“Strangers to Fire: When Tradition Trumps Scripture,” an anthology published by the Foundation for Pentecostal Scholarship rebuts John MacArthur’s “Strange Fire” book and conference which took aim at the charismatic Christian movement and their use of the supernatural gifts of the Holy Spirit.

The book, compiled by 26 scholars, consists of two parts with the first half giving direct replies to John MacArthur’s “Strange Fire” and the latter with classic replies to cessation theology.

Cessationist Christians hold to the view that the supernatural gifts such as healing, speaking in tongues and prophesying were used as signs to confirm the validity of who Jesus and his followers were and that they are no longer necessary for the church. They also believe the position of Apostle no longer exists.

“What our [book’s] title says is that there are people out there who are strangers to the authentic fire and we’re saying that John MacArthur is stranger to the authentic fire of the Holy Spirit and of revival,” said Robert W. Graves, President of The Foundation for Pentecostal Scholarship.

Graves believes MacArthur, along with most cessationists, rely too heavily on their own tradition which prevents them from embracing what he believes to be “a proper interpretation of scripture” that acknowledges the supernatural gifts. Calvinism and reformed theology dominate the teachings of cessationists, which state that the supernatural gifts disappeared once the original twelve apostles died.

He also addressed some of the criticism for charismatic Christians and admitted that many in the movement abuse or fake the supernatural spiritual gifts, but doesn’t believe that’s the reason why some have chosen to be cessationist.

Original Post by Christian Post

A prominent Orthodox Church leader in Ukraine has stated that Russian President Vladimir Putin is being guided by Satan.

Patriarch Filaret of Kiev and All Rus-Ukraine, released a statement Friday titled the “New Cain,” which is based off of the Genesis 4 account of Cain and Abel.

Filaret did not mention Putin by name, but he did refer in his statement to a “governor” who “is cynically lying” about his country’s “sending killers mercenaries to our country.”

“In his will and power is to immediately stop the bloodshed and death, but it is for the sake of his pride he continues to multiply evil,” stated Filaret.

“He calls himself a brother to the Ukrainian people, but in fact according to his deeds, he really became the new Cain, shedding the brotherly blood and entangling the whole world with lies.”

The patriarch added that, juding by his actions, Putin has been possessed by the devil in the same way that Judas Iscariot was possessed to betray Jesus Christ.

“Calls for this ruler and his minions have already been sounded many times publicly — to think again, to stop sowing evil and death, to repent,” continued Filaret.

“But it seems that he remains deaf to these appeals and only multiplies evil, because satan went into him, as into Judas Iscariot.”

Over the past several months violence has broken out in eastern Ukraine due to a recent referendum that purportedly showed that the Crimean region wanted to break away from the nation.

The ensuing violence has been between pro-Russian separatists and pro-Ukrainian nationalists and has cost an estimated 2,600 lives since April.

A baptized member of the Russian Orthodox Church, Putin has a reputation for being a strong supporter of the institution, which lost much of its power during the Soviet era.

The post-Soviet return of the Orthodox Church to a position of prominence in Russia is often credited as having happened because of Putin, noted the Canadian publication The Globe and Mail.

“Putin oversaw the resurrection of the Russian Orthodox Church, including the reconstruction of some 23,000 churches that had been destroyed or fallen into disuse,” reported Globe and Mail. “To the delight of the church leadership, Putin’s policies have also taken a sharply conservative turn since his return to the Kremlin last year for a third term as president.”

Filaret’s denunciation of Putin comes as the European Union is expected to put sanctions on Russia for its proxy involvement in the Ukraine conflict.

“The EU says new sanctions against Russia should be adopted shortly and take effect on Tuesday, despite a Kremlin warning of retaliation,” reported the BBC.

“But an EU spokeswoman said the sanctions would be ‘reversible,’ depending on the situation in Ukraine. Pro-Russian separatists and government troops are observing a fragile truce.”

Original Post by Christian Post

Fighters of the Islamic State stand guard at a checkpoint in the northern Iraq city of Mosul, June 11, 2014. ISIS fighters have seized Iraq’s second biggest city Mosul and Tikrit, home town of former dictator Saddam Hussein, as well as other towns and cities north of Baghdad.

As ISIS continues to pose a menace to religious minorities in Iraq and Syria, Christians from the region have spoken with horror about what the terrorist group is doing to their communities.

