The Cambridge Declaration

[Note: As you might have noticed, I like to sometimes post guest articles, especially those I strongly agree with. The Alliance of Confession Evangelicals is an organization with which I substantially agree and the following article is from their website at http://www.alliancenet.org/partner/Article_Display_Page/0,,PTID307086%7CCHID615424%7CCIID1411364,00.html.]

The Cambridge Declaration


April 20, 1996

Evangelical churches today are increasingly dominated by the spirit of this age rather than by the Spirit of Christ. As evangelicals, we call ourselves to repent of this sin and to recover the historic Christian faith. In the course of history words change. In our day this has happened to the word "evangelical." In the past it served as a bond of unity between Christians from a wide diversity of church traditions. Historic evangelicalism was confessional. It embraced the essential truths of Christianity as those were defined by the great ecumenical councils of the church. In addition, evangelicals also shared a common heritage in the "solas" of the sixteenth century Protestant Reformation.

Today the light of the Reformation has been significantly dimmed. The consequence is that the word "evangelical" has become so inclusive as to have lost its meaning. We face the peril of losing the unity it has taken centuries to achieve. Because of this crisis and because of our love of Christ, his gospel and his church, we endeavor to assert anew our commitment to the central truths of the Reformation and of historic evangelicalism. These truths we affirm not because of their role in our traditions, but because we believe that they are central to the Bible.

Sola Scriptura: The Erosion of Authority

Scripture alone is the inerrant rule of the church's life, but the evangelical church today has separated Scripture from its authoritative function. In practice, the church is guided, far too often, by the culture. Therapeutic technique, marketing strategies, and the beat of the entertainment world often have far more to say about what the church wants, how it functions and what it offers, than does the Word of God. Pastors have neglected their rightful oversight of worship, including the doctrinal content of the music. As biblical authority has been abandoned in practice, as its truths have faded from Christian consciousness, and as its doctrines have lost their saliency, the church has been increasingly emptied of its integrity, moral authority and direction. Rather than adapting Christian faith to satisfy the felt needs of consumers, we must proclaim the law as the only measure of true righteousness and the gospel as the only announcement of saving truth. Biblical truth is indispensable to the church's understanding, nurture and discipline.

Scripture must take us beyond our perceived needs to our real needs and liberate us from seeing ourselves through the seductive images, cliches, promises and priorities of mass culture. It is only in the light of God's truth that we understand ourselves aright and see God's provision for our need. The Bible, therefore, must be taught and preached in the church. Sermons must be expositions of the Bible and its teachings, not expressions of the preacher's opinions or the ideas of the age. We must settle for nothing less than what God has given.

The work of the Holy Spirit in personal experience cannot be disengaged from Scripture. The Spirit does not speak in ways that are independent of Scripture. Apart from Scripture we would never have known of God's grace in Christ. The biblical Word, rather than spiritual experience, is the test of truth.

Thesis One: Sola Scriptura

We reaffirm the inerrant Scripture to be the sole source of written divine revelation,which alone can bind the conscience. The Bible alone teaches all that is necessary for our salvation from sin and is the standard by which all Christian behavior must be measured.We deny that any creed, council or individual may bind a Christian's conscience, that the Holy Spirit speaks independently of or contrary to what is set forth in the Bible, or that personal spiritual experience can ever be a vehicle of revelation.

Solus Christus: The Erosion of Christ-Centered Faith

As evangelical faith becomes secularized, its interests have been blurred with those of the culture. The result is a loss of absolute values, permissive individualism, and a substitution of wholeness for holiness, recovery for repentance, intuition for truth, feeling for belief, chance for providence, and immediate gratification for enduring hope. Christ and his cross have moved from the center of our vision.

Thesis Two: Solus Christus

We reaffirm that our salvation is accomplished by the mediatorial work of the historical Christ alone. His sinless life and substitutionary atonement alone are sufficient for our justification and reconciliation to the Father.We deny that the gospel is preached if Christ's substitutionary work is not declared and faith in Christ and his work is not solicited.

Sola Gratia: The Erosion of The Gospel

Unwarranted confidence in human ability is a product of fallen human nature. This false confidence now fills the evangelical world; from the self-esteem gospel, to the health and wealth gospel, from those who have transformed the gospel into a product to be sold and sinners into consumers who want to buy, to others who treat Christian faith as being true simply because it works. This silences the doctrine of justification regardless of the official commitments of our churches.

