These figures are so nightmarish you wonder why they are not being shouted from the housetops in every US city! This is a report from the National Inflation Association, whose sub-heading is: "Preparing Americans for hyper-inflation." There have been many that been warning others for years that when governments print money the end result is that money becomes worthless. Just look at German history and what happened next. Christians know all this is leading to a one-world currency.
Healthcare Bill to Cause U.S. Hyperinflation By 2015
The National Inflation Association today issued a warning to all Americans of a potential outbreak of hyperinflation in the U.S. by year 2015 caused primarily by the healthcare bill and rising interest payments on our national debt.
Medicare was created in 1966 at a cost of $3 billion per year and the House Ways and Means Committee estimated in 1966 that in 1990 the cost of Medicare would reach $12 billion per year. Instead, the actual cost of Medicare in 1990 was $107 billion (792% more than what was projected) and today Medicare costs $408 billion annually. In 2003, the White House Office of Management and Budget estimated that the Iraq War would have a total cost of $50 to $60 billion. So far, we have already spent $713 billion on the Iraq War (over 1,000% more than what was projected).
The Congressional Budget Office is estimating that the healthcare bill will cost $940 billion over the next 10 years, but if history is any indication, the actual cost will likely be several trillion dollars. NIA believes the healthcare bill will be the final nail in the coffin of the U.S. economy and will just about guarantee that we will see hyperinflation by the year 2015.
The U.S. government last week reported a record monthly budget deficit for February 2010 of $220.9 billion. Total tax receipts for the month were only $107.5 billion compared to outlays of $328.4 billion. The total U.S. deficit for the first five months of fiscal year 2010 was $651.6 billion, with tax receipts of $800.5 billion and outlays of $1.45 trillion. The deficit was up 10.5% for the first five months of fiscal year 2010 over the same period in fiscal year 2009.
We are now at a point where if the U.S. government taxed Americans 100% of their income, the tax receipts generated would not be enough to balance the budget. Likewise, if the U.S. government cut 100% of its spending including defense, but kept paying Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, we would still have a budget deficit. NIA believes it will be impossible for the U.S. to have a balanced budget ever again.
The U.S. national debt is now $12.67 trillion of which $8.061 trillion is public debt. Due to the Federal Reserve's artificially low interest rates of 0% to 0.25%, interest payments on our national debt last month were only $16.9 billion, an interest rate of only 2.548% on our public debt. The reason for the spread between our 2.548% interest rate on the public debt and the federal funds rate of 0 to 0.25% is that a portion of our national debt is made up of long-term bonds at higher interest rates.
Our debt ceiling was recently raised to $14.3 trillion, which we are on track to reach in less than a year, sending our public debt up to about $10 trillion. If the Federal Reserve raises the federal funds rate up to just 2% during the next year, NIA believes the interest rate on our public debt could rise to 5% and our annual interest payments will likely rise to $500 billion or 23% of projected 2010 tax receipts of $2.165 trillion.
The White House is not projecting for interest payments on the national debt to break the $500 billion mark until fiscal year 2014. By then, even if we go by White House projections that the deficit will be cut to $828 billion in 2012, $727 billion in 2013 and $706 billion in 2014, in 2014 we will still be looking at a national debt of over $18.5 trillion with a public portion of around $13.14 trillion. We find it shocking that the White House is projecting an interest rate on our public debt in 2014 of only around 4%.
All of this means that the While House expects the Federal Reserve to leave interest rates at artificially low levels almost indefinitely. However, we know it will be impossible for them to do so without creating a huge outbreak of inflation in the prices of food, energy, clothing, and just about everything else Americans need to live and survive. In order to prevent hyperinflation, we need interest rates to be higher than the rate of inflation.
NIA believes the real rate of U.S. inflation to already be approximately 5%. If the Federal Reserve doesn't raise the federal funds rate to above 5% in the short-term, in our opinion, an outbreak of double-digit inflation is inevitable. By 2014, it is possible the Federal Reserve will be forced to raise the federal funds rate up to above 10% and the public portion of our national debt could exceed $15 trillion. Therefore, in 2014 we could see the interest payments on our national debt reach $1.5 trillion, about triple what is currently being projected and 43% of the governments projected tax receipts that year of $3.455 trillion.
Besides the cost of the Healthcare bill and rising interest payments on our national debt, another major catalyst for hyperinflation will be social security payments, which adjust to the CPI-index. As the government's CPI-index rises, so will the social security payments that it owes. This could cause a death-spiral in the U.S. dollar. Inflation is still the last thing on the minds of most Americans, but soon it will be their primary concern.
