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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.
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