Word: swaggart
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...Tammy Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart are nationally known Christian leaders who have fallen from their pedestals. I know you have no desire to judge them, but what accounts for their fall...
Especially ironic is the book's indictment of another celebrity, Jimmy Swaggart, the Louisiana preacher who has specialized in charging rival preachers with heresy. The book faults Swaggart -- who continues to broadcast despite his public disgrace after frequenting a New Orleans prostitute -- for confusing Christianity's classical definition of the Trinity. Swaggart is slammed for asserting that the unity of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit is limited "strictly to their being one in purpose, design and desire" and neglecting the traditional Christian teaching that the Trinity is also of one "substance." Sounding more like a Mormon than a Bible...
Replying to those criticisms, Swaggart says that when God made man "in our image," he was referring to body as well as spirit. However, he explains, God's body is "immaterial." As for the Trinity, he insists that his thinking is "identical with the church fathers'," but adds with a touch of humility, "I'm not a Bible scholar. I'm just a Bible student...
Leland said he started the book shortly after the Jimmy and Tammy Fay Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart scandals broke, at a time when he "had become fascinated with Christian television." Leland's fictional televangelists, Ted and Becky Standish, though meant to be reminiscent of the Bakkers, were not meant to be representative of them, he said...
Lawyers for Swaggart's ministries, supported by religious groups ranging from Protestants to Hare Krishnas, argued that the tax conflicted with First Amendment rights. But the Justices saw it as a commercial issue, not a spiritual one. Wrote Justice Sandra Day O'Connor: "The tax is not a tax on the right to disseminate religious information, ideas, or beliefs per se; rather it is a tax on the privilege of making retail sales of tangible personal property...