Lunar Skeletons

Blogroll Disclaimer

Most old salts on the Blogific Ocean know what a blogroll is all about, and they also know that having links on blogroll to other web sites does not necessarily constitute an endorsement of the opinions expressed on those web sites. However, for the sake of those greenhorns who happen to visit here, lest they misunderstand things, I should point out that my blogroll contains links to other web sites that I happen to find interesting for a variety of reasons. But it does not mean that I endorse all the opinions expressed on those web sites, nor what they in turn happen to link to.

Addendum: After thinking about it, I've decided to just eliminate the blogroll altogether, except for some generic news sites. It's just too easy for a blogroll to be misconstrued as an endorsement of some kind. But very few people read Lunar Skeletons anyhow, so I don't have to worry about depriving anybody of a much needed link. Blogging consists mostly of having a weird conversation with one's self.

Labels: blogology

At his blog, Greg Laurie mentioned that he was on television today talking about the Jesus Movement.
Yes, my wife and I remember when Greg Laurie had hair.

And, yes indeed, Chuck Smith was one of the key figures, but there were many other "key figures" as well, who don't necessarily get television time nowadays. There was Lonnie Frisbee, who led Greg (and my wife) to Christ, who helped to kick start the growth of Smith's church in Costa Mesa, and who was the one who started Greg's church in Riverside, California; and there was Duane Pedersen who ran the Hollywood Free Paper, who coined the term "Jesus People"; and there was Arthur Blessitt who carried a cross around the world; and Linda Meissner who started the Jesus People Army in Seattle; and there were also Jack Sparks, Jim Palosaari, David Berg, Ted Wise, John Higgins, Kent Philpott, David Hoyt, Glenn Kaiser, John Wimber, Brant Baker, and many other people as well.

The very last thing anybody should think is that the Jesus Movement was somehow the exclusive franchise of Chuck Smith and Calvary Chapel. It most certainly was not.

It was His revival, and it wasn't just happening in a couple of places in SoCal. It was happening in many different places across the country and overseas.

Now the funny thing about revivals is that everybody is happy to take ownership of them once the dust has settled and they have receded safely into history. But at the time those revivals were actually happening, which had their ups and downs, and fallible people as well, there was often fierce opposition and bitter denunciations of them. It's truely remarkable to me how, in the minds of their contemporary critics, those revivals always ended up at the time being attributed to the Devil, as though the Devil were heavily invested in the revival business and had achieved a near monopoly on the entire market. Just think. Has there ever been a revival that was universally welcomed?¹ This reaction usually happened because the revival had gone beyond some limit that its critics had set beforehand, beyond which, they thought, God could not possibly cross. Yet what is ironic is that, years later, many will engage in a nostalgic yearning for the past—such as the "Jesus Movement," which is a good example—while conveniently forgetting that at the time it too had its share of problems as well as plenty of opposition.

Remember, the "Jesus Movement" was beckoning people who were dismissed as "hippie freaks."² And indeed it was a messy affair. Yet thanks to that messy affair, people like Chuck Smith, and Greg Laurie, and many others, are where they are today. It seems that God had much more faith in what He was doing than many people had at the time. He was like a farmer who knew to exercise patience with regards to His harvest. Farming is like that, requiring plenty of manure and patience, which is why some people don't like farming. They want things done immediately, and are offended by the odor of manure.

Anyhow, the danger of people taking ownership over a past revival is that doing so could mislead them into thinking that they can now set up new boundaries for God on the basis of what they think happened in the past—often mentally sweeping under the amnestic rug the untidy aspects. But when He again proceeds to ignore those boundaries, as He often does, they end up making the same mistake as the earlier critics did, and therefore they fail to recognize what is happening today.³

For it seems, nowadays, that people have no patience whatsoever, and when things are even the slightest bit not what they expected, they are even quicker than ever before to call up that way of thinking that says in effect that the Devil is (once again) bringing another revival to the Church.‡ And using the Internet it's possible today for them to spread this perennial idea over the entire Earth with blazing rapidity.

Modern technology is amazing, isn't it? But it also has its downside, for it is a very poor substitute for experience. To truely know what a revival is about, you have to be there, and not just for a day or two. Depending on the Internet to understand what's happening is a mistake; there is simply too much noise and static and distortion on the Internet for it to be a reliable guide. And the blogosphere pours out plenty of phony "discernment," which is coming from people who never get beyond the confines of their computer screens and their big egos—Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? The problem with all of this is that the Internet has amplified the noise to deafening levels, all the while shortening the timespans at which things are perceived to operate—nobody has the patience to wait things out for the harvest. The Internet inherently causes things to be seen through a warped mirror.

