Reformed/Orlando hosts Tony Campolo and Roger Nicole...

With some hesitation, I post this announcement from Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando concerning the invitation they have extended to Dr. Tony Campolo to give the Kistemaker Lectures on their campus this coming March. Our good readers may remember that we believe Mr. Campolo would best serve the Church of Jesus Christ by never uttering another word publicly, unless that word were to repent of the heterodoxies, heresies, and blasphemies issuing from his own and his wife's mouths and pens.

No, we are not speaking tongue-in-cheek. Although long ago Mr. Campolo should have been condemned to oblivion, sadly he continues to be a superstar on the evangelical lecture circuit. And now even Reformed Seminary has come as a supplicant and will provide him a forum to destroy the biblical faith of their students. Here is the announcement just issued through Reformed Seminary's E-newsletter:

DR. TONY CAMPOLO TO SPEAK FOR KISTEMAKER LECTURES

Dr. Tony Campolo, preacher, educator, and founder of Evangelical Association for the Promotion of Education, will be the keynote speaker for the annual Kistemaker Academic Lecture Series at the RTS Orlando campus in Oviedo on March 6 - 7, 2006. The Lecture Series entitled "Sociology Looks at the Church" will consist of four lectures as follows:

Lecture # 1: The Church as a Prophetic Voice
Lecture # 2: The Church in Transition from Sect to Ecclesia
Lecture # 3: The Church Faces Post-Modernity
Lecture # 4: The Church Faces its Tendencies toward Idolatry

Dr. Campolo's wife has publicly promoted same-sex marriages in the pages of Christianity Today. But instead of rebuking her for this attack upon women and men struggling with the temptation to same-sex intimacy, Dr. Campolo issued a statement...

that he disagrees with his wife. And then more recently, following Katrina, Dr. Campolo issued this statement denying the sovereignty of God:

Certainly, God would not create suffering for innocent people, who were--for the most part--Katrina's victims.

Perhaps we would do well to listen to the likes of Rabbi Harold Kushner, who contends that God is not really as powerful as we have claimed. Nowhere in the Hebrew Scriptures does it say that God is omnipotent. Kushner points out that omnipotence is a Greek philosophical concept, but it is not in his Bible...

While documenting the invitation Reformed/Orlando extended to Campolo, I also noted the celebration of Dr. Roger Nicole's ninetieth birthday by Reformed faculty and staff. Since taking four courses under Dr. Nicole back in the early eighties at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary (he was by far my favorite professor), I've been saddened to watch the decline of his commitment to the authority of God's Word, particularly in the area of the meaning and purpose of sexuality. Dr. Nicole explicitly denies that Scripture teaches women are not to serve as pastors and elders. He also denies that husbands are in authority over their wives in the marriage relationship.

So, consider just these two incidental matters coming across my desk today--that Tony Campolo will give the distinguished Kistemaker Lectures despite his denial of God's omnipotence and his wife's promotion of homosexual non-marrriage, and that Roger Nicole is an esteemed and feted faculty member despite his denial of the male eldership and the headship of husbands--and it becomes clear why the elders of my brother, David's, and my churches have joined together to found the Reformed Evangelical Pastors College.

Also, why in its first year the college has six students.