October 05, 2015:
Editorial: Let’s keep the Sabbath and see what happens
July 11, 2014
By Marv Knox / Editor
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COMMENT: This article is published in “The Baptist Standard” and written by the Editor Mark Knox. Notice that he is referring to keeping SUNDAY. (See the highlighted sentence in the below excerpt.) “If you absolutely cannot keep the Sabbath on Sunday, schedule another Sabbath, another “stop day.” |
The Fourth Commandment—“Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy”—is the bridge between heaven and earth, Matthew Sleeth insists. He’s absolutely right.
Sleeth was a nonbelieving emergency room doctor who experienced a call to follow Jesus, care for creation and keep the Sabbath almost simultaneously. He now leads Blessed Earth, a nonprofit organization that educates, inspires and equips “people of faith to become better stewards of the earth.” He led a workshop on Sabbath rest at the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship annual general assembly in Atlanta this summer.
Tips for keeping the Sabbath
Sleeth inspired me to pursue Sabbath more passionately. And he provided a few key tips for succeeding:
*• If you absolutely cannot keep the Sabbath on Sunday, schedule another Sabbath, another “stop day.” He travels to preach all over the country, so he and his wife, Nancy, block out their Sabbaths four months at a time.
• “Keeping the Sabbath is like exercise. It builds up,” he insisted. “You do it for a couple of weeks, and you don’t notice. You do it for a year, and it changes your life. It changes your character.”
• “Try to do it with somebody else,” he advised.
I’ll be keeping the Sabbath. Care to join me?
Click on Link:
Editorial: Could/should a Christian vote for a Muslim?
October 2, 2015
By Marv Knox / Editor
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COMMENT: This article is also published in “The Baptist Standard” and written by its Editor Mark Knox. Notice this statement below:
Imagine that: The “Baptist Standard” explaining this to Mr. Carson. |
An aged, hollow echo has reverberated across the 2016 presidential landscape.
Ben Carson, a top Republican contender thanks in large measure to evangelical support, has been insisting a Muslim could not be qualified to serve the United States as president.
Carson, a Seventh-day Adventist, said on NBC’s Meet the Press : “I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation.”
A week later, Carson defended his position on CNN’s State of the Union, insisting, “you have to reject the tenets of Islam” in order to be president.
This line of reasoning follows the logic many Protestants—Americans rarely used the term “evangelical” back then—applied to John Kennedy when he ran for president in 1960. Protestants questioned whether a Catholic’s loyalty to the pope would overrun his responsibility to the nation. Some claimed a person could not be a good Catholic and a good president.
While Kennedy won the political battle, the legal issue had been settled since the founding of the nation. Article VI of the U.S. Constitution states, “…no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.”
'No religious test' means no religious test
“No religious test” means no religious test. That applied to Kennedy, a Catholic, and it would apply to any conceivable Muslim candidate about whom Carson warns.
Religious liberty is a bedrock of this nation.
***Baptists can stand tall when we discuss religious liberty, because our forebears played a crucial role in guaranteeing freedom for people of all faiths and no faith in the United States. Baptist Roger Williams founded the first colony to guarantee Religious Liberty, Rhode Island. And Baptist John Leland helped secure the religion clauses in the First Amendment.
Religious liberty is a major issue in politics today, and it will be a key issue in presidential election politics throughout the coming year. Ironically, Christians who warn about the loss of “religious liberty” for people to dissent against same-sex marriage line up behind candidates who would deny adherents of other faiths the right to seek office. This is inconsistent.
Click on Link:
The Death of Protestantism
The "Death Knell" of Freedom of Religion?
Edited By John D. Keyser
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COMMENT: This article is published on a Jewish website. Rather interesting evaluation of the situation. |
Is Protestantism, as the world has known it, finished? Has it written its epitaph? Has the "Protestant Reformation" been undone -- come unglued -- and been betrayed by modern Protestant and evangelical Christian leaders? Has the greatest "sell-out" in all religious history been perpetrated upon an unsuspecting, ignorant, and sleeping church? What are the facts? How close are we to a Satanic-inspired ONE WORLD RELIGION, with the Pope of Rome at the head of a UNIVERSAL Church? Is there any danger to the world with the resurgence of Catholic political and religious POWER -- any threat to the concept of "freedom of religion," the key motive which led to the settlement of North American some 400 years ago?
The Protestant Reformation was launched, and sanguinary religious wars were fought, particularly in Europe, where blood flowed freely, as Roman Catholic tyranny over the minds of men was savagely defended by kings and armies in France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Holland, and throughout Europe. How soon the world forgets. Were it not for the forces of the Protestant Reformation, the world today would be enslaved by the dogma of Catholic creed and all dissent and disagreement would be stamped out furiously, with "heretics" burned at the stake, beheaded, butchered, imprisoned, their property confiscated by the state, and their families ruined and destroyed.
But is the Protestant Reformation now in the process of being "undone"? Is it over? Is Protestantism now ready to back into the waiting arms of the "new" Roman Catholic Church, and acknowledge the Roman Pontiff as the "vicar of Christ" and the head of the universal Church?
Without much fanfare or hoopla or ballyhoo, quietly and surreptitiously, the modern preachers, evangelists, and leaders of the Protestant and particularly the evangelical branches of Christianity have begun working with priests and ministers of Rome, to effect a joint plan, to work together in the future, for the religious evangelization and domination of the world. The key word is, "Together."
Click Link:
http://www.hope-of-israel.org/deathpro.htm
From Mainline to Sideline — The Death of Protestant America
Tuesday August 26, 2008
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This article refers to a much longer one written by Catholic writer Joseph Bottum, Editor of “First Things.” Here is a brief Bio of the man.
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Joseph Bottum remembers a time when America was painted in bold Protestant hues. “America was Methodist, once upon a time–Methodist, or Baptist, or Presbyterian, or Congregationalist, or Episcopalian,” he explains. But, that was then, and this is now.
Now, Bottum suggests that the average American “would have trouble recalling the dogmas that once defined all the jarring sects, but their names remain at least half alive.”
Bottum writes of this Protestant collapse in the August/September 2008 issue of First Things, one of the most influential intellectual journals of the day. In “The Death of Protestant America: A Political Theory of the Protestant Mainline,” Bottum offers a clever and insightful theory of mainline decline — the collapse of liberal Protestantism as a movement and dominant cultural influence.
The American concept of religious liberty was, he argues, actually about making space for intra-Protestant rivalries and was “essentially a Protestant idea.” The dominance of mainline Protestantism within the culture represented one leg of a “three-legged stool” that joined democracy and capitalism to establish civic order and national self-consciousness. Protestantism provided the nation’s narrative, he offers, along with a moral vocabulary.
Nevertheless, the mainline Protestant denominations began to implode in the 1960s. In Bottum’s analysis, this decline meant that the main stream of Protestantism began to run dry in the 1970s.
The “Death of Protestant America” Joseph Bottum describes must serve as a warning to Evangelicals. There can be no doubt where theological revisionism and accommodationism will lead. Why, then, would some argue that Evangelicalism should follow essentially the same path? Can they not see that the liberal Protestant river has run dry?
| COMMENT: Notice the terms: “theological revisionism and accommodationism.” The watering down of theological beliefs and the compromised accommodation of other belief systems did indeed have its effect: The Death of Protestantism. |
Click Link:
http://www.albertmohler.com/2008/08/26/from-mainline-to-sideline-the-death-of-protestant-america/