God's grace in Christ is not merely necessary but is the sole efficient cause of salvation. We confess that human beings are born spiritually dead and are incapable even of cooperating with regenerating grace.

Thesis Three: Sola Gratia

We reaffirm that in salvation we are rescued from God's wrath by his grace alone. It is the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit that brings us to Christ by releasing us from our bondage to sin and raising us from spiritual death to spiritual life.We deny that salvation is in any sense a human work. Human methods, techniques or strategies by themselves cannot accomplish this transformation. Faith is not produced by our unregenerated human nature.

Sola Fide: The Erosion of The Chief Article

Justification is by grace alone through faith alone because of Christ alone. This is the article by which the church stands or falls. Today this article is often ignored, distorted or sometimes even denied by leaders, scholars and pastors who claim to be evangelical. Although fallen human nature has always recoiled from recognizing its need for Christ's imputed righteousness, modernity greatly fuels the fires of this discontent with the biblical Gospel. We have allowed this discontent to dictate the nature of our ministry and what it is we are preaching.

Many in the church growth movement believe that sociological understanding of those in the pew is as important to the success of the gospel as is the biblical truth which is proclaimed. As a result, theological convictions are frequently divorced from the work of the ministry. The marketing orientation in many churches takes this even further, erasing the distinction between the biblical Word and the world, robbing Christ's cross of its offense, and reducing Christian faith to the principles and methods which bring success to secular corporations.

While the theology of the cross may be believed, these movements are actually emptying it of its meaning. There is no gospel except that of Christ's substitution in our place whereby God imputed to him our sin and imputed to us his righteousness. Because he bore our judgment, we now walk in his grace as those who are forever pardoned, accepted and adopted as God's children. There is no basis for our acceptance before God except in Christ's saving work, not in our patriotism, churchly devotion or moral decency. The gospel declares what God has done for us in Christ. It is not about what we can do to reach him.

Thesis Four: Sola Fide

We reaffirm that justification is by grace alone through faith alone because of Christ alone. In justification Christ's righteousness is imputed to us as the only possible satisfaction of God's perfect justice.We deny that justification rests on any merit to be found in us, or upon the grounds of an infusion of Christ's righteousness in us, or that an institution claiming to be a church that denies or condemns sola fide can be recognized as a legitimate church.

Soli Deo Gloria: The Erosion of God-Centered Worship

Wherever in the church biblical authority has been lost, Christ has been displaced, the gospel has been distorted, or faith has been perverted, it has always been for one reason: our interests have displaced God's and we are doing his work in our way. The loss of God's centrality in the life of today's church is common and lamentable. It is this loss that allows us to transform worship into entertainment, gospel preaching into marketing, believing into technique, being good into feeling good about ourselves, and faithfulness into being successful. As a result, God, Christ and the Bible have come to mean too little to us and rest too inconsequentially upon us.

God does not exist to satisfy human ambitions, cravings, the appetite for consumption, or our own private spiritual interests. We must focus on God in our worship, rather than the satisfaction of our personal needs. God is sovereign in worship; we are not. Our concern must be for God's kingdom, not our own empires, popularity or success.

Thesis Five: Soli Deo Gloria

We reaffirm that because salvation is of God and has been accomplished by God, it is for God's glory and that we must glorify him always. We must live our entire lives before the face of God, under the authority of God and for his glory alone.We deny that we can properly glorify God if our worship is confused with entertainment, if we neglect either Law or Gospel in our preaching, or if self-improvement, self-esteem or self-fulfillment are allowed to become alternatives to the gospel.

A Call To Repentance & Reformation

The faithfulness of the evangelical church in the past contrasts sharply with its unfaithfulness in the present. Earlier in this century, evangelical churches sustained a remarkable missionary endeavor, and built many religious institutions to serve the cause of biblical truth and Christ's kingdom. That was a time when Christian behavior and expectations were markedly different from those in the culture. Today they often are not. The evangelical world today is losing its biblical fidelity, moral compass and missionary zeal.

We repent of our worldliness. We have been influenced by the "gospels" of our secular culture, which are no gospels. We have weakened the church by our own lack of serious repentance, our blindness to the sins in ourselves which we see so clearly in others, and our inexcusable failure to adequately tell others about God's saving work in Jesus Christ.

