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My pastor was preaching last Sunday on heaven invading earth. He wants to see heaven poured out in our worship gatherings so that God’s presence would be so manifest that anything would be possible: salvations, healing, forgiveness, restoration, etc. “Not just fifteen minutes, but an hour and a half or even two hours of extended worship would see this start to happen…” At that point in the sermon I shouted out “TWENTY FOUR SEVEN”! He paused. “Okay! Now that’s faith! Who said that?” He asked, looking over in my direction. I raised my hand. He said “that’s good, that’s right on!” and went on with his message.

He seemed surprised it was me expressing such faith.  Perhaps, it was because him and I are having a friendly debate over the nature of reality and how God heals. My wife is a medical doctor. She believes healing is from God whether it comes supernaturally through prayer or naturally through medical skill. For her and I, one way is not necessarily better than the other way.

Our pastor disagrees, preferring a supernatural manifestation of healing. He is taking his cue from a book by Bill Johnson, Senior Pastor of Bethel Church in Redding California entitled When Heaven Invades Earth: A Practical Guide To A Life Of Miracles. Johnson’s states “our mandate is simple: raise up a generation that can openly display the raw power of God. This book is all about that journey… the quest for the King and His Kingdom.” (p.27, online here) 

As a member of a charismatic church, I believe the gifts of the Holy Spirit are a vital part of the ministry of the church. Healing is one of those gifts. I support and I have benefited from prayer for healing in all its various forms at our fellowship. I have personally seen God’s power at work in our congregation through prophetic utterances, physical manifestations and demonic deliverance. I believe that God is alive and aggressively active in establishing his kingdom on earth through his church.

So I enjoy hearing stories of “power encounters” as John Wimber used to describe them. This is when God’s power confronts, overwhelms and undoes demonic powers in the form of healing or deliverance. I attended a Wimber conference in Edmonton in 1989 in which the power of God was so manifest that it blew the electrical system, dimmed the lights  and brought the City emergency services to the building. I have been in prayer meetings and seen evangelistic gatherings where light bulbs blew out and street lamps fizzled and went dark. I believe in the visible tangible demonstration of God’s power.

Bill Johnson’s book is full of these stories and they are of great encouragement to the church. However, I take issue with the way in which he constructs his version of reality. David Ruis, one of the founding pastors of our church, spoke recently on a Sunday morning and one thing he said struck me as capturing this problem. Ruis said, “there is a gospel that can come that puts one thing down to elevate another and that’s always a temptation in the church.” This is what I see Johnson doing in his book.

In the Foreword to the book Jack Taylor sums up Johnson’s view on reality. 

“I love this book because it points us toward primary reality in a world almost totally preoccupied with secondary reality. The reader of Scripture is aware that it ultimately defines primary reality as “unseen and eternal” while secondary reality is temporal, that is, it doesn’t last (see 2 Cor. 4:18). Bill Johnson’s beliefs, teachings, and ministry center on primary or Kingdom reality and finds that reality sufficient to change the face of “that which is seen.” (p. 18, online here)

Here is Johnson’s description of the “primary reality”.

The invisible realm is superior to the natural. The reality of that invisible world dominates the natural world we live in…both positively and negatively. Because the invisible is superior to the natural, faith is anchored in the unseen…

Unbelief is anchored in what is visible or reasonable apart from God. It honors the natural realm as superior to the invisible. The apostle Paul states that what you can see is temporal, and what you can’t see is eternal. Unbelief is faith in the inferior. (p. 45, online here.)

For example, Johnson is fond of making the point that there is no cancer in heaven, so when heaven invades earth cancer must go!

“Real faith is not living in denial of the natural realm. If the doctor says you have a tumor, it’s silly to pretend that it’s not there. That’s not faith. However, faith is founded on a reality that is superior to that tumor. I can acknowledge the existence of a tumor and still have faith in the provision of His stripes for my healing…I was provisionally healed 2,000 years ago. It is the product of the kingdom of heaven—a superior reality. There are no tumors in heaven, and faith brings that reality into this one."

