The error of expecting the application of an Old Testament message to modern times to be exact

I'm trying to get all this together in my mind, in order to have a definitive response to the critics myself, which is what I regard David James' book as attempting to do for his team. So along with reading his book I've been listening to the last part of the discussion on Brannon Howse's program for August 7th, with Howse and T A McMahon as well as David James, which deals with the same material the book does if not in as much detail.

Something I have to say right away is that if David James is going to complain about my trying to make him or his fellow critics look foolish, which he suggested in his comment to my previous post, it has to be acknowledged that they are not pulling any punches themselves in characterizing The Harbinger, Jonathan Cahn or his defenders as foolish. It's true that David James himself seems to be more cautious in his use of terms but the message is nevertheless the same: the defenders of The Harbinger are falling for an extremely foolish illusion, treating mere coincidences as a word from God, and failing to apply what they characterize as basic principles of Bible interpretation, and so on and so forth. Brannon Howse on that program mentions an email he received from a "well-known" pastor in Chicago whom he quotes as saying he'd read half of The Harbinger and found it "silly and foolish."

With that kind of rhetoric coming from the critics they are hardly justified in demanding that Cahn's defenders refrain from similar language. In fact, there is no way to do so consistently. Even with the best of intentions, bending over backwards to avoid insulting language, it can't be done beyond a bare minimum because both sides of this controversy regard the other side as coming to absurd and foolish conclusions about the book. Certainly I don't think the critics themselves are foolish, but I do think their arguments are foolish, something I find hard to account for coming from knowledgeable Christian leaders, and I've had a struggle to comprehend this all along. Obviously they have the same opinion of their opponents' judgments.

In my last post I raise questions about what seems to me to be only one of their absurd criticisms of The Harbinger, this notion that Cahn interprets Isaiah as literally addressing America. I asked what might have led them to this conclusion since to me it IS absurd, and so far I have only my same guesses -- some way they read Cahn's word choices in some other sense than he meant them. That's the best I can do to understand it.

Another issue that is just as absurd to my mind is their insistence that the "harbingers" are not precise enough matches from Isaiah 9 to present-day America to claim that these harbingers are something only God could have brought about. Jonathan Cahn has himself answered this many times, pointing out that this is like expecting New York City to BE Jerusalem of the 8th century BC, or to expect that ancient Assyrians are going to come marching against the United States as God's judgment against us. You can't expect a message that was originally intended for ancient Israel to be precisely matched in the context of modern America, to which it does now nevertheless clearly apply. They keep harping on the idea that the match must be PRECISE. This is absurd in the extreme. What on earth leads them to this absurdity?

I'm sorry, David James and the rest of you, I can't see this any other way and I sincerely do not understand how you can allow yourselves to entertain even for a moment what I can only regard as extreme absurdities.

But this is just to give one more instance of the same. I'm still working on all this.

Reading the US into Isaiah?

David James' book arrived and I've been reading through it.

The idea continues that The Harbinger assumes that the United States is somehow included in Isaiah 9:10 even as written to Israel, an idea so bizarre I don't know whether to laugh or cry or just sit stunned.

A couple of questions occur:

1. Has anyone ever in the history of Bible interpretation been documented to have made this particular error of finding a current place or situation actually embodied in the Biblical text? Some cult? Anybody?

If not, that would seem to make it something that just doesn't happen, and that being the case how is it they are willing to assume that Jonathan Cahn, alone of all Christians on the planet, would make such a bizarre error? They acknowledge that he doesn't say any such thing directly but they nevertheless believe the book expresses such an idea. Again, against all likelihood that anyone would ever commit such an error.


2. Is the idea that Jonathan Cahn made such an error due entirely to his reiterated phrase about a message for America being "hidden" in that verse? Is that what this is all about?

Just have to ask. Anyone know the answer?

More on why I'm defending the Harbinger

This "Harbinger" controversy is beginning to wear on me.

Still need to finish my response to Brannon Howse's radio show of August 6th which I started in a previous post. Finally they are trying to address the central point of The Harbinger which I've been yelling about for a while now, the fact that there doesn't seem to be any way to dismiss the "harbingers" themselves as coming from any source other than God. They can't be explained away as mere coincidence or explained on the basis of any particular theological position. They exist in reality, and to discuss all the supposed theological objections to the book without acknowledging that is like pointedly ignoring the elephant in the living room as they say.

