THE UNBELIEF AT FULLER THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY

Updated May 13, 2004 (first published August 23, 1999) (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) -

Fuller Theological Seminary wields vast influence. When it was formed in 1947 it held that the Bible is infallibly, inerrantly, verbally, plenarily inspired, but within a short time this was rejected. Fuller quickly became a hotbed of New Evangelical compromise, adopting a philosophy of doctrinal neutrality, positivism, pride of intellect.

Its first president, Harold John Ockenga, claimed to have coined the term “New Evangelicalism” in 1948 at a convocation in connection with the seminary. Ockenga stated that New Evangelicalism “differed from fundamentalism in its repudiation of separatism.” Friends, if you repudiate “separatism,” you repudiate the Scriptures!

Current Fuller president Richard Mouw says: “Early on, the school backed away from the separatism and dispensationalism that had been associated with fundamentalism of the 1940s, adopting a more conciliatory posture” (Christianity Today, October 6, 1997).

Having rejected biblical separation from its inception and having adopted the unscriptural philosophy of dialogue and infiltration, it is no surprise that Fuller Seminary was quickly infected with worldliness and unbelief.

In 1955, Fuller endorsed the liberal Revised Standard Version (RSV) which wickedly replaced the word “virgin” with “young woman” in the Messianic prophecy in Isaiah 7:14. All of the men involved with the translation of the RSV were rank liberals. Walter Russell Bowie wrote, “The impecatory psalms and other utterances like them reflect a God who is dead and ought to be dead—and never was alive except in unredeemed imagination” (Bowie, Where You Find God, p. 25). William Foxwell Albright wrote, “One cannot of course place John on the same level with the synoptic Gospels as a historical source” (Albright, From the Stone Age to Christianity, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1957). Millar Burrows wrote, “We cannot take the Bible as a whole and in every part as stating with divine authority what we must believe and do” (Burrows, Outline of Biblical Theology). Henry Cadbury wrote, “He [Jesus Christ] was given to overstatements, in his case, not a personal idiosyncrasy, but a characteristic of the oriental world” (Cadbury, Jesus, What Manner of Man?). Clarence Craig wrote, “The mere fact that a tomb was found empty was capable of many explanations. the very last one that would be credible to a modern man would be the explanation of a physical resurrection of the body. ... Paul was not talking about an event which could be photographed by eye-witnesses, but an event in the world of spiritual perception. ... It was not to be demonstrated by appeal to graves that were empty. It was a proclamation that must appeal to religious faith” (Craig, The Beginning of Christianity, pp. 135,36). Edgar Goodspeed wrote, “Jesus ... was far from giving to the old testament as a whole the unqualified assent natural to a Jew of his day” (Goodspeed, The Formation of the New Testament, 1926, p. 7). Goodspeed claimed that Genesis is composed of “Babylonian myths and legends and Canaanite popular tales” (Goodspeed, The Story of the Old Testament, 1934, pp. 107). In our book For Love of the Bible we give similar heretical and blasphemous quotes from many other RSV translators, including Frederick Grant, H.G.G. Herklots, Fleming James, William Irwin, James Moffatt, and Willard Sperry. Fuller Seminary’s endorsement of the Revised Standard Version was irrefutable evidence that the school was already on the wrong side of the age-old battle for truth.

CHANGING THE DOCTRINAL STATEMENT

By 1976, Harold Lindsell, who served as a professor and vice-president of Fuller, raised his voice against Fuller’s apostasy. In his book The Battle for the Bible, Lindsell devoted an entire chapter to “The Strange Case of Fuller Theological Seminary.” Nowhere in his book does Lindsell discern the root of Fuller’s error, which was the rejection of biblical separation, nor does he call upon evangelicals to separate from Fuller’s apostasy; but he does document the end product of Fuller’s error. He stated:

“In or about 1962 it became apparent that there were some who no longer believed in the inerrancy of the Bible, among both the faculty and the board members” (Lindsell, Battle for the Bible, p. 108).

