Truth Magazine

By Larry Ray Hafley

By now everyone has heard about the neutered Bible. God is not to be referred to as our “Father.” He is now our heavenly Parent. Jesus is the “child of God,” not the Son of God. (So, we must, I suppose, be baptized in the name of the Parent, the Sibling and the Holy it.) It is high profanity. It was bound to happen. If God is nothing but a nebulous force or unexplained power, why call him a person? If God is simply and merely a word used to sum up what cannot be known, why refer to him by gender? If the Bible is only a collation and collection of the “superstitious fables of an ancient people,” why accept its gender designations?

Actually, gender arguments are not the issue. The issue is one of truth and faith. What has to be established is the existence and nature of Deity, the Godhead. Also, the nature of man has to be resolved. Is man a mass of quivering protoplasm – that, and nothing more? What must be seen is the veracity, integrity and authenticity of the Bible. If a personal God exists, has He revealed Himself to His creation? If so, is the Bible that means of revelation and communication? Was God “manifested in the flesh”? Is man lost in sin? Is he accountable to his Creator? Is Jesus his Savior? Settle these matters and the gender question will not be raised. Unbelief manufactures issues that are the symptoms, not the disease. Our response must be to treat the malady, not the reaction.

Still, I feel like taking the neuterers out in the street so I can hit them over the head with a person hole cover!

Oral Profanity

Truly, profane language is rampant. It taints and stains the conversation of our society. Mouths have become dirty as a drain. Unless you are a monk or a hermit, I do not need to elaborate. Verbal profanity comes from the heart’s depravity. “O generation of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good things? For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh. A good man out of the good treasure of the heart bringeth forth good things: and an evil man out of the evil treasure bringeth forth evil things” (Matt. 12:34, 35). Purity of mind precedes purity of mouth. Therefore, “Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life” (Prov. 4:23).

Profanity reveals a lack of self-control. It is the essence of selfishness, the offspring of anger, the vile repudiation of decency. Profanity shows the leaven, the influence of the world upon us. Hence, we must teach and practice temperance and be aware of the danger of conformity to the world. Parents, are you setting a good example? Are you instructing your children in righteousness and true holiness? The consequences of your failure to do so are eternal.

Guardian of Truth XXXI: 13, p. 404
July 2, 1987

By Daniel W. Petty

Robert Schuller was born in 1926 in northwestern Iowa, and belonged to the stock of Dutch immigrants who were attracted there in the late nineteenth century by the soil and by the opportunity to practice their Calvinistic faith without state interference. The Schuller family was part of the Reformed Church in America (Dutch Reformed), which holds to a staunchly orthodox interpretation of Calvinist theology, epitomized by the acronym T.U.L.I.P. total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and perseverance of the saints. The emphasis is strongly upon divine sovereignty and grace vs. human autonomy and efficacy.

Young Robert was nurtured on this doctrine, and in 1947, he graduated from Hope College in Holland, Michigan, a school affiliated with the RCA. Upon graduation from Hope, he entered Western Theological Seminary, just across the street, and also a theologically conservative RCA school. His B. D. thesis was a 285-page scriptural and topical index to Calvin’s Institutes.

In 1955, Schuller accepted the task of organizing a new church in Garden Grove, California. The Garden Grove Community Church began as Schuller started preaching from the tar-paper roof of a drive-in theater snack bar. The “drive-in church” concept was never dropped, even when modern buildings were later erected. The first “great glass cathedral,” complete with drive-in parking and equipped with hi-fi speakers, was finished in 1961. In 1980, the new $20 million Crystal Cathedral was completed, with an interior seating capacity of 3000, plus many more from cars parked outside.

The services of Schuller’s church are broadcast on the “Hour of Power,” a TV program with an audience of more than 500,000 viewers. The program began in 1970, and is part of the Robert Schuller Televangelism Association, Inc. Schuller is the only major TV evangelist within mainline Protestantism.

His TV work has been inspired by Bishop Fulton Sheen, while his message has been at least partly inspired by Norman Vincent Peale, who was Schuller’s guest speaker on more than one occasion. Schuller emphasizes “possibility thinking” and “self-esteem” – messages intended to reach the unchurched. In Self-Esteem: The New Reformation, the Fall of Man and original sin are interpreted as the loss of self-esteem and a consequent inferiority complex. Redemption is preached as the restoration of self-esteem.

