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[ by Charles Cameron — Benedict XVI, Lutherans, ecumenism, C Peter Wagner’s “new paradigm” of Christianity ]
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Photo: Pope Benedict XVI and Nikolaus Schneider (R), Chairman of the Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD) attend the Ecumenical Service of the World in the church of the Augustinian Monastery in Erfurt, September 23, 2011.  Credit: Reuters / Norbert Neetz / Pool

Earlier today, Pope Benedict visited the cloister in Erfurt which once housed Martin Luther, for an ecumenical meeting with leaders of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD), a mainline Protestant coalition of Lutheran, Unified and Calvinist churches.

In the course of his presentation, the Pope made clear his admiration for Luther himself:

As the Bishop of Rome, it is deeply moving for me to be meeting representatives of Council of the EKD here in the ancient Augustinian convent in Erfurt. This is where Luther studied theology. This is where he was ordained a priest in 1507. Against his father’s wishes, he did not continue the study of Law, but instead he studied theology and set off on the path towards priesthood in the Order of Saint Augustine. On this path, he was not simply concerned with this or that. What constantly exercised him was the question of God, the deep passion and driving force of his whole life’s journey. “How do I receive the grace of God?”: this question struck him in the heart and lay at the foundation of all his theological searching and inner struggle. For him theology was no mere academic pursuit, but the struggle for oneself, which in turn was a struggle for and with God.

“How do I receive the grace of God?” The fact that this question was the driving force of his whole life never ceases to make an impression on me. For who is actually concerned about this today – even among Christians?

That’s a striking utterance from the holder of the office that Martin Luther so often assailed, writing (for instance):

St. Paul calls Antichrist the man of sin and the son of perdition, because through his precepts and laws he will turn all the world from God and prevent God and the world from coming together; he shall be a master of sin and all iniquity, and yet will retain the name and appearance of Christ and call himself Sanctissimus and Vicarius Dei and Caput Ecclesiae [“most holy one; vicar of God; head of the Church”], and persecute all who will not obey him. It is easy to recognize that the pope more than fits this description.

Things have clearly changed since that time, and the US branch of Lutheran World Ministries has proposed to its member churches:

That they officially declare that the Lutheran commitment to the Confessions does not involve the assertion that the pope or the papacy in our day is the anti-Christ.

It is not, therefore, the Evangelical Churches (ie mainstream Protestants like the Lutheran and Reformed churches) that Benedict is thinking of when he raised an issue that obviously disturbs him, saying:

The geography of Christianity has changed dramatically in recent times, and is in the process of changing further. Faced with a new form of Christianity, which is spreading with overpowering missionary dynamism, sometimes in frightening ways, the mainstream Christian denominations often seem at a loss. This is a form of Christianity with little institutional depth, little rationality and even less dogmatic content, and with little stability.

The matter seems urgent to Benedict, precisely because, as he had just said:

It was the error of the Reformation period that for the most part we could only see what divided us and we failed to grasp existentially what we have in common in terms of the great deposit of sacred Scripture and the early Christian creeds. The great ecumenical step forward of recent decades is that we have become aware of all this common ground and that we acknowledge it as we pray and sing together, as we make our joint commitment to the Christian ethos in our dealings with the world, as we bear common witness to the God of Jesus Christ in this world as our undying foundation.

Catholics and Lutherans may still have their differences – but on “the great deposit of sacred Scripture and the early Christian creeds” they have much in common – and it is of this common ground that Benedict says, “The risk of losing this, sadly, is not unreal” immediately before speaking of the new “form of Christianity with little institutional depth, little rationality and even less dogmatic content, and with little stability”.

The Pope continues:

This worldwide phenomenon poses a question to us all: what is this new form of Christianity saying to us, for better and for worse? In any event, it raises afresh the question about what has enduring validity and what can or must be changed – the question of our fundamental faith choice.

The Pope is a diplomat, and he is expressing his concern as diplomats do, in a carefully worded, highly generalized and eminently tactful way. But can we read between the lines? What does the Pope mean by “this new form of Christianity”?

