T. A. McMahon & G. Richard Fisher (Part 1)

Program Description:

Tom McMahon and G. Richard Fisher answer the question: "What gives us the right to expose aberrant teachings in the church?"

Transcript:

Gary: Welcome to Search the Scriptures 24/7, a radio ministry of The Berean Call featuring T.A. McMahon. I’m Gary Carmichael. We’re glad you could join us.  In today’s program, the topic is “Apostasy in the Church.” Joining Tom is special guest, Richard Fisher of Personal Freedom Outreach. And now, along with his guest, here’s TBC Executive Director, Tom McMahon.

Tom: Thanks, Gary. As Gary mentioned, our topic for today is “Apostasy.” We’re going to define it and discuss what the Bible has to say about it. Our guest is G. Richard Fisher. He’s a retired pastor, author of the The Confusing World of Benny Hinn, and contributing writer to the Personal Freedom Outreach Quarterly Journal, an excellent—I mean, excellent!—newsletter, which addresses false doctrines and false teachers that have contributed to the spread of apostasy in our time.

Dick, welcome to Search the Scriptures 24/7.

Dick: Thank you for having me on today.

Tom: One of the reasons…you know, we got to know each last year, and I just have to say this, it’s absolutely my thrill to know you personally. You know, I’ve followed your writings in the Quarterly Journal but to discuss things with you, to run things by you, has really been a…just a privilege and a blessing on my part.

Dick: Well, I hope it should help.

Tom: Yeah. Now, one of the things that I’m fascinated by is your background, and I want to talk about this a little bit—40 years, right?

Dick: Yeah, well, actually 41.

Tom: Forty-one, but you retired as a pastor—that’s what I’m getting at.

Dick: Yeah, we were at the same church for 41 years in New Jersey.

Tom: Yeah, but you also write articles…

Dick: …yes…

Tom: ...dealing with cults and aberrational Christian groups and teachings. How did your interest in apologetics—defense of the faith—how did that come about as a pastor?

Dick: Well, the Bible colleges that I went to, the Bible colleges that I attended, were very, very strong on doctrine—of knowing what you believe, why you believe it—and I just knew as I went through those courses and studied the Word of God, I knew that without a foundation, you’re going to be open to all kinds of error, and you’re going to be vulnerable to false teachings. It’s like not knowing the ABCs. If you don’t know the ABCs, you’re not going to get your spelling right.

And then I knew from the study of the Word that the emphasis the Bible puts on doctrine was very, very important. Again, knowing what you believe and why you believe it. And then in Acts:2:42And they continued stedfastly in the apostles' doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers.
See All..., it talks how the early church, they just followed diligently in the apostles’ doctrine. And then Paul—his warnings all through his epistles—against false teaching. And then, as a pastor, as you say, as you mentioned, it’s the pastor’s responsibility to guard the flock, according to Acts:20:28-31 [28] Take heed therefore unto yourselves, and to all the flock, over the which the Holy Ghost hath made you overseers, to feed the church of God, which he hath purchased with his own blood. [29] For I know this, that after my departing shall grievous wolves enter in among you, not sparing the flock. [30] Also of your own selves shall men arise, speaking perverse things, to draw away disciples after them. [31] Therefore watch, and remember, that by the space of three years I ceased not to warn every one night and day with tears.
See All...—very strong in their emphasis about the responsibility to guard the lives of your people.

And I’ve often met people, as I write articles, who’ll write to Personal Freedom Outreach and say, “Well, who gives you the right?”

Well, the Bible gives every believer the right to stand for truth and to call out error and to renounce error.

Tom: Yeah.

Dick: So, that’s kind of my journey. I mean, I knew early on my responsibilities as a pastor—I took it very seriously, and it’s a frightening thing to have the care of souls and the care of lives and families in your hand. It’s a very frightening and humbling thing, so…

Tom: You know, Dick, I so appreciate what you’re saying. And I hope that pastors who come to our website or as we put this out on the air that they would take heed to what you’re saying. You see, it’s been my observation, and I get to visit churches all around the world, but in this country in particular, I rarely hear a defense of the faith, especially to the degree that they may be looking at false teachers, false prophets, false doctrines, and so on, and it’s just my observation, I think one of the reason many pastors are not taking heed to what you’ve just said is that, hey, it creates controversy! I think that pastoring—the call to be a pastor—is one of the most difficult callings that there is. People say, “Well, Tom, you’re in—you know—you’re in apologetics. You’re kind of on the front line and, you know, in the trenches, duking it out with false doctrine, teachers, and so on. But, Dick, as a pastor, you’ve got sheep to minister to, to sort of keep harmony, apologetics, dealing with sound doctrine, especially with the media, you know, whether it be TBN or Christian media so-called.

