Dallas Theological Seminary
January 19, 2022
The following is excerpted from The History and Heritage of Fundamentalism and Fundamental Baptists, available from www.wayoflife.org -
Dallas Theological Seminary (DTS) was founded in 1924 by LEWIS SPERRY CHAFER (1871-1952) (Congregational/Presbyterian), William M. Anderson, Jr. (Presbyterian), and W.H. Griffith Thomas (Anglican). Thus it was interdenominational from its inception. The original name was Evangelical Theological College.
Chafer served as the first president until his death in 1952 and taught systematic theology.
He was called “a man of prayer with strong piety” (John Hannah, An Uncommon Union: Dallas Theological Seminary, 2009).
Chafer’s pastor father died of tuberculosis when he was 11 and his mother supported her three children by managing a boarding house.
In 1889, Chafer attended Oberlin Conservatory of Music for three semesters and began a ministry as singer and choir director for YWCA evangelist Arthur T. Reed of Ohio. From 1890 to 1896, they conducted 58 revival meetings that lasted from several days to several weeks.
In 1896, Chafer married Ella Case, whom he had met at Oberlin, and from 1897 to 1907, Chafer and Ella traveled as an evangelistic team and conducted dozens of meetings, with Lewis preaching and his wife singing and playing the organ. He preached in Baptist, Presbyterian, Congregational, and Methodist churches, and held interdenominational meetings supported by a variety of churches in an area. “He traveled widely throughout the East and the South” (An Uncommon Union: Dallas Theological Seminary). Chafer began his Bible teaching ministry by setting up classes for those who had professed faith in Christ in these campaigns.
In 1901, Chafer moved to Northfield, Massachusetts, and began a lifelong affiliation with C.I. Scofield. He met him while attending Trinitarian Congregational Church, where Scofield was the pastor. Chafer took courses taught by Scofield at the Northfield Training School that was founded by D.L. Moody. Chafer later called Scofield his “father” and described Scofield’s teaching as life changing. “My first hearing of Dr. Scofield was at a morning Bible class at the Bible school. He was teaching the sixth chapter of Romans. I am free to confess that it seemed to me at the close that I had seen more vital truth of God’s Word in that one hour, than I had seen in my life before. It was a crisis for me. I was captured for life” (An Uncommon Union).
Chafer became affiliated with the Northfield Bible Conference and was appointed president of the conference in 1909.
During his time in Northfield, Chafer published his first three books: Elementary Outline Studies in the Science of Music, Satan, and True Evangelism.
In 1911, Chafer moved to New Jersey and taught at New York School of the Bible, operated by Scofield, and traveled widely as a Bible conference teacher.
In 1913, he assisted Scofield in founding Philadelphia School of the Bible, “chiefly being involved in the writing of the curriculum” (Daniel Stanfield, Biography Dr. Lewis Sperry Chafer, biblesanity.org). It had a two-year curriculum that focused on a survey of the English Bible.
Between 1915 and 1921, Chafer continued to teach and to participate in Bible conferences, and he published five more books.
After Scofield’s death in July 1921, Chafer moved to Dallas and took the pastorate of First Congregational Church, which was founded by Scofield in 1882. It is called Scofield Memorial Church today and remains affiliated with Dallas Seminary.
In 1924, Chafer founded the Evangelical Theological College (later Dallas Seminary), and in 1926 he published Major Bible Themes, which was the precursor to his multi-volume Systematic Theology. It covered 52 themes. “Major Bible Themes was revised after Chafer’s death by one of his successors, John Walvoord, in 1974 and stands as a single volume or ‘lite’ version of Systematic Theology” (Stanfield, Biography Dr. Lewis Sperry Chafer). Chafer’s Systematic Theology (1948) is fundamentalist (biblical inerrancy), dispensational (e.g., literal interpretation of prophecy, distinction between Israel and the church), pretribulational, Presbyterian in ecclesiology, and Calvinistic (except for rejecting limited atonement). It was the first dispensational systematic theology and had a major influence against amillennialism and theological liberalism. John Walvoord said, “Its appearance in a day when liberal interpretation and unbelief have riddled the Biblical basis for theological study is in itself highly significant.”
One of Chafer’s goals with the Evangelical Theological College was to encapsulate the Bible conference movement into an educational program. “Chafer ... envisioned the institutionalization of its best qualities” (An Uncommon Union: Dallas Theological Seminary). The emphasis of the training was on dispensational theology, Keswick holiness, the literal interpretation of prophecy, and the teaching of the whole English Bible.