We also earnestly call back erring professing evangelicals who have deviated from God's Word in the matters discussed in this Declaration. This includes those who declare that there is hope of eternal life apart from explicit faith in Jesus Christ, who claim that those who reject Christ in this life will be annihilated rather than endure the just judgment of God through eternal suffering, or who claim that evangelicals and Roman Catholics are one in Jesus Christ even where the biblical doctrine of justification is not believed.

The Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals asks all Christians to give consideration to implementing this Declaration in the church's worship, ministry, policies, life and evangelism.

For Christ's sake. Amen.






Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals Executive Council (1996)



Dr. John Armstrong
The Rev. Alistair Begg
Dr. James M. Boice
Dr. W. Robert Godfrey
Dr. John D. Hannah
Dr. Michael S. Horton
Mrs. Rosemary Jensen
Dr. R. Albert Mohler, Jr.
Dr. Robert M. Norris
Dr. R.C. Sproul
Dr. Gene Edward Veith
Dr. David Wells
Dr. Luder Whitlock
Dr. J.A.O. Preus, III

FOR FURTHER READING, SEE ALSO:

Highlights From The Cambridge Summit Meeting
An Introduction to The Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, by James M. Boice
This declaration may be reproduced without permission. Please credit the source by citing the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals.

Critical Thinking Skills of the Masses

I find it extremely frustrating when people in general do not critically assess what the media portrays as neutral and objective reporting. Obviously, the media has an agenda and is trying to persuade the audience to hold certain views which the reporters or the news organization itself holds. The modern media here in the United States is for the most part pro-choice on abortion, pro-homosexuality, anti-Christian, and anti-traditional values.

It is particularly frustrating when trying to express these media biases to anti-intellectual individuals who do not take the time to read articles that are both pro and con on the issues. Critical thinking skills are difficult to come by in the first place. Moreover, even those with a college or university education do not always recognize media bias and propaganda when it is staring them in the face. How much more are the uneducated taken in by such propaganda pieces masquerading as "objective reporting"?

Unfortunately, the United States is succumbing to the secular, materialistic biases of those who work in the media and those who own the media outlets of this country. The power of propaganda is indisputable. I am reminded of how the Nazis in World War II Germany used propaganda to inflame the people against Jews and other religious and racial minorities. In particular, the analogy is poignant to those of us in the conservative and confessing Evangelical movement. Evangelicalism, in its attempt to be relevant to those who do not know Christ, has essentially caved in to secular biases on many issues and one wonders which issue will collapse under the weight of popular secular opinion next?

There was a time when divorce was rare and avoided. Now Evangelicals have embraced the easy divorce, serial marriage paradigm to the detriment of the Christian witness of the family and the church. Already we see compromise on the issue of homosexuality since some "Evangelicals" on the far left are advocating tolerance for homosexuality on the basis that people are pre-determined by genetics and biology to their sinful behavior and lifestyle. When the basis for ethics becomes emotional appeal rather than hard science and biblical morality, then the result is relativism and a moral slide into national apostasy and immorality.

Popular television talk show hosts sadly have more influence on public opinion by the sheer numbers of the viewing audience and availability of such programming. Church services and sermons of the most conservative content are seldom aired on television since most have no resources to get that message out. And the so-called "Christianity" that appears on most Christian television networks and info-mercial time slots is mostly concerned with materialistic appeals to the desperation of the people rather than teaching solid expositional understanding of the Holy Scriptures.

If I were not a believer in the complete sovereignty of God, I would despair. However, I know that God is in control and however the world and its rulers rage against God, they cannot in the end prevail against God or His church (Matthew 16:18). It would be well if the rulers of this age would heed the words of the psalmist:

Psalm 2:10-12

• 10 Now therefore, be wise, O kings;
• Be instructed, you judges of the earth.
• 11 Serve the LORD with fear,
• And rejoice with trembling.
• 12 Kiss the Son, lest He be angry,
• And you will perish in the way,
• When His wrath is kindled but a little.
• Blessed are all those who put their trust in Him.

