Have you heard of Kingdom Now?

[GandalfTheWise]

It's now been almost 4 decades ago that God stopped me from walking down a very dark path.  I had run across some books by a few Christian authors that had started to highlight how the New Age movement had started to infiltrate the church.  As I read their materials, I realized I'd been starting to see the same thing.  With the zeal that is a hallmark of both young men and young Christians, I launched myself into purifying the body of Christ of New Age influences.  If the internet had been around, it's there's a good chance I'd have started a site or blog calling out these heresies and occult practices that were starting to become common among Christians.

One day at church, one brother in Christ mentioned a particular preacher he liked who I knew to be one of those who had fallen under New Age influence.  I tried to enlighten him as to the dangers of this preacher.  He said he'd bring one of this guy's books for me to read the next week.  I was licking my chops to dig into the book so I could point out everything wrong with it since this was one of the books quoted in the New Age expose' materials I was reading.  What I found however shocked me even more than I expected.  Pretty much everything I found was standard Christianity.  There were a few points of overemphasis but nothing remotely New Age.  As I went carefully through my New Age expose' materials which had quoted this book, I found that every single quotation was taken out of context and misrepresented.  I mean every single quotation!  In a couple cases, the New Age expose' had ignored the surrounding paragraph which was completely orthodox and grabbed one sentence, said that it meant something the author had explicitly not intended, and used it as proof how the author was unwittingly under the influence of the New Age movement.  This shook me, but did not completely deter me since anyone can make a mistake.  I then found a couple more books that had been exposed as having strong New Age infiltration of the church and found the same thing.  Pretty much every quotation was lifted out of context.   In hindsight, the authors of this New Age expose' probably could have been sued for libel or slander by many different Christians.   At this point, I started to see through the accusations, overzealousness, and basically lies being made about brothers and sisters in Christ.  These were not isolated mistakes or a few misplaced accusations, it was the standard method of operation.  It was manufacturing evidence of heresy and occult practice which did not exist.

Decades later, this heresy hunting movement is still going strong.  Some of the original authors who started me down this path are still alive and kicking on this and have raised up a new generation of heresy hunters zealously protecting the church from heresy and the occult using the same methods.  Having fallen for the seduction of this type of thinking once, I'm now pretty sensitive to it and how easy it is to fall into the trap and become addicted to it.  I choose the words, seduction, trap, and addiction intentionally not rhetorically.  My guess is that if someone did some research on it that they would find a similar phenomena to how people can become addicted to online gambling or social media.  These Christians have become addicted to the thrill of finding errors (whether real or not) in individuals, ministries, churches, and denominations.

Here are some of the characteristics I've observed in people who have become addicted to heresy hunting (both to their detriment and many Christians around them).

1. Assuming the worst.   Once someone is under suspicion, it is alright to take any ambiguous statement or action on their part and interpret it to be proof of their heresy or occult activity.  It's alright to ignore context because heresy and the occult are insidious and often hidden.

2. Not fact checking or documenting accusations.   Once someone is blacklisted, they are obviously fair game for each and every accusation anyone makes.  It does not matter if a particular accusation is wrong because so many of the accusations probably are true.  Once an "accepted" source (usually another heresy hunter) says something, it is acceptable to repeat that as fact.  Guilt by preponderance of accusations is acceptable.

3 Using cult-like jargon to define and refer to and essentially dehumanize other Christians.   Any type of accused heresy or occult activity is given a special name.  Lists of heresies and occult activities are drawn up.  Big lists of characteristics and activities that characterize those things are drawn up.  Even bigger lists of proven and suspected advocates of those things are drawn up.   Anyone showing any relationship or possible support of those things needs to be watched carefully.

4. They are absolutely convinced of the righteousness of their cause.  Any mistakes they make are of no consequence because of the importance of what they are doing.

