Category Archives: Newfrontiers

Christianity, Erasmus, Fundamentalism, God, Jesus, Luther, new writer, Newfrontiers, Religion

False fundamentalism

Leave a comment
HOLBEIN, Hans the Younger (b. 1497, Augsburg, d. 1543, London) Portrait of Erasmus of Rotterdam

Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466 – 1536) is most probably the man who began the science of historical-biblical criticism that has polarised attitudes to the Bible up until this day. Erasmus himself was highly gifted academic, a Roman Catholic priest and in many ways one of the first ever genuine citizens of Europe. He was the son of a Roman Catholic priest (yes, you read that correctly), born out of wedlock, and both his parents died from the plague when he was a teenager. It is doubtless the challenges of his early life that shaped his life-long belief in synergism, as opposed to the monergism preached by Luther and many influential Protestant preachers since the Reformation.

Erasmus was a pacifist who desperately wanted his Christian faith to be lived out by following Jesus in daily life. One of his biggest issues with Luther was that he knew that Luther’s belligerent provocations and theological argumentation would lead to a division in the church, which is of course exactly what happened during the Reformation. So how can it be that placid Erasmus himself inadvertently kicked off the greatest polarisation in the church today?

Erasmus was not only a Christian, but also a product of his time. He was a humanist. He was concerned to move Christianity away from lofty and often hypocritical scholasticism and place it back with sincerity in the centre of the daily lives of ordinary people. This sincere concern logically led to him wanting to have accurate translations of the Bible based on authentic manuscripts and then to place these translations into the hands of ordinary people.

The main version of the Bible used up until the 15th century was the Vulgate, a 4th century translation of the Bible into Latin. By comparing the Vulgate Bible with the manuscripts in their original languages that Erasmus was able to source, he knew that there were many mistakes in the Vulgate, ranging from shocking mistranslations to outright mistakes and omissions. This fact alone, too disturbing for Luther and anathema to modern fundamentalists, raises the question: if the Bible is the infallible Word of God, why did God allow the followers of Jesus to have a flawed version of it in their hands for the first 1,500 of the history of the church?

This leads us on to the second question: if, according to the fundamentalists, Christians are meant to base their lives on the infallible Word of God, what did they rely upon for the first few thousand years during which they didn’t even have a copy New Testament? Especially a New Testament whose canon was and still is, according to all historical evidence, decided upon by chaotic human preferences and choices.

Third question: what if further, even more accurate manuscripts of the Bible were still to be discovered? Then the fundamentalists would have a similar problem to the Jews, who will never be able to prove the authenticity of their Messiah, when he comes, since all the genealogical records were burnt during the destruction of the temple in AD 70.

This also leads us to the fourth question: given that the most accurate manuscripts of the Bible were only discovered in the 18th century – ironically thanks to the research of historical-biblical scholars – why did God permit believers to have an errant text in their hands for at least 1,700 years after the death of Christ?

It is questions such as these that have polarised the church. At the one end we have more pragmatic Christians such a s Erasmus who take the view that a few mistakes in the manmade transcripts in no way negate the overall message of Jesus and His Word. At the other extreme, we have the fundamentalists who claim that there can be no mistakes, even in the New Testament, and that every word is inspired by God Himself. Accordingly, every sentence of the Bible must be correctly interpreted in synergy with the Holy Spirit and then applied in the daily life of every believer. Hence, the fundamentalists claim to enjoy an arrogant monopoly of correct interpretation of an infallible text, even though God permitted the text to have many mistakes in it for at least 1,700 years. Need I say more?

Erasmus thus also planted the seeds of historical-biblical criticism. If we are open to recognising that the text may have mistakes in it, so-called textual criticism, then it should be no surprise that the other three main elements of historical-biblical criticism, source, form and literary criticism should follow on from there. Once again, for most fundamentalists, such methods are tools of the devil who seeks to undermine the authority of God’s Word, divide the church and promulgate atheism. Given that the devil is a mythical figure invented by humans with wealth and authority in order to keep the plebs in fear and obedience, the fundamentalists are really more concerned with their loss of authority over naive believers’ lives, upholding division in the church via their arrogant and flawless interpretation of Scripture and with protecting their sects from the increasing numbers of atheists, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, atheists and agnostics who will, thanks be to God, all be spending eternity burning in hell.

