“If Islam is a peaceful religion, then what do you call the Amish in Lancaster County?” - Dr. Peter Hammond, WOTMR Hr 2 10/10/07

On [the gay] issue, the emergent crowd is becoming increasingly obscure. Brian McLaren was named by Time Magazine as one of the 25 most influential evangelicals in America. He was asked this question, “What is your position on gay marriage?” His answer was this: "You know what, the thing that breaks my heart is that there's no way I can answer it without hurting someone on either side." To which I would respond, “Now you have hurt God.” That we cannot simply say there are people who believe heterosexual marriage is acceptable, there are people who think that homosexual marriage is acceptable, and I plead the fifth and refuse to answer the question because someone will have their feelings hurt, when God is in heaven with His feelings hurt. Because He has spoken to this issue with great clarity. He then went on to say, in an online version of Christianity Today, to which I lost my mind and had to repent of what I said so I’m not telling you that he’s a bad guy and I’m a good guy, we’re both bad guys, Jesus is the good guy, he said, “Frankly, many of us don't know what we should think about homosexuality.” I’m not sure who the “many” are. Do you think he knows what he believes about homosexuality? Do you think that a man that is the age of, essentially, my father and has pastored a church for a good number of years has no idea where he is at on the issue of homosexuality? How many of you could possibly be in pastoral ministry and not have a position on homosexuality?

A huge percentage of the people who attend my church have all kinds of sexual sin including bisexuality and homosexuality. And no answer is an answer. An inability or unwillingness to answer the question is, in and of itself by virtue of silence, permission.” - Mark Driscoll – “Convergent Conversation Session 3; SEBTS”

“And in [the revisionist] sort of emergent stream, what concerns me is what I see in genesis 3. I (look at/hold up) the verbal, plenary, inerrancy, and authority of scripture. I might be the only guy in Seattle who does, but that’s where I’m at. And what I see in Genesis 3 is incredibly important because it shows us where history went askew, and we were led by the serpent, which revelation reveals is Satan our enemy, into error and folly, and that is through a conversation. And the emergent church has positioned itself as a conversation. A conversation about things that God has said; a conversation about whether or not God meant what He said. Of course, I don’t mind a conversation. I’ve got a wife and two daughters, I’ve had them.

But when God speaks, we are not to converse, we are to obey. And the subtle manipulation of God’s word is; God speaks, and we’re not denying that, we’re not attacking that, and we’re not undermining that, we just want to question that. And in that stream there are three men that are very prominent; Brian Mclaren, Doug Pagitt, and Rob Bell.” - Mark Driscoll – “Convergent Conversation Session 3; SEBTS” beginning at 18:50

“We could talk about the new perspective on Paul which assaults the New Testament understanding of the doctrine of justification. We could talk about the openness of God which attacks the very nature of God. Perhaps I should say a word about that. Open theism is a new liberal agenda item that starts with the denial that God perfectly knows or controls the future. Open theism is the idea that God is open to the future. He has no idea what the future holds. He has no clue. He’s just like you and I. He’s trying to react to what is going on and He has no more foreknowledge of anything than you or I do because it hasn’t happened, therefore He can’t know about it. He doesn’t know what’s going to happen until people make choices. He doesn’t know what the choices will be and He’s responding like a very, very adept chess player doing His best to accomplish His will in counter response to the moves of all of us. This is a very, very popular, wide-spread, developing viewpoint. It has intruded into evangelical...quote: “evangelical theological society” which up to now has been unwilling to dismiss people who hold that view. It attacks the very nature of God Himself. It attacks the deity of God. God is not the God He claims to be. He does not speak truly of Himself when He says He knows the end from the beginning therefore God is a liar and it is rehearsal of exactly what we saw in the garden. Every assault by these critics that denies any portion of Scripture is a battle that has to be fought and a point at which we have to defend the authority of Scripture.” - John MacArthur (“Assorted Attacks on the Bible” http://www.biblebb.com/files/MAC/90-320.htm)

“It’s not in theology, It’s not in denominationalism, but it is in the Bible. I can go to the Scriptures and quote Scripture after Scripture after Scripture that shows us that it is God’s will for us to materially prosper. In my own ministry, and others that teach along these lines, we’ve been telling people [that] we’re always going to have opponents because Satan is going to fight us tooth and nail so he can keep everybody poor.”[1]


(You can also find Scriptures that says that God does not exist...but, you have to wrench it from the context and mangle the rest of the Bible to do so. Shame on prosperity gospel preachers.)

---

[1] Dr. Fredrick K.C. Price on the prosperity gospel. “THE TRUTH: About 20/20's Report on Dr. Price & CCC” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LurX47zfks

[Dennis Prager Speaking to Rabbi Harold Kushner] “How do you deal with that famous opening phrase in Ecclesiastes of, everything is vane or vanity or meaningless? Do you believe that?

[Harold Kushner’s Response]“No I don’t. Funny thing about the book of Ecclesiastes, I first discovered it as a teenager in Hebrew High School when I loved it because I saw [Solomon] as puncturing pomposity and just bringing a healthy cynicism to things, [and I] missed the whole point of the book. Ecclesiastes was written by an old man who is terrified of dying because he’s afraid that everything that he’s invested his energies in will disappear when he dies. I don’t believe that. I don’t know how many years I have to live, I’ve already lived longer than my mother did, I’m 72 and in good health, but who knows. I’m not worried about that. I think that some of what I’ve done will outlast me. I’ve had the advantage that not everybody has of writing ten books now, they’re published and to some degree they will continue to be in libraries and on people’s bookshelves. I’ve influenced people. I’ve shaped the thinking of I don’t know how many thousands of people. I have had an impact, I will leave a daughter, I will leave grandchildren behind. No, I don’t think that everything is vanity.”[1]

---

[1] Rabbi Harold Kushner on the Dennis Prager Show (7/30/07) – Rabbi Kushner “missed the whole point of the book” as a child, and he still doesn’t understand Ecclesiastes. How tragic.

