Tag Archives: believe

The gaff that keeps on gaffing?

30 Sunday Mar 2014

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In Brian Houston’s clarification, he decided to attack critics for his gaff. We will offer our views on this soon.

Meanwhile Apprising Ministries reports,

WORD FAITH PREACHER BRIAN HOUSTON ATTEMPTS TO CLARIFY HIS RECENT STATEMENT CONCERNING ISLAM

You might have seen the March 18, 2014 Apprising Ministries piece WF Preacher Brian Houston says Christians serve same God as Muslims. In it I shared the following clip from Houston’s Hillsong TV // Living For The Master’s Well Done, Pt1 program:

I then provided you with a transcription of what he says in that clip:

How do you view God in a desert? There’s two types of birds. There’s vultures, and there’s hummingbirds. One lives off dead carcasses, rotting meat.

The other lives off the beautiful, sweet, nectar in a particular flower, on a particular desert plant, in the same desert. They both find what they’re looking for.

Do you know—take it all the way back into the Old Testament—and the Muslim and you, we actually serve the same God. Allah, to a Muslim; to us, Abba Father, God.

It would seem pretty clear above that Houston has just told us those who adhere to the world religion of Islam, the followers of the prophet Muhammad, are serving the same God as those of us who are regenerated believers in the one true and living God of the Bible, the followers of Christ Jesus, the Lord.

But later on Brian Houston, who is Senior Pastor of the nefarious Word Faith haven Hillsong Church (HC) Australia along with his wife pastrix Bobbiee,1 could be seen going around the Internet proclaiming: Wait a minute, that’s not really quite what I meant.

Well, now pastor and pastrix Houston have issued the following joint statement attributed to Brian Houston on their Facebook page:

proof_ApprisingHoustonClarification_30-03-2014 (source)

Being one of those “critics” I wanted to make sure that in the interest of fairness you’d have the chance to see this for yourselves. I also wish to point out a couple of things here, speaking simply for myself as I have no way of knowing the intentions of whatever other critics Brian Houston is talking about; whomever they may be.

First of all, I didn’t say Houston believes Muslims and Christians worship the same God. I have no way of knowing what he believes unless he specifically states it. However, apparently Brian Houston shares with God the ability to know what others believe:

I realize that some critics WANT to believe their interpretation,…

In my case the title of my article is clear: Brian Houston says Christians serve the same God as Muslims. That is exactly what he did say:

Do you know—take it all the way back into the Old Testament—and the Muslim and you, we actually serve the same God. Allah, to a Muslim; to us, Abba Father, God.

He can claim that’s taken out of context, but that statement sounds/reads as if he personally believes this. There’s nothing in the prior part of his message that changes this, which is why I only highlighted the previous clip. That’s also why I also put in one of Houston’s attempts at clarification:

proof_TwitterJohnstonAndHoustonCorrection_30-03-2014(source)

As I explained before, his clarification really doesn’t help him. It makes it look like he does hold a common, but erroneous, view that Islam is an Abrahamic faith. If Houston does believe that, then the statement below is indicative of his own beliefs and not merely that of some Muslims:

[T]ake it all the way back into the Old Testament—and the Muslim and you, we actually serve the same God. Allah, to a Muslim; to us, Abba Father, God.

Notice that Houston says you—to the Christians he’s addressing—then appears to include himself with them as he says ”we actually serve,” etc. ” Now we know that Christians holding the view that Islam is an Abrahamic faith usually also believe the Muslim has wrong beliefs about the one God.

The problem really isn’t with someone like myself who is trying to understand what is being said by attributing the meanings to words I find in dictionaries and text books. No, the problem stems from Christians who use what seems to me to be purposely vague language when it comes to the false religion of Islam.

