Month: April 2018

K.P. Yohannan Blesses and Consecrates Holy Oils for Believers Eastern Church

In another sign that Believers’ Eastern Church continues to move away from evangelical roots, the church celebrated a “sacred ceremony” using specially prepared and blessed holy oils on the Thursday before Easter. While common in Catholic, Anglican and Lutheran services, use of anointed oils is less common among evangelicals who deny that the oil has any special properties.
From the church Facebook page:

This year’s #MaundyThursday was a historical day for the Believers Eastern Church. Following the Biblical and Eastern Church traditions, we had the sacred ceremony of the Blessing and Consecration of the Holy Oils, which were consecrated by Metropolitan Dr. KP Yohannan in the presence of our Bishops, selected priests, deacons and laity representing the entire church. The process of making these oils started several weeks ago and has been done in a complete atmosphere of prayer and fasting. These holy oils which are known as ‘Myron’ or ‘Chrism’ will be used for the sacraments such as baptism and also dedication of churches, church altars and utensils for the Eucharist and to anoint and pray for the sick.


 

K.P. Yohannan in his Metropolitan garb. From Believers Church Facebook page.

Believers Church Validates Claims Made by Former Staff

Gospel for Asia’s public problems began when a large group of former staff members, known as the GFA Diaspora, approached GFA leaders and board members in 2014 with five concerns about the organization. At the top of the list was this:

GFA leadership practices and teaches a false view of spiritual authority

As evidence that K.P. Yohannan had inappropriately elevated himself to that they considered to be an unbiblical level of authority, the former staff pointed to the practice of requiring followers in India to kiss Yohannan’s ring as well as church practices which appeared to reflect a Catholic hierarchy of authority.
To me, the issue here isn’t the correct view of hierarchy.* It is the credibility of GFA’s statements. In response to criticism of Yohannan’s ring kissing and other practices, GFA insisted that such practices didn’t exist and that GFA was thoroughly evangelical in practice. However, this does not appear to be the case, as indicated by photos of followers kissing Yohannan’s ring, and now this use of holy oil in a special manner by Yohannan.
 

*I mean no criticism of any religious tradition. I have my own views but what is at issue is the accuracy of statements by GFA’s leaders over the years. GFA’s leaders have at various times portrayed Believers’ Church as evangelical in practice. However, on the ground the church operates in a manner which places all power within the hands of the K.P. Yohannan, the Metropolitan Bishop. He is a papal figure with veto power over all church actions. The church celebrates his birthday as a holiday.

Happy Birthday to Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson was born on April 13 1743 at Shadwell, Virginia.
In honor of our third president, I can suggest a worthy gift for anyone given in his name.
jeffersonbookcover
Written mostly to debunk self-styled historian and Christian nationalist David Barton’s The Jefferson Lies, our book Getting Jefferson Right: Fact Checking Claims about Our Third President stands on its own as an examination of Jefferson’s views on religion, the Bible, and slavery.
 

The Jefferson Lies

After Barton’s book was pulled from publication in 2012, he claimed Simon & Schuster would republish it. That never came to pass. Then WorldNetDaily put it out claiming that Christian publisher Thomas Nelson pulled the book due to “political correctness.” Barton’s buddy Glenn Beck claimed that “liberal bastards” were behind the effort to discredit the book. These claims came even though most of the recent critics were Christian college professors. In short, none of these excuses hold water.
Thomas Nelson said at the time that they lost confidence in the books facts and pulled the book due to historical errors. I outlined what I know about the situation in a previous post. In fact, philosopher and college professor Jay Richards recruited 10 Christian scholars, mostly historians, to read our book and then Barton’s. On the whole, the scholars came back to Richards with the feedback that Barton had turned Jefferson into a figure unrecognizable to them. It wasn’t long afterwards that Thomas Nelson took the extremely rare step of pulling the book from publication.

Additional reading:

The David Barton Controversy – WORLD – Thomas Kidd (2012)
Doubting Thomas – WORLD – Thomas Kidd (2012)
Publisher Pulls Controversial Thomas Jefferson Book – NPR – Elise Hu (2012)
Citing Lost Confidence, David Barton’s Publisher Pulls Book on Jefferson – TPM – Casey Michel – (2012)
Barton’s Jefferson Book Yanked – Eric Marrapodi and Dan Gilgoff – CNN (2012)
Christian History: How David Barton is Doing it Wrong – Gospel Coalition – Justin Taylor (2017)
 

Uganda: Members of Parliament Call for Another Anti-Homosexuality Bill

Yesterday members of Uganda’s Parliament called for legislation akin to the failed Anti-Homosexuality Act 2014. Beginning in 2009, Uganda had the world’s attention as the nation’s Parliament debated a bill which would have implemented the death penalty for repeat instances of same-sex behavior between consenting adults. A slightly modified bill finally passed in 2013 only to be struck down by a Ugandan court in 2014.

