Meanwhile refugees from the PCUSA appear to be agitating in the comparatively tiny PCA over long ago settled "women's issues"

Reported here:

One of the reasons that the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) left the Presbyterian Church in the United States 40 years ago was because the new denomination opposed women in church leadership.

Last week, the PCA General Assembly voted to form a committee to take up the issue again. The seven-person committee will look at the biblical basis and theology of ordination and of the office of deacon, then report back to the General Assembly any changes to consider. ...

Over the last five years, the denomination has added 68 churches, 374 ministers, and almost 19,000 members. The PCA now has 370,000 members.

Membership in the PCUSA has dropped 48% in the last thirty years, the pace of decline increasing by 75% since 2010 when it gave in to the gay mafia

Membership has dropped from 3.1 million in 1984 to fewer than 1.6 million in 2015.

Since 1965, before Presbyterians united in the PCA, membership has fallen 63%, from 4.25 million.

In the five years after 2010, when the PCUSA began to conform to the LGBT agenda, the average annual decline in membership has been 4.9%. In the prior five year period the average annual decline had been only 2.8%.

The denomination has been notably anti-Israel since at least 2004 because of Israel's "occupation" of the West Bank, which it likens to South African apartheid.

The wealth of nations shall be turned to ashes

Hiroshima

Has not the LORD of Heaven's Armies promised that the wealth of nations will turn to ashes? They work so hard, but all in vain!

-- Habakkuk 2:13

Paul mocked wealth-obsessed dominionists like Bill Johnson of Bethel Redding

"We were born to rule--rule over creation, over darkness--to plunder hell and establish the rule of Jesus wherever we go by preaching the gospel of the Kingdom. ... [C]reation has been infected by darkness, namely, disease, sickness, afflicting spirits, poverty, natural disasters, demonic influence, etc. Our rule ... is focused on exposing and undoing the works of the devil. ...

"Jesus destroyed the power of sin, sickness, and poverty through His redemptive work on the cross. In Adam and Eve's commission to subdue the earth, they were without sickness, poverty, and sin. Now that we are restored to His original purpose, should we expect anything less?"

-- Bill Johnson, When Heaven Invades Earth (2013), pp. 33f.

What do you have that God hasn't given you? And if everything you have is from God, why boast as though it were not a gift?

You think you already have everything you need. You think you are already rich. You have begun to reign in God's kingdom without us!

I wish you really were reigning already, for then we would be reigning with you. Instead, I sometimes think God has put us apostles on display, like prisoners of war at the end of a victor's parade, condemned to die. We have become a spectacle to the entire world—to people and angels alike.

Our dedication to Christ makes us look like fools, but you claim to be so wise in Christ! We are weak, but you are so powerful! You are honored, but we are ridiculed. Even now we go hungry and thirsty, and we don't have enough clothes to keep warm. We are often beaten and have no home. We work wearily with our own hands to earn our living. We bless those who curse us. We are patient with those who abuse us. We appeal gently when evil things are said about us. Yet we are treated like the world's garbage, like everybody's trash—right up to the present moment.

-- 1 Corinthians 4:7ff.

Is there a biological basis for resurrection on the third day?

Panel from Roman sarcophagus, c. 350, depicting victory wreath of Christ

Seen here:

When a doctor declares a person dead, some of their body may still be alive and kicking – at least for a day or two. New evidence in animals suggests that many genes go on working for up to 48 hours after the lights have gone out. ... Hundreds of genes with different functions “woke up” immediately after death. These included fetal development genes that usually turn off after birth, as well as genes that have previously been associated with cancer. Their activity peaked about 24 hours after death. ... If genes can be active up to 48 hours after death, is the person technically still alive at that point?

Bill Johnson of Bethel Redding erects his whole theory of signs and wonders on a Christological lie

From When Heaven Invades Earth (2013), p. 29, where Bill Johnson attempts to drive a wedge between the two natures in Christ in the manner of an Arian, an Adoptionist, or a Nestorian:

'Jesus could not heal the sick. Neither could He deliver the tormented from demons or raise the dead. To believe otherwise is to ignore what He said about Himself, and more importantly, to miss the purpose of His self-imposed restriction to live as a man. Jesus Christ said of Himself, "The Son can do nothing" (John 5:19). ... He had no supernatural capabilities whatsoever! While He is 100 percent God, He chose to live with the same limitations that man would face once he was redeemed. ... He performed miracles, wonders, and signs as a man in right relationship to God. . . not as God.'

