairs, kitchen and living room on the main floor, and in the half-basement a beautiful music room with piano and organ. After school the husband gives private music lessons, and, while he is teaching, his mother, who lives nearby, comes in, makes the beds, freshens the bath, washes the dishes, and cares for the children. He or his wife usually prepare dinner.

Occasionally he makes house calls to tune pianos; occasionally he picks up a used instrument for a song, reconditions it, and sells it at a profit. He tries to do his work outside the home while his wife is not working or whenever his mother can babysit. The wife-nurse drives an older car, already paid for; and the husband-musician, an old van, for his business. Together they bring in about $75,000 a year, but they are saving a bundle on child care and are able to lay back some of their income in savings, CDs, and investments. Their needs are simple, and they live comfortably, if not affluently. Because they have acclimatized to this life-style, they are even contemplating home-schooling.

It is obvious from these three scenarios that the only couple living the lifestyle of the rich and famous is the pastor and his wife, who are the least educated, the least trained, the least capable, and the most covetous and opportunistic. Everything about the pastor, from his lifestyle to his lack of integrity, is out of character with his constituency. Which leads one to believe that someone likes it this way. Someone is seeing to it that the Federal government is underwriting the churches, and that their man—not God’s man—is filling the pulpit.

Control—it is all about control. The Feds are controlling the churches—by putting in place their man, their money, and their music.

Do you know the number-one issue when preachers send out newsletters among themselves? Not God. Not religion. Not revival. Not spiritual passion. Their number-one topic of conversation is money. Taxes. How to maintain their easy affluence.

If you want God in your churches, it is time to reduce the minister’s salary, to end the deduction for tithes and offerings, and to cut the exemption of the preacher’s housing allowance—because the money is polluting the church.

Minister’s Compensation and Housing Allowance http://www.irs.gov/faqs/faq/0%2C%2Cid=199753%2C00.html
Setting up a housing allowance http://www.freechurchaccounting.com/housingallowance.html
Earnings for Clergy http://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc417.html

“We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.”
~General Omar Bradley

Some years back, I was approaching Greater DC—Connecticut Avenue, Chevy Chase, Maryland—when I saw an older, well-dressed man standing on the sidewalk with a placard: All priests are pedophiles.

Sweeping generalization. Not all priests are homosexual, and, of those who are, not all are predatory.

I wondered why a seemingly sane man would stand there and say such things? Was he part of a special-interest group to defame priests? Had he himself been abused as a child? I doubted it. Abused children do not usually become activists. Whatever he was up to, the attention-seeking behavior said more about him than about priests. 

More recently, online, I stumbled across a seething diatribe against religious Fundamentalists. The writer had gone through the entire Mosaic Code, pulled out all the things that were an “abomination,” and accused Fundamentalists of selectively condemning homosexuals while continuing to eat their lobster and shrimp.

My question to him would be: Why does it bother you so much? Your emotion betrays an uneasy conscience.

I would remind him that there is a fundamental difference [no pun intended] between prohibitions against food and prohibitions against illicit coupling. The English Bible is a translation. The English “abomination” translates various Hebrew words. The ones for food have to do with being “unclean”; the ones for morals have to do with “wickedness.”

In the Old Testament, God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, and the cities of the plains, because of sodomy (Genesis 19). Historically, in Western Civilization, where decency is valued, sodomy has been criminalized. The Mosaic Code mentions sodomy only in passing (very little there actually). It proscribes sodomy along with adultery, incest, bestiality, infanticide (Leviticus 18:6-28), and transvestism (Deuteronomy 22:5). “Defile not ye yourselves in any of these things: for in all these the nations are defiled … And the land is defiled: therefore … the land itself vomiteth out her inhabitants. Ye … shall not commit any of these abominations … That the land spue not you out … as it spued out the nations that were before you. For whosoever shall commit any of these abominations, even the souls that commit them shall be cut off” (Leviticus 18:24-30).

Strong language, not only against homosexuality, but against immorality in general. However, the strongest scriptures against homosexuality are not in the Old Testament, but in the New. Paul uses specific language. In a homosexual relationship (male or female) there is a macho or butch personality and an effeminate or femme personality. Translators have rendered the butch personality as “abusers of themselves with mankind”; the femme personality as “effeminate” (1 Corinthians 6:9).

Effeminate homosexuals are rather passive. People do not feel threatened by them. I attended high school with one. He seemed harmless, more like one of the girls. Students knew he was different—as if something did not develop quite right. He never married and died prematurely—of AIDS. Do I think he was born that way or made that way? Born. Was he a sinner? Yes. “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). Does being born that way excuse the behavior? No. “Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish” (Luke 13:3). “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God” (John 3:3). “God … now commandeth all men every where to repent” (Acts 17:30).

If you can inherit a sin nature from Adam—Charles G Finney did not even believe you could—then you can inherit specific sins. A lady told me that in her family—Irish, by the way—there had never been a generation without an alcoholic. Is alcoholism inherited? Yes. And any preacher—the late Jerry Falwell, for instance—who says that such sins are not inherited denies Original Sin. Whether he realized it or not, when Falwell said that God would not create an alcoholic or a homosexual, he was agreeing with the theory of tabula rasa, something he did not even subscribe to. God is Creator; He creates human beings. If “in Adam’s fall, we sinned all,” then God creates sinners: alcoholics, homosexuals, liars, thieves, murderers, adulterers … Falwell, by the way, was the son of an alcoholic and, himself, had traits associated with alcoholic personality (arrogance, chameleonism, grandiosity, gregariousness, etc.), even if he never drank. For more on this subject, see Sharon Begley, “Sins of the Grandfathers,” Newsweek 8 November 2010, 48-50. While this article is a secular look at a religious subject, it says exactly what it should say.

I am neither hyper-Calvinist nor low-Calvinist. I do not believe “once saved, always saved” … “I’m not perfect, just forgiven” … “I’m just a sinner saved by grace” … if it means continuing to wallow in the same old sins.

I am Holiness and Pentecostal. I believe when you get saved, you stop sinning: you live right. “Therefore, if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature; old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new” (2 Corinthians 5:17). “And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God” (1 Corinthians 6:11).

Can a person be both an active sinner and a believing saint? No. And this is where Calvinists come short. A line has to be drawn. “Be dead … unto sin, but alive unto God …. Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that ye should obey it in the lusts thereof. Neither yield ye your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin: but yield yourselves unto God …. Know ye not, that to whom ye yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants ye are …. Being then made free from sin, ye became the servants of righteousness” (Romans 6:11-18).

Paul said, “I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection: lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway” (1 Corinthians 9:27). I do not know what Calvinists do with that verse, since many believe they can live any way they want to and still make it to heaven, as if their reservation is secure; but if Paul could yet be lost, you better believe you and I can.

From my perspective, macho homosexuals are the predators. In my schooldays, one of my physical education teachers was a dyke. I was afraid of her, not because she was predatory, but because she was mean. Butches have a heavy spiritual presence: it is difficult to be in the same room with them.

There is a myth that homosexuals couple like lovers—sometimes they do live together for a while, one subsisting off the other—but they are rarely “monogamous.” And there is not much love there either. They are sexually active with hundreds, if not thousands, of partners. They cannot stop sinning. They are driven to sin. Obsessive compulsive disorder. But is it any different from sexually active heterosexuals with the same disgusting drives and multiple partners? No. It is all sin.

This is where even Wesleyans come short, because they believe you can be “saved,” not yet “sanctified,” and still sin. John Wesley taught, if you will—for the first time: no one else had ever come up with this idea—a two-step salvation. He taught “get saved” (get rid of your sins), then “get sanctified” (get rid of Adam’s sin). Nonsense. You get rid of both when you get born again. If “they have no changes … they fear not God” (Psalm 55:19). John Wesley’s theology, of course, was the basis of the Holiness Movement.

John Wesley was born into the home of an Anglican priest. His dad, Samuel Wesley, was away from home a great deal. The wife, Susannah Wesley, reared the children and even preached herself. John’s oldest brother, Samuel, was already grown and married, and living somewhere else. In the family, still at home, were only two males: John and Charles. Most of the children in the home were girls.