Lindsell names the names of many of these faculty and board members: C. Davis Weyerhaeuswer, Daniel P. Fuller (son of the school’s founder), Calvin Schoonhoven, David Hubbard (who became president of the school), James Daane, and George Ladd. In the early 1970s, Fuller Seminary changed its doctrinal statement to more accurately reflect the position held by members of its faculty. The original statement the Bible is “plenarily inspired and free from all error in the whole and in the part... (and is) the only infallible rule of faith and practice.” The new statement dropped the words “free from all error in the whole and in the part.” This leaves room for heretics who believe the Bible errs in matters such as “science” and history. Many liberal evangelicals have tried to make a distinction between the Bible being infallible and being inerrant, claiming that it is infallible but not inerrant. This is scholarly nonsense. If the Bible is infallible, it is inerrant, and that is precisely what the Lord Jesus Christ and the Apostles taught. Jesus said “the Scripture cannot be broken” (Jn. 10:35).

The change was encouraged when Daniel Fuller returned from Europe where he had studied under neo-orthodox theologian Karl Barth. He had accepted the neo-orthodox view that the Bible is only inspired in matters pertaining to spirituality but not in matters of science and history.

Since then, Fuller Seminary has gone from bad to worse in this matter. It is doubtful that there are any professors at the school today who believe the Bible is the inerrant, verbally-inspired Word of God without error “in the whole and in the part.” Fuller Seminary is infatuated with scholarship and has drunken deeply from the wells of modernism.

PAUL KING JEWETT

Paul Jewett was Professor of Systematic Theology at Fuller Seminary. In 1975 he published Man as Male and Female. The foreword was written by Virginia Mollenkott, chairman of the Department of English at William Paterson College in New Jersey. Mollenkott is a lesbian who moves in the most radical of pro-abortion feminist circles. In 1978 she co-authored (with Letha Scanzoni) the book entitled Is the Homosexual My Neighbor? in which she called for nondiscrimination toward homosexuality. Her book argues that the Sodom account in Genesis does not teach the evil of homosexuality, but the evils of violent gang rape and inhospitality to strangers. The book also claims that “the idea of a life long homosexual orientation or ‘condition” is never mentioned in the Bible” (p. 71), and that Romans 1 does not “fit the case of a sincere homosexual Christian” (p. 62). In the June 1991, issue of the Episcopal monthly entitled The Witness, Mollenkott testified, “My lesbianism has always been a part of me. ... I tried to be heterosexual. I married myself off. But what I did ultimately realize was that God created me as I was, and that this is where life was meaningful.” In her 1994 book, The Divine Feminine: The Biblical Imagery of God as Female, Mollenkott calls God the “One Mother of us all” (p. 19) and suggests that the Lord’s prayer might be addressed to “Our Father/Mother who is in Heaven” (p. 116).

In the book Man as Male and Female, Fuller professor Paul Jewett admits that he has been influenced by modern biblical criticism and claims that the Bible contains error because it was written by men:

“Historical and critical studies of the biblical documents have compelled the church to abandon this simplistic view of the divinity of Scripture [the traditional doctrine that the Bible is the Word of God without error] and to take into account the complexity at the human level of the historical process by which the documents were produced. Instead of the simple statement, which is essentially true, that the Bible is a divine book, we now perceive more clearly than in the past that the Bible is a divine/human book. As divine, it emits the light of revelation; as human, this light of revelation shines in and through the ‘dark glass’ (1 Cor. 13:12) of the ‘earthen vessels’ (2 Cor. 4:7) who were the authors of its content at the human level” (Jewett, Man as Male and Female, p. 135).

Jewett is wrong. The Lord Jesus Christ knew more about the Scripture than modern textual critics, and He never hinted that there is any error in it. He plainly stated that “the scripture cannot be broken” (John 10:35) and that the very jots and tittles are authoritative and preserved by God (Matthew 5:18). When the Apostle Paul stated that “all scripture is given by inspiration of God” (2 Timothy 3:16), he obviously understood that there is a human element in Scripture, but he knew that God controlled the writers of Scripture in such a manner that the product is the inerrant Word of God. Any doctrine of the Scripture that disagrees with that taught by Christ and the Apostles is heresy.