There was an emphasis on training men to be effectual expository Bible preachers. This is an important thing that has largely been missing from the training of fundamental Baptists in general. Chafer believed that effectual expository preaching requires a strong knowledge of the whole English Bible, as well as of the biblical languages. “Chafer believed that ... without knowledge of the whole Bible, men would be left unprepared for the task of expository preaching” (An Uncommon Union). We believe that this is the correct approach whenever possible.
In the early years, prominent Bible conference speakers taught at the school by turns, teaching through books of the Bible.
Chafer and the founders of Dallas Seminary believed that the Bible institutes “did not offer a curriculum of adequate breadth or depth to prepare men to be pastors and teachers” (An Uncommon Union). We would agree, but the solution is not a parachurch entity that has no biblical authority to train or ordain preachers.
From its inception, Dallas held to the Calvinist interpretation of sovereign election and irresistible grace, but rejected limited atonement and the doctrine that regeneration precedes faith.
Dallas has held to dispensational theology, and its faculty members have written some of the most influential books on this topic. This includes Chafer’s eight-volume systematic theology and works by Henry Thiessen (Systematic Theology), Merrill Unger (Unger’s Bible Handbook, Commentary on the Old Testament), Charles Feinberg (Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Minor Prophets, Revelation, Israel at the Center of History, Jesus the King Is Coming, Premillennialism or Amillennialism?), John Walvoord (Bible Knowledge Commentary, The Millennial Kingdom, Every Prophecy in the Bible, The Rapture Question), Charles Ryrie (Dispensationalism Today, Come Quickly Lord Jesus, contributions to Everyman’s Bible Commentary), Thomas Constable (Expository Notes), and Dwight Pentecost (Things to Come, Thy Kingdom Come, Prophecy for Today).
Even from its inception, Dallas was only mildly fundamentalist. It was not separatist and was not very outspoken against error and compromise. The stance was “conservative” and scholarly. Chafer was not a “come outer”; he remained in the liberal Presbyterian denomination.
Chafer and his friends were educators, not fighters. They wanted a positive face on their Christianity, which fit in perfectly with the mood of the New Evangelicalism that swept into the school beginning in the 1950s.
“Though Chafer was a premillenarian evangelical/fundamentalist, he was not a willing participant in the militantly aggressive attitudes of the WCFA [World Christian Fundamentals Association, founded by W.B. Riley]. He despaired over the negative, vitriolic posture of this faction and sought to remain distanced from it” (An Uncommon Union).
The term “vitriolic” is a typical New Evangelical slander of a fundamentalist stance. It means “filled with bitter criticism or malice; spiteful; vicious; vindictive.” There is no evidence that W.B. Riley and his fellow preachers in the WCFA were any of that in their defense of the faith. As for being “militantly aggressive” and “negative,” the Bible is absolutely filled with examples of preachers who were aggressive and negative, including all of the prophets and apostles and the Lord Jesus Christ Himself!
Thus regardless of how much good it accomplished in Bible education, and it was a lot, Dallas wasn’t a thoroughgoing biblicist institution, first, because it was parachurch, secondly, because it neglected the command to earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered to the saints” (Jude 3). This is not a “negative, vitrolic posture”; it is a biblical stance. It is the stance of the prophets and apostles of old and of Jesus Christ Himself. Paul was not only a teacher, he was a warrior for the faith. He was most definitely “militantly aggressive.” He called out heretics publicly by name. He smote them with blindness and cursed them and even ridiculed them. A reading of Acts and the Pauline Epistles confirms this.
Dallas Seminary’s official publication is the Bibliotheca Sacra. It was founded in 1843 by Edward Robinson of Union Theological Seminary, and subsequently passed to Andover Theological Seminary, then Oberlin College, then Xenia Theological Seminary (Presbyterian). The journal was purchased by Dallas in 1929.
Dallas was closely affiliated with the Independent Fundamental Churches of American (IFCA), which was founded in 1930. Prominent Dallas teachers who were influential in the IFCA included John Walvoord, Charles Feinberg, and Merrill Unger. The IFCA was permeated with New Evangelicalism by the 1960s. At the IFCA national meeting in 1963, there was a move to “eliminate criticism of ecumenism and new evangelicalism from the Voice magazine” (John Ashbrook, New Neutralism II, p. 67). Obviously there was a terrible softening of stance and “mood” within the IFCA by then. Soon the IFCA’s Voice carried news of Campus Crusade and other ecumenical, New Evangelical organizations.