For further reading on Robert Schuller, a good biography has been written: Dennis Voskuil, Mountains Into Goldmines: Robert Schuller and the Gospel of Success (Eerdmans, 1983).

Guardian of Truth XXXI: 12, p. 376
June 18, 1987

By Steve Wolfgang

Second in prominence and influence only to Billy Graham, Oral Roberts has had a major impact upon the American religious scene over the past forty years. At least two factors contributed to Roberts’ prominence. First, he was and is the most recognizable “leading light” among the Pentecostal, neo-Pentecostal, and charismatic movements – numerically and dynamically the most amazing international religious phenomenon of the modern age. Second, Roberts (as much or more than anyone else) is responsible for pioneering the mass media evangelism which has spawned the electronic church addressed in these articles.

Born in Pontotoc County, Oklahoma on January 24, 1918, only a few years after it had made the transition Indian Territory to statehood, Roberts has remained proud of his Cherokee heritage. Entering his teenage years at the beginning of the Depression, Roberts resented not only the poverty but the social stigma magnified by his parents’ convictions as Pentecostals. In 1935, he was diagnosed as having tuberculosis – a crisis which was resolved by his conversion and subsequent healing later that summer in an itinerant tent preacher’s revival.

Shortly thereafter, Oral decided to preach, joining with his father, who was a licensed preacher in the Pentecostal Holiness church – one of the largest of the Pentecostal bodies, exceeded in size only by the Assemblies of God, Aimee Semple McPherson’s Foursquare Gospel church, and A.J. Tomlison’s Cleveland, TN-based Church of God.

In 1937, Oral launched out on his own, conducting revivals and preaching over the radio. After several years of itinerant evangelism, Roberts worked with a succession of local Pentecostal Holiness churches in Georgia and Oklahoma, claiming to discover an ability to “heal” people of physical maladies, and noticing a “hunger for miracles” on the part of many people. In April, 1947, he began holding Sunday afternoon “healing services” in his church in Enid, OK. Later that year, Roberts moved to Tulsa to begin conducting healing revivals in various churches, including those outside his own denomination.

Upon the astute advice of observant friends and successful businessmen, Oral assembled an organization, Healing Waters, Inc., to handle his various enterprises. He began to publish his own magazine, Healing Waters, advertising his books and promoting his radio broadcasts. Roberts’ use of a large tent for his meetings eriabled him to go many places where there were no city auditoriums. Those cards and letters (to say nothing of dollars) kept rolling in.

Like Billy Graham, some of Roberts’ popularity was due to his willingness to become more “ecumenical” with the passing of time. He was also astute enough to by-pass the denominational hierarchies of the various Pentecostal groups, being instrumental in helping found and develop Demos Shakarian’s “Full Gospel Businessmen’s Fellowship International.” As with Graham, who moved steadily from the context of “Southern redneck fundamentalism” into the Protestant mainstream, Roberts allowed this increasing ecumenicity and desire for respectability to lead him into the Methodist church in 1968.

But it was Roberts’ entry into the visual media of film and television that was to set him apart. After producing a film about his ministry to be shown in churches, Roberts launched his television ministry in 1954. In the 1960’s, Roberts abandoned the Sunday morning “religious ghetto” of television programs for a series of slickly-produced, prime time TV specials which vresaged programs like “The 700 Club” and “PTL.”

But “the times they were a’changin.. in the ’60’s, and Roberts changed with them, abandoning his tent evangelism and turning his attention to Oral Roberts University (founded in 1966; indicative of his increasing acceptance by and of the religious world, Billy Graham spoke at the Dedication ceremony) and then to the “City of Faith” which would eventually begin to sap his financial strength seriously.

Roberts efforts on behalf of these enterprises (including his “vision” of a 900-foot Jesus and his recent threat that God would take his life if he did not raise $8 million for his medical school) have kept him in the news lately. However, his fortunes may be declining; Newsweek recently reported that Roberts’ audience had dropped from 2.5 million households in 1977 to 11.1 million in 1985, and TIME reported his 1986 proceeds at $55 million, down from $88 million in 1980.

