Bible Answer Man Broadcast ExcerptsTranscripts of Excerpts from the Bible Answer Man Radio Broadcast
January 5, 2010, 12:10-15:27 [ audio excerpt / complete broadcast ]:
Hank Hanegraaff: We, as believers, need to learn how to do discernment ministry properly. We need to look carefully at how investigative journalism is being done within the Christian church. Oftentimes it’s not investigative journalism; it’s the yellow journalism practiced in the world imported into the church. So often we are stuck in our own psycho-epistemological cocoons, in a linguistic hall of mirrors.
And we think somehow or other we have been able to fully codify the mystery of the nature of God in our language, and denounce those when cultural barriers are often the obstacle. We need, as Christians, to understand doctrine and theology. We need to know that theology matters, that what we are discussing in studio today is not an ivory tower debate. There are people halfway around the world sitting in prisons and dying because ideas have consequences—that’s what we’re talking about today, Elliot.
Elliot Miller: That’s exactly right, Hank. Ideas do have consequences. And what we in the countercult community have published, doing our thing of critiquing different movements according to a paradigm that we developed. You know, you fit into this paradigm, you’re orthodox; you don’t fit into, then you’re unorthodox. But not really thinking in terms of a larger paradigm that would match the entire human race, but more seeing things from the paradigm of our Western evangelical perspective.
So, if we stamp heresy on a group because they failed our litmus test, we may not realize that, number one, that that was more of a culturally than theologically determined stamp, and number two, that the consequences of that is that our brothers and sisters in Christ—directly because of what we published—are being put in prison and persecuted and some don’t return alive. And you know, this is not melodramatic speech. I met people when you and I were in China last year who had been in prison as a result of material that we and others had published, and they could not have been more gracious, but the Holy Spirit was gracious enough to let me see the consequences of our past cavalier action.
June 10, 2010, 44:18-45:29 [ audio excerpt ]:
Hank Hanegraaff: I think it’s really important too that as Christians we never knowingly take someone out of context or distort what they say. And, we as the Christian Research Institute have been doing primary research for many, many years. Our organization is celebrating our jubilee year this year. So we’ve been in existence for fifty years. We are responsible for what we say, and we’re very responsible in what we do.
And in 2003, we began a primary research project on the local churches or the Lord’s recovery, as they’re known, because it was possible, it seemed to us, that we had contributed to a fountainhead of misinformation with respect to the local churches. And in doing a six-year primary research project, that is exactly what we discovered. And so we had to have the Christian conduct of recognizing that when we have taken someone not completely in context, that we have to say we are wrong, and that’s exactly what we did.
January 6, 2010, 40:29-45:52 [ audio excerpt / complete broadcast ]:
Hank Hanegraaff: Well, Elliot Miller points out that in 1985, Gordon Melton, founder of the Institute for the Study of American Religions, published An Open Letter himself concerning the Local Churches, Witness Lee, and The God-Men controversy—a controversy over a book titled, The God-Men. And he writes,
During the past year I, like many of you, have become concerned about the lawsuit between the Local Church led by Witness Lee and Spiritual Counterfeits Project … and the publisher of their book, The God-Men. I was at first concerned that a Christian body like the Local Church would take fellow Christians to court, until I discovered that the leaders in the Church had exhausted all less severe means to have the book withdrawn and its errors acknowledged.
Recently, I was asked by the Local Church to begin a more rigorous investigation of its life and belief than I had been able to do in previous years while I was working on my Encyclopedia of American Religions…
Part of my study of the Local Church involved the reading of most of the published writings of Witness Lee and lengthy depositions of Neil Duddy and Brooks Alexander of Spiritual Counterfeits Project. The experience proved among the more painful of my Christian life. As I began to check the quotes of Witness Lee used in Duddy’s book, I found that The God-Men had consistently taken sentences from Lee’s writings and by placing them in a foreign context, made them to say just the opposite of what Lee intended. This was done while ignoring the plain teachings and affirmations concerning the great truths of the Christian faith found throughout Lee’s writings. I also took note of the ludicrous attempt to equate the Local Church’s practice of pray-reading with the use of mantras in Eastern religions. They bear no resemblance whatsoever.
As I read the depositions, especially that of Duddy, I was appalled to discover the number of substantive and libelous charges made against Lee in The God-Men, which were based entirely upon the unconfirmed account of a single hostile ex-member…
The mistakes and misrepresentations in the book are so frequent and so consistent that it strains credulity to suggest that The God-Men is merely the product of poor scholarship.
So here you have one researcher writing an open letter saying, at first I was very concerned about the lawsuit but afterwards, I was more concerned about the libelous charges made against the Local Church movement and Witness Lee.
