Missions and the Gospel

Transcript

GRM 1230
11/24/2019
Missions and the Gospel
Selected Verses
Gil Rugh

I’ll just talk about some of the things and then we’ll open it up for questions. We’ll bump into Romans 7 the next time around. What we’re going to talk about is related to what we’re doing in the gospel, talking about the gospel in Romans. I’ve observed over the years in my own life and in the life of the church that often we study things and we study them repeatedly, but they don’t really get a hold of us until an issue comes, and then all of a sudden that issue makes us think. Well, how are we to handle this, what is to be done? The good things about that kind of situation is it drives us to the scripture. Now I have to remember what we studied, remember what the word said, how does it apply here, how do we grow.

The board of elders was talking about some of the matters related to the gospel in our meeting this past week. I think there is a dramatic change taking place in the evangelical world regarding what the gospel is. Now we go through Romans and we think it’s simple, and it is, the clarity. Paul walks us through step-by-step unfolding the reality of sin, its consequences, how God provided righteousness in Christ, and it can only be applied to us by faith. Then he moves to the doctrine of sanctification, how that work of Christ is also the enablement for us to live a godly life, so it is complete, but somehow in the world and in the evangelical world there is a mass movement away from the sufficiency of the scripture and what the gospel really is. Once we become confused on what the gospel really is where do we go, and where will the world hear the gospel? I mean, the church is to be the pillar and support of the truth. If it’s proclaiming now a false gospel, which I think is going on, we begin, so to speak, roll over.

Our board read a chapter out of a book, the book is on holistic mission. It’s by a man named E. S. Williams, you may not be familiar with him, we have I think maybe three books by him down in Sound Words. He’s from London so it’s a little different background, but he deals with issues in the states as well. “Holistic Mission” basically is saying that carrying the gospel to the lost in other places, in other parts of the world, is not enough. You really are not fulfilling God’s purpose and plan, you are not honoring the gospel if all you’re doing is going and saving souls. What you must do is fix the world and then we’re into social justice, racial justice, all these kinds of things. And I had given this to the board because I thought it’s a good example.

So one chapter that we read together as the board was on Ralph Winter, Ralph Winter, just like our word winter for the season, he was born in 1924 he died in 2009. Let me just read you, he’s recognized as a giant in the field of Christian missions. One seminary professor said, “Dr. Ralph Winter was perhaps the most influential person in missions of the last 50 years and has influenced missions globally more than anyone I can think of.” John Piper said, “Winter’s vision of the advance of the gospel was breathtaking.” A very intelligent, a very smart man, had degrees in engineering and other fields, and brought about a great change in how we do missions down to today. He cofounded several organizations that are operational today in carrying out his vision. He started an organization and this person said, “He had a deep personal concern about the way disease and evil seemed to tear down God’s creation and tarnish God’s reputation, making Christian gospel witness ineffective.” So you know what he’s saying here, because of the terrible conditions in the world, disease, evil, people aren’t open to hear the gospel, so the revolution he brought to evangelical missions is you have to clean up the world so they’ll listen to you. Now we think, well, that doesn’t sound right. I hope it doesn’t sound right! He started his studies at Fuller, you know, Fuller was the center and it’s like a poison fountain, everything that comes out of Fuller is corrupted and some of you have been involved in the studies on neo-evangelicalism, and know the key place.

At the first Lausanne Congress in 1974, he said the highest priority is cross-cultural evangelism and they got this thing that became big in church growth movement, unreached people, it became part of missions. “Winter’s presentation was a watershed moment for the world missionary movement and many believe it changed the outlook of mission agencies worldwide.” He started an institute, it goes by the name “Perspectives.” I opened a mission correspondence I received from a relative, I opened it after lunch today and sure enough, there they are, they’re taking the course on “Perspectives,” because we’ve learn how important holistic missions really is, so it permeates everywhere. I’m jumping through this article. It becomes important, let me read back the last statement with you. “A core doctrine of ‘Perspectives,’ (this is Ralph Winter’s training stuff) is that the task of world evangelization requires strategic holism in which community development is integrated with church planting. Evangelization invariably integrates relief and development endeavors.”

Now remember whenever you make anything part of the gospel and is essential for the gospel, you begin to erode the gospel. “The integration of evangelism and social endeavors should be strategic.” There are over 100,000 alumni of his “Perspectives” training course in North America alone, so he’s a man of great influence. “Winter has redefined the methods and doctrine of evangelization and trained an entire generation of missionaries in these new doctrines” and you want to know some of the mission’s organizations that are aligned with Ralph Winter and his approach. Among the 4,000 plus groups that partner with his missions organization are “Mission Aviation Fellowship, the Wycliffe Bible Translators, Intervarsity Fellowship, Campus Crusade for Christ, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, Christian Educators Association” and many, many others, so they’re organizations probably you’re familiar with and they’re adopting his approach, so I want to walk through that with you.