Sadly, Erasmus annoyed many theologians of his day by holding on to his more pragmatic synergistic beliefs. In retrospect, he was well ahead of his time in his Christian Weltanschauung. For example, let’s ask ourselves another simple question. Which type of Christian most closely resembles Jesus? The one who gets up each day of his/her life in grateful communion with God through prayer, worship, Bible-reading and joyfully applying the main tenets of God’s Word in daily life, or the one who vehemently preaches a fundamentalist gospel while walking past a beggar in the street, ranting against homosexuals and actively collaborating in the destruction of the planet? Not only that, but which type of Christianity most closely reflects the heart of Jesus? Erasmus’ synergistic theology that accepts that humans have the choice to co-operate with God in making His world a better place, or Luther’s monergistic theology that proclaims that human beings can only become believers if God chooses by his grace alone to save them, thus leaving all sinful-to-the-core human beings pre-destined from fertilisation for either heaven or hell? After all, Jesus gave the rich young man in Matthew 19 a choice, didn’t he?

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

God, new writer, Newfrontiers

Biblical Untruth

Leave a comment

When I went to a charismatic, Bible-believing church, we were taught, and I believed, that the Bible was the inerrant Word of God. God the Holy Spirit had inspired men to write down exactly what God wanted them to say and so, as it says in 2 Timothy 3:16 “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.” I have only recently come to understand that the “Scripture” referred to here is, as in the other fifty cases where the New Testament writers use this word, referring to the Old Testament. We were taught to understand, probably on the rather weak basis of 2 Peter 3:16, that the New Testament was also Scripture and therefore God-breathed and inerrant. Hence, everything written in the books of the New Testament in our Bibles was authoritative.

When you are ignorantly living in a sect, you accept such propositions as the truth since you love and respect you leaders, dread the rejection of your friends and fear God’s wrath lest you become ignorant and unstable and distort the truth to your own destruction (2 Peter 3:16). However, once you have escaped the sect and research topics that were never even touched on by its leaders, teachers and preachers, you soon see the incredible inconsistencies.

First of all, the decisions that were made during the 300 years (!) after Jesus’ death as to which books and letters should be included in the canon of the New Testament are such a chaotic patchwork of human arguments and uncertainty that it is impossible to maintain that God Himself infallibly determined the contents of the canon. If, as a compromise, you were to believe that God guided the early church inerrantly through this chaos, then the church takes on a higher status than Scripture itself, leading us to the Roman Catholic papal position, which has been considered heresy by Protestants since the day that Martin Luther placed the apocryphal writings in a separate part of the Bible.

Secondly, as Erasmus (1466-1536) knew from his exploration of scriptural texts, the Christian church had for over a thousand years a version of the New Testament which contained very considerable errors and omissions. How are we to square the circle of the Bible being the inerrant Word of God that is to be followed faithfully by all Christians, yet these Christians have the wrong Bible?

Thirdly, in the sect to which I belonged for twenty years of my life, there prevailed an arrogant certainty that “our” interpretation of the Bible must be correct. The historical and cultural context that would unquestionably assist the interpretation of any text is not required by us since the Holy Spirit, who wrote the text, will endow our preachers with an equally God-inspired, flawless interpretation. If the Bible recounts events at Pentecost in which believers are baptised in the Holy Spirit (e.g. in Acts Chapter 10), speak in tongues, interpret tongues, effect miracles and prophesy, then this is unquestionably to be the norm for every Christian church until the day that Jesus comes again. Those who preach otherwise are either misguided or heretics, such as the entire Baptist Church. I actually believed this. Seriously. Yet never did I question why women did not have their heads covered in our sect ( 1 Corinthians 11:6) or why they were allowed to speak and even prophesy when the Bible says that “women should remain silent” and that it is “disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church” (1 Corinthians 14: 34-35).

