THE MONTANIST CONTROVERSY - Wind Ministries

Found here. A very interesting perspective regarding the early church.

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TESTING THE PROPHETIC SERIES

In the 2nd century, in an area known as Phygria (present-day Turkey), a man named Montanus had been recently converted to the Christian faith. Asterius Urbanas, who wrote about the Monastist movement, described Montanus as a man with “excessive lust of his soul after taking the lead”. Montanus wanted to be the leader. In meetings, Montanus would become overwhelmed by some spiritual influence and he would prophesy. Eventually, he drew a number of people away from the churches in Phygria and they began calling themselves The New Prophecy movement.

Montanus had identified two women, Maximilla and Prisca. He convinced these women to leave their husbands through a prophetic word. Both women became integral to the New Prophecy movement. For a time, Montanus attracted the support of Tertullian, a highly respected church father of the time. This lent an air of credibility to the New Prophecy movement. Initially, it was hard to deny the attractiveness of what was happening in Phygria. They were theologically orthodox, and many were become quite passionate about the Christian way. Montanus emphasized a strict ascetic discipline as the path to spiritual maturity.

The Montanist claimed direct descendance from the prophets of the New Testament. They saw themselves as carrying on the function of the prophetic office in line with Agabus, the daughters of Philip, and two early church prophetic figures; a woman known as Ammia of Philadelphia and a man respected as a prophet named Quadratus.

PS: A final note on tax day - by Robert Reich

Found here. Our comments in bold.

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Marxists need a bad guy, and that is always a person who has more money than them. Dr. Reich intends to create discord, greed and envy based on money. Thus his article is not to inform, but to agitate.  He's an agent of the political Left, with an agenda to promulgate The Narrative in order to foment revolution.

He'd prefer to have people vote themselves into socialism, but be assured that the typical Marxist has no moral problem with bloody revolution, as we saw in the 2020 summer riots. This is the continuing history of Marxism, where only the methods have changed, but not the goals.

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Deaconesses and Female Deacons -Michelle Lesley

Found here. My comments in bold.

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As is typical for Ms. Lesley (and many of those we call the Doctrinal Police), she hardly quotes Scripture. We are continually astonished at how these teachers can write thousands of words about the Bible but can barely bring themselves to quote it.

For today's post, we think Ms. Lesley's problem is not necessarily her bad doctrine, but rather, her trust in bad translation. It seems she thinks that we should be just as confident in the translators as Scripture itself. But translators are subject to bias, cultural and political understanding, and tradition.

We do not think translators are dishonest, they are simply products of their environment and training. Generally, they do a difficult job pretty well. But not perfectly. Especially when we consider their work on 1 Timothy 3; what they tell us the Greek means borders on malpractice.

Will will demonstrate below.

Also, we note in passing the redundancy contained in Ms. Lesley's title.

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Why we lift hands, and why we should.

Recently we've been reconsidering many of the things we thought we understood regarding doctrine and faith. We have begun to question certain beliefs, church structures, and practices of the western church. Too often we have discovered unbiblical doctrines and activities. This causes us concern. We have deemed this our “Rethink.”

Our questions include, how did we arrive at our doctrines? Does the Bible really teach what we think it teaches? Why do churches do what they do? What is the biblical basis of church leadership structure? Why do certain traditions get entrenched?

It's easy to be spoon fed the conventional wisdom, but it's an entirely separate thing to search these things out for one's self. In the past we have read the Bible with these unexamined understandings and interpreted what we read through those lenses. We were lazy about our Bible study, assuming that pastors and theologians were telling us the truth, but we rarely checked it out for ourselves.

Therefore, these Rethinks are our attempt to remedy the situation.

We should note that we are not Bible scholars, but we believe that one doesn't need to be in order to understand the Word of God.

Did Jesus drink the cup of the Father's wrath?

Excerpt found here. Our comments in bold.

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There seems to be a lot of confusion and bad teaching regarding Jesus' sacrificial death. We have frequently commented on some of these errors. Therefore, we have made it a priority in our blog to examine the errant teaching regarding this.

In this excerpt, Ms. Lesley makes a couple of assertions:

Christ carried our sin. He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree… (1 Peter 2:24). There’s no way we could begin to fathom what it was like for Christ to carry every single sin of billions of people in His body. But He didn’t just have the weight of that sin on His shoulders, He also propitiated God’s wrath toward every single one of those sins. God poured out the cup of His wrath for our sin and Jesus drank every last drop of it. 