Oral, however, is probably not finished. As Ed Harrell asks, “How do you top a 900-foot Jesus? Well, he did. I would never bet against Oral Roberts or Richard Nixon” (Newsweek, April 6, 1987, p. 20).

Sources

Oral Roberts: An American Life (1985), by David Edwin Edwin Harrell, is comprehensive. Harrell’s earlier work, All Things Are Possible (1975) places Roberts in the context of the Pentecostal/Charismatic movements, as does Richard Quebedeaux, The New Charismatics (1976). Interesting perspectives from former “insiders” are provided by Jerry Sholes, Give Me That Prime- Time Religion (1979), and Patti Roberts, Ashes to Gold (1983).

Guardian of Truth XXXI: 12, pp. 380-381
June 18, 1987

By Steve Wolfgang

Jerry Falwell is perhaps the quintessential media- made preacher. When he graduated from Baptist Bible College in Springfield, MO in 1956 and returned home to Lynchburg, VA, he was a virtual unknown. He started a little church with 35 people in a rented pop-bottling plant. He proved to be a tireless worker, canvassing the town – but he also went on radio the first week, and purchased TV time within a year. Even then, without the mushrooming of cable TV in the 1970’s, the chances are that he would still be unknown outside the county.

Falwell was born in Lynchburg on August 11, 1933 and raised there, attending two years at Lynchburg College (affiliated with the Disciples of Christ) before transferring to Springfield after a “conversion experience” in a local Baptist church. His mother had often tuned in “The Old Fashioned Revival Hour” with Charles E. Fuller, a famous radio preacher of the World War II era, and his preaching influenced young Jerry considerably. Thus, media evangelism was prominent in Falwell’s concept of religion from an early age.

The college in Springfield had roots in the Baptist Bible Fellowship, one of the more prominent Fundamentalist organizations which arose after the Scopes Trial. When he roomed at Springfield with the son of John Rawlings, mainspring of Cincinnati’s Landmark Baptist Temple, the concept of a “super church” was planted in Falwell’s mind. Returning to Lynchburg after graduation, he began Thomas Road Baptist church in the summer of 1966. From an inauspicious beginning in the old Donald Duck Bottling plant (a rented facility against which was erected a tent-like lean-to for Sunday School classes), the church has grown into a 21,000 member congregation (about a fourth of the town’s population) with a staff of about 60 employees. Other enterprises include a summer camp, a home for alcoholics, and Lynchburg Christian Academy. Liberty Baptist College, which was begun in dilapidated downtown buildings in 1971, was moved to Candlers Mountain in 1977, where a host of new buildings had been erected and 7500 students are currently enrolled.

A large part of Falwell’s ability as a promoter (“Businessmen in Lynchburg say he is . . . the best salesman they have ever seen”), is his extensive use of media. His “Old-Time Gospel Hour” (a tape of the 11:00 Sunday service at Thomas Road, edited with some extra footage inserted) has been on-air since 1969, and is now carried on 190 TV stations plus cable outlets.

Additionally, in 1979 Falwell founded the “Moral Majority,” a political organization (he has repeatedly stated that it is not a religious body). Renamed the “Liberty Federation” last year, this group allows him to work in common cause with Jews, Catholics, Mormons, and Protestants such as Billy Graham (with all of whom he has religious differences great enough that they would not be invited to preach at Thomas Road).

With all these enterprises (church, television program, college, political organization – all of which overlap to some degree, despite Falwell’s disclaimers to the contrary), it is difficult to tell what is the total income generated. Most estimates, however, place it in excess of $100 million annually, which allows Falwell the use of a mansion donated to the church as well as the ministry’s Israeli-made private jet. With Falwell’s takeover of PTL after the Bakker scandal, he will, if he is successful in salvaging that operation, have at his disposal the additional cable outlets and TV production facilities of that group.

Sources

Strober & Tomczac, Jerry Falwell. Aflamefor God (1979); Falwell, Dobson, & Hindson, The Fundamentalist Phenomenon (1986); Frances Fitzgerald, “A Disciplined, Charging Army,” New Yorker, May 18, 1981; Christianity Today, September 4, 1981; TIME, September 2, 1985.

Guardian of Truth XXXI: 12, p. 374
June 18, 1987