For example, it took years for the Azusa Street Revival of 1906 to fully work itself out. But had the Internet existed then, what would the reaction had been? The initial reaction was actually very negative, but the Internet would have elevated that opposition to a shreaking atomic pitch. The same hold true for the "Jesus Movement" as well. Some of the hippies who converted were still smoking ganja for a time before they understood they didn't need it anymore. But had the blogific "discernment specialists"† gotten a hold of this, if they had existed back then, what an earth-shaking uproar they would have created! In both cases, thanks to the Internet, the revival would have been killed off, and the baby thrown out, along with the bathwater, the soap, the towels, the hot water heater, and the baby's mother and father to boot.

¹ I mean here by churches in general. The world's reaction on the other hand is most often a blend of sophisticated scoffing and condescending derision, except for some whose eyes are opened, in which case they end up joining it.

² Likewise there's much the same reaction when people look at Todd Bentley, for example, and find his tattoos and body piercings to be rather unnerving.

³ Unlike your plastics, revivals are seldom recyclable. Also, I don't like to over do it on recycling of past blog entries. So anyone who wishes to read my earlier thoughts on this subject should consult my May 28th entry in the archives.

‡ If the notion of "the Devil bringing revival to the Church" sounds crazy, well, that's because it is crazy. But I say it this way to make an ironic point about what some xtians end up believing in: a great big proactive Devil, and a distant, coldhearted God who's hardly more than an intellectual abstraction.

† The IDJIT practitioners as I have earlier called them.

Labels: blogology, recycling, revivalology

Todd Bentley has gotten the attention of the news media. None other than sleaze-meister Geraldo Rivera has jumped in on the Lakeland story; MSNBC also did an interview, and a Nightline segment is planned. But if I were Bentley's advisor, I would tell him to be extremely cautious in dealing with the news media. They are not his friends.

Most news media people don't have any faith, and they're not in the least bit interested in repentance and submitting themselves to XP. So even if they were to stumble into the real thing, they wouldn't necessarily recognize what it is even if it crawled up their noses and out their ears. Probably Geraldo's entire concept of revival is limited to whatever fits into the standard Elmer Gantry paradigm. And I surmise that he is looking for another vault to pry open, hoping to find something nasty or sensational.

Anyhow, the Charlotte Observer published an interesting transcript of their telephone interview with Bentley. The occasion of the interview was his holding a meeting in Concord, North Carolina, back around June 18th.

On the other hand, I would say the general MSM reaction is typified more by this article in the Washington Times by Julia Duin.

And the Internet noise regarding Bentley has reached, over the last couple of weeks, a level of shrillness that is now deafening: For googling on "Todd Bentley" now gives 566,000 hits, and of these a whopping 9,900 come up by qualifying the search using the word "heretic." By way of comparison, using "Greg Laurie" (who's been around much longer) only rings up 166,000 hits, and of these only a measly 937 come up using "heretic." Therefore, allowing for the proportional difference in net presence, this works out to mean that Todd Bentley is 3.10 times more heretical than Greg Laurie. Although this ratio tends to bounce up and down, it seems to stay in Bentley's favor.

Well, actually what it proves is that there are now a lot of people on the web yelling their heads off, shouting one thing or shouting another, but accomplishing nothing.

Labels: blogology, revivalology

IDJIT

Well, on further thought, it occured to me that some bloggers on the Internet have such acute and powerful discernment that it's nothing less than astonishing. For instance, they could be all the way up in the Yukon, and yet somehow, miracle of miracles, they can sniff out what's going on spiritually in people's hearts as far away as Florida—and that without ever once leaving their keyboards and computer screens and actually going to Florida.

This is so remarkable that it takes my breath away, the more I think about it. Therefore I have coined a specific term describing this peculiar and extraordinary ability that the Internet seems to confer on certain people. I call the effect Internet & Discernment Jointly Interoperating Together, or IDJIT¹ for short.

In this specific case, Todd Bentley is neither here nor there—which is why I have the comment box turned off, since I don't want the Discernment Police who happen to google on "Todd Bentley" to come here and lard up things with tiresome ranting because I am simply not interested in it. Now if Bentley were coming to Land-In-Between, then maybe I might go and investigate for myself. Unfortunately, I don't have the inclination, nor the funds, nor the vacation time, to go all the way to Florida to spend several weeks watching what's going on. Therefore, I choose to withhold judgement about him, because I am not endowed with super-discernment antennae that can detect vibrations all the way across the country. I just have to be there myself in a very meatspace kind of way in order to decide. However, the case of Bentley does point up how IDJIT is such an remarkable phenomenon.

