A Short-Term Mission Trip to Nicaragua: Conclusion

 

The principle of the greatest good for the greatest number is one by which dictators can justify their cruelty. When the communists starved to death millions of Ukrainians, massacred thousands of Polish officers, murdered possibly twenty million Chinese, and slaughtered the Tibetans, they could justify themselves on the ground that the pleasure of future generations of communists would outweigh the temporary pain. Certainly no scientific observation can prove the contrary.  (Clark, "Ethics," ibid., p. 77).  Also online at "Ethics,"  Gordon H. Clark Foundation.

A Short-Term Mission Trip to Nicaragua:  Part 4

 

Around 1989 I was in my second year at Southeastern College of the Assemblies of God.  The chapel services that year began to promote a short-term mission trip to Nicaragua which was to be led by an Assemblies of God mission and professor at Southeastern, Rev. Ralph Leslie.  There was another professor on the trip, also a mature man, whose name I cannot recall.  The trip was to take place during spring break of that year as I remember.  I was able to raise funds from friends at the college and from members at my home church.

I was slightly older than most of the other students on the trip being 29 years old.  We were instructed to bring audio equipment for street preaching to help the Nicaraguan churches there in the Grande Campaña to be held all over the area of Managua.  No one should bring any equipment that would not be donated because in that country everything is viewed as community property.  As you know, Nicaragua is a communist country and most of the industry there is state owned and controlled.

Ronald Reagan’s second term of office as President of the United States ended in 1988.  George H. W. Bush, the former Vice President had just been elected as the new President of the United States of America.  So things were still tense after the Iran-Contra affair where Reagan had to apologize for subsidizing the Contras in Nicaragua without the authority of the Congress.  Feelings in Nicaragua among the general population were towards a communist nationalism and against the Contra rebels. 

In light of this, we were instructed not to discuss politics or anything remotely connected to politics while were there.  Of course, this was no problem for me because I didn’t speak much Spanish anyway.  I was to go into the mountains to a church in a remote area because I was one of the more mature students on the trip, or so they said.  The problem was that I had no interpreter.  Perhaps it was selfish of me, but I had envisioned being able to preach to the small church with an interpreter because that is what was implied in going on the trip in the first place.  So after several days, I finally was able to speak to Ralph Leslie and told him that I was not happy about not having an interpreter.  It was then agreed that I would be partnered with another student who spoke at least passable Spanish because he was of Hispanic background and his parents spoke fluent Spanish.

On the trip back to Managua I rode with the pastor of the church where I had been assigned.  We rode in the back of a small truck with dual rear tires.  There was a handrail running over the top of our heads, and there was fencing sides to the truck.  Before the truck made it to Managua it was crowded, and we were standing shoulder to shoulder with at least fifteen to twenty people on the back of the truck.

Later, we transferred to the back of a pickup truck, which I learned later was owned by a local church.  There were about eight to ten pastors riding in the back of the pickup, all of whom were Nicaraguan Assemblia de Dios ministers.  I had with me my preferred translation of the Bible, a King James Version with cross references in a small edition that I had purchased sometime after my joining the A/G church in Wauchula, Florida.  For some reason during the trip to Managua the driver stopped and we took a break on the side of the road near a sidewalk.  One of the older men in truck, who had gray facial hair, held up a pocket sized book and began speaking to me in Spanish.  I did not understand what he was talking about, as I don’t speak Spanish.  But suddenly I saw on the cover of the little hardback book the title, Manifiesto del Partido Comunista.

I saw that the pastor had a serious and intense look on his face.  I had an epiphany at that moment that he was testing me to see if I would make any anti-communist remarks so that I could be arrested and imprisoned.  We had been instructed not to mention that we as students were Americans, because in the minds of the Nicaraguans they too were Americans, albeit Americans Central America.  We were to them Norte Americanos.

I patiently waited for him to finish his lecture in Spanish.  After he finished, I held up my KJV Bible and gave him a look just as serious as he had given me.  I mustered up the best Spanish I could remember and told him, “No comprende.”  I should have said, “No comprendo.”  I wanted to say that I didn’t understand Spanish but I was actually saying that he didn’t understand.  I then said, “No Estados Unidos, no Nicaragua, pero la Palabra de Dios, la Sancta Biblia!”  After that, it got very quiet.  None of the other ministers said anything and the elder pastor said nothing else.  I had said what I said in a firm voice.  I was essentially saying I don’t agree with your communism.  I am here to preach God’s Word.  No one bothered bringing up the Communist Manifesto again after that.