These same inconsistencies are applied to the interpretation and application of passages from the genuinely God-breathed Old Testament too, further undermining the position of errant arrogance that in the end always comes down to an abuse of authority in such conservative circles. For example, why do fathers no longer present their disobedient sons to be publicly stoned to death? Why are women on their period not regarded as unclean and banned from church gatherings? Why are practising homosexuals not annihilated in the same way as the men of Sodom and Gomorrah – even though the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah has absolutely nothing to do with homosexual relationships and identity?

The Bible is an awesome piece of inspired literature and may even be a revelation of God – at least for those who choose to believe that. But those who use its unproven inerrancy in order to wield their interpretative arrogance and self-appointed authority should be ashamed of themselves for the division, pain and deaths they have caused for three hundred years since the birth of Jesus Christ.

“When the missionaries came to Africa, they had the Bible and we had the land. They said ‘Let us pray.’ We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.” – Desmond Tutu

Education, God, health care, meditation, Newfrontiers, society, war

Personifying Anxiety

1 Comment

In the last few weeks I have started using the Calm app in order to meditate. I can recommend it for anyone who is looking for guided meditation. I’m very new to mediation, though, and got into it as part of enjoying the Ayurveda way of life in recent months. When I used to pray, the focus was always either on worshipping God or praying for other people. In meditation, you get to focus on yourself, not just out of selfishness, but also with the aim of being in a better place to serve others.

This morning, the app’s very gifted Canadian main author and speaker, Tamara Levitt, encouraged what was effectively the personification of anxiety.

While I was sitting in a quiet place, first focussing on my breathing, she then encouraged me to think about a situation that causes me fear and anxiety. She prompted me to locate where in my body I could feel this anxiety, physically manifested, as it were. Once I had found it (it could be in your jaw, forehead, chest or gut, for example), I was encouraged to describe for myself its size, its shape, its colour, its intensity and so on. That’s why I’m calling it personification. I acknowledged it without judging it, giving it space and room to manifest itself as a genuine concern in my life – yet all the time aware that my anxious thoughts do not necessarily correspond to reality. I spoke to my anxiety, giving it genuine recognition, saying that I would address it at a future moment, but for now letting it drift away, like the leaves floating leaves on a nearby stream. At the end of just ten minutes, I felt so much more peaceful and even assured that the challenging situation I had been thinking about would one day be resolved. If there is one certainty about any situation in life, it is that it will not stay the same.

A clearer head left me better equipped to start work … at least until a different kind of anxious thought came into my head that would not leave me alone. Hence today’s unplanned blog.

I am referring to the battle raging between Jews and Muslims in Palestine and Israel as I write. I can’t stop placing myself in the minds of my fellow human beings who are living in an overwhelming fear of death. Back in 1997 I spent the night in Belfast and a bomb went off at the end of the road where my hotel was situated. Before the flight home, we all had to get off the plane and identify our suitcases that had been removed from the hold before we could take off because they suspected that we had a bomb on board. The tangible and unforgettable fear I experienced was existentially unsettling in a scary, new way for me, but it was nothing in comparison to what the people in Palestine and Israel must be experiencing right now, especially the children, elderly and infirm.

I’m tempted to take sides at this point, but that won’t help. You can guess what I think anyways. Plus the fact that we don’t have much of a right to say anything, since our countries are benefitting from the enormous wealth we have made by selling Israel and Palestine the weapons they are using to annihilate one another. What we can say, however, is that these war crimes, ethnic cleansing and genocide are being perpetrated because of the revolting and fatal division created by religion, or belief in a different, superior God. How many lives and despicable tortures would never have taken place, if , instead of a primitive, selfish belief in a non-existent God, human beings recognised their beauty, complexity and racial unity with one another and the universe. Even or especially when wrongful political decisions are made.

