Post
by steve » Tue Mar 22, 2011 7:23 pm
My reflections on the above video clip:
Bill Johnson, the preacher in the clip is counting on an audience that is there to be stimulated by witticisms, rather than to be discipled in the truth. Statements like, "The reason Peter's shadow healed people is because your shadow will always release whatever overshadows you," is, of course, nonsensical. The scriptures do not teach it, nor does reality confirm it—nor does it even make sense. The comment got some whoops and cheers from the audience (as it was calculated to do), but it is just the kind of silliness that has been bleeding the last drops of credibility from the charismatic movement over the past half-century, and has forced many Christians concerned about the reputation of Christ increasingly to distance themselves from it.
The preacher (typically of his ilk) mocks the idea that pain and suffering may be God's tools to shape us and to build us up spiritually. He says we have created a theology from our "disappointments" rather than from "revelation." I can't answer for others, but I built my theology from sources like Genesis, Job, the Psalms, the prophets, Jesus, Paul, James and Peter. I count the teachings of these sources to be a revelation from God. The preacher did not tell us from which revelations, or from which authors, he has derived his theology. He certainly did not use scripture.
Johnson points to certain aspects of Jesus' ministry (healing, calming a storm, etc.) as descriptive of normative life on earth, but does not seem to see Christ's weakness, shame and suffering (through which Christ was "made perfect" and "learned obedience") as equally normative. Though I did not hear him comment upon this, he must certainly think that Paul, who believed that his sufferings were actually spiritually beneficial to himself and to the church, greatly miscalculated what the norms of Christian experience should be. If Paul didn't know, I wonder how Johnson found out? Was he, perhaps, caught into a fourth heaven?
The audience does not appear to be made up of critical thinkers—which is sad, since the Apostle Paul insisted that those who speak should be judged by their audience. Too many Christians have been afraid to obey this injunction for so long that they seem to have lost the capacity to listen and think simultaneously.
For example, the preacher seems to think that the petition, "Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven," actually means: "May all of the conditions that prevail in heaven also characterize existence on earth" (a very nice thought, which would immediately eliminate aging, marriage, secular employment, child-rearing, evangelism, persecution, and a great number of other things that do not go on in heaven).
To say that God's will should be done on earth just as God's will is done in heaven is not the same thing as saying that God's will for our circumstances on earth is the same as what will be God's will for us once we get to heaven. If God wished to have exactly the same conditions prevailing on earth as prevail in heaven (e.g., no trials), then one of the two places is redundant. Earth is a place of warfare; heaven is rest. Earth is a place of mortality and death; heaven is a place of immortality. Earth is a place of faith; heaven is a place of sight. Earth is the training ground of the soul; heaven is the destiny of the fully-trained soul. God's will in heaven is that heaven's business is perfectly done in heaven. His will for earth is that earth's business is perfectly done on earth.
If preachers would become more interested in preparing their congregations for the realities of life, rather than charming them with shallow (and untrue) aphorisms, we might actually begin to see the healing of the charismatic movement of its tragic sickness of carnality and immaturity, which has taken what was once the most dynamic sector of the modern church and reduced it to a laughingstock among sensible observers.
TK, I hope this is not your pastor that I am thus critiquing. I hope not to offend you, if it is. I am far more impressed with you than with him.