Pre-Trib Hypocrisy
By Dave MacPherson
Yes, hypocrisy! Hypocrisy tied to pretrib rapture leaders as well as to the pretrib rapture view. (You can't believe how many "pretribbers" have told me over the years that they either have doubts about pretrib or don't even believe it----but they promote it anyway!)
Pretrib icon C. I. Scofield could be hypocritically double-minded. In a 1921 letter to his daughter Abigail, who had a financial need while then living in San Luis Obispo,California, he advised her to pray to a Catholic saint: "...why don't you seek the special intercession of the San Luis in whose name-town you live?" (This entire letter is in Joseph Canfield's classic work The Incredible Scofield and His Book published by Ross House Books.) But a dozen years earlier in his Scofield Bible (p. 1346) he had begun predicting a future reign of "apostate Christendom, headed up under the Papacy"!
Many evangelicals are still unaware that during the 1980's Hal Lindsey proudly announced that two of his daughters, Robin and Jenny, were then enrolled at Gonzaga University, a Jesuit Catholic school. (The Jesuits were originally Catholicism's arm to terroristically infiltrate and destroy the growing Protestant Reformation.) But years earlier Lindsey's There's A New World Coming (pp. 58, 103) stated, and continues to state, that the "dominant church" of the "Middle Ages" which "bound the people to image-worship, superstition, and priest craft" is the "prostituted form of Christianity" that will eventually become "the Antichrist of Rome"!
I still have a letter I received dated Nov. 14, 1971 and signed by a William T. Bruner. Here's the eye-catching part: "I was brought up to be a strong Pre-Tribulationist. In fact I never even thought that the other view was worth inquiring into. When Dr. Bob Jones called me to teach in the Bob Jones College one of the first questions he asked me was, whether I held to this view, and of course I said Yes. But while I was professor of Greek New Testament at the Bob Jones University, 1949-1955, one of my colleagues, Robert Besancon, happened to ask me if I had ever read anything on the Post-Trib side. I had to confess that I never had. He recommended two little books by Horner. I read them and was truly astonished to find that the Post-Trib view is the simpler, more Scriptural, and more reasonable of the two. So I am now a Post-Tribulationist.
Very interestingly, though, there was at that time on the BJU faculty a great scholar, Dr. Charles Brokenshire, who could teach 25 languages and every subject in the School of Religion. But he was a Post-Tribulationist. Dr. Jones considered him worth more than any other faculty member, perhaps worth more than all of us put together. During the school year 1954-55 Dr. Brokenshire died. After he died Dr. Jones went before his faculty meeting and announced that from that time on he would be true to his old-time promise to the Christians of America that he would strongly emphasize the Pre-Tribulation doctrine of the Second Coming of Christ and that he wanted all his teachers in the School of Religion to stand in favor of that doctrine!"
Well, it's apparent that the first Dr. Bob had been playing the role of hypocrite! (Dr.Roland Rasmussen, pastor of Faith Baptist Church in Canoga Park, California, can verify the late Dr. Bruner's letter. As a BJU prof then, Rasmussen was at the same faculty meeting.)
Several years ago my wife and I found ourselves chatting on the BJU campus with one of it's best-known profs. We were astounded when he admitted that even though that school publicly promotes pretrib, professors can privately hold to differing rapture views as long as they retain at least a premill outlook!
The year 1973 found me handing out posttrib literature on a Kansas City sidewalk to delegates going into the annual conference of the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches. It was easy for them to react by saying bluntly "We're pretrib!" and just as easy for me to say just as bluntly "Not only is pretrib not in the Bible, but it isn't in even your GARBC statement of faith!" After I widely aired their hypocrisy, they added pretribwording to their official statement during a following conference so that their doctrine could finally begin practicing what the GARBC "doctors" had long been preaching! A Dec. 31, 1983 letter written on Southeastern College of the Assemblies of God stationery by one of their profs, J. Bashford Bishop, contained these shocks: "Thanks for the book. [I had given him my 1983 book The Great Rapture Hoax.] I'll do what I can to circulate your book through our Assemblies of God [who], as you know, are opposed to Post-tribism. Make a point of getting acquainted with Joseph Flower, our General Secy. at headquarters in Springfield. He and I were schoolmates and both of us were Post-trib then and ever since. He would be glad to discuss with you the subject----a real man of God."