Thursday, March 25, 2010
The History of Pentecostalism -- One Man’s Correct View
The history of the Pentecostal movement is history that many of us have lived through and been eyewitnesses of. When I was a college student in the late 1950s, one Sunday evening several friends and I paid a visit to a Pentecostal church in the area of Franklin and Eastern in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The church was an exclusively black congregation meeting in a ramshackle storefront building. Today, the same worship-shouting, arm-waving, falling to the ground, dancing in the aisles, speaking in tongues--that fascinated us as college students goes on in the mainly white, well-educated, sophisticated Assembly of God Church in its multi-million dollar building on 44th Street in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
I was pastor of a Protestant Reformed congregation in Loveland, Colorado during most of the 1960s and the first half of the 1970s in the midst of Protestant churches that exploded with the charismatic movement. I had to struggle to understand and judge the movement, whether it was friend, foe, or neutral to the Reformed faith.
Later, in the second half of the 1970s in South Holland, Illinois, I witnessed in the village the dramatic playing out of a valiant effort to combine the Reformed faith and the charismatic movement.
Circumstances dictated that the Protestant Reformed Church of South Holland take a stand on the question, whether the Reformed faith and the charismatic movement are compatible and whether a Reformed Church may accept charismatic members. (The valiant effort in South Holland to combine the Reformed faith and the charismatic movement was a failure. The gifted Reformed minister began by insisting that he would complement Reformed orthodoxy with charismatic fervor. He ended by offering his "dusty books of Reformed doctrine for sale cheap" and by trying to raise the dead.)
The history of Pentecostalism is astounding. Whether one is for the movement or against it, he must be amazed at the fact that a movement that began only 100 years ago among a handful of lower-class people (I intend no disrespect; I am deeply conscious that God always delights in the base and no-account) has engulfed Christendom, has become the "third force," and has captivated Roman Catholic cardinals and evangelicals such as Packer and Lloyd-Jones.
The history of Pentecostalism is not only interesting and informative. It is also decisive for determining whether the movement is of God. This is not sufficiently reckoned with in analyzing the movement. The history of Pentecostalism--the history!--is decisive, whether Pentecostalism can possibly be accepted as a movement of the Spirit of Jesus Christ, as it claims, or whether Pentecostalism is of the devil. This, it must be remembered, is our concern in this booklet in obedience to the command of the apostle, "Try the spirits, whether they are of God."
As I relate the history, the reader should keep in mind my assertion at the outset, that the history of the Pentecostal/charismatic movement decides our judgment of the movement. To paraphrase the German philosopher, the history of Pentecostalism is the judgment of Pentecostalism.
My account of the history is not controversial. It is based on the accounts given by Pentecostal scholars themselves, including the Dictionary of the Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements, Donald W. Dayton, Vinson Synan, and others.
The Pentecostal movement was conceived in the womb of Bethel Bible College in Topeka, Kansas on New Year's Day, 1900. The movement was born into the world on Azusa Street in Los Angeles, California in 1906.
Conception is first. Late on the last day of 1899, or early in the morning of the first day of 1900, the itinerant preacher Charles Fox Parham laid hands on Agnes Ozman, so that she would receive the BHS as a second work of grace. Agnes received the baptism and spoke in tongues as evidence of it. This is known in Pentecostal circles as the "second Pentecost."
Birth followed six years later in revival meetings in a dilapidated building on Azusa Street in Los Angeles. The preacher who brought Pentecostalism to the birth--Pentecostalism's obstetrician--was the Rev. W. J. Seymour. He laid his hands on the people in his little group, and they received the BHS and spoke in tongues. Seymour was an amusing fellow. The revivals went on night after night for several years.
Seymour would mostly sit behind the pulpit with his head in an empty shoebox as the lively meeting raged in the room before him. The meetings were wild: tongues, rolling on the floor, falling and lying prostrate, crying, laughing, convulsing, and even levitation. Vinson Synan, himself a Pentecostal and a historian of the movement, gives this description of the meetings on Azusa Street, and of the peculiar behavior of Rev. Seymour:
A visitor to Azusa Street during the three years that the revival continued would have met scenes that beggared description. Men and women would shout, weep, dance, fall into trances, speak and sing in tongues, and interpret the messages into English. In true Quaker fashion, anyone who felt "moved by the Spirit" would preach or sing. There was no robed choir, no hymnals, no order of services, but there was an abundance of religious enthusiasm. In the middle of it all was "Elder" Seymour, who rarely preached and much of the time kept his head covered in an empty shoe box behind the pulpit At times he would be seen walking through the crowds with five- and ten-dollar bills sticking out of his hip pockets which people had crammed there unnoticed by him. At other times he would "preach" by hurling defiance at anyone who did not accept his views or by encouraging seekers at the woodplank altars to "let the tongues come forth." To others he would exclaim: "Be emphatic! Ask for salvation, sanctification, the baptism with the Holy Ghost, or divine healing" (The Holiness-Pentecostal Movement in the United States, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1971, pp.108, 109).
