Neither Dulia nor Latria

My friend Doxo said this in yesterday's meta:

I signed, so don't take this the wrong way...

Will a petition matter to a person who claims to receive direct and personal revelation from God?

See: we're signing this petition to Pat Robertson to tell him that his self-appointed station as Prophet is a sort of public shame which brings ill repute to the church and the Gospel. Because he's a false prophet, yes?

So will it do good? I mean, Doxo's point is a pretty good one: Pat thinks he gets mental IM's from God, so why would the words of men change his mind? Wouldn't God tell him to lay off if God wanted him to lay off?

Here's my purpose, and you can take it for what it's worth.

[1] I do not think Pat Robertson is going to stop making prophecies. Not even if we kidnap him and hide him in a basement. That is, we will not kidnap him and we will not hide him in a basement, but even if we did he would still claim God was speaking to him. So the point of this petition is not to make Pat stop. He won't stop.

[2] However, I do think that there is a big question at stake: what kind of people are Christians? I think that when we let a guy like Robertson off the hook for falsely using God's name to make his opinions sound more important (because let's face it: many of his opinions are mediocre at best and ignorant at worst), we send a message to those who are not Christians which is two-fold:
{a} We are people who will let anything pass for the word of God.
{b} What we believe is exactly the same kind of trash that Pat Robertson is espousing.

[3] In that, I think the Gospel is at stake. The Gospel! Listen: if 1Cor 15:1-4 is the same kind of "word of God" that Robertson's apocalyptic affirmations represent, we believe the crumbiest, lousiest flim-flam ever spoken in language. We are dupes and idiots. So it is important, if we are declaring what the Gospel is, to make it clear what the Gospel is not.

The petition is posted and open to sign to be given to Pat Robertson, but Robertson's response is almost irrelevant -- in fact, in many ways, I hope he does nothing in response to the petition -- to demonstrate fully what kind of fraud he is.

What is at stake is not Robertson's position at CBN or as chancellor of his own university: what is at stake is whether or not God's people will allow themselves and the message of Jesus Christ to be represented by a puffed-up fraud who cannot tell the difference between his own passing thoughts and the word of God which is like a fire, and a hammer, and a two-edged sword.

This is why you ought to sign this petition: for the sake of the Gospel and the credibility of the Christian church. You don't have to be a baptist to be this disgusted -- you don't even have to be a cessationist. You just have to care about whether or not the lost should put the message of salvation from sin in the same filing cabinet with Pat's prognostication that a tsunami was going to hit New England in 2006.