Steven Anderson's King James Onlyism and Outrageous Behavior

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Steven Anderson, a King James Only Baptist pastor in Tempe, AZ, has made a name for himself with his imbalanced behavior and speech. Some thoughts.

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Speaking of misbehavior, I was listening to the local drive time talk show host on our local talk station.
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There used to be two of them. The other one went off to FM land and nobody found it again. It just died.
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I think there's about four old people in Sun City that listen to that station now and that's about it. But the other one, the big one, the one that I was on, used to be on all the time.
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I mean, for a while there, I almost lived down there. But then they took my card out of the
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Rolodex, I think, and that was it. But anyway, the fellow who's the afternoon guy is former
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Congressman J .D. Hayworth. And I remember seeing J .D. Hayworth at North Phoenix Baptist Church.
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I'm not sure if that's where he still goes. Is that where he still goes? I think it is. Yeah, okay. So, and isn't that where McCain had his town hall last weekend?
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Weekend before last? Whenever it was. I noticed from the pictures, I said, that looks somewhat familiar.
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Been there a long, long time ago. Back from 1978 to 1989, actually, is the time frame that I was there.
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Anyway, and J .D. Hayworth was talking about a local pastor who's become a, well, let's just say that this fellow likes attention.
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And I've known about this fellow for a long time. The first time I heard about Stephen Anderson was because he is a
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King James only advocate. And I'm looking at the doctrinal statement of the faithful word
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Baptist Church over in Tempe. And you always know when the thing starts, the statement of faith starts with these words, you know what's coming later.
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We believe that the in bold, please notice it's in bold. We believe that the
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King James Bible is the word of God without error. That's the first statement on the doctrinal statement of the faithful word
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Baptist Church. They're King James only folks. And I don't know what it is about King James only is that it makes people just a little bit on the weird side.
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Well, actually sometimes way over on the weird side when you look at people like Gil Ripplinger and Peter Ruckman.
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You know, we can start going down a long road here of some really interesting folks. But they like to use bold and underline and italics and then bold italics and underline italics.
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And when they're really, really upset about something, bold italics underline. That's, I don't know.
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How is it that adopting the King James only position makes you do that?
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I've not really figured it out. But anyway, it's a pretty short doctrinal statement, but I did notice a little bit farther down the eye sort of catches these things.
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There really isn't, interestingly enough, there's no affirmation of the Trinity here.
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It does say we believe Jesus is God and that Jesus Christ is begotten by the Holy Ghost, the Virgin Mary, but there's nothing defining the doctrine of the
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Trinity here. I'm just going to read this. This is really interesting. Some of these things here. We believe in the eternal security of the believer.
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Once saved, all is saved. Got your ticket punched, going to heaven. We believe then, say, we'll spend eternity in torment and in literal hell.
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We believe that Jesus is God and that Jesus Christ is begotten by the Holy Ghost, but the Virgin Mary. We believe only in the local church and not in a universal church.
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What does that mean? There's no universal church? Or is there only one local church?
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I don't know. I haven't figured that one out. Then the next one, we reject the teaching of Calvinism.
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And then check this out and believe that God wants everyone to be saved. Now remember, this is the same fellow. Yes, I am talking about the fellow who has made national news by having preached the sermon a week ago,
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Sunday night, specifically stating that he hates
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Barack Obama and that he wants Barack Obama to die and that he wants
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Barack Obama. Now, he didn't say this in his sermon, but he was interviewed by one of the local
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TV stations. And I have that clip, and I'm going to play that clip for you here.
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We'll let you hear what kind of local news our local
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King James only got. This guy, by the way, he's the one who did the sermon on the text from Isaiah in the
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King James Version about relieving oneself against the wall, but he used the
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King James language. And I mean, that sermon went all over the Internet.
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I mean, I don't know how many copies of that one I was sent. And then sometime,
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I don't know, about six months or so ago, he refused to get out of his car at a stop along the
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California -Arizona border. And so the cops broke into his car and tased him. And so there's this video of him getting tased and all the rest of his stuff and all the lawsuits and all the rest of the stuff that he's doing.
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So he just loves attention, obviously. I mean, he's looking for it and probably eating it up, because a lot of these guys, a lot of these
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King James only guys figure, oh, this persecution means I must be doing God's will. You know, that's what the street preachers are into, too.
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But anyways, here's the local Channel 10 interview with Pastor Andrews.
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...and praise for his death. Listen to what he said when we talked to him today. I hope that God strikes
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Barack Obama with brain cancer so he can die like Ted Kennedy. You know, and I hope it happens today. More strong words from Pastor Steve Anderson about President Barack Obama.
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He continues to encourage his parishioners to pray for the president's death. But he says he doesn't condone killing.
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I will not take the law into my own hands. I will not take up any arms. It's a spiritual battle. It's a spiritual warfare.
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This morning, about 30 parishioners at the Faithful Word Baptist Church were met by a few protesters.