CHARLES SCALISE

Another example of how Fuller professors have capitulated to modernistic views of the Bible is Charles Scalise. He is associate professor of church history and academic director of Fuller Theological Seminary in Seattle’s M. Div. program. In his book From Scripture to Theology: A Canonical Journey into Hermeneutics (InterVarsity Press, 1996), Scalise argues for accepting the conclusions of biblical criticism while at the same time accepting the Bible as the “canonical Word of God.” He proposes the “canonical approach” of Yale Professor Brevard Childs who follows Karl Barth. Scalise uncritically describes how “the ‘postcritical’ hermeneutics of Karl Barth assists Childs in charting his way across ‘the desert of criticism’” (p. 44). It is true that modern biblical criticism is a desert, but instead of rejecting biblical criticism as the unbelieving heresy that it is, the modern Evangelical scholar tries to reconcile it with a way to allow the Bible to remain authoritative in some sense. In the first chapter of his book, Scalise plainly and unhesitatingly rejects the “facts-of-revelation” approach to Scripture that accepts the Bible as the historically accurate record of God’s infallible revelation (pp. 28-31). Scalise does not believe Moses wrote the Pentateuch under divine inspiration or that the Old Testament record of miracles is accurate. He believes the Pentateuch was written by unknown editors centuries later (p. 56). He believes the Bible’s accounts of miraculous events are exaggerated. For example, he believes that the Egyptian chariots pursuing Israel got “stuck in the mud” (p. 39) rather than being overwhelmed by God’s miraculous dividing and undividing of the waters. He agrees with Karl Barth that the book of Numbers contains both “history” and “storylike saga” (p. 49). He believes portions of Amos were added by an unknown editor (p. 56). He believes that to view the Bible as historical is dangerous (p. 79). He does not believe the Psalms are historical writings (p. 78). He does not believe that the Apostle Paul wrote the book of Ephesians nor that it was originally addressed to the church at Ephesus, and he doesn’t believe it matters (p. 58). Scalise wants to allow the Catholic apocryphal books to be accepted as canonical (pp. 60, 61). He commends an approach to biblical canon which has “A FIRM CENTER AND BLURRED EDGES” (p. 60). Scalise says, “The Bible is the Word of God because God speaks through it” (p. 22). That is a false, subjective Barthian view of Scripture. In fact, the Bible is the Word of God because it is the Word of God, regardless of whether man feels that God is speaking through it. Scalise does not like the “negative view of tradition” that comes from the Protestant Reformation, and he believes the Protestants and Catholics simply misunderstood one another (p. 73). He believes it is possible to reconcile the differences by requiring that the Bible be interpreted within the context of church tradition (p. 74). In fact, if the Bible must be interpreted by tradition, the tradition becomes the superior authority. In the preface to his book, Scalise notes that he was guided into his critical views of the Bible during studies at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and at Tubingen in Germany.

MISCELLANEOUS FACTS

Fuller began to approach Roman Catholic seminaries in the 1970s in search of students. One of the first Roman Catholic students to attend Fuller was Paul Ford, who went on to become a professor of theology and liturgy at St. John’s Seminary in Camarillo, California. In Fuller Seminary’s alumni paper Theology, News and Notes for March 1993, Ford describes his experience at Fuller and described how pro-Catholic it was. He said Fuller professors David Hubbard and Jack Rogers visited his Catholic monastery and that Fuller professor Paul Jewett was a speaker there during the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. A 2002 edition of Fuller Seminary paper Focus featured an interview with a Catholic nun about her experience as a student at Fuller. She said, “I think Fuller is a great place for a Catholic woman to study who wants to be taken seriously as a woman in ministry.”