The relation between the conception of the Pentecostal movement in Kansas in 1900 and the birth of the movement in Los Angeles in 1906 is that Seymour had learned the BHS from Parham at a meeting in Texas.
Soon, people were flocking to Azusa Street from all over Los Angeles, from all over California, from all over the United States, and from all over the world, to get the BHS and bring it home. The direct result was the formation of the Assemblies of God (Pentecostal) Churches in 1914 and the worldwide spread of Pentecostalism.
From 1900 to about 1960, Pentecostal teaching and practices were confined to Pentecostal churches. The established churches looked down on these Pentecostal churches as "holy rollers." This would change in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
The 1960s saw the spread of Pentecostal doctrine and practices into all the established denominations: Baptist, Lutheran, Presbyterian, and even the Roman Catholic Church. This is the charismatic movement, or charismatic renewal, in distinction from Pentecostalism. The charismatic movement is simply Pentecostalism in the previously non-Pentecostal churches. The name "charismatic," which the established Protestant and Roman Catholic churches prefer, suggests that in these churches the special gifts, the "charismata," are emphasized more than other aspects of the old Pentecostalism. Pentecostalism in the established churches is also known as "neo-Pentecostalism."
Largely responsible for the penetration of Pentecostalism into all the churches were a man and an organization. The man is Dennis Bennett, Episcopal clergyman in Van Nuys, California, who told the story of his own BHS in the book, Nine O'clock in the Morning. The organization is the extremely influential Full Gospel Business Men's Fellowship International (FGBMFI). One effective method of FGBMFI to spread the message of Pentecostalism and gain converts to the movement has been their breakfast meetings. Professional people and leaders in various churches are invited to a breakfast at which a charismatic pitches the message of the charismatic movement.
Pentecostalism became respectable. It crossed all doctrinal and ecclesiastical boundaries and divides. All the churches accepted Pentecostalism and approved the Pentecostal spirit as the Spirit of Jesus Christ.
One later development of the Pentecostal/charismatic movement demands mention: the "signs and wonders" movement of John Wimber and his new denomination, The Vineyard Fellowship. This phase of the charismatic movement claims to possess the power to perform mighty miracles, which promote "church growth." Related is the infamous "Toronto Blessing," characterized by "holy laughing" for hours on end. Wimber's church and movement are not an unseemly aberration. They are part and parcel of the Pentecostal movement as the movement develops the extraordinary gifts. Pentecostals call this development "the third wave" of Pentecostalism.
If the history of Pentecostalism following the birth of the movement in 1900/1906 is astonishing, the history leading up to Pentecostalism's birth is decisive for our judgment, whether Pentecostalism is of God. Pentecostalism derives directly from the theology of the 18th century English preacher John Wesley, particularly from Wesley's teaching of a "second blessing" in the life and experience of the Christian. According to Wesley, there is a second work of grace in the Christian after conversion that brings one to a higher level of salvation: the level of "sinless perfection." This second work of grace is a dramatic act in one's experience at a certain moment. The second blessing is more important than the first, which "merely" gives the forgiveness of sins. Wesley taught that this second blessing, which he also referred to as "entire sanctification," must be sought by every Christian. If the Spirit is to grant this glorious experience, the Christian must fulfill certain conditions.
Wesley's teaching of the second blessing resulted in the "Holiness Movement" in the 1800s both in North America and in England. Revival meetings were held at which the Spirit would grant this second blessing of perfect holiness and a higher Christian life. One of the leading evangelists preaching up this supposedly more wonderful work of the Spirit was Charles Finney. At these revivals, the reception of the second blessing was accompanied by all the strange phenomena that later attended Pentecostalism's BHS.
All that Pentecostalism did was to call Wesley's second blessing the BHS and to insist that the one necessary evidence is tongues, with one notable exception. When Pentecostalism baptized Wesley's second blessing, that is, took it over as the BMS, it changed Wesley's second blessing in one, fundamental respect. Pentecostalism denied that this second blessing, now known as the BHS, consisted of holiness, indeed perfect holiness. Pentecostalism teaches that the BHS has nothing to do with holiness at all. The BHS has instead to do with mystical experience and with power and gifts for ministry. Wesley would have been appalled at this hijacking of his second blessing.
