Holy Father, Holy Smoke

I was looking at the Christian News website, which stays the same for months at a time.

One page has a big to-do about the Pope and District Pope Benke, who has the guts to admit he is ecumenical everywhere he goes. Yes, I know Benke is an apostate. But I prefer honest apostates to dishonest ones, those closeted Calvinists who run off to Fuller and Willow Creek, bragging to their friends, denying it to the public.

Benke is an official bad guy at Christian News, for those who read it even less often than I do. Benke is ecumenical, hanging around with ELCA (like ELDONA) and Romanists (like ELDONA) and other thoroughly bad dudes like Neuhaus.

Speaking of ecumenism, another page quotes LCMS Pastor Don Matzat, an avowed Pentecostal, so deep into Enthusiasm that he must have swallowed the Holy Ghost, feathers and all. Christian News is glad to quote him:

“While the pre-millennialists, the Calvinists, the Arminians, the mystics, the prosperity teachers, the Pentecostals, and the Charismatics all have their theology widely promoted in over 3,000 Christian Bookstores around the nation, we who claim to have the pure Gospel, seemingly feel that our truth is neither worth promoting nor relevant to the popular issues being so widely discussed and debated. Rather than promoting what we believe for the welfare of the wider church, we pick fights among ourselves, ignoring the Christian world and the issues debated…The only legitimate vehicle that exists whereby Missouri Synod Lutherans are enable to speak a word to various Christian issues is Christian News. For this reason, God bless Herman Otten”
(Rev. Don Matzat, LCMS pastor, St. Louis MO).

The bizarre content of this quotation is worth preserving forever, since Otten sent me one Matzat book where Don boasted that the Holy Spirit spoke to people in dreams (always favorable to his cause), told people to give him big checks, and otherwise worked everywhere except through the Word. Otten marked the false doctrine in the book, so Herman was not unaware of the Don's precession into Pentecostalism.

Even better, Matzat (the good guy on this page) is the counselor, helper, and supporter of Benke, the bad guy on the front page.

Dizzy yet? There's more.

Matzat accused Waldo Werning of false doctrine in Christian News. Holy smokes - that is worse than Werning accusing Cascione of false doctrine, or Cascione accusing Werning. What do all three have in common? Christian News - a beacon orthodoxy in a sea of false doctrine.

That reminds me of a famous sermon quotation from Northwestern College: "I dreamt I was floating on a mattress in a sea of iniquity - and I was THIRSTY!"