“If there is an omnipotent God – in the sense of a Creator of the universe, then he / she / they must surely be capable of communicating in a credible and unambiguous way with the entire human race. The absence of this reality, together with the culturally and geographically different accounts of who God is, is ultimately evidence that God is a human creation, invented in order to to justify oligarchical laws and to promulgate tribal superiority. The concomitant racial hatred results in division, untold suffering and unnecessary death.” Beyond Redemption – a shorty story by Nigel Dutton

This religious division does not start at the national or inter-faith level, but already within one and the same faith and ultimately in individual human hearts. When I was a member of the Newfrontiers sect, our church was invited to join in on certain ecumenical activities promoted by the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches across our town. Our church never joined in on the basis that we could not possibly be united with churches that did not believe the gospel and preach the Bible. My former mentor and pastor, whom I still fondly respect and admire, would say to me and even to the other church leaders, “Why would I want to put my race horse (referring to his church) along side your cart horses (referring to their churches)?” If such theological arrogance can exist within one faith, it becomes easier to understand how divisive fanaticism caused by such hateful division between different religions can lead to the appalling suffering that it happening right at this moment between Muslim human beings and Jewish human beings who live in the same street.

Faith really is, as Nietzsche said, a refusal to believe what is true. My hope and intention is that, as the world becomes more enlightened, religious differences might one day be put aside and that people will look first and foremost to the miracles that unite them.

I’ll end with probably one of the deepest lyrics on this subject ever written:

But if you only have love for your own race
Then you only leave space to discriminate
And to discriminate only generates hate
And when you hate then you’re bound to get irate, yeah

Madness is what you demonstrate
And that’s exactly how anger works and operates
Man, you gotta have love just to set it straight
Take control of your mind and meditate
Let your soul gravitate to the love, y’all, y’all

Black Eyed Peas

Post scriptum: today is Ascension Day, a day on which we remember that the resurrected Jesus Christ ascended into heaven in bodily form and now sits, still in his resurrected, new-order, imperishable human body on the throne of eternal heaven, ruling the world and the universe and sovereign over the control of the thoughts and actions of every single (even unborn) child, man and woman.

I think Nietzsche can probably rest his case.

God, new writer, Newfrontiers, plant-based lifestyle, politics, society, vegansim, vision

What can we learn?

Leave a comment

Since my last blog entry, I guess we could say that a few things have happened. Some of them continue to dominate our daily life and will continue to do so for generations to come. Given that every crisis is an opportunity for improvement, I’d like to ask what we can learn from recent events. How might we behave differently in the future?

The Curse of Covid

Whatever opinions we hold about this virus, one fact cannot be factually disputed, namely that it occurred as a direct result of human selfishness and irresponsibility. A blatant disregard for our essential interconnectedness with the whole of the planet. Our treatment and consumption of millions of animals per year causes unimaginable suffering to sentient beings as well as wrecking the environment via climate change.

The mass of animals raised for slaughter on earth now outweighs wildlife by a factor of 15-to-1. For example, for every person on the planet, there are approximately three chickens. Meat and dairy specifically account for around 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO).

Why do we need to eat meat? The answer is: we don’t. Social conditioning, underpinned by effective marketing and together with a lack of information, leads many of us to believe that we need to consume many kinds of meat – and fish too. Yet now we know otherwise. For those who believe that they can’t live without the taste of slaughtered animals, there is an alternative for pretty much everything.

Given that the climate impact of plant-based foods is typically up to 50 times smaller than that of animal products, it follows that switching from a largely meat-based diet to a vegetarian or vegan diet would reduce green house gas emissions significantly and help to reverse climate change.

When I stopped buying meat a few years ago, I was surprised by how much less I spent on food. I recommend spending some of the savings on buying organic produce too. Not so much because it is far better for your mental and physical health, but because it is so much better for the environment. Organic farming practices reduce pollution, conserve water, reduce soil erosion, increase soil fertility, and use less energy. Farming without synthetic pesticides is also better for nearby birds, frogs and other animals as well as people who live close to farms.