Given the “holy boldness” of the moment, I am glad that I did not offend them to the point of being arrested.  For all I know, the pastor could have been an informant for the government. 

Later I was able to visit the home of a family that Rev. Leslie had known during his missionary years in Nicaragua.  Rev. Leslie’s daughter, Melinda, was there.  She spoke fluent Spanish because she had grown up in Nicaragua when her father was appointed there as a missionary.  There was a young man there around age 18 or 19 years old.  He had had one leg seriously injured as a soldier in the Nicaraguan army fighting against the Contras.  There was a military draft there at the time, so I was unsure if he supported the government or not.  But as the discussion via the translator went on I perceived that the majority of the Christians there were supportive of the communist government.  I later surmised that the Pentecostal churches in the communist countries were very much influenced by the Latin American Liberation Theology of the leftist progressives.

This was a sharp contrast to the prosperity gospel of the majority of Pentecostal/Charismatic megachurches with which I had been familiar.  It was troubling to me for at least two reasons.  First, I grew up very poor and was somewhat sympathetic to the poor and their unmet needs.  I opposed the false gospel of prosperity and the health and wealth movement.  On the other hand, I still believed in capitalism, freedom of speech, and the American view of the freedom of religion.  Communism by its very nature is based on materialistic atheism.  It seems to me that liberation theology is a this worldly natural religion, even a godless religion.  Liberation theology in its many forms is loosely based on the Bible but reinterprets the Scriptures in terms of a this worldly justice for the poor.  That I could and will never agree with.

May God have mercy.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

A Short-Term Mission Trip to Nicaragua: Part Three

 

“The critique of secular views continues to ethics. Here too, Clark contends, secular philosophy fails. He briefly dispatches Kantianism before addressing utilitarianism. As he has written elsewhere, a major problem is that the calculations required by utilitarianism are impossible. The ‘still greater difficulty’ in calculating the greatest good of the greatest number is establishing the normative proposition in the first place; why ought man to seek the greatest good for the greatest number? This cannot be established by observation. Referencing Hitler and Stalin, Clark writes, ‘The greatest good of the greatest number is a principle for tyrants.’ (p. 46) Among critiques of other philosophies, Clark writes that Existentialism fails of ‘establishing values or norms of conduct.’ (p. 53) Existentialism’s freedom of choice, he contends, ‘totally unrestricted, empties life of all meaning.’ (p. 54) Sartre ‘can command us to choose, as insistently as he wants, but he can give us no idea of what to choose.’ (p. 54) Secular ethics, Clark concludes, ‘do not justify a single norm of conduct.’ (p. 54).”  Doug Douma.  “GHC Review 17: The Philosophy of Gordon H. Clark.”  A Place for Thoughts Blog.  December 2, 2018.

 

A Short-Term Mission Trip to Nicaragua:  Part 3

 

Purposely, I did not go straight to the point in this article because I wanted to give some background.  My excursion into Pentecostalism was a good detour.  It was good because it showed me the shallow and vacuous nature of experientialism and existentialism.  As an avid reader and an interest I had in the supernatural and in psychology, I once bought a few books from the Psychology Today magazine.  Several of those articles had to do with Christian Science and the possibility of healing the body through self-affirming positive thinking.  Later, that knowledge proved helpful in my beginning to question what was being taught at my church, Forida’s First Assembly of God, Wauchula, Florida.  I neglected to mention in an earlier post that allegedly the first Assembly of God church in the entire state of Florida was established in Wauchula.  I do not know the dates, though.

At any rate, one of the assistant pastors at the church at that time was a disciple of Kenneth Hagin and the Word of Faith movement.  I had questions but due to peer pressure and not being informed enough to be able to refute the teaching or doctrine, I kept quiet.  I came from a poor background, so the prosperity gospel was both enticing and disturbing.  If true, it could get me out of living from paycheck to paycheck to having more financial security.  Fortunately, I was wise enough to see through it all.

After two years of being a new convert at my church, I felt the call to ministry.  The point of that decision came when Dr. James Hennessy came to preach at our church.  He was the president of Southeastern College of the Assemblies of God at that time.  As I mentioned in a previous post, Southeastern changed its name to Southeastern University to reflect a change to a liberal arts emphasis.  Southeastern is located in Lakeland, Florida.  I matriculated there in 1988.