On one occasion while he was gone, Samuel Wesley received word that there was a great meeting in Susannah’s kitchen. Good wife excused herself, saying that since he was gone, it was her duty to be the “priest” of the household and have devotions with family and staff. Since Dissenting activity was illegal, Samuel warned her to keep it quiet and simple. Afterward, both kitchen and yard were filled with hundreds of seekers. Mom was that kind of preacher.

Like the duck who thought he was a chicken, I believe, John, a man of diminutive size, identified with the women of the house. All his life he wore his hair long; he refused to cut it. Charles wore short hair—he had sons. A contemporary said that you could hardly distinguish John from his sister. When you look at his portrait, you can see how effeminate he was.

John married late. He did not want a wife of child-bearing years; and every student of Wesley knows how that marriage turned out. Most people who know the story believe the union with Mary Vazeille was never consummated. The word was that John was an abused spouse, that he had innocent flirtations. Anybody who has read his biography knows the names of his female admirers—all platonic, of course.

According to his Oxford diary for 1732, John took an unusual interest in a Holy Club member charged with homosexuality; he visited him privately and provided him with legal defense. That same year John sailed for Georgia as a missionary. During a well-publicized romance in America, he spent a night with Sophia Hopkey, sleeping under a shared blanket, and never touched her. Little wonder that he later made a scene when she married someone else. Good cover for his want of desire.

To maintain their privacy, John and Charles Wesley communicated in Latin or secret code. In his diary John used an even more private code. That code is only now being unlocked. There John admitted that he was slave to a dark sin from which he had never abstained for longer than six months. Charles, consciously or subconsciously, I believe, knew, and that is the reason he snatched away Grace Murray before John could marry her. I believe the reason John “invented” “sanctification second definite” was not because it was scriptural, but because he needed it to cover or hide his own sin. If you are a serious scholar, with an open mind, go check it out.

Are some homosexuals made? Yes. Sadly, many are the victims of homosexual seduction or rape. Such was true of Henry M Stanley, the newsman who found David Livingstone in Africa; that he was sexually dysfunctional for the rest of his life only serves to illustrate the nightmare of pedophilia. Some macho homosexual males are unconsciously, I believe, reacting against an overbearing mother: “Here, Mom, I will show you how to treat a man.” Some, perhaps like John Wesley, are innocently identifying with the wrong group: they are gender confused. Some are, more recently, being brainwashed by a pluralistic—evil—society that sexual preference is a choice as abortion is a choice.

We are living in “perilous times” (2 Timothy 3:1) when people do not know right from wrong and “call evil good, and good evil … put darkness for light, and light for darkness” (Isaiah 5:20). Moral peril is the worst peril there is—because it will cost you your soul.

Catholics have given us mortal (wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy, and gluttony) and venial (lesser) sins. The Bible is more extensive. Several passages in Scripture give catalogs of sin. I have listed some below.

“God also gave them up to uncleanness, through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonor their own bodies between themselves … For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections; for even their women [lesbians] did exchange the natural use for that which is against nature; And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another, men with men [homosexuals] working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was fitting. … Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness … envy, murder, strife, deceit, malignity, whisperers, Backbiters, haters of God, insolent, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents; Without understanding, covenant breakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful” (Romans 1:24-32).

“Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate [femmes], nor abusers of themselves with mankind [butches], Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Corinthians 6:9-11).

“The acts of the sinful nature are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God“ (Galatians 5:19-21 NIV).

“But among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality, or of any kind of impurity, or of greed, because these are improper for God’s holy people. Nor should there be obscenity, foolish talk or coarse joking, which are out of place, but rather thanksgiving. For of this you can be sure: No immoral, impure or greedy person—such a man is an idolater—has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God“ (Ephesians 5:3-5 NIV).

“In the last days … men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, Without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good, Traitors, heady, highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lover of God” (2 Timothy 3:2-5).

“But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone” (Revelation 21:8).

Old Testament and New Testament alike take a clear stand on morality and immorality. You cannot do some things and call yourself Christian. If you do the things listed above, “you will be sinning against the Lord; and you may be sure that your sin will find you out” (Numbers 32:23 NIV).

Sins of the Grandfathers http://www.newsweek.com/2010/10/30/how-your-experiences-change-your-sperm-and-eggs.html
Unlocking the Code http://www.divinity.duke.edu/publications/2008.10/features/code/index.htm

Have you ever wondered at coincidences? I do.

If you ever saw the film 1776—rated G, by the way—you probably know that at the Second Continental Congress, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, were two men particularly essential to its outcome: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Thanks to them, and a few others, a nation was born July 4, 1776. Fifty years later on the nation’s Semi-Centennial or Golden Jubilee, 1826, Adams and Jefferson both died. Coincidentally, that very day, Stephen Collins Foster, father of American music, was born near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Pittsburgh was Foster’s hometown; but he spent part of his youth farther north, in Bradford County, Pennsylvania, at the junction of what is now US 220 and US 6. Towanda, the county seat, was incorporated in 1828, when Foster was two, and became the center of the lumbering industry. The name Towanda comes from Native Americans who thought the area a beautiful place to bury the dead.

Not far away—ten miles north—in Rome, lived another man who was also to make history as a songwriter: Philip Paul Bliss. These two young men, Foster and Bliss (both born in July, both married to a girl named Jane, both familiar with Bradford County, one born in the year of the nation’s Semi-Centennial, one departed in the year of the nation’s Centennial, the two bearing the given names of sequential deacons in Acts 6:5), led parallel lives, faced the same financial hardships, chose different paths, and experienced tragic premature deaths—neither lived to see forty.

Foster, son of William Barclay Foster and Eliza Clayland Tomlinson, was privileged to receive a classic education (Greek, Latin, rhetoric, diction, language, history, math) at private academies. A self-taught musician, he learned to play clarinet by ear. He was still celebrating his twelfth birthday in Athens, when Bliss was born to Isaac Bliss and Lydia Doolittle, July 9, 1838, in Rome, another borough in Bradford County. Unlike Foster, Bliss never received a classic education. He never even went to elementary school. He was home-schooled: his mother taught him from the Bible.

When he was thirteen (1839), Foster spent the summer in Towanda, working with his brother William, an assistant engineer. At fourteen (1840) he wrote his first musical composition, the “Tioga Waltz,” and graduated Athens Academy. He spent less than one semester at what is now Washington and Jefferson College, Canonsburg, Pennsylvania. At eighteen he published his first song “Open Thy Lattice, Love” (1844). At twenty (1846) he went to Cincinnati, Ohio, to work, as a bookkeeper, for his brother Dunning, who owned a steamboat business. There he wrote “Oh, Susanna” (1846), for which he received $100; it became the anthem of the California Gold Rush (1848-1855).

Bliss was ten before he heard a piano for the first time—his instrument. At age eleven (1849) he left home. For two years (1849-51) he worked on a farm. At twelve (1850), he was converted at a Baptist revival, then baptized by a minister in the Christian Church. He worked (1852) as a cook at Pine Creek, cut logs (1853) at Covington, and worked (1854) at a sawmill in Portage.

About the time that Bliss was getting religion and being baptized, Foster left Cincinnati and returned to Pennsylvania, where he wrote “Camptown Races” (1850), “Old Folks at Home”/”Swanee River” (1851), “My Old Kentucky Home” (1853), and “Jeannie With the Light Brown Hair” (1854). He was the first American composer to try to make a living solely off his music, and he was not doing a good job of it. He signed a contract with the Christy Minstrels, but probably due to the way music was printed, and reprinted, in those days, without copyrights, Foster saw little in royalties.

July 22, 1850, Foster, a small, slender man, five-feet-seven, married Jane (Jeannie) Denny McDowell. Jane was the daughter of Andrew N McDowell, MD, a leading physician in Pittsburgh and the grandson of John McDowell, the first president (1799) of St Johns College, Annapolis. For his honeymoon Foster made his one and only trip South, to New Orleans, via the Mississippi River, on his brother Dunning’s steamboat, the Millinger. The couple’s only child, a daughter, Marion, was born April 18, 1851.

Bliss, at seventeen (1855), acquired a schoolteacher’s certificate; he began spending his winters teaching school and his summers in the field. The first winter (1855) he taught in Troy; next winter (1856), Hartsville, New York. In 1857 he was privileged to meet professional musicians J G Towner (father of Daniel Brink Towner), who taught in singing schools, and William B Bradbury (trained in Germany), who composed the music for such songs as “Jesus Loves Me” and “Just As I Am.” It was Bradbury who persuaded Bliss to become a music teacher. Bliss later met George F Root and other influential music mentors; James McGranahan, another Christian composer, was a storekeeper in Rome.