His concern… these are coming from articles or books he’s written, so I’m not going to identify them. In one of his articles, he says, “One idea looms larger and more significant in my mind than any other. It is the concept of our having to identify with God’s concern for defeating evil in order properly to glorify Him.” You say, well, I don’t know, yeah, we’re defeating evil but for him the evil he’s talking about is disease, social problems, racial problems. He continues, “There are two significant barriers to Christian belief: the rampant evil in this world if there is no Satan behind it,” whatever that means) “and a Bible with the feet of clay…” In other words, we have to get scientifically up-to-date, Genesis is not, so Genesis is not telling you how creation came into existence.

He believes the earth is probably 13.7 billion years old, so the age of the earth 13.7 billion years, it exploded from a tiny speck. And then he goes on and talks, and despite his belief in a universe that is billions of years old, Winter is adamant that he does not believe in evolution as such. Rather he believes in what he calls ‘progressive development’ which takes place over 13.7 billion years. Yet he says he believes in both the old earth and the young earth theories. This is part of the problem, he believes in two contradictory things and that’s fine, Winter seemed to have no difficulty holding together contradictory views when it suited his theories.

Then he’s got a view of ‘prehistory.’ And just showing how far away from biblical truth you can get and yet you have had the greatest influence in evangelical missions in the last 50 years. It’s amazing! There was a prehistory in the world and then he gets in what happened in all these times and then there were ‘intermediate beings’ that came into existence. You know, where do you get all this? We’ve already decided the Bible won’t fit, but I’ve got all these great ideas that have no foundation. Well, we ought to be concerned about a man like this that just disregards the opening chapters of Genesis. Because if we’re ever going to get the world to listen to the gospel we present you can’t be telling them God created the world in six days so we’ll change the Bible. The works of the devil is what this is about, “Winter firmly believed that evangelism should be concerned with defeating the works of the devil,” and of course they go to Christ’s earthly ministry and He healed people and He cast out demons and stuff like that.

Now here we go, “One of the great works of the devil that needs to be overcome is disease.” Now wait a minute, I thought maybe we were going to talk about sin. No, one of the great works of the devil that needs to be overcome is disease. “Winter acknowledges that he is well known for believing that disease is probably the greatest killer and producer of suffering in the entire world so Winter writes this. In my theology, Satanic disruption, distortion, and destruction of God’s good creation is so extensive and pervasive that it even extends to what are often called genetic defects, so we have to fix these things. The same goes for destructive viruses, bacteria and especially parasites. These represent incredibly, ingenious evil.’ ”

Winter claims that nature was violent long before Adam and Eve. He writes, “Nature prior to the appearance of homo sapiens is shot through and through with terrible slaughter, bloodshed, violence, and suffering as the result of the fall of Satan long before Adam fell.” So much for what we looked at in Romans 5 with sin and death coming from Adam so he’s not only attacking Genesis he’s attacking the New Testament as well. “Here we must note that Ralph Winter says that death and chaos were in the world before the fall of man.” In other words, death is not the result of sin as the Bible teaches. “Winter is concerned that ‘Christians are not well known for fighting the viruses, the bacteria, and the tiny parasites that cause illnesses. We mount no offense against the pathogens themselves. Thus to my knowledge there’s not a single avowedly Christian institution on the face of the earth that is working specifically for the eradication of disease pathogens.’ ” Where did you get that out of the Bible? You understand the gospel’s got lost in this. It bothers me that a man like John Piper said, “Winter’s vision of the advance of the gospel was breathtaking.” It’s heretical, you’ve turned the real evil in the world we have to deal with are parasites and those kind of things, and then when you’ve done that people will realize we have answers, and so then we can present the gospel.

Now on he goes, he is not fond of the Reformation, he thinks that did a lot of damage in bringing in salvation by faith alone. It focused on the salvation of the soul so they could go to heaven, and that’s not good. He feels the reformers were no better than the Roman Catholics, they both made a mess of things, if I can paraphrase. “Winters says that many pastors and missionaries have continued to replace the biblical agenda with one of the central issues of the Reformation, namely mission that simply offers (or sells) advice to people on the attractive subject of ‘how to get to heaven’, or ‘how to be assured of eternal salvation.’ You know that’s not the biblical agenda. Missionaries and mission organizations continue to think that that’s the central issue. They got that out of the Reformation, that’s not out of the Bible.” Amazing, he can come back to the Bible when it suits him but he’s sure that this isn’t what the Bible’s about. Well, what are missions about… I’ll say more as we move along.

