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The shepherds sing; and shall I silent be?
    My God, no hymn for Thee?
My soul’s a shepherd too; a flock it feeds
    Of thoughts, and words, and deeds.
The pasture is Thy word: the streams, Thy grace
    Enriching all the place.
Shepherd and flock shall sing, and all my powers
    Outsing the daylight hours.
Then will we chide the sun for letting night
    Take up his place and right:
We sing one common Lord; wherefore he should
    Himself the candle hold.
I will go searching, till I find a sun
    Shall stay, till we have done;
A willing shiner, that shall shine as gladly,
    As frost-nipped suns look sadly.
Then will we sing, and shine all our own day,
    And one another pay:
His beams shall cheer my breast, and both so twine,
Till ev’n His beams sing, and my music shine.

[Herbert, George. Christmas, The Poetical Works of George Herbert.
New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1857. 101-102.]

Dear Arthur,

God often moves in very unusual ways. Arthur, I tremble as I write this . . . God has told me to release His End Time Financial Anointing. Do you want it?

Arthur, on my 63rd birthday, and entering my 44th year of ministry, I am facing the most massive financial ministry challenges ever . . .

Never in my 44 years of ministry has God released me to do this. But I must obey his timing.

In honour of my 63rd birthday, please pray about stretching your faith and give £63 which is £1 for each year. I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t know God was going to abundantly RETURN IT TO YOU.

Don’t delay. Do it deliberately. Do it spiritually. Do it immediately . . . and I will agree in the Spirit over your seed, praying and speaking in tongues for your need.

Arthur, don’t wait . . . ACTivate your faith now by returning the enclosed End Time Financial Anointing form.

God’s faithful servant

Maurice Cerullo

[Quoted in Nigel Scotland, Charismatics and the New Millennium (Eagle, 2000), p184]

Can anyone say “Tetzel“? There is so much that is wrong here that it should require no comment from me. Nevertheless, as an act of public service, here is what I believe to be an exhaustive list of true statements in the letter:

1. Cerullo is facing the most massive financial ministry challenges ever.

IF we satisfy ourselves in mere notions and speculations about the glory of Christ as doctrinally revealed unto us, we shall find no transforming power or efficacy communicated to us thereby. But when, under the conduct of that spiritual light, our affections do cleave unto him with full purpose of heart, our minds are filled with the thoughts of him and delight in him, and faith is kept up unto its constant exercise in trust and affiance on him - virtue will proceed from him to purify our hearts, increase our holiness, strengthen our graces, and to fill us sometimes ‘with joy unspeakable and full of glory.’  This is the just temperature of a state of spiritual health - namely, when our light of the knowledge of the glory of God in Christ doth answer the means of it which we enjoy, and our affections unto Christ do hold proportion unto that light; and this according unto the various degrees of it - for some have more, and some have less. Where light leaves the affections behind, it ends in formality or atheism; and where affections outrun light, they sink in the bog of superstition, doting on images and pictures, or the like.

[John Owen, from A Discourse concerning Evangelical Love, Church Peace, and Unity. Quoted in James Moffatt. (1904). The Golden Book of John Owen. London: Hodder and Stoughton. p104-5]

This is a tricky one, for the simple reason that evangelical Christianity, at least in its best form, is committed to the idea of the centrality both of doctrine (something which can be given expression using a public vocabulary) and of the experience of God’s grace in the life of the individual.  The two things are formally separable and this, of course, means that the public distinctives of evangelicalism can be learned by those who lack the second, while the second can be claimed with no real grasp of the first.  This has led, in some quarters, to a fear not simply that the truth might be preached through the mouths of those who are actually unbelievers but also that there can be a fundamental opposition between the two, the head and the heart, and that the latter, the heart, should therefore be given precedence.  Now, I want to be careful here, in that I do not want to be misinterpreted as saying that conversion is not a prerequisite for ministry.  It most certainly is; but I do want to say that the content and efficacy of the gospel does not depend in any way whatsoever upon the moral qualities or salvific status of the individual who brings the message.  The early church debated precisely this issue in relation to the efficacy of ministry of those who had fallen away during times of persecution and then returned to their old jobs when the persecution died down.  It was decided then - and rightly so - that the Word of God was the Word of God, and not dependent upon the person bringing it to the church.  To take any other position is surely disastrous, as none of us can know for certain what the state of anyone else’s heart is; it is only because the gospel concerns the promise of God revealed in Christ that we can have confidence in the efficacy of the message preached.  To put it more bluntly: it is better to have the gospel competently preached by one who proves to be an unrepentant adulterer than to have it preached incompetently by one who has been born again, precisely because it is the Word which is efficacious not the heart of the preacher.

