Lausanne, Theology of Integral Mission and Israel

By Julio Severo

The Lausanne Movement was in full force in Brazil, April 2014, to discuss its most important theological worry. No, no, their worry is not about Brazilian theologians — all of them adherents of the Theology of Integral Mission (TIM) — who work together with the ruling socialist Workers’ Party and its ideological campaign to advance its anti-family agenda in Brazil.

Their worry was exclusively neo-Pentecostals’ Prosperity Theology (PT).

According to the Brazilian leftist Protestant magazine Ultimato, “45 specialists from 17 nations — prominent thinkers, ministers and professionals — gathered together in Atibaia, SP (Brazil), from March 30—April 2 for the Lausanne Global Consultation on Prosperity Theology, Poverty and the Gospel.”

The consultation was headed by Valdir Steuernagel, a fervent TIM advocate. His religious roots, as exposed by the Portuguese essay “Por que esconder a real intenção da Teologia da Missão Integral?” (Why hide the Theology of Integral Mission’s real intent?), go back to his denomination, the Evangelical Church of Lutheran Confession, which embraces both the most radical variety of Christian Marxism — Liberation Theology — and its hardly watered Protestant version, TIM.

The second speech fell to Paul Freston, old TIM advocate. Freston, a former member of the Workers’ Party, has always been a staunch PT opponent.

The Portuguese essay “A maior ameaça à Igreja Evangélica do Brasil” (The Most Important Threat to the Brazilian Evangelical Church) explains why the most prominent PT opponents are TIM theologians.

The ruling Workers’ Party, in the person of Gilberto Carvalho, said that its most important worry are neo-Pentecostal televangelists, whose PT basic message is that the key supplier of all human needs should be God, as opposed to the proposal that the Workers’ Party and other radical socialist movements want to impose: government as a god supplier of all human needs.

These two visions — God-Supplier versus Government-Supplier — are at the core of the clash between socialists and neo-Pentecostals.

Carvalho, as the chief minister in the General-Secretariat of the Presidency of the Brazilian Republic, has a special friendly relationship with TIM theologians, including Ariovaldo Ramos. The most important adviser to Carvalho for the Workers’ Party administration in its relationship with the evangelical community is the Presbyterian theologian Alexandre Brasil, who receives a monthly wage of R$15,000 and has a classical pattern of TIM adherents: he has a book against PT.

The Global Consultation on Prosperity Theology also had a speech titled: “The New Apostolic Reformation and Prosperity Theology.”

The New Apostolic Reformation was founded by C. Peter Wagner, who in the 1st Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization in 1974 confronted left-wing theologians from Latin America who wanted to turn Lausanne into a platform for the Marxist ideology.

The central personality in the 1st Lausanne Congress was Billy Graham. Without him, there would have been no Lausanne, but even he did not expect repercussion on ideological level. When Graham perceived that the Protestant Left was trying to co-opt everything, he stopped funding Lausanne, and it displeased Brazilian Marxist Anglican Bishop Robinson Cavalcanti, an old Ultimato columnist, who openly charged that Lausanne was under a “hegemony from a conservative, white, anti-WCC (World Council of Churches) and anti-socialist group,” etc. (Poor Graham: white, Anglo-Saxon, conservative, etc!) Cavalcanti wanted Graham to continue in the Lausanne movement to raise funds to advance the TIM revolution. This revolution has been happening, but without Graham’s money and participation. Valdir Steuernagel, a TIM leader, has said that today Lausanne is much more TIM than ever. It is not, therefore, a movement with the Gospel’s face, but with the face of an ideology.

For his old opposition to the raging Left in Lausanne, even today C. Peter Wagner is criticized by the Protestant Left, and even by the secular Left, which has been denouncing his New Apostolic Reform.

Lausanne has become a movement of the Protestant Left. And as usual for every left-wing (secular or pseudo-Christian) movement, it sees neo-Pentecostals, especially their PT, as the most important threat to the advance of socialism. Yet, with theological tricks, the Protestant Left has changed slightly the rhetoric, by saying that PT is a threat to the Gospel.

Socialism in Lausanne is old. In the 1980s, Ultimato magazine was officially recommended by Lausanne for Brazilians. It was the incipient left-wing Lausanne promoting the Brazilian Protestant Left.