Bliss spent the summer of 1858 in Almond, New York, then the winter back home as schoolteacher at Rome Academy. In the spring he found work on the farm of Oscar F Young, at $13 a month. The Youngs were a Presbyterian musical family: all amateur instrumentalists and vocalists. One among them, Lucille (Lucy) Jane Young, the farmer’s daughter, caught Philip’s eye. There, in Rome, June 1, 1859, still under age twenty-one, he married her, joined her church, and so ended his drifting days.

That summer Bliss wanted to go to Normal Academy of Music in Geneseo, New York (south of Rochester), but he did not have the money. So his grandmother-in-law, Grandma Allen, gave him $30 to attend. For the next several years (1860, 1861, 1863) Bliss returned to the six-week-long summer school in New York, receiving the kind of musical training and opportunity to network, that he could only dream about. Because of this training, he would now be considered an expert.

Foster, probably with high hopes, still trying to support himself with his music, moved to New York City in 1860; but, perhaps because of finances, it was only a year before his wife, Jane, and daughter left him and moved back to Pennsylvania, where Jane secured a job as a telegraph operator. By this time the Civil War was underway, which should have provided him opportunity for patriotic music. It did not.

At 22 (1860) Bliss, astride his horse Old Fanny and carrying a melodeon, became an itinerant music teacher. In 1862 he stayed on the Young farm and did not go to school. That winter he spent in Honesdale, New York. Back to Geneseo in summer 1863, then that winter in Castile, New York.

By 1862 and 1863 Foster, a problem drinker, whose story has been told and retold in film, was on a downward spiral. He was living alone, ill and impoverished, on the Lower East Side, Manhattan. Jane occasionally came to visit, to check on him; his siblings had pretty much turned their back.

In New York Foster was collaborating musically with George Cooper, and photographs suggest he was sober—maybe anxious, but not inebriated. Cooper said the year he and Foster worked together, Foster did not drink. But, as is often true of the poor and impoverished, he did not resist disease well either. One morning that winter, suffering chills and fever (ague), Foster fell out of bed and toppled a washbasin, which broke and gouged his head. He was taken to the hospital, but died three days later, January 13, 1864. He was 37 years old and had 38 cents to his name—35 cents in Civil War scrip and 3 US pennies.

Foster’s colleague, Cooper, wired the family in Pennsylvania: “Stephen is dead. Come on.” Stephen’s oldest brother, Morrison, the most sympathetic sibling, came with Jane. According to Cooper, when she arrived, Jane knelt beside his body, put her head to the floor, and stayed that way a long time. Admirers of his music paid to have the body shipped back to Pennsylvania for burial in Allegheny Cemetery. Foster’s song “Beautiful Dreamer” (1862) was published posthumously.

That same month, January 1864, Bliss’ dad, Isaac, died. Only a few months before, Bliss had taken a savings of several hundred dollars and purchased his parents a humble home in Bradford County. When the dad saw it, he sat on the porch and wept. “I never expected to live in a house so nice as this.”

That year opened a brand-new era of ministry for Bliss, now 26. Working out of Chicago, he did a two-week concert tour, with J G Towner, for which he was paid $100. He could not believe so much money could be made so quickly and so easily. To bring him back to earth, the following week he was drafted to the Carlisle barracks, but the notice was canceled because the war was nearly over. He served briefly with the 149th Pennsylvania Infantry.

Afterward Bliss secured a job with Root and Cady Music Publishers at $150 a month plus expenses. He stayed with them eight years (1865-73) during which time he conducted the music for conventions, concerts, and singing schools and also composed music and gave private instruction. None of Bliss’ compositions was ever copyrighted. Like Foster, he received few royalties.

The story is that Bliss had a wonderful, deep baritone voice, and his wife, Lucy, a rich alto; they often sang together. In 1869 Bliss participated in twelve conventions in Illinois; and at one in Brockton, New York. As was his custom, Bliss, with his wife, returned to Rome in the summer. On June 5 he went to Boston for its Jubilee; June 20, to Brooklyn, where he heard Henry Ward Beecher preach. He was paid $100 for four days of meetings.

Back in Chicago, Bliss happened on Evangelist Dwight L Moody, who regularly held open-air half-hour meetings on the courthouse steps. After Bliss sang, Moody, who coveted a good singing voice in his meetings, urged him to quit his job and become a full-time gospel singer. (It would be another year before Moody teamed up with Ira Sankey.)

Later, May 1870, Bliss met Major Daniel Webster Whittle, who, during the Civil War, had served on the staff of General Oliver Otis Howard and had accompanied General William Tecumseh Sherman on his “march to the sea.” After the war, Whittle had become a preacher. Whittle, who found Bliss “a beautiful, lovable man,” took Bliss with him to Winnebago. Whittle described Bliss as a systematic and orderly man, shrinking from all vulgarity, one who kept his books and papers in order and his desk clear. To him, misspelled words and wrong pronunciations (diction) were like a wrong note in music. He had flawless penmanship, a joyous nature, good humor, and tenderness. His was no sombre piety; he was playful, witty, and generous, full of puns, alliteration, humor, and poetry. He had the delicacy of a woman and the strength of a man, a magnificent physique, most handsome. Though he was a big man, he was perfectly proportioned and graceful.

In July 1870 Bliss became the choir leader for the First Congregational Church in Chicago and served there three years.

The Great Chicago Fire started Sunday, October 8, 1871, and continued to Tuesday, October 10. It changed Moody’s life forever. The night of the fire, Moody and his wife, Emma, handed off their small children to someone to carry away from danger. They themselves stayed behind to guard their personal belongings until even that was not feasible. As she watched the flames, not knowing for sure if the children had made it out, 28-year-old Emma (sister to Fleming H Revell, Moody’s publisher) lost all color in her hair. No Lady Clairol in those days. She was white-headed for the rest of her life. The fire had to have been a shocking experience for everyone, including Bliss. After the fire, the Moodys relocated back to their home, Northfield, Massachusetts, and never again lived in Chicago, though Moody continued to oversee the work there.

March 1874 Bliss gave himself up for full-time ministry and quit his day job. That year he conducted meetings in Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. In November 1874 Horatio G Spafford, a businessman, received a telegram from Britain announcing the drowning death of his four children; his wife had survived. He afterward penned the words to “It Is Well With My Soul,” and asked Bliss to compose the music; he did. In 1875 Bliss expanded his itinerary to Minnesota, Kentucky, Tennessee; in 1876, to Missouri, Alabama, and Georgia.

The year 1876 was a big year, not only in Bliss’ life, but also in the life of the nation. It was the Centennial: 100 years since 1776—if Foster had lived, he would have been fifty years old. March 7 Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone. June 4 the Transcontinental Express went from New York to San Francisco in less than 84 hours (3.5 days). June 25 was the Battle of the Little Bighorn; 300 men of the 7th Cavalry were killed. August 8 Thomas Edison patented the mimeograph machine. The Dewey Decimal System and Heinz Tomato Ketchup were introduced. November was a Presidential election, resulting in the Compromise of 1876. By the end of December the nation still did not know who was going to be their next President (it was Rutherford B Hayes).

Easter Sunday, 1876, Bliss addressed 4,000 people on the courthouse square in Augusta, Georgia. When they neared Atlanta and Marietta, Whittle intentionally took Bliss to Kennesaw Mountain, Georgia, and told him the story of how Sherman had signaled his men: “Hold the fort. I am coming.” Out of that story came the hymn “Hold the Fort.”

April 17 Bliss left Georgia for Chicago and packed for a summer in Rome, Pennsylvania. That year the Normal Academy of Music was held in Towanda; Bliss taught. He visited the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia and the Chautauqua Association in western New York; then, in September, he spent one week with Moody at Northfield. Afterward he went to Vermont and New Hampshire, evangelizing, then came back to spend another week with Moody.