5. Anyone who questions them is likely under the influence of various heresies or the occult.

6. Guilt by association.  Anyone who does not shun and rebuke a blacklisted person is now under suspicion themselves.

 

Here's a made up example to show how this works.  God reveals to some heresy hunter a new evil infiltrating the church.  They decide to call it conscience baiting (I just made up this term for the sake of this paragraph).  They write a few articles on what it is and various characteristics of it along with Bible verses condemning this evil.  They point out what Christian teachers, ministries, and churches have started to fall for it.   All the insiders to the truth then know the evils of conscience baiting.  Any Christian teacher or preacher who says something resembling any of these characteristics or activities might be a potential conscience baiter.  At that point, anything that teacher says needs to be scrutinized under a microscope for promoting conscience baiting.  Once enough proof has been found, someone will declare that teacher a conscience baiter and quickly the community of heresy hunters will put them on the black list of conscience baiters.  Now, any church, conference, denomination, or Christians who have anything to do with that person are potential conscience baiters.   Any publishing company or website that does not immediately denounce and shun that teacher and refuse to sell their books is under suspicion as well.  Soon a number of heresy hunters are maintaining active lists of proven and suspected conscience baiters and their supporters.   At some point, conscience baiting goes mainstream and some pastors become aware of it and denounce it from the pulpit along with any Christian (often conveniently those they have a doctrinal disagreement with) of being conscience baiters.  Some mainstream Christian websites start to pick it up.  Then some Christians in the pews know which teachers and churches and Christians to avoid because they are conscience baiters.  They don't need to know anything else about those Christians to know they are to be avoided.

This thread is starting down a dark road.  There is no solid documentation or description as to what "Kingdom Now" really is.   I looked at a number of links and it's basically the same undocumented material being cut and pasted and repeated and enhanced by various people (including some heresy hunting sites) uncritically passing it on.  It seems to be a vague collection of characteristics and alleged beliefs ranging from agnostic/atheist influences in mainline churches to charismatics to disagreements about eschatology to having the wrong OSAS/non-OSAS beliefs.   As far as I can tell, it's just lumping together several unrelated things under one heading and attributing it all to any person who looks like they have any relation to one part of it.  I see most of the characteristics of heresy hunting in the production and transmission of this material as well as its application.   

I've gone aways down this dark road myself with sincerity, good intentions, and zeal.  It's not a good place to go.  It's ultimately sinful and spiritually harmful because it starts to involve false accusations and lies against the brethren and excusing of those things because one is deceived into believing that it serves a greater good.  It ultimately turns us into the boy who cried wolf.  If we burn our credibility on poorly documented things (or even falsified things), we will not have it when we truly have something important God wants us to say.

 

[missmuffet]

9 hours ago, Debp said:

I don't think they will admit it.   But hopefully this topic will cause other Christians to be careful of whose teachings they follow.   

Yes 

[Michael37]

12 hours ago, GandalfTheWise said:

 If we burn our credibility on poorly documented things (or even falsified things), we will not have it when we truly have something important God wants us to say.

Do you have a list of known heresy hunters to help us contend earnestly for the faith once delivered to the saints? (Jude 1:3)

[Debp]

Gandalf has said among other things, "this thread is going down a dark road."

 

When one has taken mission courses (I have), there is a course offered on the cults and world religions.   If we are taught how to recognize false doctrines and religions, then it's important to warn others when there is a possibility they are being led astray.   That is all I am seeking to do....I don't spend my time doing this otherwise.

 

[Michael37]

37 minutes ago, Debp said:

Gandalf has said among other things, "this thread is going down a dark road."

Psa 119:105 Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path.
 

[GandalfTheWise]

8 hours ago, Michael37 said:

Do you have a list of known heresy hunters to help us contend earnestly for the faith once delivered to the saints? (Jude 1:3)

I don't keep lists of people.  I look at articles and claims and posts on a case by case basis.  When I see a pattern of sloppy (or nonexistent) research, doctrinal overzealousness, sensationalist and inflammatory language, and (in extreme cases) manufacturing evidence, I simply slowly lose respect and have little confidence in what they say.  I also lose respect for people who unquestioningly treat sources like that as authoritative.  My approach is to fact check and point out out the worst abuses as an examples of what not to do.  I'm just hoping more Christians will learn how to do that.   I simply believe that Christians should hold themselves to an extremely high standard when making accusations of heresy and occult activity in other Christians.

