Dr. William De Arteaga, a semi-retired Anglican priest, continues to be passionately tethered to the ministries of intercessory prayer and healing, having approximately 48 years of experience. He was called by God specifically, to the healing ministry, with his wife in the 1970s. He is a respected historian and author, holding two degrees in History and a doctorate in Sacramental and Revival Studies. For 20 years, Dr. De Arteaga served as the Anglican Chaplain for the Order of St. Luke’s (OSL-Georgia) and was ordained as an Anglican priest in 2000. He has pastored two Hispanic churches in Georgia. Raised a devout Catholic in the 1950s, as a child who experienced the loss of his brother, he recalls that no intercession for healing was made for his brother, rather there was the traditional lighting of a candle with the prayer that God would grace his brother to skip purgatory and arrive directly in Heaven.

William De Arteaga is a regular contributor to PneumaReview.com.

He argues effectively for the PPS, as a vital tool for reaching unbelievers. There are in-depth accounts from Dr. De Arteaga’s vast, documented experiences as well as those of colleagues. From the start, his biblical hermeneutic and application is straightforward and woven throughout the book. He shares non-biblical sources that witness to the healing prayer ministry from both the early and contemporary Church, in America and abroad. Dr. De Arteaga references an array of sources including several of his own published works. The spectrum includes a PBS TV series, and current Christianity Today and other articles. Photographs dot the chapters, drawing the reader a bit closer to the historical PPS encounters.

Dr. De Arteaga does not flinch from presenting and respectfully decrying the historical arguments from cessationists that oppose the validity of the modern healing ministry. The reader is provided details on these sources for further inquiry.

Dr. De Arteaga skillfully compiles the essentials from his huge collection of material into this short, 73-page read so as to present the meat for launching a PPS initiative. The content flows seamlessly even when redirecting the reader back in time for historical detail. It is essentially an instruction manual, providing additional educational and training resources. He also touches on the practical matter of supplies. Yet, even the novice reader who is merely curious to understand more about the PPS concept, will not be distracted by these mechanics.

Reviewed by Catherine Miller

Publisher’s page: http://www.emethpress.com/product/9781609471415/

Charismatic historian and prayer warrior, William De Arteaga, invites readers to visit his blog and be challenged to rethink how casting out demons can have a powerful impact on your community.

This posting, “Exorcism in Public Places,” is doubly controversial. Some Christians still doubt the reality of the demonic world and the possibility of Christians being infected by demons. Many (especially the clergy) would be horrified at the thought of doing a deliverance out in public. Yet the Biblical evidence shows that the demonic should be confronted and cast out whenever it is encountered. Check it out and add your comments.

Link: http://anglicalpentecostal.blogspot.com/2017/08/exorcism-in-public-places.html

Jonathan Malesic, Secret Faith in the Public Square: An Argument for the Concealment of Christian Identity (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2009), 248 pages, ISBN 9781587432262.

From outward appearance the author, an assistant professor of Theology at King’s College in Pennsylvania, argues for non-public involvement in public affairs with nothing said of the participants’ Christian faith. His expressed concern is that Christian identity be protected from being exploited as a means for political gain. Malesic, in his introduction, writes that “too often in American public life, the light is used to illumine the Christians themselves, bringing glory to the wrong person”(p. 19). The light, in this sentence, refers to “Christian identity.” By concealing one’s own identity, it is easier to bring the identity of Jesus to bear in public life.

In developing his theme, Malesic first explains that what he does not want to do is to create a privacy of Christian life in opposition to anything public. “Most often ‘public’ is set in opposition to ‘privacy’” (p. 21). It is a false dichotomy. His proposal is to define what individual Christians should do “when non-Christian publics, especially the overarching and competitive public spheres of government, work, and the market pose danger to the integrity of the Christian public” (p.23).

The author’s basic premise is based upon Matthew 6:1,6 where Jesus enjoins those listening to him “Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them …” The full quotation is printed on the page facing the table of contents. Malesic sets forth his argument in two parts. The first part sets forth both the biblical and the theological rationale for secrecy of identity in the public square. He not only cites Jesus but also the liturgical secrecy set forth by Cyril of Jerusalem in the late fourth century when the life of the church and the life of the empire appeared to be fusing. After discussing the position of Cyril, he moves on to discuss in two succeeding chapters later the contribution of Soren Kierkegaard’s Works of Love which appeared in the mid-nineteenth century. In chapters five and six Malesic devotes attention to Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his famous work, The Cost of Discipleship. Melasic’s explanation of Bonhoeffer’s view of discipleship is that “Christians confess their Christian identity in secret and conceal that identity in public” (p. 123). The distinctively Christian form of public life is that of “being for others.” While Christians’ works of love should bear visible fruits, the Christian identity of the one who lives for others need not be intentionally made known.

