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The April 2006 PNEUMA INFORMERIn this issueChanges coming to the PNEUMA INFORMER: June 2006Distribution of the Pneuma Informer changing soon. June 2006 has been set as the month when distribution of this newsletter will begin through GoogleGroups. This change will affect all opt-in subscribers. The Pneuma Foundation editorial committee decided to begin using GoogleGroups to distribute this newsletter, with the goal of alleviating some of the administrative duties that our volunteer staff is currently spending considerable time on. More information will follow regarding what the newsletter will look like in the future and how you can make sure that you continue to receive the newsletter without interruption. We are still looking for more feedback, especially about what departments are meaningful to you or what new things you would like to see. We are also looking for more volunteers to help with the preparation of the Informer. For more information, please use the "Contact Us" page: http://www.pneumafoundation.org/contactus.jsp
What's New at www.PneumaFoundation.org
Why so few graphics?
Have you noticed that www.PneumaFoundation.org does not have many heavy graphics, animated clipart, or flashy video presentations? One of the greatest reasons for this is to allow our international visitors the ability to browse the site without tremendous wait or unnecessary and unwanted features. It is the goal of the web team to provide great content to our visitors, fulfilling our mission of offering sound biblical teaching to Pentecostal/charismatic believers and a forum to discuss the gifts of the Holy Spirit. We hope you agree that this goal is more important than foofy graphics (as nice as they might look). Here is one testimony from an international Christian worker: "... Now living in Africa, I have greater appreciation for the pleas I had often heard from residents in Africa requesting that the missions community reduce the size of emails, use less graphics on websites, do not send unsolicited attachments, and do not require web use. Internet and phone service here is very slow and expensive. In South Africa, for example, I have 'unlimited' web access. However, the phone company charges me by the second to use the phone line even for a local number. When traveling in other African countries it can be even worse. I once paid $5 to load the weekly update to my anti-virus software. Obviously, I am not keen to be online for unsubscribing to something I did not request. Thanks for hearing the perspective from another continent!" (this note reprinted from Brigada Today 2006/03/31) The Pneuma Foundation web team would like to say "Thank you!" to all of those that send notes of encouragement and suggestions about www.PneumaFoundation.org. It is a real joy to us to know that our efforts are making a difference. We are so glad to be helping people that are serving the Lord Jesus and making his love known around the world. New Articles, Links, and other Features
Reports from Around the World
Worldwide Growth of the Pentecostal/charismatic Movement
Upheaval in Nigeria
I have spent time in northern Nigeria, and the Archbishop is speaking the truth. The western media reported when "Christians" massacred a few hundred "Muslims" in the "Muslim" town of Yelwa, but they took the matter completely out of context. A few years before local non-Muslims retaliated against Muslims there, I taught 60 pastors in Yelwa--which was not an exclusively Muslim town, and was in a mostly Christian state. I was conversing with some church leaders over a meal and overheard a Muslim from outside the area instructing local Muslims negatively about my presence (though I could only reconstruct it from the gestures and the few words of Hausa I recognized). The next year, the Christians were slaughtered or driven out of Yelwa, and their churches burned. Thousands of Christians were murdered by jihadists throughout that state, starting just a few days before the infamous Sept. 11 in the U.S.A. But in contrast with the U.S. response to jihadists' attack, nothing was done effectively to protect the Christians in Plateau state, and they received no media attention. Tens of thousands of people became internally displaced refugees. Finally, some non-Muslims in the area retaliated. The media response, which blamed the Christians, invited the slaughter of hundreds of Christians in Kano; my friend's contact there reported that all the morgues and refrigeration units were full--but the official report said only a few were dead, and their faith was not specified. To this date, I am more likely to see media reports saying how Muslims and Christians kill each other, or giving inflated figures for Muslim casualties and negligible figures for Christian casualties. That Christians turned the other cheek for years is routinely ignored. Yet how long would Americans have turned the other cheek? (It was only a matter of days, as I recall, before the U.S. went to war in Afghanistan.) We have a real double standard here. The archbishop is right to work against the violence. But he is also right to be sensitive to the youth who are tired of turning the other cheek. Violence cannot solve anything and violence cannot win. But we need to understand what motivates it so we can address it. Grace be with you,
North Korea: why prayer is needed
Helping with Reports
Report the News
Articles from the Spring 2006 issue of the PNEUMA REVIEWThe PNEUMA REVIEW is a quarterly printed journal of ministry resources and theology for Pentecostal and charismatic ministries and leaders. For more information about the PNEUMA REVIEW, and to learn how to subscribe, please visit: Introducing the PNEUMA REVIEW. www.pneumafoundation.org/intro_pr.jsp Buy the PNEUMA REVIEW online at Amazon.com http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0000D8CY9 From "Rightly Understanding God's Word: The Reader's Social Location" by Craig S. Keener Slavery and Bible Interpretation People sought religious justifications for slavery both in the Arab and western worlds. Arab tradition claims that Muhammad held slaves, but there is no basis for supposing that Muhammad made slavery worse than what already existed in his day, and in fact he may have limited it. After the Arabs conquered the Sassanian empire in 642, however, they took over the east African slave trade. By the ninth century, many Arabic texts (cited by Bernard Lewis in Race and Slavery in the Middle East [Oxford, 1990]) reveal a racial prejudice against Africans as stinky, lazy, and suited for slavery. The mighty empire of Songhay was eventually toppled in part by pressure from northern Arabs and Berbers for more slaves. By the nineteenth century the terrible march across the Sahara, Tippu Tib's near depopulation of the upper forest