If There's Error in the Church, What's the Remedy?

Tom: Thanks, Gary. You’re listening to Search the Scriptures Daily, a program in which we encourage everyone who desires to know God’s truth to look to God’s Word for all that is essential for salvation and living one’s life in a way that is pleasing to Him. 

In this first segment of our program, we will be discussing the concluding two chapters of Dave Hunt’s out-of-print book Beyond Seduction, which he wrote about 18 years ago as a follow-up to The Seduction of Christianity. 

And, Dave, the topics we’ve been addressing, from both books really, are two decades old, yet the issues seem to be even more prevalent today: the distortion of Biblical faith into a positive mental attitude methodology; the transformation of the Biblical cure of souls to psychological counseling; the turn around from the biblical command to deny self to loving and esteeming self as a solution to solve a Christian’s mental, emotional, or behavioral problem; the abandonment of Biblical doctrine in favor of a compromised unity among Christians; the rise of various occult methodologies, techniques, and practices to foster one’s spirituality; and the practical rejection of the sufficiency of God’s Word, and certainly much more. But, Dave, what about these things? Why are they worse today than when we addressed most of them in The Seduction of Christianity 20 years ago?

Dave: Well, you have a long list, and it sounded to me like it was mostly from psychology. I would say the influence of psychology in the church just grows because more and more people, young men and young women, they want to have a degree behind their names; they want to be able to speak with some authority; they want to be able to hold their heads up in society, in the world of academia. This is pretty much the trend today. 

Let’s say a grammar school, Christian grammar school, they want to be accredited - or whether it’s a Christian college, so-called, they want to be accredited. Well, generally, who do they get accredited by? Not Christians, not Christ, not the Word of God, but by the world. I will never forget Fuller Graduate School of Psychology’s newsletter. You remember it, Tom. They sent it out, and it had big headlines: “Accredited!” [laughs] And they said, “An APA, American Psychological Association, team has been in here checking us out, and they have accredited us.” And then they quoted from them that they didn’t find their religious orientation to inhibit their psychological soundness. Wow. They just got Satan’s imprimatur, and they were just ecstatic about it. So this is where the accreditation comes from. 

So now the church - we missed it in evolution (I’m saying that tongue-in-cheek; this is what people think). “Well, we were tied down in evolution and we looked like idiots; we want to show them that we are scientific, too.” So they jumped on the band wagon of psychology, which is not a science. We’ve probably mentioned before… 

Tom: Oh, Dave, we’ve underscored it big time, and if people are interested, get some copies of our program through the series of Beyond Seduction.

Dave: What was it - three years? - a team from the American Science Foundation, 80 scholars, studied it to see whether psychology could be called a science. They said it is not a science and, in fact, it cannot be a science.

Tom: And we’re talking about psychological counseling, clinical psychology…

Dave: Psychotherapy. Yeah. So…but the church somehow doesn’t seem to get it. And they want to be able to hold their heads up in society and have their degrees, and so forth, and somehow integrate the Bible with psychology. 

So, I would say, Tom, this is a growing trend; it’s a growing industry. Well, you know that psychology is a growing industry - more beds, more psychiatrists, because they are determined that we need their help. And if you left it up to them, every one of us would be on some kind of medication, in counseling, psychotherapy. So that’s, I would say, basically what has happened.

Tom: Mm-hmm. And the bottom line, Dave, is in this area, along with the other things that I mentioned, it’s a rejection of the sufficiency of God’s Word. I don’t care if it’s solving your mental, emotional, or behavioral problems, or how you worship, or how you go about growing your church, it seems it’s got to be - the mentality out there is that there must be a better way, there must be a way that’s more effective, that will bring the people in.

Dave: Well, Tom, we could quote some secular psychologists and psychiatrists, who, in fact, say every time you have a problem to run to someone to help you with it, get some counseling, or get some medication is counterproductive. Because even non-Christians recognize that these problems build character; you stick with it. You know, you’ve got a recruit in the Marines, and he’s faced with an obstacle course, and he wants a little help: “Help me get over this wall here. Help me do this and that.” No, that’s how you develop your muscles; that’s how you develop character. 