Today, Lausanne and Ultimato advance in their socialism, though the so-called “conservative” theological Presbyterian elite in Brazil, who have a fine relationship with Ultimato and TIM leaders, have had a hard time to recognize TIM in Lausanne or even in their own Presbyterian midst.

Ultimato is Presbyterian and it has controversial Presbyterian columnists in its magazine and publishing house, including Rev. Marcos Botelho, who had made the strange point that Christians have a duty to fight for people’s right to commit homosexual vices, and Rev. Rev. Luiz Longuini, a four-times divorced minister in PCB (Presbyterian Church of Brazil) and author of a book defending TIM.

Another Ultimato columnist, Marcos Amado, is the director for Latin America in the Lausanne Movement, and he has been writing articles to deconstruct the evangelical support for Israel. This deconstruction is a trend in the Protestant Left around the world, often led and spurred by well-funded U.S. Protestant groups.

Even the left-wing Jewish-American billionaire George Soros has invested millions to make evangelical views on Israel lesser positive. If I am asked how a Jew can campaign against Israel, my answer is that the same socialism that turns Jews against Israel also turns evangelicals against the Gospel. There are thousands of left-wing evangelicals with no sincere love for the Gospel, but passionate about using it as a platform for the socialist ideology, which typically opposes Israel.

In his deconstruction effort, Amado also shows, in Ultimato, that he is opposed to what he labels “evangelical Christian Zionism,” and he stresses that in 2014 he took part in a special conference at the Intercontinental Hotel in Bethlehem. This conference was “Christ at the CheckPoint,” which seeks to present Jesus as a “Palestinian” oppressed by Israelis.

In 2014 the Israeli government warned evangelicals around the world to steer clear of “Christ at the Checkpoint.” Notwithstanding the Israeli warning, the Lausanne Movement and the World Evangelical Alliance, two movements where Steuernagel has prominent leadership posts, have supported “Christ at the CheckPoint.” Steuernagel is also an Ultimato columnist.

Marcos Amado and Ultimato want you to avoid PT, neo-Pentecostals, Israel and Zionist evangelicals and they are already helping prepare Brazilian evangelicals for the “Christ at the CheckPoint” message, whose contents is the Palestinian Liberation Theology, a TIM sister.

Therefore, you should be worried when you read about theologians “worried” about PT or the so-called “evangelical Zionism.” Their “worry” has other interests.

Evidently, you should oppose neo-Pentecostal abuses, but should you stand passively while these abuses are maliciously attacked as a way to create an opportunity to advance TIM and deconstruct the evangelical support for Israel? 

The defense of Israel that many Brazilian neo-Pentecostal leaders make is necessary. Besides, their message, though defective, emphasizing God, not the government, as the supplier of the human needs is fundamental for the people — and abominable to the secular and Protestant Left.

The Lausanne Movement has lost credibility, and it will only have respect from evangelicals when actually it shows that it is worried about its Brazilian adherents and leaders who work together with the ruling Workers’ Party, which has made everything to advance its antifamily dictatorship in Brazil.

Portuguese version of this article: Lausanne, TMI e Israel

Source: www.lastdayswatchman.blogspot.com

Recommended Reading:

“Palestinian Messengers”: How Christ and Christians Are Used for the Palestinian Cause

Jewish Issues: A Clarification to Christians about Their Perception on the Jews

The Perfect Revival?

A Charismatic Response to “The Growing Crisis Behind Brazil’s Evangelical Success Story”

Liberation Theology and Neo-Pentecostalism: A Leading Challenge to the Evangelical Churches in Brazil

Brazilian Pentecostals: Church Growth Endangered by Socialist Embrace

R.C. Sproul: There Is No True Prophecy Today

Impunity for criminals and disarmament for victims

Defenseless Brazilian women vs. a young American mother prepared to defend herself

By Julio Severo

What happens when a robber invades a house at night and finds a young woman?

In Brazil, here is what happens, according to several Brazilian newspapers:

Gazeta Digital of April 29, 2012: Man invades a house and rapes a 21 year-old woman, in Cuiabá. The crime happened Sunday morning (29). After the victim’s husband left for work, the robber took advantage to enter in the house. According to the police, he raped the woman and fled taking a cell phone, a notebook and a wallet.

Impacto of January 10, 2012: Attacker invades a residence and rapes a 13 year-old girl.