CAVEATS, DISCLAIMERS AND CAUTIONARY PRINCIPLES REITERATED:
First, it's not the book itself I'm defending as much as the message I get out of the book, which I'd already gotten out of speeches and interviews before the book came out, that is, the meaning of the "harbingers" in America that echo Isaiah 9:10. I could have all kinds of objections to how the book is put together, various word choices and phrasings, but to my mind all that is not the point. It's the harbingers that are the point.

To say it again, I share the theological objections of the critics to the publisher of the book (Charisma House subsidiary Front Line), and to many of the personalities who have interviewed Jonathan Cahn, such as Jim Bakker, Sid Roth, and Pat Robertson. I don't know enough about their theologies to know how seriously out of line I would regard their views if I knew more but I know enough to know they are off in an area of the Christian community that I generally reject. I also gather from Jonathan Cahn's talk to a Messianic convention in 2005 (at You Tube) that he's more accepting of the idea of prophecy in the church today than I am, describing his messianic congregation or the messianic movement as a whole as "a prophetic people" and referring to certiain experiences as "prophetic" that I might see differently.

And I should also say that I don't regard any of this as insignificant either. Associations DO matter, of course. The Charismatic Movement promotes the idea that the supernatural gifts God gave to the Church in apostolic times continue today, a position which is rejected by most of the rest of the churches who say the gifts have stopped. Sometimes this rejection extends not only to the gifting of persons, with which I -pretty much agree, but also the occasional working of supernatural phenomena within the body of Christ, and that I don't agree with.

Such phenomena do occasionally still happen, and that to my mind could include isolated prophecies (See my post on Jan Hus) or visions or dreams from God, miraculous healings or other miraculous events, again not as the specific gifting of a person but at least as an occasional event for a specific purpose (It would have to have a specific purpose for the good of the body of Christ, it seems to me, to even be considered as authentic).

Nevertheless I realize this is also a problematic issue and I'm open to being convinced I should reject it all without reservation -- not yet convinced but open to it.

Most of such phenomena I've come to regard as something Watchman Nee and Jessie Penn Lewis identifed as "soul power," that is, as abilities related to the original endowment of the human race that were suppressed as a result of the Fall but still occasionally manifest as psychic powers, clairvoyance and that sort of thing. Such abilities are cultivated in various religions through meditation and physical disciplines and shamanistic rituals, and much of it involves demonic communications and influence as well. I used to regard the counterfeits as completely the work of the satanic hordes but I find Penn Lewis and Nee's explanation more realistic.

It's not always easy to tell the difference but I think it's very clear in some cases that this is what is really going on in charismatic circles but getting wrongly attributed to the Holy Spirit. I have no doubt this is what is behind Benny Hinn's "powers" and his predecessor Kathryn Kuhlman's, also William Branham who had an "angel" following him around and thought he was the Elijah of the last days. Also this is clearly what is manifesting in Rick Joyner's church, which I've discussed in earlier posts (examples of which are at You Tube), and in "prophetic readings" by Jill Austin, which I also discussed earlier, and the rest of the doings of those who make up the New Apostolic Reformation. It is no doubt also what's going on in Pat Robertson's "word of knowledge" segment of his show, and it seems to me that Sid Roth (who accepted Rick Joyner as a true prophet on his show) is deceived about these things and that the vast majority of the charismatic community are also taken in by them. The "revivals" such as the Toronto Blessing, "Holy Laughter" (Watchman Nee describes this counterfeit phenomenon back in the 30s in the Chinese churches, so it was far from new when it came to America in the 90s), the Brownsville Revival, and certainly Todd Bentley's bizarre carryings-on.

Calling out all this stuff as part of the Great Apostasy is the righteous work of the discernment ministries, but sometimes they do it with a heavy hand and not true spiritual discernment.

So here I've given a pretty broad indictment of the charismatic movement in general, and sometimes I wonder why I don't go all the way and reject everything that seems to have a supernatural origin.

It's just that I can't account for ALL such phenomena this way.

Can people be deceived by such phenomena, wrongly attribute it to God, and still be true Christians? I have to hope so because there have been many, including me, who have come out of the charismatic movement after gullibly accepting it for some time.