Dallas Seminary itself was thoroughly committed to the New Evangelicalism by the 1960s. The speaker for the 1963 Founders’ Banquet was Ted Engstrom, President of Youth for Christ, which already practiced inclusive ecumenism with the Roman Catholic Church. Dallas faculty member Haddon Robinson headed up the Dallas Youth for Christ. The speakers for the 1974 Dallas Seminary conference on evangelism included W.A. Criswell (Southern Baptist), Luis Palau (ecumenical evangelist who works closely with Roman Catholics), Tom Skinner (kingdom theology, social gospel), and George Beverly Shea and Cliff Barrows of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.
Dallas Theological Seminary was at the forefront of promoting modern textual criticism among fundamentalists. My Greek teacher at Tennessee Temple in the 1970s was a Dallas graduate, and he considered the great differences between the Received Text and the Critical Text a non-issue.
From 1953 to 1986, John Walvoord was president of Dallas. Under Walvoord’s leadership, “[I]t continued dispensational theology and a methodology and cooperation with New Evangelicalism” (David Beale, In Pursuit of Purity, p. 249). Walvoord held to “the fundamentals of the faith” (inerrant Scripture, the deity of Christ and His virgin birth and substitutionary death on the cross, bodily resurrection and future literal return), but he didn’t expose error in any clear, effectual way. Everything was upbeat.
“The Seminary continues to train men for ministry in the apostate denominations and many United Presbyterian, American Baptist and other denominational pulpits are filled with Dallas men, and with Seminary commendation. Naturally these men are without convictions in matters of Biblical separation. The teaching at the Seminary, with but few exceptions, is in the all positive, inclusivist mood. This spirit is well confirmed in a conversation which Dr. Bob Jones, Jr., had with a high Dallas official who said, ‘We are in the conservative camp but we don’t like to be called fighting fundamentalists” (William Ashbrook, Evangelicalism The New Neutralism, p. 62).
In 1975, Walvoord wrote a positive report about Billy Graham’s International Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne, Switzerland (called Lausanne I). It was published in the March-April 1975 issue of Voice magazine (IFCA). Earnest Pickering, a Dallas graduate, wrote to Walvoord as follows:
“I was deeply disappointed in the article. It contained no real exposure of the subtle dangers and open compromises of this gathering which had first been manifested in the Berlin Congress several years ago. You did mention the fact that there were those there whose theological orthodoxy could be questioned, but you did not attach the importance to this that I believe the Scriptures do. ... This is a very key issue. Whether or not there were persons assembled there who had a heart for world missions and a concern for lost people is beside the point. The issue is whether or not this concern was expressed within a biblical framework. I believe that it was not. ... The kind of compromised position represented at Lausanne should be thoroughly exposed by those in places of leadership and influence” (Pickering, The Tragedy of Compromise, p. 42).
In contrast to Walvoord and Dallas Seminary, Pickering was a defender of the faith. He exposed the Lausanne Congress for its ecumenism, its heresy of contextualization, and its heretical statement on biblical inerrancy, which says only that the Bible is “without error in all it affirms,” leaving room for error in its “geographical, scientific, or historical details.” Pickering was willing to speak against his own alma mater. Not only did he write to challenge Walvoord, he published the communication in a book to make the matter public. This kind of thing requires real spiritual conviction and courage, because it brings reproach, it closes doors, it limits one sphere of ministry and fellowship; but it is right and biblical and pleasing to the Spirit of Truth.
In 1979, Walvoord said, “Dallas has never taken a position against Billy Graham, and it never will as long as I am President” (John Ashbrook, New Neutralism II, p. 100). So Dr. Walvoord took a strong against taking a stand!
This soft, compromising evangelical philosophy has spread far and wide through the influence of Dallas Theological Seminary.
From 1962-1976, George W. Peters was Professor of Missiology at Dallas. He claimed that many Roman Catholics are “quite evangelical.” “According to student reports he frequently refers to officials of the World Council of Churches as ‘Christian gentlemen’ and gives them fulsome praise. He has openly advocated socialism in his classroom, according to these reports, and often springs to the defense of Karl Barth” (William Ashbrook, Evangelicalism The New Neutralism, p. 62).
