Revival And Renewal

Editor's Note:

Dr. Norman Geisler is the author of more than fifty books and one of the country's leading experts on cults. Several of his books, including “When Cultists Ask,” have been best-sellers in the Christian community, and “Legislating Morality,” which he wrote with Frank Turek, won the Gold Medallion Book Award from the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association. His latest book is “Unshakable Foundations.” His monumental “The Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics” has become a standard text. Currently, he is the president of Charlotte-based Southern Evangelical Seminary, which he co-founded in 1992.

Warren Smith: Why have you – and why should Christians in general – spend time learning about cults?

Norman Geisler: The number one reason is that so many people are getting trapped into them. Number two: they are dangerous. They are doctrinally dangerous, and some of them are physically dangerous. Waco. Jonestown. Some of these images are still in our minds, images of people committing suicide or going up in flames.

And in a society where cults are knocking at your door aggressively -- like Mormons or Jehovah's witnesses, for example -- literally stealing many people out of the churches -- we have to be forewarned and forearmed to handle them.

So we have a program here at the seminary, a master's degree in a cult ministries. I help people who are going to be pastors or Christian educators directors evangelistic to deal with the people trapped in the cults keep their own young people from getting into the cults and defend the orthodox Christianity against their attacks.

WS: Are you discovering in your own research or hearing from other people who are reading your works that cults are infiltrating the church?

NG: Yes, they are. For example, the Weigh-Down program, which was pretty widely reported.

WS: Are you talking about Gwen Shamblin and the Weigh-Down dieting program? She was teaching things that were contrary to the doctrine of the Trinity, I believe.

NG: Absolutely.

WS: And that program was marketed in the evangelical church.

NG: Absolutely.

WS: That program is still being used in some pretty conservative and evangelical churches today, even though they know about Gwen Shamblin's statements. I guess they figure her comments don't relate directly to the course, and that as long as the course itself contains no errors, then they are at liberty to use it. How do you differentiate a cult from someone or a group that is merely in error about a single or a few doctrinal points?

NG: First of all, this was no small point. They were denying the Trinity.

As for a definition, let me say that there are social and psychological dimensions to cults. But a cult by definition denies one or more fundamental Christian doctrines, such as the divinity of Christ, the Trinity, the atonement, bodily resurrection, salvation by grace.  

WS: T.D. Jakes is very popular in the evangelical world, and some people say he denies the doctrine of the Trinity.

NG: That' s correct. He does. It's an old, old heresy in the Christian church called modalism. I know T.D. Jakes is very popular, and I know people don't like his ministry being called a cult, but it is. It would have been condemned by any orthodox church down through the centuries.

WS: What does it say about the evangelical church that these heretical teachings have been allowed to creep in so readily, and even when they are identified as extra-biblical, or cultic, a lot of evangelicals just wink?

NG: It says the evangelical church in America is about 3,000 mile wide and an inch deep. Doctrinally, we are very shallow. In North Carolina we are in what is called the Bible Belt, but our problem is that we don't have enough Bible under our belts. We have enough religion to makes us susceptible, but not enough doctrine to make us discerning. You can't recognize error until you can recognize the truth. I'm told that when government experts want to train people to recognize conterfeit currency, they study genuine currency. The same is true with doctrine.

WS: I hate to keep picking on groups that have made visits to Charlotte, but let me at least mention a couple more. The Brownsville Blessing movement, and the Toronto Blessing movement. Believers in those movements claim there were manifestations of gold dust. Even a lot of charismatics started distancing themselves from those movements when the gold dust claims started being thrown around. Yet many people are very ready to embrace that sort of thing.

NG: Because, as P.T. Byrum said, a sucker is born every minute. And in America, you can change that to a sucker is born every second. You can change that to every second in America. Yes, there are cultic tendencies in the evangelical churches. The “Jesus-only” movement denies Father and Son, and that is a cult by definition because it denies a major doctrine. And you have the radicals in the Word of Faith Movement who are saying that God the Father has a body. The Bible says God is spirit. That's denying a major truth about God. You even had Benny Hinn saying there are 9 persons in the trinity -- 3 in the father, 3 in the son, and 3 in the holy spirit. He later he backed off that. He said this was a revelation from God. Well, if it was a revelation, either God was wrong or Benny Hinn was wrong. Then he said Jesus didn't atone for our sins on the cross. He had to go to hell to finish the job. Incredible things infiltrating the evangelical church, to say nothing of the real notable cults outside of us. And the reason gets back to our failure to emphasize doctrine, our failure to teach the word of God to people and to instead emphasize experience.

WS: Other than deep study on the part of pastors and other leaders, are there other possible solutions? By that I mean to ask what the role of church polity and church discipline is?

NG: Well, first it's a lack of doctrinal depth. Secondly, it's a lack of doctrinal discernment. And thirdly it's a lack of church discipline -- and in that order, because if you don't know what doctrines your church policies should enforce, what you have is really just a hymn-singing Rotary Club; it's not really a church. We need strong doctrine. We need to be very discerning about it, so that when people deviate from it the courage to discipline is there.

WS: To shift gears a bit: You are president of an evangelical seminary here. What have you accomplished and where do you want to go in the next year or two?

NG: Well, as a matter of a fact, what we have been discussing is at the center of our mission. This is our purpose: to preach the gospel and defend the faith. Defend the faith internally and externally and that includes from all the cults and all the forms of religion. So we have a master's degree in training people to do that very thing, to defend the faith and to discern what is a cult and what isn't and to minister to people who are trapped, and to keep others from getting trapped.