SO, after all that, given that The Harbinger has such associations, WHY DO I CONTINUE TO DEFEND IT?

Simply because I can't account for the appearance in the real world of what Cahn calls the "harbingers" by any such reasonings as the above, as mere coincidences, as anything that humans or demons could have concocted, as any kind of illusion, or as anything other than something God Himself must have done.

Also, the accusations of the book ARE predominantly a matter of associations and don't hold water as indictments of Cahn, such as for thinking himself a prophet, such as for equating God's covenant with Israel with America's godly consecrations from the past (by Winthrop for instance, or even Washington's prayer of consecration of the nation).

I can see that the book raises suspicions by some of its associations, by some of its terminology, and probably because it was written without adequately anticipating how some of its phrasings might be heard in some theological camps, and I'm not completely happy with some of Cahn's ways of conceptualizing his material either.

But nevertheless I cannot account for the "harbingers," particularly the ones based on Isaiah 9:10 (I have yet to fully grapple with the concept of the "shemitah") as anything but something only God could have brought about.
I can't. And so far none of the explanations anyone has given to account for them convince me.

Such as the explanations David James is giving on this radio show.

TO BE CONTINUED

Another out-of-body encounter with "Jesus"

Another Phony Near-Death Conversion. A regular epidemic of these deceptions coming on now. Like appearances of "Mary" and other demonic manifestations.

This one isn't new but I just happened to find it promoted by a Christian at another blog.

Atheist professor’s near-death experience in hell left him changed

By Mark Ellis

In some near-death experiences, people report they were drawn toward “the light.” But in this horrifying near-death experience for an atheist art professor, he was drawn into the darkness of hell, which dramatically altered the course of his life.

...On the last day of a three-week European art tour he led, his group had returned to their hotel in Paris after a visit to the artist Delacroix’s home and studio. As Howard stood in his room with his wife and another student, suddenly he screamed and dropped to the floor in agony.

[Later in the hospital] ...he had a very unusual out-of-body experience, and found himself standing next to his bed, looking at himself lying there. As he stood there, he noticed he didn’t feel the pain in his stomach. He felt more alive than ever, and his senses seemed more heightened than usual.

...“I saw my body lying on the bed, but I refused to believe it was me. How could that be me if I was standing there,” he wondered.

Suddenly he heard people outside the room calling for him by name. ..“Come with us,” they said. “Hurry up, let’s go.”

Howard left the room and started to walk with them down a long hallway, which was very dimly lit – almost dingy. “They took me on a very long journey through a grey space that got increasingly darker and darker,” he recalls.

They walked a long time, and Howard wondered why he was not tired when he had just suffered the worst day of his life.

...Howard’s fear and apprehension grew at the same time he lost trust in his guides. “Finally it was so dark I was terrified and I said, ‘I’m not going any farther. I want to go back.”

“You’re almost there,” one replied.

Howard dug in his heels. “I’m not going any farther,” he said firmly.

...His guides began to push and pull at him. Howard fought back, but he was horribly outnumbered.

“We had a big fight and the fight turned into them annihilating me, which they did slowly and with much relish,” he says. “Mostly they were biting and tearing at me. This went on for a long time. ...

He lay there motionless for a few moments, completely spent. Then he was surprised by a small voice inside his head that said, ‘Pray to God.’

He thought, ‘I don’t pray. I don’t even believe in God.’

Then he heard the voice a second time, ‘Pray to God.’

‘But I wouldn’t know how to pray even if I wanted to pray,’ he thought. Whose voice was this, he wondered? It sounded like his voice, but the words were completely foreign to his own thinking. Then he heard the voice a third time repeat the same message. His mind drifted back to his days in Sunday school as a child. “I tried to remember things I memorized when I was very young,” he says. He struggled to think of something he could pray.

Then he managed to blurt out, “The Lord is my shepherd and I shall not want…”

When the people around him heard his attempt to pray, they became enraged. “There is no God and nobody can hear you,” they cried, along with other obscenities. “If you keep praying we will really hurt you.”

But Howard noticed something curious. The more he prayed and began to mention God, the more they backed away from him.

