Archive for the ‘Calvin L. Smith’ Category

Posted on November 3, 2010 - by Calvin L. Smith

Press Release: Israel and the Church (8 – 9 Oct 2010)

PRESS RELEASE
Israel and the Church: A Common Heritage and an Uncertain Future
(London, 8 – 9 October 2010)

The aim of this two-day conference, held at the London School of Theology, was to raise awareness within the Church of an alternative to the often polarised debate between supporters of Israel and the Arab population in Israel and the disputed territories. Speakers were Drs Darrell Bock (Dallas Theological Seminary), Mitch Glaser (Chosen People Ministries), Jules Gomes (Liverpool Cathedral), Richard Harvey (All Nations Christian College), Barry Horner and Calvin Smith (King’s Evangelical Divinity School). The event culminated with a concert by Nashville Messianic artist Marty Goetz. Jointly organised by Chosen People Ministries and King’s Evangelical Divinity School, the conference eventually involved most of the evangelistic works among the Jewish people in the United Kingdom. The conference hall was packed, and the presentations were at once direct and conciliatory in tone. The final session, modelled on the BBC’s Question Time programme, permitted delegates to raise questions with a panel comprising the various speakers.

During the conference, responses among speakers to the current Middle East conflict (including issues such as the land) were varied and nuanced. Yet all speakers were united in their challenge to supersessionism, affirming instead God’s continued plan and purpose for the Jewish people. The speakers also highlighted and eschewed the highly polarised and divisive nature of the current debate between supporters of both Israel and the Palestinian people, calling for greater objectivity and Christian charity towards fellow brothers and sisters in Christ holding opposing viewpoints. The conference also explored the detrimental impact caused by the unnecessarily pejorative language of the current debate, including how polarisation of opinion is causing Church disunity, how polemical anti-Israel and anti-Christian Zionist rhetoric is impacting Messianic Jewish identity and its relations with the Church, and the effects upon Jewish evangelism. All speakers also affirmed the need to share the gospel with both Jews and Muslims.

A conference volume is planned and additional papers to complement those delivered at the conference have been commissioned. Audio and video recordings and further details of the event are available through the websites of both host organisations (see below). It is our hope that as people become aware of this conference the tone of the debate will change somewhat, while replacement theology will give way to a greater appreciation of God’s continued plan and purpose for the Jewish people.

www.chosenpeople.org.uk
www.kingsdivinity.org

Posted on October 4, 2010 - by Calvin L. Smith

Brazilian Politics and Evangelical Studies

It looks like the former Marxist rebel, Dilma Rousseff, poll favourite and heir apparent to Brazil’s President Lula da Silva, is going to have to face a runoff ballot for the Brazilian presidency next month. Despite a series of opinion polls suggesting she commanded well above the 50% of support needed to avoid a runoff, instead a last-minute surge of support for the Green candidate Marina Silva, who secured nearly a fifth of total ballots cast, resulted (as things stand at the moment) with Rousseff some 2-3 % shy of what she needed for an outright victory.

This result – if confirmed – is significant for Evangelicals for various reasons. First, Brazil counts one of the largest Evangelical – predominantly Pentecostal – populations in the world, with figures of between 40% and 50% regularly cited by commentators (though it is important to treat with care some of the inflated figures often bandied about, usually by Marxists and Catholics fearful of an Evangelical invasion, or else driven by Pentecostal triumphalism). Such a powerful bloc cannot be ignored in any election, and it seems in this instance Rousseff failed to convince Brazil’s Pentecostals that she planned to liberate the country’s abortion laws, together with introducing other social policies which Pentecostals would have found hard to swallow. Interestingly, many Evangelicals switched support to Marina Silva, likely explaining in part her surge of support at the last minute.  Significantly, the Green candidate Marina Silva is herself a Pentecostal belonging to the Assemblies of God. (more…)

Posted on August 26, 2010 - by Calvin L. Smith

“It’s Human Nature, Stupid!”

Remember Bill Clinton’s famous observation concerning what winds people’s clocks when they vote? “It’s the economy, stupid!” This little phrase came to mind this evening while encountering two small bits of news. First, the Guardian speculates that Jerusalem’s forthcoming light rail company may offer several segregated carriages along gender lines to appease the city’s strictest Haredi (ultra orthodox) Jews. Later, BBC’s Newsnight ran a package exploring why women wear the niqab, including an interview which featured three highly radicalised young women in sinister-looking garb. Newsnight also interviewed a young Muslim woman wearing a hijab (headscarf) who explained how, at university, she likewise had become radicalised and wore the niqab to prove her Islamic credentials within the group she was involved with, but had since shifted away from this radicalised position. (more…)

Posted on May 18, 2010 - by Calvin L. Smith

Televangelism

With a looming major validation event and a couple of publication deadlines this month, I’ve not beeen a very good blogger of late. Apologies for that. That said, one of the things I’ve been asked to write for a forthcoming dictionary-type academic publication on Pentecostalism was a short essay on televangelism, which I just finished. I thought this might be of interest, so I’m posting the pre-edited version below. Hope you find it useful.