For example. there’s A Common Word” Christian Response where we read:

As members of the worldwide Christian community, we were deeply encouraged and challenged by the recent historic open letter signed by 138 leading Muslim scholars, clerics, and intellectuals from around the world. “A Common Word Between Us and You” identifies some core common ground between Christianity and Islam which lies at the heart of our respective faiths as well as at the heart of the most ancient Abrahamic faith, Judaism…

Before we “shake your hand” in responding to your letter, we ask forgiveness of the All-Merciful One and of the Muslim community around the world… What is so extraordinary about “A Common Word Between Us and You”… lies,…in something absolutely central to both: love of God and love of neighbor…

We applaud that “A Common Word Between Us and You” stresses so insistently the unique devotion to one God, indeed the love of God, as the primary duty of every believer. God alone rightly commands our ultimate allegiance… We find it equally heartening that the God whom we should love above all things is described as being Love. In the Muslim tradition, God, “the Lord of the worlds,” is “The Infinitely Good and All-Merciful.” (source)

Unfortunately, such language is a bit disingenuous because does give the Muslim the impression that the Christian signers of that document, e.g. Rick Warren, are saying that they believe in the same God as those in Islam. Keep all of this in mind, and then let’s take a look at the following from Houston’s new statement:

If you listened to the message in its entirety, my point was that; who a Muslim extremist believes God is, determines what they believe God does, and what they believe God loves.

I was contrasting their harsh perspective of (their) god, with who I believe God is – (a Loving God, the Father of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ) and therefore what I believe God does and what I believe God loves.

The ONE sentence that critics are drawing huge conclusions from was clearly a (clumsy) way of me explaining that though both Christians and Muslims believe they serve the God of Abraham, they are very DIFFERENT ‘entities’ or ‘deities’ in both nature and action.

The botheration begins when Houston’s words in his original message are combined with his later Twitter statement, “Islam descends from one of Abraham’s sons.” They could easily seem to indicate that, in spite of their differing views about God, he meant Muslims and Christians do serve the same One.

As I get ready to close this out, I offer that if Brian Houston wishes to address such important and sensitive subjects as the nature of God and the religion of Islam then he needs to learn to be more precise in his language. That said, Islam cannot be an Abrahamic faith because it doesn’t believe in the God Abraham believed in.

First of all, Islamic history says its faith originates with an extraterrestrial visit:

Muslim tradition states that the angel Gabriel visited Muhammad and gave him the words [of the Qur’an] directly from Allah. (source)

However, if there truly was such a visit, then it was a lying spirit, possibly sent by God Himself (cf. 1 Kings 22:19-23). In other words, it would have been a demon who was impersonating the angel Gabriel. It’s also important at this point to understand that:

The Qur’an (Koran, Quran) is the Holy Book of Islam and the religion’s most sacred writing. Muslims consider it the actual word of Allah and not the word of Muhammad to whom it was given. (source)

Now, since the Qur’an was supposedly brought by that being, who allegedly appeared to Muhammad, contradicts the Bible on the nature of God, then we know that this being could not have been an angel sent by the LORD God Almighty. If anything appeared at all, then it would have a lying, deceitful, spirit i.e. a demon.

As I told you in Keeping You Apprised of: Islam, while Islam does teach the existence of just one God (Qur’an 5:73; 112:1-4), Allah is so transcendent, incomprehensible and unapproachable, that it could not possibly be the one true and living personal God of biblical revelation, Who shows Himself to befriend men (Exodus 33:11).

The God of Holy Scripture is shown to be merciful to them because He loves them (Romans 5:5-8), and, in the doctrine of the Trinity, He reveals Himself as God the Father, God the Son–Jesus the Christ, and God the Holy Spirit (Deuteronomy 6:4; 2 Peter 1:17; John 1:1,14; Acts 5:3-4; 2 Corinthians 13:14).

In fact, the Qur’an itself actually admits that Allah is not the God of the Bible in Surah 5:73-75 where it states:

They do blaspheme who say: God is one in three in a Trinity: for there is no god except one.

Finally, the Qur’an portrays a different Jesus from the One we meet in the Bible. It says Jesus was not crucified (4:157), is not Deity (5:17, 75), nor is He even the God the Son (9:30). So, in the end, Islam is not an Abrahamic faith because Allah, the god of Islam, is nothing at all like the Biblical revelation of the only God there is.

Source: By Ken Silva, WORD FAITH PREACHER BRIAN HOUSTON ATTEMPTS TO CLARIFY HIS RECENT STATEMENT CONCERNING ISLAM, Apprising Ministries, http://apprising.org/2014/03/28/word-faith-preacher-brian-houston-attempts-to-clarify-his-recent-statement-concerning-islam/, Published 28/03/2014. (Accessed 30/03/2014.)

