In my reply to Steve’s comment on my most recent post, I explain why I’m concerned about the doctrinal errors of even moderate Charismatics. Essentially, my point is that Satan uses apparently small deviations to corrupt entire churches, because contrary to the Hypercharismatics’ advice to “eat the meat and spit out the bones,” discernment is a gift that many immature believers, and not a few mature ones, do not possess.
The biblical pattern is for leaders to exclude the bones before the saints break their teeth on them, because, as Paul reminds the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians 5:6-8, we are not talking about easily separable errors, but about leaven that corrupts the whole lump. His direct reference is to the non-discipline of sexual sin, but the same applies to every matter he wants to correct in Corinth – including, of course, their misuse of spiritual gifts and misunderstanding of the Holy Spirit.
The same responsibility for leaders to be vigilant over false teaching is seen throughout the New Testament, such as in Paul’s letters to Timothy and Titus, and in John’s second letter, where the Elder urges that false teachers should not even be allowed into the house (probably meaning “house-church”).
This last example brings me to my hot-off-the-press anecdote about truth mixed with error. I started off my working day (after mending our battery lantern, but you don’t want to know that) by clicking on a nerdy theological video YouTube offered me. In this, three textual scholars listen to the thesis of a fourth about the introduction to 2 John. He argues that the letter is addressed not to “the elect lady” (a metaphor for a whole church) as most translations suggest, but to an actual woman named “Eclecte,” or “Chosen.”
I like this kind of discussion firstly because I love to know what the Bible actually says, and because such detailed corrections make a great difference to the way we read the texts. In this case, accepting the addressee as a woman tells us a lot about the role of women in the New Testament Church, for she appears to host an assembly in her home, and has the authority to screen the teachers admitted to it. Furthermore, it is at least an even probability that “her children” are not merely her biological offspring, but her church members as children in the Lord. Note that this personal reading makes individual leaders, not the “children,” the main gatekeepers of sound teaching.
Anyway, in a video nearly an hour long, the scholar’s case was excellently presented through discussion of the grammar, the manuscript and patristic evidence, the evidence for the existence of such a Greek name as “Eclecte,” and so on. In other words, it was top notch biblical scholarship, which I found entirely persuasive.
Only in the last five minutes or so did a joke by one of the participants lead to the mention of the leadership of a Relief Fund being delegated to a woman by Joseph Smith, and it became obvious that this scholarly discussion was actually being conducted by Mormons.
Now, I think I’m safe in assuming that the vast majority of my readers would regard the Church of Latter Day Saints as falling outside the perimeter of what they would accept as “Christian,” in the sense of regarding Mormons as brethren in the Lord. Their doctrine, not least of the Person of Jesus, is just too heterodox for us to invite the be-suited missionaries on the doorstep to address our house-group, or to suggest to a new convert that they might either join the local Baptist church or the Mormon Temple.
That does not preclude my benefiting from Mormon scholarship (though it does make me wonder how they still believe in the Book of Mormon where all that textual evidence is lacking). But I’m a mature Christian with 60 years of experience in spiritual discernment. I was not ashamed to use the work of a Christadelphian Assyriologist for explaining Mesopotamian cosmology in one of my own books. And yet with all my experience it took me nearly an hour to spot that these guys were of another faith entirely, and that only because I recognised the significance of the name “Joseph Smith.”
I suppose it would be far-fetched to imagine that some innocent searcher after God would be so impressed at the brilliance of these New Testament scholars on YouTube that he sought out his nearest LDS centre. Neither do I have the least suspicion that there is any deceptive motive in their scholarship. But it does demonstrate that even gross error can have a very plausible face, though its beating heart is heterodox.
The searcher after God might well, though, find himself getting some apparently sound Bible teaching in a welcoming church. When the name “William Branham” was mentioned with approval, as “Joseph Smith” was in my video, and as Branham’s name is in Bethel and many other NAR churches, he would have no idea that he was being groomed to accept the leaven of that false prophet’s deception.
In the case of Bethel, such bait is deliberately put out as a matter of policy – Bill Johnson has said that the widespread distribution of their music is intended to get people in non-NAR churches singing today what they will believe tomorrow. And it works.
But even in the Megachurches (as Costi Hinn points out from personal experience of his uncle Benny), the leadership is a strange mixture of deliberate deception and belief in what they teach. Discredited prophets are rapidly reinstated because their “gifting” is thought to be essential to God’s Big Plan. Glitter or feathers are placed in the air-conditioning to engender faith that, this theology holds, will be sufficient to produce real miracles.
Elsewhere, though, false teaching is held, and propagated, in all sincerity from lack of discernment, group-think, worldly expectation, false interpretation of experience… in fact, from all the things that Paul perceived in Corinth and the other churches he sought to draw back to Scriptural purity.
I conclude that taking the biblical “leaven” parallel seriously trumps the Charismatic “Spit out the bones” policy. Shepherds are responsible for feeding their sheep on good pasture. As a farmer friend said to me, “Sheep are always looking for an excuse to die.”
One further point, tangentially related. Like most works of God through the Holy Spirit, the gift of discernment is given through the natural faculties of the spiritual man. Briefly, the more we are steeped in the knowledge of Scripture through the Spirit, the more alert we are to error, which is why heresies prey more on the immature (whilst being initiated by the self-conceited).
The particular irony of Charismatic theology is that it seeks to cut out the supposed weakness of human faculties by the direct inspiration of the Spirit. If this were true, then the more churches are “moving in the Spirit,” the greater convergence there will be on doctrine and practice. But in fact the opposite has been the case since the divisions of the early days of Pentecostalism, which pretty soon even generated a large Unitarian variant. Even the Charismatic movement in this country was marked from the start by disagreements, splits and changes of doctrine, as is documented in this useful article.
The reason is not hard to see: if you and I disagree about what the Bible teaches, we can hammer out the evidence (even using Mormon scholarship!), consult the tradition, or convene a Council. We can even agree to differ whilst remaining in fellowship, because we know the Spirit is working in vessels of clay.
But if I believe the Spirit has told me directly he has appointed me as the Apostle of the End Times Revival, and you believe the Spirit has told you something entirely incompatible with that, then the other must either be an enemy of God, or we must live out a theology where the Spirit is the author of divine disorder, and Paul is mistaken in 1 Corinthians 14:33. Neither situation is safe for sheep.
