“And they shall make you eat grass like oxen” (Daniel 4:24): Reflections on Recent Practices in some New Charismatic Churches
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The narrative of Daniel and Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 4 is metaphorically applied to impress the understanding of dangerous practices recently observed in some New Charismatic Churches in South Africa. “And they shall make you eat grass like oxen” is a premise used to show the danger of these practices, not only to theological fundamentals, but also to human health and dignity. It is pointed out that the practices of people eating grass, snakes and rats, and drinking petrol, together with some other manifestations, all evolved out of the phenomenon known as The Toronto Blessing. This was a term created by the press in Britain, and describes the Christian revival and associated phenomena that began in January 1994 at the Toronto Airport Vineyard church (TAV), which was renamed in 1995 as the Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship (TACF) and then later in 2010, renamed to Catch the Fire Toronto. The impact of this phenomenon in South Africa, especially to the stabilising Classical Pentecostalism is highlighted. The article discusses celebrity cult as is compared and contrasted in characters of Daniel and Nebuchadnezzar. The rationale behind these practices is the centre of this discussion. This includes anti-institutionalism, antiintellectualism, antinomianism, and anti-sacramentalism. The government intervention through its CRL Commission is justified as a way of protecting its citizens from ensuing harmful effects of these practices.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".