The “world” of Christianity is changing very rapidly, both demographically and doctrinally, and that’s putting things mildly. I hope to address some of these changes in a series of future posts on ZP — but for now, let me just say we should watch Pope Benedict’s future utterances closely for further signs of exactly what worries and what encourages him.

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I cannot image, for instance, that Benedict would be altogether comfortable with what C Peter Wagner of the new Apostolic Reformation refers to in his forward to Bishop Bill Hamon‘s book Apostles, Prophets and the Coming Moves of God: End Times Plan for His Church on Planet Earth as

my “paradigm shift” from traditional Christianity to an openness to the person and to the full ministry of the Holy Spirit.

This “full ministry of the Holy Spirit” includes, as the title of Harmon’s book suggests, the idea that Apostles and Prophets will arise in our times, which are the End Times.

In his book Apostles Today: Biblical Government for Biblical Power, Wagner states:

We are now living in the midst of one of the most epochal changes in the structure of the Church that has ever been recorded. I like to call it the “Second Apostolic Age.”

Wagner goes on to say, “The Second Apostolic Age is a phenomenon of the twenty-first century” and then identifies four “notable movements of the Spirit of God” that “have been building the foundation of the Second Apostolic Age for several decades.” These are (pp. 8-9):

• The African Independent Churches
• The Chinese House Churches
• The Latin American Grassroots Churches
• The U.S. Independent Charismatic Movement.

Is any of this beginning to sound like the “new form of Christianity, which is spreading with overpowering missionary dynamism” that Benedict mentioned – a “form of Christianity with little institutional depth, little rationality and even less dogmatic content”?

Let’s turn back to Bishop Bill Harmon for a moment. Hamon himself appears to be clear that he is both an apostle and prophet. In the body of the book which I linked to above – and not on the dust jacket, where over-the-top praise from an author’s friend is commonly found — he quotes one of his supporters, Dr Henry Ramaya of Grace Assembly, Fasan, Malaysia, who writes:

The global recognition and acceptance of bishop Bill Harmon as Father of the Apostolic-Prophetic movement speaks for itself.

and refers to Harmon as “the Apostle Prophet Statesman”.

Dr. Ramaya’s description of the apostolic and prophetic functions, also quoted by Harmon in his book, puts both the missionary and apocalyptic elements of this movement together in a nutshell:

The apostle is God’s vehicle of invasion like light invading darkness, and the prophet is God’s ultimate weapon of warfare. This end-time Apostolic-Prophetic Movement will climax into the apocalypse with a spontaneous outburst of joy because the missionary mandate will be fulfilled.

And one last quote, if I may.

According to notes published on the Elijah List, a listserve that supports the New Apostolic Reformation agenda, Bill Harmon told an “International Gathering of Apostles and Prophets” back in 1999:

We are seeing prophets and apostles coming forth for a strategic reason. … We are about to move from the dispensation of grace to the dispensation of dominion. We are about to see Jesus, not as the suffering lamb that was slain, but the roaring Lion who is King!

If we’d be well-advised to follow Pope Benedict’s further utterances, we should also take note of sources like the Elijah list, and critical considerations of the movement, like those posted on such Evangelical sites as Herescope.

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Please note that I am not saying that Benedict’s remarks were directed specifically at the New Apostolic Reformation — they were diplomatic and highly generalized for good reason — merely that the NAR is a prominent, if not the preeminent, manifestation of the kind of shift that Benedict is talking about. The second section of this analysis, in other words, is simply one person’s attempt to “read between the lines”…

And did I really just promise to write a series of posts on demographic and doctrinal shifts within Christianity?

Also in the pipeline, a series on the psychological impact of ritual and ceremonial, whether of state, military or religious origin, and a series on the “other wing” of AQ’s jihad, the Ghazwa-e-Hind hadith, Pakistan’s ISI and related matters.