In protest, nations around the globe cut off aid to Uganda and President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton denounced the bill at the 2010 prayer breakfast. Evangelicals were divided over the bill with some giving quiet support to the evangelical parliamentarians in Uganda. Others, like Rick Warren, criticized the bill and urged Ugandan pastors to come out against it. See the end of this post for more reading on the issue. I wrote scores of articles about the bill and came out strongly against it.

A New Anti-Homosexuality Bill?

After speaking out against same-sex marriage at the March Inter-Parliamentary Union conference, members of Parliament passed a commendation of Speaker Rebecca Kadaga.


Here is Kadaga at the IPU meeting:

The recognition of Kadaga Wednesday led to other members of Parliament making statements about a need for a new law against homosexuality.


That homosexuality spreads “like a wild fire” is just one of many misconceptions which members of Parliament use to generate support for their efforts. As a response to a request from President Museveni for scientific information relating to homosexuality, Jack Drescher and I wrote a scientific consensus letter in 2014 which was signed by over 200 scholars and sex researchers. I would like to think it helped but he signed the bill anyway. Furthermore, when I read these statements from the Parliament, I can see we have more work to do.

Additional Reading

Scientific Consensus Statement

History of Uganda’s Anti-Gay Bill – NPR

Uganda Anti-Homosexuality Bill Inspired by American Evangelicals  – Daily Beast

My Salon series about a Nevada church who dropped support of a Uganda missionary over the bill

Straight Man’s Burden – Harpers

The Bill Inspired by American Evangelicals – The Atlantic

All posts about Uganda

On This Day in 1945, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was Executed

On April 9, 1945 Dietrich Bonhoeffer was hanged in a Nazi concentration camp at Flossenburg Germany. He had been involved in getting Jews out

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

of Germany and resistance to the Nazi regime.  Arrested by the Gestapo in 1943, Bonhoeffer was killed along with his brother and other conspirators. A brief but helpful summary of Bonhoeffer’s work against the Nazis can be found at the Holocaust Museum website.

The Church and the Jewish Question

Setting the stage for his resistance activities was a paper written in 1933 titled, “The Church and the Jewish Question.” I can’t find it online but you can see it in Google books preview of The Bonhoeffer Reader and Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works.  In it, Bonhoeffer sets forth a relationship between church and state which might seem foreign to modern day evangelicals who support Christian nationalism. Even though Bonhoeffer, as a churchman, did intervene in his government, it was a last resort under the most extreme of circumstances. According to the Bonhoeffer, “There is no doubt that the church of the Reformation is not encouraged to get involved directly in specific political actions of the state. The church has neither to praise nor to censure the laws of the state.” He added that there is a “radical separation between the place of the gospel and the place of the law.” According to Bonhoeffer, the “true church of Christ, which lives by the Gospel alone and knows the nature of state actions, will never interfere in the functioning of state actions in this way. by criticizing its history-making actions from the standpoint of, say, any humanitarian ideal.”
Rather, according to Bonhoeffer, the church may critique the state as either creating too much or too little law to fulfill the governmental function. The church may rightly complain if the state uses “force to such a degree as to rob the Christian faith of its right to proclaim its message.” On the other hand, if the state doesn’t create enough law and as a result a group is deprived of rights, the church may also speak. “There is too little law and order wherever a group of people are deprived of its rights,” he wrote. In such cases, there are three actions which the church may take.

First, (as we have said) questioning the state as to the legitimate state character of its actions, that is, making the state responsible for what it does. Second is service to victims of the state’s action. The church has an unconditional obligation toward the victims of any societal order, even if they do not belong to the Christian community…The third possibility is not just to bind up the wounds of the victims beneath the wheel but to seize the wheel itself. Such an action would be direct political action by the church itself.

In his essay, Bonhoeffer cited a threat of too little law when a group of citizens is deprived of rights. On the other extreme of too much law, his example was the church being told that baptized Jews must be excluded from Christian congregations or banning missions to Jews. Bonhoeffer asserted that “the church cannot allow the state to prescribe for it the way it treats its members.”
Bonhoeffer did not say that the state cannot create laws which touches the religious beliefs of individuals. He distinguished between the church as an entity and individual Christians when he wrote the following:

At the other extreme from too little law and order, there can be too much law and order. This would mean the state developing its use of force to such a degree as to rob the Christian faith of its right to proclaim its message. (This does not apply to restriction of free conscience — that would be the humanitarian version, which is an illusion, since every state in its life impinges on the so-called free conscience).