New King James Version

John MacArthur on the Pentecostal/Charismatic Movement and Church Growth

[I have taken the liberty to post the following transcript of a Grace to You broadcast from John MacArthur. You can read it on the original website at http://www.biblebb.com/files/macqa/70-22-2.htm.  Postscript:  I should add that my opinion of MacArthur has changed significantly since I posted this article.  MacArthur's views on Lordship Salvation confuses sanctification with justification and implies sinless perfection.  (See: The Gospel According to John MacArthur).  Therefore, I have to put MacArthur himself in the heresy corner.  That does not discredit what he has to say below about the errors of the Pentecostal/Charismatic Movement.  Charlie, 8/14/2011].


"And they have created a fertile ground now for an all out assault on God, which is coming from some pretty heady places--the parade is being led by Christianity Today, a magazine, which finds a very open climate to question God. The new view of God is: God is not sovereign; God not only doesn't determine the future, He doesn't even know what it is; that God is about as clear about the future as you are. He has about as much control over it as you do. This is the redefinition of God!"

John MacArthur


The following "Question" was asked by a member of the congregation at Grace Community Church in Panorama City, California, and "Answered" by their pastor, John MacArthur Jr. It was transcribed from the tape, GC 70-22, titled "Questions and Answers--Part 50." A copy of the tape can be obtained by writing, Word of Grace, P.O. Box 4000, Panorama City, CA 91412 or by dialing toll free 1-800-55-GRACE. Copyright 2001 by John MacArthur Jr., All Rights Reserved.

Question

I read an article in a "big city" newspaper, on the Pentecostal movement and I am still puzzled. These people, true believers, and if they are true believers, what are they doing in this movement: "Heal me right away or maybe I'll walk away from Jesus Christ." Can you shed some light on that?

Answer

You are opening up a huge issue here of the Pentecostal Movement. The Pentecostal Movement, as a movement, defined by its unique characteristics, is not Biblical. Now, understand what I am saying. I am not saying that all the people in it are not Christians, some of them are, but those things that define the Pentecostal Movement are not Biblical. It is not Biblical to say, that speaking in tongues is a sign of receiving the Holy Spirit, and if you haven't spoken in tongues you haven't received the Holy Spirit--that is not Biblical. It is not even Biblical to encourage people to speak in tongues, as if that in itself, was some spiritual gift that everybody had to have. It is not Biblical to believe that God is going to heal you. It is not Biblical to believe that some people have the power to heal and can go into great places and knock people over, by the power of the Holy Spirit, and that they wield this great supernatural power.

So, what I am saying is: the defining characteristics that label Pentecostalism "Pentecostalism" as apart from general Orthodox Christianity, are not Biblical. So the movement is defined by things that aren't Biblical. If you, for example, compared it to the Reformed Movement. What distinguishes Reformed Theology is an accurate theology; it goes back to the Reformation and it's based on an accurate understanding of theology. What distinguishes Pentecostalism is an inaccurate, wrong interpretation of Scripture, and all the distinctives are not accurately interpreted from Scripture. So you have a movement defined unbiblically. At the heart of it, I think, there are masses of people who are unconverted--unconverted--who couldn't explain the gospel, the way you heard it explained tonight. They could say that Jesus died for their sins and rose again, but they have no idea just exactly how God used the death of Christ to satisfy His justice and grant righteousness to those who believe. They do not understand anything more than a very shallow and thin grasp of the gospel.

Many of them (and this has been reiterated to me by people who have come to our church, from other large Pentecostal churches in the area) live under a strange and bizarre doctrine that they never articulate, but it is definitive in the movement, and it is the doctrine of the "Sovereignty of Satan." It is inherent, at least to contemporary "Charismania"...Pentecostalism, by the definition of the current Charismatic Movement, and the Pentecostals and the Charismatics are so blended now, you can't separate them...but, it is inimical to that system to believe that Satan is sovereign--not God. God would like people to be saved but He is not sovereign in salvation. God would like to keep people saved but He can't, so people can get unsaved on their own. God would like to solve the problems in the world but the devil keeps messing things up. People in that movement are taught that when you get sick: it's the devil. When your little baby gets sick: it's the devil. When you lose your job: it's the devil. When it's announced to you that you have heart disease or you have cancer, or you have some other problem; when one of your children goes astray, whatever it is: it's the devil. And so, you are living, literally, under the sovereignty of Satan in a mode of constant fear. That's one very unbiblical element of that, so you're always trying to "bind Satan;" you're always trying to cast out demons. God, in Pentecostalism becomes the victim. It is a strange kind of thing where there is this pervasive fear of Satan. Parents who can't sleep, who live with anxieties and fears that the devil is going to come in and make their baby sick at night. Or the devil is going to get in their house, and they have to pray the devil out, or the demons out of their house, or bind Satan some way. This is utterly unbiblical. We as believers have nothing to fear from Satan, in the ultimate sense. It is God Himself who has made the blind and the lame, it says in the Book of Exodus.