region of the Congo, and other horrors had reached their peak, but they had continued for over one thousand years. The Arabian peninsula made slavery illegal only in 1962, and outside observers still claimed a quarter of a million slaves there afterward; it continues today in Mauritania, the Sudan, and elsewhere. Those who practiced this abuse of others naturally sought justification for the practice. Building from an earlier Jewish tradition not in the Bible, Arab slave traders argued that all descendants of Ham (not simply Canaan as in Gen 9:25, fulfilled in Joshua's day), hence Africans in general, were meant for slavery. Slavery was engrained in Arab culture; in the nineteenth century the sultan of Morocco resisted outside forces to abolish slavery, claiming that it was part of their religion as well as their culture. In 1855, when the Turks tried to outlaw the slave trade in their empire, under British pressure, Shaykh Jamal issued a fatwa from Mecca declaring the Turks now apostate from true Islam. He announced that it was therefore acceptable to kill them and to enslave their children. Western slave traders, starting with the Spanish and Portuguese but soon including the British and Americans, borrowed the "curse of Ham" and various racist stereotypes from Arab slave traders. Although the Arabs had been engaged in this practice for many centuries, the Europeans pursued plantation agriculture more brutally, stuffing masses of captured Africans into cargo holds for the three-month voyage across the Atlantic. The earliest slaveholders in the U.S. refused to allow their slaves to hear about Christianity, protesting that the slaves might get the idea from it that they were equals of the slaveholders. (Their fears were justified: most slave revolts in the U.S. involved Christian teaching.) But eventually they were able to secure some preachers who would preach from the Bible more selectively, avoiding its themes of liberation, justice, or other matters that might cause troubles. The south was at that time the least evangelized part of the thirteen colonies, in a country which, before the Second Great Awakening, may have had only seven percent church attendance. But while slaveholders came up with a selective way to read texts, a growing abolitionist movement looked for more general biblical principles. Passionate for justice, British evangelicals in the 1790s (especially related to Wesley's growing Methodist brand of Anglicanism) had two main causes: missions and opposing the slave trade. The Wesleyan revival shook Britain in a number of ways, but one was creating a new climate of concern for evangelism, justice, and obedience to God. William Wilberforce and his "Clapham Sect" worked to abolish slavery in the British Empire until finally, on Wilberforce's deathbed, they succeeded in persuading enough people about their Christian views. The Methodist revival impacted the Americans, too. The 1784 Methodist General Conference declared slavery contrary to God's law; the 1812 conference forbade slaveholders to be church elders; in 1826 the Maryland conference unanimously denounced laity holding slaves. In 1825 even the bishop of Georgia, in the heart of slave country, considered requiring all Methodists there to free their slaves. The African Methodist churches in the U.S., as well as other black American denominations, also opposed slavery. In 1789 the Virginia Baptists resolved that slavery should be abolished; Quakers like John Woolman had always opposed slavery; as early as 1710, Anglican Bishop William Fleetwood had condemned slavery. By the mid-1800s the American debate became fiercer and some churches withdrew from it, but many continued the fight. Abolitionist Christian leaders like Charles Finney, Lewis Tappan and Theodore Weld built their case against slavery from biblical principles. LaRoy Sunderland's antislavery manual drew principles about justice from every section of the Bible to use against slavery. For example, he pointed out that the penalty for kidnapping was death (Ex 21:16; Deut 24:7; cf. 1 Tim 1:10), and correctly understood that kidnapping in the ancient Mediterranean world meant slave trading (e.g., Gen 40:15). He therefore declared that all slave traders should be put to death, and that slaveholders, who deliberately sustained the slave trade, supported it and should also be executed. Meanwhile, the slaves engaged in some Bible interpretation of their own. The slave preachers often allowed them to hear only a small selection of biblical texts, but they could not avoid texts which talked about all humanity being descended from Adam or about all people having equal access to God's grace through faith in Christ. Slaves would sing songs about God delivering Israel from slavery in Egypt, and the slaveholders, who were too morally depraved to understand the connection, did not realize that the slaves were praying for their own deliverance. One slave who had learned how to read later reported that he used to read the Bible while he was a slave and he found in it confirmation of what most slaves already believed--that God opposed slavery. He found there the principle that God made all humanity from one person, and that they therefore were of equal worth in God's sight. We should not read into the Bible something that is not there. But because the slaves heard the Bible at their point of need, they were able to hear themes that were already there which the slaveholders did not expect. Our attachment to our traditions can keep us from hearing anything new. Not everything new is right; but not all of it is wrong, either. To apply the Bible most fully, we must be ready to ask fresh questions, as long as we search the Bible on its own terms (in context and original background) to supply the answers. . . . __________ Craig S. Keener, Ph.D., is professor of New Testament at Eastern Seminary. He is the author of ten books, including Gift & Giver: The Holy Spirit for Today (Baker Academic, 2001), and is married to Dr. Medine Moussounga Keener. Read the rest of this article in the Spring 2006 issue of the PNEUMA REVIEW www.pneumafoundation.org/intro_pr.jsp
Prayer Requests
Praise Reports
Support the Pneuma FoundationThe Pneuma Foundation is supported by the generous gifts of its members and friends. If you would be interested learning more about how you can support the Foundation, please visit: http://www.pneumafoundation.org/supporting.jsp. Mention of a ministry or organization in this publication does not mean that the Pneuma Foundation recommends that organization or its resources to you. Mention of an organization or its news or resources is for informational purposes only. Please exercise appropriate wisdom before utilizing resources or otherwise receiving any assistance from an organization mentioned within this publication. | |||||||