Now, in a city that has six seminaries you would think that another seminary wasn't needed, but the reason that we exist today is because -- to put it in market terms -- we have a niche in the market, and that niche is there because by conservative counts there are at least 1,000 and probably 3,000 cults. The Watchman Fellowship alone has 10,000 files on people or cults so they are proliferating and where they are proliferating. The seminaries are not dealing with them. There are very few seminaries that have master's degrees on cults. You can count them on one hand. In fact, the ones who are doing exactly what we are doing you can count on one finger.

So that's why we exist today, because we have a niche and we are training people and they are coming from all over. We have 3,000 inquiries from 49 states and 15 countries, and we have no national advertisement. It's word of mouth, or people find us on the Internet and they say, “that's exactly where I want to come.”

God has given us and we have just bought about 10 acres. We have a million-dollar matching gift, and we have already raised $200,000 of that. We have over 200 students here, and an internationally known faculty that have written 150 books. They are drawing students, too. People like Ravi Zacharias and Ron Rose. And people like Josh McDowell, Hank Hanigraaf and John Ankerburg are all on our advisory board. They all recommend the seminary to people.

WS: And long term what do you want to create here?

NG: Short term we have the property and we are going to continue raising the million dollars for the matching gift, and then we are going to start building. Hopefully by the end of the year we can start on the building. Our goal is to train trainers and to disciple disciplers. If you teach students, it stops there. But if you teach teachers it never stops. If you train a trainer it never stops.

WS: What do you think the state of seminary education in the country is today?

NG: In one sense it's very encouraging. When I started in the ministry 51 years ago there were only a handful of good seminaries and now there are 100 or 200 of them. So in one sense it's good. In another sense, seminaries are subject to some of the same things churches are, going experiential or going “how to” instead of “what” or “why”. We are teaching them how to preach, but not what to preach. We see some seminaries with courses that might as well be in basket weaving. What we end up with churches that have programs that would succeed even if there was no God!

WS: It sounds like you are making a not so subtle indictment on some of the targeted, methodologically driven churches that we are seeing spring up in the area. Am I reading too much into that comment?

NG: Well, I am not opposed to being “seeker-sensitive,” but I am opposed to being seeker-centered. It should be God centered, and Bible based.

WS: Of course, people involved in seeker-oriented ministry would never admit that they are not God centered. How can you know whether they are – or for that matter, whether you and I are -- or not?

NG: By the book of James. I don't see them taking people from a lower level of knowledge and faith to a higher level. They are not reaching a higher level. They are not teaching them to defend their faith. They say they do. They say that it's their intention. But they don't. And I have seen all the big ones.

WS: Where are your graduates going? Are they going into the pastorate? Into teaching ministries?

NG: We are conservative and we are evangelistic and we have a strong emphasis on apologetics. But we have people going to a whole range of churches from here. We have a student who is hoping to become an Episcopal priest. A Christian education director. Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians. Some from Bible churches. Many are going into pastoral work. Many are going on to further graduate school because they want to be teachers in secular universities. We can't sit here in our evangelical bubble. We had a student accepted at Oxford. Texas A&M. St. Louis University. They're getting into good programs at the top schools. We have a student in Russia. Tony Frank is in Russia, where it's all apologetics. They don't believe in a soul, let alone God. You have to start with pre-evangelism.

WS: If what you say is true, that there are a good deal more good seminaries today than there were 50 years ago, but the culture is not a good deal more Christian, what is going wrong?

NG: That's an interesting question. We are better trained than we were 50 years ago. We have better schools and we have more schools. We have a higher level of education in the ministry and in the people in Christian work. But for a full generation or two, depending on how you measure it, we withdrew from the culture. “Fortress Fundamentalists,” Carl Henry called it.  

WS: What more needs to happen if Christians are to have a significant impact on the culture?

NG: We need two things. We need a revival and a reformation. One won't do it. You can't reform people who are not revived, and just reviving people is just not enough. Only then can we begin to make institutional changes.

WS: By institutional changes, do you mean within the churches, or within the government?

NG: Within the body politic and within the culture. It took a long time to get to where we are today. In 1933 the humanists signed their first manifesto. In 1934 John Dewey wrote his book about taking over the country and educational system, and in the book he said we have to make humanism the militant religion of the public schools. Between 1934 and 1961 he trained a whole generation. It took them a generation to train the leaders. But by 1961 those humanist pupils of his system had made it up to Congress and the Supreme Court. In 1961 they said humanism is officially a recognizable religion. By 1962, no more prayer in school. In 1963 no more Bible reading. 1980 no more Ten Commandment, and by 1989 you can't even teach creation.

It took 60 years. We have to do the same thing we have to get back. We have to get people's hearts, to get them to change laws and institutions, and to again penetrate the media. It will take just as long to turn it around.

WS: And you see Southern Evangelical Seminary as an instrument for that turnaround. Other than your school, do you see other hopeful indicators?

NG: I am very encouraged. Fifty years ago we didn't have organizations like the Moral Majority, or Dobson's organization. We didn't have Christian newspapers like yours. I see a lot of encouraging signs, but we have a long way to go.

WS: But it sounds like you are an optimist in this regard.

NG: I am a near view pessimist and a long range optimist. Things may get worse before they get better, but when they get better they are going to get really good. You know what a pessimist is? He is someone who feels bad when he feels good because he is afraid if he felt better he would get worse.

So I am not a pessimist.