Repórter MT of December 1, 2011: Gang invades a house, ties husband and rapes his wife: Four armed men tortured the wealthy Ávila family on Wednesday night (30). According to the Civil Police, the criminals, besides robbing the family, raped the lady of the house, during the robbery. A female cousin of the family was able to flee from the group, which had also tried to rape her.

Guia Campina of April 18, 2012: Woman was overtaken by a robber inside of her room, and was raped. The police have not be able to identify the man who invaded a house this Wednesday at dawn, where he attacked and raped a woman and later fled taking a bicycle, money and some objects. The woman told the police that she was sleeping in her bedroom with their three children when she was overtaken by a stranger who attacked her armed with a machete and forced her to have sexual relations with him. Her husband was working in a factory.

MidiaMaxNews of February 28, 2012: Two young women, one 14 and the other 24, were raped by a man who invaded the house where they live about 3:40 on Monday.

90% of all of homicides in Brazil unsolved

In Google, I found countless cases of Brazilian girls and women raped at night by robbers who invaded their houses. When an attacker invades a house at night and finds a man, the robbery may be followed by murder. But when the victim is a woman alone, whose husband is working, rape is inevitable.

And a poor and defenseless woman cannot even utter complain to the criminals, who have total freedom to torture, rape and kill. If the criminal chooses to kill the victim, the police can do very little, before or after the murder. The Brazilian police have been powerless in their efforts to stop more than 50 thousand murders a year — not to mention untold thousands of rapes.

About 90% of the cases of homicides committed in Brazil are never solved and their perpetrators are never found guilty, according to the president of the National Association of the Federal Criminal Experts, Hélio Buchmüller. That is, 90% of murders in Brazil go unpunished.

Who can say that in cases of rape even more go unpunished?

It is obvious that the government-sponsored media and the government itself educate the population to trust only in the police for protection. Thus, if a robber suddenly invades the home of a young woman in the middle of the night, she should kindly ask for his permission to call the police. If the criminal is kind, both may remain seated on a sofa awaiting the police. Certainly, the end will be very happy and no rape will happen!

Maybe the anti-gun government should launch a public campaign to educate criminals to allow their victims to call the police during robberies, rapes and murders. This would greatly help the police and victims.

Sadly, criminals will never pay attention to government anti-gun campaigns, or campaigns demanding that criminals be kind to their victims. They will never give their victims a chance. And the Brazilian police, with their overload of crime cases to solve, could never afford to respond quickly to all emergencies.

So what should a victim do to defend herself?

In the United States, here is what happens when victims are able to defend themselves:

DailyNews of January 4, 2012:

A recently widowed teen mom shot and killed an intruder to protect her 3-month-old son on New Year’s Eve after asking the 911 operator for permission, local media reported.

Sarah McKinley, 18, was alone with her son in their Blanchard, Okla., home about 2 p.m. Dec. 31 when two men tried to break in, the Oklahoman said. McKinley’s husband had just passed away from lung cancer on Christmas Day.

McKinley grabbed a shotgun, called 911 and begged the operator to send help.

Sarah McKinley

She stayed on the line for a terrifying 21 minutes and asked the dispatcher if it was all right to shoot if the men forced their way in.

“I can’t tell you that you can do that, but you do what you have to do to protect your baby,” the dispatcher told her, according to ABC News.

The young mom fired when Justin Martin, 24, who was wielding a 12-inch knife, kicked his way through the door.

Police arrived to find Martin lying dead on the sofa McKinley had used to barricade the front door, according to Oklahoma's News 9.

His alleged accomplice, Dustin Stewart, 29, was arrested and jailed.

“It’s not an easy decision to make, but it was either going to be him or my son,” McKinley told local TV station KOCO. “And it wasn’t going to be my son. There’s nothing more dangerous than a woman with a child.”

Police say that McKinley was justified in taking action against the intruders once they entered her home.

What is the difference between that American young mother and the Brazilian women who were raped and robbed? Most American women are protected by laws that guarantee their right to have and use guns for personal defense. Brazilian women don’t have any state protection against a sudden home invasion in the middle of the night.

Impunity for the criminals and disarmament for the victims

Recent report of Examiner found that the number of murders in Brazil is higher than the number of deaths in global war zones. On average, there are 50,000 murders a year in Brazil. With such a high number, it is no surprise that 90% of the murderers in Brazil go unpunished.

