Strange Firony and Frustration

I promised to update the previous post, but life is running at mach 1 right now.

I’ll do my best to update quickly now as I providentially have around two spare hours in my day, but this will pretty much be a frantic rant.  Dr. Brown has reached out to me for dialogue and unblocked me on Twitter.  Regardless of disagreements, that’s commendable.  I have had some interaction with him privately, and that’s still ongoing.

I will say that Dr. Brown claims that he was given the impression that Phil Johnson was the person to contact in order to arrange a dialogue with John MacArthur (that’s a fairly public claim, so I don’t believe I’m revealing private correspondence).  Phil has responded to Brown’s claims today with this updated article, claiming otherwise.  Phil has provided some rather straightforward comments, where as I haven’t seen anything of corresponding clarity from Dr. Brown.  He may have responded in kind, but I haven’t seen it.

I’m in no place to comment, seeing that I don’t have the necessary information to have an opinion beyond what I’ve already insinuated:  Phil appears to address these things candidly and with straightforwardness, which makes him look more credible…

…but that situation is not really what has frustrated me with this all.

Strange Firony…

***Update at the bottom***

I honestly, sincerely wish I could move on from the topic of the Charismatic Movement, but it just keeps on coming up.  It’s been almost two years since the Strange Fire conference, and it seemed like all the parties involved got their shots in.

The Cessationists made their reasonable appeals, made a lot of unreasonable rants, published their stuff, wrote their responses, etc.

The Continuationists basically cried about division and broad brushes.

The Pentecostals basically cried about division and broad brushes.

The Charismatics basically cried about division and broad brushes.

Charisma Magazine kept on doing everything possibly in their power to provide an endless tsunami of amazing examples as to why the Strange Fire Conference was necessary (and possibly understated things: every single word in that statement links to a separate mind-numbing article, just for a few dozen examples)

There has been biblical proportions of ink spilled on the topic and I’ve been involved in a small percentage of said spillage.  In fact, I got started blogging more seriously when Dr. Michael Brown started laying salvos against the conference, before the conference.  We interacted quite a bit and then yesterday, I saw this:

So what exactly is the prosperity gospel?

I’m obviously not blogging much these days.  The reason is two-fold:

1.  I’m editing a book and that is taking up all my available energy.

2.  I’m in my final two weeks of Hepatitis treatment and as the drugs accumulate in my system, life is getting rougher.  My energy levels are super low and don’t seem to get restored (due to the fact that I have very little hemoglobin, among other things).  I simply cannot sleep at night either (last night between 10pm and 8am I managed a little less than 4 hours of sleep).  I have a constant headache that never goes anywhere.  It’s going to get worse as the drugs build in my system, but then on about Dec. 22nd I’ll be done and they’ll slowly dissipate out of my system over the next six months.  I’m surviving well enough and don’t really have anything to complain about; all those things I mentioned are at the level of “inconvenience”.

Quick Thoughts: Guess what Charisma Magazine did?

Did Charisma let some ranting “prophet” share their latest divine revelation, or post an article promoting a heresy condemned by an early church ecumenical council?

Well, probably…but that’s not exactly news.

What Charisma did do was allow noted cessationist and biblical exegete, Dr. Albert Mohler, to post an article on their website that goes after Joel & Victoria Osteen for their prosperity gospel theology.

No, I’m serious.

Three Highly Important Resources Regarding the “Gay Christians” Movement

I’m currently spending several hours in the hospital every day, lying on a bed, getting IV treatment that is strengthening my body in order to prep me for the upcoming treatment that I’ve been fighting for (and my health insurance provider recently agreed to pay for – Praise the Lord!).  I’ve been using this time to catch up on various things I’ve wanted to listen to, and today I listened to some very helpful resources I wanted to make known to my readers.  The first is this: