PRETRIB 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
priestcraft" 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
its 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
pretrib wording 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.