There were several challenges at the college.  The first one is that I learned that the Word of Faith movement was actually based in Christian Science and New Thought.  The professor of New Testament theology at that time was Dr. Terris Neuman.  Neuman recommended that we read a book by D. R. McConnell titled, A Different Gospel.  (See:  Updated edition of 1994).  In that book, McConnell confirmed my suspicions that the Word of Faith movement was not Pentecostal at all.  Instead, it was rooted in Christian Science as taught by Mary Baker Eddy and New Thought as disseminated by Phineas P. Quimby.  The thesis of McConnell’s book was that Kenneth Hagin had plagiarized almost word for word the writings of E. W. Kenyon, a Baptist evangelist of the 1940s.  Kenyon had done studies in rhetoric and public speaking at Boston College in Massachusetts.  While there Kenyon adopted the Christian Science views being propagated there and incorporated them into his preaching.  Kenyon became a faith healer, though not necessarily a full blown Pentecostal.

The position of the most of the professors at Southeastern, who were mostly Pentecostal preachers with higher theological degrees, was classical Pentecostalism, not necessarily the more radical Charismatic views being taught in the third wave.  While I was a student, one of the megachurches in Lakeland split over this very issue.  At the time Jimmy Swaggart had not yet had a moral failure publicly.  Swaggart had been critical of the Charismatic movement, Jim and Tammy Bakker, and Karl Strader.  The Rev. Karl Strader, who is now deceased, was the pastor of Carpenter’s Home Church, Lakeland, Florida, which was a megachurch of over 2,000 members with a sanctuary that could seat 10,000.  Strader built his ministry on the Charismatic movement and the Word of Faith prosperity Gospel.  There was also a radio station called W.C.I.E. at FM 91.5.  The classical Pentecostals finally split and started King’s Way Assembly of God, now the largest A/G church in the area.  After a scandal a few years later, Carpenter’s Home Church lost most of its members and the radio station was sold to Moody Broadcasting.  Karl Strader’s son, Daniel Strader, went to prison for over 30 years.  The building itself was later bulldozed and no longer exists.

For a time, then I investigated alternatives to the prosperity gospel.  My faculty adviser at the time was Dr. Michael Dusing.  Dusing pushed a more leftist view of the Evangelicals for Social Action and other ministries for the poor.  Unfortunately, Dusing was also a proponent of a postmodernist view of truth because he still believed in the classical Pentecostal views on miracles, healing and supernatural Spirit empowered ministry as taught in classical Pentecostal theology.  Another emphasis of Pentecostal theology is what is called experiential exegesis.  Most of the professors at Southeastern, including the classical professors, was that the early Pentecostals interpreted Scripture according to their ecstatic experiences of speaking in glossolalia and experiencing supernatural miracles of healings, tongues and interpretation of tongues, etc.  Most of them believed in anywhere from seven to nine supernatural gifts which went beyond just the gift of teaching.

I have since that time totally rejected existentialism, experiential theology, and the entire Pentecostal/Charismatic movement.  I will save the reasons for that for a later post.  However, to get to the point of this series of posts and the title, I was impressed by the providence of God to go on a short-term mission trip to Nicaragua in 1989.  I will cover that in the next post, the Conclusion.  Stay tuned.

See:  Part 1, and Part 2.  Conclusion.

 

 

A Short-Term Mission Trip to Nicaragua: Part Two

 

“The first and basic point in a Christian philosophy of education, or a Christian philosophy of anything, is Biblical authority.  Just as Platonism is defined by what Plato wrote, and not by the decadent skeptical Academy of later years, so the ultimate definition of Christianit not the decadent confusion of the liberal churches, not the pronouncements of the Pope, not the inconsistent opinions of a so-called Christian community, as is so frequently asserted in ecumenical circles, but what is written in the Bible.  . . .”  Dr. Gordon H. Clark.  A Christian Philosophy of Education.  1946.  3^rd Ed.  (Trinity Foundation: Unicoi, 2000).  P. 86.