The enemy of God, who is Satan, is God's servant. I don't know if you have ever thought of it that way, but the devil is God's servant: he can only do what God allows him to do, and his borders and boundaries are established by a sovereign God. There are some people who came to our church from out of this kind of background, and they happened to come on a Sunday (I think), and when they heard me preach on the sovereignty of God, they said it was the most liberating thing they had ever heard--to find out the "God" was sovereign, that God was in charge, was totally opposite everything they had ever heard. Now that is an aberrant theology that says that.

Pentecostalism, also because of its belief that people today can have the same gifts that the Apostles have...Benny Hinn and whoever the "healers" are, he's sort of the prototypical healer today, it started out with A. A. Allen, and Oral Roberts, and down to Morris Cerullo, and on and on it goes...Jimmy Swaggart and Benny Hinn, and whoever it is. Benny Hinn is the latest edition of con men in that area. This idea, that they believe that these men can do what the Apostles did: they have the power to heal, the power to cast out disease...I heard Benny Hinn say, with my own ears, I heard it, "that if you have somebody in your family die. Leave their body in the living room, take their body over to the TV, drape their arms over the TV, because God is going use me to raise the dead through the television!" I can't think of a more insensitive thing for a man to do, than to have some poor bereaved person drag the corpse of their family member and drape them over the television, under some bizarre illusion that Benny Hinn is going to heal them through the TV set--it's cruel, is what it is! But that is only the extreme form of cruelty. There is a cruelty that goes along day after day, week after week, with this bizarre expectation of healing, and then this false staging of supposed healings, that continue to raise people's hopes, and all that does is create false hopes that are dashed to pieces. And much of the fallout of that movement is people who reject the gospel, reject Christ, because they didn't get what they were promised they would get.

As I said, the defining elements of the movement itself, what gives it its identity are unbiblical, and yet at the core there are many in the Pentecostal Movement who are Christians who understand the gospel. If you just took all the "Pentecostal stuff," the "Charismatic stuff" out, there would be a core understanding of the gospel there, so I believe that some of them are Christians. The Lord knows how many, but it is my own conviction, that the vast majority are not. And also, that those people who purvey and ply the trade, particularly in the media, know they are deceivers, and they are very effective at it--raising millions of dollars. One such preacher alone, T. D. Jakes, took in, personally, last year, 63 million dollars! They are trading on a certain desperation. That's why Jesus, when He sent out the Seventy, said, "go and heal, but take no money." If you can heal people--you can be instantly rich. People get instantly rich who can't heal, but pretend they can.

But at the heart of it, if you can just strip the trappings, there are some who know the gospel truth. So I guess I would say, somewhere in that movement there is a true body of believers, not to be confused with the Movement, which is full of schemers, and dreamers, and con men, and people with aberrant theology, and false teachers who take advantage of people. And then people in the middle: there's the serious, very serious errors of the Word-Faith Movement: Fred Price, Kenneth Copeland, Kenneth Hagin, etcetera, Marilyn Hickey, Joyce Meyer, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, who have an aberrant view of the nature of Christ. They are the ones who say, that on the cross Jesus became a sinner, had to go to hell and suffer for His sins for three days, and then the Father let Him come out of hell, and that is when He was raised. They turned Jesus into a sinner who had to be punished for sin. This is a frightening view of Christ. Also, Kenneth Copeland is the one who said, "That Jesus wasn't any more God than he is!"

