Tanzania: 'Corpse Raising' Preacher Yet to Perform Miracle

I can raise the dead

Arusha — ALL roads in Arusha seem to be leading to the Railway Station grounds where Pastor Josephat Gwajima is conducting a large meeting where he boasts to be able to 'raise the dead!"

The Dar es Salaam based cleric, set camp here last Friday intending to preach in the City for two weeks. "There is nothing strange or weird in raising the dead, it is very clearly stated in the Bible right from the Old to the New Testament," said Mr Gwajima and revealed a testimony in which he claimed to have so far brought back to life 450 'dead' persons in his resurrection portfolio.

To substantiate the claims, Pastor Gwajima paraded four alleged 'zombies' on stage, people who professed to have died years ago but came back to the land of the living after being prayed for.

He ordered the 'living dead' to speak for themselves and challenged anybody who still does not believe to purchase a DVD on sale.

Pastor Gwajima says; "I do not oppose people dying, it is just that nobody should face premature death through witchcraft or other dubious causes," he stated, adding that people should die at the age of 70 and not younger than that and certainly not through the forces of darkness.

Tens of thousands of Arusha residents have flocked to Pastor Gwajima's crusade rally, many vowing to test the preacher's claims of raising people from the dead by submitting names of newly deceased friends and relatives at the meeting.

"This is my first ever open-air rally to be held in Tanzania and I am starting the trend in Arusha before moving to Kilimanjaro, Tanga, Mwanza, Morogoro, Dodoma, Iringa and other regions," said Pastor Gwajima.

For years, Pastor Gwajima, though based in Dar, has been preaching mostly in overseas countries of Europe, United States and Asia.

"My preaching is not for self-enrichment," maintained Pastor Gwajima, boasting to be the wealthiest church minister in the country, "I am the only pastor who owns helicopter," he said and to attest the fact he drove into the venue in a flashy red Hummer which was escorted by a high-end Toyota Land-cruiser VX, among other trendy vehicles.

Now, based on Steve Hays' arguments, what can we say? I suppose that we have to accept these claims at face value or else we are borrowing methods from skeptics and atheists. But then again, we are talking about someone that seems to be drifting more and more into the bizarre with his openness to paranormal activities, muslim dreams and visions about Jesus bringing the gospel to them, and who knows what else. This man presented four people that claimed to be dead for years, not days. And he supposedly raised them from the dead. Apparently you are not supposed to die before age 70 and if you do, he can raise you from the dead. Not only that, but any Christian should be able to do this, according to Gwajima.

When you compromise on Sola Scriptura, and you permit just about any hermeneutical method to enter the camp, it becomes nearly impossible to stop the flow of rancid, putrid dogmas and ideas that enter the community passing themselves off as biblical, or cutting edge, or fresh ideas. The modern American mind is full of itself and it is so without good cause! Regrettably, this pattern of thinking fills the ranks of the young and the restless who view the sacred teachings of the Church as just one more toy to be revised, updated, revamped and called their own.

Responding to Hays Responding to Butler

Steve Hays is at it again with his at-a-distance pie-in-the-sky non-falsifiable theory that God continues to work miracles in a manner not at all materially different from how He has always worked miracles. Hays’ argument is really an argument from silence. What I mean by that is that Hays’ argument appeals to claims of miracles far, far away, in a distant land in order to defend his position. From my perspective, it seems that Hays is more interested in a debate than he is in settling the truth of the matter. His strategy, if accepted, keeps adding fuel to the fire, keeping the debate open indefinitely. Perhaps this is what Hays really seeks in the first place. Hays’ wants a debate of the theoretical when the issue that John MacArthur is dealing with is one of reality, one of theology, one of actual consequences. In his response to Butler, Hays accuses those of us in the opponent’s camp of having something in common with the skepticism of Hume, saying,

“I never used that argument. Rather, I've pointed out that MacArthurites often resort skeptical tactics to dismiss modern miracles which are indistinguishable from the tactics of Hume and secular debunkers. That doesn't suggest or imply that MacArthurites have to be influenced by Hume.” 

Can Hays sustain this argument? I don’t think so. In the first place, we have never said that God cannot or does not heal or perform miracles today. Hume’s form of skepticism is fundamentally different. Hays is an educated philosopher and he knows better. What we object to is the view that the “gifts” of healing and miracles as they operated in the early Church are present today. That is a fundamentally different question. In addition, it is not a commitment to philosophical skepticism or any component of if that leads us to this conclusion but rather, our observation that they simply are not occurring. If someone claims to be a miracle worker, we simply demand some form of clear and acceptable proof. Had someone been able to supply such a certification, perhaps the contours of the debate would shift. To date, all we have so far are vague stories about unverifiable reports of supernatural events in distant lands far, far away.