That creates issues and problems among the sheep, doesn’t it?

Dick: Yeah, and actually, though, we’re all on the front line in one way or another, and it hasn’t always been this way, but, yes, in recent years, I see the ministry going in a totally different direction. Some years ago, we were part of the Conservative Baptist movement in New Jersey. And it was very, very strong. The men were solid in doctrine. They were opposed to false teaching. And I was on a state committee for ordination. And we would interview young men coming out of seminary, looking forward to going into ministry, or they had candidate for a church and they were looking for ordination.

And as the years rolled on, we found that the men were less precise in their beliefs and less able to defend the faith. They were products of their seminary, unfortunately, and we didn’t stay too long in the Conservative Baptist movement because it was moving in a different direction that we certainly didn’t like, so we became independent.

But Jude 3: “Earnestly contend for the faith” it tells us. And how much more, pastors? There’s so much emphasis today on unity, ecumenism, political correctness, and even church growth. You’ve got to make the church grow at all costs—even at the cost of truth.

And so pastors are just buying into the spirit of the age, and I’ve observed—because I’ve been around awhile—that the society we live in used to make it very difficult to sin. There were things when I was growing up as a child, a young man, that you didn’t do. They were even illegal to do. And now the society makes it easy to sin.

So we have all of that, but, again, this explosion of Christian television, with error that it’s pumping into people’s living rooms every single day—it’s just overwhelming.

Tom: Right.

Dick: So, I agree with all you’re saying, and these are some of my observations about where we are and why.

Tom: Yeah.

Dick: And it’s getting worse, and I don’t think it’s going to get any better.

Tom: No, but, Dick, I’ll throw one more thing in to what you’ve been saying…and that’s why, as people have said, “Oh, we couldn’t do a ministry like you do, Tom,” and so on, but going back to the calling to be a pastor—you just underscored something here—how much time did you have before your sheep? When you were pastoring, you had, you know, your services; you had, maybe, an hour on a Sunday with each service, however large your church was; and then did you guys have, say, a Wednesday Bible study, or something along that line?

Dick: Well, we had a Sunday school; we had a 9 o’clock service, so…and we had an evening service as well on Sunday night, one of the few in the area that did that. People would get a few hours of Bible on Sunday. We always urged them to daily devotions, to be in their Bible through the week; we would distribute Bible devotional material they could use through the week. We kept the church totally stocked with all kinds of helpful booklets and teachings against other cults. We would warn them about it. We would intersperse our messages with what the current trends were, going south away from the Bible. We would keep people alerted on that. And our journals, our Personal Freedom Outreach Journals, we would keep those in people’s hands, and we were doing a lot of that kind of thing as well, along with church services. Yeah, and a Wednesday night Bible study. Occasionally, we would have DVDs or videos that were related to informing the people about error and cult teaching, and so on.

It’s work! You’ve got to really work at it all the time.

Tom: But, Dick, what I’m hearing here—I’m thinking of the words of Peter…or not Peter, of the Lord to Peter: “Peter, do you love me? Feed my sheep.” “Do you love me? Feed my sheep.”

Dick: Yeah…

Tom: Now, here’s the point I’m making about the time of a pastor before his sheep. Normally, it’s an hour—maybe an hour and a half—for a whole week. Now, his sheep, they’re being fed from all kinds of other sources. You mentioned the rise of Christian television—Christian networks, even, and so on…

Dick: You’ve got to warn people.

Tom: Absolutely…

Dick: I was in a church recently nearby, and the pastor got up on Sunday morning and said he…this was when The Shack was all the rage—the book, The Shack…and he got up and said, “Well, you know, I read The Shack this week, and I’m not totally for it, but I’m not going to give you the reasons why.” I just wanted to fall on the floor, you know!

Tom: Yeah…

Dick: You know, Come on! Get it out there! Let your people know so that they can be informed. If you’re against it, why? Why would you not want to advise them on that?

Tom: Well, let’s go to Ezekiel: “If you see the evil coming [as a watchman], and you don’t warn the people…,” well, guess what, their blood’s going to be on your head.

Dick: Exactly…

Tom: Now, that sounds extreme, but this is what we’re talking about—that we have a responsibility—those who have biblical content information, well, we’re to encourage…

Dick: Right.