In 1968, John E. Walvoord, son of Dallas president John F. Walvoord, co-authored New Sounds (Yesterday Today and Tomorow), a “psychedelic song book” that was on the cutting edge of Christian rock. All of the authors were Dallas graduates (Walvoord, Don Wyrtzen, son of Jack Wyrtzen of Word of Life, and David MacCorkle, son of the president of Philadelphia College of the Bible). Following is a sample of the nearly meaningless lyrics from the New Sounds song “Bread,” which was set to a “Beatles-like tune.” “Ever feel hungry, ever feel empty/ Take a look inside--Get off the joy ride/ You only need some bread, You only need some bread./ Bread, bread, that’s what the man said./ Where you gonna get the bread/ When you’re always in the red? What did it mean when He said, we only needed bread? People still today--Look the other way/ But the broken bread--Came when His blood was shed/ It was the way He said--It was the way He said./ Bread, bread, that’s what the man said/ Bread, bread, that’s what the man said/ He’s the one that is the bread/ Even when we’re in the red/ That’s what He meant when He said/ ‘I am the bread.’”
In 1968, Stanley White, a third year Dallas graduate student, son of missionary parents and affiliated with the GARBC, withdrew from the seminary a few months before his scheduled graduation. This was a courageous protest of the school’s errors (Ashbrook, Evangelicalism The New Neutralism). He documented his reasons for leaving in a 13-page paper. White told of professor Haddon Robinson’s admiration for the rank heretic Karl Barth, who denied the infallible inspiration of Scripture and the virgin birth of Christ. White told of professor George Peter’s support for the welfare state. He reported that Peters spent a whole class period advocating that conservatives join the World Council of Churches. Dallas Seminary responded to White’s serious accusations by questioning his “stability of mind”! The executive committee of the GARBC labeled White’s position “extreme” and stated, “We reject Mr. White’s contention that Dallas Seminary is a New Evangelical school.” This was signed by Joseph Stowell and four other men. They refused to recognize New Evangelicalism because they themselves were New Evangelical!
In 1974, Dallas president John F. Walvoord and other professors participated in Billy Graham’s ecumenical/social gospel-oriented Lausanne ’74 Congress.
Dr. Charles Woodbridge, who formerly lectured at Dallas, withdrew from the school because of its compromising stance. He warned,
“Friends of Dallas Seminary, in this hour of crisis, had hoped that the institution would take a firm, resolute, positive, public, unequivocal stand, not only for the integrity of the Bible, but also against the entire theological orbit of compromise represented by the New Evangelicalism. ... This is precisely what Dallas Seminary has not done. A battle of great intensity is being waged between truth and error. The Seminary seems content to teach exegesis, Hebrew and Greek, and to let the enemy triumph. She will not raise the flag against the foe” (William Ashbrook, Evangelicalism The New Neutralism, p. 62).
This is the “Sinful Silence” that Charles Spurgeon warned about.
“Treatises in abundance have been produced upon the sins of speech; but are there not also sins of silence? ... A man may transgress as truly by holding his tongue as by speaking unadvisedly with his lips. If by being quiet we could escape from all responsibility, life would be an easy matter and the coward’s millennium would have arrived. ... To refrain from warning the unwary when we see that they are being deceived is to be an accomplice to the imposition. To quietly listen to false doctrine without seeking a fit occasion to enter a protest may soon amount to participation in the error. ... ‘To him that knoweth to do good and doeth it not, to him it is sin.’ When God calls us to speak, we sin if we are silent. ... Take the velvet out of your mouths, O ye whose business it is to denounce sin. ... Silence is unseasonable when sin reigneth and roareth. When men are dishonoring God, it is sad that our tongues should be nailed. ... By this silence we are injurious to God, in that we do not vindicate His glory.”
In 1992, Dallas Seminary’s National Pastor’s Conference featured Chuck Colson, one of the fathers of the dangerous Evangelicals & Catholics Together venture. That year, Dallas also brought in modernist Bruce Metzger. In the New Oxford Annotated Bible, Metzger claimed that the Pentateuch is a mixture of myth and legend that gradually evolved over a period of hundreds of years, that Job is a “folktale,” that Jonah is a “popular legend,” and that the biblical account of a global flood is merely a “heightened version of local inundations,” etc.
Ecumenist Leighton Ford, brother-in-law to Billy Graham, was the Dallas Seminary commencement speaker in May 1997.