As a possible case in point, I have a sense that Bonhoeffer would reject the state making pastors officiate at gay weddings, but he might not have a problem with anti-discrimination laws regarding Christians providing services in the marketplace.
Bonhoeffer’s essay provides a useful foundation for considering how Christians today could consider religious liberty and church and state relationships. In his day, he chose to intervene because there was too much law. My reaction is that many religious liberty issues which occupy Christians politically today don’t rise to the level of “too much law” as framed by Bonhoeffer. I would like to see the church spend more time and money on fulfilling Bonhoeffer’s second point. As for his third point, in America, in my opinion the essential Christian message is in no danger of government restriction.
Additional reading:
The Bonhoeffer Quote That Isn’t Bonhoeffer’s

Oren Paris III Resigns as Ecclesia College President, Enters Conditional Guilty Plea in Kickback Scheme

Correction: An earlier version of this article said Ecclesia was unaccredited. I have corrected it to reflect that the school is accredited by the Association of Biblical Higher Education but is not regionally accredited which is the gold standard for academic accreditation. 
…………………………………….
Watch out, shoes are dropping in the Ecclesia College kickback case.
Arkansas Online today reports that Oren Paris III resigned from his post as president of Ecclesia College and entered a last minute conditional

Ecclesia College

guilty plea in the kickback and bribery case which came to light early last year. Along with State Senator Jon Woods, and consultant Randall Shelton, Paris was indicted in federal court on March 1, 2017 for allegedly participating in a scheme to funnel state improvement funds through Ecclesia to Woods and Shelton. State representative Micah Neal was also in on the alleged plot and earlier entered a guilty plea.

Read the Indictment Here

Ecclesia College is an Christian school in Springdale AR which has the support of Christian nationalists David Barton and Eric Metaxas. The school is accredited by the Association for Biblical Higher Education but is not accredited by the Higher Learning Commission which covers schools in Arkansas.
Initially, Paris was defiant and claimed he would be vindicated. Although Paris entered a guilty plea, the move may have been a legal maneuver, according to media reports. His trial was slated to begin Monday and Paris may be hoping to revisit his status if an appeals court overturns Judge Timothy Brooks decision not to dismiss the case.

Read the Plea Agreement Here

In the plea agreement, Paris admits that he “knowingly obtained GIF [General Improvement Funds] money for the College under materially false and fraudulent pretenses.” Paris then caused funds to be paid to Randall Shelton knowing that some of those funds would end up back with Senator Jon Woods in a kickback. By entering a conditional guilty plea to one count, Paris has thrown Shelton and Woods under the bus.
Incredibly, Ecclesia College is standing by Paris, writing on the school Facebook page:

Dear friends,
As you know, Dr. Oren Paris and two others were indicted a little over a year ago by the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Arkansas. For Oren, his immediate family, and the extended family at Ecclesia College, this has been a period of spiritual trial, eased by an ever increasing gratitude for God’s constant presence and His great faithfulness.
While we continue to believe firmly that Dr. Paris has been honest and forthright in his statements from the beginning of this case, he and his legal team are now convinced that the best path forward is to accept a conditional plea agreement negotiated with the government. We stand with him in his decision.
Information recently brought to Dr. Paris’s attention has shed new light on facts he previously knew but had interpreted differently. This enables him to truthfully make the statement required by the government. The terms of the conditional plea agreement clear the path for an appeal to be filed with the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals to address some the issues raised during the course of this case that have caused us all great concern regarding the appearance of fairness of the judicial system. In the meantime, while Dr. Paris will be stepping down as president of Ecclesia College until his name is cleared in order to avoid further unnecessary distraction from the College’s mission, he will continue to serve Ecclesia.
We know and trust that God is moving on our behalf toward His ultimate answer to our ongoing prayer for His deliverance. Please continue to pray with us that the upcoming appeal will lead to a fully just outcome in the end.We are completely confident that God has every individual and this institution in His all-capable hands. To the faculty, staff, and students operations will continue as normal. We look forward to seeing Him in and through this situation for the overall good and promising future of Ecclesia College.
For His glory,
EC Board of Governance

It is very difficult to square the plea agreement with this statement from the Board of Governance. If his statement to the government is true, then he “knowingly obtained GIF money for the College under materially false and fraudulent pretenses” and “knowing and intentionally engaged in a scheme to defraud the citizens of Arkansas of the honest services of Arkansas state Senator Woods.” (See image below from page 4 of the plea agreement)

This case is not over. Senator Woods and Randall Shelton still must go to trial and no doubt they will have something to say about Paris’ involvement.