Tom: …as you said at the beginning of the program, we’re to be Bereans. We’re to search the Scriptures daily, and these weren’t even Christians, right? These were Jews in the synagogue of the Greek city of Berea…

Dick: You know, it’s interesting, too. We live in a day of just this mysticism—trips to heaven: you can make a trip to heaven on your lunch hour. You know, everybody’s going there; everybody’s doing it. And we hear all about…especially miracle gifts, mystical gifts, and so on, but nobody talks of the gift of discernment? Whatever happened to the gift of discernment? It’s just forgotten, it’s overlooked…

Tom: Well…sure, but if somebody is being spoon fed, whether it be from the pulpit, or they’re getting their information from Christian media, and they’re not checking it out, well, there will be no discernment. You have no basis for it, as you said. You learn to read, well, you’re not going to read unless you know the ABCs. You’re not going to be able to understand communication unless you (laughing) know a little bit about grammar and how things communicate, and so on. That’s where we are.

Dick: Yeah, I also want to mention too that for a number of years we ran an evening adult Bible Institute—we set up doctrine courses, church history, archaeology—and we actually would do it on a Monday night for working adults and have them commit…just like you’re going to Bible School. And it really did lay a foundation for a strong leadership in our church because they were being trained. And any way that’s possible, you know, if there’s a Bible school or Bible college or seminary nearby that you can trust, you can feed your people into that. I mean, there’s just so many ways to do it…

Tom: But it’s not happening, you know. As I said…

Dick: No, I know…

Tom: I get to be…you know, I go around the world, and I’m excited, whether it be in England, or New Zealand, or Australia, and I ask people who tell me that they’re a fellowship—it’s a small fellowship, but they love it. And I say, “Wait! What about a Bible study?”

“Oh, yeah, we have a Bible study…”

And I said, “Great! What book are you in now?”

And they’ll say, “Well, it’s a book by John Eldredge.”

Dick: (Laughing)

Tom: And if it’s women, they’ll say, “It’s Beth Moore!”

Dick: Oh boy…

Tom: And I don’t know what, you know, epistles that they wrote, but… I’m being facetious here, but it’s a serious deal. So, Dick, it seems to me, wherever I go there’s a mentality of getting away from what you just suggested and recommended and did in your church to extra-biblical information. God has gifted people to be teachers. But if I’m hanging out on an individual and that’s where I’m getting…being fed with the Word of God, well, you know, it’s spoon-feeding. How can I even judge what they’re saying? They may have some great teaching, but I’m not going to know because I don’t have anything to compare it to.

You know, or they may be giving false teaching. I’m not going to know. I’m just going on the basis of a personality, or who’s popular, or who everybody’s reading, and so on. That’s deadly.

Dick: Right. And sometimes it seems benign, and there’s some error that’s not quite as bad, but it’s junk food doctrine—people are never going to grow…

Tom: Right…

Dick: They’re not going to be healthy spiritually. And it’s just these kinds of things that people are absorbing. It’s just a…it’s amazing, what’s going on.

Tom: And, Dick, even if somebody says, “Oh, you don’t understand, Tom. I’ve got…our pastor, I mean, he’s one of the best teachers. It is so great!”, there can be a downside to that. I mean, if a pastor is so good, such a great speaker, and his understanding of the Word is so good, and I end up just hanging onto that individual—well, guess what? You know, we talked about the hours of the day, or the week, let’s say, in which people are being fed—well, if that’s the only meal they’re getting, they’re going to be anemic…

Dick: Exactly…

Tom: and not be able to, again, go back to discernment, and so on.

Now, Dick, I want to take us back a little bit. And you correct me datewise, here. Personal Freedom Outreach. You guys got started in the ‘70s?

Dick: No, actually, the early ‘80s. I didn’t get on board right away, but within a few years of the founding in the early ‘80s. It goes back to a guy named Wes Walters and Kurt Goedelman. Wes since passed away, and Kurt’s still running the ministry…

Tom: Right. Doing a terrific job.

Dick: Right…

Tom: Kurt’s fantastic.

Now, here’s what I want to talk to you about a little bit…

Dick: All right…

Tom: Because there’s an analogy here between myself and Dave Hunt, when we started dealing with issues.

Dick: Right…

Tom: ...doctrinal issues in the church. But prior to that, the direction of Personal Freedom Outreach was primarily cults, wasn’t it?