Since the 1970s, Fuller Seminary has been heavily influenced by and associated with Pentecostals and Charismatics. Russell Spittler of the Assemblies of God has been a faculty member since 1976. In 1996 he was elected the provost and vice president for academics. He is an ecumenist who is frequently involved in dialogues. In the early 1980s, Fuller invited John Wimber to teach a course entitled “MC510, Signs, Wonders, and Church Growth.” He encouraged the students to seek after signs and miracles and taught that every believer should lay hands on others and heal them. John Wimber opened the floodgates to many errors by downplaying the importance of biblical discernment. He warned against being “too rigid” and “too heavily oriented to the written Word” (Counterfeit Revival, p. 109). One would say something like that only if he were attempting to promote things which were not in accordance with the Word of God. The Psalmist said the written Word “is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path” (Ps. 119:105). It is impossible to be too strongly oriented toward the Bible! In his healing seminar, Wimber made the following statement, “It’s evil when you hide behind doctrinal beliefs that curtail and control the work of the Spirit. … The Church today is committing evil in the name of sound doctrine. And they are quenching the work of the Holy Spirit” (Wimber, Healing Seminar Series, cited from Testing the Fruit of the Vineyard by John Goodwin). Wimber had a large influence through his books, conferences and through the Vineyard Fellowship of Churches that he led until his death in 1997.

Another Fuller professor, C. Peter Wagner, supported Wimber in his false doctrine and has gone on to become one of the most influential voices in the spiritual warfare movement. I heard both Wagner and Wimber speak in 1990 at the North American Congress on the Holy Spirit and World Evangelization in Indianapolis. They were perfectly at home with the 10,000 or so Roman Catholics who were in attendance. The closing message of the conference was delivered by Catholic priest Tom Forrest, who said in one his messages that he praises God for purgatory because he knows that it is the only way he can get to heaven. Wagner’s 1998 book New Apostolic Reformation promotes charismatic heresies such as tongues (actually gibberish), prophecy, spirit slaying, spiritual mapping, territorial demons, and binding the devil. Wagner wrote the preface to one of Robert Schuller’s books saying, “I am personally indebted to Robert Schuller for much of what I know and teach.” Schuller has redefined the gospel in accordance with his self-esteem theology. He said that defining sin as rebellion against God is “shallow and insulting to the human being” (Schuller, Self-Esteem: The New Reformation, p. 65). According to Schuller, born again means that we must be “changed from a negative to a positive self-image” (p. 68), sin is “any act or thought that rob myself or another human being of his or her self-esteem” (p. 14), hell “is the loss of pride that naturally follows separation from God (p. 14), and Christ “was self-esteem incarnate” (p. 135).

During the 1984-85 school year, Raymond Brown was a lecturer at Fuller Seminary. Brown was a liberal Roman Catholic who denied the deity of Jesus Christ and was active in the World Council of Churches.

In 1984 Fuller professor Lewis Smedes published a book entitled Sex for Christians. He claims that “thousands of homosexual people live highly moral and often deeply religious existences” and that the homosexual “should simply refuse to accept a burden of guilt for his condition” because he is “a victim either of biological accident or someone’s else’s folly” (Sex for Christians, pp. 65-71).

In November 1986, Fuller Seminary opened the David du Plessis Center for Christian Spirituality. Du Plessis, who died in 1987, was a key figure in breaking down the walls of separation between Pentecostals and theological modernists and Roman Catholics. He was the only Pentecostal invited to attend the Catholic Vatican II Council in the 1960s, and he claimed that God melted his resistance to the mass, prayers to Mary, and other Catholic dogmas. In fact, he was deluded and was following Pentecostal “visions and voices” more than the Scriptures. Du Plessis was the only non-Roman Catholic ever to receive the Benemerenti Award, the highest honor that a pope can bestow.

Fuller Seminary has held ecumenical talks with the Roman Catholic Church since 1987. In 2001 the committee in charge of the talks got two congregations to join in the dialogue by sharing in a common worship service (Calvary Contender, Aug. 1, 2001).