Bliss returned to Chicago October 1 and spent three weeks with Ira Sankey, working on composition. Afterward he had meetings in Michigan. On his last night in Kalamazoo, a girl gave him as a gift The Complete Works of John Bunyan with the text of John 14:2, 3, inscribed on the flyleaf. As he left the building, he turned around and said, “Good-bye, Old Methodist Church. I shall not see you again.” To the girl: “I will just say good-night to you; we shall meet again in the morning.” Before he left, “I shall watch for you in heaven.” At the train depot, a group of young singing men serenaded him good-bye. Their last song was “We’re Going Home Tomorrow.” November 20 he preached at the state prison in Jackson, Michigan, to 800 inmates, two-thirds of whom broke down.

November 24 he was back in Chicago with Moody at a ministerial conference. Over 1,000 men were present when he sang in Chicago for the last time. November 25 he left for Peoria with Whittle. He preached at the state prison in Joliet. Spafford, the businessman who had penned “It Is Well With My Soul,” also addressed the prisoners.

Privately, December 4, Bliss and Whittle talked of an evangelistic tour to England and prayed for guidance. Bliss shrank from coming back to Chicago. Anywhere but Chicago. He wanted to go to Boston and work with Moody and Sankey in their next crusade.

Thursday, December 14, Bliss and Whittle took the train from Peoria back to Chicago. They breakfasted with Moody at Brevoost House. It was arranged that Bliss and Whittle would take up the work in Chicago, Sunday, December 31, New Years Eve. After Chicago, then maybe England. Against his will, Bliss yielded.

Friday, December 15, Bliss and his wife left by rail for Towanda and Rome. Traveling together as a singing and preaching couple, they had made a habit of leaving their sons, Philip and George, with her family, the Youngs. Before they left the train depot in Illinois, Bliss and Whittle had prayer together. It was the last time they would see each other on earth. Whittle returned to Peoria for the Holidays; Bliss rode east.

The following Sunday, December 17, Bliss spent with his birth family in Towanda. Monday, December 18, the couple went to Rome to see the Youngs, who were keeping the children. They spent a week, bought gifts, and celebrated. Monday, December 25, they exchanged Christmas gifts. Wednesday, December 27, they went to midweek services, where Bliss, full of the Holy Spirit and power, sang “Hold the Fort,” “Eternity,” “Father, I’m Tired.” He told the congregation it might be the last song he would ever sing to them.

Bliss was scheduled to be back in Chicago Sunday, December 31, but he was trying to get out of it. He sent a letter to Whittle that he would prefer to lay over and come later. When he received the letter, Whittle immediately wired Bliss: “Come now.”

Bliss and wife bought tickets for Chicago via Buffalo and Lake Shore Railway. They left Thursday, December 28, so they could be in Chicago Friday night. However, one of their connections had mechanical problems; they had to change their schedule. They spent the night somewhere, left the hotel Friday morning, now looking to be in Chicago Saturday.

Friday, December 29, 7:30 pm, the unthinkable happened. Had Bliss had a premonition? In Ashtabula, Ohio, as the train was passing a tressel, the bridge gave way, plunging the train 70 feet into icy water, where it caught fire. The incident is known as the Ashtabula Horror or the Ashtabula Bridge Disaster (available online). At the time it was the worst rail disaster in American history; close to 100 people perished.

Naturally, the word spread quickly to Chicago. Saturday, December 30—hoping against hope—Whittle telegraphed Rome to see if Bliss had left yet. He had.

The next morning, Sunday, December 31, the day Bliss and Whittle were supposed to take charge of the church services in Chicago, Whittle himself was in Ashtabula.

The story was that after the initial impact, Lucy, the wife, was killed or missing; Bliss himself had emerged uninjured. He went back into the burning flames to find her and was never seen or heard from again.

Bliss was 38 years old; his wife, 35. Their bodies were never recovered. Whittle: “There was no sign of them. They were as gone as Enoch.” What ashes or remnants of human remains were found, were buried in a single mass grave in Ashtabula (this is the image online if you look for Bliss’ grave). Whittle, of course, felt responsible for having coerced Bliss on the trip.

Shortly after the tragedy, Moody raised funds, from as far away as England, to purchase a marble memorial, which he placed in a humble cemetery in Rome, across from the simple frame house Bliss had called home. Written around the large marble statue are scripture verses about the Resurrection. This is not the image you see online for Bliss, but it is, nevertheless, his headstone. It is a memorial. Bliss’ body is not there.

Ministers like Moody and Whittle were awed by the composer’s prodigious output. Between 1870 and 1876, alone, Bliss produced seven songbooks, 40-50 songs in sheet music, and many contributions to musical journals. Besides the songs already mentioned, and many others—some known, some unknown—he composed “Almost Persuaded,” “Hallelujah! What a Savior!” “Wonderful Words of Life,” and “Let the Lower Lights Be Burning.” Whittle put together what is called Bliss’ Memoirs (available online), giving the fuller story of his life, along with letters and memorabilia. It is a work of love.

When peace like a river, attendeth my way,
When sorrows like sea billows roll;
Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say,
It is well, it is well, with my soul. ~Horatio G Spafford

• Historical Marker Foster www.waymarking.com/waymarks/WM8AE_Camptown_Races
• Bliss Memorial Rome, Pennsylvania www.joycetice.com/cemb/rome019.htm
• Historical Marker Ashtabula www.remarkableohio.org/HistoricalMarker.aspx?historicalMarkerId=918

Some good people have said some bad things about Rod Parsley. But they have not said them long enough or loud enough. The critics need to be heard.

Parsley pastors World Harvest Church in Columbus, Ohio, and heads up World Harvest Ministerial Alliance (WHMA). His church services and personal appearances are telecasted over TBN-TV and Daystar-TV in a program called Breakthrough. You have probably heard of him.

Unfortunately, both church and school have suffered some bad press. Because of an incident that occurred in 2006, a lawsuit was brought against the church daycare for child abuse. Earlier in the year 2011 the Columbus Dispatch reported that Parsley’s school, Harvest Preparatory School, because of multiple violations, was banned from Ohio High School Athletic Association (OHSAA) postseason play through 2013. But that’s neither here nor there, since it does not directly implicate Parsley.

However, the only statement of faith I found for Parsley or World Harvest was the one for the ministerial alliance (WHMA)—that is a shortcoming.
The article on the Trinity says that there is one God “who has chosen to reveal Himself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” which comes dangerously close to modalism. In another place Parsley explains the Trinity as ice, water, and steam, three manifestations of the same thing.

The article on the Holy Spirit does not mention speaking in other tongues. It says only that “the baptism in the Holy Spirit is given to believers who ask for it.” However, Parsley himself claims to speak in tongues, but he’s not Pentecostal. No one knows what denomination he is or where he got his ministerial credentials. Does he have any?

Parsley says he has an undergraduate degree from Ohio Christian University and a doctorate from Liberty University. If so, that is sad commentary on both schools, as Parsley is no intellectual. He claims a mission organization, Bridge to Hope; a values organization, Center for Moral Clarity; and authorship of more than 50 books.

Acting as if he is already anointed, Parsley enters an auditorium and jumps up on a front pew or some place high so he can see over the audience. He calls people out, “prophesies” over them, smacks them on the forehead, and they swoon. Is this real? All I can figure is that the participants are primed by the heat of the moment and the thrill of Parsley’s charismatic personality to be prey for his antics. They willingly place themselves at his disposal and are ignorant enough to fall for his cunning devices. Do they believe him? Oh, they think he’s the “real deal.” But, then, that is the nature of the followers of this cultlike leader.

Strangely, Parsley cannot remember what he just said. While he is talking, he’ll come out with something like “Where was I?” When I saw and heard him in person, I wondered if he was drunk. He explained that his daughter accompanies him to his out-of-town meetings; and when he gets back to the motel room, she tells him about the meeting because he has no memory of it. Psychologists might call this “multiple personality disorder,” but someone like Jonathan Goforth, missionary to pre-Communist China, would call it “demon possession.” I agree. Joseph R Chambers, pastor in Paw Creek, North Carolina, states that “There is a discernible sense of demonic spirits as you listen or read Rod Parsley presentations.”

Well, you have heard the cliche “guilt by association.” I don’t know if this cross-implicates Parsley or TBN-TV or Daystar-TV since association with one could soil the other—which only serves to affirm the adage “birds of a feather flock together.” Right now, I’m more concerned for Tommy Bates, Ron Phillips, and Perry Stone, because they too are associated with Parsley. All of these men have megaministries supported by partnerships.

