Posted by SB on 12/29/2001, 11:12 pm

Repost on the Latter Rain Movement (part 2) Posted by Steve B. on 11/5/2001, 7:49 pm , in reply to "...And a repost on the Latter Rain Movement (part 1)" This is the larger part of a posting I made a day after the one above. Another poster had responded with some good points about a posting of mine (a different one than the one above, I think), and I in turn replied to him: ...I presented the difference between the Latter Rain Pentecostals and the Reformers as being "new truths" vs. "recovering old truths." You correctly point out that the Chapel itself explicitly claimed that it viewed itself as being in the "recovering old truths" heritage. This in fact is typical of the LRM (Latter Rain Movement). They would like to view themselves as being in the tradition of Luther -- they view church history since his time as a steady march out of the darkness of Romanism into progressively greater truths revealed to us by God. I am maintaining that this is at best only half true. Now, I do agree that the Church needed a reformation. The Roman Catholic Church had horribly corrupted the gospel and the church of Jesus Christ. There was a lot of work to be done in peeling off the traditionalism and the sacramentalism and the heierarchy that the Roman Catholics had stacked on to the scriptures. I think there is still work that can be done in this area -- I am not advocating that we should all troop back into the Catholic Church, or the Eastern Orthodox Church (which, by the way, is attracting a lot of evangelicals and charismatics lately. The son of Francis Schaeffer is now a full-fledged advocate of the Eastern Orthodox Church being the One True Church of Christ). But there is a vast difference between the way the reformers viewed themselves and the way the LRM people view themselves. That was the point I was trying to make by including the quotes from George Warnock and DB's "Dear Sheepies" letter. Warnock: "There is a time and a season for the proclamation of every Biblical truth, and when God's hour of revelation has struck, the Spirit of God is gloriously present to remove the veil from God's secrets and initiate His people into the mysteries of God." Barnett: "God is anointing me with a new message...No man will get to Tabernacles in the bondage of the law! Your elders can never lead you there -- they can only lead you backwards. They need my new revelations!" The reformers would have been aghast to hear either of these statements. They believed that all truth had already been revealed to the twelve apostles (they -- the original apostles -- are the ones to whom Jesus was speaking when he said "the Holy Spirit will lead you into all truth") and that they only wanted the free proclamation of truths already given and the removal of false traditions, not the reception of new truths never before revealed. The reformers did not view themselves as apostles to whom had been revealed new truths into which the people of God should be led. The LRM teachers, including Don Barnett, do view themselves this way. So, to wrap up my answer to your first question, yes -- the Chapel did explicitly claim itself to be part of the "recovering old truth" tradition, but it also (not so explicitly at first, more explicitly later) added to it the new Latter Rain role of receiving new truth. In the minds of its adherents, this role probably grows unnoticeably out of the first role since they believe those truths were lying latent in the scriptures all along. But the fact is that such things as the Manchild, latter-day apostles, Feast-of-Tabernacles-fulfillment-on-earth, and the wackier lesser-known doctrines such as the Serpent Seed doctrine of William Branham, were never taught at all, or only taught by men well outside of the church, until maybe the early nineteenth century at the earliest (Edward Irving's church in Scotland). Some people go further than this maintain that each of these "new truths" are nothing more than a collection of old false doctrines which individually were rejected by the church at one point or another in its early years. Does this make sense to you? Your second observation also deserves comment. You wrote I see so little sacrifice on the part of christians (at least the ones I'm exposed to) in the church world that Manchild theology (as I understand it) seems to be not so much spiritual elitism, but perhaps rather a spiritual division between those who want to add Jesus to their "bag" (remember that phrase) and those who are willing to make sacrifices out of love and obedience. There is certainly a division here, but I think we have to be very careful how we judge. There are degrees of maturity and commitment, but I think the division you make here is one between those who are truly Christians and those who are not. Remember that Jesus said the tares and the wheat will grow together until the end. I can see the New Testament urging us all on to greater maturity in Christ, but I cannot see that it makes distinctions of kind between Christians. Distinctions of degree, maybe, but not distinctions of kind -- we are all his sheep. The LRM people make a distinction between those who have "received new truth" (and therefore take part in speaking in tongues and in "prophetic" activities) and those who have not received it. This seems fundamentally different to me than the distinction the New Testament makes between degrees of maturity in Christians. If you have "received new truth" it seems to me to inevitably suggest that you are more "enlightened" than someone who has not received it (truth is equated with light in the Bible, is it not?), as well as possessing more "knowledge" of some kind. The picture this cannot help but produce in people's mind is of one class of Christian which walks in light and another class which has refused to come into that light and is therefore walking in darkness, and therefore to some degree at least, "unenlightened." This picture (of two classes of Christians distinguished by the kind of knowledge they possess) is far more characteristic of gnosticism than of New Testament Christianity. But to return more directly to your point, the Manchild doctrine is not simply a doctrine about being "willing to make sacrifices out of love and obedience." If that was all it is, there is no need for a special new doctrine labeled "Manchild." Simply call it a doctrine of love and obedience. The question is, what are you being obedient to -- the Word of God as found in the scriptures or the Word of God as delivered by a self-appointed end-time apostle? I hope that one of these postings is the one you were thinking of, Matt. If it is not, then the posting you were thinking of must have been made by someone else, because these are the only postings of my own that I could find that address the Latter Rain movement at any length. Sincerely, Steve ---------- Posted by Matt Geib on 11/6/2001, 10:31 am , in reply to "A repost on revelations (in response to Matt)" Steve, Thank you for re-posting these words. I believe you express these things quite well & it is good for us to discuss these things. Thanks Again Matt