Dick: It was cults. The early years we only addressed main…what we call mainline cults. JWs, Seventh-day Adventists, Christian Science, and all—what were called the mainline cults, the older cults, right? And also, there were many other ministries that were being raised up to do that as well. So there were these large amounts of apologetics material—I mean, go way back to Walter Martin, even, that were being generated…

Tom: Sure.

Dick: So there were books, and booklets, and tracts, and tapes, and DVDs, and CDs, and PFO offers a large, large inventory of all of these kinds of things, right? But you can’t keep reinventing the wheel, and often, when you’re asked about an issue, you can give a book or booklet that covers a lot of that—rather than have…just keep writing the same thing over and over.

Tom: Right…

Dick: So we were just in that mode in the beginning, with JWs and Mormons and SDA, and so on, but as the televangelists—as they multiplied and metastasized, like mushrooms, you know, so did the errors and the heresies, and we were beginning to realize that…were people in the millions were being bombarded, and clones were cloning off these guys, you know…We’ve got so many people out there that were Benny Hinn wannabes, and it was proliferating, and the publishing houses that were once dependable, now they’re all market-driven, money-driven, offering books with the worst extremes. You can get a good book, you can get horrible books…

Tom: Well, Dick, let me throw this in. Just to keep that thought going…I want to give you an example from… The Berean Call has been a ministry for 20 years, but Dave and I have been dealing with these kinds of issues for about 35 years. Twenty-five years ago we did The Seduction of Christianity. But here’s the analogy: just as you guys, as you’ve articulated, moved away from cults…

Dick: No, no, we didn’t move away from…

Tom: I don’t mean “move away,” but I mean let them…

Dick: Oh, in the emphasis in the writing of the Journals…

Tom:  Yeah, in terms of emphasis…

Dick: Yeah…

Tom: Yeah, exactly. But what I’m getting at here is that at the beginning of my involvement with Dave, we dealt with things like Mormonism, the God Makers…

Dick: Right…

Tom: Dave did the book with Ed Decker, I did the documentary The God Makers.

Dick: Well, that’s what was needed…

Tom: Yeah, but here’s the interesting thing about it. Prior to that, I did the documentary called The Cult Explosion, and then Dave wrote the book. Now, as we were laying out all of this cult information for the church, people started responding, writing to us and saying, “Wait a minute! Those are the cults. But we’ve got these teachings in our church, in our evangelical church, in our charismatic church.” And out of that came The Seduction of Christianity…

Dick: Which I was going to mention…

Tom: Right…

Dick: You guys were one of the groundbreakers in all this stuff…

Tom: And what was interesting, probably it became a bestseller not necessarily because we were trying to straighten people out on doctrine, on sound doctrine, but because we named names. It was controversial. And I don’t know of a book written by a mainline Christian publisher that ever did that before.

But, Dick, just as you guys have done in PFO, you’ve got to document this stuff. You’ve got to show who said it, when they said it… Like I’m holding a book here. You’re probably familiar with the book: The Confusing World of Benny Hinn.

Dick: Right…

Tom: G. Richard Fischer, Kurt Goedelman, and some others…

Dick: Yeah…

Tom: I mean, this book would have been meaningless if you couldn’t quote Benny Hinn, and you couldn’t show people how his doctrine and his teaching was false.

Dick: Yeah, and we made a trip to Israel, too, just to document his early years, and even all the lies that he told about his early years, in Jaffa in Israel. So, yeah, that was heavily documented. We had to. We got a legal…You know it’s not the power of the Lord, it’s the power of the lawyers! Because we got threatened with a lawsuit on that book, and we wrote his attorneys back, and we don’t have an attorney. We just said, “Look, if you can find anything that’s factually wrong, let us know and we’ll change it. It was just a big ploy to try to, you know, get the book off the market, but they never bothered writing back.

Tom: Right. Well, again, this is so important in this day, in this age, with regard to the body of Christ…with regard to…Jesus, when His disciples asked Him, “What will be the sign of your coming in the last days?” He said, “Take heed that no man deceive you…”

Dick: Exactly…

Tom: And then, that’s Matthew:24:4And Jesus answered and said unto them, Take heed that no man deceive you.
See All... and then 24:24, its says that the deception would be so great that “if possible, even the elect would be deceived.” So this is what we have to do. You know, just as you said at the beginning of the program, these are issues that the church needs to hear, and they need to respond to them.