Indeed, the IDJIT phenomenon is so astonishing that even conversing with angels or having gold dust turn up in your Bible cannot compare with it. Thanks to the Internet and IDJIT, some people can now exercise an ability almost akin to ominiscience. For what amazes me the most is how some IDJIT practitioners can determine infallibly whether something is "from God" from a distance by merely reading other bloggers or going by whatever second-hand hearsay gets published on the Web. Without ever leaving their computers, they can probe to the inmost depths of things, detecting in advance what fruit will result; they can pronounce from great distances on the level of repentance and humility of the people involved; and they can with upmost acuity distinguish between false and true miracles; and they have utterly perspicacious insight on what God will and will not do in any given situation, especially when He is dealing with very messy humankind. There is nothing beyond their ken it seems.

On the other hand, it occurs to me that somehow all of this powerful IDJIT has led to some rather ludicrous results. A good example of this would be the treatment often done on evangelist Greg Laurie; and I mention Greg because he is the best example that I know something about, although, unlike Bentley, there is nothing in the least sensational about him. Yet googling on Greg's name will yield all sorts of IDP² dossiers alleging what a horrific, blood-curdling heretic Greg is. But this is not a surprise since the IDJIT smellfungus can detect the tiniest nosegay of heresy from twenty-thousand leagues away. And indeed these nitpickers are so smart they know how to use the old "cut and paste" procedures to assemble thoroughly incriminating montages on Greg. A little piece cut from here, a little piece from there, and lo and behold, you have enough to damn just about anybody. But when I look at their vaunted compilations, I can only laugh my head off³, because after having been there at Greg's church for about 15 years listening to him preach, I at least know him well enough to appreciate what complete rubbish these dossiers actually are. This comes from my having seen the big picture, from the actual experience of being there.

There are some things that blogging and the Internet just doesn't cut. To truely know you have to go. That's the way I see it.

Dire Dan once complained about the prevalent lack of discernment in the Church. Well, that may be. But as I was telling him not long ago, for some reason there is no lack of it on the Internet, where thanks to IDJIT, there's now so much discernment that it's coming out our ears and noses.

¹ The obsolete term for this, which occurs in some of the older technical literature, is IDAE or "Internet Discernment Amplification Effect."

² Internet Discernment Police.

³ The act of lolliating at something patently ridiculous.

Labels: blogology, revivalology

Some Lakeland Addenda

§1 Someone named Steve Hickey, who sounds like he was actually there in Lakeland, has a different view on the matter. Also, I notice that somebody has put in a Wikipedia entry for Todd Bentley. However, I do not regard the Wikipedia as being a reliable source of accurate information, especially when it comes to biographic entries for anybody who might be controversial, and so I would take anything there with a grain of salt…er, more like a truckload of salt. Sometimes the Wikipedia is hardly better than an agitprop tool, or a cheap way to conduct a smear campaign; and sometimes it takes the threat of a libel lawsuit to get the entries cleaned up (assuming someone can afford the lawyers). Nonetheless, that Bentley might have had a checkered past in his younger days may explain why some in the news media and the blogocracy have gotten interested in Lakeland.

§2 By every measure, Todd Bentley is turning into a sizable web event. As of this date, googling on his name gives 419,000 hits, which is way past the 155,000 hits that googling on "Greg Laurie" will return. And Greg has been around much, much longer. Furthermore, everybody has their opinion. For example, if I google search using the phrase "Todd Bentley heretic," that will yield 5,670 hits. On the other hand, if I were to google using "Greg Laurie heretic," that gives only 962 hits. Well, that proves everything, doesn't it? That Todd Bentley is worse than Greg Laurie.

But what do really I think? Well, I think what it proves is the ultimate absurdity of the Internet: all this high-speed networking, but so little trustworthy knowledge—and so little of anything of any real substance being accomplished. The bandwidth is clogged, and the noise-to-signal ratio is approaching infinity. What human being has the time to sort out all this confusion?

Thanks to the Internet, garrulousness has now been elevated to a level that threatens to destroy civilization—to paraphrase Neil Postman, we are blogging ourselves to death.

And furthermore, I really don't think I have any obligation to form, pronto quick, any opinions about Todd Bentley per se. It's his effect on the web that I have been noticing, and things are following well-worn patterns, accompanied by the usual overload of vituperation. So even if Bentley were a "man of God", and Lakeland, Florida, were the scene of a tremendous spiritual revival, you will never know it going by the Internet.