Hays goes on to accuse Butler of circular reasoning:

What about Fred's digression? His response is circular. Remember that MacArthurites classify Biblical miracles as sign-gifts whose function is to certify the messenger. So although Fred believes in Biblical miracles because he believes in the Bible, his position also commits him to believing in the Bible because the Bible was attested by sign-gifts. Therefore, he can't simply exempt Scripture from testimonial evidence in general. On the one hand he believes in Biblical miracles because the Bible attests them. On the the hand, he believes in the Bible due to miraculous attestation. So his cessationism ironically creates some parity between the case for Biblical miracles and the case for modern miracles, given the function which cessationism assigns to miracles (i.e. to accredit the messenger). Given that paradigm, you can't discount the one without discounting the other.

It seems to me that Hays misses the point. It is not our position that Christians believe the Bible because it contains miracles. We believe that miracles occurred because they are contained in the Bible. Moreover, we know that miracles are real because we know that God exists and that we are His creation. Now, did God use miracles to usher in the unique nature of the Christian message to those living at the time of that event? I think Scripture has something to say about that. Peter preached the following: “Men of Israel, listen to these words: Jesus the Nazarene, a man attested to you by God with miracles and wonders and signs which God performed through Him in your midst, just as you yourselves know.” That word attested means “to cause something to be known as genuine, with possible focus upon the source of such knowledge—‘to demonstrate, to show, to make clearly known.” Clearly, NT miracles were designed for a very specific purpose. The resurrection from the dead was a miraculous sign given by the prophets and fulfilled by Christ. These miracles demonstrated that Christ was the messiah and that the message of His apostles was divine. They operated with the authority of the Son of God Himself. Paul said, “The signs of a true apostle were performed among you with all perseverance, by signs and wonders and miracles.” Moreover, Paul said that Jesus was declared to be the Son of God with power by the resurrection from the dead.

To the philosophers at Mars Hill Paul thundered that God was going to judge the world by one man, having furnished proof to all men by raising Him from the dead. Clearly, the NT gift of miracles in Scripture served a very specific and high purpose. Why Hays doesn’t seem to recognize this fact is puzzling. It does not seem to me to be a stretch to assert that inspired history really is quite different from uninspired history. Events that are part of divine revelation really are special events that deserve their own category. They are special events in redemptive history given to the Church for very specific reasons. To place these events in the same category as obscure claims to the same phenomena in modern times seems to me to be driven by desperate bias on the one hand, or extreme naiveté on the other.

Hays then launches into some fairly sympathetic remarks concerning Amie Semple McPherson, John Wimber, and the Catholic claims to miracles. McPherson was a first-rate charlatan. To begin with, she was a female preacher, something Scripture explicitly prohibits. She faked her own kidnapping in order to carry on an adulterous affair. She claimed to hear directly from God. She was obsessed with the “slain in the Spirit” phenomenon that has become very popular in PC circles. She died of a drug overdose in 1944. If you can believe it, John Wimber was even worse. He began his ministry by pulling a group of people together and announcing himself as pastor. He talked about a new breed of manifest sons of God. He was a strong proponent of the laughing movement and called it the third wave move of God. He taught dominion theology and that without His body, the Church, Christ was incomplete. Wimber even believed that Christians could be demon possessed. Wimber’s teachings were deceptive, his methods were a disgrace because of their repeated failures coupled with his claim to serve Christ, Who never fails. Moreover, his anti-intellectual, check your brain at the door kind of rhetoric destroys the very idea of critical thinking.

If I follow Hays’ logic, I am left with some pretty serious problems. First, what basis do I have for rejecting the miracles claimed by Islam? If I must accept obscure and vague testimony from people in distant lands without question, then on what basis can I reject other miracle claims of competing belief systems? Second, Hays’ view that we accept the Bible because of the miracles has it exactly backwards. We believe in miracles because God reveals to us in Scripture that they happened. In addition, all men know that they are the product of the miracle of God’s handiwork. We also know that God lies in back of creation, another fantastic miracle. The miracles contained in Scripture are special events attached to a very special purpose, not only for the sake of that audience at that place and time but also for our sake, for the purpose of spiritual growth and edification. Such historical phenomena are in a category distinctly different from historical phenomena that is not part of God’s miraculous and special revelation. If Hays refuses to acknowledge that such a material difference exists between experiences in Scripture and claims of similar experiences outside of Scripture, what can we say but that the problem must be located somewhere in Hays’ theology.