The bottom line is that these are all sincere brothers and sisters in Christ that are zealously contending for the faith but using questionable means to do it with a corresponding impact on effectiveness.  Some of what they say is accurate; some is not.  What is not diminishes their credibility.  No Christian starts out planning to slander or libel or make false accusations about fellow Christians but they start to fall into that.  A number of months ago, this site banned a handful of individuals who had started to contend for the faith so zealously that they were attacking and piling onto anyone they didn't agree with.   Fact checking and giving people the benefit of the doubt went out the window.  This group seemed frustrated that the mods on this site would not ban people they disagreed with.  From what I could see, they seemed to take matters into their own hands so they'd gang up on people and push and prod and manipulate people into an angry responses and then report them.   A number of threads debating whether showing fruit of the Spirit was optional or not when contending for the faith turned rather contentious with this group and some of their supporters claiming that defending the faith basically excused one from displaying Christian behavior when debating.   There were a handful of "contending for the faith" and polemic websites that they liked to link to as source material.  I tried to fact check some of the worst links but no one seemed to care.  The most disturbing thing to me is that some Christians reach the point that the truthfulness and accuracy of "facts" that they are using and quoting no longer matters.  This completely undermines everything they say and diminishes not only their credibility but tarnishes anyone associated with them.   

For one egregious example, one 4 to 5 page thread from about a year and a half ago was based on a link to a news article about how there were charismatic groups that used ouija boards to talk to angels.  I fact checked this article and found it to be a clickbait headline and an accusation without evidence.  As I recall, some psychic from South America was probably trying to make a quick buck painting angels onto a ouija board and selling them on Amazon.  Perhaps she sincerely thought it worked.  I don't know.  But what I do know is that some people on this site seemed to unquestioningly accept the Christian site that made the claim that "Charismatics actually are using ‘Christian Ouija Boards,’ but not just as an evangelism technique. They are using them to communicate with ‘angels.’"  The headline was "Charismatics Using ‘Christian Ouija Board’ to Communicate with Angels".  No proof of this statement was given about which church or individuals were promoting or doing this.  This is quite a serious accusation given with no proof that basically is a smear campaign against millions of Christians.  I did an internet search yesterday and in the first couple pages found a handful of Christian sites that had directly copied and pasted this article without questioning it.  Some within the past few months.  I also found a pagan site that accepted it as factual and called out hypocrisy of Christians to condemn ouija boards but accept angel boards.   A clickbait headline and an accusation without proof against a undefined number of Christians is being accepted without question as factual.  The sad thing to me is that some Christians just accept this type of thing and pass it on without caring whether it is true or not.  It shakes the very foundation of trying to contend for the faith when someone doesn't care if their facts are right or not as long as it confirms what they already thought about some group.

This thread is no where near this level, but it is showing troubling signs in my opinion.  No one has clearly defined "Kingdom Now".  All I see are basically undocumented descriptions of at least two different things being confused and associated with each other. 

The first thing is a result of the decades old infiltration of some mainline denominations by those who are basically atheist and agnostic in outlook.  These are people who think religious symbolism has nice emotional and social connotations to help us deal with our mortality and problems in life.  They see anyone who "believes" as a brother or sister or (pick your gender) in "faith".   This group has a view of using religion to create a society that they like and will use terms like "kingdom of God" and "love" and "peace" for their emotional connotation.  This is a group that often unreservedly welcomes in influences from any religion or spiritual or occult practices around the world.

A second thing is a group of evangelicals with a different outlook on eschatology than that which receives the most attention from evangelicals.  Many evangelicals are completely convinced of some variation of pre-trib, mid-trib, or post-trib eschatology and that we are near the fulfillment of this and the Lord's return.  Within this group, there is often  a mentality of "it's only going to get worse from here" with this being confirmed by every news article one reads.  There is however a different outlook which I've seen in a number of Christians spread across a wide range of churches and ministries.  This is that Christians can have a tangible impact on the world around them and that they can act as leaven and salt in society around us.  These are Christians who actively make a difference in business, education, healthcare, the arts, and other spheres of life affecting both individuals and institutions.  Decades ago as eschatological fervor started to sweep the church (via books like "The Late Great Planet Earth"), a circle-the-wagons and withdraw-from-the-world mentality did start to overtake Christians.  I remember getting quite angry at my mother that I didn't want orthodontic braces because it was stupid since the Lord was returning soon anyway.  Four decades later, I'm glad she exerted her parental authority.  Some Christians simply decided it was spiritually unhealthy to hunker down and hold out for the Lord's return rather than living our lives day to day as we would whether or not the Lord would return in our lifetime.  Some Christians look to church history and various revivals which swept regions and nations and simply wonder if that will never happen again or if it will happen many more times if the Lord's return is still decades or centuries away.  Some of what I am seeing lumped into Kingdom Now are evangelical believers who simply believe that God will still bring about widespread spiritual renewal and societal change again if the Lord's return is still decades or centuries away.