So you have aberrations all the way down the line. Of course, because the movement is defined by its experiences and its phenomena, they don't ever deal with the aberrations. Nobody polices the movement. You can turn on "Channel 40" [Southern California UHF TV Station], and you can see them...they will literally advocate anything! They would advocate absolutely anything. Anybody can come on there and say anything they want about God, anything they want about Christ, anything they want about the Holy Spirit, anything they want to say about the work of God, any interpretation of the Bible will stand. But what you can't do, is go on "Channel 40" and say somebody is wrong--that's intolerable! And so that's why in some of their books, they call me a "Heresy Hunter." There is one book that has a whole chapter on me as a "Heresy Hunter"--well, I am! And I thank them for the compliment! [Applause]. I don't have any axe to grind with those people, I just am committed to the truth, and I want to bring the truth to those people. It's really one of the wonderful realities that "Grace to You Radio" penetrates into those people, who don't come to this church, but they turn on the radio, and they get the books. The book, The Charismatics, that I wrote back in 1978, I think it was, later on we wrote a new one called Charismatic Chaos . Those books have had a great impact, and continue to have an impact on the hearts of people who are questioning the movement--they're in it, they are questioning the reality of it.

As a final thought, one of the give-a-ways that there is something seriously wrong with the movement is its breadth. It embraces anybody, and anything, and any view of anything that purports to be of God. If you just say, the Lord told you this, or the Lord told you that, or you had a vision, or you saw this, or you heard voices, or the angels told you--if you have the experience, you supposedly experienced some of this supernatural phenomena, it will embrace you. The movement will take you in no matter how bizarre your theology is.

I remember when Benny Hinn first wrote his first book, called Good Morning Holy Spirit (I think it was), and in the book, he had nine members of the Trinity. It's not even good English to have nine members of a Trinity! You can have a double-quartet plus one, but you can't have a Trinity with nine people--it's not a Trinity. But in the book, he had nine members of the Trinity. He had the Father having three parts (three persons), the Son having three persons, and the Holy Spirit having three persons, totaling nine. I said to the publisher, who was having lunch with me, wanting to sign me to a book contract. I said to him, "Why in the world did you publish that book?" "Why would you publish that?" And with a look of incredulity he said to me, "What do you mean? We publish everything!" He didn't even understand the question! It didn't even connect, for "What do you mean? We publish everything!" And I would say, that has been pretty much the reality with the Pentecostal Movement, there is just no borders, at all.

The way the "movement" has perpetuated itself--it's an infection in the Body of Christ that is spreading rapidly. It's a kind of "Spiritual AIDS." AIDS is a deficient immune system, and this kills the Church's immune system! The Pentecostal/Charismatic Movement kills the immune system, because it makes it a sin to question their theology. You see, the only way error can survive is if truth doesn't prevail--right? It's the only way. The only way error can survive is if truth does not prevail. So how do you get the truth out of the way? You have to silence the people who speak the truth. So how do you do that? You have to turn them into "bad guys"--those people with discernment, those people who speak the truth, those people who draw lines that are Biblical. You have to turn them into the "bad guys" the non-spiritual.

I remember a radio program, where a man who was prominent in the Charismatic Movement said, "I don't know much about John MacArthur, but I know one thing, he doesn't possess the Holy Spirit." And that was on a radio talk show, and that created an interesting dialogue. I was being vilified as someone who didn't possess the Holy Spirit, was not therefore of God, simply because I called into question some of their unbiblical teaching. And what has happened is, they have been saying this long enough; they have been working their way into the mainstream of Evangelicalism simply by attacking the critics, and silencing the critics, and most people just rollover.

I can give you an illustration. In, about 1980, after I had written the book, The Charismatics, which was a bomb when it came. It was the first book that was out really definitively taking on that movement, and it just hit with thunder, but it was really an important statement. At the time, Moody Monthly, was a monthly periodical put out by Moody as sort of a standard, fundamental, Evangelical magazine. They said, "This is so important, we want to serialize the book." So the magazine picks up the book, they put the cover of the book on the cover of the magazine, which had a circulation of...I don't know, let's just say for the sake of argument, 150,000. During the time they serialized the book it went up 50%, so maybe to 225,000--tremendous response, and this book was a direct attack on that issue. And Moody, at that time, says, "This needs to be heard, this is discernment." Today, if I say on "Grace to You" anything negative about the Charismatic Movement--the Moody Broadcasting Network will remove it from the broadcast! Because what has happened over a period of time is that Evangelicalism has just rolled over, because we have been vilified so much as being unloving, and heresy hunters, and divisive, and so they literally have shouted, long enough and loud enough to silence people. And they have found their way into the mainstream, and now they dictate what is "Politically Correct" to say within the body of Evangelicalism.