Hays and others sympathetic approach is detrimental to the testimony of the Christian community. After all, we have charlatans moving around within the visible Christian community making outrageous claims that God speaks to them, that God is healing and working miracles through them, building empires, teaching heresy and doing tremendous harm to the Church, to her position as light in the world, and to countless souls the world over. For some reason, we are more concerned to protect such practices and we are more interested in debating the subject than we are in protecting the flock, protecting the truth, and purging these wolves from the pastures of God’s sheep.

Finally, when Hays and others compare our acceptance of miracles in Scripture with our rejection of miracle claims in modern times, he says we are being inconsistent. If we accept the miracles of Scripture, it seems, we must accept modern claims on the same basis. Otherwise, we are being logically inconsistent. Hays’ reasoning contains a very fundamental flaw. The basis for our belief in the miracles of Scripture is the testimony of God Himself. God the Holy Spirit has made it known to us. The writer to the Hebrews says that we intellectually grasp that the world was made by God from nothing, by faith. That is to say that we possess this knowledge by faith. We know the testimony of Scripture is true, by faith. The activity of God is involved, not only in bringing a revelation, or in giving a revelation, but in our receiving it. If Hays thinks that this process is no different from everyday experiences we have now, he is sorely mistaken. The problem, it seems to me, is not just one of argumentation, it is one of serious theological error. I do not know what kind of theology concludes that modern claims from the PC movement are not materially different from those found in Scripture, but I DO know that it is not the product of sound biblical exegesis. And that is enough for me to say that it should be avoided.

Endowed With The Gifts of The Spirit – The Fruit of Pentecostal Charismatic Theology

I want to accomplish a couple of objectives in this post. First, I want to refute Adrian Warnock’s misrepresentation of John MacArthur’s view regarding the Pentecostal/Charistmatic Theological (PCT) parasite that lives in the visible Church. Second, I want to spend some time talking about the most serious theological error that I believe characterizes PCT. By now you are probably aware that Patheos has posted a public criticism of John MacArthur concerning his own criticism of Pentecostal-Charismatic Theology (PCT). The article was written by Andrian Warnock. I will provide a few very brief comment about his reason simply because it is obviously fallacious that it only requires a few remarks.

Andrian’s rebuttal essentially comes down to two things: PCT is growing at a maddening pace, and we are bigger than the other components of evangelicalism once you step out of the Western world. Warnock writes, “The Charismatics and Pentecostals are acknowledged by experts to be proliferating like no other previous movement in history. It seems to me that the movement contains many vibrant, faith-filled people who have a deep trust in God, a sense of a relationship with God, and a strong desire to share the gospel.” Apparently, Warnock is oblivious to the fact that this statement has absolutely no bearing on the question concerning whether or PCT is actually biblical or not. In order to determine if a movement is a biblical movement, we must compare its teachings with the Bible, not with its growth rate. Mormonism’s growth rate was extraordinary as well. Does that mean it teaches Christian truth?

Warnock continues, “Outside of the West the Charismatic and Pentecostal Movement dominates the Evangelical church. Whether you are Charismatic or not yourself, I hope you agree that these hundreds of millions of people are our brothers and sisters in Christ, and that we share in salvation together as one Body.” This is a fascinating statement. I think Jesus addresses it with these words, “Many will say to Me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name cast out demons, and in Your name perform many miracles?’ “And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness.’ (Matt. 7:22-23) It seems clear to me that professions and numbers, regardless of their passion or sincerity to size are not substitutes for genuine Christianity. Warnock’s rebuttal fails to achieve its goal by a long shot.

John MacArthur is offended that PCT adherents claim to experience the work of the Holy Spirit in their movement. The reason this claim offends Dr. MacArthur and should offend anyone filled with the Spirit is that these experiences have continually and, steadily produced a stream of one false teaching after another. It is more than just a little disturbing when you hear PCT adherents claim that the NT gifts are still present and still needed in the modern Church when the people laying unique claim to those gifts continually line up in support of men who are false teachers and prophets; Men who claim to heal the sick and even raise the dead. What has the PCT movement given the Church since its inception back in the late 1800s to early 1900s? What is the fruit of this self-professing Spirit-filled movement? Let’s take a look to see what she has contributed to the modern Church.

We can begin with Katheryn Kuhlman. This was a woman preacher, something that is very common in PCT circles, who traveled around claiming to heal people miraculously. Having been interviewed and obtaining names and addresses of several people (23+) that Kuhlman claimed to have healed, one Dr. Nolan discovered that not a single miracle had taken place. One woman who was supposedly cured of spinal cancel through her brace away and ran across stage, experienced the collapse of her spine the next day. She died four months later. But the attendees would never hear the rest of the story. In their minds Kuhlman was a great miracle worker from God. Many people don’t know that Kuhlman had a proclivity for the flamboyant lifestyle. She liked expensive things. In addition, she was married to an evangelist who had divorced his wife for the purpose of marrying Kuhlman.