Politics

The political landscape since my last blog post has changed for the better and for the worse. I am so delighted for the US people that they have jettisoned the divisive, racist caricature of a politician and the worst president in my lifetime. Sadly, his twin brother is still at large in the UK, lying, dividing and grooming his endless narcissism. As the UK erroneously believes that it will be better off as an island of service industries, the only thing the British can currently be proud of is that they have taken part more swiftly than any other European nation in the largest drug-testing experiment in the history of the world. I had much higher hopes for the opposition under Keir Starmer, but it seems as if he is not a leader after all. He offers no alternative vision to inspire the inhabitants of the sinking isle. Further afield, I remain heartbroken for the plight of my fellow human beings in Syria, Yemen, Brazil and India – to name just a few countries – and I am hoping for political solution to come soon. Let us do everything we can to support this.

God and the church

The charismatic church in particular has struggled during the pandemic. Although awash with many gifted prophets (apparently), none of them saw Corona coming. In fact, many of them were busy buying and renovating large, disused warehouses – large “barns” prepared for bringing in the enormous harvest of souls promised by their prophets back in 1993. Yet we don’t need a prophet to tell us not to buy a large building. The Bible is good enough for that. The New Testament teaches that the church is not a building, but Spirit-filled Jesus-worshippers who gather in one another’s homes. And there has still not been any honesty from the leaders of such congregations, explaining why the promised revival never came, let alone apologising for the irresponsible untruths and ensuing delusion. On the contrary. In a sermon I heard just two weeks ago, one of these leaders was again telling his poor sheep that a massive harvest of souls was coming at the end of the Corona period and that the church needed to get ready. He longed for another so-called outpouring of the Holy Spirit too, since the current younger generation has never experienced people falling over, laughing out loud and in their drunkenness signing more large cheques to pay for the new barns that they won’t be needing. Still, at least we can all now see what “charismatic renewal” means: establishing a superior sect that steals Christians from well-established churches > lunatic gatherings in the name of the Holy Spirit > exciting prophecies about national revival > a massive increase in offerings > ignoring the facts, managing social projects and propagating spiritual boredom. And once the generation who has experienced this renewal has either left the church, died, is demented or living in the sect’s obedience and amnesia, the whole cycle starts anew.

What really matters

On a more hopeful note, the virus has taught many of us to focus on what matters most: family, relationships, health, the environment and looking for positive ways out into a better future.

When I was meditating the other day, I was reminded of a scene from Winnie-the-Pooh in which Piglet asks Pooh, “Supposing a tree fell down, Pooh, when were underneath it?”

“Supposing it didn’t,” said Pooh after careful thought.

Piglet was comforted by this.

In some of my upcoming blog articles, I’m going to share with you some of the comforting things that I have enjoyed during the last twelve challenging months in the hope that we might learn from our mistakes and make the world a better place for the generations of people, animals and plants to come.

“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”  Albert Einstein

Berlin, Children, God, Newfrontiers

The church destroys families – Part Three

1 Comment

I am guessing that this may be the final instalment in this short blog series about the church destroying families. If you have missed the first two and would like to read them, please click either here for Part One and/or here for Part Two.

So, I broke off at the point at which, under the heavy-handed guidance of the church leaders, my wife and our two youngest children returned to England, leaving our two oldest children and me temporarily homeless on the streets of Berlin.

When we managed to move back into our old apartment, we had no furniture. The churches who had promised to support our older children for three more months stopped their support without warning. So I had to take out a loan and work the night shift in a gas station in order to provide us at least with the basics you require in a family home. I remember that the early weeks together were a real challenge, not only because my oldest son and daughter were trying to come to terms with the sudden implosion of our family but also because they had made some very unpleasant experiences during the few weeks when they were living on the street. For me, too, I missed our two younger children so badly and wanted desperately to see them.

At this point, looking back, the behaviour of the church leaders becomes more and more absurd, and I still do not fully understand why I went along with all their destructive, controlling and even illegal nonsense.

The church leaders forbad me to have any contact with our younger children. They reasoned that the church was there to protect them and my wife from the pernicious, rebellious behaviour of our two older children and me. Were they to be kept away from us, they may well remain Christians. When I pushed and pushed to see them, however, the church leaders after four months agreed to let me see them, on two conditions. First, I had to agree to meet with the leaders in order to undergo a debrief and disciplinary measures, and  secondly, I had to agree that another couple from the church would accompany my wife and younger children when I met them in England since the leaders were fearful that I would try to abduct them and get them swiftly on a plane back to Berlin.