§3 As I said, I have no opinion one way or the other about L'Affaire Bentley. But let us suppose that all the naysayers are absolutely correct in their assertions that Bentley is phony baloney, and that the foofaraw in Lakeland, Florida, is bogus and will burn itself out in a short time—that it was a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing. Well, what will it prove? Well, in my mind it will prove nothing surprising—it would mean business as usual continues in America, and nothing has turned around. For I am already convinced that this country¹ is rotting from the inside out and cannot last; and I am probably going to end up as just another statistic in the process of things falling to pieces. So if in the end Lakeland gets chalked up on the "comes-to-nothing" side of the ledger, along with so much else, well, then it's one more piece of evidence supporting my conviction. And who knows? Perhaps the "lampstand is getting removed" from here, and the light is in the processing of getting moved elsewhere. China maybe? Yet why should this be so shocking to anyone? We have been warned already about this possibility, and it's happened before elsewhere². For example, just consider Western Europe. The light there has already gone out, and it's all over but the shouting and the dreary end game of mere arithmetic and demographics. And since this country has been sowing to the wind for such a long time now, why should anybody be surprised when the whirlwind finally gets reaped?

§4 On the other hand, there is the other possibility. Suppose that Lakeland is the real thing. Can it last? The answer is maybe not; I wouldn't bet on it. In history there has seldom been a revival that wasn't stubbornly opposed by churches. Revivals can be refused, or even strangled in the cradle, especially if they don't come on the terms we expected. And now with the Internet, opposition can be raised to a level of shrillness that would have been unobtainable in the past, and it can be much more widely disseminated than was ever possible before. And I have personally seen a small revival destroyed, but this was back before the Internet and the blogosphere existed. Today things have been raised to mega-decibel levels—the Internet serving almost as the Demon of Cacophony—which would make it even more miraculous that any revival could survive such a deafening drumbeat of opposition. So if things were to fizzle out in Lakeland, that doesn't necessarily disprove it.

§5 Answering his critics, Todd Bentley speaks for himself. But I don't think this will change very many minds. Posting anything on the Internet seldom changes the minds of one's opponents.

¹ And the Church too. For example, try reading Schaeffer's "The Great Evangelical Disaster." Everything said therein is more so nowadays and in spades.

² Consult Ps. 9:15-16. God has a funny way of painting nations into corners.

Labels: blogology, revivalology

Concluding Footnotes

"Some Enlightened Common Sense Discernment Regarding Revivals" is a satire. I say this just in case some people can't figure that out.

And having written it, I am sure it will make plenty of bloggers pretty angry at me. Satires tend to do that. That's the risk I run. And there was plenty of satire elsewhere in what I wrote above.

However, for the sake that credit gets acknowledged, I will clarify that it is a parody based on this article by Dan Edelen.

Now on a different note, lately I have been feeling disgusted with the whole blogific scene, too much of which is big waste of time and where there is plenty of ego-stroking, self-promotion, and vanity. And there are days when I think the Internet might be near to becoming the worst thing to happen to Xnty since 313 A.D. And I am sure that had the Internet existed in their day, there would have been plenty of bloggers merrily shredding vulnerable and fallible people like a Lonnie Frisbee or a Brant Baker, who though stumbling badly yet answered the call of God on their lives. In a way, it's good Brant and Lonnie left the scene the time they did before the whole Internet monstrosity came into existence, because it would have murdered them in an instant.

In fact, had the Internet existed back in their times, without any doubt I am convinced that it would have annihilated William J. Seymour, Maria Woodworth-Etter, Evan Roberts, Smith Wigglesworth, John G. Lake, Robert Semple, Aimee Semple McPherson, Kathyrin Kuhlman, and a host of other people too many to list here.

Now publishing satire runs the risk of offending some people who expect everyone to kowtow to their opinions and who think nothing of vilifying someone like Todd Bentley at the drop of a hat. But it's what I had to say, and if people misunderstand it or don't like it, that's the way it goes. Yes, Todd Bentley might be weird, but there are days for me when the the Internet is even more irksome.

Labels: blogology, parody, revivalology

Dan Edelen has some interesting things to say about the dangers of blogging. In my comments to him, I responded with the following:
A totalitarian society doesn't necessarily have to be one run by a government. And I find more and more that most blogs are not worth enough of my time to read.

