Followup on Harbinger lawsuit

Got an email linking a press release from the publisher of The Harbinger answering the publication of information about a lawsuit against a critic of The Harbinger.

The main point of the communication is this: 

“As this issue has spilled into public forums, the dispute has been re-characterized as one in which Charisma House and Rabbi Cahn have sought to suppress the right to criticize The Harbinger and discourage dialogue regarding the work. Because of this misinformation, Charisma House feels compelled to respond in order to make clear its position that any and all dissent, disagreement or dialogue regarding The Harbinger is not only encouraged but also necessary for the continued growth of the body of Christ in today’s world.  

“It is also important to note that despite what has been portrayed, the legal counsel involved represents Charisma House and not Rabbi Cahn. Any communication from the attorney to The Berean Call has been initiated by Charisma House and not Rabbi Cahn.

A tribute to Dave Hunt 1926-2013

Chris Pinto does a nice  tribute to Dave Hunt,  who died on Friday the 5th.  He includes excerpts from a lengthy interview of Dave he did many years ago.

Dave was the founder of the Berean Call, and wrote many books I read as a new Christian over twenty years ago, most of them on the New Age, the cults and occultic religions and their impact on America over the last decades, also particularly his expose of the Roman Catholic Church, A Woman Rides the Beast. 

Another Comment on my post about the "Heaven" experiences

UPDATE:  October 26, 2013:

Listening to parts of the Strange Fire Conference I missed the first time around I just heard Justin Peters on the Word-Faith Movement and somewhere toward the middle of his talk he mentions visits to Heaven, including the stories of Colton Burpo and Alex Malarkey. He says he and Phil Johnson spoke with Beth Malarkey who told them the story about her son is not true. So Peters says the stories are simply false, made up, lies.

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Even after such a long time my main post on the experiences of visits to "heaven" continues to accumulate hostile comments.  Today I received one from "wingedlion" who accuses me of being a satanic infiltrator since my views don't "build faith" but destroy it. 

Well, I have to say I WANT to destroy "faith" in experiences of this sort.  Our faith is to be in what God tells us in His word, not in our experiences.  Experiences that contradict the Bible, and so far ALL those I've read about do, are only going to lead people into deeper deception. 

It's one of the signs of the times that we are in the very last of the last days that this sort of phenomena has been increasing, which is apparent just in the number of books that have come out about such experiences, and even in the number of comments I've been getting to this topic.  It's all of a piece with the increase in apparitions of "Mary" over the last century or so.  Apparently we're only too gullible when it comes to anything "supernatural."

Here's today's exchange:

Having died, and been brought back to life myself, I will have to agree with the Burpo's. I am somewhat concerned about makeing demons more powerful then God though, I believe this is the work of a Satanist infiltrtor, and not a "concerned Christian". This is a faith destroyer, not a faith builder.

Hello Wingedlion,
Did God allow Satan to deceive our first parents?  Has He allowed him to deceive countless millions across the world and down the millennia who are enslaved to false religions?  If so, why wouldn't He allow demons to deceive us still if we believe things contrary to the Bible?  What sort of "faith" is it that is built on false experiences?

I can't judge your experience since you don't describe it, but the Burpo boy brought back descriptions of supposed occurrences in "heaven" that contradict the Bible.  I cover this more in a more recent post on this subject than I do in this one. 

Christians CAN be deceived and "supernatural" experiences are apparently an all-too-easy way for the devil to accomplish this these days.

A few remarks on a lawsuit by the publisher of Jonathan Cahn's Harbinger, against the publisher of David James' book, The Harbinger, Fact or Fiction?

UPDATE:
Reluctantly I have to agree with those who emphasize the biblical teaching against suing a brother in Christ, for any reason.  I say this "reluctantly" because I have to suppose that the publishers of The Harbinger took the scripture into account and must have come to their decision after much thought, and having followed all this from the beginning I can see how they might have been driven to such an extreme. 

I began supporting The Harbinger here before any of the criticisms emerged against it and I responded to some of the early ones, notably T A McMahon's and eventually David James', so I'm aware of how it all developed and felt from the beginning that most of it was misguided and terribly unfair, even maddeningly so as so many different accusations were made of the book from different sources.  

Nevertheless I can't agree with the lawsuit even though in my earlier post below I entertained the possibility that I might.  Those ministries like the Berean Call have to be free to say what they will no matter who they offend.  Also, while I could see suing for something like defamation since some of the criticism implied terrible things about Cahn and his ministry that in my opinion are clearly untrue, it doesn't seem right to sue for loss of financial gain from a book that has sold over a million copies already, which is a staggering statistic for any Christian book.

