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.