While I endorse the fact that there are “no tumors in heaven” and that there is healing in the atonement, and that the prayer of faith brings healing, I cannot endorse the language that divides reality into that which is ‘superior’ verses that which is ‘inferior’.

It is language that puts one thing down (the natural) in order to elevate another thing (the supernatural). It reflects a fundamental insecurity in our creatureliness, (the Latin ‘natura’ means ‘that which we are born with’) as if something is fundamentally wrong with who God made us to be, where God intends us to exist and how God intends us to work...

Secularists who oppose faith in the public arena such as workplaces often complain that allowing Christians to bring faith to work blurs the lines between church and state. Faith is a private matter, they say. So it ought to be kept for private affairs and not allowed to influence decisions in the public square. To permit it is to travel down the road to a theocracy.

A theocracy according to Webster's dictionary is “Government of a state by the immediate direction or administration of God; hence, the exercise of political authority by priests as representing the Deity.”  Wikipedia has an article on the history of the word here.

TheocracyWatch, a project of Cornell University, documents the influence of religion in American politics. Many on the Left believe religion plays far too great a role in American public life. (See Street Prophets: When is a theocrat, not a theocrat? (w/poll!)) A number of these people have been recently published books on the subject.

Ross Douthat, a writer for The American Scene and Associate Editor for the Atlantic Monthly, writes a review of three of these books in the most recent issue of the magazine First Things.

“Most of these books aspire to be anthropologies, guides for the perplexed that lead the innocent reader through what the subtitle of American Theocracy calls “the perils and politics of radical religion.” There isn’t perfect agreement on what to call the religious radicals in question: Everyone employs theocrat, but Kingdom Coming also proposes Christian nationalist, while The Baptizing of America favors the clunky Christocrat. Others have suggested Christianist, the better to link religious conservatives to Osama bin Laden—and of course there’s the ubiquitous theocon, suggesting a deadly mixture of Oliver Cromwell and Paul Wolfowitz.

But the various authors are in agreement about the main point, which is that something has gone terribly wrong with the separation of church and state in this country, and that America is poised to fall into the hands of people only one step from the ayatollahs. Today’s battles aren’t just a matter of ordinary political factionalism, they insist. The hour is much later than that, and nothing less than the republic itself hangs in the balance.”

Douthat unpacks the complaints of the anti-theocrats well and shows their fears to be groundless. His review makes good fodder for those who would defend faith in the workplace from secular exclusionists.

Some others that have written on this topic:

Joe Carter at the evangelical outpost: Theocrats and Theophobes: Kevin Phillips and Carter’s Law of Political Rhetoric Also, the evangelical outpost: On Earth As It Is In Heaven: Americans and the “Theocracy” Canard

John at Brain Cramps for God: Toward a Definition of Theocracy

crimsonline: A moratorium on "theocracy" talk

GetReligion: Putting “theocracy” fears in their place

What's the Rumpus?: Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean the anti-theocrats aren't out to get me

Christian Alliance for Progress Blog: The Hysteria over Theocracy

This week the Christian Carnival is HOT! Lots of HOT Topics to match the summer HEAT with a little humor thrown in! 

Thank you to Donald Bosch at the The Evangelical Ecologist for helping me as a rookie host for the Christian Carnival and for John Howell at Brain Cramps for God for forwarding all those great entries and for the much esteemed Dory at Wittenberg Gate for  giving us the opportunity to host.

Tom Gilson at Thinking Christian discovers two “tin woodmen" in his short snippet of a story - Only Natural.  

Polly at Life is a Buffet (as opposed to a box of chocolates J? ) does a review of her Book of the Month: - The Holy Bible!. “Synopsis:  God creates the universe and a man and a woman and then the story blasts off from there with an ending that is out of this world.”

The Deputy Headmistress shares an inspiring story of the authenticity of the Bible in her post: The Common Room: Ancient Manuscripts.

Sprittibee has some practical insight about God's Smoke Alarms from her reading of Bruce Wilkerson’s The Secrets of the Vine.