Tommy Bates pastors a rural church, Community Family Church, in Independence, Kentucky, and preaches at Southern Baptist (SBC), Assemblies of God (AG), and Church of God (CG) camp meetings, conferences, and conventions. Though he is “free Pentecost” (denominationally unaffiliated), this denominational acceptance gives him credibility. In the last few years, he has aligned himself with Parsley’s WHMA and TBN-TV, which brings him back into question. His services are broadcast live over the internet; he has a weekly program, Bridging the Gap, and his own periodical, The Kentucky Voice Magazine.

Bates cannot sing well or play piano well, but he is totally uninhibited when doing so and rather enjoys showing off his “talent” and hawking his CDs/DVDs. Though he is nearing sixty, and already a grandparent, something about Bates is still boyish, which serves to illustrate the adage “You are young only once, but you can stay immature indefinitely.”

This autumn Abba’s House, a Southern Baptist church in Hixson, Tennessee, is proudly hosting Parsley at one of its conventions—they call it “bringing in the big guns” as Parsley has more name recognition than any of them. Also scheduled at the convention are—you guessed it—Tommy Bates, Ron Phillips (SBC), and Perry Stone (CG).

Ron Phillips, pastor of Abba’s House, does not know what he is. Years ago he was a Baptist pastor—who had been watching too much TBN-TV evidently—and decided to turn Pentecostal. He says he was filled with the Holy Spirit with the evidence of speaking in other tongues and now terms himself “Bapticostal” though he is still SBC. According to Bates, Phillips is trying to put together a new denomination.

It was somewhere around 1989 that Phillips caught the fire and changed the name of his church from Central Baptist of Hixson to Abba’s House–reminiscent of T D Jakes’ Potter’s House, don’t you think? Phillips has his own radio broadcast CenterPoint, his own telecast Ron Phillips From Abba’s House, and claims authorship to over 20 books. One, of course, sees the pattern of media ministry. Everything about it is marketing.

Phillips also offers free prophecy. Yes, you heard right. If you want to be prophesied over (sounds a bit like palm-reading or fortune-telling to me), you can schedule a time with Abba’s House’s prophets, for a private consultation.

One night at Abba’s House, addressing those listening by internet and showing an insensitivity to the move of the Spirit, Phillips interrupted an altar service to promote his “anointing oil,” pressed from Stone’s own personal olive grove in Israel. People who are truly filled with the Holy Spirit know that Stone’s oil has no more power than any other oil—it’s the Spirit that matters, not the oil. And marketing Stone’s oil is certainly not worth interrupting someone seeking God.

But such is the intelligence of Phillips. Does he not know that selling consecrated and holy things—trafficking in spiritual things—was one of the criticisms reformers like Martin Luther et al had against the Catholic church when they started the Protestant Reformation?

Probably there are followers sitting in the audience at Abba’s House who are as ignorant as Phillips, because these meetings are attended by the same groupies who attend Parsley’s meetings. These followers think they are better than Catholics because they are Protestant, or better than non-Pentecostals because they speak in tongues. They are clueless that believing in the efficacy of Stone’s oil is no different than someone saying the rosary using prayer beads.

Perry Stone heads his own ministry Voice of Evangelism and has his own weekly program Manna-fest and his own print journal Voice of Evangelism Magazine. The son of a CG minister, Fred Stone, Perry was born and reared “Pentecostal.” I say that carefully because Fred, who died in 2011, was called to preach not by God, but by a deceased friend, Al Collins, whom he met in an out-of-body experience. Anyone who is truly filled with the Holy Spirit knows that such activity is indicative of the occult, not of true Christianity.

Stone also tells the story that in one meeting, a piano kept on playing after the pianist rose to shout. Again, that is occult activity. Perry wonders why we don’t see more such “signs and wonders” in our Pentecostal services. Thanks to his father, I don’t think Perry knows the difference between the occult and true Pentecost.

Before the dad died, the son wanted to be present at his deathbed so he could receive his “mantle” (cf 2 Kings 2:13). He missed it. Someone else who was there supposedly received it. So now Stone talks about inheriting the “mantle” that has fallen from such gurus as A A Allen and William Branham. (I don’t know about you, but that’s one mantle I would never want!) Dave Hunt, The Berean Call, has already pointed out the heresy and danger of false prophets Allen and Branham. (I’m surprised Hunt has not jumped on Parsley and Stone, but maybe it is safer to critique dead personalities than live ones.)

I am Trinitarian Pentecostal, so perhaps you might wonder why I would not be more sympathetic, even supportive, of these televangelists. I am also sane. Mainstream. And cognizant enough to discern the true from the false. When a so-called “man of God” is heretical, someone needs to say so publicly. My advice to the Southern Baptist, the Assemblies of God, and the Church of God is, Quit entertaining them! By doing so, you endorse them and lead people astray.

“If there come any unto you, and bring not this doctrine, receive him not into your house, neither bid him God speed: For he that biddeth him God speed is partaker of his evil deeds” (2 John 10, 11).

Before there was Rick Warren, there was Bruce Wilkinson. Remember him? He wrote The Prayer of Jabez (2000) that sold a zillion copies. Greedy, money-grubbing preachers were beating themselves up because they had not thought of it first. It was, of course, the perfect religious expression for a materialistic, prosperity-gospel-driven church.

Knowing the success of The Prayer of Jabez (2000), I assumed that Warren, with his The Purpose Driven Church (1995) and The Purpose Driven Life (2002), was another Bruce Wilkinson: someone trying to make money and a name for himself.

I had never seen much of Warren, but I had heard of him. He was a successful Southern Baptist minister with a lot of press. So, this past Easter, 2011, before Sunday school, when I was searching for something religious on TV and happened on a re-telecast from Saddleback Church, Lake Forest, California—one of the Top Ten churches in America—I watched.

I was surprised. The atmosphere was cold and dark—lifeless, mechanical, stilted—more like that of the spiritualist Elizabeth Clare Prophet than that of, say, the Crystal Cathedral, the Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church, or Thomas Road Baptist Church. Before this, I had thought Warren merely a sleek opportunist, but I now considered him closer to a shaman.

Shamans in the Bible went by names like Balaam (Numbers 22) and Simon the Sorcerer (Acts 8).

When Israel, that enormous multitude—“which covereth the face of the earth” (Numbers 22:11)—numbering over 600,000 fighting men alone—not counting old men, young men, women, or children (perhaps as many as 5 million people total)—plus livestock—were wandering in the wilderness forty years, nations saw them coming and feared. Scared for himself and his country, the Moabite king Balak hired Balaam to curse Israel. Balak’s men went to Balaam “with the rewards of divination in their hand” (Numbers 22:7). In the New Testament Balaam became the epitome of the “false prophet.” Such a one “ran greedily after the error of Balaam for reward” (Jude 11) … “following the way of Balaam … who loved the wages of unrighteousness” (2 Peter 2:15).

Simon the Sorcerer lived in Samaria. Philip the Evangelist and eventually the Apostle Peter went down to Samaria to hold a revival. “When Simon saw that through laying on of the apostles’ hands the Holy Ghost was given, he offered them money, Saying, Give me also this power” (Acts 8:18, 19). Peter flared. “Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money” (8:20).

Do you see a pattern here? Money. Hirelings. Trying to do the King’s business for ulterior purposes. There is too much of that going on nowadays.

However, that hardly sounds like Warren, does it? He calls himself a reverse-tither (giving away 90 percent of his income, keeping 10 percent). I assume that includes royalties on multiplied millions of books. Who knows? It was reported, however, by the New York Daily, that in December 2009 he took in over $2 million for “food pantry, homeless ministry, counseling and support groups” by sending to constituents a letter, pleading hard times. Sound like anyone else you know?

What is the appeal of Rick Warren? Why is he so popular? Is it his marketing strategy—that he knows how to sell himself? That he obviously draws a crowd—he pastors a megachurch? That he put his book The Purpose Driven Life into the hands of many churches and they were using it as a Sunday morning study in lieu of the Word of God itself? That he graduated from Southern Baptist schools? That he is Conservative on social issues?

Why have “Christians” followed him—not necessarily because he follows Christ, but because they have heard of him—”if you build it, they will come”? Why have many local churches given him their seal of approval by using his books? Why does the saintly Southern Baptist Jonathan Falwell refer to him as “my friend Rick Warren”?

