Chuck Darwin on Nostr: Wagner met a woman named Cindy Jacobs, who understood herself to be a prophet, and ...
Wagner met a woman named Cindy Jacobs,
who understood herself to be a prophet,
and believed that the “principalities” and “powers”
mentioned in the Book of Ephesians
were actually “territorial spirits”
that could be defeated through
“spiritual warfare.”
She and others formed prayer networks targeting the “10/40 window”
—a geographic rectangle between the latitudes of 10 and 40 degrees north
that included North Africa, the Middle East, and other parts of Asia
that were predominantly Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu.
Wagner also became captivated by a concept called #dominionism,
a major conceptual shift that had been emerging in conservative theological circles.
At the time, the prevailing view was that God’s mandate for Christians was simple evangelism,
person by person;
the Kingdom would come later,
after the return of Jesus Christ,
and meanwhile,
the business of politics was,
as the Bible verse goes,
rendered unto Caesar.
The new way of thinking was that God was calling his people to establish the Kingdom now.
To put it another way, Christians had marching orders
—a mandate for aggressive social and institutional transformation.
The idea had deep roots in a movement called "Christian Reconstructionism",
whose serious thinkers
—most prominently a Calvinist theologian named
R. J. Rushdoony
—were spending their lives working out the details of what a government grounded in biblical laws would look like,
a model for a Christian theocracy.
By 1996, Wagner and a group of like-minded colleagues were rolling these ideas into what they were calling the "New Apostolic Reformation",
a term meant to evoke their conviction that
a fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit was moving around the globe,
endowing believers with supernatural power and the authority to battle demonic forces
and establish God’s Kingdom on Earth.
The NAR vision was not technically conservative but radical:
Constructing the Kingdom meant destroying the secular state with equal rights for all,
and replacing it with a system in which Christianity is supreme.
As a practical matter, the movement put the full force of God on the side of free-market capitalism.
In that sense, Wagner and his colleagues had found the answer to liberation theology that they’d been seeking for decades.
who understood herself to be a prophet,
and believed that the “principalities” and “powers”
mentioned in the Book of Ephesians
were actually “territorial spirits”
that could be defeated through
“spiritual warfare.”
She and others formed prayer networks targeting the “10/40 window”
—a geographic rectangle between the latitudes of 10 and 40 degrees north
that included North Africa, the Middle East, and other parts of Asia
that were predominantly Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu.
Wagner also became captivated by a concept called #dominionism,
a major conceptual shift that had been emerging in conservative theological circles.
At the time, the prevailing view was that God’s mandate for Christians was simple evangelism,
person by person;
the Kingdom would come later,
after the return of Jesus Christ,
and meanwhile,
the business of politics was,
as the Bible verse goes,
rendered unto Caesar.
The new way of thinking was that God was calling his people to establish the Kingdom now.
To put it another way, Christians had marching orders
—a mandate for aggressive social and institutional transformation.
The idea had deep roots in a movement called "Christian Reconstructionism",
whose serious thinkers
—most prominently a Calvinist theologian named
R. J. Rushdoony
—were spending their lives working out the details of what a government grounded in biblical laws would look like,
a model for a Christian theocracy.
By 1996, Wagner and a group of like-minded colleagues were rolling these ideas into what they were calling the "New Apostolic Reformation",
a term meant to evoke their conviction that
a fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit was moving around the globe,
endowing believers with supernatural power and the authority to battle demonic forces
and establish God’s Kingdom on Earth.
The NAR vision was not technically conservative but radical:
Constructing the Kingdom meant destroying the secular state with equal rights for all,
and replacing it with a system in which Christianity is supreme.
As a practical matter, the movement put the full force of God on the side of free-market capitalism.
In that sense, Wagner and his colleagues had found the answer to liberation theology that they’d been seeking for decades.