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Tempe police patrolled the area to make sure things didn't get out of hand. Many parishioners walked into the church carrying guns on their hips.
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One of them, Christopher Broughton, got national attention for bringing an AR -15 to a rally outside the
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Phoenix Convention Center, where the president was speaking. Would you be interested in clarifying that at all?
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I mean, do you think the sermon is what prompted you to bring the gun in? Hi there. He didn't want to talk about whether the pastor's sermon motivated him to bring a rifle to the rally.
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If anything, I was talking him down, not riling him up. Pastor Anderson says his hatred of Obama and former
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President Bush stems from his views on abortion and the Iraq war. Look up the word hate.
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Look up the word abhor. Look up the word loathe. And you'll see that there are a lot of people who God hates and who we should hate.
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But see, I didn't write that. That's in the Bible. The pastor says since he posted his sermon about the president on YouTube, he and his family have received death threats.
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If people want to wish death on me, I don't have a problem with that. But when people say I'm coming and killing you and your family within the next 36 hours, that's different than them hoping or wishing something in their mind.
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And we did talk to the White House today. They have no comment. Yeah, I'm sure.
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Yeah, and I have to admit, Mr. Hayworth did point something out that I haven't had time recently to be a big news person.
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It only happened that I was running an errand yesterday. So I had the radio on the car. So that's why I heard this stuff. I had heard some of the stuff.
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The guy that showed up at the rally with the RFID tag is from this guy's church.
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That was the first thing. But then it was pointed out that the media zoomed in on stuff.
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So you couldn't tell he's African -American. So a bunch of the Eastern press outlets were doing racism stuff and everything else.
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But he's an African -American and they didn't even mention that. Nothing was even talked about that.
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So anyway, there's there's some of excuse me, Steven Anderson's stuff.
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And people should not be surprised by this. King James only us are this way.
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Haven't you ever listened to Peter Ruckman? Haven't you ever listened to Gail Ripplinger? Haven't you listened to? I mean, when when
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I put videos up of Sam Gipp calling me a liar and all this stuff, you know, I sort of chuckle about because I'm used to this.
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This is this is the mindset of the independent fundamentalist Baptist King James only.
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It's not the independent fundamentalist Baptist. I feel sorry for independent fundamentalist Baptists who are not
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King James only us, who do not have this worldview that allows you to just, you know, it's it's us against everybody else.
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There's, you know, there's nobody outside of our tiny, tiny little group that's even saved.
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You know, that kind of a mindset allows you to to say this kind of stuff. Now, the problem is that when when we try to say serious things, for example, if I were to say
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I believe very firmly that people who promote godlessness in a position of authority in a society will answer to God for that, there will be a day when they stand before God and not to be able to say,
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I was just politics, man, you know, I mean, you know, that's the the issues of our society are moral issues.
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And God is concerned about all those things. And I know and I listened to the first I started listening to even before the big the big news broke out,
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I'd start listening to the beginning of the sermon. I didn't get to the part about Barack Obama near that or it wasn't the beginning of the sermon.
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I don't know which one it was, but, you know, he went to passages in the Psalter, Psalm five, five, things like that, where God talks about hating the wicked.
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And there's everything right to be said about people who think that the
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Bible preaches this idea that Jesus or that God is this, you know, this grandfather in the sky.
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There's no wrath of God, you know, but when you when you are imbalanced, as any King James only is by definition in that sense, when you're imbalanced like this and you use this kind of rhetoric and you have all these other problems in your theology as well, the result is, well, what we're seeing and anybody who would say that that the policies that are promoting abortion and things like that and the degradation of our society and all the rest of that stuff, you're all we're all being whitewashed in the same way by this kind of silliness, because there are these people just don't think through what they're saying and, in fact, continue with their various perspectives, no matter what the facts are.
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That certainly has been our experience with King James only advocates all along. So that part did not get mentioned as I was listening to all the calls calling in.
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No one even picked up on that. They didn't even make the connection. There was a independent Fundamentalist Baptist that called in.
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Hey, you know, we're different than that. You know, the fact is we are commanded to pray for our leaders.
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That does not mean that we pray for their success. That does not mean that we pray that their godless, anti -biblical, anti -godly programs and policies succeed.
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But we are to pray for them, first and foremost, that they would be converted. And yes, we do pray that God would protect innocent children from from death as a result of these of these policies and and would protect the nation from the kind of debauchery that is a part of the worldview of so many people who are in power today.
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But to do what these people are doing and to lose their balance completely and to not recognize that God's wrath is over every sinner who is not in Jesus Christ, every single one, including the politicians that you like the best, but who refuse to bow the knee to Christ.
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God's wrath is just as much abiding over them. And unfortunately, it's that lack of balance that ends up causing a lot of people a lot of problems.
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So he is a local and I have a feeling we're going to be hearing more in the future because I know his trial stuff could be coming up pretty soon.
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And it's going to be it's going to be interesting.