Now, Tom, you know, you guys used to accuse me of death marches in the Sierras [laughs], and we are going over some… Listen, you never went over Milly’s Foot Pass. But we’re getting up 13-14 thousand feet, you know, and we’re going up and down, up and down, and it’s tough. I used to carry about 70 pounds on my back. Well, I like to have some fresh oranges and fresh apples, and so forth…

Tom: Your son liked to bring along a pie.

Dave: No, I’m the guy that brought the pie. First night out I liked to treat everybody to some pie. But anyway, I mean, it’s tough. You think you can’t take another step, but as you do, you learn what you can do, and you keep at it, and you develop some character, believe me!

Tom: Well, Dave, I’ll give you another analogy, one that we like. Folks, if you don’t know, we’re doing this program in Oregon; we’re in Central Oregon, and we love our salmon. Don’t we love our salmon?

Dave: Oh, yeah.

Tom: But we don’t like farmed salmon. It just sits around in a pond somewhere and it’s fat. We like the salmon that comes out of the ocean, works its way up through these ice cold rivers, and we’re talking good meat, good solid food.

Dave: Has some real character. [laughs]

Tom: Exactly, and we like to get them on the line, don’t we?

Dave: Right.

Tom: Yeah, okay. Well, Dave, you say - again, we are talking about Beyond Seduction, and we’re in the last chapter now.

Dave: We need to bring that book back into print, Tom.

Tom: Well, the Lord willing, if the Lord tarries, yes, I want to do that. But in the last chapter, you talk about a remedy for all these things that I’ve listed, and you have numerous things that you presented in the book that need to be addressed, but here’s the remedy: you write, “The only antidote is to test every doctrine in practice by the Bible, and whether we follow the revealed Word of God, or an apparently successful extra-Biblical technique will, in the final analysis, determine whether we pass the test that God is allowing in these days, or fail it to our everlasting loss.” 

And then you take some verses from Jeremiah:23:16Thus saith the LORD of hosts, Hearken not unto the words of the prophets that prophesy unto you: they make you vain: they speak a vision of their own heart, and not out of the mouth of the LORD.
See All...: “Thus saith the Lord of hosts, Hearken not unto the words of the prophets that prophesy unto you: they make you vain: they speak a vision of their own heart, and not out of the mouth of the Lord.” Verse 17: “They say still unto them that despise me, The Lord hath said, Ye shall have peace; and they say unto every one that walketh after the imagination of his own heart, No evil shall come upon you.” Verse 26: “…they are prophets of the deceit of their own heart…” Verse 27: “Which think to cause my people to forget my name by their dreams…” Verse 36: “Ye have perverted the words of the living God, and of the Lord of hosts our God.”

Dave: I’m afraid that’s been done, Tom. The Word of God is perverted; I mean, you said it in the opening: what have we done? We’re supposed to deny self. Jesus said, “Except a man deny self, take up the cross and follow me, [he] cannot be my disciple.” 

But, Tom, these Christian psychologists have popularized loving self, accepting self, praising self, in order to build up your self-esteem. But Paul writes in Philippians:2:3Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory; but in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves.
See All..., “In lowliness of mind let each esteem others better than himself.” In other words, they have turned the Bible inside out, they have rejected God’s Word, and they’ve said, “Well, yeah, but that’s not proper, you know; that’s not psychologically sound.” So they are going by the wisdom of the world, and let me quote again Bruce Narramore, nephew of Clyde Narramore…

Tom: Who’s the Dean of Christian Psychology.

Dave: I would say so; the godfather, I call him, [of] Christian psychology in America, at least. And Bruce Narramore has said, “It was humanistic psychologists Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers who first made us aware of the need of self-love and self-esteem, and we have found that to be a good emphasis.” So then they go back and see if, perhaps, maybe somehow or other, the Bible was really advising that, but nobody recognized it until these godless, atheistic humanists came along and told us that. So no one in 1900 years of studying the Bible on their knees ever got these ideas out of there: self-love, self-acceptance, self-esteem, and self-ad nauseam, on and on it goes. But it came from the world - it came from anti-Christians, in fact, and then the church has accepted this and tried to integrate it with the Bible. And it is the destruction, really, of the evangelical church; we are witnessing this before our very eyes.

