Albania-based CEO and Founder of KLN TV and Power City International, Dr Abel Damina, teaches heresies ( A belief or an opinion generally different from what is accepted to be confirmed). “Don’t listen to him”, says the conservative Pentecostal. Like the Catholic Schisms pre and post-reformation in Europe inspired by Martin Luther’s ninety-five theses on religious practice, Abel Damina encourages a Pentecostal split with his many views on previously settled dogma.
He is intellectual and prepared to disrupt the Pentecostal tradition. He dares into unwanted, unfamiliar, uncomfortable topics. He revels in the controversy.
The beauty of his story is that he was a vital part of the old tradition that claims to have rediscovered the true gospel of Christ and is on a mission to shake the tables of popular Pentecostal theology. Armed with the ability to do rigorous exegesis, he sounds convincing and woke in the gospel. Like Martin Luther, he enjoys a love-hate relationship with Christendom.
Highlights from his many ‘troubling’ teachings are :
God has not killed anyone, not even in the old testament. He is a life-giving spirit, not a murderer.
Adam isn’t the first man. There were nations of men, contemporaries of Adam. The biblical Adam is an archetype; the stories should not be taken literally.
The reports of the old testament are a physical representation of a spiritual reality in the background unfolding in the revelation of Christ Jesus. The writers needed to be made aware of what they were writing about. The word of God is not the old testament, therefore. It is the word of Christ as revealed in the new testament.
Salvation is neither earned nor limited. It is a gift and final. The finished works of Christ do not allow for deliverance services, tithes and offerings, losing salvation and the many petitions to God for penance. Christians should fully acknowledge and live in that reality of unconditional love and salvation from God.
Just recently, he stated that the fire from heaven in the Elijah Challenge must have been brought down by Satan, not the God of Jesus, who does not do such ‘abhorrent’ acts like killing the prophets of Baal afterwards.
The theological issues brought to the fore by Damina’s emergence cannot be dismissed as the musings of a half-educated Christian. They result from inherent problems of the Jewish religious practices and the noticeable progression in the God-man relationship as we move from the Old to the new testament.
The problem is the progression in the revelation of God throughout the scriptures. God appeared to be ‘maturing’ after the nature of men as knowledge progressed.
The flood, Fall of Jericho, Fire of Sodom and Gomorrah, Phinehas killing of 25,000 Jews for marrying Canaanite women, the witch hunt (implied by the statement: Suffer not a witch to live), Elijah’s fire from heaven and the subsequent mass slaughter of the prophets of Baal, the calling of a bear to maul children who mocked him, the splitting of the ground to swallow critics of Moses, the mass slaughter of men, women and children in Israel’s battle with the Amalekites, Institution of Levirate marriage, Curse verses, and Polygamy. The Condoning of slavery, divorce and religiously inspired killings. All these must be accepted as proof of a progressive God or reinterpreted in the light of Christ’s message.
To choose to believe neither is problematic for the objectively curious Christian. The God of Israel appeared to be a vengeful, vindictive, benevolent dictator, possessive, volatile temperament, excessively loving, needing exclusive devotion and excessive praise, demonstrably competitive, divisive and ritualistic.
The God of Jesus was loving, patient, generous and kind. He was global in orientation and accommodative. He prefers moral sincerity over ritualism. He isn’t vengeful but merciful and forgiving. He has nothing to prove. He is comfortable in his skin as God of the universe. He doesn’t need praise or worship. He only desires a loving relationship founded on mutual understanding and consent.
He loves unconditionally and is eternally committed to the salvation of the human race. The devil, not man, is his arch-enemy. He is trying to deal with the problem of man from an ignorant perspective. Hence, Jesus is sent to the world to reveal who he is against the manifest misinformation canonized as tradition. It doesn’t appear to be the same God.
That said, it is common to see two conflicting natures resident inside one person. We call it bipolar disorder, or perhaps it is not a disorder if you are God, in fact, and the title. Since God, by definition, defers to no moral authority or standard, neither can he be described as modest or learning anything; he cannot be right or wrong. These concepts should derive their definitions from him. Our opinions are thus irrelevant to his decisions. He is a God, for God’s sake!
Like Human Kings and Laws… He can do no wrong.