So in Ms. Lesley's view, 

1) Christ bore our sin, and, 

2) Jesus drank the cup of God's wrath. 

Will all Israel be saved?

Recently we've been reconsidering many of the things we thought we understood regarding doctrine and faith. We have begun to question certain beliefs, church structures, and practices of the western church. Too often we have discovered unbiblical doctrines and activities. This causes us concern. We have deemed this our “Rethink.”

Our questions include, how did we arrive at our doctrines? Does the Bible really teach what we think it teaches? Why do churches do what they do? What is the biblical basis of church leadership structure? Why do certain traditions get entrenched?

It's easy to be spoon fed the conventional wisdom, but it's an entirely separate thing to search these things out for one's self. In the past we have read the Bible with these unexamined understandings and interpreted what we read through those lenses. We were lazy about our Bible study, assuming that pastors and theologians were telling us the truth, but we rarely checked it out for ourselves.

Therefore, these Rethinks are our attempt to remedy the situation.

We should note that we are not Bible scholars, but we believe that one doesn't need to be in order to understand the Word of God.

God Desires That ABSOLUTELY NONE Should Perish? - EDITED BY: RM Kane

Excerpted from here. Our comments in bold.
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This author has a particular point of view as a Calvinist, which we understand, but simply pronounces his belief as self-evidently true. His interpretation of the subject verse is pulled out of thin air, without regard for the words used or the thought being communicated.

Through this passage Peter is talking about scoffers [2Pe. 3:3]. They were mocking the idea of Jesus coming again [2Pe. 3:4]. He then notes the eternal nature of God's existence [2Pe. 3:8], which means God is not slow in keeping His promise [2Pe. 3:9].

It is important to note that God is waiting for something, which brings us to the subject verse.

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Trying to Excuse the Idolization of Nationalism - By Anthony Wade

Excerpted from here. Our comments in bold.
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We can only take so much of Rev. Wade's flame-throwing, so today we are just going to deal with two excerpts. 

Rev. Wade is obsessed with the NAR. He cruises Charisma News just looking for targets, then blasts away at them for offenses, imaginary, supposed, misread and inferred. Today he levels his sights on Joseph Mattera.

We should note that we do not intend to defend Mattera or the NAR.

Strangely, this "Reverend" rarely quotes Scripture. He has a lot to say about what proper beliefs should be, and any violation, perceived or real, unleashes his wrath. But he never documents his claims. He spouts rhetoric in a stream-of-consciousness mode, repeatedly making various claims as if they were unassailable truth. 

Lastly, we should remind the reader once again that Rev. Wade is a political leftist, which is the principal reason he objects to the idea of "Christian Nationalism." 

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God’s Sovereignty and Glory - by Derek Thomas

Found here. Our comments in bold.

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We have been on the lookout lately for someone who can coherently explain God's sovereignty as it relates to election. A previous post examined a failed attempt to explain. Here's another. 

The author we are examining today basically assembles a word salad. He blows the opportunity to explain anything. Truly, there is no elucidation here, just a series of assertions with a random tangent or two thrown in. He completely sidesteps the issue.

The thing that Calvinists and reformists seem to have difficulty with is the division point between what is pre-ordained and what isn't. By that we mean, a Calvinist will always assert that God did not create or cause sin, that the unsaved are choosing to sin by their own free will, and that the devil chose to rebel, etc; but on the other hand will deny the other side of the coin, that people have free will in the salvation process.  

This means that Calvinists accede to free will, at least on the sin side, because they simply can't let God be the author of evil. But they are unable to cite the verses that speak of this delineation.

The Calvinist wants to interpret the nature of God through his own definitions and finds tension with the violations of his definitions. So the Calvinist needs workarounds and complicated explanations. He creates a system of rules, precepts, and terminology that sound high minded and sophisticated:

• evil as a privation of the good, 
• Evil is a matter of ontology (being).
• contingency of second causes 
• God is the “first cause” of all things, but evil is a product of “second causes.” 
• the proximate cause is one thing, and the remote cause another.

This is the process of systematic theology, which at times is barely distinguishable from nonsense. 

Our position is that God is completely sovereign, and knows every detail of everything that has happened and will happen, everywhere. But sovereignty is not control. He is God, therefore He decides His sovereignty on His terms. Sovereignty does not come to bear on free choice, simply because it is God who decides what His sovereignty is and how it operates. 

God certainly can know everything and there still be free choice in man. He has this ability. These are not the binary equations Calvinists suppose they are.

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