Aimee Semple McPherson had a strong influence on Kuhlman and others in the PC camp. She too was a traveling faith healer. Few people know, however, that McPherson faked her own kidnapping in 1926 to carry on an adulterous affair. It was this event that led to her founding the International Church of the Four-Square Gospel. McPherson died of an overdose of barbiturates. Again, few people realize this about McPherson. Kuhlman had significant influence on Benny Hinn and John Arnott while McPherson influenced Hinn as well.

Another PCT figure, AA Allen, claimed to perform hundreds and thousands of miracles and healings in his ministry. He claimed he could turn one-dollar bills into twenties. He sold anointed prayer cloths. He offered “Miracle Tent” shavings as points of contact for miracles. He actually started a “raise the dead” campaign at one time. It ended when his disciples refused to bury their departed and their departed refused to come back to life. Allen died from cirrhosis of the liver. He had received DUI after a miracle crusade in Tenn. This is one of many alcohol-related incidents. He was an embarrassment to the ministry and to the Christian Church.

I could go on and on about men like Oral Roberts, W.V. Grant, Jr., The Kansas City Prophets, John Wimber, Randy Clark, Paul Crouch, Jack Coe, Paul Cain, William Branham, John Avanzini, John Arnott, Benny Hinn, Ken Copeland, Ken Hagin, Fred Price, Marilyn Hickey, Pat Robertson, Robert Tilton, Earnest Angsley, John Wimber, The Vineyard Movement, The Laughing Revival, Rodney Howard Brown, The Toronto Blessing, The Brownsville Revival, Jim Bakker, and so forth. The list could go on and on and on. These men and women are false prophets, false teachers, teaching false doctrines for the purpose of material gain. All of them speak in tongues and claim to possess the same gifts of the Spirit that existed in the NT Church. This list is literally a tiny fraction of prominent names from among prominent names.

Now, here is the response you will hear from defenders of PCT. They will claim that ALL these men and women are the abusers. They are not indicative of PCT in general. And that, ladies and gentlemen is a dishonest argument. If it were not for the support and endorsement of the overwhelming majority of PCT churches, the movement in general, these men and women could never have risen to the levels of success they experienced. The fact that I have only listed a few indicates that these practices and teachers are prevalent within the Charismatic movement. Of course there can be small pockets here and there that may see these leaders as the abuser that they are. But that is the whole point. Such small pockets do not represent the majority of the movement.

Now, I want to turn your attention of the false teachings that have been the fruit of most PCT (Pentecostal-Charismatic Theology). The most obvious teaching among PCT is the notion of individual-personal-experiential revelation. This is the view, embraced by an overwhelming majority of PCT adherents that God is still actively giving revelation to the individual and even the Church. PCT adherents often make a big deal out their dreams, continually looking for spiritual meaning and messages from God. The focus is more than a little odd; it can be downright bizarre. The PCT adherent believes that God speaks to them often, through an inner voice that only they can hear. This inner voice provides very specific guidance in their lives around issues like careers, marriage, divorce, even, and things like relocation, and even interpreting Scripture. The goal, from my perspective is to know the hidden will of God, that will which is not revealed in Scripture. Moreover, there is a spiritual pride associated with this practice. The idea that God spoke to me and told me something is lauded as an indication that this person is very close to God. There is a power-factor that immediately surrounds such people. Essentially, this view inadvertently denies the sufficiency and efficiency of Scripture. This is by no means a small issue.

PCT embraces a view of salvation and atonement that is really quite different from that taught in Scripture and expressed by historic Christianity. Many Pentecostals believe that if you die immediately after sinning that you suffer eternal damnation because sin cannot enter the Kingdom. They reject the view that all sin, past, present, and future are forgiven in Christ. They teach that the security of the believer is conditioned upon the actions of the believer. Essentially, truly born again regenerate people can and do suffer eternal judgment in PCT.

Pentecostals teach that a person can be saved but not filled with the Holy Spirit. Some actually teach that sanctification is also a separate work of grace. In that system a person is regenerated, then subsequently sanctified, and then finally filled with or baptized in the Holy Spirit. The evidence that one has been filled with the Spirit is speaking in tongues. If you do not speak with tongues, you are not filled with the Spirit.

