The Friday Church News Notes is designed for use in churches and is published by Way of Life Literature’s Fundamental Baptist Information Service. Unless otherwise stated, the Notes are written by David Cloud. Of necessity we quote from a wide variety of sources, but this does not imply an endorsement. For instructions on how to unsubscribe to this list or to change mailing addresses, please consult the information paragraph at the end.

SAI BABA’S DEATH (Friday Church News Notes, April 29, 2011, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - Indian Hindu guru Sai Baba died on April 24 at age 84. He had prophesied that he would live to age 96 and stay healthy until then, but that was only the last in a long line of errors (“Scramble for Dead Indian Guru,” The Daily Telegraph, April 25, 2011). Not only did he miss his target by 12 years, but he was also an invalid the last six years of his life. His empire is said to be worth $12 billion, and the battle over a successor is being fought as we write. His disciples included the late king Birindra of Nepal, who was murdered by his own son, actress Goldie Hawn, the Duchess of York, and Isaac Tigrett, founder of the Hard Rock Cafe chain. His guru name, Sathya Sai Baba, means “truth divine father,” but he did not know the truth and he certainly wasn’t divine. His alleged miracles, such as materializing ash and jewelry, were demonstrated to be cheap parlor tricks. I followed a Hindu guru for a short time before I was saved. His name was Paramahansa Yogananda, founder of the Self-Realization Fellowship Society, and I am so thankful for the Lord’s grace in opening my blinded eyes 38 years ago and showing me the exclusivity of salvation in Jesus Christ. No one has ever demonstrated that Jesus’ miracles were fake, and His bodily resurrection was well-attested by the historical facts and hundreds of eye witnesses. “Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me” (John 14:6).

Though all bird sounds are typically categorized as “songs,” a distinction should be made between true songbirds and other birds that make various noises. For example, most ducks, eagles, and hawks are not songbirds. They quack or screech, but they don’t sing.

I suspect that bird calls are often lumped into the “song” category because of the evolutionary philosophy underlying the field. It is assumed that the purpose for all bird noises, regardless of how pretty and complicated, is for such things as territorial marking and mating which supposedly acted as conditions for “natural selection.” Evolutionists even theorize that the true song birds are more highly evolved (Les Beletsky, Bird Songs from Around the World, 2007, p. 7).

While there is no doubt that bird songs mean something to birds, the Bible believer knows there is more to it than this. Evolutionists are blind to the fact that pretty bird song has a much higher purpose, and that is to glorify the Creator and to please man, the crown of creation (Psalm 8:4-8).

The Friday Church News Notes is designed for use in churches and is published by Way of Life Literature’s Fundamental Baptist Information Service. Unless otherwise stated, the Notes are written by David Cloud. Of necessity we quote from a wide variety of sources, but this does not imply an endorsement. For instructions on how to unsubscribe to this list or to change mailing addresses, please consult the information paragraph at the end.

TURNING CHURCH INTO A CIRCUS AND PASTORS INTO CLOWNS (Friday Church News Notes, April 22, 2011, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - Shawnee Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky, has a Marvel Comics superhero theme for its August 2011 youth conference. They even have a Scripture to back it up -- “Declare his glory among the heathen, his MARVELlous works among all nations” (1 Chronicles 16:24). The photos of the six visiting preachers are graphically altered to make them look like Marvel superheros. Forget the fact that many of the so-called superheros operate in occultic powers and modern comic books are often lewd. This type of thing is not glorifying to God. It turns the church into a worldly circus and pastors into clowns. It cheapens the preaching of God’s holy Word. It is like trying to preach the gospel in a clown’s suit. The message is right but the context weakens its effectiveness and confuses the hearers. In my wildest imagination I cannot imagine Paul or John dressing up as Marvel Superheros. The Shawnee Baptist Youth Conference ad ran in The Sword of the Lord (April 1, 2011, pages 12), and I pray they will repent of this type of thing.

PILTDOWN MAN

Piltdown Man was held forth as a missing link in human evolution for 40 years, but it turned out to be a complete hoax.

In 1912, amateur naturalist Charles Dawson told the Geological Society of London that over the previous four years fragments of a skull, half of a lower jawbone, and a tooth had been found at the Piltdown gravel pit in Sussex. Dawson had been accompanied on some of his excavations by Arthur Smith Woodward, keeper of the geological department at the British Natural History Museum and the world’s leading expert on fossil fish, and by Teilhard de Chardin, Jesuit priest and New Age mystic. It was Teilhard who found another tooth at the Piltdown site in August 1913.