 

A Short-Term Mission Trip to Nicaragua:  Part 2

 

To avoid confusion, let me say upfront that I am no longer a Pentecostal, a Charismatic, or a continuationist.  I am a cessationist of the highest degree.  I totally repudiate the experiential theology of the classical Pentecostal movement, and I particularly dislike and reject the so-called third wave of the Pentecostal movement or the Charismatic movement.  My purpose in writing this article is to lay out the many reasons that I am no longer a Pentecostal.  I gave a brief testimonial of my first time going to church to show why I was early on influenced by the Pentecostal movement, as that is a major part of the Evangelical movement in the Bible belt South.  Fortunately, I would later learn that there were other options, particularly the Presbyterian churches.

Following my family history, it came to pass that my father lost his job at Friedman’s Jewelry Store as a watch and jewelry repairman because of the Timex watch and other modern innovations.  Our family had now grown to seven children.  I have three younger sisters and three younger brothers, being the eldest of the seven.  My father took new employment in central Florida working in the phosphate mines in Polk County.  Unfortunately, only a few years after moving to Florida, he was killed in a car crash south bound on U.S. 17 just north of the Hardee County line.

My mother was left as a widow with seven children, and I was only 12 and in the 6^th grade at the time.  Fortunately, I had visited a Presbyterian church in Wauchula, Florida several times with our neighbors in Wauchula, Florida a year or two before moving to my hometown of Bowling Green, Florida.  It was there that I began to read about Calvinism and double predestination in the Encyclopedia Britannica that my father had purchased in Alabama before we moved to Florida.  Say what you will, but in the days prior to the internet the Encyclopedia Britannica was full of useful information. I followed the chain index and read about infralapsarianism and supralapsarianism; I read about the Synod of Dort and the Arminian Remonstrance, all at an early age.

Unfortunately, in Bowling Green there was no Presbyterian church.  The church I had attended in Wauchula was formerly part of the Presbyterian Church in the United States or PCUS.  But there was a controversy over the ordination of women as teaching elders in the early 1970s.  The pastor and the congregation of First Presbyterian Church voted to leave the PCUS and join with the new formed Presbyterian Church in America or PCA.  I was too young at the time to understand all the issues.  However, it left an indelible mark on my memories.  I later learned that Pastor Thoms had given up his retirement and other benefits because of his commitment to biblical truth.

Moving on to the story, my mother became an alcoholic a few years after my father passed away.  She did not attend church and did not profess to be a Christian.  I was left to care for my siblings, along with my two oldest sisters.  As time went on and in high school, I became involved with smoking marijuana and experimenting with other drugs.  I was not serving the Lord during this time.

Without airing too much dirty laundry let me say that I am not proud of that period of my life.  After high school this pattern continued.  At one point I almost dropped out of high school, but my mother and a few friends encouraged me to go back and graduate, which I did.  I opted not to go to college.  Instead, one of my mother’s many boyfriends after my father’s death helped me to get a job working at a phosphate mine in Brewster, Florida. 

After only a few years, that was not working out.  I started out working hard labor on the section crew, a crew of railroad maintenance workers which maintained about 11 miles of railroad tracks between the Fort Lonesome mine and the Brewster mine.  I bid on a dragline oiler job and went from working all day shift to working a rotating shift.  I got along well with my operator at first.  He even let me learn to swing and dig with the huge machine with the 45 cubic yard bucket.

As time went on, however, we had a falling out because I was caught sleeping on the job.  I left and joined the U.S. Navy for almost two years.  At that point, things did not work out for me, and I was given an honorable discharge because I was not suitable for military service.  I returned to work at the Brewster mine because I was a member of the union.  While I was gone, one of the foremen on the section crew had become a Christian.  He was a black man named Sam Johnson.  I later learned that he was illiterate.  He could not read or write.   However, he knew the Bible backwards and forwards.  He carried a Gideon’s pocket New Testament with the Psalms in the King James Version.  What a coincidence that was.  During break times he would witness to me.  He did so by handing me the Gideon’s New Testament and asking me to read a passage.  After I read it, he would then explain it to me, most likely as he had been taught by his pastor or someone in the Sunday school class at Mount Olive Missionary Baptist Church in Bradley Junction, just down the road from Brewster.

This was the beginning of a renewal of my Christian faith.  After a few more hardships, I began attending First Assembly of God, Wauchula, Florida.  I gave up my drug use and turned fully to God.

Here ends Part 2 of my story about my Christian faith and my short-term mission trip to Nicaragua in 1989.  Please read my next post tomorrow.