Emboldened, he began to shout out bits and pieces of the Lord’s Prayer, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and “God Bless America.” Finally, he was screaming any fragments of God’s truth he could muster from the moldy recesses of his memory bank.

It seemed to work! Even in the darkness, he could tell they had fled, but not too far away.

As he lay there, Howard began to review his life. “I came to the conclusion I led a crummy life and I had gone down the sewer pipe of the universe. I had gone into the septic tank with other human garbage. I was being processed by the garbage people into garbage like them.”

{Does he know they are demons?]

“Whatever life was supposed to be about, I missed it,” he thought. “What I received was what I deserved and the people who attacked me were people like me. They were my kindred spirits. Now I will be stuck with them forever.” Feelings of self-loathing and hopelessness filled his mind. His thoughts floated back again to himself as a nine-year-old in Sunday School, “I remembered myself singing “Jesus Loves Me,” and I could feel it inside me. As a child, I thought Jesus was really cool and he was my buddy and he would take care of me.”

...“I’ve got nothing else to lose. I’ll give Jesus a try.”

Then he yelled into the darkness, “Jesus, please save me!”

...Within an instant, a brilliant light appeared that came closer and closer. He found himself bathed in a beautiful light, and for the first time he could clearly see his own body’s miserable condition, ghastly for his own eyes to behold. “I was almost all gore.”

Immediately he recognized Jesus, the King of Kings, the Rescuer, the Deliverer.

[Savior? Cross? Atonement? Forgiven sin?]

“His arms reached down and touched me and everything healed up and came back together,” he recalls. “He filled me with a love I never knew existed.”

Then he picked up Howard, like one football player picking up a fallen teammate on the field, put his arms around him, and Howard cried like a baby in His arms. “He carried me out of there and we headed to where God lives.”[Is God somebody different from Jesus?]In his mind, Howard began to think that Jesus made a terrible mistake. “I’m garbage and I don’t belong in heaven,” he thought.

They stopped moving, and both Howard and Jesus were hanging in space, somewhere between heaven and hell. “We don’t make mistakes,” Jesus said tenderly.

[Cross? Atonement? Repentance?]

“He could read everything in my mind and put His voice into my head,” Howard recalls. “We had very rapid, instantaneous conversations.”

Then Jesus told Howard He had angels who would show him his life. “It was a terrible experience because my life deteriorated after adolescence. I saw I became a selfish, unloving person. I was successful, a full tenured art professor at 27, the department head, but I was a jerk.”

In this replay, he saw his heavy drinking and adultery. “I cheated on my wife proudly. It was horrible.”

...For the first time he realized the way he lived his life hurt Jesus. “I was in the arms of the most wonderful, holy, loving, kind person and we’re looking at this stuff. Embarrassing doesn’t even begin to describe it.”

As they watched together, Howard could see the pain and disappointment on the face of Jesus. “When I did these things it was like sticking a knife into his heart.”

“Do you have any questions?” Jesus asked.

“I have a million questions,” Howard replied, and proceeded to unburden himself of anything and everything he could imagine asking an omniscient being. Jesus answered Howard’s questions kindly and patiently.

When Howard couldn’t think of anything else to ask, he said, “I’m ready to go to heaven now.”

“You’re not going to heaven. You’re going back to the world,” Jesus replied.

Howard began to argue, but it was to no avail. Jesus told him to go back and live his life differently.

[Forgiven? Under the blood? Through the cross? Or just through his own will?]

...At 9:00 p.m., Howard was back in his hospital room...Less than 30 minutes had elapsed since he lost consciousness.

...When his strength returned, Howard began to devour the Bible. “Since none of my atheist friends believed me, I started memorizing verses and I would give them Bible lectures, but that didn’t go over very well,” he recalls.

He grew “desperate” for fellowship in a church, and began to attend Christ Church in Fort Thomas, Kentucky, part of United Church of Christ.

...He also wrote a book about his experience, “My Descent Into Death,” which he says was written primarily to non-believers.

Howard and his second wife, Marcia, a strong Christian, are both involved in missionary work in Belize. He maintains a passion for painting, with much of his art devoted to spiritual themes.

[Why couldn't Jesus help him strengthen his first marriage, why didn't He convert his wife? Jesus said God hates divorce.]