Ralph Winter clearly does not think that the Protestant doctrine of salvation by faith alone in Christ alone is important. Well, what do we send the missionaries out for? It’s like this letter on holistic missions and it talks all about how we’ve been helping people. “One person we worked with off and on for 14 years, it just shows how holistic missions is the way to go.” Never a mention about anybody getting saved but they improved their life. They got a woman out of a life of prostitution that learned how to make clothes become more independent. That’s what missions is. That’s why Joel James and another… Joel James attended here before he went to seminary and over to Africa and he said this kind of teaching has destroyed evangelism in Africa. How does all these Christian organizations… I thought Campus Crusade for Christ or CREW was about evangelizing the lost and you join with Ralph Winter, I mean, something’s wrong.

“Mere Evangelism: Throughout his extensive writings, Winter appears to be uninterested in, even dismissive of personal salvation from sin.” He writes, and this is a quote, “It may today have become one of the distinctive heresies of the evangelical as we have become known as specialists in getting people to heaven.” He said that’s a heresy, that may be the distinctive heresy of evangelicalism. Now we think our focus ought to be sharing the gospel so people can believe, and be rescued from eternal lostness. That’s heretical? How do mission organizations take this man as their leader and buy in to all his material? It is appalling! Winter writes, “There is evidently a very great difference between a mission to get people into heaven and a mission to recover the glory of God by defeating the powers of darkness and distortion, and this later, larger mission evangelism is to be viewed as in part recruitment for the latter.” Larger mission evangelism which is to be viewed as in part recruitment -- in other words, saving people, that’s just there to provide resources for us to work on changing the world, getting rid of disease, and so evangelism is not the focal point. We are restoring the world and getting rid of the evil in the world and we need people who will deal with all these kinds of diseases and that. If somebody gets saved then he can join that war. It’s a strange view. Again, he says, “The saving of souls will no longer be the central strategy of mission, but will in a large part be merely a means.”

You see what happens to the gospel, progressively pushed more and more out. We go through the book of Romans and we say, well, this is clear this is what the gospel is. No, and you think this is the man that has influenced evangelical missions more than anyone else in the last 50 years. What is going on? Do we not know what Romans says? It’s sort of like we talked about this morning, Christians don’t care, they just settle down. Oh, you know it’s not a bad thing to help people, it’s not a bad thing to deal with disease. Well, God didn’t call us to deal with those kinds of things. It’s His church, He’s head of it. He presents the truth of His word.

And of course, he’s wrong on the kingdom. You know what these people do? It was through the neo-evangelicals as well. They decided what they wanted then they come up with the doctrine of the kingdom, that’s why it’s not exegetically derived. They develop their theology, George Eldon Ladd and Carl F. H. Henry, these men. We have to have a social program, we have to bring social change to the world, and having just a future view of the kingdom will never do. Well then, we’ll change, we begin to bring the word of God into our own convictions. Is that not a corrupting of the word of God, so the kingdom of God?

Winter’s “Perspectives,” that’s his course that so many take, that this missionary was taking, “Winter’s “Perspectives” course teaches that “God accomplishes His purpose by triumphing over evil in order to rescue and bless people and to establish His kingdom rule throughout the earth.” Further says, “The biblical mandate is the gospel of the kingdom, not merely a gospel of salvation. The gospel of the kingdom is the central matter of God’s will being done on earth as it is in heaven.” So now he makes two things. We have the gospel of the kingdom, the gospel of salvation, but the gospel of the kingdom is what matters and so we have to do kingdom things, clean up the world. This is God’s world, this is His kingdom, we have to clean it up, we have to get rid of disease, and he goes into great detail on these kinds of things. But the gospel of salvation that’s a secondary thing. I don’t find that in scripture.

‘Winter was asked the question, ‘What in the world could microbes have to do with the kingdom of God or global evangelism?’ He answered, ‘Distorted microbes war against the kingdom of God. Distorted genes make animals violent and destructive. Destructive parasites kill off many varieties of plant and animal life, and as well by the malarial parasite. All this massive damage to the purposes of the kingdom of God amount to noise so loud that people can’t hear what we are preaching to them.’ ” You see what he is saying? You have to clean all this stuff up, people, they’re so encompassed with these things they don’t listen to the gospel, so first let’s get this place cleaned up. Deal with distorted genes distorted microbes, and he’s to the point if we could do some genetic alteration, animals wouldn’t be violent. Who’s going to have time for the gospel when you’re going to do all this?