Elliot Miller: That’s right, and at the time I dismissed that because J. Gordon Melton has a reputation among people in my field as being a “cult apologist.” In other words, he’s come to the defense of the Unification Church or different groups in different situations, and so we have just easily been able to dismiss anything he’d say. However, he went on in his book and he actually gave his own documented analysis of where they had taken Lee out of context in four different instances to prove his charge that they had deliberately taken him out of context. And the proof was there in 1985.
And when I read that, I just at the time, it was like—I responded to that the way I’m afraid a lot of people in my field are going to respond to my article today—and just said: he’s got to have that wrong, but I don’t have time to look into this but surely he’s wrong. I mean, SCP is a very respected group and they’ve been very careful about everything else they’ve published. Just as people today will say, “Yeah, but there’s 70 scholars, those are 70 respected scholars; they’ve been very careful about everything they’ve published.”
And so this is how we perpetuate error is that we pass over obvious challenges to a position, documented challenges to a position that we ourselves have the means to look into and confirm or deny. But we just pass it by and continue to support maybe out of a feeling of collegiality, brotherhood with other people in our field are under attack by this group because they’re suing them. So let’s not be confused with the facts. Let’s keep this feeling of camaraderie going among people in our field, our besieged field of countercult ministry.
Well, that’s not a philosophy that can be described as, Truth matters. And so that’s why I feel right now we’re at a paradigm shift in the countercult community where we have got to learn from this experience and not keep repeating these kinds of behaviors if we want this form of ministry to be viable, valid and ongoing, vital in the Body of Christ.
January 5, 2010, 24:16-26:29 [ audio excerpt / complete broadcast ]:
Elliot Miller: You know, he [Witness Lee] would make controversial statements that could be misinterpreted and he would not immediately clarify his position and submit it to many qualifications because he wanted the full force of the particular thing that he was saying at the moment to sink in. So later in his teaching, he would then present the balancing views that showed that what he was teaching was well within orthodox theology.
But we, in our research, did not keep reading far enough. We came across those heretical-sounding statements that clearly sounded like heresy, and a lot of these quotations in the open letter clearly sound like heresy, and so we concluded that they were heretical. But you see, it was a flaw in our research methodology, Hank, and it’s only been really in CRI more than any other ministry that I know of in the countercult world, all the way back to the days of Walter Martin, who has always believed in dialogue, believed in being open and seeking to reach out and win people to Christ and not just denounce them as heretics. And we’ve practiced it at many times but nonetheless in many cases, we would simply read a group’s literature and draw conclusions without seeking to have them explain their teachings to us. And we never really went to them and sought dialogue and understanding from them.
And when you accepted their invitation for dialogue in 2003, which originally I was very uncomfortable with but I went along with it because I believe in dialogue and you asked me to, but as we actually began to enter into dialogue, they began to explain the context of some of these teachings that we had all responded to. Now the people that wrote the open letter, they haven’t engaged in that same dialogue process. I believe that many of them who are fair-minded and good scholars would and still will, as they read our material here and as they maybe even take it the next step and enter into dialogue with the Local Church members themselves, they will come to the same conclusions that we have.
January 6, 2010, 28:27-29:53 [ audio excerpt / complete broadcast ]:
Elliot Miller: But with regard to the Local Church, this is almost the ultimate test of whether we would be true to our historic principle of dialogue, because there was probably no group we had worse blood with and less reason to want to dialogue with. We had a basic animosity toward them and a very sharp history of contention and really nothing to gain from it. It was a test almost of our willingness to dialogue and I participated in that to be true to that principle but really expected nothing to come of it.
And was surprised by truth to find out that indeed these were not only brothers in Christ but that, in the meeting when they were professing that they believed in orthodox doctrine, Gretchen and I were still skeptical. Hank was probably quicker to believe because he didn’t have the same history with them that Gretchen and I had. So Gretchen and I went to Anaheim and spent three full days in dialogue with representatives of the movement, going over their materials, reading materials they gave us, asking for clarification on this point and that point until we finally worked it all out and saw that indeed the reason they haven’t recanted these doctrines is they never taught what we thought they were teaching. We’re the ones that need to recant this time. Okay, we’re Christians, let’s rise to the challenge and confess that we were wrong.
January 6, 2010, 5:32-6:25 [ audio excerpt / complete broadcast ]:
Elliot Miller: Because what we didn’t do in that case and what we should always do is, number one, you want to interact with the people and understand them in their own terms instead of just looking into them enough to confirm your own prejudice. If they’re adamantly telling you, “No, we don’t believe that. You’re getting it wrong.” Well, find out what they do believe, talk about it in different ways, help them to explain to you what they believe. But instead, we just kept dropping the C-word on them (you know, we didn’t but others in the countercult community would call them a cult; we called them cultic and aberrant). And that got them to react defensively, and it was a deteriorating situation. So instead of having the dialogue that would have helped us transcend the cultural and language barrier, instead we had a call to arms.
All audio clips are © Christian Research Institute and used by permission.
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