Now that Evangelicalism is so softened up theologically; now that we have this case of AIDS, this immune deficiency that can't fight off error--we can't stop the influx of disease--theological disease. The latest is called the "Openness of God" (I am digressing, but I need to take you there for a minute). Have you been reading about this? This is the last place you can attack. They have attacked the Person of the Holy Spirit. They have attacked the Person of Christ. They have attacked the gospel. They have attacked the authority of Scripture by adding to Scripture revelations, and visions, and Words of Wisdom, and Words of Knowledge, and on and on and on..... And they have created a fertile ground now for an all out assault on God, which is coming from some pretty heady places--the parade is being led by Christianity Today, a magazine, which finds a very open climate to question God. The new view of God is: God is not sovereign; God not only doesn't determine the future, He doesn't even know what it is; that God is about as clear about the future as you are. He has about as much control over it as you do. This is the redefinition of God!

I said to someone the other day, "That is the end! Jesus has to come soon! Where else do you go, when you have attacked the nature of God?" I have a chapter in a new book that came out called, What Ever Happened to the Reformation? I wrote one chapter, R. C. Sproul wrote one, a bunch of us wrote them, and Sproul in his chapter says, "Call yourself a Christian if you want, but if you have the wrong view of God--you're a pagan!" You're a pagan! That's idolatry! That's the last place you can go in heresy, is to reinvent God! That climate to do that, I think is largely aided and abetted by the utter disinterest in doctrine that has been created by this Charismatic pressure--Pentecostal pressure.

So, at the same time I say that, there are people in that movement who are Christians, and most of the Evangelical Church doesn't have the discernment to know how to sort all of that out, and many of these people don't either. They are subject to their leaders--like Hosea says, "Like people, like priests." They can't rise above it, and so they just sort of take it in, but in their hearts they are truly trusting Christ for their salvation. Surely there are true believers in that movement. I have said this before: You can take the Charismatic Movement; you can take the "Seeker-Friendly Church Growth" Movement, and somewhere in those movements there is a true church, not to be confused with the crowd.

But I think when you look at the legacy of the Charismatic or Pentecostal Movement, in history looking back, it is not going to be, "Oh, they were speaking in tongues," that's true, but speaking in tongues, to me, is a minor detail. In fact, I have even gone so far as to say, "If you have the choice between going in your closet and mumbling in tongues, and going out and gossiping--go in your closet and mumble in tongues! So I don't want to overstate the importance of that.

I don't think history is going to look back and define the impact of Pentecostalism in tongues; I don't think it'll look back and define it in terms of healings, since everybody who goes into that movement, with any kind of honest, analytical, and critical approach, and tries to find healings can't find them, and that's documented many, many times over. But what is going to be history's verdict on the effect of the Pentecostal Movement, is that the Pentecostal Movement caused the Church to become disinterested in sound doctrine. And that ultimately, is the greatest impact, and that's Spiritual AIDS--the Church no longer has a functioning immune system to recognize deadly error.

Added to Bible Bulletin Board's "MacArthur’s Questions and Answers" by:

Tony Capoccia
Bible Bulletin Board
Box 119
Columbus, New Jersey, USA, 08022

Websites: http://www.biblebb.com/ and http://www.gospelgems.com/
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John Calvin on the Church Fathers

4. It is a calumny to represent us as opposed to the Fathers, (I mean the ancient writers of a purer age,) as if the Fathers were supporters of their impiety. Were the contest to be decided by such authority (to speak in the most moderate terms,) the better part of the victory would be ours. While there is much that is admirable and wise in the writings of those Fathers, and while in some things it has fared with them as with ordinary men; these pious sons, forsooth, with the peculiar acuteness of intellect, and judgement, and soul, which belongs to them, adore only their slips and errors, while those things which are well said they either overlook, or disguise, or corrupt, so that it may be truly said their only care has been to gather dross among gold...

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/calvin-onclergy.html

John Calvin on Miracles

3. In demanding miracles from us, they act dishonestly; for we have not coined some new gospel, but retain the very one the truth of which is confirmed by all the miracles which Christ and the apostles ever wrought. But they have a peculiarity which we have not - they can confirm their faith by constant miracles down to the present day! Nay rather, they allege miracles which might produce wavering in minds otherwise well disposed; they are so frivolous and ridiculous, so vain and false. ...

Prefatory Address to the King of France