Winter says, “The problem is that mission theology is not broad enough to the point where we would plan to tackle some of the bigger problems such as the wiping out of the Guinea worm.” Now that’s a big one, I don’t even know what the Guinea worm is but it’s “problems which have existed for over a century under the very noses of missionaries,” because those missionaries were just there presenting the gospel of salvation.” That’s terrible, they should have been there getting rid of the Guinea worm. You get rid of the Guinea worm will you go to heaven? “Such extra breadth must not be seen to be a divergence from the preaching of eternal life but rather an empowerment of the message of the gospel of the kingdom, which is both here and hereafter. This is the gospel of Jesus Christ. This is the gospel of the kingdom, the announcement of the rule and reign of God, which must extend over the whole earth, so if Christ established the kingdom, we’re in the kingdom.” You think He wants this dirty, filthy, disease ridden place for His kingdom? So Number 1 priority is we’ve got to get out there and take care of all these things, and when we do… It’s the same thing the neo-evangelicals did, some of you have been studying that. Well, we have to do social action, then when people see we’re socially involved and our answers to social problems are better than theirs, then they’ll be open to the gospel we talk about. And we have to demonstrate that we have scholars with great intellect, and when they see our intellect is better than theirs is, then they’ll be ready to hear us on the gospel. It denies the whole concept of sin!

If I was just reading this and hadn’t told you this has been the biggest influence on evangelical missions in last 50 years you’d just say, “Why are you reading this to me?” No evangelical would believe this. That’s why John Piper said, “Winter’s vision for the advance of the gospel was breathtaking.” I don’t know where he got that, I think Winter is a heretic, I think he is destroying the gospel, denying the gospel, he’s every bit as bad if not worse than the Galatians that Paul condemned with anathema for altering the gospel. One person, who knows him well but does not agree, said, “Winter has shifted his focus away from gospel proclamation and church development and in this direction of social transformation and kingdom building.”

You know another problem the gospel is too westernized. “A constant theme of Winter’s teaching has been the critical need to de-westernize the gospel” and he wants “The future is bleak for the further extension of our faith into the vast blocs of Chinese, Hindus, Muslims and Buddhists unless we are willing to allow our faith to leave behind the cultural clothing of the Christian movement itself.” I don’t know that that’s a western movement, I didn’t know Paul and Israel and that was Western but I’m learning. “Do we preach Christ or Christianity” because Christianity is western, emphasis on the Church is western. I don’t think our Bible is a western product, so to speak. “Our task may well be to allow and encourage Muslims and Hindus and Chinese to follow Christ without identifying themselves with a foreign religion.”

You know what he means? You can have Hindus who follow Christ, you can have Muslims who follow Christ. According to Winter this is the Third Reformation, “the creation of a biblical faith for Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists that is beyond the Christian church. It is a religion that pledges allegiance to Christ without involving the church.” I thought that was what Christ was doing, building the church. I thought the church was the body of Christ and he is the head. Again, I read this and how could this man become the greatest influence in evangelical… we’re not talking about the liberal churches the liberal missions, I mean, we’re talking about evangelical missions. It is amazing.

“He maintains that the distinctive heresy of evangelicals is that they have become specialists in merely getting people happy and getting them into heaven. According to Ralph Winter, latter day evangelicals have made their gospel of salvation a nearly total substitute for the gospel of the kingdom. His concern is that missionaries who preach the gospel of salvation are not normally trained, nor well-equipped to take on the social, commercial, medical, engineering, and political problems of Africa. This vast array of problems is not part of our gospel of salvation even though it’s definitely part of the gospel of the kingdom. You know, as we work through we’re not finding this in the scripture, he’s created it because he was an engineer, and he re-engineered several different areas he was working in when he then decided to work on missions. He says I’m going to re-engineer missions, too. Now I know you’re probably getting tired but I had to read it, so you have to listen to it.

“Today we must understand more clearly that neither western Christianity nor Protestantism, nor even evangelicalism is the only substantial cultural tradition stemming from the Bible. Furthermore, it is now reported for all to know that the incredible impact of the Bible on India, for example, has produced between 14 and 24 million daily Bible-reading believers in Jesus Christ who are still part of their Hindu communities.” Now, do we not have oxymorons? I’m a Hindu Christian, I’m a Muslim believer. Could Paul stay in Judaism? It was a lot closer to biblical truth than this. They don’t call themselves Christians, they remain in their Hindu communities and so on. “The same is true in more than one movement to Christ within the world’s Islamic traditions… Do we preach Christ or Christianity? If the latter, it may be the greatest mistake in missions today.” Well, the disciples were first called Christians at Antioch, you get this as westernizing. When Jesus called people, you cannot be My disciple unless you give up everything, but here you don’t have to give up anything. Claim you believe Christ, put Him in your pantheon, you can believe in Buddha, you can believe in Christ. And we wonder where we’ll get the world church from, we may be moving closer.