Auday P. Arabo, lay spokesman for the St. Thomas Chaldean Catholic Diocese, told The New York Times that Iraqi Christians are calling it “a slow-motion genocide.”

“It’s unfortunate people don’t feel it until it hits home. But I guess it’s human nature that you only see what’s happening in the mirror,” said Arabo.

Bishop Francis Y. Kalabat, who was appointed by Pope Francis to oversee a Michigan-based community, told the Times that recent actions by ISIS against Iraqi Christians was the worst yet.

“The bad things we look back at now — the Iran-Iraq War, the first Gulf War, the embargo, even six months ago. …We’d take all of that over today,” said Kalabat.

“We wish to scream, but there are no ears that wish to hear.”

Formed last year, the Islamic State is also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

Over the past few months, ISIS has garnered international attention for both its conquest of territory in the Middle East and its strong penchant for violence against civilians and prisoners of war.

Among its victims include Christian communities in Northern Iraq, many of which date back to the earliest centuries of Christianity.

Earlier this month, the Christian persecution watchdog group Open Doors reported that in territory it controlled ISIS performed “outright targeting of all non-Sunni Muslim groups.”

“This has resulted in a mass loss of life, forced conversions and seizure of homes for Iraq’s minority Christians, Shiite Muslims, Yazidis and Turkmen,” noted Open Doors.

“Since then, IS has steadily moved north of Mosul into the Nineveh Plain, a predominantly Christian area. In total, more than 100,000 people have had to flee the villages and towns of Qaraqosh, Mosul and the Nineveh plain.”

The attacks on Christians in Northern Iraq represents the most recent series of violence against the Middle Eastern country’s Christian minority.

Since the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime, Iraq’s Christian population has decreased dramatically as large numbers have fled the nation due to escalating persecution.

In late 2007, the Rev. Canon Andrew White, Anglican chaplain at St. George’s Church in Baghdad, told CBS that it was “clearly worse” now than under Hussien.

“Things are the most difficult they have ever been for Christians. Probably ever in history. They’ve never known it like now,” said White.

Efforts to combat ISIS have included Iraqi Kurdish militias battling the terrorist organization in conjunction with airstrikes by the United States Armed Forces.

President Barack Obama and his administration are reportedly planning out a long term strategy to eliminate ISIS from the region.

“The first phase, airstrikes against Islamic State, also known as ISIS, is already under way in Iraq, where U.S. aircraft have launched 143 attacks since Aug. 8,” noted Fox News.

“The second phase involves an intensified effort to train, advise, and equip the Iraqi Army, Kurdish Peshmerga fighters, and any Sunni tribesmen willing to fight their ISIS co-religionists.”

Original Post by Christian Post

In this April 29, 2010, file photo, Stephen Hawking watches the first preview of his new show for the Discovery Channel, Stephen Hawking’s Universe.
Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking has warned that the Higgs boson, also known as the “God particle,” is capable of destroying the universe if it happens to become unstable and thereby cause a “catastrophic vacuum decay” leading to the collapse of time and space.

In his preface to a new book, Starmus, which is scheduled to be released next month, Hawking, however, underlines that the possibility of the God Particle wiping out the universe is highly unlikely, according to U.K.’s The Sunday Times.

The Higgs boson is the particle, scientists say, that is responsible for mass in the standard model of physics.

“The Higgs potential has the worrisome feature that it might become metastable at energies above 100bn gigaelectronvolts,” he says in the preface. “This could mean that the universe could undergo catastrophic vacuum decay, with a bubble of the true vacuum expanding at the speed of light. This could happen at any time and we wouldn’t see it coming.”

But this possibility alone is alarming, given that it points to a completely new realm of physics, he explains. “A particle accelerator that reaches 100bn GeV would be larger than Earth, and is unlikely to be funded in the present economic climate.”

Last year, Hawking said he was left disappointed after the discovery of the God Particle, explaining that it has made physics less interesting.

He said this in a speech at the Science Museum in London, England, last November, in which he also claimed that humans have only have 1,000 years left on Earth.

“I don’t think we will survive another thousand years without escaping beyond our fragile planet. I therefore want to encourage public interest in space,” he said at the time.

