You will find that the critics of the WoF use a series of tactics to discredit what Faith people believe and teach. I’m going to mention a few of them here and share some observations to help you to spot them when you encounter them. You can remember them by thinking of the word “liars”, as in “all liars will have their part in the lake of fire” (Rev. 21:8).
- Labeling
- Intellectual Attacks
- Ad Hominem Attacks
- Ridicule
- Sensationalism
Labeling– The critics love to throw around words like New Age, metaphysical, Gnosticism, Shamanism, and dualism when attacking the WoF movement. In my book and in this blog these labels are addressed and debunked. New Age adherents believe in channeling, astral projection, transcendental meditation, and reincarnation. WoF people don’t The metaphysical cults believe that sin, sickness, and evil aren’t real, and that God is “mind”. WoF people don’t. Gnostics believe that spirit is good and the physical realm is bad, and the path to salvation (escaping the physical universe) is receiving secret knowledge. WoF people don’t. Shamans believe in channeling spirits into this world for healing and wisdom. WoF people don’t. Sometimes they’ll use guilt-by-association to label people, like Joseph McCarthy labeled people as communists just because they had met a commie or two in their lives, or said something that sounded similar to statements made by communists.
Intellectual Attacks – This is seen when critics accuse us of twisting the word of God because of a lack of appreciation for sound theology and hermeneutics. The implication is that their views are right because they are derived from scholarly research. This attack is chock full of big, scary theological words like “soteriology” and “anthropomorphism”. It’s interesting that Jesus chose common people to be His disciples rather than the theologians. Sometimes the best theologian is somebody who has been with the Lord, like the blind boy who Jesus healed in John 9, and who later challenged the Pharisees. Nevertheless, the Apostle Paul told us to study to show ourselves approved unto God. (II Tim. 2:15) The most effective Christian is one who has the power of the Holy Spirit and the power of persuasion based on education.
Ad Hominem Attacks – “Ad Hominem” comes from the Latin, meaning “to the man”. It’s an attack on the individual and their character rather than their argument. You’ll see this a lot when the critics talk about Faith people being greedy, insensitive, apathetic, or ignorant. Sometimes they’re even called “unsaved” or “of the devil”. Critics will also dig up dirt from the personal lives of people they disagree with in an effort to discredit their teaching. I’ve even heard one critic mocking accents, as if the right accent has anything to do with sound doctrine.
Ridicule – Similar to the Intellectual Attack and Ad Hominem Attack, this tactic ridicules the doctrine through the use of the straw man argument or sarcasm. In this case you might hear the critic say something like “Faith people say that all you have to do is say the right words and you’ll never have any problems!” In fact Kenneth Hagin used to say “Living by faith doesn’t mean that you’ll just float through life on flowery beds of ease. Your faith will be tested.” He also used to say “the blessings of God don’t just fall on us like ripe cherries off a tree”. But of course it’s always easier to mock than it is to build a compelling case based on a fair representation of the facts.
Sensationalism – Critics use hype and sensationalism to stir the emotions of the reader or listener. They use anecdotal evidence to show how many people have been hurt by WoF theology (as if nobody has ever suffered as a result of the unbelief taught in orthodoxy), or they’ll talk about the movement being part of the great apostasy at the end of the church age. Another frequent tactic is to take a non-essential issue like how the process of atonement played out between the crucifixion and the resurrection, and elevate it to the status of an essential doctrine in order to brand WoF teachers “heretics”. The essential doctrine is that Jesus’s substitutionary death, burial, and resurrection brought redemption to a lost humanity. The rest is speculative and non-essential.
I modeled my WoF apologetics book Defending the Faith on Charles Ryrie’s defense of dispensationalism entitled Dispensationalism Today, published in 1965. Below you can read an excerpt from that excellent work by the great scholar. As you read through it, you can almost substitute “word of faith” for “dispensationalism” and apply it to today. How little things have changed.
These various attacks range from mild to severe. Philip Mauro, a premillennialist who abandoned the dispensational position, is bitter in his denunciation:
Indeed, the time is fully ripe for a thorough examination and frank exposure of this new and subtle form of modernism that has been spreading itself among those who have adopted the name “fundamentalists.” For evangelical Christianity must purge itself of this leaven of dispensationalism ere it can display its former power and exert its former influence…. The entire system of “dispensational teaching” is modernistic in the strictest sense.
Only slightly more mild than Mauro’s charge of modernism is the conclusion of Oswald Allis that dispensationalism is a “danger” and is “unscriptural.” Daniel Fuller reached a similar conclusion, namely, that dispensationalism is “internally inconsistent and unable to harmonize itself with the Biblical data.”
John Bowman, in a practically unrestrained attack on the original Scofield Bible and its dispensational teachings, said, “This book represents perhaps the most dangerous heresy currently to be found within Christian circles.” In a more temperate manner the editor of Presbyterian Journal, in answer to a reader’s question, called dispensationalism “a conservative ‘heresy'” since, in his own words, “whatever else you may say about a dispensationalist, one thing you can say about him with great assurance: he is conservative in theology”
More recently reconstructionists (also known as dominion theologians or theonomists), who are postmillennial, have joined the fray. One calls dispensationalism “unbelief and heresy,” whereas another labels premillennialism “an unorthodox teaching, generally espoused by heretical sects on the fringes of the Christian Church.”
