ISSUE: Affairs are two people, each “turned in on oneself” using the other. No love there, but surely a lot of law squeezing between the sheets, right there in bed with them. Just ask the Guv or his Argentine girlfriend. They both were guilty as hell.
UPDATE: "…moral lapses of Republican Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina will damage the GOP brand in the South. Sanford, who is married with four sons, had been a strong public advocate of ‘family values,’ but he has been making headlines because of his admitted affair with his Argentine mistress, Maria Belen Chapur."
UPDATE: "South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford has cleared his schedule this week to take a personal trip with his wife, three weeks after announcing his extramarital affair with an Argentine woman, his office announced Wednesday."
You have heard of Governor Mark Sanford? He’s back.
For a day or so Michael Jackson’s death grabbed the headlines; then his funeral drowned-out Sanford again. But sequentially, like an unending soap on daytime TV, squeezed between Jackson’s death, his memorial, and debate about where to plant his body, the story of Sanford’s affair with an Argentine mistress has long enough legs to jump from South Carolina where Sanford is governor to California where in Los Angeles Jackson reigns as king in his death as he never did in life. But intermittently, Sanford resurrects: several lead stories in a couple of days, see above,and here.
More than mere tabloid sex keeps the story alive.
Sanford had already admitted to adultery, five liaisons, in fact; he apologized to everyone, but insisted he would stay in office. He cited ancient Israel’s King David as reason for doing so. You know Bathsheba and all that? Of course, David had Bathsheba but one time, not five; but then he did do away with the lady’s husband.
Perhaps Sanford now owning up to several more than just five trysts with his lover is his way of keeping up with David. Then, too, he says he’s crossed the line with other ladies, as well.
But how did David get in the mix? Here emerges the drama turning cheap tabloid trash into a dynamo for the political press. Pundits smell more than a little hypocrisy from a sitting governor whose rise to Republican stardom began with winning a congressional seat way back in 1994. That’s when the ‘family values’ revolution engineered by Newt Gingrich threw the House of Representatives into wide-open, holier-than-thou, back-to-the-family Republican arms. Back then, Freshman Congressman Sanford was as holier as they come.
Now, the odor of two-faced legalism that exempts the politician from rules made for the public wafts through this whole affair like stink from my long-dead-dad’s Limburger cheese. Like a bumbling clown with a fan at a funeral, Sanford’s inept efforts to cool the affair keep the smell of something rotten hidden in the casket floating around the room.
If the medium is the message as Marshall McLuhan claimed, then Charles G. Finney near 175 years ago prophesied the post evangelical age; by the same token, more recently Grandpa prophesied the rise, as from the evangelical ashes, of a renewed, Spirit-empowered biblical faith focused on service not sensationalism.
Let me explain.
(Unless otherwise noted the quotes that follow are taken from A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing, at Spurgeon.org; and Charles G. Finney: How Theology Effects Understanding of Revival, at The Highway. But they are widely available elsewhere, with a caveat: revisionist work on Finney is rampant; many of his more egregious statements have been redacted; and his doctrinal positions modified, postmortem.)
"You see why you do not have a revival," stated the self-assured, egotistical Finney in his 1835 Lectures on Revival. "It is only because you do not want one; because you are neither praying for it, nor feeling anxious about it, nor putting forth efforts for it."
Finney concluded, "God has put the Spirit at your disposal. If the Church will do all her duty, the millennium may come in this country in three years [i.e., 1838?]. . . If the Church would do all her duty, she would soon complete the triumph of religion in the world."
Assessing Finney’s ministry, Billy Graham concluded that Finney near single handedly produced "one of the greatest periods of revival in the history of America."
Yet, instead of either the millennium or "triumph of religion in the world" following Finney, on the heels of his "revivals" America plunged into civil war. Giving Finney the benefit of the doubt—he may have been off a few years on dating the millennium—his revival methods, combined into a brand new evangelical medium, were applied diligently over the next 150 years by a spate of evangelists from D. L. Moody to L. S. Chafer to Billy Sunday to Billy Graham, with Phoebe Palmer and "all on the altar" squeezed between. Yet, instead of heralding a belated millennium, there followed the bloodiest, costliest, and most disastrous century in human history.