Pentecostal worship is also quite different from historic Christianity. PCT adherents encourage their congregations to get in or enter the Spirit as they begin to worship. In most Pentecostal services, the goal is to impart some emotional experience that they call worshipping in the Spirit. I once had an Assembly of God pastor tell me that he knew when someone was dancing in the Spirit because people who did such in the flesh would get tired. The notion of “dancing in the Spirit” is nowhere found in Scripture. Another feature of Pentecostal worship is the practice of being “slain in the Spirit.” This happens when a preacher lays hands on you and you fall down. Again, nothing like this is ever witnessed or taught in Scripture. Another phenomenon is being “drunk in the Spirit.” This happens when people get so emotional that they just begin to stagger around the church and fall down, and basically behave like a bunch of drunks. A more recent phenomenon was the laughing revival. Supposedly the Spirit comes on people and they begin to laugh hysterically. If you have ever witnessed this phenomenon as a true Christian, you can’t help but feel like Satan is using it to blaspheme and profane true Christian worship. It is about as heinous a practice as I have ever seen associated with Christianity. There is nothing Christian about it.

I could go on and on about all the serious errors and even heresies that exist in PCT. I think you get the point. The errors touch the nature of divine revelation and Scripture, the believer’s relationship to the Holy Spirit, salvation, the atonement, worship and more. I am sure that defenders of PCT will respond by calling these abuses. However, the fact remains that these so-called abuses are the very behaviors, practices, and beliefs that have come to define PCT over the short 100+ years of its existence. In the second place, I am curious just how it is that PCT adherents distinguish the abuse of a gift from the proper exercise of a gift. Is it abuse when someone runs circles around the Church yelling glory at the top of their lungs or is it the power of the Holy Spirit? We hear the word abuse quite a lot. What we need to see is the criteria by which abuses are identified so that we can interact with it. So far, I have not seen anyone in PCT publish such a list. In addition, the radically autonomous nature of most PCT churches makes genuine consensus nearly impossible. What one PCT writer says is abuse, 10 others claim is no abuse at all.

In summary, if it is true that the PCT movement is actually endowed with the NT gifts, it seems that the gifts not only don’t help avoid error and sin at all. If anything, the presence of the gifts seem to have a very high correlation with serious error and even heresy. One would expect just the opposite. I would expect a true movement endowed with the true gifts to see a high correlation with truth, with very low instances of error, of moral failure, of materialism.

Here is the list of PCT heroes: Katheryn Kuhlman, Amie Semple McPherson, Oral Roberts, W.V. Grant, Jr., The Kansas City Prophets, John Wimber, Randy Clark, Paul Crouch, Jack Coe, Paul Cain, William Branham, John Avanzini, John Arnott, Benny Hinn, Ken Copeland, Ken Hagin, Fred Price, Marilyn Hickey, Pat Robertson, Robert Tilton, Earnest Angsley, John Wimber, Rodney Howard Brown, Jim and Tammy Bakker, Reinhard Bonnke, Creflo Dollar, Joyce Meyer, Gloria Copeland, T.D. Jakes, and so forth. Is it a coincidence that every personality in this list also has a very high attraction to and interest in materialistic gain? What these false teachers require to be successful is a movement of people that endorses them, agrees with their teachings, and supports them financially. This movement is the Pentecostal-Charismatic movement. While it is true that there are small elements, tiny actually, that view these men correctly as false teachers, the truth remains that such elements are small, uncommon, and not the norm.

The typical PCT adherent will accept, approve, and support many if not most and all the names in this list. What is sorely needed in PCT is for someone to specifically dig into the beliefs and, practices of the movement, and gain consensus on what is abuse and what is not abuse. Perhaps then we can have a conversation about the conclusions as well as the criteria. Until such criteria is in place, those of us who are not PCT adherents are left to qualify our comments as addressing the movement as a whole with the understanding that some within the movement may not be as guilty of error as the movement itself. 

Suffice it to say that it is indeed an egregious error to claim that something is the work of the Holy Spirit when in fact that work is used to issue false prophecies, make false claims about being Spirit-filled, pretend that healings and miracles are regular occurrences, and to line the pockets of false teachers with millions of dollars so that they can build empires and live lavish lifestyles all in the name of Jesus. If anything, the PCT defenders that claim that there are abuses in these practices should simply say amen and pronounce their public shame rather than defending them. After all, the PCT movement as a whole has made a mockery of Christianity with its prosperity gospel, its pseudo-tongues, its false claims about the miraculous, its visions and dreams, its radical focus on the experiential, and its obsession with the material. It is only because we care about the Church and about the testimony of our Lord that we make such public criticisms of a movement that does nothing but create scandal after scandal for the Christian community.