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| Burning Buddhas, Books, and Art: Meet The New Apostolic Reformation

Texas governor Rick Perry's August 6th, 2011 The Response prayer event, the de-facto launch of his presidential bid, was dominated by the apostles of C. Peter Wagner's New Apostolic Reformation. This article documents a little-noticed aspect of this little-noticed movement.

Top NAR leaders, including C. Peter Wagner, Cindy Jacobs, Ed Silvoso and, Chuck Pierce, have repeatedly emphasized in their writings the need for believers to destroy or neutralize, by burning, smashing, or flushing down toilets, objects deemed to be unholy, including profane books and "idolatrous" religious texts (such as Books of Mormon), religious relics (such as statues of Catholic saints, the Buddha, or Hindu gods), and native art (such as African masks, Hopi Indian Kachina dolls, and totem poles.)

According to New Apostolic Reformation doctrine, objects to be destroyed include those associated with Mormonism, Islam, Jehovah's Witnesses, Hinduism, eastern religions, Christian Science, native religions, and Baha'i.

NAR theologians, including C. Peter Wagner, sometimes cite, as a Biblical justification for the destruction of artifacts, an incident described in the New Testament's Book of Acts in which the magicians of Ephesus, under the influence of Apostle Paul, gathered together and burned their books of magic (thus weakening, according to Wagner, the hold of the goddess Diana over the city of Ephesus.) But Wagner also provides a more contemporary model.

In books from 1994 up into 2008, C. Peter Wagner has repeatedly cited, as a model for societal "transformation", the efforts of the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola in late-15th Century Florence, Italy.

Savonarola is credited with instigating the mass-burning in Florence of books and cultural objects deemed to incite sin (including by some reports several paintings by the Renaissance master Botticelli), in an event that has become known to historians as the "Bonfire of the Vanities."

On page 96 of his book Changing Church: How God Is Leading His Church Into The Future (2004, Regal/Gospel Light), bemoaning the lack of significant city `transformation' in the U.S., Wagner notes that, while evangelists have invested "huge amounts of time" and "large sums of money", "Even after 10 years, we cannot point to a single city in the United States that has undergone a sociologically verifiable transformation!"

A lot more at the link.