But it's Johnson who does the ignoring about what Jesus said about himself, and he does so utterly dishonestly.

Not only does Johnson rip John 5:19 from its broader narrative (where Jesus is defending a Sabbath miracle by actually appealing to his intimacy with the Almighty as the divine Son), Johnson deliberately shortens it into a fragment, representing that as if it were the whole:

Then answered Jesus and said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do: for what things soever he doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise.

 

-- John 5:19

Johnson ignores "but what he seeth the Father do". Jesus is not emphasizing his limitations as a man in this statement, but his glory as the one who is so close to God that he cannot but do what God himself does, because it would be contrary to his nature to do anything else. "No man hath seen God at any time" the Evangelist has said earlier (John 1:18), but here the Son clearly has, and does. Accordingly he cannot do anything but what he sees his Father do. Whereas John is out to show Jesus' divinity in this way in the narrative, Johnson is out to show Jesus' mere humanity.

But Jesus' Jewish opponents in John are not out to kill him for claiming to be a mere man, but for claiming equality with God!

Therefore the Jews sought the more to kill him, because he not only had broken the sabbath, but said also that God was his Father, making himself equal with God.

 

-- John 5:18

Bill Johnson specializes in nothing so much as a violence of his own . . . to the text and to those who follow it.

 

If there were a jail for heresy, Bill Johnson should be celebrating his tenth year in it.

The procurator Festus thought Paul's madness was caused by his great learning, whereas others might have blamed a devil as in the case of Jesus

Frontispiece, Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton, 1638

And as he thus spake for himself, Festus said with a loud voice, Paul, thou art beside thyself; much learning doth make thee mad. But he said, I am not mad, most noble Festus; but speak forth the words of truth and soberness.

 -- Acts 26:24f.

There was a division therefore again among the Jews for these sayings. And many of them said, He hath a devil, and is mad; why hear ye him?

-- John 10:19f.

A ridiculously conceived healing miracle from Bill Johnson's When Heaven Invades Earth: Carpal Tunnel Syndrome

From the Expanded Edition (2013), pp. 26f., italics in the original:

"He told us his problem was carpal tunnel syndrome. ... [W]e laid our hands on his wrists, commanding the tunnel to open and all numbness and pain to be gone."

But there is nothing "closed" in carpal tunnel syndrome which needs "opening".

The idea of "opening" reflects a misunderstanding of a treatment method in which the name given to a treatment technique has been transposed to a misconceived description of a healthy outcome.

Apart from the non-invasive treatment methods which are initially preferred because about a third of cases self-correct anyway without treatment, the last resort is surgery, either the more invasive open carpal tunnel release surgery, or the less invasive endoscopic carpal tunnel release surgery.

The identical object of both surgical techniques is to get in there and sever a ligament which puts pressure on the nerve causing the numbness and pain.

You either open up the wrist in the traditional manner with a scalpel, or go in through a much smaller incision with an endoscope equipped with smaller cutting instruments.

Always keep an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out.

Mr. Ariel Sabar uncovers the lies, damn lies and rotten scholarship involving The Gospel of Jesus' Wife

Here in "The Unbelievable Tale of Jesus’s Wife" for The Atlantic, where the old-fashioned work of a gumshoe reporter exposes the hard work too often lacking in much of contemporary scholarship:

[S]keptics had identified other problems. Among the most damning was an odd typographical error that appears in both the Jesus’s-wife fragment and an edition of the Gospel of Thomas that was posted online in 2002, suggesting an easily available source for a modern forger’s cut-and-paste job.

With [Karen L.] King [Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard] and her critics at loggerheads, each insisting on the primacy of their evidence, I wondered why no one had conducted a different sort of test: a thorough vetting of the papyrus’s chain of ownership. 

Prof. King has replied to the author, here:

For four years, Karen L. King, a Harvard historian of Christianity, has defended the so-called “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” against scholars who argued it was a forgery. But Thursday, for the first time, King said the papyrus—which she introduced to the world in 2012—is a probable fake.

She reached this conclusion, she said, after reading The Atlantic’s investigation into the papyrus’s origins, which appears in the magazine’s July/August issue and was posted to its website Wednesday night.

“It tips the balance towards forgery,” she said. ...

Thursday afternoon, however, she called me to say the story was “fascinating” and “very helpful.” ...

“I had no idea about this guy, obviously,” she said. “He lied to me.”

