DTS update: Chapel speaker Frank Glover intros students to Kimpa Vita, lionizing her without noting syncretist controversies (🧵 incoming).
Off the bat, he says of her: "Before Luther or before Calvin, there was a revolution." Both men died 100+ years before she was born.
It's hard to find trustworthy sources on this online, but from the Met Museum we see that Kimpa Vita, aka Dona Beatriz, was trained as a medium for spirits. Glover notes in his speech she claimed direct revelation from God. metmuseum.org/toah/hd/pwmn_4…
You can also see in this screenshot that Kimpa Vita believed, based on her direct revelation, that Jesus was born and baptized in the Kongo.
Glover says she had a vision from "God" while seemingly dead, but that's not even half the story. Her vision was from St Anthony, who she considered the "second God." jstor.org/stable/1581595
(The quote is substantiated from the above book review of "The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian Movement, 1684-1706" by John K. Thornton. The article is paywalled by Jstor but the text appears in the Google preview)
According to Thornton, Kimpa Vita did not just have one heavenly vision from one near-death experience. "[S]he died every Friday and spent each weekend in Heaven conferring with the Heavenly Father about the affairs of Kongo." executedtoday.com/2009/07/02/170…
A portion of the quote that Glover emphasized from Kimpa Vita is true, that the Kongo people (who believe in Jesus) are children of God and that white people are not superior in God's eyes. But we need not over-correct and celebrate pagan syncretism to make that point.
I'm not seeing anything to substantiate the "black angels" claim. In fact, one missionary wrote that she told him "in heaven, there is no color." She gave the title of "angels" to local men who were emissaries for her movement. nypl.org/blog/2021/10/0…
This same missionary also contradicts the claim, made by Glover, that Vita Kimpa's infant son was executed with her. headstuff.org/culture/histor…
Lutheran Rev. says 1st use of the law = yes to vax mandates
"Government...[is] meant to act like a good parent would over the people of the nation. That includes the application of medicine. I would say, since we do believe that illness + death are fundamentally not good things"
Including some more setup before we get to his main argument, since it is sincere and not just a hot take.
"Doctors function kind of as civil servants. They do first use of the law stuff"
<the edits and aspect ratio change are inherent to the original vid>
"I think we should understand that the government actually has a theological right to do this...I don't think it's authoritarian to make people get a vaccine any more than it's authoritarian to make a person drive on the right side of the road."
"The version of Christianity that I received had this very strong, you're not supposed to commune with the dead, basically...I really asked the question, why would it be so important for these oppressors to tell us not to connect with our ancestors?" Andre Henry
<Christianity does not prohibit you from "connecting" to your ancestors in the sense of knowing who they are and what they did in their lives. It does prohibit occult rituals to directly communicate with the dead. This discussion does not clearly make the distinction.>
Oh, we're not done.
Jo Luehmann says in Christianity, "pleasure is for whiteness...pleasure is divine...but for us [POC], work is divine...It's grooming theology."
"The COVID vaccine...may have a distant origin story in abortion, but that past has been reworked + redeemed into something that saves life. We can point to the vaccine and say: Jesus' redemption is kind of like that."
Youth pastors, pack it up. There's no beating this one.
"Each of us has had our story reworked by Jesus into new life. That's what it ultimately means to be pro-life. To be pro-life is to be pro-redemption. And to be pro-redemption, in my view, means being pro-vaccine."
Curtis Chang, "Redeeming Babel"
This, apparently, is seen as convincing rhetoric by authors such as John Piper and David French who have shared it.