Fuller Seminary has long promoted women pastors. Fuller Seminary president David Hubbard joined 200 prominent evangelical leaders in signing a 1990 declaration affirming the equality of men and women. The statement appeared in Christianity Today, April 9, 1990. It said that “in the church, public recognition is given to both women and men who exercise ministries of service and leadership.” An article in The Independent, Huntington Beach, California, for Nov. 20, 2003, contained the testimony of Jude Secor, who grew up believing that a woman should not be a pastor. After she attended Fuller “she was surprised to find that she was the only one at the seminary who still held a prejudice against women pastors.” Thus she became the co-pastor of Goldenwest Vineyard Christian Fellowship and when her husband died, she continued as the senior pastor.

Siang-Yang Tan, director of the Doctor of Psychology program at Fuller Seminary, was one of the attendees of the national conference on Personal Spiritual Renewal in October 1991. It was hosted by Renovare, an organization founded by Richard Foster. Speaking in the evening sessions, Foster praised Pope John Paul II as a “powerful asset of the Catholic movement” and called for unity in the “body of Christ” through the “five streams of Christianity: the contemplative, holiness, charismatic, social justice and evangelical.” He promoted occultic meditative techniques such as guided imagery and visualization. Another speaker was Renovare Steering Committee member Sister Bernard, a Catholic nun who is involved in the Buddhist-Roman Catholic dialogue. Fuller professor Tan “stressed the need to integrate psychology with spirituality” and “advocated inner healing, healing of the memories, and other occultic visualization techniques” (Christian Information Bureau Bulletin, December 1991).

In October 1993, Donald Hanger was installed at Fuller as the “George Eldon Ladd Professor of New Testament.” In his installation address he said, “It is hard to imagine anything more debilitating to the work of the Biblical scholar than the a-priori insistence on inerrancy,” and he expressed his thanks that the seminary discarded that “unreasonable, unnecessary and misleading” doctrine (Theology, News and Notes, June 1998). He also said, “One does not have to affirm inerrancy to be or to remain evangelical.”

In December 1995, Fuller Seminary hosted a meeting of the World Council of Churches, one of the most theologically liberal organizations in the world. Fuller professor Arthur Glasser has for decades been at the forefront of trying to unite evangelicals with the World Council. He was a voting delegate at the WCC meeting in Bangkok in 1973. The November 1993 World Council-sponsored Re-imagining conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota, featured speakers such as Delores Williams who said: “I don’t think we need a theory of atonement at all. ... I don’t think we need folks hanging on crosses and blood dripping and weird stuff ... we just need to listen to the God within.” And Virginia Mollenkott, who said, “I can no longer worship in a theological context that depicts God as an abusive parent [referring to Christ’s death on the cross] and Jesus as the obedient, trusting child.” And Chung Hyun Kyung, who said, “My bowel is Buddhist bowel, my heart is Buddhist heart, my right brain is Confucian brain, and my left brain is Christian brain. ... If you feel very tired and you don’t have any energy to give, what you do is ... go to a big tree and ask it, ‘give you some of your life energy.’” The WCC-sponsored conference featured a standing ovation for a group of some 100 “lesbian, bi-sexual, and transsexual women” who gathered on the platform. On Sunday morning the conferees joined together in repeating a prayer to Sophia: “Our maker Sophia, we are women in your image. ... Our guide, Sophia, we are women in your image.” The Seventh Assembly of the World Council, which met in February 1990, in Canberra, Australia, opened with pagan Aborigines in loincloths and feathers, their bodies painted, dancing around a pagan altar to the beat of drums. One of the speakers was the aforementioned Chung Hyun Kyung, who summoned the spirits of the dead and “the spirit of Earth, Air, and Water.” Chung said, “I also know that I no longer believe in an omnipotent, Macho, warrior God who rescues all good guys and punishes all bad guys.” In 1991, Wesley Ariarajah, who was the director of the WCC’s Inter-Faith dialogue, said that all religious faiths are one with God. “Therefore it is inconceivable to me that a Hindu or a Buddhist, or anybody, is outside God. My understanding of God’s love is too broad for me to believe that only this narrow segment called the Christian church will be saved. If you are a Christian you must be open and broad, not narrow and exclusive” (Ariarajah, quoted in The Australian, Feb. 11, 1991). This is the type of thing that Fuller Seminary has yoked up with in its fellowship with the World Council of Churches. (For more information, see our book The World Council of Churches, which is part of the Issues Facing the Churches series and can be obtained from Way of Life Literature, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061, 866-295-4143.)