Part two of Secret Faith in the Public Square which comprises chapters seven through nine takes the arguments from Scripture, Cyril, Kierkegaard and Bonhoeffer and takes the idea of concealment of Christian identity as it may work out in contemporary America. Malesic does not rely exclusively on the three men just mentioned. He also relies upon models set forth by Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J. The church grew and had influence upon its pagan environment by offering an alternative more attractive: “Seeing the mutual love and support of the Christians and the high moral standards they observed, the pagans sought entrance into the Church.”[1] In this recognition, Malesic’s position is not one of withdrawal from the public square but a quiet lifestyle as opposed to a vocal or visible involvement. He also differs from Stanley Hauerwas, who is close to Malesic in sentiment but who challenges Christians “to stand as a visible social and political alternative to the violent ways of the world, bearing witness to the gospel in works of love and mercy” (p. 28). The key word is “visible” as opposed to “secret.” Yet in reading Secret Faith in the Public Square, it appears that what Malesic is advocating is not a secretive Christianity but a Christianity working “behind the scenes” rather “out front” advertising itself.

J. Budziszewski is professor of philosophy and government at the University of Texas at Austin, and has written a number of well-recognized books on political theory, politics and virtue ethics, tolerance and liberalism, and natural law ethics, among other topics. For the project which formed the backbone to this book, a conference was sponsored by the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Prouts Neck, Maine, in September of 2003, where initial drafts of the essays published here were presented. In this review, I will summarize the book’s structure and arguments, briefly explicate on the central dilemma plaguing the formation of an evangelical political theology, and comment on why these matters are of relevance also to Pentecostal and charismatic Christians today.

After a short introduction by Michael Cromartie of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, the two lead essays by Budziszewski, which constitute more than half of the book, lay out the basic issues and set the tone of discussion for the volume. In the first essay, Budziszewski suggests that one major reason why evangelicals have not yet developed a robust political theology is that their commitments to grounding any theological agenda biblically do not work well with the fact that there are insufficient biblical guidelines for such a task. In fact, political theology needs a more hearty acknowledgment of the role of general revelation precisely in order to provide a theological justification for evangelical engagement in matters related to the wider public square, as well as theological guidelines for how evangelicals might concretely proceed. But, as Budziszewski then attempts to show in his second longer essay on the four formative thinkers announced in the book’s subtitle–Carl F. H. Henry, Abraham Kuyper, Francis Schaeffer, and John Howard Yoder — evangelical hesitation about embracing this particular theological idea (of general revelation) further complicates their already difficult task. In Budziszewski’s analysis, the political theology each of these evangelical thinkers suffers because they falters at key points in their projects with regard to the doctrine of general revelation: Henry is hampered by a nagging premillennial and dispensationalist defeatism in addition to an ambivalence about the (perhaps all to Catholic) idea of general revelation; Kuyper by an underdevelopment of his ideas of common grace, sphere sovereignty (of the state, society, and the church), and principled pluralism; Schaeffer by an unbalanced emphasis on apologetics which in turn neglected the pragmatic dimensions of engaging the public square, as well as by his acceptance of the presuppositionalist school of apologetics along with its suspicion regarding general revelation; and Yoder by a sectarian and countercultural orientation which is not predisposed to exploring the continuities between Christians and non-Christians, even for the purposes of public engagement. As a result, these four evangelical theologians, as formative as any for evangelical thought and action, have been unable to bequeath to their descendents the much needed resources to more fully develop the kinds of orienting ideas, practical programs, and cultural apologetics needed for a more vibrant evangelical political theology today.

The remainder of the volume includes four essays by scholars responding to Budziszewski’s readings of these evangelical theologians and a concluding after word reflecting on the conference discussion as a whole. David Weeks, a Henry scholar and political science professor at Azusa Pacific University, attempts to provide a thicker description of Henry as an evangelical theologian as well as fill out, in dialogue with Henry, some of the details which Budziszewski has identified with regard to the formulation of an evangelical political theology. Similarly, John Bolt, a Kuyper scholar and systematician at Calvin Theological Seminary, basically agrees with Budziszewski’s remarks about Kuyper, but provides a further elaboration of how the Kuyperian theological vision can be reappropriated in the service of evangelical thought and political action. Not surprisingly, William Edgar, a presuppositionalist philosopher and theologian at Westminster Theological Seminary, responds to Budziszewski both by locating the larger socio-cultural, political, and theological framework of Schaeffer’s apologetics and by explicating how the logic of presuppositionalism leads to a different set of concerns that may be complementary rather than opposed to the logic derived from a commitment to the doctrine of general revelation. Finally, Ashley Woodiwiss, a political scientist at Wheaton College, responds that even if one cannot go all the way with Yoder, yet one must respect how his Anabaptist and Mennonite perspective informed his scholarship and produced vision of the gospel focuses on the church as an alternative politics, an distinctive praxis, and a subversive mode of cultural engagement, all of which combine to perhaps even undermine the received framework of questions concerning evangelicalism as well as political theology. The book concludes with Jean Bethke Elshtain’s (Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago “A Friendly Outsider’s Reflections” (her title) on the entire exchange.

Editor’s note: Much has happened since Professor King wrote this article in March 2000. The principles he outlines, however, are as applicable today as when it was first published on the Pneuma Foundation website.