[ by Charles Cameron — minor, curious post on apocalyptic, conspiracism, jihad, graphics ]

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There’s a long, conspiracist post on the “wake up project” that (among other things) declares that President Ahmadinejad is the “flag bearer of Imam Madhi’s army, insha’allah” andquotes a hadith of Imam Ali (with present-day comment in parens):

He that meets with Al Hashimi (i.e Hasan Nasrullah of Hezbollah)
with the Black Banners at his front is Shuayb, the son of Salih
who will engage As-Sufyani at the Gate of Istakhr —

and with a footnote that declares, “President Ahmadinejad is also the Tamimi Youth, al Mansur and the disputed Abdullah of the hadiths.”

So there’s something of a Shi’a perspective here, no?

What caught my eye, however, focused as I am on this black banner business, is the distinction the writer makes between two sets of black banners, the first of which apparently feature Blackwater:

“Before your treasure, three will kill each other —
all of them are sons of a different caliph but none will be the recipient.
Then the Black Banners will appear from the East
and they will kill you in a way that has never before been done by a nation.”

IT IS THE FIRST SET OF BLACK BANNERS (I.E BLACKWATER/XE) WHO WILL COME OUT FROM AFGHANISTAN AND THE HADITH SAYS THEY WILL KILL YOU LIKE NO ONE ELSE HAVE KILLED YOU BEFORE.

And in case we’re in any doubt, there’s a helpful link to the Blackwater/Xe banner (see at top of this post).

Thus more or less confirming the link between the Dajjal / Antichrist and Blackwater / Xe made in the Urdu book, Dajjal ka Lashkar – Blackwater / The Army of Antichrist: Blackwater to which Ibn Siqilli pointed us in 2009:

[ by Charles Cameron — reality, appearance and virtuality ]

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These two phrases, wars and rumors of wars and done and seen to be done have apparently been rattling around in my head for long enough that they finally dodged all the other stuff about Mahdis and Glass Bead Games and met.

Okay, I’d already thought of the first one in terms of “Cameron’s Function”:

f(x) = x + rumors of x           (i)

because it seemed to “apply” to other things than war — the instance that gave me that insight was the run-up to the Year 2000, during which it became abundantly clear that rumors of bank runs were precisely what bank runs themselves were about — which in turn became my classic instance of the need for mapping that “crossed over” between the subjective and objective realms — or morale and materiel, as I called them in a recent post.

And so here comes “Cameron’s Function #2”:

f(x) = x + seen to be x         (ii)

What I’m wondering now is whether the two of them are essentially the same “function” — any thoughts? They’re twins — but are they identical?

[ by Charles Cameron — yet more black banners, Khorasan, Jerusalem and Armageddon, with the usual strategic implications ]
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It’s beginning to be embarrassing how obvious the Khorasan / black banner / Mahdism meme is getting these days.  Earlier this week I pointed it out as the basic through-line of Syed Saleem Shahzad‘s Inside Al-Qaeda and the Taliban: Beyond bin Laden and 9/11. Today it’s Ali Soufan‘s turn.

In his book, The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against Al-Qaeda — which I hope to review here — Soufan too makes the apocalyptic significance of AQ’s jihad painfully apparent. Take his title, for instance…

Black banners, eh?

Those would presumably be the ones mentioned to Soufan by Abu Jandal, who began to quote the hadith:

If you see the black banners coming from Khurasan, join that army, even if you have to crawl over ice; no power will be able to stop them —

at which point Soufan broke in and completed the hadith for him:

— and they will finally read Baitul Maqdis [Jerusalem], where they will erect their flags.

And in case you missed it, that’s an explicitly end-times, Mahdist hadith, as you can see from (eg) this Hizb-ut-Tahrir-associated site:

Messenger of Allah said: “If you see the Black Banners coming from Khurasan go to them immediately, even if you must crawl over ice, because indeed amongst them is the Caliph, Al Mahdi.” [Narrated on authority of Ibn Majah, Al-Hakim, Ahmad]

Soufan goes on to say:

I was to hear that reputed hadith from many al-Qaeda members I interrogated. It was one of al-Qaeda’s favorites.