Billy Graham, of course, came along after the Great War to End All Wars (WWI), The Depression, WWII, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki; but he was right there with every President from Truman to Bush—including proudly Nixon—for Korea, Viet Nam, Gulf War I, and the War on Terror, including 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq. And after applying all the new methods proposed by Finney, at the close of Graham’s gargantuan efforts odds still favor Iran getting The Bomb, Radical Islam winning the War on Terror, everyday Islam triumphing in religion, and Sharia law running the millennium.
Revival, where art thou? As it turns out, promising revival, Finney had pronounced judgment on the entire evangelical movement. Promising life, his new methods worked death. The message of his McLuhan’ medium, then, was, "Evangelicalism is sure to self-destruct!" It has. All signs say we are now in a post evangelical age.
What happened? And what does the future hold in store because of what happened? Well, ask Grandpa…
To reference producers comments on video, see Emma the Angel
Doing church growing up was a fairly straightforward affair: prayer meetings, Bible studies, and memorizing Scripture at home; mid-week church, Sunday school, and church on Sundays. I cannot remember not being in church; and also cannot remember not knowing the gospel.
We were Pentecostal to the core; Assemblies of God, to be exact. My buddy down the street was Baptist—thoroughly so. His Dad was a Baptist lay-minister. But other than him being allowed movie shows and me not, our church stuff meshed nicely. Probably this was because without making any big deal of it, we shared the same gospel. He read John 3:16 as did I. That was enough. I cannot remember that his eternal security or my charismata were ever mentioned—they probably were; but not in a serious enough way to be memorable. Of course, I had not at that point met Emma.
Given these roots, over a lifetime I never fell out with the Baptists over the gospel. Baptists I know hold tightly to biblical traditions covered with gray hair: their doctrine’s been around for awhile; and despite squabbles, little gets shifted as to gospel essentials. So too, Assemblies of God-style Pentecostalism has its roots in a strong gospel tradition stemming from Calvin. Early on this set the denomination apart from certain precursors to Pentecostalism not nearly as concerned with the integrity of the gospel as with other matters. In a similar way, today this strong gospel tradition sets mainstream Pentecostalism apart from a many-faceted, late-born epilogue to the movement that includes wild offshoots sprouting like weeds in a garden—and Emma; let us not forget Emma.
The precursors went their way but are still around; the epilogue’s wild offshoots keep sprouting. Together, precursors and offshoots have had a profound affect on how we view the gospel, and Emma the angel has had no small part in this. This being so, Emma matters to all to whom the integrity of the gospel matters. You can be sure, then, that Emma matters to Jesus.
Let me tell you why.
The precursors reach back to John Wesley, who was perhaps far more Arminian than Arminius; he was the master marketer of Arminianism, anyway; and semi-Pelagian to the core. But the precursors come forward though Charles G. Finney, who elevated Wesleyan views from mere step-child status into a full-blown Pelagian twin. If Wesley believed sinners were drowning but could grasp a life preserver, Finney insisted they need only swim for shore. God agrees with neither. He directs the gospel only to those who have already drowned. Owning up to this in part (as evidenced later by men like Lewis Sperry Chafer who endorsed Calvin), but fascinated with Finney’s on-demand revivalism, the "all on the altar," not-quite-second-blessing movement was born. Remembered as the so-called Keswick higher-life movement, it developed in two directions: on the one hand, it shaped full-blown second-blessing Pentecostalism cleaving the born again experience from the baptism of the Holy Spirit; on the other, it morphed into not-quite-second-blessing dispensationalism cleaving Jesus as Savior from Jesus as Lord. As expounded by Chafer, Jesus becomes your savior sovereignly, but only you can make him Lord. Chafer clarified this in his classic, He That Is Spiritual (See also reference above on Keswick, and this review of Chafer, Must Christ be Lord to be Savior? NO) This Chaferian emphasis seems to serve two purposes: first, it preserves the "all on the altar" higher-life flavor of Keswick while dispensing with distasteful (to some) second blessing theology; then, too, it allows evangelicals to hold serious-minded, stodgily-solid, gray-beard Father Calvin by one hand and fanciful, colorful, dynamic, inventive, persuasive, marketable Uncle Finney by the other. And it carves out a place ever so nicely, if not intentionally, for Emma as the eminently marketable guide watching over a kind of schizoid, psychic Christianity.