Well, let’s skip some of this. He’s got another man, Ron Sider, who writes “Rich Christians in an Age.” I’ve never had any reason to believe Ron Sider was truly a believer but he really likes Ralph Winter and here’s what Ron Sider says, he’s a promoter of social and so on, like Winter. Listen to this, “Forty years ago, most evangelical leaders would have agreed that the primary mission of the church is saving souls.
In other words, evangelism is our primary mission. Ralph Winters rightly celebrates the fact that things have changed dramatically. Today almost all evangelical leaders agree that we are to do both evangelism and social action. “

Forty years, I’ve been here fifty years. This is a change that has occurred in evangelicalism, we don’t want to just live in a bubble. Yeah, you know we know Romans, we know Romans. Well, somewhere along the line people who claim to be believers and know the gospel let it go, and things have changed from forty years ago. Well, it’s not the same world, it’s not the same missions, that idea that you carry the gospel to the lost. No, you go out there to rescue people. Now what? When like this was in Latin America and you get women out of prostitution and then you have people learn how to support themselves and they’ll become successful like Americans. Then what? Americans don’t need salvation because of our prosperity? Okay, I’m almost done with this, in fact, I’ll be done.
It concerns me for these missions groups, Mission Aviation Fellowship used to come out of a lot of the training for Moody Bible Institute, Wycliffe Bible Translators, Intervarsity Fellowship, Campus Crusade. John Piper said, “Winter’s vision for the advance of the gospel was breathtaking.” There is a rapid change, a collapse that is going on. You can’t trust people you used to think you could trust for biblical truth and standing biblically. You know, what is going on out there and where are churches, how many churches in our city are being influenced by this necessity to bring social action. You know, I told you I was invited by evangelical pastors to come to a prayer meeting that included all kinds of people, and we’re going to be specifically praying for racial justice in our city. Well, does the church know we abandoned the real problem, the sin of the heart? When you move away from that then the real solution, the death of Christ on the cross, doesn’t matter either, you’ve put it out here, that’s where we are going.

There’s something called the New Calvinists. I was talking to a pastor on the phone and he asked me what it was, I made up my own definition of the New Calvinists. The New Calvinists, they are Calvinistic, by that I mean they claim to believe the five points that they identify with Reformed theology, the ‘tulip’ idea. They are neo-evangelical, which some of you are familiar with that, we have talked about it. Charismatics, now be careful, they’re not all charismatics, but they are open to charismatics because much of it is an emotional-driven, feeling-driven Christianity that’s subtly rolling over. They promote a form of Liberation theology and again they wouldn’t go as far. Liberation theology was started in Latin America by a couple of Roman Catholic priests, they were more into violent overthrow and those kinds of things. But as far as dealing with racial justice, social justice those things, that’s what the New Calvinists are.

There’s a little book if you want to get it by E. S. Williams. He wrote the same “Holistic,” it’s a little thinner. Some people I don’t know, you may know them, Tim Keller, he pastors at Redeemer Church in New York City, John Piper, Mark Driscoll, and then he talks about it in England where he is headquartered. And this is bringing together this whole move that social action is social and then it gets wed. These people, since they don’t have sound hermeneutics, they don’t interpret the Bible consistently literal like we do and they get into problems over the kingdom to support their ideas, and if you don’t make a clear distinction between Israel and the church. Why would you say that the spiritual gifts, all of them, aren’t present today like the charismatics say, and there is a strong emphasis on emotion and feeling that makes them susceptible because the charismatic movement has always been strong in that. When we were in the Holiness movement it was a strong and when your emotions and your feelings are determining your theology you’re in trouble, and you begin to drift out here and it spreads more and more and it infiltrates the churches. And then, well, you know, they may have a point here.

I was talking to someone about this, come back to your hermeneutics, once you abandon consistent, literal hermeneutics you’re just out here, everybody has their own opinion. So this is the New Calvinists and the Old Calvinists, the old-line Calvinists, are strongly critical of them. That would be true of Williams, he is strongly critical of these New Calvinists. Why people want to constantly go to people whose theology… they’re covenantal, their hermeneutics are distorted, they have an emotional-driven, feeling emphasis. I mentioned Fuller Seminary, I mentioned John Piper, he’s probably the one some of you know more often than the others I mention, Tim Keller, now Mark Driscoll, unless you’re into some of those things. You know, everybody comes out of Fuller that’s where Piper came from, too, Fuller. And then you go overseas and get a doctor’s degree and then you’re corrupted.

Daniel Fuller was Charles E. Fuller’s son, some of you have been into this in recent studies. Charles E. Fuller used to have the “Old Time Gospel Hour,” some of you old enough to have listened to the Old Time Gospel Hour. Yeah, Sally you’re old (laughter), we’re just almost the same birthdays. But yeah, and he used to call his wife, come honey and read the letter, and she’d read one of those folksy letters, but he took in a lot of money. He had a very popular, like Theodore Epp, that style bible teaching, and he was a dispensationalist. Then he decided he wanted to start a school, seminary, so they did and that became where neo-evangelicalism developed out of strongly. His son Daniel Fuller was a teacher there and he got degrees from various places, then went overseas to Switzerland and studied under Karl Barth. His father Charles, oh no, he won’t come back corrupted. He came back corrupted, he did not believe in the inerrancy of scripture any longer, he believed in partial inerrancy and that rocked the boat. That was 1967 when he came out and Fuller was still in the throes that I don’t believe in the full inerrancy of scripture. Partial inerrancy, well, you can see in all the debate who discerns what part, where it starts, where it stops, but you go sit under corrupt teaching pretty soon it gets a hold of you and you think differently.