Related articles:

Houston’s “Clarification”

The deafening silence of Brian Houston (silence now broken)

Thank you Brian Houston for your response but please clarify further

Brian Houston & Chris Rosebrough Offering Corrections

Brian Houston: “the Muslim and you, we actually serve the same God”

What Is The Gospel These Days? (Part 1 & 2)

27 Thursday Jun 2013

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There is no question that Hillsong preaches a false gospel known as the Prosperity Gospel. The peddler of this dangerous gospel is Brian Houston.

Brian Houston’s Gospel

When the gospel is not defended, erosion takes it’s course. Generally speaking people are starting to lose the basic understanding of the gospel in our ever increasing secular culture. This is why we think it is important that our readers get a solid grasp on what the gospel is and why it should be believed.

The White Horse Inn has done a fantastic job tackling this subject. We hope all our readers can grow in discernment, testing what Hillsong says in the name of God to the Word of God. For every article on this topic, we will be publishing two of their articles on their ‘What The Gospel Is…’ series.

The White Horse Inn writes,

What The Gospel Is & Why We Should Believe It, Part 1

There seems to be a lot of confusion today about what the gospel is. There are the obviously crass examples on display at Christian and secular bookstores everywhere, encouraging us all to have our “best life now” or, more recently, to Have a New You by Friday.

But there are also others in our time who point to the ongoing work of social rather than personal transformation. They tell us that we should partner with God in his redemptive mission to change the world through the pursuit of social justice. Now I’m not saying that these aren’t worthy goals. The pursuit of justice either for an individual or for a society is a noble calling, and I would encourage most of the readers of this blog to become better versions of you. But the question is whether these things actually provide a good description of what the gospel is.

Alexis De Tocqueville was a Frenchman who came to America in the early 1800s and was fascinated by differences between America and Europe. He published his observations in a book titled Democracy in America. In that book he focused primarily on politics but also made some fascinating observations about religion in this country. He writes,

Priests in the Middle Ages spoke of nothing but the other life; they hardly took any trouble to prove that a sincere Christian might be happy here below. But preachers in America are continually coming down to earth. Indeed they find it difficult to take their eyes off it. The better to touch their hearers, they are forever pointing out how religious beliefs favor freedom and public order, and it is often difficult to be sure when listening to them whether the main object of religion is to procure eternal felicity in the next world or prosperity in this.

That emphasis is certainly still with us today. Churches, we are told, need to be relevant, down to earth, practical. They need to meet people where they are. But what if where we are is in a world of consumerism, entertainment, and narcissistic hedonism? In such a time a gospel about me, my prosperity, or my worship experience will always be relevant. But churches that focus on something outside of ourselves, something rooted in an ancient and unfamiliar culture – explained and unpacked with big and unfamiliar words like propitiation, justification, and predestination – will always appear to us as irrelevant if we fail to challenge the world’s way of thinking.

Paul helps us in 1 Corinthians 15 by giving us a very good definition of what the gospel is. But before we dive into that definition, here is a little historical background. Paul’s letters to the Corinthians are among the earliest writings of the New Testament, a fact is undisputed in our day even by the most liberal scholars. This is a wonderful concession because it means that historians everywhere must explain how by 53-55 AD (which is the generally accepted date of the Corinthian epistles) we find a monotheistic Jewish Pharisee professing faith in the divinity of one of his fellow Rabbis who had gotten himself crucified just a couple decades earlier. It’s a fascinating historical drama in and of itself, especially when you add the fact that before he became a Christian leader and evangelist, Paul was a fierce opponent of this strange Jewish sect, persecuting other believers even unto death. Of course the way the story is usually told is that Jesus was a nice groovy teacher who preached peace, love, and harmony until he unfortunately got himself crucified . The story continues like a good fish story: tales about this Jesus evolved over time so that by the late first century, when the story was finally written down, this teacher is pictured with a halo, walking on water and performing miracles. In other words, the man was turned into a God over time by the believing community.

But if that’s really what happened, how do we explain Paul’s conversion in the early 30s AD? How do we explain the various documents that he left behind, some written in the late 40s (ie. his epistles to the Galatians and Thessalonians)? It’s one thing to get a Greek or Roman pagan to believe in the divinity of one of his neighbors (you might recall the story of when Paul and Barnabas were mistaken for incarnations of Zeus and Hermes in Lystra). But Jews were different. Pharisees in particular were very strict monotheists. So how do we get a man like this to profess the divinity of one of his fellow rabbis at such an early date? This question is totally ignored by most liberal scholars as well as by a popularizer such as Dan Brown in his book the Da Vinci Code. In that story, the teacher Jesus wasn’t declared to be divine until a decree by Constantine in 325 AD. It made for interesting fiction, but it is far from the complexity of actual historical events.