Labels: blogology, declinism

Shekinah Fellowship is a ministry that presently operates down in Southern California. In a manner of speaking, it is also the renascence of an earlier church that once existed back in the 1970s, which I was a part of once, although peripherally. Their blog features postings from several of its current leaders, and it cover a variety of xtian topics, some of which have the purpose of preserving the historical record regarding the healing ministry of the late Brant Baker, who was the chief pastor of Shekinah Fellowship back in the 1970s. As far as I know, they are the only people who have made any effort to keep that history from disappearing altogether. Brant Baker's story, though different in many ways, would have been every bit as interesting and as tragic as the story about Lonnie Frisbee.

Now Lunar Skeletons is my personal fueilleton, a mostly literary blog, on which I talk about sundry things that happen to interest me. Mainly I do reviews of books that I've read, or I talk about some event up here in Land-In-Between, or I mouth off about politics or other blogs, when I feel particularly irritable. And here I've tried my hand at such things as publishing my grandfather's oral autobiography, or writing bad political satire, or trying to defend Greg Laurie when I thought he was being unfairly criticized by malcontented people; or I rant about a large number of other unimportant things that I've now forgotten about. But I don't view Lunar Skeletons as being, insofar as its primary focus is concerned, any sort of "xtian ministry" blog. I never intended to do that here.

On the other hand, the leadership at Shekinah Fellowship have kindly invited me to forward to them for publishing anything I felt was significant enough to share with other xtians. Since their focus is primarily on being a ministry, anything from me that might appear there on their blog will be something that I felt was important enough to be directed to them and which was also consistent with their overall purpose, although I can't imagine myself often having much to say there ministrywise. Yet I sincerely want to thank them for the invitation they've extended to me. Their readership is much larger than mine here at Lunar Skeletons. In fact, I can count my readership here on just one hand, with a generous surplus of fingers left over.

Labels: blogology, meringue

Oh, oh. Another letter came in:
Dear Puzzled,

Whew, boy, I was dreading the day when somebody asks me about this. Well, Mr. Puzzled, I am not an expert on blogology, but I will try to give this my best shot, although I am often as puzzled about things as you are. But I daresay, first of all, that Mr. Shea has built his reputation on being an on-line apologist for the Roman Catholic Church and its doctrines. Now I don't particularly pay much attention to his bloggings in this regard (mainly because I am not a Roman Catholic) but I have heard that his apologetics are considered rather astute by his denominational compatriots.

However, I can also sympathize with your baffled reaction to some of Mr. Shea's fruitier blog fodder, especially when it ends up sounding like this:
Of course, zany stuff like this might fly perfectly well on Coast To Coast AM with Art Bell. It so happens that xtians are also getting persecuted in India as well, for example, but it's hard to say what eschatological scheme that's supposed to fall under. (If Dubya and Cheney were really out to hasten the Second Coming, by now we should have seen big contracts awarded to Haliburton for rebuilding the Third Temple in Jerusalem.)

Nevetheless, the crucial point I am trying to make is that a person's expertise in one area, however genuine, does not guarantee that he has any expertise in another. One can even be an idiot savant, with very remarkable abilities in some narrow category of arcane knowledge; albeit, in other respects, the same person may be so mentally or socially incapacitated that he cannot unbutton his shirt, tie his shoes, or even feed himself. A good example of such mental lopsidedness would be the logician Kurt Gödel. When it came to symbolic logic and mathematics, the man was probably the greatest genius to have ever lived. But he was also so mentally deranged by paranoia that it eventually destroyed his health and sadly brought about his premature death.

Or look at Bob Dylan. On one hand, the man is world renowned as a song writer, and musicians have done marvels with his materials. On the other hand, Dylan himself has about the worst singing voice ever. Being gifted at one thing doesn't always overflow into something else.

This is one of the biggest problems with blogging: A person can earn a reputation for being very good at something, even justly so, whereupon he erroneously assumes that he is therefore entitled to be regarded as an expert in everything else, with license to say pretty much as he pleases and with the expectation that everybody will bow to his authority. There is nothing inherent within blogging to put a check on such a tendency.

Blogging allows you to publish any thought that pops into your head, any bee that buzzes into your bonnet, no matter how wise or how stupid it might be. Unfortunately, there are no internet protocols that automatically filter out goofiness.

But as I said before, I am not an expert on blogology. So whatever you do, please ignore everything I am telling you.

Again, I don't pay much attention to Mr. Shea, mostly because of my lack of interest. But there are many other people who have expended a great deal of effort analyzing and criticizing his oeuvre, and I guess they would be the Shea-ologists to consult if you need any more insight on this issue.

But if it were me, I wouldn't worry about any of it. Go to the library and check out a good book to read. It's time better spent.

Sincerely yours.

Labels: advice, blogology