Peter Higgs, the theoretical physicist who discovered the Higgs boson, attempted to describe the fundamental particle in the most basic way he could in an interview earlier this year.

“… These particles are just packages of energy of some kind of field,” the scientist said on the BBC Radio 4 program, “The Life Scientific.”

He continued: “And the feature [that] distinguishes this kind of theory, which leads to this kind of symmetry breaking, is the existence of what we, theoretical physicists, call the vacuum, which means nowadays something different from what it used to mean. It’s just the lowest energy state that you could possibly have in which there are no particles around but there may be something around. And that something around can be a background field of some sort, which pervades the universe.”

“In this theory, there is such a background field. And the background field, its interaction with all the other stuff that goes through, is responsible for generating the masses and mass differences of the other particles, elementary particles, [those] which are packages of all the energy in other fields. Simply because the background affects the way the waves propagate,” Higgs added.

“But then, the field itself can be excited, or classically to give you waves to the packages of energy of that are the Higgs boson. So it’s an extra, which comes with this type of theory, that you need to have something there, which is the excitation of the background field.”

Original Post by Christian Post

The 2013 conclave that elected Pope Francis was “the highlight of my life,” said Cardinal Seán Brady, the day the Pope accepted his resignation as archbishop of Armagh, Northern Ireland.

Pope Francis “challenges and inspires me” with the “message of God having mercy and at the same time choosing us, despite our sinfulness,” the cardinal told people gathered in St Patrick’s Cathedral in Armagh. “It reminds me that I, too, need to say sorry and to ask forgiveness. And I do so again, now.”

Cardinal Brady spoke on September 8, the day it was announced at the Vatican that Pope Francis had accepted his resignation, which bishops must submit when they turn 75. The cardinal, who as archbishop of Armagh serves as primate of all Ireland, will be replaced by Archbishop Eamon Martin, who has served as coadjutor since early 2013.

“It has been my privilege to have been appointed a bishop by Pope St John Paul II, to have worked closely with Pope Benedict XVI, and to have taken part in the conclave that elected Pope Francis — that conclave has been the highlight of my life,” he said.

“The people of the Archdiocese of Armagh and the people of Ireland will remain in my prayers for the rest of my life. I ask the favor of your prayers to help me continue to serve God as best I can all the days God gives me.”

Cardinal Brady was ordained a priest in 1964 and was initially appointed to teach in a Catholic high school while serving as a part-time secretary to the late Bishop Francis McKiernan of Kilmore.

It was in this role that he assisted in a canonical inquiry into a priest who had been accused of abuse. Then-Father Brady interviewed a 14-year-old boy who alleged he had been abused by Norbertine Father Brendan Smyth. The allegations were not shared with the civil authorities, and Father Smyth went on to abuse in Northern Ireland, the Irish Republic and the United States; he was arrested and imprisoned in 1994.

When Cardinal Brady’s role came to light in 2010, he faced serious pressure and calls for his resignation. However, he refused to quit, but admitted he had done wrong, sought forgiveness and pledged to stay on, describing himself as a “wounded healer.”

During his time as president of the Irish bishops’ conference, Cardinal Brady was responsible for the adoption of stringent child-safeguarding procedures on both sides of the Irish border that have won praise from the civil authorities in both jurisdictions. He also spearheaded a zero-tolerance approach to abuse and insisted that all allegations are passed on to the civil authorities.

In a bid to ensure confidence in the new procedures, he established the National Board for Safeguarding Children in the Catholic Church as an independent watchdog to ensure that the church was following its own guidelines when it came to the protection of children and vulnerable adults.

As an archbishop whose diocese straddles the border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, he keenly followed events that led to the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement in Northern Ireland.

In 2001, he led his fellow bishops in supporting a radical program of reform of policing that would phase out the sectarian Royal Ulster Constabulary and replace it with the Police Service of Northern Ireland, which had an affirmative action policy to ensure equal recruitment from the Catholic and Protestant communities.

He showed a passion for ecumenism. The Rev Donald Watts, co-chair of the Irish Inter Church Meeting and president of the Irish Council of Churches, said the cardinal made an “enormous contribution to interchurch relations in Ireland.

“He chaired meetings with a gentle humility that has enabled rich dialogue and built understanding. As he retires, we enjoy unprecedented positive relationships between our member Churches,” Rev Watts said.

Original Post by Catholic Herald