 

You can read Part 1 of my series here:  A Short-Term Mission Trip to Nicaragua:  Part 1

Part 3

A Short-Term Mission Trip to Nicaragua: Part One

 

"Some suggest that North American Pentecostalism represents an anti-cultural posture arising from an experience of deprivation or marginalization from mainstream culture.1 One response to cultural marginalization is the adoption of conservative politics and the materialistic values of consumer culture. A sense of disenfranchisement often leads to withdrawal from society or to a spiritual triumphalism.2 On the other hand, there are those who argue that Pentecostalism outside North America is developing a “theology of liberation” in response to social issues.3 The latter are described as “progressive Pentecostals” who engage issues of poverty, inequality, and ecology.4 The focus of these Pentecostals, however, is primarily on Africa, Asia, and Latin America, with little discussion about North America."   Paul Wilkinson.  "A Liberating Spirit:  Liberation Theology and the Pentecostal Movement."  The Ecumenist:  A Journal of Theology, Culture, and Society.  Vol. 4.  No. 4.  Fall, 2008.

A Short-Term Mission Trip to Nicaragua:  Part 1

 

Around 1986 I became a member of First Assembly of God, Wauchula, Florida.  I had been away from God for many years without attending any church on a regular basis.  My earliest memory of attending church, however, was when I was around 8 or 9 years old.  At that time my father was working as a watch and jewelry repairman at Friedman’s Jewelry Store in Anniston, Alabama.  Memories fade over time.  All I can remember is that I, being the eldest child of the family, and my next oldest sibling, Ann, was invited to church by a lady who lived several blocks away from our house on 1216 Jacksonville Street, Weaver, Alabama.  My parents made us children memorize our address and phone number in case we ever got lost or kidnapped.

Anyway, getting back to the story, the lady down the street, was the mother of a girl who rode our school bus.  The girl’s name was Tanya.  The church to which Ann and I were invited was next door to where Tanya and her mother lived.  I had never been to church in my life, but my mother agreed to allow us to go if Tanya’s mother would pick us up.  All I can remember is that Tanya’s mother drove a pretty light blue Ford Thunderbird, probably a 1964 or 1965 model.  Of course, at that time I had no idea about makes and models of cars.  I figured this out years later.

I can vaguely remember seeing on the church sign the name of the church, which was Church of God.   As I said earlier, I had no idea about church denominations at that time, because I was too young.  It turned out as I figured out years later that this particular Church of God was a Pentecostal church and part of the Church of God, Cleveland, Tennessee.  People like to joke about snake handlers and such, but this particular denomination did not and does not handle rattlesnakes, thanks be to God.

As the good Lord would have it, I had some familiarity with the Bible and had read portions of the King James Version New Testament and Psalms.  The Gideons were at that time still allowed to hand out pocket editions of the New Testament and Psalms at the beginning of every school year.  I got my first Gideon’s pocket New Testament and Psalm when I began first grade in Savannah, Georgia.  Shortly after that, we moved to Anniston, Alabama and then Weaver, near Fort McClellan.  I was forced to stop the first grade in Weaver because my birthday was too early in the year.  My mother had to re-register me the next year.

That Sunday morning, my first time ever attending a church service, must have been when I was in third grade or so.  The music was upbeat and we sang from a hymnbook published by the Church of God.  I can remember getting up early on Sunday morning in those years.  The TV we had was a black and white cathode ray tube television.  There were only two or three TV stations we could get and all of them played Gospel quartet groups or Pentecostal or Baptist church services.  The Gospel quartets sang southern Gospel songs, which at the time didn’t interest me that much.

At any rate, when the preacher began to preach, he preached in a singsong fashion, his voice rising and falling in volume and holding a certain cadence.  Later in seminary I learned that this Pentecostal style of preaching originated with black slave preachers who could not read or write.  The slave preacher would have another slave read a portion of Scripture.  The other slave who could read would most likely be a house slave who was taught to read the Bible.  Slave owners, contrary to modern propaganda, did want their slaves to be evangelized as Christians because good virtues and morality come from the moral law of God as it is recorded in the Decalogue or Ten Commandments.  The Pentecostal revival itself began in Los Angeles, California around 1906 when a black holiness preacher named William J. Seymour started a church in an old stable.  The Azusa Street Mission sparked a worldwide Pentecostal revival.  The black tradition of preaching in ways that could be easily understood by illiterate and poorly educated individuals apparently caught on.  To this day most classical Pentecostal churches still preach this way.