We'd been doing research there in Springfield, Missouri that winter and soon enjoyed two hour-long chats with Flower, the No. 2 AG leader. Secretaries outside his open office door could easily hear everything discussed. I asked how he could hold to a non-approved rapture view. He replied that AG ministers are required to uphold pretrib but privately can believe any other rapture view. When I remarked that such a rule encourages hypocrisy, Flower sheepishly agreed. Incidentally, those chats took place several years before any of the hypocrisy-filled scandals having to do with Bakker and Swaggart, two AG ministers!
What you've just read is a tiny fraction of the gigantic amount of pretrib dishonesty uncovered by my decades-long research. To get your money's worth, get my 300-page book The Rapture Plot via armageddonbooks.com or by phoning (800) 967-7345.
For Biblical Christianity's more detailed explanation on the timing of the rapture, against pre-tribulation doctrine, go HERE.
I totally ripped this off the Tribulation Central website, including their Title banner- I hope this free advertizing doesn't offend them. It is meant to be complimentary advertizing. Rather than just give a link, I thought it deserved a full page! I probably should have sought permission, but shucks, I never do that.
ReplyDelete[Thanks, Bro. Fred, for your great and much needed blog. What a coincidence that you featured a MacPherson article that is included by title in a "thermonuclear" blast I saw recently on the web that exposes the No. 1, facts-twisting, winning-any-way-I-can pretrib defender, Thomas Ice, who will be the last to leave the sinking pretrib "Titanic"! Here's the blast:]
ReplyDeleteAMERICA'S PRETRIB RAPTURE TRAFFICKERS
There are some who haven't been taken in by noisy pretrib rapture traffickers in America such as Thomas Ice. He's the "genius" (with a "Ph.D" from a Texas crackerbox that was fined for illegally issuing degrees, according to World Net Daily!) that LaHaye etc. count on to stiff-arm historian Dave MacPherson's fastidiously accurate research. (The late F. F. Bruce, world-class theologian and encyclopedia contributor who wrote a glowing Foreword to one of Dave's books, could find only one typo in it: an accidental listing of something like "Vol. I" instead of "Vol. II" on one page!) And his research of decades is highly endorsed (Google "Scholars Weigh My Research"). On the other hand, Ice's rapture-rush-job research includes sloppiness - Google "Thomas Ice (Bloopers)" - as well as deviousness. In a 1990 article (in Dallas Seminary's journal Bibliotheca Sacra) on Margaret Macdonald, the long covered up pretrib originator, he quoted up to line 55 in her revelation explanation, deliberately skipped over her main point in lines 58-63 (where she saw "one taken and the other left" BEFORE the "WICKED" [II Thess. 2:8] is "revealed" - phrases even Hal Lindsey views as "pretrib" in his books!), and resumed his extensive quotation in line 72! Ice has knowingly repeated the same omission in later writings because he is aware of her (pretrib) partial rapturism (Google "X-Raying Margaret") which cancels out his falsehood that she was a posttrib - even though his former mentor, the late John Walvoord, stated in his books that partial rapturists ARE pretribs! Ice is just as devious with his Pseudo-Ephraem and Morgan Edwards claims (Google Dave's "Deceiving and Being Deceived") and lately - fearing neither God nor man - has been claiming to find pretrib rapturism in MANY pre-1830 writers (who were actually posttrib) simply because they used the word "rapture" (as if pretrib has a monopoly on this word!). Even Walvoord could find only a trio of ancient writers who seemed to support pretrib, but their support was seemingly the only kind of imminence Walvoord embraced - but was really no support at all since the rest of the quotation, which Walvoord chopped off, was posttrib through and through! Before anyone badmouths Dave's research, he or she should see his bestselling book "The Rapture Plot" (available for a great price at Armageddon Books online) or at least borrow it cheaply via inter-library loan at any library. Or even more cheaply Google his unique articles including "Famous Rapture Watchers," "Pretrib Rapture Diehards," "Walvoord's Posttrib Varieties - Plus," "Appendix F: Thou Shalt Not Steal," "Wily Jeffrey," "Thieves' Marketing," "The Unoriginal John Darby," "Pretrib Hypocrisy," "The Rapture Index (Mad Theology)," "Open Letter to Todd Strandberg," "The Real Manuel Lacunza," and "Roots of (Warlike) Christian Zionism." Patrick
If you check back through my archives,you'll find I have been attacking that sinking ship for a while! Glad you enjoyed it. Too bad I didn't write it! Enjoy some of the stuff I DID write.