In Brazil, citizens have no choice: either they provide for their personal defense, or they are at the mercy of criminals and rely on a police force that is unable to address an overwhelming 50,000 murders a year.

Years ago, in an article in the Brazilian leftist Presbyterian magazine Ultimato defending the anti-gun government campaign to disarm the population, Ricardo Gondim, today a Protestant minister isolated for his ideological radicalism in the name of the Bible, said that Christians supporting guns for personal defense are not allowed to mention Bible texts such as Psalm 91: “He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will abide in the shadow of the Almighty. I will say to the LORD, ‘My refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust.’” (Psalms 91:1-2 ESV)

My public answer to him was:

The vast majority of the Psalms were written by David, who asked for protection and help from God. But he also did his part: he usually used a sword, a mortal weapon equivalent to a modern military rifle. When the Lord Jesus instructed us to pray asking for “our daily bread”, he did not mean that we should stay idle and let only God do his part. As in the case of David, we need to do our part, for our maintenance and for the defense of our families. I trust in the Lord Jesus and have I never touched a gun in my life. But I know God’s Word enough to understand that just because I don’t use a gun I cannot condemn people who needs to use it. In fact, there are occasions and situations when its use is necessary. But Communists don’t think this way. For them, the population should stay eternally unarmed before their tyrannies.

Gondim has already fallen from his pedestal, and today his ideas are rightly seen as madness.

However, there are other Brazilian evangelical leaders that make alliances with the government in its communist goal of disarming the population. Rio de Paz, founded and headed by the Presbyterian minister Antonio Carlos Costa, is the largest evangelical anti-gun organization in Brazil. Its purpose is to disarm the Brazilian population, and it has successfully enlisted many Protestant churches in its campaigns.

This communist radicalism contrasts with Presbyterian conservative tradition, which left as its legacy, in Switzerland (whose capital was a Holy See of Calvinism), the armed defense as the citizen’s right. In America, Calvinism has also established that right.

But how does the most prominent Presbyterian organization in Brazil in that issue work to achieve the communist goal of disarming the population?

It is evident that all the criminals should be disarmed. All the murderers and rapists should have no access to any gun.

It is equally evident that all the law-abiding citizens need guns and other resources in the war against crime, which Brazil is losing, with 90% of the murderers enjoying full impunity and freedom to continue killing and raping.

It would be a crime to leave your wife alone home with no defense. Brazilian parents and husbands do it because the State doesn’t allow them to defend themselves as needed. Communist interests of subduing and disarming the population are much more important, for the government, than the well-being of the families.

However, regardless the government obsessions, to defend your life and family is an indispensable human right. If we can have doors and windows locked as minimum resource of protection, why not larger resources able to match the critical situation of “war” in Brazil, where thieves invade houses in the middle of the night to steal, kill and rape?

Of course, even with the right to have and use a gun for defense, the police are necessary. While the 18 year-old mother awaits the arrival of the police, she has the right to do everything necessary to defend herself and her baby from criminals that are invading her house in the middle of the night.

With two guns in her hands, a young mother has, in the USA, some chance against two robbers. In Brazil, she doesn't have any chance. She depends on the criminals’ “good will.” By government determination, she is forced to be totally unarmed before criminals avid of robberies, rapes and murders.

The Left, abortion and personal defense

Of course, the comparison between Brazilian women and American women is limited. Legally, an American woman can defend herself of criminals. But that same law gives her the right to behave as a criminal: She can also kill, before the birth, how many babies she wants. American law protects babies’ murder during the nine months of gestation. Nazis would applaud the American “progress” of the legal and medical slaughter of the innocent. The Left howls of joy with the well-known American example of “interrupting” pregnancies by highly sophisticate medical and legal cruelty.

According to the schizophrenic American law, if two criminals decide to invade the sanctuary of the home in the middle of the night, a 18 year-old mother can, to defend herself, shoot. That same law allows her, with a doctor’s help, to invade the sanctuary of the womb to annihilate its occupant.

In the case of an invading robber, who is responsible for his wicked action, he can be left alive or dead, depending where the bullets hit. But when a doctor’s murderous instruments, by the woman’s will, invade the shrine of the womb, the unborn baby is totally unarmed and innocent against his imminent extermination.

Many of those murders of innocent are funded by tax-money that the US government takes from its citizens.