Thus, in brief, such were the precursors. As for the epilogue, the late-born offshoots have come primarily in two phases: first, Latter Rain, ca 1945 sparked by William H. Branham; and second, Charismatics, ca 1960 inspired by Episcopal Rector Dennis Bennett. We consider them in reverse order.
The Charismatics emerged front and center when Dennis Bennett an Episcopal priest at Saint Luke’s Parish in Van Nuys, California, announced to his church that he had spoken and would continue to speak in tongues. Bennett addressed the Pentecostal Fellowship of Greater Los Angeles shortly after his experience. In that message, he was as solidly in the Bible and honoring of the gospel as any Pentecostal or Baptist I have ever heard. It does not follow, of course, that Charismatics after him have always been as solid gospel-wise; but many of them drifted into Assemblies of God and other like-minded churches. In fact, they went where welcomed and today, "charismatic" is a benign-enough term to apply even to Calvinist John Piper’s Bethlehem Baptist Church. For the most part, Charismatics have been embraced by the larger evangelical milieu.
Such is not the case of the earlier Latter Rain. Decades before the Charismatics came along independent-minded Pentecostals had already spawned the lesser-known latter rain movement which is seldom quiet, loudly dismissive of tradition always, separatist in spirit, and would no more drift into an Assemblies of God-type Pentecostal or an un-Pentecostal-type Baptist church then they would wait around for sound biblical exegesis. PFA (pull from air?) prophecy is much more exciting. Besides, Emma gets to tag along; and from a Latter Rain perspective, Emma and others of her breed are key to a whole new gospel revolution. Jesus, it seems, they have had enough of. Ah, say, Jesus, got a moment? Meet Emma. She may know your Momma, so don’t feel bad when she says, "Move over...." It’s kind of in the family...?
Some date the movement to a revival in a Canadian Bible School in 1948; the Assemblies of God rejected the movement in 1949; but in fact the touchstone of the Latter Rain especially as it affects American evangelicalism today was William H. Branham’s healing revivals already underway in 1941; he published his seminal tract, "I Was Not Disobedient Unto the Heavenly Vision" in 1945; and claimed The Angel—Emma’s main man, apparently—visited him in 1946; Branham’s "angel" has formed a core of the movement’s claims regarding frequent "outpourings" from that point forward, including the touted Toronto, Canada, revival and the most recent event in Lakeland, Florida.
More on the above ahead; here we note that these offshoots of my side of the aisle, along with the precursors to my side of the aisle (I am letting my Baptist buddy off the hook), have profoundly affected how we do church today; and it is just no longer the case that I and my Baptist buddy can agree on the gospel and let other matters care for themselves. The other matters have so intruded on the gospel that often the gospel of God gets buried beneath tons of imitations. Precursors and offshoots alike have produced frauds of "deeper experience" mysticism which passes itself off as a "fuller" gospel in various guises. And too many innocent, and/or gullible bystanders to the whole thing have swallowed tainted bait sold to them as good news.
We Pentecostals used to call ourselves "full gospel;" then "charismatic" came along and the "full" fell by the wayside. But there is in fact only one way in which supposed full gospel people are not frauds: that is if with Paul we mean the gospel as "the whole will of God" (Acts 20:27). By this, Paul meant that he declared the full meaning of Jesus as Lord of all, Jesus Christ having fulfilled God’s complete intent in creation, and his promise in covenant, thereby upholding the integrity of God and of God’s gospel.
Quite different than this, somewhere along the way the label "full" grew bigger than the gospel. The offshoots of Pentecostalism inspired by precursors of second-blessing mysticisms stretched the label way beyond the boundaries of the gospel of God and came up with distortions much closer to gospel of Barnum and Bailey. Emma slipped into her bright shinny circus get-up and took over where Jesus left off. Thus we discover anew a truth of long-standing: when the gospel we preach is no longer God’s call to his full will to serve Jesus as Lord, Emma and her crew will happily supply what is missing. As Mr. Dylan insists, "Everybody’s gotta’ serve somebody."
In all of this, the integrity of the gospel has been compromised. To see how, we need to nail down what we mean by integrity. Then we’ll get back to Emma.
