Witness Lee has Seven Gods

[aron]

Originally Posted by aron

I would like to show how George Lucas... is actually representative of "gospel hucksters" who merchandise the gospel.

Of course my writing is actually the opposite of what I elsewhere called good and desirable -- scholarship. I opined that scholars would put forth an idea, a proposal: say, that "A is somehow related to B". The scholar will present this conjecture, displaying possible dependent relationships between two variables. He/she uses readily observable and commonly agreed-upon facts to demonstrate a "correlation" between two different things.

However, I didn't unoquivocally link with Mr. Lucas with an evil Trade Federation; I just pointed a possible linkage, in that his $4 Billion buyout by Walt Disney Co. shows that rich merchants somewhere were quite pleased with his wares. Nor can I prove that Living Stream Ministry's 2002 entry into the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association, nor its 20003 "dialog" with CRI which led to its eventual rehabilitation of and by them, was the equivalent of their joining the Dark Side (or that it demonstrated them having already done so).

No -- I merely point out these facts, along with the interesting coincidence in Revelation 13 of worship (v.15) joined with a kind of copyright "mark" (v.16), and linked to control of buying and selling (v.17). I already noted the detailed descriptions of merchandising in Ezekiel 27 & 28 and its culmination in Revelation 18.

Originally Posted by aron

The key is in the money changing hands... something like: "You will benefit from your helping me to prosper materially"... [and then] the gospel story becomes a monetized product, which can be exchanged for a bowl of soup, Esau-like...The marketplace seems to be spreading the truth, but the spreading-for-cash process ultimately subsumes the truth...

My sense was that cash exchanged for the gospel seems to use the market forces to spread gospel truth, but actually the market subsumes it. The gospel message becomes just another product on eBay or Amazon or Wall-Mart. So the 'relational' hypothesis might be: A seems to be using B, but really B is co-opting A. Light seems to be overcoming darkness, but darkness is actually infiltrating the gospel light. And when the light turns to darkness, how great is the darkness! (See, e.g. Anakin Skywalker).

In fairness, pointing out weaknesses/alternatives, I will say that Jesus got money & material support from His followers; see e.g. Luke 8:3. Paul quoted Deuteronomy 25 in about not muzzling the threshing ox in 1 Cor. 9:9. Multiple times in the NT record (Acts and Epistles) Paul collected money for the poor. In Acts 5 Peter received sums of cash from disciples, laid at his feet.

But none of this was quid-pro-quo, like Simon Magus, like "my-ministry-for-your-money", especially in the realm of merchandise (books, tapes, CDs, videos, magazines, pamphlets, booklets, calendars, coffee mugs, etc). In such an environment, the Holy Spirit, once given without measure, and given "without money and without price", is replaced by a thing, which is sold. And the "truth" becomes a number attached to a dollar sign.

But all this really proves nothing. This is what I see. What such observed phenomena might mean, ultimately, to and for the collective ekklesia I have no way of knowing. But this is what I see.