“In that incident of the golden calf, you remember it’s in the book of Exodus…. As soon as he turns his back, the Israelites build this idol and they’re dancing around it. Moses is coming down the mountain with the two tablets of the Ten Commandments personally inscribed by God. He sees the Israelites dancing around the calf, days after they’ve sworn they’d never to worship idols, they’re worshiping an idol. He is so distraught; he takes the tablets, throws them to the ground and breaks them. That’s as far as the narrative in the Bible in the book of Exodus goes. There’s a Jewish legend… [saying that] he picked up the broken pieces and carried them with him for the rest of his life, not as a reminder of his failure, as a reminder of what he once dreamt of achieving: turning these people into a nation that would live in the presence of God. He never wants to forget that that was his dream. Then he goes back up the mountain and comes down with a second set of tablets, not fashioned solely by God, but the product of a human-divine collaboration. And those are the tablets which have lasted for the last three-thousand years.” The [broken] tablets were an ideal, they envisioned people being capable of perfection, of never blowing it, never making a serious mistake. Human beings could not live up to that, and so Moses has to shatter those original commandments [because] they ask too much of people, and come up with a divine-human collaboration: the original vision of God tempered by the recognition that people will not be perfect…. I don’t believe in a god who demands perfection from us. I don’t believe that life is a spelling bee where you get the first twenty-five words right and when you blow number twenty-six, you’re disqualified. I think we have to make room in our lives for imperfection. - Rabbi Harold Kushner[1]

---

[1] Rabbi Harold Kushner on the Dennis Prager Show (7/30/07) – this shows the fallacy of human tradition – “human-divine collaboration”…what kind of crap is that? The second part about “the ideal” of the original 10 commandments that were, apparently, different shows another trajedy of self righteousness, “I don’t believe in a god who demands perfection from us.” How sad. [The second portion of this quote occurred after the Ecclesiastes question, but it was a tie-in]

"Our basic problem as Catholics was that personal worth and dignity was ingrained into us. We believed that could respond to the help God gives us to be right in His sight. This presupposition that many of us have carried for years is aptly defined in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (1994) #2021, “Grace is the help God gives us to respond to our vocation of becoming his adopted sons....” With that mindset, we were unknowingly holding to a teaching that the Bible continually condemns. Such a definition of grace is man's careful fabrication, for the Bible consistently declares that the believer's right standing with God is “without works” (Romans 4:6), “without the deeds of the Law” (Romans 3:28), “not of works” (Ephesians 2:9), “It is the gift of God,” (Ephesians 2:8). To attempt to make the believer's response part of his salvation and to look upon grace as “a help” is to flatly deny Biblical truth, “...if by grace, then is it no more of works: otherwise grace is no more grace...” (Romans 11:6)." - Richard Peter Bennett (Former Roman Catholic Priest)

"From Tradition To Truth - A Priest’s Story" by Richard Peter Bennett, p. 8-9

"The soul purpose of all forms of yoga is Spiritual-Realization. The various authentic yogas are the progressive religious disciplines of Hinduism."

(Classical Yoga/Hindu Academy http://www.classicalyoga.org/page30.html)

“Hinduism is not like a recipe ingredient that can be extracted from Yoga. Says Subhas Tiwari, professor of Yoga philosophy and meditation at the Hindu University of America in Orlando, Fla.: ‘Yoga is Hinduism.’”

(Robert A. Davis, “Stretching for Jesus,” Time, September 5, 2005)

“I don’t know what you feel about the prosperity gospel, but I’ll tell you what I feel about it. Hatred. It is not the gospel. And it is being exported from this country to Africa and Asia selling a bill of goods to the poorest of the poor. ‘Believe this message, and your pigs won’t die and your wife won’t have miscarriages. And you’ll have rings on your fingers and coats on your backs.’ That’s coming out of America! People that ought to be giving our money and our time and our lives, instead selling them a bunch of crap called ‘gospel’. And here’s the reason it is so horrible: When was the last time that any American, African, Asian ever said Jesus is all-satisfying because you drove a BMW? Never! They’ll say, ‘Did Jesus give you that? Yeah? Well, I’ll take Jesus.’ That’s idolatry, that’s not the gospel. That’s elevating gifts above Giver. I’ll tell you what makes Jesus look beautiful. It’s when you smash your car and your little girl goes flying through the windshield and lands, like I was with a little girl on 11th avenue two weeks ago, dead on the street, for three hours before the police would let her go, and you say through the deepest possible pain, ‘God is enough. He is good; He will take care of us; He will satisfy us; He will get us through this. He is our treasure. Whom have I in heaven but You? And on earth there is nothing that I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart and my little girl may fail but you are the strength of my heart and my portion forever. That makes God look glorious, as God, not as giver of cars or safety or health. Oh, how I pray that Birmingham will be purged of the health, wealth, and prosperity gospel. Indeed America would be purged. And that the Christian church would be marked by suffering for Christ. God is most glorified in you when you are most satisfied in Him in the midst of loss, not prosperity.” - John Piper