ReplyDelete(Here's a late web item I just collided with. Shocked? Irv)
ReplyDeleteCHUCK MISSLER - COPYIST !
Many these days are abandoning the pretribulation rapture view, and the June, 1995 article by Chuck Missler (”Byzantine Text Discovery: Ephraem the Syrian”) reveals why there is such a mutiny! First of all, the authoritative scholar that Missler cited, Dr. Paul Alexander, referred only to “Pseudo-Ephraem” and not to Ephraem the Syrian. (If an unsigned ancient manuscript resembles the real Ephraem but there is a question of authorship, they assign it to “Pseudo-Ephraem” - the word “pseudo” meaning “possibly.” For some groundless reason, Grant Jeffrey, the one who reportedly found the “discovery,” changed Dr. Alexander’s terminology! For more info on Jeffrey, Google “Wily Jeffrey.”) And Missler’s scholarship is also questionable. According to the Los Angeles Times (July 30, 1992), about one-fourth of Missler’s 1992 book “The Magog Factor” (which he co-authored with Hal Lindsey) was a daring plagiarism of Dr. Edwin Yamauchi’s 1982 book “Foes from the Northern Frontier”! Four months later Yamauchi’s publisher revealed that both Lindsey and Missler had promised to stop all publishing of their book. But in 1995 they were found publishing “The Magog Invasion” (which was either a revision or a replacement of “The Magog Factor”) - which had a substantial amount of the same plagiarism! (Dave MacPherson’s 1998 book “The Three R’s” has complete documentation on this and other pretrib scandals.) After listing “1820″ as the reported date of the birth of pretrib (he should have said “1830″), Missler sees a pretrib rapture in that Medieval writer’s phrase “taken to the Lord” and, since he evidently favors rewriting others instead of researching, is unaware that Dr. Alexander explained that this phrase really means “participate at least in some measure in beatitude” - which has reference only to doing acts of virtue on earth and not being raptured away from earth! Alexander added that the same ancient writer held to only one final second coming (and not to any prior coming) which would follow the time of Antichrist! (Readers can Google “Deceiving and Being Deceived” by MacPherson to see how groundless the Pseudo-Ephraem claim is and to learn how desperate pretribs are to find any pre-1830 evidence for their escapist view. Dr. Robert Gundry of Westmont College has also demolished the Pseudo-Ephraem claim in his 1997 book “First the Antichrist.”) Since Missler also leans on Thomas Ice, readers can evaluate Ice’s qualifications by Googling “America’s Pretrib Rapture Traffickers,” “Thomas Ice (Bloopers),” “Thomas Ice (Hired Gun),” and “Pretrib Rapture Diehards” (the latter part). For further light on the 179-year-old, fringe-British-invented pretribulation theory, Google or Yahoo “Pretrib Rapture - Hidden Facts.” Finally - why would anyone who has the brains of a rocket scientist want to be taken up with the concept of an any-moment pretrib rapture? The answer may well be that there’s more money in elevating a rapture than launching a rocket!