I digress too much.  Getting back to the story, that white Pentecostal preacher began to talk about how sinful and rebellious most people are.  He focused on the penalty of sin and how living an immoral life would send you to hell.  Most of the sermon was focused on the law of God and how those who broke God’s commandments were on the road to a terrible place of fire and brimstone.  As the preacher worked himself up, he began to shout louder and louder until every few minutes sweat would break out on his face.  He began to pace back and forth on the small platform.  It was not a large building, and the congregation could not have been more than 20 or 30 persons in all.  I remember the congregation began to shout in agreement with the pastor’s sermon, “Amen, brother!”  And, “Halleluia!  Glory to God!  Thank-you, Jesus!  Preach it, brother!”  The preacher brought out a white handkerchief and waved it around above his head as he preached.  Every now and then he would mop the sweat off his face with it and continue to shout and pace.

The congregation stood up and raised their hands above their heads, shouting in agreement at certain points in the sermon.  Then I noticed that some of them were chanting and singing in some sort of language that I did not understand.  Just prior to the sermon when the minister had accepted prayer requests, the entire congregation began praying together out loud and in these unknown tongues.  It sounded like a cacophony of voices all speaking at once.  This was supposed to represent what had happened on the day of Pentecost in Acts chapter 2.

I later learned that the Church of God and the Assemblies of God differed on this particular practice of praying out loud all at once.  Be that as it may, I do believe that the Church of God still practices this in the smaller rural churches and even in some of the larger classical Pentecostal churches.

I remember feeling moved by the message that the minister was preaching because I had read enough of the four gospels to know that there was a heaven and a hell.  I knew that hell was a terrible place of darkness and flames, weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.  But toward the end of the sermon the minister sudden got quieter.  He began to talk about a solution to sin and how our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ had died on the cross and shed His precious blood for sinners like me.  The minister invited everyone to come to the altar or platform and kneel for prayer and to pray for their salvation.  I did not understand much at the time, but I knew enough to know that without Jesus I would be lost and on my way to hell.  So I went forward to be saved.  I knelt with my head bowed and my eyes closed as I held my two hands together in prayer.  I remember that the preacher came down the line praying for sinners and for others to be healed of their sicknesses.  As he came to me, he laid his hands on my head and began to pray in English and in tongues.  I cannot remember exactly what he said.  However, I do remember that it had something to do with praying that God would guide me in my life and lead me to everlasting life.  I felt a chill go from the top of my head to the bottom of my feet as he prayed for me.  After the prayer line was over, the minister invited those who had accepted Christ as their personal Savior to be baptized.  He said that they should speak with him later after the service.

I went home from church that Sunday forever imprinted with the Gospel message.  I asked my mother if I could be baptized, to which she responded that I was not old enough to understand that decision.  I remember begging my father and mother to go to church with us, but they refused.  They both got really angry at times and cursed and took God’s name in vain a lot.  Both of my parents were also smokers.  Although I did not know it at the time, the Church of God, being an offshoot of the Wesleyan holiness movement, preached against smoking cigarettes as a sinful habit.  The holiness churches also emphasized that women should not dress like harlots by wearing too much makeup and jewelry or short dresses.  The women at that time wore their hair long but put it up in buns on the top of their heads, because it was seen as too erotic to let their hair down.  Women were not supposed to cut their hair, while the men were supposed to wear their hair short. 

I cannot say that my life overall changed that much.  However, I was always conscious about cursing.  God was continually on my mind.  I would look up at the stars at night and wonder where all of creation came from.

You are probably wondering what on earth all of this has to do with a short-term mission trip to Nicaragua?  I will get back to that later.  As you can see from the quote above, I am interested in the so-called progressive or liberation movement.  I wanted to share my first encounter with Pentecostalism and how that led up to a mission trip to Nicaragua in April of 1989.  I was at that time a student at Southeastern College of the Assemblies of God, Lakeland, Florida.  The school has since changed its name to Southeastern University to reflect a change from a ministerial college to a liberal arts college.

My story is complicated.  It will take several posts to lay out the groundwork for this series of posts, so please be patient.  I will be writing more in the coming days to reflect on my views on poverty, humble beginnings, and what the biblical focus of Gospel evangelism should be.

Stay Tuned for Part 2

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The Bible and the Bible alone is the word of God.  2 Timothy 3:16

I'm not an expert in making and uploading videos.  However, this is my first video uploaded to the Reasonable Christian channel in YouTube:  Reasonable Christian Apologetics channel.

