Mainstream Evangelicalism has become increasingly Pentecostal and less Evangelical over the years, as I have repeatedly pointed out. But though this theological drift from our Reformation roots has failed to deliver revival or even increased numbers in church over the 55 or so years since it began to bite, it continues to fascinate and spread. Why?
A couple of anecdotes to kick off. Many years ago my wife went forward for blessing at a Don Double crusade. I’m not sure I’d ever clocked that she was “slain in the Spirit” at the time, or maybe I forgot. In any case, discussing it recently, she explained why she went down. “He pushed me.”
In turn, she was this week in conversation with a mainstay member of our church, a few years older than us and the wife of a former elder. She too, back in the early second or third wave of Pentecostalism, admitted that she’d done the falling over bit, “because everyone else did.” I’ve no doubt that others were not coerced or subject to peer pressure, but then we have to factor in the power of suggestion. Most of all we have to remember that the only people slain in the Spirit in Scripture were Ananias and Sapphira, and it didn’t end well for them. If it ain’t in the Bible, it’s not biblical.
Leaving the Message recently had a YouTube video on the extreme-healing preachers of the past, such as William Branham of The Message Cult, and why so many followers even went to their deaths from cancer believing they’d been healed. The lessons apply just as much to modern positive confession teachers, such as Bill Johnson of Bethel, who refuses to believe in any Christianity that doesn’t include universal healing, even though it is doubtful whether anyone has genuinely been healed in his ministry.
The account has to begin with the small “c” charismatic personality of the preacher, who must be able to persuade ordinary people that impossible things are possible (even after 120 years of failed Pentecostal healing ministries), and that they are actually demanded by the Bible. I have long noted how some preachers are able to spout utter nonsense and be hailed by most of a congregation as inspired, and I suppose one need look no further than Adolf Hitler for confirmation. For the undiscerning, style always trumps substance.
Once limited powers of critical appraisal have been overcome, the tasty carrot on offer is guaranteed healing of all diseases, because look! It says right here in this verse that healing is in the atonement. The supporting evidence is either wonderful miracles that took place somewhere unnamed where he last preached, or prepared stooges leaping out of wheelchairs (at every venue) to inculcate faith, or if all else fails the old leg lengthening trick, which still excites as much credence, even after all these years, as sawing a lady in two would. With perfect health on offer, and the suggestion that anyone refusing such a miracle would be an unspiritual fool, who is going to resist?
The best thing is that no qualifications are required to get healed. The Holy Spirit is all in the special anointing of the preacher, and all the sick person has to do is trust God and make a positive confession. The video included a five-point set of conditions, the exact list of which I forget, but which include the positive confession that one is indeed healed, even in the face of no obvious immediate change, and persisting in that faith-based confession until the healing comes.
The trouble is that in most cases healing doesn’t come, ever, and so the video included sad cases of American believers driving around with illegally poor vision (believing their healing is on its way) and without car insurance, because the same preacher taught that insurance, like medicine, is of the devil, since it denies God’s promise of prosperity and protection. Unshakeable belief also accounts for those with such (pathological) faith dying in agony whilst believing they are healed. I once had hands laid on me (for a second non-blessing) by a Charismatic preacher who, a year later, died of oro-facial cancer in just such a misguided state of shunning all medical help. It’s a truly toxic belief.
John Collins pointed out a get-out followed by many such sufferers. Having poured damnation for years on those unbelievers who sought help from doctors, their symptoms became so bad that they themselves got medical treatment – and not only still believed for their miraculous healing, but somehow blanked or excused their recourse to Satan’s deceptive medical profession. The suppression of cognitive dissonance is an important truth even outside the genuine cultic situation: in less extreme Charismatic churches you will still hear people saying that though someone died of their diabetes, they nevertheless had inner healing through the gift of healing. But what Scripture says that only inner healing is in the atonement?
Perhaps the most instructive feature of the cult-healer account in the video is what happened to those who sought advice from the leader himself about their lack of healing. The main lesson is that the theology is never at fault, and neither is the Spirit-filled healer. Ergo, the victim’s ongoing problem is, most commonly, lack of faith (even though they have proved their faith by avoiding doctors for decades), or indwelling unconfessed sin, or being secretly unconverted, or (depending on whether the leader has a deliverance ministry or not) the presence of a demon of diabetes, or of unbelief, or if the healer happened to be Derek Prince, an ancestral demon of almost any nature. Whatever the case, the lack of healing is your fault, and by the time you have remembered and confessed all the sinful thoughts you had from age 3, or been through the mill of deliverance sessions, you’ll either have died (“Hallelujah! He’s now fully healed with the Lord!”) or have left the cult.