This history, which is Pentecostalism's own account of its history, conclusively proves that Pentecostalism is not of God, and proves that the spirit of Pentecostalism is not of the Spirit of the Lord Jesus Christ.
I was pastor of a Protestant Reformed congregation in Loveland, Colorado during most of the 1960s and the first half of the 1970s in the midst of Protestant churches that exploded with the charismatic movement. I had to struggle to understand and judge the movement, whether it was friend, foe, or neutral to the Reformed faith.
Later, in the second half of the 1970s in South Holland, Illinois, I witnessed in the village the dramatic playing out of a valiant effort to combine the Reformed faith and the charismatic movement.
Circumstances dictated that the Protestant Reformed Church of South Holland take a stand on the question, whether the Reformed faith and the charismatic movement are compatible and whether a Reformed Church may accept charismatic members. (The valiant effort in South Holland to combine the Reformed faith and the charismatic movement was a failure. The gifted Reformed minister began by insisting that he would complement Reformed orthodoxy with charismatic fervor. He ended by offering his "dusty books of Reformed doctrine for sale cheap" and by trying to raise the dead.)
The history of Pentecostalism is astounding. Whether one is for the movement or against it, he must be amazed at the fact that a movement that began only 100 years ago among a handful of lower-class people (I intend no disrespect; I am deeply conscious that God always delights in the base and no-account) has engulfed Christendom, has become the "third force," and has captivated Roman Catholic cardinals and evangelicals such as Packer and Lloyd-Jones.
The history of Pentecostalism is not only interesting and informative. It is also decisive for determining whether the movement is of God. This is not sufficiently reckoned with in analyzing the movement. The history of Pentecostalism--the history!--is decisive, whether Pentecostalism can possibly be accepted as a movement of the Spirit of Jesus Christ, as it claims, or whether Pentecostalism is of the devil. This, it must be remembered, is our concern in this booklet in obedience to the command of the apostle, "Try the spirits, whether they are of God."
As I relate the history, the reader should keep in mind my assertion at the outset, that the history of the Pentecostal/charismatic movement decides our judgment of the movement. To paraphrase the German philosopher, the history of Pentecostalism is the judgment of Pentecostalism.
My account of the history is not controversial. It is based on the accounts given by Pentecostal scholars themselves, including the Dictionary of the Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements, Donald W. Dayton, Vinson Synan, and others.
The Pentecostal movement was conceived in the womb of Bethel Bible College in Topeka, Kansas on New Year's Day, 1900. The movement was born into the world on Azusa Street in Los Angeles, California in 1906.
Conception is first. Late on the last day of 1899, or early in the morning of the first day of 1900, the itinerant preacher Charles Fox Parham laid hands on Agnes Ozman, so that she would receive the BHS as a second work of grace. Agnes received the baptism and spoke in tongues as evidence of it. This is known in Pentecostal circles as the "second Pentecost."
Birth followed six years later in revival meetings in a dilapidated building on Azusa Street in Los Angeles. The preacher who brought Pentecostalism to the birth--Pentecostalism's obstetrician--was the Rev. W. J. Seymour. He laid his hands on the people in his little group, and they received the BHS and spoke in tongues. Seymour was an amusing fellow. The revivals went on night after night for several years.
Seymour would mostly sit behind the pulpit with his head in an empty shoebox as the lively meeting raged in the room before him. The meetings were wild: tongues, rolling on the floor, falling and lying prostrate, crying, laughing, convulsing, and even levitation. Vinson Synan, himself a Pentecostal and a historian of the movement, gives this description of the meetings on Azusa Street, and of the peculiar behavior of Rev. Seymour:
A visitor to Azusa Street during the three years that the revival continued would have met scenes that beggared description. Men and women would shout, weep, dance, fall into trances, speak and sing in tongues, and interpret the messages into English. In true Quaker fashion, anyone who felt "moved by the Spirit" would preach or sing. There was no robed choir, no hymnals, no order of services, but there was an abundance of religious enthusiasm. In the middle of it all was "Elder" Seymour, who rarely preached and much of the time kept his head covered in an empty shoe box behind the pulpit At times he would be seen walking through the crowds with five- and ten-dollar bills sticking out of his hip pockets which people had crammed there unnoticed by him. At other times he would "preach" by hurling defiance at anyone who did not accept his views or by encouraging seekers at the woodplank altars to "let the tongues come forth." To others he would exclaim: "Be emphatic! Ask for salvation, sanctification, the baptism with the Holy Ghost, or divine healing" (The Holiness-Pentecostal Movement in the United States, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1971, pp.108, 109).