Tom: Dave, Chapter 12 of Beyond Seduction you titled, “The Better Way,” but really, it’s the only way. And I’m going to quote from 1 Samuel which you lead into this chapter with - 1 Samuel:15:22And Samuel said, Hath the LORD as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the LORD? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams.
See All...,23: “Hath the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as in obeying the voice of the Lord? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams. For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry. Because thou hast rejected the word of the Lord, he hath also rejected thee from being king.” And of course, this is to Saul, King Saul.

Dave: Mm-hmm. Well, I think this is what is happening, not only in the area of psychology… Tom, we could talk about many other things. There is a growing movement, for example, in the church today - Replacement Theology; the church has replaced Israel. These people are defying God. Many of them say God is finished with Israel. You could get a statement by D. James Kennedy and the faculty of his seminary there. You could get a special statement put out by the faculty and a number of others - I think 70 leading evangelicals signed this when it first came out. The faculty of the Knox Seminary - of which I think D. James Kennedy is the chancellor, and he teaches there, and so forth - but they absolutely deny, and the statement says in clear language, that if you imagine that God favors some special people like the Jews above others, that he has a special plan for them, and that God gave these people a land, and that they have any significance, you know, being in that land today, that this is of any significance in Bible prophecy, you are just sadly mistaken. 

So I would say that we have turned away from the Word of God. It’s so clear in the Old Testament, and I don’t want to go into the details of that, but we have literally hundreds of promises from God. And I often point out that if God does not bring his people Israel back into their land, and if Israel is not re-established as a nation for the Messiah to return to, to rule over them on the throne of His father David, God is a liar, and He has lost His moral basis for judging, punishing Satan, the father of lies, because God has made hundreds of promises that He would do this, and now He has failed, and these people would like Him to fail. They would like Israel to be out of that land. They would like Israel to be defeated, which is what most of the world would prefer. 

Now, I’m not condoning everything Israel does, but this is a promise to a special people, God’s chosen people, and God will fulfill it. So they are defying, literally defying, the Word of the living God, and when the Christian psychologists say, “No, we should love ourselves instead of denying ourselves,” they are defying the living God and His Word.

Tom: Dave, the astonishing thing about this is it’s not that complex. All you have to do is read the Word of God and you can see the error in these things. The other things that we went through in this book - the whole word-faith teaching, the positive confession, the prosperity teaching - the things that these individuals teach, so-called leaders, is so contrary to the Word of God that just a simple reading of God’s Word makes it clear, yet we are being seduced by it. I say “we” - those that profess to be Christians - the numbers are out there in favor of many of these approaches that we’ve been talking about.

Dave: And, Tom, the errors are so blatant; that’s what’s so amazing. I don’t want to go back over the ground, but we cover it all in the book. Oral Roberts, for example, has a seven-hour conversation with a 900-foot Jesus who tells him to build a hospital that anyone knows is not needed, and it’s just because of pressure on the planning department that he was allowed to put it up - 777 beds. I think they had -what? - 146 occupied at one time. It went bankrupt. This is not Jesus telling him to do that, and yet he is still a hero on TBN or the charismatic stations. How can you overlook this? It’s just incredible, Tom! 

One of the verses that I keep coming back to - it’s shocking…the most shocking, I think, indictment of Israel and the human race. John:8:44Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.
See All... or 45, where Jesus said, “Because I tell you the truth, ye believe me not.” In other words, He’s saying, “You would believe any lie. The one thing you don’t want is the truth.” 

And Jesus said, “Thy word is truth,” and we’ve been over that. “I am the truth.” 

And yet we’ve got Christian psychologists who say, “Oh, all truth is God’s truth; some of it comes from Freud, some of it comes from Jung.” And we’ve quoted it - again: “When he the Spirit of truth is come, he will lead you into all truth, and I’m going to send the Spirit of truth to you whom the world cannot receive, because ye seeth him not, neither knoweth him.” And yet they are embracing the world and saying, “Ah, but the world does have some of God’s truth, and in fact, the world has some of God’s truth that isn’t in the Bible, and we need to integrate it with the Bible.” Tom, I get really upset about this.