Public leadership has greatly diminished in societal value, primarily because it is based less upon moral and religious foundations of civil society, and more upon political expediency of policy issues. Institutionalized civil leadership has suffered because many public leaders, even within the highest elected offices of the nation, have all but abdicated social responsibility and moral rectitude in favor of political advantage and personal gain. When this occurs—and it has happened many times over the course of human events—political crises inevitably result, and the consequences generally rock the foundations of civil society. Today more than ever moral leadership is captured within the tantalizing grip of political seduction.

Political crises are not new. Starting at the infancy of the United States there was the XYZ Affair of 1798 (which eventually led to an undeclared naval war between France and the United States), Ben Franklin’s bastard children, whom he sired while serving as ambassador to France, the alleged sex scandal involving Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, one of Jefferson’s slaves, who gave birth to a son, Easton Hemings, the Whiskey Ring, a national internal revenue scandal revealed in 1875, the infamous Teapot Dome scandal of the 1920s, the graft and corruption of New York’s Tammany Hall, John F. Kennedy’s many sexual affairs, Richard Nixon’s Watergate, Reagan’s Irangate, and the various and diverse escapades of Bill Clinton—all should serve notice that political life is full of the sordid and dastardly deeds of historical politicos. Indeed, it seems a perpetual truism that persons of political power and influence have always engaged in actions speaking less of moral character and more of political expediency, even leaders as diverse as Louis XIV, Henry VIII, or Julius Caesar. Bearing all this in mind, let us examine what the Bible has to say about political scandal or crisis, public or private revelation of the scandal, the eventual political fallout, and the hard lessons to be learned.

One hallmark of the Bible is that it paints its heroes with brutally honest strokes. Nothing is held back. In a style that is most often painfully abrupt, it neither minces words nor waxes eloquent about its protagonists, but presents them with all the faults and foibles inherent in the human condition. Take, for example, the Biblical character David, the archetypal king and Messianic prototype. Scripture makes no apology for depicting not only his triumphs but also his dark side. Yet the Bible goes on to call him “a man after God’s own heart.” To be sure, the Biblical David was a fundamentally flawed, occasionally pathetic individual who vacillated between lust, megalomania, mental instability, and eventually personal misery. David is a case study in the socio-religious and political consequences of serious weakness of character and faulty judgment, as well as an example of a truly repentant leader, who suffered through the severe personal, social, and political problems resulting from his commission of sin.

King David—as do most, if not all, political leaders—exhibited a roller coaster range of emotions, particularly during difficult times of political decision making including, sharp and zealous anger at the Philistines for laughing at the sacredness of God in the form of the Ark, and at his fellow Israelites for wallowing in fear at the sight of Goliath; humility while being anointed by Samuel as king; and lust in his adulterous relationship with Bathsheba. He later shed tears over the death of Absalom, a deceitful son who nearly succeeded in seizing the kingship from him, but did nothing to avenge the rape of his daughter, Tamar. Too often, historians portray a one-sided David: either exceptionally spiritual, God-fearing, and humble—which he was—or a power hungry Machiavellian antagonist who used any measure, draconian or otherwise, to achieve his military and political successes, and was a man given to deceit, lying, and fulfilling his sexual passion—which he did as well. Neither extreme is entirely accurate, but both describe the human aspects of David, and of many other modern public officials. And both aid us in extracting from David’s character those traits that best depict the genuine composite of his person.

This essay will illustrate a leader who was both a man and a king; the honor and prestige of the latter was susceptible to the avarices of the former, including the events leading up to and going beyond the adulterous affair with Bathsheba (henceforth known as ‘Bathshebagate’). Bathshebagate represents a direct and telling crisis both in his “personal” as well as his “public” life, in which the inability or unwillingness to control his actions in the “personal” realm ultimately unleashed a torrent of problems upon David in the “public” environment. The same story—that of the pompous elected “king” abusing and misusing his political authority—has been retold many times, in various and sometimes differing degrees, such as with Richard Nixon and Watergate and more recently with Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. Only because of David’s humility, ultimately his willingness to listen to his trusted confidant and courageous prophet, Nathan, and his personal love for God did David survive the onslaught of negative repercussions, including decreased public support and internal political conspiracies by trusted advisors to strip him of his kingship. How have our modern leaders fared? Do the lessons of King David and Bathshebagate tell us anything about the political seduction of power, and how to avoid its tentacles of deception? If so, have we heeded the warning? If we have not, are we prepared for the consequences?

David’s early successes as king may first be attributable to the contention that he served not only as king or ruler, but also as judge. According to Jewish standards, a judge is one who dispenses justice based upon absolute principles of right and wrong, principles indelibly marked in the heart of man and codified in the Mosaic law. In I Samuel 8, the people demanded a king, one who rightly performs the principal function of the king: to judge righteously. With Saul, the people endured a ruthless despot, one who consistently and malevolently used the army for military retribution. David, however, was both a “victorious redeemer,” aided by God, and a dispenser of justice and righteousness to all the people, including such actions as the restoration of Mephibosheth, Saul’s crippled grandson, to the king’s house, and the use of capital punishment against two siblings for wrongly taking the life of Ish-Bosheth. So, David’s propensity for distributing justice included performing ethical and moral-based deeds for particular individuals, to meting out international justice through his military successes, and generally dispensing judicial, social, and even economic righteousness.