In one of Warren’s “Purpose Driven” seminars, Rabbi Ron Wolfson observed that “Warren managed to speak for the entire evening without once mentioning Jesus—a testament to his savvy message-tailoring.”

Michael Horton shares that “Warren endorses a host of books, from New Age authors to Emergent writers to conservative evangelicals. So why not include Calvinists?…” Good question.

Warren is not the only megachurch pastor, of course, that leaves you scratching your head as to why he is so popular. There is Joel Osteen, pastor of Lakewood Church, Houston, Texas, and scion of the late John Osteen, a former Southern Baptist pastor turned Charismatic. Osteen too, of course, is a televangelist and writer; his first offering was Your Best Life Now (2004), which sold 4 million copies in its first edition. Since his sermons are about as juvenile as they come, no one has quite figured out the cause of Osteen’s popularity.

Another is Joshua Harris, pastor of Covenant Life, Gaithersburg, Maryland, the founding church of Sovereign Grace Ministries. Having written I Kissed Dating Goodbye (1997), Harris—now married with children—is another successful writer. Since his sermons too are juvenile and uninspired, no one has quite figured out Harris’s success either.

Of course, each of these ministers lives in a large metropolitan area. With a little publicity—their books, their televangelism—they can draw a crowd.

I see a serious problem with the Church today. “Where the Church is irrelevant to the world and its needs, the reason must be it has lost its vision and its message” (L Nelson Bell).

One, whole denominations have turned themselves into nothing more than money-making machines: bureaucracies whose only raison d’etre is self-existence. Their denominational headquarters look like industrial plants. Why won’t they denounce certain “preachers”? Because it is bad for business. They do not want any negative press. That is wrong. “Having begun in the Spirit, are ye now made perfect by the flesh?” (Galatians 3:3).

Two, we are wrapped up, tied up, and tangled up in the world. Marketing sells. Money talks. And anyone popular succeeds. That is wrong. This world is not our home, and we have no business making ourselves at home in it. “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him” (1 John 2:15).

Three, we think of popular personalities as “stars,” the way that Hollywood, in the era of the big studios, promoted actors and actresses. Any “Christian” with name recognition becomes someone to follow. That is wrong. The Bible says, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3), and that includes “Christian” “stars”: iconic personalities.

Four, we have no discernment. Anyone can come along and call himself “Christian,” and we accept him. That is wrong. “Believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world” (1 John 4:1).

Five, we are willingly ignorant of the Word of God. We don’t read it, we don’t know it. Many things get by us because we don’t know any better. There is “a famine … of hearing the words of the Lord” (Amos 8:11). That is wrong. “Seek ye out of the book of the Lord, and read” (Isaiah 34:16).

Six, “we are prone to depend on personality, education, organizational structures, and programs as the primary means of leading people to believe … They are useless unless surrendered to the … power of the Holy Spirit … [It is] ‘Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the Lord of hosts’ [Zechariah 4:6]” (L Nelson Bell).

No wonder, then, that many disheartened and disenfranchised followers desire a return to first-century Christianity! “The root trouble of the present distress is that the Church has more faith in the world and the flesh than in the Holy Ghost, and things will get no better till we get back to His realized presence and power.” ~Samuel Chadwick

Executive editor of Christianity Today, Bell wrote a regular column “A Layman and His Faith,” which formed the basis for his book While Men Slept: A Concerned Layman’s View of the Church Today. Published in 1966 by Doubleday, the book went through five printings its first five years. The volume I have is dated 1970.

Layman is the wrong word for someone like Bell. He may not have been an ordained minister, but he was a missionary, a churchman, and a religious leader. He read and studied the Scriptures, and he had a theological mind; but, of course, he was using the title from his column.“Today” for Bell was a while back. He died in 1973. Much of his “view” of the “church,” then, was that of the 1950s post-war America, the Vietnam Era, the Civil Rights Movement, and the national convulsions of the 1960s. However, having lived through the nationalism of Chiang Kai-shek, chronic political unrest, and the Communist threat in pre-war China, he understood how ideologies influence a nation and how kingdoms rise to power. When he wrote “A Layman and His Faith” for Christianity Today, he was trying to do more than be current; he was genuinely disturbed about what he saw.

The title of his book comes from his belief that “while men were sleeping the theological seminaries and church-related colleges of America became thoroughly infiltrated with professors who no longer believe in the complete integrity and authority of the written Word of God.” He says: Satan’s greatest victory began when he implanted in the minds of Adam and Eve doubt as to the truthfulness of God’s Word (“Yea, hath God said?”), and he continues his work today in the classroom of Dr I Doubtit, through the writings of Professor W E Knowbetter, and from the pulpit of Dr Will Knott Believe …. Protestant Christendom has been asleep and during our sleep the enemy of souls, under the guise of scholarship and advanced knowledge, has sown the seeds of doubt and unbelief …. To reject the authority of the Holy Scriptures is to be tossed hither and yon by the conflicting opinions of men.

Bell had a theological mind because he read and studied the Scriptures. He believed in biblical inerrancy. The Bible is the inspired Word of God. Bell does not—cannot—write at any length without using Bible-speak. He knows the Word first-hand. The Bible comes out of him because it is a well springing up in his innermost being (cf John 4:14). It is the Bible, not theory, that informs his theology. He laments that “today the Church is suffering from those who ‘know neither the scriptures nor the power of God’” …. “I have known people who affirmed their faith in the Bible ‘from cover to cover’ but who at the same time knew nothing about it” …. “We are confronted with a generation characterized by ignorance of the Scriptures … a generation largely devoid of Bible-based moral and spiritual values … brought up on a syncretistic philosophical conglomeration where ‘religion’ is, at best, a questionable option.”

Because of his training, Bell also had a scientific mind and looked at things through the prism of medicine. This is seen when he writes: “Pain and inflammation are nature’s warning of infection in the body. So it is with the Church” …. “When a body no longer reacts to harmful stimuli, it is either desperately sick or dead. The same is true of the Church” …. “Modern preachers … are being trained away from the simplicity of the Gospel, while the ‘basic science’ of their calling … is woefully neglected.” He talks about diagnosis, disease, cures, crisis, emergency, surgery, symptoms, and palliative treatment—things he understands because he is a physician, and things we understand through his eyes.

Both disciplines—theology and science—come together when he writes: “Like a searchlight, the Bible shows us the remote corners of out lives” …. “Like an X-ray, the Scriptures penetrate into the innermost being” …. “Like a surgeon’s knife, the written Word of God lays bare the thoughts, motives, subterfuges, and lies we conceal.”

Because he was a student of the Word, Bell believed in the supernatural power of God to effect the miraculous. He says the seminary professors’ “rejection of the doctrines clearly stated in the Scriptures stems from philosophical presuppositions which largely rule out the supernatural and the miraculous” …. “The need is not to make the Church popular with the world but to show the power of the Holy Spirit to transform lives” …. “The Church … need[s] to rediscover that we are dealing with a supernatural God.” He quotes Princeton professor J Gresham Machen (who had publicly withstood the Presbyterian non-Christian missionary to China, Pearl S Buck): “Eliminate the supernatural and the miraculous and there is no such thing as Christianity.”

Accompanying Bell’s affirmation of the Scriptures and the supernatural is his rejection of the social gospel, which tries to change society for the better without changing the human heart. “Society [will] never be changed until men’s hearts [are] changed.” The purpose of the gospel is not to make the Prodigal more comfortable in the pigpen but to get him back to the Father. The gospel is not reconciliation of man with man but reconciliation of man with God. The social gospel “is not Christianity at all. It is a gospel of accommodation.”

Citing the Humanist Manifesto (1933), Bell denounces secular humanism as “another gospel.” Humanism is concerned with the material, the present (temporal), and the earthly; Christianity is concerned with the spiritual, the future (eternity), and the heavenly. Humanism rejects God and accepts evolution; Christianity believes God and accepts creation. Bell asks:

What’s wrong with the world? It may well be likened to a ship at sea, without captain, compass, helm, or chart, with all radio contact lost, and at the mercy of a mutinous crew. Our world is in desperate straits and headed for disaster.

