Standing Strong by John MacArthur Jr

Author:John MacArthur, Jr.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: God, Christian, Grace to You, John MacArthur, Standing Strong, spiritual warfare
Publisher: David C. Cook
Published: 2012-06-03T16:00:00+00:00

Note

1 Peter Masters, The Healing Epidemic (London: The Wakeman Trust, 1988), 15–16.

8

FAITH: OUR DEFENSE SHIELD

A number of years ago, Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, offered a course called MC510: the Miraculous and Church Growth. At the conclusion of each lecture, laboratory sessions were held to do such things as cast out demons and heal people. The purpose of that activity was to enable students to discover what miraculous gifts they had supposedly been given.

The course, which was both the most popular and the most disruptive course on campus, is now defunct. Several of the theological faculty raised questions about what was going on in the classroom. That protest resulted in a moratorium on the course, and the school’s president then ordered a faculty task force to study the biblical, theological, and psychological impact of the course on the curriculum. The ensuing published report concluded that a course on signs and wonders was not appropriate for a theological curriculum. Here are a few of the faculty’s wise objections to the course:

New secularism. [A] strong emphasis on the miraculous, stressing that God is peculiarly present in this, as distinct from natural healings, borders dangerously on an unbiblical dualism. Another version of the old “God of the gaps” dichotomy is set up in which God is at work in the extraordinary and the supernatural—but not in the ordinary and everyday.

Exclusivity. The so-called power encounter of signs and wonders was being claimed as the norm for truly biblical evangelism. The implicit, and sometimes explicit, judgment is that others have been and are doing the work of God in their own strength. Thus the great lights of the church—Augustine of Hippo, Luther, Calvin, Pascal, Jonathan Edwards, John Wesley—seem pretty dim, for the [miraculous] brand of unction was absent from their ministries.

Christian magic. Faculty were concerned that the approach to the miraculous tended to be formulaic, especially in the “deliverance” ministries, in which persons supposedly oppressed by demonic powers are set free. Some … students stressed saying the right words or going through a list of demons’ names so as to find the specific one involved in the oppression. You go down the list until one name strikes home. This approach assumes an ipso facto God who can be coerced to do our bidding; if we do this, then he must do that.

Privatism. When the charismatic is pushed to the front of Christian experience, the ethical tends to take a back seat. It seems those most preoccupied with physical health and demonic realities tend to be the least concerned in confronting these issues. But the ultimate goal of the Christian life is the fruit, not the gifts, of the Spirit.…

Failures. What do you do with the people who are not healed? This question was foremost in the minds of many of the faculty. Did Satan win one? If so, then Satan holds a commanding lead in the game, because the majority of people who are prayed for do not, in fact, get well physically.

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