The great thing about Paul is that we don’t have to speculate. We have his writings and no one disputes the early dates of their composition. So the best way to find out what made Paul tick would be to go back to the original sources. And this text for 1 Corinthians 15 is one of the most important such sources.

In the next installment of this blog series, we’ll start walking through Paul’s arguments from this text in order to get a better understanding of what the gospel is and why we should believe it!

Source: , What The Gospel Is & Why We Should Believe It, Part 1http://www.whitehorseinn.org/blog/category/blog-series/what-is-the-gospel-blog-series/#sthash.Ke2wLr9L.dpuf, 31/05/2013. (Accessed 27/06/2013.)

Shane Rosenthal continues with this article:

What The Gospel Is & Why We Should Believe It, Part 2

1 Cor. 15:1 Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you – unless you believed in vain.

In this amazing text, Paul starts out by reminding his disciples in Corinth of the basic components of the Christian gospel. Since he’s reminding them of what they had already received, a good question to ask would be, “When did Paul first preach this message to them?” This letter was written while Paul was in Ephesus sometime between 53-55 AD. Here he is reminding them of the basic gospel message which he probably first delivered to them around 51 AD.

1 Cor. 15:3 For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received.

I’d like to draw your attention to the particular words “of first importance.” The Bible is the word of God, yet this book contains some things that are more important than others. Jesus himself makes this same point to the Pharisees when he tells them that they have neglected the “weightier matters of the law, such as justice, mercy, and faithfulness.” Tithing wasn’t unimportant, but it was less important, he argued, than the incredibly significant issues of justice and mercy. Likewise, everything we find in the New Testament is important and inspired. But here Paul is reminding the Corinthians about the issue of first importance. He has already said in verse 1 that he’s reminding them of the gospel. So essentially Paul is saying that the gospel is the most important thing, the thing of first importance that we need to focus on and never lose sight of.

1 Cor. 15:3 For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received.

Now pay attention to that last word: received. This gospel message is something that he himself received? But from whom? Paul is arguing here that this is not merely something he came up with when he first delivered this message to them in 51 AD. In his letter to the Galatians (written in 48 AD), Paul provides a brief sketch of his own conversion. Paul’s conversion is generally fixed at around 32 AD, two years after the crucifixion. In Galatians 1:18 Paul says that “after three years I went up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas,” which would mean he visited Peter around 35 AD.

This incredibly early timeline that I am presenting here is not disputed by even the most radical liberal scholars. According to John Dominic Crossan, one of the pioneers of the infamous Jesus Seminar: “Paul wrote to the Corinthians from Ephesus in the early 50s. But he says in 1 Corinthians 15:3 that ‘I handed on to you as of first importance that which I in turn received.’ The most likely source and time for his reception of that tradition would have been Jerusalem in the early 30s when, according to Galatians 1:18, he ‘went up to Jerusalem to visit Peter” (from his book Excavating Jesus, 2002, p. 298).

It’s interesting to note the actual word Paul uses when he went to visit Peter in Gal 1:18. The word translated in this text as “visit” is actually the word historesai, which is the root of our English word “history.” So the sense is not merely that Paul is going to visit a friend, but rather to inquire of Peter and possibly even to write down his story.

We would do well here to recall that Luke is one of Paul’s companions, as we discover in his letters to Philemon, Timothy, and the Colossians. We’re not sure when Luke began to be associated with Paul, but he certainly outlines this same approach in the beginning of his gospel, saying that he compiled his narrative by interviewing the eyewitnesses.

In the next installment of this blog series, we’ll continue our survey of 1 Corinthians 15 as we start to walk through the substance of Paul’s gospel message.

Source: By Shane Rosenthal, What The Gospel Is & Why We Should Believe It, Part 2, http://www.whitehorseinn.org/blog/category/blog-series/what-is-the-gospel-blog-series/#sthash.Ke2wLr9L.dpuf, 03/06/2013. (Accessed 27/06/2013.)