Updated October 3, 2006 (first published June 27, 2006) (David Cloud, Fundamental Baptist Information Service, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061, 866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org; for instructions about subscribing and unsubscribing or changing addresses, see the information paragraph at the end of the article) -

A 2005 survey of roughly 1,100 “young fundamentalists,” found that John Piper has a significant influence. Almost 50% agreed with the statement, “John Piper’s ministry has been a help to me.”

This might help to explain the high number of Calvinists and the New Evangelical leanings among the responders. The unscientific survey largely represented graduates of Bob Jones University (29% of those surveyed), Maranatha Baptist Bible College (22%), and Northland Baptist Bible College (21%). (For more on this see “A Survey of Young Fundamentalists” at http://www.wayoflife.org/fbns/survey-young-fund.html.)

John Piper is a popular Evangelical author and the senior pastor at Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota, but though he pastors a church that is called Baptist he wanted it to allow non-immersion “baptisms” for church membership. In 2002 Piper proposed to the church that the constitution be amended to allow a candidate to reject believer’s baptism by immersion if he “sincerely and humbly believes that it would be contrary to Scripture and conscience--and not just contrary to family tradition or desires--to be baptized by immersion and thus to count his infant ‘baptism’ or his adult sprinkling as improper or invalid.” The proposal was not passed, but the fact remains that Piper was willing to allow non-immersion “baptisms.”

This is heretical and is a very strange position for a so-called Baptist church to take. The Greek word “baptizo” means immersion and baptism is called a burial in Scripture (Rom. 6:3-4; Col. 2:12). There is not one example in Scripture of an infant being baptized. To the contrary, the requirement for baptism is faith in Christ and an infant is clearly incapable of that (Mk. 16:16; Acts 8:36-39; 16:30-33).

Many sincerely believe that their infant baptism or adult sprinkling is a genuine baptism, but they are sincerely misled and should in no wise be encouraged in their error by Baptist preachers.

Piper is a Calvinist who believes the strange heresy that regeneration precedes faith. Note the following statement:

“We believe that the new birth is a miraculous creation of God that enables a formerly ‘dead’ person to receive Christ and so be saved. We do not think that faith precedes ... the new birth. Faith is the evidence that God has begotten us anew. ... God begets us anew and the first glimmer of life in the newborn child is faith. This new birth is the effect of irresistible grace, because it is an act of sovereign creation” (John Piper, quoted from John MacArthur, Faith Works, 1993, p. 199).

Piper is also a New Evangelical ecumenist. For example, he was a speaker at the 2004 National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) conference in Charlotte, North Carolina, joining hands in that forum with Franklin Graham, James Dobson, Ted Haggard, and Pat Robertson, all of whom have a close relationship with the Roman Catholic Church. Graham follows in his father’s footsteps in turning converts over to the Catholic Church. Dobson has appeared on the cover of Catholic magazines and to our knowledge has never warned his many Catholic listeners to come out of Rome. Robertson wrote the foreword to A House United? Evangelicals and Catholics Together: A Winning Alliance for the 21st Century (NavPress, 1994). He said that Catholics and Protestants “have a moral imperative to join together” to oppose cultural evils such as abortion and praised Roman Catholic Keith Fournier for his “deep dedication to helping to heal the divide” that “separated the Body of Christ.” Three years earlier Robertson had invited Fournier to be the executive director of the American Center for Law and Justice at Regent University. Haggard, Senior Pastor of New Life Church in Colorado Springs and president of the National Association of Evangelicals, said in October 2005: “New Life doesn’t try to ‘convert’ Catholics” and “the church would never discourage its members from becoming Catholic or attending Catholic Mass” (The Berean Call, Jan. 2006). Three Roman Catholic organizations were active at the 2004 NRB conference. The Global Catholic Network ran an ad in the NRB newspaper each day and rented exhibit space. Priests for Life handed out packets of their material; and Catholic Answers, which promotes Roman Catholic dogma, also participated.

Dr. Ralph Colas, who wrote an eyewitness report of the meeting, concluded: “This year some speakers, like John Piper, had more Bible content than is usually presented at NRB conventions. However, not one identified the apostates, Roman Catholicism as well as those who embrace extra-biblical revelations and dreams, as being a threat to the people of God. As it is so often at such new evangelical meetings, it is not necessarily what they say--but what they fail to say that creates the confusion and further compromise. The NRB continues to be a hodgepodge of believers and unbelievers, and its broad inclusivism reveals it fits exactly in the center of the new evangelical camp.”

Regardless of the good things that he might teach, John Piper is a New Evangelical and a Calvinist who despises Scriptural baptism and should therefore be avoided (Rom. 16:17; 2 Thess. 3:6).

“Now I beseech you, brethren, mark them which cause divisions and offences contrary to the doctrine which ye have learned; and avoid them” (Rom. 16:17).

“Now we command you, brethren, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that ye withdraw yourselves from every brother that walketh disorderly, and not after the tradition which he received of us” (2 Thess. 3:6).