Is the Doctrine of Common Grace Biblical or Confessional?

 

Is the Doctrine of Common Grace Biblical or Confessional?

 

“To the reprobate the preaching of the gospel is no favor because as it increases their knowledge, it increases their responsibility and condemnation. Better if they had never heard the gospel. One can reply, nonetheless, that in some cases the preaching of the gospel may restrain an evil man from some of his evil ways. Since therefore sins are not all equal, and since some are punished with many stripes, but others with few, the preaching of the gospel results in the lessening of the punishment. Thus preaching would be a small favor, a modicum of grace. We note it and pass on.”  Dr. Gordon H. Clark  (See:  A Place for Thoughts:  Gordon Clark on “Common Grace,” by Doug Douma).

 

To discuss the issue of the reputedly “reformed” doctrine of common grace is a convoluted and complicated matter.  Often it is hard for the layperson to understand exactly what the controversy is about.  Basically, it comes down to a controversial doctrinal statement issued by the Christian Reformed Church in 1924 at Kalamazoo, Michigan.  That document outlined what is identified as the Three Points of Common Grace.  You can access a direct quote of the three points and subsequent critique of the three points at the Protestant Reformed Churches in America website here:  The Three Points of Common Grace.

The first thing I would like to point out is that common grace often is used to justify accommodation with Arminianism, and worse, liberal theology.  The point of compromise here is that even theological liberals and other reprobate persons allegedly can do civil good by practicing the discipline of liberal scholarship.  But, this is hard to understand because the agenda of theological liberals and other ungodly scholars is to undermine the Bible, not to support it as special revelation from God.  A good example of this is the apostasy of Bart Ehrman, who attended Princeton Theological Seminary in order to study textual criticism.  Ehrman was once an Evangelical Christian who attended Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, Illinois.  Being weak in his faith, he decided that the Bible could not be trusted because of the many errors in the extant Greek manuscripts of the New Testament.  The Evangelical position is that God has providentially preserved what was contained in the original autographs, even though the originals are no longer extant.

This is a significant issue because if we no longer have the original autographs, then logically speaking none of the extant manuscripts are without error or infallible.  Using the axioms or principles of reasoned eclecticism, the Bible is alleged to be a reconstruction of the original autographs and only in that sense can any modern translation of the Bible be considered infallible or inerrant.  Any apparent errors are to be attributed to the translation from the original languages or to errors in transmission of the original Greek or Hebrew manuscripts which are only preserved in copies of the copies passed down through hundreds and thousands of years.  The debate then degenerates into which manuscripts are best and who has the logical upper hand in making those determinations?  In short, the science of textual criticism is alleged to be a part of the common grace of God since many of the men who invented the basic principles of the science were either part of the Renaissance or the Enlightenment.  From there we get the 19^th century scholars of Westcott and Hort, who then influenced subsequent schools of textual criticism that went in other directions.

One of the opponents of the reasoned eclecticism approach to textual criticism used to be part of the reasoned eclecticism approach.  His name is Maurice Robinson.  His main objection to that approach is that the reasoned eclecticism approach often creates verses by splicing together fragments and variants to create verses that do not exist in any extant manuscripts whatsoever. 

Another issue with common grace is the third point mentioned above that the reprobate can do civic good.  Theological liberals prior to the first world war were optimistic that the entire world could be harmonized into a peaceful global community.  Where have we heard that one before?  After WWI, that optimism changed to pessimism.  Now, apparently, the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction.  Part of the blame for this would be the theology of Abraham Kuyper, the Dutch Reformed theologian turned politician.  Kuyper gave his Stone Lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary in 1898.  The vast majority of modern Reformed denominations support the compromised theology of the Three Points of Common Grace.  This compromise can be traced all the way back to the Stone Lectures.  It could even be argued that the Stone Lectures were the genetic cause of the eventual fall of the Presbyterian Church in the United States into apostasy.  The Old Princeton stalwarts became infatuated with creating a Calvinist cultural reformation worldwide such that eventually the emphasis on solid biblical and systematic theology fell to the wayside in order to facilitate missions and evangelism at the cost of special revelation and biblical truth.  

