AFRICAN PLUME

By Stephen Law | Psychology Today | June 22, 2011 Around the globe, audiences sit at the feet of marketing experts, life-style consultants, mystics, cult-leaders and other “gurus” waiting for the next deep and profound insight. People often pay a great deal of money to hear these words of wisdom. So how do these elevated individuals come by their penetrating insights? What is the secret of their profundity? Unfortunately, in some cases, the audience is duped by the dark arts of pseudo-profundity. The art of sounding profound is fairly easily mastered. You too can make deep- and meaningful-sounding pronouncements if you are prepared to follow a few simple rules. First, try stating the incredibly obvious. Only do it v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y, with a sort of knowing nod. This works particularly well if your remark has something to do with one of the big themes of life, love, death and money. Here are some examples: “Death comes to us all.” “We all want to be loved.” “Money is used to buy things...

“The Danger of Mysticism” By Prof. Hanko | Professor Emeritus of Church History and New Testament in the Protestant Reformed Seminary Introduction In the previous article, I described the ladder which mystics defined as necessary to climb to attain union with God. In this article I take a look at criticisms of mysticism which must be made. Criticisms of Mysticism There are various criticisms of mysticism that can be made which, as serious as they are, do not come to the heart of the matter. We mention these first. Some have said that in the quest for union with God and absorption into the divine being, the mystic bypasses Christ. There is an element of truth in this, although it is not true of all mystics. However, when one reads the mystics, one cannot help but think that the union with God which the mystic holds up as the ideal religion is such complete absorption into the divine essence that Christ is no longer the only way to the Father. One goes directly to God and hurls himself i...

By Akin Ojumu By biblical standards, the RCCG General Overseer is a false prophet. Here is the receipt. Deuteronomy 18:20-22 “But the prophet who presumes to speak a word in my name that I have not commanded him to speak, or who speaks in the name of other gods, that same prophet shall die.’ And if you say in your heart, ‘How may we know the word that the Lord has not spoken?’ – when a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word that the Lord has not spoken; the prophet has spoken it presumptuously. You need not be afraid of him.” At the last RCCG Crossover Service, Baba Enoch Adeboye claimed that the Almighty God specifically told him that: “On the international scene, He said, the chance of a major war is less this year than in 2025.” Well, here we are less than 3 months later, we are 10 days into a major war in the Middle East. As of this writing, preliminary fatalities in the ongoing conflict between the United States, Isra...

“Five Steps to Mystical Union with God” By Prof. Hanko | Professor Emeritus of Church History and New Testament in the Protestant Reformed Seminary Introduction In dealing with Thomas à Kempis and medieval mysticism, I discussed in the last article what mysticism really is. I described it as, most fundamentally, a doctrine that teaches the desirability and possibility of direct and immediate union with God, which union with God is the epitome of the godly and pious life. How Mystics Attain Fellowship with God We are back now to what we described earlier as being the essence of mysticism: “a deep sense of union with God in the inmost depths of the soul.” The Middle Ages developed a lengthy process through which one had to pass in the attainment of that deep sense of union with God. It is worth our while to go through these steps to try to see what the mystics were talking about.  The process had five distinct steps, although two things must be remembered about these five steps: one ...

“The Noetic Quality of Mysticism” By Prof. Hanko | Professor Emeritus of Church History and New Testament in the Protestant Reformed Seminary Introduction In our last article we introduced the subject of mysticism in the Middle Ages by describing the life of Thomas à Kempis, a late medieval mystic from Germany, who spent most of his life in the Netherlands. We also spoke of his most famous book, The Imitation of Christ, a book that continues to be read and appreciated to the present. In this article and following ones we shall discuss the characteristics of mysticism and why it constitutes such a threat to the church of Christ. The Prevalence of Mysticism I mentioned in my last article that there is scarcely a period in the history of the church when the church was free from all forms of mysticism. Already in the early church, the Montanists, to which Tertullian joined himself late in life, represented this mystical tendency to which many in the church were inclined. The Medieval Perio...

“ The Life of Thomas à Kempis, a Late Medieval Mystic ” By Prof. Hanko | Professor Emeritus of Church History and New Testament in the Protestant Reformed Seminary Introduction The error of mysticism has never been absent from the Church of Christ in the new dispensation. It appeared early in the Montanist movement in the third century and has, in a remarkable way, maintained itself to the present. The Church has always had to fight off mysticism. Not a single period in the Middle Ages was without its mystics. Sometimes they were present in multitudes; sometimes only individual mystics kept the flame of mysticism burning. But never did the Church free itself from them. In fact, the Church had no interest in condemning the mystics. They were never considered heretics. One gets the impression, on the contrary, that the Church encouraged them. I suspect there were good reasons for such encouragement. The mystics were, almost without exception, faithful and loyal members of the Church and ...

“Bible Translations That I Would/Wouldn’t Recommend” By Akin Ojumu In the last installment of this commentary series, we described the developmental evolution of Bible translations. We alluded to the universal agreement on the content of the Old Testament. This consensus is the result of the meticulous record keeping of Jewish Rabbis. The oldest complete copy of the Old Testament, in the original Hebrew, is called the Masoretic Text. Generally speaking, this is what Bible translators use when translating the Old Testament.  Because of the many different Greek manuscripts available to scholars, the New Testament presented a more difficult challenge. Generally, the available manuscripts fall into three main categories, namely the Western, Byzantine, and Alexandrian manuscripts. These manuscripts have been used to produce several English translations of the Bible, some of which were discussed last time. At the last installment of the commentary series, we indicated that the Bible tran...