The only way to deal with the criticism is to leave the outcome in God's hands, but also of course try to answer it.  I wish I had it in me to do the thorough kind of critique of David James' book that he did of The Harbinger.  In fact I started to do just that a few months back, got something like twenty pages of notes together for the project and then got derailed.  The criticisms have been answered many times over, by Cahn, by me and by others, but with James' whole book out there against The Harbinger something definitive still seems to be needed.

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Earlier post:

I'd heard rumors of a lawsuit against the book by David James which criticizes The Harbinger in lengthy detail, or its publisher the Berean Call, but have been occupied elsewhere, and to be honest also avoiding the subject for some time although I knew eventually I'd probably have to address it.   The reason for avoiding it is that it would obviously bring up a lot of controversy I'd have to investigate in great detail to do it justice, and I just haven't been up to that sort of research lately. 

But now I've read the article on the subject at the Berean Call, which came out in February, and figure the time has come to begin the process of investigating the issue -- if it's still a live issue, and I don't even know that at this point. 

But I want to say just one thing about the article at the Berean Call: Overall I'd say the BC article creates a false impression by referring to so many other issues they've addressed in their ministry over the years, lumping the Harbinger with them by implication, and this is how McMahon criticized the book originally too, mostly by innuendo, which I objected to in my blog when his review came out about a year ago now.  In this current article he goes on and on with general statements about the importance of a truly biblical perspective which implies that this is lacking in Cahn's book and its supporters.  Purely by innuendo he justifies his own critique of the book without saying anything direct about it.  He did the same thing in his Foreword to James' book, making all kinds of general statements about current problems with biblical discernment among Christians without making ONE statement directly about The Harbinger itself.

The article says very little about the lawsuit itself except that it's the first time they've ever been sued by anyone they've criticized. Of course it might be possible to draw the conclusion that this is the first time they've been WRONG in their criticism, and I might come to that conclusion myself.

In my post about McMahon's original review I argued that his objections were unfounded, and eventually I came to the conclusion that what he and David James were calling unbiblical in the book was not unbiblical at all but merely a reflection of their own dispensationalist theology, and I believe that much of that theology can itself be shown to be unbiblical. 

The article,  The Demise of Biblical Discernment addresses the lawsuit in two paragraphs:

The latest issue, which we submit to you for prayer support, is a threatened lawsuit over the book we published by David James ( The Harbinger: Fact or Fiction? ). The complaint is that the author used too many quotes from the New York Times best-selling book, The Harbinger, without permission from author “rabbi” Jonathan Cahn and publisher Charisma Media Publications (CMP). The complaint further states that our use of the quotes has inhibited the sales of The Harbinger and has thus financially damaged Cahn and CMP in an amount yet to be determined. In effect, we are being told that we must limit our documentation in warning the body of Christ of the biblical errors in The Harbinger. In other words, we cannot be Bereans or like the watchman of Ezekiel:3:17-19
 without Cahn’s permission.

This is the first time in my 35 years of working with Dave Hunt and our addressing nearly every major religion, religious cult, aberrational Christian sect, unbiblical trend, religious publication, book, media production, etc., that any organization or individual has even hinted at suing us. Now, however, we are being threatened with legal action by those claiming to be in the church. More critical than the unbiblical action of a brother threatening to take another brother to court (1 Corinthians 6) is the issue of preventing the biblical evaluation of a work that is influencing hundreds of thousands of professing and confessing Christians, as well as those who don’t profess to know Christ. We have hired a copyright attorney to address the legal issues and have responded to the attorney for Cahn and CMP. Even so, we covet your prayers that the Lord will be glorified throughout the process.

Again, I don't yet know enough about the lawsuit to have an opinion about it, but my impression from the above is that it focuses on the legal limit to how much material can be quoted in a review without permission. James quoted a great deal of the Harbinger in his criticism so that he may well have violated that limit.

While I might agree that biblically it's wrong for brother to sue brother in the church, my judgment on this subject has always been for the Harbinger and against most of its critics, and specifically because of what I consider to be UNBIBLICAL criteria, particularly in the criticism from the dispensationalist camp, such as by McMahon and James, so I might in the end side with the lawsuit in this particular case.

But at this point I don't know enough to have an opinion one way or the other.

The Berean Call weighs in on the History Channel's Bible miniseries

This came in email from The Berean Call, exposing the History Channel's mini-series, "The Bible." I did a very short post on it a while back based on what I'd heard about it from Chris Pinto since I don't have TV these days and couldn't watch it myself. I did get to watch some of it finally, at You Tube, but didn't have the patience to stick it out for long. It clearly rewrites the Bible, and besides being offensive it's also boring, perhaps because it isn't the Bible but just a bunch of made-up tales loosely based on the Bible. But as usual these days, enough "Christians" are taken in by it to warrant more of a comment.