In January 1997, Fuller Seminary hosted a two-day seminar that explored “the theology of pluralism. The seminar featured Donald Theimann, dean of the radically liberal Harvard Divinity School, and Rabbi A. James Rudin, Both agreed that “no religion has a monopoly on God’s truth” (Foundation magazine, Jan.-Feb. 1997).

The following is a firsthand report by a pastor who visited Fuller Seminary in 1999: “My wife and I visited Fuller Theological Seminary on July 27, 1999. … We attended a class taught by Dr. John Goldingay of the School of Theology. Dr. Goldingay had very good rapport with the class and is one of the most popular professors on the campus. He told the class that there is no archeological evidence that the city of Jericho existed or that the walls came tumbling down. Referring to the Biblical account he said, ‘Perhaps this is a parable.’ This is evidence that unbelief and denial of the Scriptures is alive and well on the Fuller campus today. Hebrew 11:30 states, ‘By faith the walls of Jericho fell down, after they were compassed about seven days.’ The Bible is correct and Dr. John Goldingay is in error” (Dr. Arthur B. Houk, Hayden, Colorado, houk@springsips.com).

In January 2001 an ecumenical venture named The Foundation for a Conference on Faith and Order in North America was established at Princeton Theological Seminary. Executive board members include Catholic archbishop William Keeler, Greek Orthodox archbishop Dimitrios, and Fuller Seminary president Richard Mouw. The Foundation is committed to expanding its borders and enlisting “new partners in the ecumenical venture.”

In 2001, the liberal Presbyterian Church USA elected former Fuller professor Jack Rogers as moderator. At the same meeting, the PCUSA voted to lift its ban on ordaining homosexual clergy. Harold Ockenga said the New Evangelical is committed to infiltrating liberal denominations rather than separating from them. We can see the good fruit of this! Rogers rejects the historicity of Genesis 1-3.

In January 2003, 50 church leaders from 30 denominations gathered at Fuller Seminary to launch a new ecumenical alliance called Christian Churches Together in the USA. “The new alliance will be the broadest ecumenical coalition ever formed in the history of the United States, representing Episcopalian (Anglican), Evangelical, Orthodox, Pentecostal, Roman Catholic and Protestant churches” (Foundation, March-April 2003). Roman Catholic Bishop Tod Brown, who participated in the meeting, said, “I don’t think there has ever been anything like this attempted before in this country.”

A WARNING TO FUNDAMENTALISTS

Fuller Theological Seminary’s quick slide into apostasy is a loud warning to Fundamentalists today. When Fuller Seminary was formed in the late 1940s, it was a fundamentalist institution. Founder Charles E. Fuller of the “Old Fashioned Revival Hour” was a Fundamentalist, and he wanted to establish a school to defend the New Testament faith. Harold Lindsell, who was one of the school’s first four faculty members, said: “From the beginning it was declared that one of the chief purposes of the founding of the seminary was that it should be an apologetic institution. … It was agreed from the inception of the school that through the seminary curriculum the faculty would provide the finest theological defense of biblical infallibility or inerrancy.”

As we have seen, this objective was quickly abandoned. By neglecting biblical separation and focusing on scholarship rather than simple faith in God’s Word, the school became a hodge-podge of spiritual and doctrinal compromise and apostasy instead of a bastion of biblical truth.

This is precisely what will happen to every fundamentalist church and school that refuses to practice separation today.

“Know ye not that a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump?” (1 Corinthians 5:6; Galatians 5:9).

“Be not deceived: evil communications corrupt good manners” (1 Corinthians 15:33).