That that statement sounds more like our day than his day shows something of Bell’s astute understanding of nature, society, fallen man, and God. Bell believed the mission of the Church was to win souls to Jesus Christ and to make disciples. He laments that a social gospel (earthly life) has supplanted the real gospel (eternal life), and this has led to a scarcity of sermons on repentance and coming judgment. “Many no longer admit or believe in the true nature of sin, so deadly in its effect that only the atoning sacrifice of the Son of God can save its victims” … “To reject Jesus Christ as Saviour of the soul and Lord of life is … folly.”

Bell believed in hell and in warning people to flee the wrath of God. “Now that the reality of the devil and of hell are ridiculed, even by many who teach and preach, it has become passe to speak of sin and judgment” …. “The Gospel is perverted if God is regarded as a sentimental being to whom men’s sins are merely offenses against one another” …. “Certainly the Bible comforts us with the truth that ‘God is love’ [1 John 4:8]; yet it also warns us that ‘our God is a consuming fire’ [Hebrews 12:29]” …. “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of a living God” [Hebrews 10:31] …. “But, you say, this introduces the element of fear—For the unrepentant sinner there is danger, and he should fear.” “Therefore, knowing the fear of the Lord, we persuade men” (2 Corinthians 5:11).

Because he read the Scriptures, Bell believed in clean living. One of his favorite verses was “If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me” (Psalm 66:18). In China, when Americans would send them copies of some of the latest books, Bell and his wife, Virginia, would peruse them before letting them lie around the house. When Virginia received her copy of The Grapes of Wrath and Gone With the Wind, she threw them both in the fire.

Bell believed in prayer. “Without a prayer life in which prayer is as natural as breathing, the spiritual nature shrivels and dies.” He knew the importance of staying in touch with God.

Bell believed in the power of the Holy Spirit. “[We need to] turn back to Pentecost, where the power of the God of eternity was manifested in the presence and person of his Spirit” …. “To refuse the guidance of the Holy Spirit is to go on in darkness” …. “Our failures today stem largely from our forgetting that it is ‘not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the Lord of hosts’ [Zechariah 4:6].”

According to Bell, the success of the early church was attributable to the fact that the apostles had been with Jesus, they were imbued with power from on high, they were men of prayer, they were men of the Scriptures, they had a message (the good news), they had no education and no money. “Can it be that part of their success stemmed from their utter dependence on God?”

Nowadays—I personally believe—too much weight is given to Wesleyanism, the Holiness Movement, and the Pentecostal denominations as the fountainhead of certain defining doctrines. Obviously, some persons and organizations disagree with “sanctification second definite,” as taught by Wesley, but that does not mean non-Wesleyans or non-Pentecostals are “unclean” or not filled with the Spirit. Bell believed “[without] holiness … no man shall see the Lord” (Hebrews 12:14). Smith Wigglesworth, who became a well-known healing evangelist in the Assemblies of God, received the Holy Spirit when an Episcopal pastor’s wife prayed for him in her kitchen. No one group has a monopoly on Holiness or on the Holy Spirit. The Spirit distributes “to every man severally as he will” (1 Corinthians 12:11). Bell may have been a Presbyterian, not a Pentecostal, but he was still a man who believed in sanctification and the power of the Spirit.

Though While Men Slept is aged and the author is no more, I believe this is still one of the most succinct diagnoses of the condition of the Church ever written. I challenge anyone disturbed by the current ecclesiastical crisis to pick it up and give it a read because if you are a dedicated Christian, Bell has found the words for what you are sensing. This book should be reprinted again and again, because it has not outgrown its relevance.

I have issues with Castelo’s paper.

One, even though his mentor, Wesley, said, “My ground is the Bible. Yea, I am a Bible-bigot. I follow it in all things, both great and small,” Castelo rarely mentions a Bible verse. In his 21-page paper, the only scripture I saw quoted and cited was “Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed” (James 5:16). Instead he uses as his reference point Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. “Friendship is the culminating moment for Aristotle” … “Aristotle speaks of the necessity of friendship” … “Aristotle differentiates types of friendship” … “Growth in the good … is considered by Aristotle as a proper end of human existence” …”Aristotle can say that friendship is a necessity” … “According to Aristotle the good life cannot be envisioned apart from friends” … “Aristotle’s … friendship … [has] seminal implications for discipleship” … “Friendship, according to Aristotle, includes … a certain kind of communication” … “For Aristotle, a courageous person … is courageous because she performs courageous acts” … “‘Aristotle is fundamentally concerned with sustaining goodness’” … “Aristotle … remarked that ‘the friendship of decent people is decent … [you will learn] what is noble from noble people’” … “Friendship is necessary in Aristotle’s ethical project for the simple reason that a person cannot be good without friends” … “Aristotle’s understanding of moral formation … requires performing virtuous acts ‘in the right way.’” He goes on.

Yes, Castelo does mention John Wesley, but he never quits Aristotle: “Wesley and Aristotle share the notion that ‘constancy is a communal virtue … we help each other grow.’” He uses Aristotle to interpret Wesley. If there is anything wrong with Wesleyanism today—according to Keith Drury (Indiana Wesleyan University), the Holiness Movement is dead—perhaps here is the place for correction. Our source should be Scripture (and, in this instance, Wesley) not Aristotle, nor secular humanism—which is not to say we cannot read and appreciate nonbiblical sources, but they should not be our reference point. Castelo is “looking for the right answers in all the wrong places.”

Two, Castelo implies, but never mentions, the Shema,“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord: And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might” (Deuteronomy 6:4, 5) and “thy neighbour as thyself” (Leviticus 19:18; Luke 10:27)—God and others—with the greater emphasis, here, being on others: “Perfecting One Another.” The title alone is problematic. Such language is not biblical. If it is Wesleyan, Castelo should say so. We Christians cannot “perfect” one another. We can talk with one another and pray one for another, but “cleans[ing] ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness” (2 Corinthians 7:1) is a personal matter as indicated by Paul’s“Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure” (Philippians 2:12, 13). In this spiritual aerobics, or workout, our personal trainer is God, not others.

I’ve been told that when you address an academic audience, you do not need to say the obvious: assume they know something. Well, evidently Castelo assumes his audience knows Scripture and does not know Aristotle, because he teaches the Greek but not the Hebrew!

Three, Castelo says that “Christian perfection is a journey [italics mine] ….” From my own perspective, I know that Holiness groups have differed over whether or not sanctification (Wesley’s forte) is instantaneous, progressive, or both. Wesley taught an instantaneous experience followed by Christian growth: “Every one, though born of God in an instant, yet undoubtedly grows by slow degrees.” Castelo mentions growth but not initial experience. Is he choosing one over the other?

Four, Castelo says that “Christian perfection is a journey that takes place only in the company of others [italics mine]” … “Journeys are better undertaken with friends.” He quotes Paul J Wadell (St Norbert College): “Virtue cannot be attained in solitude [italics mine]. By definition it is relationship because the virtuous life is the activity of doing good.” By whose definition? I suggest that persons can be virtuous apart from others, that what most matters is not how we relate with people, but how we relate with God.

• Adam was one man, alone with God, and Adam, was “very good” (Genesis 1:31).

• Abel: one man, alone with God. And “the Lord had respect unto Abel and to his offering” (Genesis 4:4). “By faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, by which he obtained witness that he was righteous, God testifying of his gifts” (Hebrews 11:4).

• Enoch: one man, alone with God. Enoch “walked with God: and he was not; for God took him” (Genesis 5:24). “By faith Enoch was translated that he should not see death; and was not found, because God had translated him: for before his translation he had this testimony, that he pleased God” (Hebrews 11:5).

• Noah: one man, alone with God. Noah “found grace in the eyes of the Lord … Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God” (Genesis 6:8, 9). After Noah built an ark (Hebrews 11:7) and was a preacher of righteousness for 100 years, the Lord said to him, “Come … into the ark; for thee have I seen righteous before me in this generation” (Genesis 7:1).

• Abraham: one man, alone with God. Abraham, who “called upon the name of the Lord” (Genesis 12:8), “was called to go out into a place … [He] sojourned in the land of promise … [He] looked for a city … whose builder and maker is God” (Hebrews 11:10). God told him, “Walk before me, and be thou perfect” (Genesis 17:1). “Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness” (Galatians 3:6).

