In naming this article ‘A Rant Today to Keep the Devil Away’ I am not just butchering a common adage, but summing up my purpose in writing this post. I don’t rant often, however when I see the word of God tortured and butchered, then ranting seems most appropriate. By ‘Word of God’ I mean, firstly, the Lord Jesus Christ, and secondly, the inspired scriptures (the bible) that reveal His nature, character, principles, and priorities. Hardly a month goes by that I don’t come across some or other form of ‘Word butchering’, but when I am personally impacted in one week by not one but two such acts of spiritual brutality, then I feel its time for a bit of a rant.

My first encounter of the week was with an attempt to build a theological foundation for dominion theology almost exclusively on the authority of three very well known charismatic teachers, one now departed and the other two alive and kicking. The second encounter was with someone who had taken issue, ever so kindly, with the leader of the small group they are attending. Before I give examples and analysis, I must first make a disclaimer. Why I Don’t Name Names I very seldom call a person out by name when I  write or preach into what they say or do. There are two main reasons for this:

The people who teach aberrant theology, prominent as they may be, are not the focus of my attention. I am more concerned about helping folk to recognise false teaching and false prophets than I am on naming and shaming the culprits. Before I would think of calling someone out I would need to carefully study their teachings and practices in context and then, preferably, have interacted with them personally at some level. I have not met either of these preconditions concerning my sources for this article.

The Big Bad Picture I am aware that for some readers, too much detail and too long an article, detracts from their appreciation of the content. For this reason, I will first describe the overall problem and the heart of my rant. After that, I will give some details of the encounters with the faulty theology and biblical interpretation I have recently encountered.

I have previously written about Hyper-literalism and flawed semantics HERE, so I won't bang on about these issues again in this article, although what I want to highlight does flow from these two poisoned wells. The people whose faulty interpretations and theology I am ranting about here all claim to respect the inspiration of the bible and to love Jesus. They make a point of stating that they are both biblical and Jesus-centred in their approach. However, being truly ‘biblical’ does not allow taking texts out of context, creating elaborate and ultimately illogical word chains based on a word or two in the original languages, or leaping to unwarranted conclusions in order to make the text mean what they want it to mean (eisegesis). And to be Jesus-centred does not allow detracting from His uniquely divine-human nature, nor playing fast and loose with what He taught.

One of the key proof-texts for a brand of theology that is the cause of my current distress is the last part of Psalm 138:2, which the NKJV translates as ‘For You have magnified Your word above all Your name’. This is a carry-over from the KJV of the bible translation and is regarded by every major theologian I have consulted as a very poor translation of the Hebrew. The NIV translates this verse far more accurately as ‘for you have exalted above all things your name and your word’. The bible does not proscribe God, but He, through the agency of His Word (Bible and Jesus), proscribes all other things. From this deformed root has grown a theology that teaches that what certain people understand of the scriptural revelation binds God and proscribes what He can and can’t do. For instance, they claim that God cannot do anything on earth without the participation of human agencies… because He has said that man has sole dominion over the earth.