It really bothers me. John Piper was one of Daniel Fuller’s favorite students and they have a mutual admiration society, and this book was a doctrinal dissertation he did from Northwestern Seminary. Daniel Fuller, Piper writes the recommendation and toward the end of it after a glowing long paragraph, he says, “Above all the book is the fruit and demonstration detailed in sober exegesis which reflects Dr. Fuller’s sometimes misunderstood,” note this, “yet incontrovertible commitment to the Bible as the infallible word of God.” That borders on dishonesty when you listen to that, he had “commitment to the Bible as the infallible word of God.” This is done in 1980. In 1967 Daniel Fuller came out and was clear, I do not believe in the full inerrancy of scripture, I believe in partial inerrancy. So I think for Piper to say he had that firm commitment to infallibility, he’s using a word there that’s sometimes used differently from inerrancy. That’s not honest and I have a lot of problems because this book is about hermeneutics.

Now Fuller did his doctrinal dissertation at Northwestern criticizing the hermeneutics of dispensationalism and then with some alterations it was published. Piper loves Daniel Fuller, here in Piper’s book “The Justification of God” in the preface he writes, “ I exalt once more in dedicating the book to Daniel Payton Fuller whose great work, “Unity of the Bible” published in ‘92 is now published. Almost 25 years ago, I was swept into the love and labor of serious, painstaking, exhilarating exegesis by this man’s classes in seminary. Everything I have preached or written is owed in a great measure to the inspiration and exegetical discipline I absorbed from Daniel Fuller.” I don’t read Daniel Fuller unless I’m doing a critique. Ah, what do you do with a man like this? He was at the center of what I would view as the destruction of Fuller Seminary because of his theology being corrupted, and he used all his influence to bring in men that would support his corrupted view and they end up driving out those who believed in inerrancy.

Remarkable what goes on, that’s why we’re going through the gospel. I mention these things because I get the idea I know how it is. It’s for me, too, if I’m going through something I’ve been through like the book of Romans or the gospel. Yeah, we all agree on that but when a conflict comes I realize I’ve got to stop and analyze this. You know, we shouldn’t be taken in by this kind of rubbish that’s every bit as bad as the Judaizers adding something to the gospel. He’s changing the gospel of salvation and denying it’s most important. Why would I want to be identified and connected to such a man? I talked to people, oh no, he’s doing a good work, there are thousands of people coming to Christ as a result of Winter’s approach to missions. Oh, wait a minute, if you’re talking about people who claim to believe in Christ but stay Hindus I don’t think we’re talking about biblical salvation. This kind of corruption deceives and deludes men, and they get drawn in and nothing’s happened like this. Fourteen years of ministry and all he can talk about is, well, we’ve trained some of them to be independent, how to make goods and sell them. So that’s nice, you’re brought out of a life of prostitution but you’re still on your way to hell. What are we doing? The world can do a lot of these things, there’s only one thing the church can do, we present the truth of the word of God, when we get distracted from that… So where will it go?

All right, I’ll open it up, anybody have any questions or comments? With all this information what do we do? I mean do we go after them, do we sit in here and make sure that we’re protected? What do we do, what can we do?

I’ll tell you, my concerns come; I’m interested in what’s going on in evangelicals around the world. My concerns are for Indian Hills Community Church and the city we’re in because churches that depart from doctrine, that backs up because we have contact with them and their influence. We are ready to deal with the criticisms, oh, Indian Hills doesn’t care for people, Indian Hills is not loving, Indian Hills thinks as long as you do the right thing everything’s good. None of that’s true, that’s slander, but we have to be willing to stand for the truth. I’m not going to try to prove we care for people and the way we prove we care for people is take on some social programs. I’m not there to impress them and the only one who can take the truth of the gospel and drive it to a heart is God Himself, so we have to be ready to stand.

I’m concerned for men like John Piper whose influence… he’s an emotion… some of the people that refer to him refer to him as the Christian romantic and it draws people in and that feeling… It’s like the charismatics, well, there’s a sense of feeling, you feel it. The devil’s good at feelings. People go to concerts or sporting events and they’re emotionally involved in it. That’s where we have to come back and say the word of God says this, period. I’ve got articles I’ve collected of people who say Gil Rugh doesn’t care about you, he doesn’t love you. Now we just care this is the truth, if you don’t believe it get out of here, we only teach the truth (said with gruff voice). That’s not true and you manifest it in your work, you pour yourself into ministering, taking care of things. People working with the kids now, not because they have nothing better, no, because God’s given them a heart for these kids and in the nursery so that we can concentrate on thinking as we work through the scripture. I mean, I think their whole being is into it.