I asked why she hadn’t undertaken an investigation of the papyrus’s origins and the owner’s background. “Your article has helped me see that provenance can be investigated,” she said. ...

[T]he preponderance of the evidence, she said, now “presses in the direction of forgery.”

Welcome to the 496th anniversary of Luther being branded a heretic by the Roman Catholic Pope

Bulla contra Erro res Martini Lutheri 

Luther burned it 10 December 1520 and was excommunicated 3 January 1521.

Jesus' family and friends thought he was a little touched, but Paul speaks positively of being so

And when his friends heard of it, they went out to lay hold on him: for they said, He is beside himself. ... There came then his brethren and his mother, and, standing without, sent unto him, calling him.

-- Mark 3:21, 31

For whether we be beside ourselves, it is to God: or whether we be sober, it is for your cause.

-- 2 Cor. 5:13

Walking in fear and loathing of fear in the same new religion

Then had the churches rest throughout all Judaea and Galilee and Samaria, and were edified; and walking in the fear of the Lord, and in the comfort of the Holy Ghost, were multiplied.

-- Acts 9:31

There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love.

-- 1 John 4:18

Paul knew how poor Jesus was: "For you he became a beggar on the street, despite being rich"

δι’ ὑμᾶς ἐπτώχευσεν πλούσιος ὤν -- 2 Cor.8:9.

Jesus didn't even become a πένης, a poor person who actually worked for his living, a paycheck to paycheck kind of guy. You know, like Paul was. No, Jesus became the jobless poor, πτωχός, so poor he had to beg for his daily bread. 

You might almost say that even Paul would agree with Luke that Jesus himself "said goodbye to everything that he owned" (Luke 14:33).

Because the Master would not ask the disciple to do what he himself had not done.

The NIV, the unhappy translation which can lead one into Christological error similar to Bill Johnson of Bethel Redding

To paraphrase Dick the Butcher, the first thing we do, let's kill all the Bible translators.

If Paul meant in Philippians 2:7 that Jesus set aside his divine "nature" as the NIV translation unhappily implies ("being in very nature God . . . he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant"), Paul would have been contradicting himself.

Paul states clearly elsewhere that there is a qualitative difference between the human First Adam and the human Second Adam, so that the former is entirely earthy, that is, made from a pile of dirt, while the latter is literally "from heaven":

"The first man is of the earth, earthy: the second man is the Lord from heaven." -- 1 Cor. 15:47.

As is so common in Greek, the action of the main verb in Philippians 2:7, "he emptied himself", is defined straightforwardly by the modifying participle supplied by Paul, so that there can be no question about what he meant about emptying: "taking the form of a slave".

There is no setting aside of anything going on, but rather taking up, adding on.

Paul means to say in Philippians 2 that the divine Son was so secure in his divinity that his equality with God would not be diminished in the slightest by condescending to take on human nature to accomplish the work of salvation for sinful man. Moreover the whole context is exhortation of believers to imitate the divine Son's example, not doctrinal instruction.

The NIV is irresponsible for introducing "nature" into Philippians. If Paul meant to do that he could have used Greek φύσις, as he does elsewhere.

Shameful business, that.

Off with their heads!

Chris Lehmann blames gnosticism for American Christians' development of a sanctified money cult

From an interesting review here by a progressive, which entirely misses the materialism inherent in both the American conservative and progressive interpretations of the meaning of the Christian faith, making gnosticism kind of beside the point because it's adapted for materialist ends, which in a real gnostic would be a contradiction in terms.

Americans, it seems, specialize in perverting not just the orthodoxy, but also the heterodoxy:

At the root of this depressing defeat for a prophetic and socially-conscious Christian faith, in Lehmann’s reading, is what amounts to a strong and ever-present current of Gnosticism: the belief that I can rise above all obstacles and can transform myself and succeed against all odds with God’s help; that I can even transcend basic human limitations—suffering, illness, and death—and become God-like in my personal triumph. It’s always about me and “my” God; it’s never about transforming the social conditions that cause so much unnecessary suffering for so many.

Lehmann demonstrates how during times of the most acute public suffering, like the depressions of 1837, 1857, 1893, etc., almost all Protestant thought leaders served up new formulas for individual self-improvement rather than challenging the presumption and arrogance of wealth. Hence his title, “The Money Cult”: in what many are pleased to regard as a Christian nation, the functional faith of most believers has usually boiled down to a sanctified form of acquisitive individualism.