I just encountered this story on another blog and realized I had to write about it although I don't yet know enough about it to say more than ask the questions I've raised in the brackets. I think that's enough to show that it's just another bogus demon-inspired deception of course, but it always helps to get more evidence.

apology

OK, I'm apologizing for falling into extreme rhetoric at times and calling arguments stupid. There's no excuse for losing it like that. I apologize and pray it won't happen again.

The Harbinger again. Or why I am defending it.

Been listening to Brannon Howse's latest radio shows on The Harbinger, in which he's interviewing David James, whose book critical of The Harbinger has just come out (I'm waiting for it to arrive), and T. A. McMahon who published James' critique. It's all more of the same, but the book should be the definitive treatment of the critics' views so I'm looking forward to it in an odd sort of way.

On the morning of 9/11 I had a dream about being in the back seat of a small plane and demanding to be let out because I had a forboding about ... something. The pilot was a little girl and some time before 9/11 there had been a big story in the news about a father who let his eight-year-old daughter fly his plane alone. Sadly she crashed the plane and died. At the very least in my dream I assume she would have represented the threat of a crash. There was a man in the front passenger/co-pilot seat, however, who supposedly could have saved us, but I still wanted out. He shook his head disapprovingly at me. I was on the ground watching them fly away when I woke up to the news that the first WTC building had been hit. I was watching the TV when the other was hit.

I'm not going to say that was a prophetic dream but it's sure suggestive of something in that direction.

It has nothing to do with the dream as far as I know, but I recognized that 9/11 was God's judgment when it happened. I don't know how others could fail to recognize it. Or I've more or less figured out how, but it's still astonishing to me. Getting others to take it seriously was just about impossible. I'd talk about it on political internet forums and even conservative blogs and get denounced for it. By people who consider themselves Christians as much as by anyone else. Some Christians still aren't sure that was God's judgment or that America is under God's judgment at all. David James for one according to some things he's said.

I remember a "humorous" picture being sent around the conservative circuits of a supposed plan for a rebuilt World Trade Center, with five buildings side by side, the buildings on the ends the shortest the two next to them a bit taller and the one in the middle quite tall. All intended to show defiance to our enemies but I knew it really meant "giving the finger" to God, not just our enemies. Which is exactly the same attitude that the harbingers of Isaiah 9:10 are all about. Did anybody want to hear that? Few then for sure, I wonder how many now.

What happened to the America whose leaders would on occasions of crisis or threat call for a national time of fasting and prayer for God's forgiveness and protection? Long gone. We couldn't muster a National Christian Anything any more. If Christians these days are going to act on behalf of the nation it's going to be in spite of the nation's leadership -- though no doubt with an exception here and there in the lower ranks. We certainly don't need all the ecumenical stuff that includes the false religions, the Mormons, the Muslims, the Catholics. (Yes, the Catholics.) The crew that Glenn Beck is trying to pull together on behalf of his Mormon view of America. Much the same motley crew that Bush assembled in the National Cathedral to pray for the nation after 9/11. That set off my alarm bells for sure. That's like ASKING for further judgment against us.

At the time my impression was that a huge majority of American preachers were refusing to accept that 9/11 was God's judgment. Remember how the very few who did know it was judgment got hooted down? Like Robertson and Falwell. Wilkerson preached on it too, though as far as I recall I don't think he got attacked for it. None of these guys are among my own Christian favorites, and I have some specific theological problems with a couple of them too, but they knew what ALL the preachers in the nation should have known and didn't.

When I first learned about the Harbinger at the beginning of this year, it occurred to me that this could be God's way of making Christians notice that 9/11 was His judgment after all. It seems to be making quite a bit of headway in that direction, but it's also stirred up quite a hornet's nest among some ministries against it, not for its message of judgment though it has the effect of derailing that message anyway. For no good reason either, as I've been arguing here. Of course they think their reasons are damning and I'm not going to say they're not sincere, I'm sure they are quite convinced they are right.

Again the message of judgment comes from an outpost of the Church that wouldn't be among my favorites, but God didn't ask me. If David Wilkerson were still alive he'd no doubt recognize the truth of The Harbinger. Jerry Falwell might too. Pat Robertson has recognized it. There are some conservative evangelicals who are recognizing it as well.