Even otherwise solid theologians like Benjamin B. Warfield and Charles Hodge were caught up in theological compromise.  Warfield advocated for reasoned eclecticism and the Westcott and Hort approach to New Testament textual criticism, while Hodge fell to the compromise that Christ in some sense died not only for the elect, but also for the reprobate.  Hodge’s reasoning was that common grace was somehow purchased on the cross for the entire world, not just for the irresistible grace and the efficacious atonement which propitiated the wrath of God against the elect.

A postmillennialist view of reforming the culture seems to lead inevitably towards an overly optimistic agenda to transform the culture.  I would contend that this naivete has led to accommodation to culture instead of a prophetic calling out of the culture, which is in manifold rebellion against the moral law of God as summarized in the Decalogue or Ten Commandments.  A further problem with this is that this postmillennialism is combined with a theonomic view of evangelization and mission, which leads to a co-belligerent cooperation with papists, Arminians, Lutherans and various other opponents of a Reformed worldview.  As the saying goes, a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump. 

While it is true that Old Princeton was for a time a bastion of conservative and reformed theology, a small compromise leads to later generations which compromise a little more, and so on until three or four generations later there is a major compromise that leads to apostasy.  It was only a period of forty years or so until the 1940s when the foreign mission board of the Presbyterian Church of the United States went in a completely liberal direction, and J. Gresham Machen and his followers were forced out of the PCUS for refusing to support the foreign mission board.  Machen, along with Gordon H. Clark, Cornelius Van Til and others helped to found Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  Unfortunately, Van Til, Ned Stonehouse, and John Murray decided to oppose Dr. Gordon H. Clark’s ordination with the newly formed Orthodox Presbyterian Church because of Clark’s disagreement with common grace, the free offer of the Gospel, and the well meant offer of the Gospel. Van Til, Stonehouse, and Murray rejected propositional revelation as the basis for systematic theology.  They redefined Francis Turretin’s doctrine of archetypal and ectypal knowledge so that they unwittingly affirmed some aspects of neo-orthodoxy.  Their emphasis on an analogical system of theology in the Westminster Standards went well beyond the traditional view of Scripture as the analogy of faith, meaning that Scripture interprets Scripture.  Van Til said that all Scripture is apparently contradictory.  Gordon Clark’s response to this in an audio lecture cuts to the heart of the issue:

What are we to make of his statement that “all teaching of Scripture is apparently contradictory?” Now, Van Til said omnipotence is not self-contradictory, but creation and responsibility are contradictory. And, also, he said all teaching of scripture is apparently contradictory. Which would of course include the idea of omnipotence.  …

I might say that the statement “David was King of Israel” is not apparently contradictory to me. 

[Audio Transcript:  (From the Gordon Conwell Lectures on Apologetics, 1981.)  “John Frame and Cornelius Van Til.”  P. 11.  Posted at:  The Gordon H. Clark Foundation.]

I would contend that the doctrine of common grace is a contradiction of the biblical doctrine of divine sovereignty by implication.  The implication of the doctrine is that God gives a non-salvific grace to those whom He has decreed to reprobation before the foundation of the world.  This is a mere charade if it is intended to solve the problem of evil.  For billions of human beings of all ages suffer the effects of the fall of Adam, yet God does not relieve their suffering.  So, this would contradict the proponents of common grace who misuse the doctrine of providence to show that God loves the reprobate.  (Matthew 5:43-48 KJV).  But, David, says that we should hate those who blaspheme God:

Surely thou wilt slay the wicked, O God: depart from me therefore, ye bloody men. 20 For they speak against thee wickedly, and thine enemies take thy name in vain. 21 Do not I hate them, O LORD, that hate thee? and am not I grieved with those that rise up against thee? 22 I hate them with perfect hatred: I count them mine enemies. 23 Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: 24 And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting. (Ps. 139:19-24 KJV)

I would contend that it is extremely naïve to promote common grace as any kind of good whatsoever.  The Protestant Reformed Churches in America have rightly pointed out that this doctrine leads to Arminianism and Pelagianism.  It looks the other way when the Bible specifically says that the wicked are the enemies of God:

The foolish shall not stand in thy sight: thou hatest all workers of iniquity. 6 Thou shalt destroy them that speak leasing: the LORD will abhor the bloody and deceitful man. (Ps. 5:5-6 KJV)

The LORD trieth the righteous: but the wicked and him that loveth violence his soul hateth. (Ps. 11:5 KJV)

 As it is written, Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated. (Rom. 9:13 KJV)