• Lot, singularly rescued out of Sodom, was called “just” and “righteous” (2 Peter 2:7, 8).

• Jacob: one man, alone with God. Jacob was on a literal journey by himself when he dreamed of a ladder. When he awoke, he said, “Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not … this is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven” (Genesis 28:16, 17). Numbers of times God appeared to or talked alone with Jacob (Genesis 31:3; 32:1, 2, 24-32; 35:1, 9-15; 46:2-4).

• Joseph: one man, alone with God. When he refused the wanton advances of Potiphar’s wife, he wound up wasting away in an Egyptian prison. “The Lord was with Joseph, and showed him mercy” (Genesis 39:21). “Joseph … was sold for a servant: Whose feet they hurt with fetters: he was laid in iron: Until the time that his word came: the word of the Lord tried him” (Psalm 105:17-19).

• Moses: one man, alone with God. He “refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter; Choosing rather to suffer affliction with the people of God, than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season … By faith he forsook Egypt … he endured, as seeing him who is invisible” (Hebrews 11:24-27). Moses “went up into the mount … [where was] the glory of the Lord … into the midst of the cloud … and Moses was in the mount [alone with God] forty days and forty nights” (Exodus 24:15-18).

• David: one man, alone with God. Alone, tending the sheep, when Samuel called him and anointed him to be king (1 Samuel 16:1-13). Alone, when he opposed Goliath and single-handedly brought down a giant (1 Samuel 17:12-58).

• Elijah: one man, alone with God. Alone, when he confronted Ahab and the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel (1 Kings 18:17-46). Alone, when God appeared to him in the wilderness and fed him “because the journey is too great for thee,” and he “went in the strength of that meat forty days and forty nights” (1 Kings 19:4-8). Alone, when God appeared to him in a cave and addressed him in “a still small voice” (1 Kings 19:9-18).

• Nehemiah: one man, alone with God (Nehemiah 1:4-11).

• Job, unequaled, “perfect and upright, and one that feared God, and eschewed evil” (Job 1:1): one man, alone with God. Job was made the brunt of a terrible contest between Satan (leviathan) and God (1:6-12; 2:1-6; 41:1-34), but the Lord both commended and accepted him (42:9-11; cf Ezekiel 14:14; James 5:11).

• Isaiah called and anointed: one man, alone with God (Isaiah 6:1-11). Jeremiah (Jeremiah 1:4-10). Ezekiel (Ezekiel 1:1–3:14). Daniel (Daniel 9:1-23) ….

• John the Baptist. This “same John had his raiment of camel’s hair, and a leathern girdle about his loins; and his meat was locusts and wild honey” (Matthew 3:4). Why? John had been living alone, with God, in the wilderness, the place where he “baptized” (Mark 1:2-14). After John was imprisoned and slated for execution, Jesus said of him, “What went ye out into the wilderness for to see? A reed shaken with the wind? … Among those that are born of women there is not a greater prophet than John the Baptist” (Luke 7:24-28).

• Then there was the man on the Isle of Patmos, John the Revelator, the original Robinson Crusoe: one man, alone with God. To John was given the final eschatological vision (Revelation 1:10-19).

Tell me: How were these men perfected? in the company of their fellows? “Iron sharpen[ing] iron … a man sharpen[ing] … his friend” (Proverbs 27:17)? (Another good scripture Castelo missed, by the way.) Of course, not. The biblical characters mentioned above were alone with God. It was after God told Jacob to relocate to Bethel, that Jacob instructed his family: “Put away the strange gods that are among you, and be clean, and change your garments … And they journeyed” (Genesis 35:1-5). It was not the journey that purified; it was preparation for the journey.

Five, Castelo says that “‘friends protect us from … boredom,’” that there is “a certain stagnant or lethargic quality” to daily living, and—quoting Wadell—that “‘we tire of our projects … because left to ourselves we are incapable of appreciating … their value.’” Well, obviously some of us are more social than others. However, some of us don’t need people for our projects too much at all and are happy working alone. Sculptors (Daniel Chester French), artists (Michelangelo), composers (Ludwig van Beethoven), writers (Emily Dickinson), and other gifted persons (Charles Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart) function quite well left to themselves. (Since Castelo borrows so much from Wadell, one wonders if the argument here is not with Wadell instead of Castelo.)

Though he said that the Bible knows nothing of solitary religion—most of us do go to church—John Wesley himself was a loner. Where did he spend most of his life? In the hinterland on horseback. Who polished him? The Lord. To whom did he tell his troubles? To God.

Six, so much of what Castelo says could be categorized as group process in a counseling course. Does it even have a place in today’s cell groups or small groups? Or might it be better used in something like, say, an addiction and deliverance ministry? “Giving account of one’s spiritual progress, publicly acknowledging one’s faults, and both receiving and giving spiritual edification and support” sounds more like a 12-step program than a teaching or training program.

Seven, Castelo focuses so tightly on others than he leaves God out of the process. Who needs God if we can do it ourselves? Again Castelo quotes Wadell: “It is this mutual, communal seeking of the good that makes us good …. we make one another good,” to which Castelo comments, “We essentially learn how to be holy from one another.”

Pardon? Where is God in all this? God’s “Be ye holy; for I am holy” (1 Peter 1:16; Leviticus 11:44) is personal instruction; and God never commands anything without giving us provision. His expectation is our assurance that it is possible.

Eight, Castelo says that “no one has an exclusive footing on the truth,” that “friendships require negotiations.” Uh? “Thy word is truth” (John 17:17; cf Psalm 119:142, 151; Colossians 1:5; 2 Timothy 2:15; James 1:18). Jesus, the incarnate Word, is “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). You may have relativity in many areas, but not Truth. Truth is absolute. It is nonnegotiable.

Nine, Castelo says that Wesley’s “ticket system” ensured that “those with the proper disposition and mindset [italics mine] would continue in the fold.” Such an explanation describes a cult not a church. In a cult persons are forced to submit to the leader’s mindset or leave. Self-expression is forbidden. Was Wesley’s “Methodism” a cult?

This thought brings up another concern that Castelo fails to mention; i.e., the infighting that went on in Wesley’s small groups. Even George Whitefield, Charles Wesley, and John Wesley—the three primary Methodist leaders—could not get along. Whitefield separated. He and John Wesley did not reconcile till some time near Whitefield’s death (he died and was buried in America). Wesley preached Whitefield’s memorial service in England. John and Charles, the two brothers, differed till they were no longer on speaking terms. Sometimes classes and bands were anything but peaceful, and the only way of restoring order was ejecting “troublemakers” outright. If small groups were this open to division, why think of using them today?

Ten, Castelo equates happiness and holiness. “If happiness and holiness are the same thing, as they appear to be for Wesley,” they “can be embodied only within a community of friends.” I don’t know about you, but I want faith that is more than friendship. I want holiness that is more than happiness. I want godliness that is more than “a commonly-held good.”

To God, holiness is separation. “Come out from among them, and be ye separate … and touch not the unclean thing” (2 Corinthians 6:17). “Present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God” (Romans 12:1, 2). “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him” (1 John 2:15). This is the message of the Book: do your own workout, with the Lord’s help. I think this is what John Wesley preached. This is what I believe.

I started out merely bothered by Castelo’s paper. As I worked out my thoughts, I began to see deeper things. I now conclude that working as he does from a secular, nonbiblical perspective, Castelo does not help his cause. He starts and ends with the Greek Aristotle and props up his message with the Catholic Wadell—a strange defense for Wesleyanism. Even the language he uses (communication, constancy, courage, decency, friendship, goodness, growth, morality, virtue) is Aristotlean, not biblical, theological, or historical (though anyone can use those words, and the Bible does, this is not the way Scripture expresses doctrine). Castelo reduces small groups to no more than self-help groups; pastoral care to no more than friendship; godliness to nothing more than ethics—relative and democratic at that—holiness to nothing more than happiness; and Wesleyanism to nothing more than a social club. If this is all Wesleyanism is, let it go. If the Holiness Movement is dead, as Keith Drury says, bury it.

“I am not afraid that the people called Methodists should ever cease to exist either in Europe or America. But I am afraid lest they should only exist as a dead sect, having the form of religion without the power. And this undoubtedly will be the case unless they hold fast both the doctrine, spirit, and discipline with which they first set out.” ~John Wesley