Khurasan is a term for a historical region spanning northeastern and eastern Iran and parts of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, and northwestern Pakistan. Because of the hadith, jihadists believe that this is the region from which they will inflict a major defeat against their enemies — in the Islamic version of Armageddon. Bin Laden’s 1996 declaration of war against the United States – a main text for al-Qaeda members – ends with the dateline “Friday, August 23, 1996, in the Hindu Kush, Afghanistan.” It’s not a coincidence that bin Laden made al-Qaeda’s flag black; he also regularly cited the hadith and referenced Khurasan when recruiting, motivating, and fundraising. Al-Qaeda operatives I interrogated were often convinced that, by joining al-Qaeda, they were fulfilling the words of the Prophet.

It is an indication of how imperfectly we know our enemy that to most people in the West, and even among supposed al-Qaeda experts, the image of the black banners means little…

I could go on, but that’s surely enough.

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And by the way, who is that man on the cover, anyway?

[ by Charles Cameron — Mahdism and Khorasan, strategic implications re Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and the West ]

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photo:  http://www.syedsaleemshahzad.com

Syed Saleem Shahzad, the recently murdered Pakistani reporter (above) profiled by Dexter Filkins in The New Yorker a couple of days ago, recently published a book with Pluto Press titled Inside Al-Qaeda and the Taliban: Beyond bin Laden and 9/11.

Reading the New Yorker piece, I was struck by the explicitly Mahdist tenor of the book’s final paragraph, which Filkins quoted, and a quick glance at pages available on the Amazon site makes it clear that Shazad’s sense of AQ strategy (a) is strongly eschatological, (b) includes India in its scope, and (c) leads from greater Khorasan to Jerusalem.

Since I’ve been harping on (a) and (c) for some while now, and (b) “fits” well enough with a few other loose ends, analytically speaking, I’ll be very interested to read (and hopefully review) the whole thing. For now, I’d just like to draw your attention to the opening and closing paragraphs of the book…

Shahzad begins his Prologue (p. xiii) with these words :

The 9/11 attacks in 2001 aimed to provoke a war in South Asia. The 26/11 Mumbai assaults in 2008 warned that Al-Qaeda was expanding its war to the east, from Central Asian republics to India and Bangladesh, and that many more such actions would follow. In the ideological perspective of Al-Qaeda, this was to be a preparation for the “End of Time” battles which were referred to by the Prophet Muhammad (in what is now known as the Hadith). These pointed to parts of modern-day Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Central Asia as ancient Khurasan. Khurasan was to be the first battleground for the End of Time battles, before a decisive confrontation against the West, with the last battle being fought in the Middle East for the liberation of Palestine and all occupied Muslim lands.

In the meantime, Al-Qaeda aimed to trap the world’s most powerful states in the impossible terrain of Afghanistan. The aim was to lead them to exhaust their energies there, before the expansion of the theater of war against the West from Central Asia to Bangladesh…

His book closes (pp. 225-26) with these words:

However, the saga of Al-Qaeda’s One Thousand and One Nights tales continues with new strategies and new characters. For Al-Qaeda these are just measures to keep the West running from pillar to post until it exhausts itself and Al-Qaeda can announce victory in Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda next aims to occupy the promised land of ancient Khurasan, with its boundaries stretching all the way from Central Asia to Khyber Paktoonkhwa throiugh Afghanistan, and then expand the theater of war to India.

The promised messiah, the Mahdi, will then rise in the Middle East and Al Qaeda will mobilize its forces from Ancient Khurasan for the liberation of Palestine, where a final victory will guarantee the revival of a Global Muslim Caliphate.

Shahzad was not always the most reliable of reporters by all accounts – but certainly one of the most intrepid, and one with unparalleled contacts among the major players. The fact that he pitches his book along so clear a Mahdist through-line should give us all pause.