Televangelism, by Calvin L. Smith

While not an exclusively Pentecostal phenomenon (for example, the Catholic priest Charles Coughlin’s weekly radio broadcasts in the 1930s reached audiences of millions, while more recently Jerry Falwell and Robert Schuller are firmly outside the movement), nonetheless from the outset Pentecostal preachers were quick to recognise the opportunities religious broadcasting offered. Clearly, there are doctrinal reasons for this. Already strongly conversionist by virtue of its revivalist roots, early classical Pentecostalism’s eschatological interpretation of its pneumatology and pneumapraxis, associating the movement’s inauguration with the ‘last days’, contributed considerably to a sense of evangelistic urgency. Thus, it was a logical step for revivalist Pentecostal preachers such as Oral Roberts and Aimee Semple McPherson to exploit radio in order to reach wider audiences than could be accommodated in buildings or tent meetings. Likewise, with the arrival of television Pentecostals quickly embraced the new medium, so that even by the early 1950s Rex Humbard, one of the pioneers of televangelism (a term coined by Jeffrey Hadden and Charles Swann, 1981), was broadcasting church services weekly, while just a few years later Oral Roberts had developed the infrastructure necessary to reach most of the U.S. television audience. (more…)

Posted on March 2, 2010 - by Calvin L. Smith

The Church and Israel Teaching Day

I’ll be doing an all-day seminar exploring various aspects of the relationship between the Church and Israel on Saturday 17 July (11 am – 4 pm) in Wolverhampton, West Midlands, organised by King’s Evangelical Divinity School. Further details later, but we’ve hired a suitable church hall and places are limited, so if you plan on attending you should express your interest as soon as possible by emailing the college office at office(a)kingsdivinity.org.

Posted on February 15, 2010 - by Calvin L. Smith

This Kind of Language is Unhelpful

An Anglican priest who recently attended a Palestine conference organised by the Federation of Islamic Student Societies today blogs of his participation in the conference. Revd Stephen Sizer also refers to the Jerusalem Declaration, a document he helped draft and which he says “repudiates Christian Zionism as a deviant heresy”.

This is strong language indeed. Of course, it is no secret Revd Sizer has widely publicised his intense dislike of Christian Zionism, which he has every right to do. But surely labelling millions of fellow Evangelical Christians deviant heretics goes too far. There is a time to speak out against genuine, grave heresy, and those destructive false teachers repudiated in the New Testament usually have a major trait in common. Whether the Galatian heresy which denies the power of Christ’s salvific work through the cross, the Colossian heresy, incipient Gnostic dualism in the Johannine writings, or the heretics Jude warns against who “deny our master the Lord Jesus Christ”, the heresies roundly condemned in the New Testament tend to deny the person and work of Jesus Christ. In short, they Christologically defective. Thus, it is quite one thing to challenge particular doctrines and teachings one may disagree with (including Christian Zionism or for that matter supercessionism), but quite another to label millions of fellow Christians who have accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as their personal saviour are deviant heretics, a label generally reserved for those whose teachings and beliefs in some way deny the person of Christ. (more…)

Posted on January 19, 2010 - by Calvin L. Smith

Poll on Israel (8 days left)

I have a new poll over at www.calvinlsmith.com (see top right of page) on Christian responses to Israel. So far responses are a little thin, though better than several previous polls. Just eight days left of voting to go, and hoping to analyse and comment on results if enough people vote, so visit the site and get your mates to vote too. I want as wide and varied a set of results as possible.

Posted on January 17, 2010 - by Calvin L. Smith

The Ecclesiological Debate Raging Within Messianic Judaism

I’ve mentioned previously the wide-ranging and intense theological debate raging on within Messianic Judaism (MJ) concerning MJ identity, its relationship with the Church and the extent to which Messianic believers ought to be integrated into a church or Torah-observant MJ synagogue. Richard Harvey’s book mentioned in that post has gone some way to mapping out the various expressions of MJ.

For those of you seeking to understand this volatile debate on ecclesiology and how it has fragmented the MJ movement, the Rosh Pina Project is a website where issues such as this, of immense importance to MJ, are debated. There, a post recently sought to highlight a possible link between Mark Kinzer and Jesuit spirituality. Mark Kinzer is author of Post-Missionary Messianic Judaism, a book which has caused considerable debate within the movement concerning its ecclesiology, and who belongs to the Torah-observant wing of MJ. Within this branch of the movement are some who not only declare Messianic believers must fully observe the Mosaic Law, but also the ideal for them is to congregate in a wholly Jewish setting in order to retain their Jewish identity, rather than attend Evangelical congregations where their Jewish identity as believers in Yeshua threatens to be diluted. Many Evangelical believers, both Gentile and Jewish, are uneasy with the ramifications of such a bilateral ecclesiology.

The link to the post on Mark Kinzer and Jesuit spirituality can be found here. But what I found particularly interesting was the debate carried on in the comments section afterwards. It becomes immediately clear how intense and passionate the current debate concerning ecclesiology and identity within MJ actually is.

Update. This post was originally published on my personal blog at www.calvinlsmith.com. Interestingly, in the last paragraph above I point out the intensity of the debate within MJ, but since posting this short piece the debate has continued over at my site on the comments section. Feel free to contribute there. Oh, and take my poll on Christian responses to the State of Israel (see top-right of that page). Only 9 days left to vote.