Now, Dick, let me give you another example of what I run into. I was talking to, you know, really a good guy—he was an associate pastor at an evangelical church, and I…you know, I’d never been to the church, but I just assumed that the guy was understanding the Scriptures and knowing what’s going on with regard to the issues in the church today. And I brought up apostasy. And he said, “What do you mean by apostasy?”

And I said (laughing), “Wait a minute, Pastor, what I mean by apostasy is what Jesus…” You know, I just quoted Matthew:24:4And Jesus answered and said unto them, Take heed that no man deceive you.
See All... and 24:24…, and then I could go through all of the epistles. They’re all about false teaching coming into the church. For the…well, I can’t say “all about,” but for the most part, I can’t think of an epistle that doesn’t deal with that.

Dick: Every second epistle deals heavily with it. So…

Tom: So, give us your definition of apostasy. What’s...

Dick: Well, apostasy is actually a word simply meaning “departure.” But in the context of the New Testament, it means a departure from the faith. And so Paul addresses believers in 1 Timothy 4. He starts out by saying, “The spirit says expressly that some will depart from the faith.” And he’s talking to the church! “Some will depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits and doctrines of demons,” and then he goes on to give more information about that in certain types of error, like dietary things, forbidding meats, and so on, and forbidding marriage—kind of a skewed morality—and as I said, every second epistle addresses apostasy heavily. And then in Revelation 2 and 3, Jesus addresses some of the churches that were actually founded by the apostles about departing in attitude, departing in action, departing in their beliefs.

And then…just look at Israel’s history, right? It’s a history of apostasy. It’s a history of departing from [to?] idols. And so Paul warns us again in 2 Timothy:4:4And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables.
See All..., “Don’t turn from the truth and be turned to fables.”

Tom: Right.

Dick: And that’s to the church, you know. I just…going back to what we said prior, though, what we found that, with observation, study, and research, was a lot of the aberrational, heretical teachers and these aberrant groups were using names like Smith Wigglesworth and William Branham, and Alexander Dowie, and A. A. Allen. So we began to research these guys and get into biographical material, and we have a lot of articles on different people because we want to know who they are and what they actually taught. And when you get into their teachings and some of their errors, it’s shocking. It really is shocking. So…

Tom: What compound...

Dick: I’m sorry…

Tom:  Yeah, that’s what I was going to say…what compounds the problem is, you know, these guys are charismatic leaders, and not in the theological sense but just personality.

Dick: Yeah, and a lot of it is what we call hagiography—it’s really all made up. It’s stories that get repeated and repeated and repeated until they become like gospel truth. Like Smith Wigglesworth was supposed to have raised all these people from the dead. When you really go back and research his life, you can’t find instances of this.

Tom: Well, you know, another kingpin in all of this is William Branham…you know, we could talk—and we will, we’ve got a few minutes left in this particular program, but we’re going to pick it up again in our next program with you, Dick.

William Branham—you want to talk about heresy after heresy. Blatant heresy! And foundational to, you know, one of the icons of the whole Latter Rain, Manifest Sons of God movement, which is foundational to much of what we’re seeing today in the charismatic church. Charismatic/Pentecostal. Not all, but this is certainly a major movement.

Dick: Well, we would say extremist—extremist charismatics. Yeah, there are extremists, and there are some mainstream, and there are some guys that are really trying to hold the line. I know a number of them, but, boy when you get into extremist Pentecostal/ extremist charismatic—it’s a zoo. It’s awful.

Tom: And now, they have the media to work with…

Dick: Exactly…

Tom: …in terms of getting their spurious teachings, doctrines, and so called out there. There’s no holds barred. Now, Dick, I’m going to close this segment of our program, and we’re going to pick up with you in the next program, but I just want to encourage our listeners: Folks, what we’re presenting here—it’s not just hearsay. This is why I love to have Dick on—a former pastor, just retired…He has a pastor’s heart. A shepherd of the sheep. And our concern—our real burden here—is to make sure that the sheep have an idea…are informed as to what’s going on. And that’s what we’re doing.

So, Dick, again, thank you for being with us in this program, and we look forward to taking this up in the next one.

Dick: Well, thank you.

Gary: You’ve been listening to Search the Scriptures 24/7 with T.A. McMahon. We offer a wide variety of materials to help you in your study of God’s Word. For a complete list of materials and a free subscription to our monthly newsletter, contact us at PO Box 7019, Bend, OR, 97708; call us at 800-937-6638, or visit our website at www.thebereancall.org.

I’m Gary Carmichael. Thanks for joining us. And we encourage you to search the Scriptures 24/7.