Labeling dispensationalism as “modernism,” “unscriptural,” or “heresy” is not the only way it has been attacked. Some have practiced the guilt-by-association method. Bowman, for instance, associates dispensationalism with names like Hitler and National Socialism, Roman Catholicism, Christian Science, and Mormonism. The book The Church Faces the Isms, written by members of the faculty of Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, includes dispensationalism along with such “isms” as Seventh-day Adventism and Perfectionism.
Gerstner (while distinguishing basic differences) puts dispensationalists, in a certain respect, alongside Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons. And in the foreword to Gerstner’s book R. C. Sproul draws an analogy between dispensationalists and Joseph Fletcher, father of modern “situational ethics.”
Resort is often made to an ad hominem attack, which focuses on a persons character rather than on his teachings. The person often singled out is John Nelson Darby, and the point of attack is usually his separationist principles and practices. He is pictured as the “pope” of the Plymouth Brethren movement, who excommunicated at will those who disagreed with him and whose separationist practices have characterized the entire dispensational movement for ill. Here is an illustration of this kind of attack: “There exists a direct line from Darby through a number of channels … all characterized by and contributing to a spirit of separatism and exclusion. The devastating effects of this spirit upon the total body of Christ cannot be underestimated.”
Sometimes this attack takes the form of pointing to cases in which division in churches was involved in some way or another with dispensational teaching. Of course, in the report of such instances the reader cannot be sure he has been given all the facts that may have contributed to the rupture. But dispensational teaching is usually made the primary, if not the sole, cause. Those who use such an argument in an effort to discredit the totality of dispensational teaching should call to mind some of the basic and most obvious facts about the divisive aspects of the Protestant Reformation.
There is the “intellectual” attack. It is noted that the process of earning a doctor’s degree has delivered the person from the dispensational teaching in which he was reared. Needless to say, there are men with doctor’s degrees who support the dispensational approach. However, unworthy as it may be, the attack is a powerful one. It implies that, whereas dispensationalism is something that may inadvertently be learned in Sunday school or at a Bible school, greater intellectual maturity will certainly lead to its abandonment.
There is the historical attack. This will be examined in more detail later. It seeks to prove that since dispensationalism in its present form is apparently recent it cannot be true; for surely someone would have taught it in the first eighteen centuries of the history of the church if it were true. Some who use this device to discredit dispensationalism are honest enough to admit that history is never the test of truth-the Bible and only the Bible is. But they persist in using the approach and leave the impression that history is a partially valid test, if not the final test. Dale Moody writes, “Dispensationalism with the modern form of seven dispensations, eight covenants, and a Pretribulation Rapture is a deviation that has not been traced beyond 1830.”
There is the ridicule-of-doctrine attack. This is usually based on a straw-man construction of the dispensationalist’s doctrine or a partial statement of it. Some supposed teaching of dispensationalism is held up to ridicule, and by so much the entire system is condemned. For instance, the opponents of dispensationalism are quite sure that it teaches two (or more) ways of salvation. And they ask, What could be more unscriptural than that? Therefore, the system should be discarded. Or, again, they declare that dispensation-alists will not use the Sermon on the Mount, and, since the Sermon obviously contains rich Christian truth, what could be more apparent than that the system refusing to use it is wrong? Indeed, Richard J. Foster, a conservative, says that “the heresy [there’s that word again] in Dispensationalism [is] that the Sermon on the Mount applies to a future age rather than today” These charges will be discussed in due time; they are mentioned here only as examples of the method of attack used.
Another jabs at dispensationalism in this way: “The nondispensationalist usually finds eschatological factors least important. Evidently the dispensationalist feels that our church creeds are inadequate because they do not include pronouncements on such matters as a pretribulation rapture or the identification of the 144,000.” Some groups do deem it best for their ministry to have a pretribulation rapture clause in their doctrinal statements, but I have never seen a creedal statement that considered it necessary to include the identification of the 144,000.
Bruce Waltke (formerly a dispensationalist, now an amillennialist, and always a friend) in a lecture given in 1991 predicted that dispensationalism has “no future as a system.” He went on to say that “unless a new, accredited theologian arises to defend historic dispensationalism, this aberration in Christian theology will die.”
The new “progressive” dispensationalism, while posing as a legitimate development within the dispensational tradition, appears rather to be a distinct change from classic dispensationalism since it seeks “dispensational structures that are more accurate biblically” Does this not imply that classic dispensationalism is less accurate biblically? One progressive views classic dispensationalism as “the cloud” under which he lives. But the changes of progressive dispensationalism will presumably dispel that cloud.
Of course, the ultimate test of the truth of any doctrine is whether it is in accord with biblical revelation. The fact that the church taught something in the first century does not make it true, and, likewise, if the church did not teach something until the twentieth century, it is not necessarily false. Tertullian, Anselm, Luther, Calvin, Darby, Scofield, and the Westminster divines were all instruments in the hands of God to minister truth to His church, but none of them was perfect in all his thinking. People do not make a doctrine right or wrong. Defective life never enhances doctrine, but neither does it necessarily falsify it. Earning a doctor’s degree may make one an expert in a particular field of study, but it does not make one infallible or without need of further light on a given subject. An understanding of the truth of the Bible can be communicated by the Holy Spirit in and through the formal education situation and procedures, and it can be communicated apart from them.
Today dispensationalism is accepted as orthodox and embraced by a good percentage of evangelicals. In fact, it’s taught at the highly respected Dallas Theological Seminary, a school attended by some and respected by most WoF opponents. How ironic.