God often doesn't do things the way we think He should.

God's will be done.

Glenn Beck's Ecumenical Travesty and the true Christian founding of early America

I wish Chris Pinto would write a book or somebody would write one using his material. We need his correctives to American history to sort out what was Christian in our history and what was not, and the historical perspectives he's dug up that show the REAL dimensions of the Antichrist Church of Rome. Pinto not a historian, as he's made clear, but a documentarian who accumulates his historical facts in the service of his films. We are starved for historical truth, thanks to such deceitful "histories" as David Barton has fed us over the last few decades, so historian or not Pinto's work is much needed.

Today's radio show, Restoring Love or Blind Delusion? is about Glenn Beck's latest attempt to blur the lines between Christianity and Mormonism and all other religions, his "Restoring Love" rally. Early colonial Governor John Winthrop was apparently made an excuse for Beck's ecumenical travesty, as the love he wrote of in his Model of Christian Charity is misused by Beck to foster acceptance of all religious beliefs as equal, whereas of course as a true Christian Winthrop would never have treated anything but the Biblical gospel as the true Christian faith, certainly not the false religion of Mormonism -- or Catholicism, or Islam etc. etc. etc. Pinto shows the antichrist nature of Beck's selective quoting of Winthrop.

Since I've been defending The Harbinger recently, I noticed that the Winthrop article has implications for this purpose. The book is often criticized for claiming that America is in covenant with God, or for supposedly equating the American covenant with God's covenant with ancient Israel.* Well, here is John Winthrop's affirmation that he did indeed believe "we are entered into covenant with" God and he does base it on God's covenant with Israel and the Mosaic law. Here is the last part of Winthrop's A Model of Christian Charity which refers to this covenant:

Thus stands the cause between God and us. We are entered into covenant with Him for this work. We have taken out a commission. The Lord hath given us leave to draw our own articles. We have professed to enterprise these and those accounts, upon these and those ends. We have hereupon besought Him of favor and blessing. Now if the Lord shall please to hear us, and bring us in peace to the place we desire, then hath He ratified this covenant and sealed our commission, and will expect a strict performance of the articles contained in it; but if we shall neglect the observation of these articles which are the ends we have propounded, and, dissembling with our God, shall fall to embrace this present world and prosecute our carnal intentions, seeking great things for ourselves and our posterity, the Lord will surely break out in wrath against us, and be revenged of such a people, and make us know the price of the breach of such a covenant.

Now the only way to avoid this shipwreck, and to provide for our posterity, is to follow the counsel of Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. For this end, we must be knit together, in this work, as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly affection. We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body. So shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace. The Lord will be our God, and delight to dwell among us, as His own people, and will command a blessing upon us in all our ways, so that we shall see much more of His wisdom, power, goodness and truth, than formerly we have been acquainted with. We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies; when He shall make us a praise and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, "may the Lord make it like that of New England." For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world. We shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God, and all professors for God's sake. We shall shame the faces of many of God's worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us till we be consumed out of the good land whither we are going.

And to shut this discourse with that exhortation of Moses, that faithful servant of the Lord, in his last farewell to Israel, Deut. 30. "Beloved, there is now set before us life and death, good and evil," in that we are commanded this day to love the Lord our God, and to love one another, to walk in his ways and to keep his Commandments and his ordinance and his laws, and the articles of our Covenant with Him, that we may live and be multiplied, and that the Lord our God may bless us in the land whither we go to possess it. But if our hearts shall turn away, so that we will not obey, but shall be seduced, and worship other Gods, our pleasure and profits, and serve them; it is propounded unto us this day, we shall surely perish out of the good land whither we pass over this vast sea to possess it.

Tomorrow's show, more revelations of the true nature of America's founders, who were far from the spirit of the Christian colonial leaders of 150 years earlier: Jefferson was a racist and intentionally excluded blacks from the phrase "all men are created equal."

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*The Harbinger doesn't say that America is "in covenant" with God though there is definitely a special relationship with God implied. But since the critics keep accusing Cahn of making some kind of equation between America and ancient Israel's covenant with God, it seems to me, based on the Winthrop statement in preparation to found a colony in America, that if Cahn had actually made such an equation he wouldn't have been wrong, so the critics' complaints don't hold either way.