We have to be willing to weather, we will not depart and I get concerned when people are listening to these people and with the internet and all this stuff it comes in, and they’re not reading I understand as much, they don’t know the background. Anybody that has a connection to Fuller Seminary I am suspicious of, anyone who thinks you learned hermeneutics from Daniel Fuller is not going to be someone I expose myself to. I went to Fuller in the 1970s, I was there, I took classes, was in their school of World Missions and Church Growth. I read everything that had been written to that point and I wrote evaluations of it and so on, and it was a great experience. But you know, I come and I realized, I can’t stay here, you don’t expose yourself to error and think it won’t affect you. That’s why the elders have a hard time protecting the church, because people open themselves up to all this other influence.

I’m not against reading material but I want it to be done where people are going to help keep us on the tracks so we’re able to sort things out. It troubles me how easily people abandon and that’s always going to be true and we’re all growing, but why people want to chase after this teacher and this teacher and they acknowledge he’s different. Well, you know there are differences, I mean, covenantal, they wouldn’t follow consistent, literal hermeneutics. He’s into racial justice and social action, he’s open to the charismatic movement, but all and all he’s not bad. Well, that’s why again and again and again we’re in Romans on the gospel. Then you hear this and you say, well, that’s not the gospel, that’s a corruption!

You know what most people think, if Campus Crusades in it, Navigators are in it, it wouldn’t be bad. I’m sure they sort through this and we can trust it, that’s where we get to when people aren’t into the Word seriously. When people don’t trust the elders and the teachers here that have guided and led them, they run off and get this teacher, I say, why are you so in love with that teacher? Well, this is not right here, this is not right here. I learned when I did conferences, I decided I wasn’t going to do them. You can be the perfect guy that everybody likes when you go do a conference, you take your best messages, you preach it. And they come up and say oh, we never heard bible teaching like that. Oh, will you come back again? Well, I’m pretty busy, you know, I’m in demand but I’ll think about it. I said to Marilyn I looked at the speakers that had been there before me, they had better bible teaching than this. I appreciate the encouragement but it’s just not the real world so I come here, people are a little more open to criticize it. It’s good for me, not that I’d ever be proud.

Any other questions comments? We’re in a battle it’s not going to get better.

I don’t know how many churches in the city are committed to literal-historical-grammatical hermeneutics. I’m not criticizing them, I don’t know, but if you’re not you will end up in social issues, programs. The E-Free church not that… I don’t know that this one, but 80% of the people voted to take pre-millennialism out of there. You know why, it happened at Fuller, they took pre-millennialism out way back when, because then we can have everybody come in. Well, people who don’t see a distinction between Israel and the church are open to social programs, that’s consistent with their view of scripture. But other people…

Well, can’t we all get along get together? No, a-millennialist are welcome to attend here, they’re not allowed to teach or influence. We have to be true to what we are committed to so I just want to encourage you as we go through Romans, know the gospel, know the gospel. Be offended when somebody who claims to be a believer presents rubbish like this. Paul didn’t mind just saying they’re“ anathema”. I don’t care if it’s an angel from heaven… anathema, cursed to hell. Well, how are you going to reach people Paul, if you run around pronouncing curses? Anybody changes the gospel is anathema, I have no time, no room. You know someone who’s divisive after the first and second admonition holds to a different doctrine, you cut off your fellowship, otherwise, you get drawn in. All right.


Remember from Fuller, Donald McGavran (yes), and he started this needs-oriented missions that somewhat goes with Winter. I don’t know who fed who, but Donald McCavren seemed to me like was the one that started this whole idea that you had to meet their needs before you can witness to them.
Yeah, Donald McGavran really viewed as the father of the church growth movement. He came and lectured to the class when I was out there and yeah, he drove a lot of that and the needs kind of thing and things become subjective. This is what bothers me about Piper, he always has it’s your emotions, your feelings, or if you’re looking to needs. All these things move us and this is where things begin to come together, social things, social justice, because what? They’re all tied to our emotions and our feelings. They begin to override the scripture and people say, oh well, they’re hard-hearted, they only care about what the scripture says, and if it’s not right there like that, that’s too bad. Well, that’s really… we can’t add to it, we can’t take away from it. And McGavran, yes, he’s viewed as the father of the church growth movement and was a key influence there at Fuller and the needs, subjective things… subjective things, avoid it.

My view as I look for the fatal flaw, I don’t have time to read all this, I look for the fatal flaw. If he’s off-track on his hermeneutics, I don’t have time for him. If he’s off-track in another key area, I don’t have time. The only time I want to get into it if I see it coming into Indian Hills, or it’s going on around us or I think it will have an influence. Then I want to find out enough to be able to analyze it, but other than that… Why are we going there? There’s so much good stuff, none of us can read all the good sound material, we’re blessed. Why we insist on chasing after… well, I guess that’s the way we are.