Tom: Well, Dave, and it goes back to exactly what is this truth that men have discovered? And when you take the careful look at it, it’s contradictory to God’s Word; it doesn’t match up.

Dave: No, it doesn’t. So, anyway, we wrote The Seduction of Christianity. I wrote Beyond Seduction, as you say, 20 years ago. I think Seduction of Christianity came out in ’85, so this is the 20-year anniversary, and it hasn’t gotten better. For a time, I think, the book was on the best seller list for 10 months - I mean, number one for 10 months, I think; I’m not sure. You wouldn’t even get it in a bookstore today hardly.

Tom: And, Dave, obviously, we tried to inform people, but it didn’t take.

Dave: Well, Tom, the encouraging thing is I was just in three different churches in Southern California. I travel all over the world, and I can tell you all over the world people come to me and thank me for Seduction of Christianity, tell me how it changed their lives; it delivered them. I remember one pastor who told his flock - well, a number of pastors forbade anyone in their congregation to read that book. And I remember at least one church where I think almost the whole church left, because they read that book and found it to be true, and why the pastor didn’t want them to read it was because it was exposing his unbiblical methodologies and teachings. 

So, Tom, you were underscoring it from the book: our only hope is to get back to the Word of God, and why is that? Because we are like lost sheep who have gone astray. We’re not sufficient in ourselves; we have corrupted minds, we have corrupted ideas, and the world is certainly far from God. And yet we have to be educated by the world, you know, our children, most of them - well, some of them are home schooled, many of them are in Christian schools, but even the Christian schools now are becoming, many of them, infected with these ideas. 

So, we are in this world, we are bombarded day and night from radio, television, movies, books, with humanistic, anti-Christian ideas which people begin to accept.

Tom: The process of osmosis, if nothing else, Dave. It’s just everywhere.

Dave: Right! So, Tom, our only hope is to get back to the Word of God. “Thy Word is a lamp to my feet, a light to my path.” The Word of God is a guide and this is what Christians need as well as non-Christians.

Tom: Again, the opening of Chapter 12, you write, “Implicit in the call for a return to biblical Christianity is the belief that the Bible itself is our only and final authority in all spiritual matters. This means, as Paul said, that we are not to give heed even to ‘an angel from heaven’ who brings a message that contradicts what God has already spoken in His Word (Galatians:1:8But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed.
See All...).” But Dave, this is not nitpicking or hairsplitting. These things that we have been mentioning are seriously shipwrecking the faith of true believers.

Dave: One day we will all stand before God. He created us. He created this universe. He makes the rules. He has the final say. Then why don’t we go to His Word right now, and why don’t we heed what He has said? He loves us. He is all wise, so His way must be best. Let us not pollute and dilute the Word of God, or confuse it with the words of men. Do I dare quote the end of that poem again?

Tom: I’d love to hear it, Dave.

Dave: “Who would leave the noon day bright, 

To grope mid shadows dim? 

And who would leave the fountain head, 

To drink the muddy stream

Where men have mixed what God has said

With every dreamer’s dream?” 

I want to drink from the water of life. I want to drink from Christ. He said, “If any man thirst, let him come unto Me and drink.” One of His names is Counselor, Isaiah:9:6For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.
See All..., and I am going to go to Him for my counsel and to His Word, and I am not going to allow some human being to improve upon it in any way whatsoever.

Tom: Dave, you quoted John 17; Jesus said, “Sanctify them by thy truth. Thy Word is truth.” Sanctify means, as I understand it, set them apart, and that’s what’s not happening today. We should desire what Jesus prayed to the Father, to be set apart according to his Word. But I’m afraid it’s not happening. Some places it’s happening, but generally, it’s not happening today.

Dave: And why not do it? “Oh, it’s not popular.” I’d rather be popular with God than with men. And why not? This is wisdom; this is our life, the Scripture says. Then let us pursue it diligently.