Do Today's Religious Leaders Lack Discernment?

Now, Contending for the Faith. In this regular feature, Dave and Tom respond to questions from listeners and readers of The Berean Call. Here’s this week’s question: 

“Dear Dave and Tom,

Is there no discernment among evangelical leaders today? I used to think that you guys were a bit nit-picky when you pointed out that certain books that evangelical leaders endorsed made you wonder whether they actually read the books, given the horrendously unbiblical content. But now I see them at conferences where all sorts of questionable teachings are being promoted, including one that began with yoga exercises. Is this a fulfillment of 2 Timothy:4:3For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears;
See All...,4?”

Tom: Dave, let me read 2 Timothy:4:3For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears;
See All...,4: “For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; and they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables,” fables meaning false or mythological ideas.

Dave: Well, Tom, we could point to the teaching of theistic evolution in seminaries, pastors who believe it. You’ve got Hugh Ross - he believes in that sort of thing, that God used evolution in order to bring about the creation of man, and so forth. That would be - I don’t know how you would say one is worse than the other, but I would say you have a larger number of people in the church going for this.

Tom: Mm-hmm. And, endorsed by leaders, James Dobson has Hugh Ross on all the time.

Dave: Now, yoga, of course, is a - well, it’s not exactly a myth, because there’s some spiritual power in this. And when you read the books by the great yogis, they warn you: you need to have a guide guiding you through this. Part of yoga is visualizing these entities - for example, transcendental meditation. In transcendental meditation, you get a mantra. Now, TM is a form of yoga, and you get a mantra. And I’ll never forget the testimony of the young man - Scott was his last name, I forget his first name; maybe you remember - and he said, “I was shocked! I was reading a book on Hinduism and there I found my mantra, my secret mantra given to me alone, which Maharishi claimed, and it was the name of a Hindu deity.” And, in fact, all of the mantras are names of Hindu deities. And he found that this deity haunted him. It was a demon. 

And so they’re getting the names of Hindu deities, they’re focusing on them and repeating it over and over, and they come and take possession of these people. You know, we’ve got many testimonies of ex-TM’ers who had that happen to them, some of them driven insane, some of them driven to suicide. And we’ve gotten letters from - I remember not too long ago the parents that wrote to us about their daughter - was she in her 30s or 40s? - who had gotten involved in yoga, and now she was haunted demonically, terrorized, and she couldn’t get out of it. They were asking us, “Why?” Well, Shiva, the destroyer in Hinduism, is called Yogiswara - he’s the master of yoga. And yoga is a Hindu practice. 

Now, they may try to westernize it in the United States, and they may say, “Well, we don’t get into the meditation, and so forth.” But, Tom, it’s very simple: we just recommend to people [that if] you want to get into physical fitness, then use exercises that are designed for physical fitness. Don’t use exercises that are designed to put you in an altered state of consciousness - the breathing and so forth, the positioning - and to make contact with Brahman, the universal soul.

Tom: So, Dave, how do you explain, then, the 2004 National Pastor’s Conference, some of the biggest names in evangelical Christianity, from Howard Hendricks, to Tony Campolo, to Rick Warren, many, many others - This Conference opens up daily with yoga exercises. Where’s the discernment there?

Dave: Tom, it may be that they’re not aware of the dangers of yoga. Maybe they don’t know what yoga is. I mean, it’s practiced in every YMCA, YWCA, it’s accepted in American Western world as just some kind of a benign form of exercises, and so forth, but they need to do a little research; they need to understand what they’re getting in to.

Tom: Don’t shepherds have a responsibility to the sheep, Dave?

Dave: I think they do, yes, absolutely. And, Tom, we’ve written a lot about it. Others have written about it. I think that perhaps they’re not willing to face this. They don’t want to admit that something could really be wrong, that something could really be demonic. “Let’s just push that to one side. We’ll overlook it because it couldn’t be that bad. Or if we are opposed to this, then they won’t invite us to speak at this conference. We’ll lose a lot of friends. We’ll be condemned as narrow-minded, dogmatic fundamentalists, or whatever.” Once again, Tom, we’ve got to get back to the Bible. And I think a book that is better than The Seduction of Christianity and Beyond Seduction - The Occult Invasion, and maybe Gary can tell them how they can get a copy of that. But that goes into all these things from hypnosis to yoga to positive confession; and Robert Schuller and Norman Vincent Peale - all of that is covered. It’s like an encyclopedia taking care of all this. Get it to your pastor and have him read it, and send it to some of these Christian leaders who are getting into these things, and much of it involves occultism.

Tom: Mm-hmm. Dave, the other side here is - I think you alluded to it - there’s almost a club mentality out there, that certain highly visible evangelical leaders are just… It’s kind of an unwritten law: you don’t address some things that this person may be into or that person may be into, because it just doesn’t look good; it may create division. But isn’t that what sound doctrine is supposed to be about?

Dave: In the gospel of John, four times it says of Jesus, “There was a division among the Jews because of him.” And you can go to Luke 12 where Jesus said, “I didn’t come to bring peace, I came to bring a sword. I came to put husbands and wives against one another, parents against children, and so forth.” Because if you take a stand for truth, and we must - if you are not a lover of truth, you will be given a strong delusion to believe the lie; you will be damned forever! Jesus is the truth, the Word of God is the truth. 

Well, he said, “I came to bring a division between those who will stand for the truth and those who will not.” And there is no way you can escape that. You are either on God’s side, or the side of man.

Tom: And, Dave, for believers who get into this thing, it’s not a matter of being damned forever or losing their salvation, but it is a matter of their rewards; it is a matter of their fruitfulness in Christ. That’s what goes by the wayside, and, particularly, leading others astray.