This has ramifications for various aspects of church life, not least in the realm of attitude towards learning.  How many times have you heard the comment, ‘Old Mrs Jones has walked with the Lord for fifty years and knows more of God than any professor with a PhD.’  On one level, the comment might well be true - walking with the Lord in faith will get you into heaven in a way that mere possession of a PhD certainly will not.  Nevertheless, when we grasp that the gospel is first of all a message, a proclamation of what God has done in Jesus Christ, and that experience comes as a response to that message, it is quite clear that a professor with a PhD may well have certain insights into that gospel message which Mrs Jones, for all her practical godliness, does not.  Much of the anti-intellectualism which pours from pulpits in churches, from Reformed to charismatic, is the result of precisely this confusion between gospel as message and the believer’s response in experience - a confusion which has just enough appearance of truth to be superficially plausible while resting on a fundamentally skewed understanding of what the gospel actually is.  Only when the church comes to acknowledge in both belief and practice that the gospel is a message, not a feeling or an experience, will such fuzzy thinking (and much else) finally be put to rest.

This is perhaps putting it somewhat crudely, but it makes the point that the gospel is a message with content and not simply a case of one person communicating an experience to a group of others.  That is, after all, the essence of old-fashioned liberalism - Christianity is the feeling, not the doctrine, and theology is simply reflection upon religious psychology not upon the revelation of God.

Carl Trueman (The Wages Of Spin - Chapter III Theology And The Church: Divorce Or Marriage?  pages 70-72)

As for the assertion that beyond the apostolic period the only pattern for healing is James 5:13-15, and that none were to have ‘gifts of healings’ any more, such an affirmation is simply arbitrary and rests on the misunderstanding that ‘gifts of healings’ means the quasi-magical ability to perform evidentialist healings at will in order to authenticate the gospel. Such a view has no place in serious New Testament scholarship.

Max Turner, The Holy Spirit and Spiritual Gifts: Then and Now (Paternoster, 1999), p329

Thanks, Max, for making that so clear!

Ruthven observes that a comparison of Warfield’s treatment of the biblical miracles with his negative reponse to later claims for miracles reveals an epistemological incoherence at the heart of his view of ‘miracle’. On the one hand, he expects the biblical miracles to be transparent to ‘common sense’ (i.e. it is ‘evident’ they are God’s own work, not that of some created power), while on the other, even so well-attested an event as the complete and spontaneous healing of Pierre de Rudder’s badly broken legs at Lourdes is not permitted the title ‘miracle’ on the grounds that the healing might turn out to be explicable in terms of as yet unknown and mysterious natural forces. How then is ‘common sense’ supposed to detect that the power unleashed to heal the man at the Beautiful Gate, who had been lame from birth (Acts 3:2-8), was God alone, and directly, rather than a providential use of the same mysterious as-yet-unknown-to-us natural forces? The answer, of course, is that we have no independent means for making such a distinction. Any assertion that a ‘miracle’ has taken place in the sense Warfield intends is ultimately a confessional and theological assertion, with a fideistic a priori, not simply the result of observation processed through ‘common sense’.

Max Turner, The Holy Spirit and Spiritual Gifts: Then and Now (Paternoster, 1999), p290

Set before you the sovereignty of God. Eye Him as a Being infinitely superior to you, at whose pleasure you and all you have subsist (Ps. 115. 3), which is the most conclusive reason and argument for submission (Ps. 46. 10). For if we, and all we have proceeded from His will, how right it is that we be resigned up to it! It is not many years ago since we were not, and when it pleased Him to bring us upon the stage of action, we had no liberty of contracting with Him on what terms we would come into the world, or refuse to be, except we might have our being on such terms as we desired. His sovereignty is gloriously displayed in His eternal decrees and temporal providences. He might have put you into what rank of creatures He pleased. He might have made you the most despicable creatures, worms or toads: or, if men, the most vile, abject and miserable among men; and when you had run through all the miseries of this life, have damned you to eternity, made you miserable for ever, and all this without any wrong to you. And shall not this quieten us under the common afflictions of this life?