In addition, there are other issues on eschatology and a debate on acceptable and unacceptable forms of church government structure included in some of the stuff I was reading.

What I am reading about "Kingdom Now" here seems to be confusing these two different groups (along with a few other things) and assuming that they are all aspects of the same thing.  I simply don't think it is wise to confuse aspects of what is an agnostic/atheist social movement which appropriates Christian language with Christians who actively teach that Christians should act as leaven and salt to influence the world around them and that widespread spiritual renewal and revival is possible.

Again, this thread is nowhere near what was severely disrupting this site last year which lead to permanent bans of a group of people.  However, it contains seeds of the same mistakes those Christians were making.  If Kingdom Now is something that we need to watch out for on this site, I think it needs to be much more clearly defined and better researched.  The inability to distinguish social movement promotion by atheist/agnostic types in mainline churches from eschatological differences between evangelicals let alone other things (such as church leadership structure debates) which Kingdom Now definitions seem to encompass is a serious deficiency.  Attributing agnostic/atheist tendencies (such as humanizing God and deifying humans) to Christians (who do not believe such things) is one thing I've already seen hints of.   This is what I mean when I used the melodramatic language of starting down a dark path.  When Christians cannot distinguish something as obviously different as atheistic/agnostic use of religious language promoting social change from legitimate doctrinal debates among Christians,  there is not going to be much effective contending for the faith nor discerning of error going on.

 

 

[cantankerous5]

On 6/6/2019 at 3:37 AM, Debp said:

This a cult that I have never heard of before.   Someone here mentioned it to me.   We need to be aware of their strange teachings.   Among other things, the worst thing is they are humanizing God and deifying man!!   More info below....

https://www.gotquestions.org/kingdom-now.html

i probably read through that a little fast but so far, have not read anything that fits your description of "deifying man" etc.. 

the secular people do that.. except that they do not because they think its OK to kill man while he is a babe in the womb... so they don't deify man except.. already-born men, those who have a lot of money 

Edited June 8, 2019 by cantankerous5

[Michael37]

16 hours ago, GandalfTheWise said:

 Some of what I am seeing lumped into Kingdom Now are evangelical believers who simply believe that God will still bring about widespread spiritual renewal and societal change again if the Lord's return is still decades or centuries away.

There's another breed I have personally crossed paths with who pursue an agenda to unite Christians under one banner so that all work together to create God's Kingdom for Him, which when complete on earth will trigger the return of Christ.

This thread asks if others have heard of "Kingdom Now". The response suggests that there is a long way to go before we are all united under one banner this side of the Lord's return. 

[Debp]

Kingdom Now theology sees the second coming of Jesus in two stages: first through the flesh of the believers (and in particular the flesh of today's apostles and prophets), and then in person to take over the kingdom handed to Him by those who have been victorious (the "overcomers"). Prior to the second coming, overcomers must purge the earth of all evil influences. Kingdom Now claims that Jesus cannot return until all His enemies have been put under the feet of the church (including death, presumably). 

Although there are people who only partially hold to Kingdom Now teachings, they still share the beliefs outlined above, all of which are outside of mainstream Christianity and all of which deny Scripture. First, the idea that God has “lost control” of anything is ludicrous, especially coupled with the idea that He needs human beings to help Him regain that control. He is the sovereign Lord of the universe, complete and holy, perfect in all His attributes. He has complete control over all things—past, present and future—and nothing happens outside His command. Everything is proceeding according to His divine plan and purpose, and not one molecule is moving on its own accord.

 

Above is just one excerpt from the article at the Got Questions site which shows a major unScriptural teaching.   The above shows Kingdom Now members do humanize God and deify the special "overcomers".

[GandalfTheWise]

5 hours ago, Michael37 said:

There's another breed I have personally crossed paths with who pursue an agenda to unite Christians under one banner so that all work together to create God's Kingdom for Him, which when complete on earth will trigger the return of Christ.

This thread asks if others have heard of "Kingdom Now". The response suggests that there is a long way to go before we are all united under one banner this side of the Lord's return. 

Do you happen to have any links to sites where people are actively promoting this?  I'd be curious to see them for myself.  Thanks.