Really, it ought to be enough for a Bible-believer to know that Roma Downey was involved with the TV series Touched by an Angel, but since that isn't enough either, maybe the Berean Call's comment will open some eyes.

 

TBC: We have received numerous inquiries regarding "The Bible mini-series" which the History Channel is broadcasting. Following are our comments.]

This mini-series is but one more program designed to discredit the authority and sufficiency of Scripture.

It gets worse if you examine the background of those making this Bible mini-series. Roma Downey and her husband Mark Burnett say they believe in the Bible, but it's clear that they will put their own spin on it. Downey was one of the stars of 

Touched by an Angel, with her co-star being Della Reese, who founded her own "New Thought" church (Christian Science, Religious Science, Unity, and other mind science cults). They are both new-agers to the core. Downey was interviewed by a Hollywood publication, which furnished this information:

"Roma also attends the University of Santa Monica, a private graduate school founded by New Age spiritual and self-help guru John-Roger, and will graduate with a master's degree in spiritual psychology in June.

 "'As someone who has been on a spiritual journey for many years, it seems a natural extension of that work,' says the lady still seen in Hallmark Channel reruns as angel Monica. She notes, 'The skills I'm learning will ultimately qualify me to be a therapist' - not that she has plans to start a practice anytime soon. 'It's really so interesting to learn about human behavior'" (http://becksmithhollywood.com/?p=1879).

Not surprisingly, there is already a "Bible 30-Day Experience Church Kit that "includes everything you need to launch a sermon series and outreach campaign based on The Bible miniseries." course for churches available in conjunction with this series. We've received reports from readers of The Berean Call that their pastors have announced new studies based upon this material.

Downey's producer, husband Burnett, states, "By telling these emotionally connected, big stories, hopefully millions of people will reopen their Bibles." 

It would truly be wonderful if people would reopen their Bibles and move away from reading about or seeing a documentary on the Bible and would instead read the Bible itself to see what it says. May the Lord deliver us from the deception of men.

 The first show aired this past Sunday. How did it fare?

It has received some well deserved flak for depicting the angels at Sodom as "Ninjas." Several news sources have commented on this. It is instructive, however, to read comments of the viewers. For example:

[Comment from a reader]: "My son and I watched it. Just about fell out of my chair when an angel was depicted as a ninja. We both said....'What were they thinking?'"

[Now from a defender]: "Really? Did you just assume and think he was a Ninja because the actor playing him was of Asian Descent? He behaved more like a Roman Gladiator in his sword work and movements, but maybe you didn't notice that. Ninjas also carry Katanas, however this guy carried Roman style swords and used them as such."

The Bible distinctly says that the angels struck the men of Sodom with blindness. They had no need for swords. Nevertheless, this is what Downey and Burnett's movie portrayed. This departure from the Scriptures doesn't leave us with an expectation that the later episodes will improve.

Happy Easter!

The New Pope, Jesuits and Socialism

UPDATE:  Some good stuff on the Roman church and the papacy by John MacArthur:

• A Timely Critique of the Catholic Church on February 21, after Benedict resigned. 
• Here's a 2005 77-minute talk at You Tube: The Pope and the Papacy:  How the Reformers viewed it as Antichrist etc.

Catholicism is no more Christian than Islam. THAT statement will offend 1,000,000,000 people... and it is TRUE ...

UPDATE on the Jesuits:  Chris Pinto is doing a special radio program today, March 22, an overview of the Jesuit Order: Part 1, The Jesuits and the Counter-Reformation.  He covers a lot of the history of Catholicism up to the Jesuits as well.    And here's the show for March 23:  Part 2, The Engineer Corps of Hell.  In this part the abominable Jesuit Oath is partially quoted. 

UPDATE, the Malachy Prophecy:
Learned a few days ago that it's possible this new Pope may yet be regarded as the Petrus Romanus of the Malachy Prophecy, the last Pope of the prophecy, based on the fact that Peter, or Pietro, was one of the given names of Francis of Assissi, whose name this Pope has taken.

UPDATE March 22:
This is to add a radio interview of Dr. Ronald Cooke on the Jesuits in our world today by Chris Pinto done back on March 12 and 13.  They are still active, their objective is to destroy Protestantism and reinstate the Roman  papacy as the ruler of the world.  And here is Part Two of this interview.