The relation between the conception of the Pentecostal movement in Kansas in 1900 and the birth of the movement in Los Angeles in 1906 is that Seymour had learned the BHS from Parham at a meeting in Texas.
Soon, people were flocking to Azusa Street from all over Los Angeles, from all over California, from all over the United States, and from all over the world, to get the BHS and bring it home. The direct result was the formation of the Assemblies of God (Pentecostal) Churches in 1914 and the worldwide spread of Pentecostalism.
From 1900 to about 1960, Pentecostal teaching and practices were confined to Pentecostal churches. The established churches looked down on these Pentecostal churches as "holy rollers." This would change in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
The 1960s saw the spread of Pentecostal doctrine and practices into all the established denominations: Baptist, Lutheran, Presbyterian, and even the Roman Catholic Church. This is the charismatic movement, or charismatic renewal, in distinction from Pentecostalism. The charismatic movement is simply Pentecostalism in the previously non-Pentecostal churches. The name "charismatic," which the established Protestant and Roman Catholic churches prefer, suggests that in these churches the special gifts, the "charismata," are emphasized more than other aspects of the old Pentecostalism. Pentecostalism in the established churches is also known as "neo-Pentecostalism."
Largely responsible for the penetration of Pentecostalism into all the churches were a man and an organization. The man is Dennis Bennett, Episcopal clergyman in Van Nuys, California, who told the story of his own BHS in the book, Nine O'clock in the Morning. The organization is the extremely influential Full Gospel Business Men's Fellowship International (FGBMFI). One effective method of FGBMFI to spread the message of Pentecostalism and gain converts to the movement has been their breakfast meetings. Professional people and leaders in various churches are invited to a breakfast at which a charismatic pitches the message of the charismatic movement.
Pentecostalism became respectable. It crossed all doctrinal and ecclesiastical boundaries and divides. All the churches accepted Pentecostalism and approved the Pentecostal spirit as the Spirit of Jesus Christ.
One later development of the Pentecostal/charismatic movement demands mention: the "signs and wonders" movement of John Wimber and his new denomination, The Vineyard Fellowship. This phase of the charismatic movement claims to possess the power to perform mighty miracles, which promote "church growth." Related is the infamous "Toronto Blessing," characterized by "holy laughing" for hours on end. Wimber's church and movement are not an unseemly aberration. They are part and parcel of the Pentecostal movement as the movement develops the extraordinary gifts. Pentecostals call this development "the third wave" of Pentecostalism.
If the history of Pentecostalism following the birth of the movement in 1900/1906 is astonishing, the history leading up to Pentecostalism's birth is decisive for our judgment, whether Pentecostalism is of God. Pentecostalism derives directly from the theology of the 18th century English preacher John Wesley, particularly from Wesley's teaching of a "second blessing" in the life and experience of the Christian. According to Wesley, there is a second work of grace in the Christian after conversion that brings one to a higher level of salvation: the level of "sinless perfection." This second work of grace is a dramatic act in one's experience at a certain moment. The second blessing is more important than the first, which "merely" gives the forgiveness of sins. Wesley taught that this second blessing, which he also referred to as "entire sanctification," must be sought by every Christian. If the Spirit is to grant this glorious experience, the Christian must fulfill certain conditions.
Wesley's teaching of the second blessing resulted in the "Holiness Movement" in the 1800s both in North America and in England. Revival meetings were held at which the Spirit would grant this second blessing of perfect holiness and a higher Christian life. One of the leading evangelists preaching up this supposedly more wonderful work of the Spirit was Charles Finney. At these revivals, the reception of the second blessing was accompanied by all the strange phenomena that later attended Pentecostalism's BHS.
All that Pentecostalism did was to call Wesley's second blessing the BHS and to insist that the one necessary evidence is tongues, with one notable exception. When Pentecostalism baptized Wesley's second blessing, that is, took it over as the BMS, it changed Wesley's second blessing in one, fundamental respect. Pentecostalism denied that this second blessing, now known as the BHS, consisted of holiness, indeed perfect holiness. Pentecostalism teaches that the BHS has nothing to do with holiness at all. The BHS has instead to do with mystical experience and with power and gifts for ministry. Wesley would have been appalled at this hijacking of his second blessing.
This history, which is Pentecostalism's own account of its history, conclusively proves that Pentecostalism is not of God, and proves that the spirit of Pentecostalism is not of the Spirit of the Lord Jesus Christ.
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