NEBRASKA MAN

In 1922, Henry Osborn, president of the American Natural History Museum in New York City, announced the discovery of a new missing link between apes and man based on “fossils” discovered in Nebraska.

This was based on a tooth discovered five years earlier by Nebraska rancher Harold Cook. Joining Osborn in the conclusion that a new apeman had been discovered were William Gregory (museum curator) and Milo Hellman, who were regarded as two of the world’s leading authorities on the teeth of primates. They concluded, “On the whole, we think its nearest resemblances are with ‘Pithecanthropus’ and with men rather than with apes” Museum novitiates, no. 27).

The Friday Church News Notes is designed for use in churches and is published by Way of Life Literature’s Fundamental Baptist Information Service. Unless otherwise stated, the Notes are written by David Cloud. Of necessity we quote from a wide variety of sources, but this does not imply an endorsement. For instructions on how to unsubscribe to this list or to change mailing addresses, please consult the information paragraph at the end.

DOLLY PARTON AND LADY GAGA (Friday Church News Notes, April 15, 2011, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - Country music singer Dolly Parton says she wants to sing a duet with the shock rocker Lady Gaga. Dolly said, “I love her. Maybe we should so something together” (“Dolly Parton Wants to Sing,” MSN.com, April 14, 2011). Lady Gaga is a New Ager. Her single, “Judas,” is about “honoring your darkness in order to bring yourself into the light” (“Lady GaGa in Love with Judas,” Christian Post, March 25, 2011). This is New Age salvation through the power of Self. It is the New Age doctrine that darkness and light are one. She says that “God comes in many forms” and “you must worship your faith.” She dreams of a future where no one judges anything as right or wrong and there is only tolerance and “love.” Dolly Parton’s attraction to Lady Gaga is not surprising. Many consider country music a safe alternative to rock, but it is anything but morally or spiritually safe. Country music today is rock & roll with a thin veneer of “Jesus” and a heavy dose of New Age gobbledygook. Parton’s 2008 album, Backwoods Barbie, is typical in that it mixes a vaguely defined “Jesus” with moral debauchery. There was a song about Jesus, but there were also songs about drinking, carousing, breaking one’s sacred marital vows, and sleeping with someone outside of marriage, all from a very “non-judgmental” perspective. Parton dresses extremely immodestly and has played the madam in an R-rated movie about a house of prostitution. She has covered Led Zeppelin’s occultic song “Stairway to Heaven” and John Lennon’s atheistic song “Imagine.” She joined the Dixie Chicks, Carole King, Yoko Ono, and others to record a benefit album in support of the Human Rights Campaign, a homosexual rights organization. Parton’s “Jesus” is not the one revealed in Scripture. She says, “God isn’t the monster in the sky that I grew up with [in the Church of God]. He’s a feelin’ within you” (Parade, Nov. 2, 1980). For the stage production for her song “Go to Hell,” she used 12 dancers. She said, “We do this with six dancers on the devil’s side and six on the Lord’s side. At the end of the song, they all merge and we all go into the light” (“Dolly’s Flame Worthy Streak Continues,” Country Music Television, April 21, 2004). This would appear to depict the New Age-Hindu concept that everything is one, that good is evil and evil is good, that everything is evolving and merging. In spite of this, Dolly is popular with the Southern Gospel crowd. The Southern Gospel Hall of Fame is located at the Dollywood entertainment center and they host a 30-day Southern Gospel Jubilee each year. This is another example of the worldliness and unscriptural “judge not” philosophy that permeates much of Southern Gospel today, a philosophy that is spreading rapidly among Independent Baptists.

Enlarged April 14, 20211 (first published July 23, 2008) (David Cloud, Fundamental Baptist Information Service, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061, 866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org; for instructions about subscribing and unsubscribing or changing addresses, see the information paragraph at the end of the article) -

The following is an enlarged edition of the biography of Carl Jung from our book The New Age Tower of Babel, available from Way of Life Literature.
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Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), the founder of analytical psychology, has been influential, not only in society at large, but also in the New Age movement and within almost all aspects of Christianity. Jung has influenced both modernists and evangelicals. His writings are influential within the contemplative movement. He has been promoted by Paul Tillich, Morton Kelsey, John Sanford, Thomas Moore, Joseph Campbell, John Spong, Richard Foster, Agnes Sanford, and Gary Thomas, to name a few. Jung’s psychological typing provides the underpinning for the Personality Profiling part of Rick Warren’s SHAPE program, which is used by countless churches and churches and institutions.