That last option, unfortunately, leaves the way open for a new generation to hear the teaching and begin the cycle again. I must mention here a minister I knew who picked up the healing-in-the-atonement positive-confession bug, but was sufficiently Christian to reject blaming those not healed – instead he blamed himself for lack of faith, which is of course potentially spiritual suicide. Yet even that, or private disillusion with the false theology, leaves the way open for a new generation to follow the same sad route. What’s really needed is public renunciation of false teaching.
Finally, in this survey of healing cults, the cycle continues by suppressing history. Bethel, for example, will laud the healing ministries of people like William Branham or Smith Wigglesworth, and carefully suppress any paper trail that might allow the examination of actual evidence. Wigglesworth, for example, famously cured a baby by throwing it at a wall – what a miracle, proving you can’t put God in a box! But nobody knows where, who, or with what result (putting the baby in a box, most likely), and neither do they care, because it’s simply a good story, told by hagiographic biographers and endlessly recycled.
Let me turn away from notorious healing cults to the more common Charismatic situation. The surprising thing is that exactly the same dynamics operate.
For a start, the history of the teaching is suppressed, so that in the unlikely event that the link back to John Wimber (Third wave Pentecostalism) or Dennis Bennett (Second wave Pentecostalism) are known, nobody will remember that both had their roots in William Branham’s Message Cult. “The Vineyard” was an offshoot of The Message, and took on board the Kansas City Prophets led by Paul Cain, who had been Branham’s right hand man. Dennis Bennett’s books say he was baptised in the Spirit and received the gift of tongues “as a real language with grammar and syntax” with a few friends at home. In fact, he received the usual asyntactic glossolalia through the ministry of members of the Full Gospel Businessmen in California, whose origins are also closely tied up with William Branham. If those heterodox origins were known, folks might be a little more discerning about the Charismatic movement.
Usually the people preaching baptism in the Spirit, tongues and other sign gifts read it into any Bible passages used, rather than out of them. Their enthusiasm stems from claimed personal experience, which makes for an emotional, rather than a discriminating, response. And like the fake healers, they will insist that the only possible reason to fail to seek such blessing is that something is spiritually wrong with you, probably fear of change or legalism. What’s more, you clearly don’t want to serve the Lord in his power, and neither does your church if it rejects the teaching and guarantees it will never achieve the wonders a Spirit-filled church can do.
I mentioned at the beginning some individual instances of non-supernatural Charismatic ministry. But quiet people like my wife, or the other lady I cited, were, at first, unlikely to stand up and say “That man pushed me,” or “I only fell over to be like the others,” because in that setting it is more natural to believe that you are the unspiritual one. And in later life, once a better theology has been internalised, it’s still not easy to stand up in an emotional service or church meeting and say, “Don’t believe this tosh, folks – I was stung by it years ago!”
“But why am I still waiting to experience this wonderful baptism, and to speak in tongues, after going forward at every service, travelling to hear famous prophets, and spending hours in prayer every day,” many will say. If you’ve been around for any length of time, you will already know the answer – lack of faith, unconfessed sin, not being truly converted or – worst case – a demon or two. It’s never a problem with a theology that urges us to seek an experience we’re not told to seek by the Bible (because all Christians are indwelt by the Spirit, contra David Pawson), or to twist God’s arm for gifts which, Scripture says, he distributes according to his will to build up the body, not to give us supernatural dopamine hits or evidence we are saved.
And so the acid continues to eat away at Evangelical roots. It’s not just that mature church members, who gave up on Pentecostal theology half a century ago, are wrong-footed by young people presenting it as a new thing promising world revival. It is also that extreme (even cultic) Pentecostalism has captured the worship music of today, as I have described at length previously, and so we sing Pentecostal theology even when it is not taught from the pulpit. Furthermore, the main evangelistic tool now is the Alpha Course, which gives a whole weekend over to a Pentecostal “encounter” with the Holy Spirit, spreading a theology that arose directly from HTB’s flirtation with the Toronto Blessing, the Kansas City Prophets and John Wimber, deriving directly from William Branham’s teaching. Hence today’s new disciples were actually converted into Pentecostalism, and have never even heard biblical teaching on the Spirit that refutes it. So it’s scarcely surprising that Evangelical churches, that neglect to teach the rich Reformed doctrine of the Holy Spirit and only have the Pentecostal view to model, have ended up where they are.
Given the similarities between the cults and the Charismatic Evangelicalism I have demonstrated here, and given the the historical roots of the latter in the former, it’s also unsurprising that today’s Evangelicals look with envy at the Megachurches which are closest to the extreme origins of the teaching in the likes of William Branham.
He is our true spiritual father, even where his name is unknown… which should be a matter of great concern.