So what seminaries or schools would you recommend to supplement be able like to understand hermeneutics? It’s getting harder, Dallas, no, Grace where I went, no, Talbot, those were the three seminaries recommended when I was going to go to seminary many years ago, no. It collapses. Some of our men are doing studies online at I believe Piedmont, Clark Summit from what I know, I haven’t kept up on them. It’s harder and harder to find it because what seminaries end up doing, they move from what they start. Can I use Master’s Seminary? And they’re not always good but this is the one you know. When they started all they’re going to do is we’re going to train pastors, but you know you put yourself in a graduate situation where intellectual credibility and scholarship matters, so now we have to have men who may not be the best person. I said to the Dean out there one time, I said, you know with the standard you have John MacArthur would not be allowed to teach at your seminary. Well, he doesn’t have the right credentials and well, people are going out there to learn to preach the Word like him, so we get into this scholarly… And this is what happened to Dallas, they decided everybody criticized them for being inbred so they started having men who were going to be professors, go overseas and get a degree, and they were like Daniel Fuller, they came back corrupted. So it’s hard when you’re looking for recognition of the world. We want accreditation so they come in here. They had what I thought was one of their better professors, had to leave because you either have to get a doctor’s degree or you can’t stay on facility. Because accreditation requires that, so this is the pressure schools are under and then you know to find men that haven’t been corrupted in their studies and once they get in then you’re saying well, they’re close enough.

Dallas has it with progressive dispensationalism and what would John Walvoord say? “I’d fire them,” but he was retired, and they don’t fire them, so it’s like Fuller and eventually the good men get pushed out and the corruption grows. So three Dallas men, somebody sent me a connection on the internet, three Dallas professors talking about you’re born with your sexual identity, so that’s not necessarily sin. Well, wait a minute, I realize all of us are born probably with tendencies toward some sin and other sin and some people like to get drunk. But to say that’s what you are? That’s the corruption of sin, it’s taken care of in Christ. They’re saying oh well, that could be, you could be a Christian and be a homosexual as long as you don’t practice because that’s just the way you were born. That’s not true!

Where do you get it, that’s just the way it goes, so be of good cheer, we have the truth. This is the most precious treasure, but if you don’t interpret it correctly, if you have bad hermeneutics you’re all over the place. Why do I want to spend time with that? I’ve had some people, I’ve cut off the conversation. I said you know, we just go round and round and round, because you use different hermeneutics than I do, you don’t use consistently literal hermeneutics, you reinterpret the Old Testament in light of the New Testament. We could talk about passages all day long and not go anywhere because we don’t have agreement on hermeneutics.

How’s the bible to be interpreted? I mean it’s not difficult. I think Piper has a book out “Interpreting the Bible Supernaturally.” I haven’t read it, I probably won’t, but I had a chance to thumb through it. I’ve read a review of it, the guy said I think I’ll have to have him explain. He loved Piper, he said I think everything about, but I have to admit I’ll have to have him go through this with me again. It’s not that complicated, God gave it to ordinary people. Remember the Jews were shepherds, they weren’t linguists. Paul’s writing to ordinary people because there’s not many mighty, not many noble that are called. You know, it’s just ordinary people like us, so read the Bible as you read the newspaper in a literal, grammatical way. There’s figures of speech, we’ve looked at that in Psalms, that’s fine, we’re use to that, we use them all the time.

It’s literal, once you abandon that you’ll be in a circle. Once you let your feelings be the driver… I believe in emotions, life would be boring without emotions, but I don’t want my life controlled by emotions. We act like we know the heart and everything begins in the heart. We don’t know the heart, God knows the heart, and when He transforms us on the inside we manifest the change by what we do, and if you say you love your spouse but you never do the things that Corinthians talks about, you don’t love your spouse. Well, if you do them without it coming from the heart, well, I’ve got to sit down now, is this coming from the heart? You’re left in a world of feeling, and yet it pulls you on and all of a sudden you maybe feel like you’re more spiritual. So the battle goes on, but the truth is truth so we’re firmly grounded. All right, I think we’re good to go.

Let’s pray together. Thank you, Lord, for the riches of Your word. We are blessed. We would not take this treasure as You have called it, that You have entrusted to us, and handle it carelessly. Lord, we want to be honest students of Your word. We are grateful that You gave it to be understood. We naturally have to study deal with it seriously, but you didn’t give Your word to fool us. You gave us Your word so we could hear it, believe it and live it. Lord, may we be faithful to that word no matter what goes on around us, no matter what people think. May we desire most of all Your approval for being faithful. Bless to us the week before us and all our various activities. We pray in Christ’s name. Amen.
1