Dave Lorenzo at Career Intensity promotes The Power of Prayer at Work. My question is, does prayer serve business success or does business success serve God’s purposes in the marketplace? Perhaps Carnival readers would care to comment on the role of prayer for prosperity’s sake or the power of prayer for God’s glory through our work?

Trivium Pursuit posts an article by Mike Evans on Spiritual Depression, Rest, and ASSISTANCE Buttons.

Prince of Thrift discusses debt, specifically, becoming and staying debt free in Understanding The Great Misunderstanding.

Diane at CrossRoads in commenting on the Emergent church “thinks the children of the Baby Boomers have learned their parents' teachings quite well” which perhaps is not such a good thing. Check out her concerns at  Where Faith and Inquiry Meet: Emerging into Emergent.

Martin LaBar at Sun and Shield looks at What's really important. And that is showing Christ’s love!

Jeremy Pierce at Parableman discuses Mark Roberts’ argument against doubting the traditional authorship of Mark & Luke. His post is entitled Mark, Luke, and Pseudonymity.

Mandi at Praising Fool in a quest for a church asks “Am I being too harsh since I don't want to go back based on the fact that not a single person welcomed me into their church?” 

Jim Nutt at A Nutt’s View asks the question, God has not given us a spirit of fear, so what are we all so scared of?

Andre Yee at Every Square Inch exhorts fellow believers to See God in the Monotony. He offers a quote from G K Chesterton, “But perhaps, God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon.”

Brandi at LongStarAcademy shares an incredible story of Words of Affirmation from the Lord.

Father David Jennings at Left of Calvary takes issue with the city of Las Vegas for stopping the service of mobile soup kitchens for homeless people in his post Does Vegas share in Sodom’s real sin?

Katy McKenna at Fallible.com discusses how blogging started for her “as a way to relieve my poor husband from a small measure of his listening duties” at The Beauty Of Budding Bloggers

Mary Yerkes of Releasing the Artist Within discusses her experience with the return of a prodigal son, specifically her 23 year old son returning home to live. Her jumping off point is Henri Nouwen’s Encounter with a Painting. Read it at http://maryyerkes.com/blog/?p=418

Rev Bill makes the point that we all need to Cross the road to see (and understand) what's on the other side! He quotes Henri Nouwen on neighborliness.

Nerd Mom from the Nerd Family explores the trend of Denominations and Colleges Breaking Ties.   She thinks denominations are a good idea and wonders why people who disagree ought to still stick together. I can think of some pretty good reasons from Scripture, but perhaps Carnival reader could take up her challenge.

Lennie Jarratt at CrossBlogging discusses the important issue of Stem Cell research at Stem Cell Treatment Allows Girl To Walk.

Anthony at Fides et Veritas responds to Christians proclaiming the imminent return of Christ at Keep on keeping on.

A Penitent Blogger reflects on the attitude that should be maintained by ministers and indeed all the faithful at Ministry with an attitude.

Eric Williams in Ales Rarus asks the question "Must Christians always support Israel?" in his comments about the recent conflict in the Middle East at http://alesrarus.funkydung.com/archives/2414/

Leslie Carbone takes issue with Senator Ron Wyden’s Tax Reform initiative but agrees the tax code needs reform because it is unwise, unjust and immoral in Is the Tax Reform Man Coming?

Mark Olson at Pseudo-Polymath discusses arguments against eugenics from a purely utilitarian viewpoint http://www.pseudopolymath.com/?p=1642.

Barbara Sanders of Alabama at Tidbits And Treasures comments on the ministry of Bill & Gloria Gaithers, some of the best, if not the best, Christian artists of our time God's "Interruption" of the Gaithers

Rey from the Bible Archive looks at his lawn and thinks "Man, there's a lot of work to do in the Church." The Bible Archive - Why Lawn (and Church) Work Doesn't End

And last but not least Mike (that’s me) of the Faith at Work posts his solution to “The Clergy Conspiracy – Decode this Post to Uncover An Explosive Truth!” in his short article commemorating the passing of Kenneth Lay - So Dark the Con of Lay Man.

Thank you everyone for participating. Don’t forget to check ...   more »