Jung (pronounced Young) has been called “the psychologist of the 21st century” (Merill Berger, The Wisdom of the Dreams, front cover).

Ed Hird says, “One could say without overstatement that Carl Jung is the Father of Neo-Gnosticism and the New Age Movement” (Ed Hird, “Carl Jung, Neo-Gnosticism, and the Meyers-Briggs Temperament Indicator (MBTI),” March 18, 1998; reprinted in Who’s Driving the Purpose Driven Church by James Sundquist, Appendix C).

Jeffrey Satinover says:

“Jung’s direct and indirect impact on mainstream Christianity--and thus on Western culture--has been incalculable. It is no exaggeration to say that the theological positions of most mainstream denominations in their approach to pastoral care, as well as in their doctrines and liturgy--have become more or less identical with Jung’s psychological/symbolic theology” (Homosexuality and the Politics of Truth, p. 240, quoted from Ed Hird).

The Friday Church News Notes is designed for use in churches and is published by Way of Life Literature’s Fundamental Baptist Information Service. Unless otherwise stated, the Notes are written by David Cloud. Of necessity we quote from a wide variety of sources, but this does not imply an endorsement. For instructions on how to unsubscribe to this list or to change mailing addresses, please consult the information paragraph at the end.

USA TODAY SAYS CATHOLIC CHURCH HAD SIGNIFICANT ROLE IN THE KJV (Friday Church News Notes, April 8, 2011, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - A USA Today report on a traveling Bible exhibit makes the amazing claim that the Roman Catholic Church had a significant role in the King James Bible. The exhibit, called Passages, is set to open at the Vatican in October. “The announcement was made at the Vatican Embassy to highlight the Catholic contribution to the best-loved English text, the 1611 KJV, which draws about 80% of its majestic language from an earlier translation by a Catholic priest” (“New Museum to Use Science to Tell Bible’s History,” USA Today, April 8, 2011). What the reporter forgot to mention was Rome’s most significant role in that project, which was burning that “Catholic priest” in a public spectacle in Vilvoorde, Belgium. The “priest” in question was William Tyndale, who published the first printed English Bible and the first English Bible translated directly from Greek and Hebrew. Though he was an ordained Catholic priest, he renounced the Roman Catholic Church and its heresies and called the pope the Antichrist. In The Practice of Prelates, Tyndale likened the pope to an ivy which climbs up a tree and gradually saps the strength of the host and kills it, emphasizing that this is what the pope had done to England and every other nation under the papal thumb. Tyndale called Roman Catholicism “a nest for unclean birds.” Tyndale also brazenly disobeyed Rome’s law that forbade the translation of the Bible into the common languages of the people without ecclesiastical permission. When the Tyndale New Testament was smuggled into England (because the Roman Catholic authorities there forbade its distribution) large quantities were confiscated and burned, beginning in 1526. By 1528, the prisons were filled with those who had committed the “crime” of reading the New Testament in English, and in 1529 Thomas Hitton became the first in a long line of believers who were burned at the stake for possessing the Tyndale Bible. (Others had previously been burned for possessing the Wycliffe Bible.) In May 1535, Tyndale was arrested for his “heresies” and for his audacity at thumbing his nose at papal laws. After being imprisoned for nearly a year and a half in a cold, dreary dungeon in the castle at Vilvoorde, William Tyndale was taken out to the public square, strangled, and his body burned. Roman Catholic authorities also burned John Rogers, the translator of the Matthew’s Bible, another Bible in the lineage of the 1611 King James. Further, the Geneva Bible, which was the most popular English Bible before the KJV, was produced in Geneva, Switzerland, instead of England for the simple reason that the Roman Catholic Queen Mary was pouring out such vicious persecution upon Bible believers that many fled to Geneva for safety. And going back before Tyndale to the first English Bible, let’s not forget that the Roman Catholic Church condemned John Wycliffe of “heresy” for translating the English Bible and so hated his memory that they dug up his bones and burned them nearly 44 years after his death. Yes, the Roman Catholic Church did have a major role in the English Bibles preceding the King James, and let’s not forget it!