UPDATE March 18
Unfortunate big news is that "evangelical" Rick Warren called for prayer for the cardinals in electing a new Pope, which ought to be a red flag to Christians that Rick Warren is part of the apostasy and not part of the Church.  And, how sad, apparently John Piper who has generally been regarded as a trustworthy Reformed preacher, continues to align himself with Rick Warren.  Sad things are coming to light in this time of the Great Apostasy as supposed "Protestants" betray the Reformation and the millions who died for the gospel under the Roman Inquisition.
{--Info from Ken Silva's Apprising Ministries.}

UPDATE  March 16

Pope Francis also said some had suggested jokingly that he, a Jesuit, should have taken the name Clement XV “to get even with Clement XIV who suppressed the Society of Jesus” in the 1700s.

Some joke.  The Jesuits already got even with Clement XIV.  They poisoned him.  And he knew it.  See quote below.

But of course this is now to be denied.  Searching on this you'll turn up websites denying it and classing it with false conspiracy theories.  We'll probably get a lot of this sort of thing now that there is a Jesuit Pope, the aggressive whitewashing of the Jesuits, who USED to be well known for their behind the scenes manipulations enforced by murder, and they were feared by kings and Popes.  Books galore were written about them, but over the last century all that history has been suppressed.   It's time it got revived and made known again.

Here are some quotes on the Jesuits from John Adams, Lincoln, Napoleon and others.

"My history of the Jesuits is not eloquently written, but it is supported by unquestionable authorities, [and] is very particular and very horrible. Their [the Jesuit Order’s] restoration [in 1814 by Pope Pius VII] is indeed a step toward darkness, cruelty, despotism, [and] death. … I do not like the appearance of the Jesuits. If ever there was a body of men who merited eternal damnation on earth and in hell, it is this Society of [Ignatius de] Loyola."

 John Adams (1735-1826; 2nd President of the United States)

"The Jesuits…are a secret society – a sort of Masonic order – with superadded features of revolting odiousness, and a thousand times more dangerous."

Samuel Morse (1791-1872; American inventor of the telegraph; author of the book Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States)

"The Jesuits are a MILITARY organization, not a religious order. Their chief is a general of an army, not the mere father abbot of a monastery. And the aim of this organization is power – power in its most despotic exercise – absolute power, universal power, power to control the world by the volition of a single man. Jesuitism is the most absolute of despotisms – and at the same time the greatest and most enormous of abuses."

  Napoleon I (i.e., Napoleon Bonaparte; 1769-1821; emperor of the French)

"It is my opinion that if the liberties of this country – the United States of America – are destroyed, it will be by the subtlety of the Roman Catholic Jesuit priests, for they are the most crafty, dangerous enemies to civil and religious liberty. They have instigated MOST of the wars of Europe."

 Marquis de LaFayette (1757-1834; French statesman and general. He served in the American Continental Army under the command of General George Washington during the American Revolutionary War.)

“Alas, I knew they [i.e., the Jesuits] would poison me; but I did not expect to die in so slow and cruel a manner.” (1774)

Pope Clement XIV (Who had “forever” abolished the Jesuit Order in 1773)

"The war [i.e., the American Civil War of 1861-1865] would never have been possible without the sinister influence of the Jesuits."

  Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865; 16th President of the United States)

Chris Pinto also has some information on the Jesuits here

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March 13

So no Pope Peter the Roman after all, so is the Malachy prophecy all blown to bits?  Now we have Pope Francis, a first for that name and another first in his being a Jesuit.  A man of austerities who rejects the luxuries of his office and probably will as Pope too.  Probably a Communist.  I mean that seriously.

Been wanting to get up a post about the connections between Communism and Rome, may yet.  Look forward to what Chris Pinto has to say about all this.

Later:  Worldview Weekend is doing a program with Brannon Howse and Chris Pinto about this that I won't get to see because it's only available to subscribers to Worldview Weekend.  Although I like some of the things Howse does I wouldn't subscribe even if I could afford to, which I can't.   Two reasons:  1)  If this becomes a common practice on the web anyone with limited resources is going to have to choose very carefully what information we are willing to pay for;  and 2)  Brannon Howse was very vocal against Jonathan Cahn's Harbinger, showing his LACK of discernment in that particular instance.

But this is from Howse's blurb for the program:

One headline spoke of his commitment to social justice which is one of the eight areas that I have detailed as a major focus of the Jesuits. Here is the headline: Pope Francis profile: Argentine cardinal known as humble conservative who preached social justice

Yes, "social justice" is a code word for socialism (as "progresive" is a code word for Communism) and it happens to have been coined by a Jesuit in the 19th century, some time before Marx came along.  It's also interesting to consider that Marx was trained by Jesuits.

So that will no doubt be Chris Pinto's theme when he gets to his radio show on the subject.