Today's Christian women don't acknowledge the authority of the Bible, so why bother listening to anything they say?

Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law. -- 1 Cor. 14:34

St. Cyril anathematized the way heretic Bill Johnson says Jesus laid aside his divinity

The third anathema against Nestorius:

If anyone divideth the hypostases after the union in respect of the One Christ, connecting them by a mere association in dignity or authority or rule, and not rather by a conjunction of real union, be he anathema. 

The priority of the very words of Jesus was recognized even by the Paulinist author of 1 Timothy

If any man ... consent not to ... the words of our Lord Jesus Christ, and to the doctrine which is according to godliness; He is proud, knowing nothing ... from such withdraw thyself.

-- 1 Timothy 6:3ff.

And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand:

-- Matthew 7:26

Jesus did not become Messiah at his baptism, as Bill Johnson says, but was the Christ from his birth according to Luke

And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.

-- Luke 2:10f.

Dimwit religion professor from Alma College blames Constantinian Catholicism for the tyranny of orthodoxy

One Kate Blanchard, here, who seems to be as seriously in thrall to an idyllic albeit anarchic world pre-Constantine as the Pentecostal fanatics among us are to its "Spirit-filled" environment. Well, Alma College was a Scottish Presbyterian institution where the Catholics must have been guilty of something, sometime.  

'There is no simple way to explain why some of us submit to the whole shebang and others don’t. In the spirit of gross oversimplification, I blame not social media but Constantinian Catholicism—not for intra-religious diversity, but for the idea that life should be any other way. Before 325 CE there existed a vast network of small clusters of pagan and Jewish Christians around the Mediterranean, mostly meeting in people’s homes, sharing a collection of related but not uniform sacraments and stories about Jesus.

'But when Constantine became the Roman Caesar he decided he needed to build a more uniform religion for his empire. The religious power elite saw their chance and spent the next decades fighting over which version of Christianity would prevail, developing a biblical canon, determining official formulae for Jesus and the Trinity, and approving only certain ways of doing baptism and communion. By the end of the century, Theodosius I would outlaw all “wrong” forms of Christian belief and practice and punish them severely.'

This is just plain silly. Constantine didn't submit to the "whole shebang" himself, and encouraged a process meant to achieve consensus among the fractious Christians, not "orthodoxy", even as he maintained religious freedom for non-Christians throughout his tenure. He was baptized on his deathbed by a heterodox Arian, Eusebius. It is anachronistic to speak of "Constantinian Catholicism", which is a relic of the medieval Roman Catholic imagination.

The passion for orthodoxy is hardly a Catholic invention. The idea is built into the Christian religion, and is at least as old as Paul himself, who in 1 Corinthians 16:22 anathematizes those who do not love the Lord, and in Galatians 1:8f. does the same to any who preach a different gospel than his.

Last time I checked, this Paul was a hero of the Presbyterians, but apparently no more, at least at Alma College.

For there must be also heresies among you, that they which are approved may be made manifest among you.

 

-- 1 Corinthians 11:19

Cassius Clay, black Narcissus who suffered from John Lennon disease, can't dodge the last punch like he did the draft: Dead at 74

"I'm the most recognized and loved man that ever lived cuz there weren't no satellites when Jesus and Moses were around, so people far away in the villages didn't know about them."

The heresies of Bill Johnson of Bethel Redding were long ago anathematized, by Cyril of Alexandria in 431

Anathema Nine from Cyril's Third Epistle to Nestorius:

If anyone says that the One Lord Jesus Christ was glorified by the Spirit, using the power which came through Him as if it were foreign to Himself, and that He received from Him the power of working against unclean spirits and of fulfilling divine signs and tokens, and does not rather say that the Spirit was His own, through whom also He wrought the divine signs, be he anathema. 

Jesus did not "lay aside his divinity" at the incarnation as Bill Johnson says, but is already "from the Holy Ghost" in his mother's womb and becomes "God with us"

A heretic of Christianity is discussed here who teaches that Jesus laid aside his divinity in the incarnation and performed his ministry entirely according to his human nature by the subsequent gift of the Holy Spirit received at his baptism by John, in order to pave the way and make it possible for his followers to receive the same, and do the same and greater things.

Utter nonsense, of course, which the author of Matthew would not have accepted:

Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. ... But as he considered these things, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, "Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. ... "Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel" (which means, God with us).

-- Matthew 1:18, 20, 23