That is surely a Nazi, communist, dictatorial, disgusting and murderous aspect of the American laws and freedoms.

However, the Brazilian Left, which has been making sacrifices to import to the Brazilian culture abortion, homosexuality and everything most rotten in the American laws and usages, shuts its eyes to personal defense and other positive aspects of the American culture, as homeschooling.

For many years the powerful murderous American Left has aimed at Brazil.

Family planning, with many of its micro-abortive methods, was introduced in the public health-care services in Brazil decades ago, by pressures and schemes behind the scenes of Planned Parenthood Federation, the largest network of abortion clinics in America. They were not successful until now to legalize abortion because Brazil has been resisting in a ferocious way. The same American multibillion-dollar forces that legalized abortion in America in 1973, ever since murdering more than 50 million unborn babies, for many years have been investing so that Brazil may also have eventually the “right” of murdering millions of its babies.

In the abortion issue, the traditional “anti-American” Left in Brazil is willing and avid of importing everything that comes from America. It loves abortion! Equally, it loves unarmed citizens.

However, Brazilian mothers don’t need the “right” of killing their babies in order to satisfy the murderous passions of multimillion-dollar leftist foundations in America.

They need, urgently, the fundamental human right of defending themselves and their babies against the dangers and unexpected evils of a Brazilian society abandoned to strongly armed criminals and to ideological criminals that are determined to disarm the population of their resources to defend their families.

Mothers should legally be armed to defend themselves from criminals, not to kill their babies.

Mothers and babies need defense, not abortion.

Portuguese version of this article: A diferença entre a brasileira e a americana

Source: www.lastdayswatchman.blogspot.com

Rio de Janeiro and the Old West

Brazilian Marxist Bishop Killed by Adopted Son

By Julio Severo

The Anglican bishop for Brazil’s northeastern state of Pernambuco was killed along with his wife by their son.

Edward Robinson Cavalcanti, 68, and his 64-year-old wife Miriam were stabbed to death on Sunday, February 26, in their home in the city of Olinda.

After killing his parents, Eduardo Olímpio Cotias Cavalcanti, 29, tried to commit suicide by drinking poison, and was hospitalized.

His father frequently wrote and preached diatribes against the United States as a “white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, conservative” nation. Yet, strangely, he visited the US regularly. And when his son was 16 years old, he sent him to study and live in the US.

Police inspector Joao Brito Alves told the Globo television network that he had learned that the son had a “violent temper and was frequently under the influence of drugs.”

Cavalcanti headed the Philosophy and Human Sciences Department of the Federal University of Pernambuco. He was a columnist in the leftist Calvinist magazine Ultimato. He was also the founder of Movimento Evangélico Progressista (Progressive Evangelical Movement), a NGO composed of leftist Protestant militants in Brazil. Today the Progressive Evangelical Movement has changed its name for “Evangelicals for Social Justice”.

In the past, Cavalcanti was an active member of the socialist Workers’ Party, of Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, who even visited him. The Anglican bishop said that he left the Workers’ Party because, in his view, the party softened its socialist speech:

Since 1997, I am no longer a member of the Workers’ Party, because I was elected as an Anglican bishop. I have positive memoirs of my past of fights for the democratic State, for national sovereignty and for social justice. I also have increasingly negative perceptions of the ideological and programmatic rupture of that party. (Ultimato magazine, September/October 2004)

His diatribes against American conservatives consistently plagued his articles and sermons for years.

The Roman Catholic archbishop of Olinda and Recife, Rev. Fernando Saburido, said Cavalcanti’s death was a “loss for Christianity.”

“He was sensitive to social issues and concerned with problems that affected the poor,” Saburido told G1, Globo TV’s Internet portal. “He will be sorely missed.”

Saburido is best known in Brazil as a liberal Catholic. In 2011, the Catholic university under his responsibility hosted a symposium on “homoaffective law” that gave advocates of the homosexual agenda a platform for promoting their ideology.

In the same year, the archbishop also led a march under the banner, “The Cry of the Excluded” (Grito dos Excluídos), in which pro-abortion, homosexualist, and socialist organizations had freely participated. 

The killing of Cavalcanti shocked progressive evangelicals in Brazil.

With information of The Huffington Post, an American leftist website that has also lamented his loss.

Source: www.lastdayswatchman.blogspot.com

Robinson Cavalcanti: always a Socialist, never a conservative