This fear was explicitly communicated to our younger boys, and especially the youngest expressed his concern that I might kidnap him while we were playing at a farm play park together in Sussex. It was such an emotional time. Our older two children, who had flown with me to England, were so damaged that they could not deal with the situation. Meanwhile, our middle son expressed already a wish to return to Germany, to go back to his Berlin school and to rebuild our family again. In his new school near Hastings, he was constantly bullied for being a Nazi (just because he had arrived as a new boy from Germany) and the school had a policy of teaching three classes together in one large room, which meant that there were at least 45 pupils in one class.

After a very tearful good-bye, our oldest son, our daughter and I flew back to Berlin and we tried to rebuild our lives, now at least with the occasional phone call to England in order to keep up a degree of contact with my wife and the younger boys. For the next few months, it was clear that our youngest son was traumatised and unable to understand why he was being separated from his father and siblings, and our middle son, who still desperately wanted to get back to Berlin, was never given any pastoral care by any member of the church.

Then, after just a few months, my wife called me from England and announced, to my amazement, that she was leaving the church and returning to Berlin with the younger boys. I will never forget the date or the moment as I watched my tears of joy discolour the sofa. Our oldest son and daughter were also very surprised, but we prepared for the return of my wife and younger boys and festooned the apartment with banners and balloons.

My wife’s decision to return to Berlin was regarded as a further act of rebellion by the church leaders and it cost her her friends as well as her church membership. She too, like our oldest two children, had now also rebelled and that would be the end of the road as a Christian woman in that church. A church for which she had given up her life, her family and personal career. To this day, the only people who are still in contact with her are either other rebels who have left the church and joined a new congregation or those whose lives who also been shipwrecked by this church.

It is now four years since all this happened. I believe that all six of us are so grateful and relieved that we have managed to escape the imprisonment of this sect. At first, I never believed that I would lose my faith through all that happened, but in time, I did. When you are trapped in a sect, you really do believe all kinds of abject nonsense and so I am also truly glad that I do not believe in God any longer. Ditching my belief in God has been the most liberating experience of my life.

As we as a family have continued to re-build our lives, there continues to be no contact from either the church in Hastings or the church in Berlin.

Of course I know that the church in itself does not destroy families. It’s just that a blog article needs a catchy headline. What can destroy families is delusional religious beliefs, combined with the social structure of a sect, combined with individuals in a church, who, when all the given external circumstances and internal character weaknesses collide in the wrong way, create the destruction of a family. It’s rather like a chemical reaction: if all of the conditions are right, an explosion will happen.

All as I can say is that I have experienced so much more grace, forgiveness, enlightenment and genuine friendship outside of the church than within it. And as I have written several times before, if my writing this blog can help any others to steer clear of religion and/or to escape a sect, then I will have achieved my aim.

If you are happy in your church, good for you. But if you are not truly happy, maybe you should ask yourself the following questions:

  1. When was the last time you saw a blind person see again, a lame person able to walk, a dead person raised to life?
  2. Why does a loving God allow young children to die in appalling suffering in Yemen or from Ebola in Congo?
  3. Whatever happened to God’s promises about a revival of the Christian faith in which millions of people turn to Christ?
  4. Do you really believe that God sends believing Muslims, Hindus and people of all other faiths to eternal hell?
  5. Are you still struggling with the same sins that you were struggling with ten years ago?
  6. Is any part of you being repressed by your faith in God, especially your sexuality?
  7. How do you really react, deeply and honestly, to the quotation at the bottom of this page? Your reaction will tell you all that you need to know.
“The Christian faith is essentially selfish because it plays on our most basic human fear: the fear of death, the dissolution of our ego. When I accept Christianity’s conditional offer of the salvation of my soul, I am admitting that the world ultimately revolves around me. Religion owes its ongoing existence to this pitiable flattery of personal vanity.”