In 1998, Dallas hosted D.A. Carson, who promotes form criticism in An Introduction to the New Testament (Zondervan, 1992), which was co-authored with Douglas Moo and Leon Morris. Form criticism is the hypothesis that the Gospel writers depended on “a shared common oral tradition,” there was a mysterious “Q” document from which some of the Gospel writers drew their information, and Mark was first written, then Matthew and Luke based their Gospels on that, etc. When discussing the origin of the Gospels, Carson, Moo, and Morris make NO MENTION OF DIVINE INSPIRATION and instead buy into the unbelieving theories of form criticism. They blatantly reject the “verbal inspiration” of the Gospels for a “voice inspiration.” They say, “But their [the Gospel writers] failure to preserve the ipsissima verba Jesu (the authentic words of Jesus) does not mean that they have tampered with the ipsisima vox Jesu (the authentic voice of Jesus)” (p. 44). This is the argument that the Gospels give only a semblance of what Christ said rather than His actual words. They say, “Moreover, many of the assumptions on which form criticism is based appear to be valid: there was indeed a period of mainly oral transmission of the gospel materials; much of it was probably in small units; there probably was a tendency for this material to take on certain standard forms; and the early church has undoubtedly influenced the way in which this material was handed down” (An Introduction to the New Testament, pp. 23, 24). For example, they claim that Matthew in Mt. 13:58 changed the words “COULD NOT do any mighty work” (that appears in Mark 6:5) to “DID NOT do any mighty miracles,” in order to remove “the potentially troublesome implication that Jesus was incapable of working a miracle.” This is to say that Matthew made this change on his own authority apart from divine inspiration, which is a blatant denial of the infallible, plenary, verbal inspiration of the Gospels.
Dallas professor Daniel Wallace also supports the form criticism approach to the four Gospels. In “The Synoptic Problem,” Wallace says, “It is quite impossible to hold that the three synoptic gospels were completely independent from each other. In the least, they had to have shared a common oral tradition. But the vast bulk of NT scholars today would argue for much more than that” (page 1). This approach to the Gospels, now parroted by many scholars claiming to be “evangelical,” was devised by unbelieving modernists who unhesitatingly deny the infallible inspiration of Scripture. These evangelicals have been infected by unbelief by studying from, associating with, and ministering with unbelievers. God’s Word forbids this and warns of its corrupting influence (Ps. 1:1; Ro. 16:17-18; 1 Co. 15:33; 2 Co. 6:14-18; Eph. 5:11; 2 Ti. 3:5), but evangelicals have renounced “separatism” since the 1940s. We are not left to surmise how the Gospels were written. The Lord Jesus Christ promised that the Holy Spirit would guide the disciples into all truth and remind them of past events concerning Himself (Joh. 14:26; 16:13-15). It would have been humanly impossible for the apostles to have recalled the exact words of Christ’s various conversations, and the details of the various events infallibly, but the apostles were not dependent upon their own resources. They were not dependent upon their own thinking to select which material to present and how to present it. They weren’t dependent on their own words. By the miracle of infallible inspiration, they wrote a perfect four-fold portrait of the Son of God. They did not need to copy from one another. They did not need secondary materials, and there is no evidence that they used such materials. If they did use secondary materials, we aren’t told, we can’t know what it might have been, and it matters not one whit to the issue, which is the divine inspiration of Scripture. Redaction theology is based on speculation, and it is an exercise in vanity, at best. That Dallas Seminary has not disciplined Wallace but has allowed him to influence the students by his lectures and writings is indisputable proof of the school’s descent into apostasy.
Chuck Swindoll was president of Dallas Seminary from 1994 to 2001 and took the school into an increasingly compromised direction. When he took the leadership of the school, Swindoll told the board, “I am not a fighting fundamentalist” (An Uncommon Union). That is an understatement! Swindoll is a big-tent ecumenist who can be counted on not to shake the boat by speaking out plainly against error and compromise and worldliness. Swindoll was listed as one of the nine chief “Popularizers” of the New Evangelical philosophy by John Ashbrook in New Neutralism II: Exposing the Gray of Compromise.
“If health authorities are to battle the outbreak of any new disease, they must determine how that disease spreads. I would submit that the men whom I have called ‘the popularizers’ are an effective network for spreading the virus of new evangelicalism. They speak with and for those who are more liberal than they are--the National Council of Churches, Southern Baptist Convention, National Religious Broadcasters or some Billy Graham program. Then, they speak with and for those who are more conservative than they are. The latter group would not associate with the former group. However, the popularizer speaks for both and forms a bridge between them. In so doing, he softens the attitudes of the more liberal and more conservative to each other. Both sides decide that the other can’t be that bad, because the popularizer speaks there. So, the virus spreads. As they move from school to school the popularizers soften the attitudes of impressionable young people. Many of us remember sitting in college chapel and considering as spiritual heroes those who spoke in the pulpit. Because we got a blessing from the speaker we assumed that wherever he spoke must be all right. ... The popularizers’ presence with any group, speaker or school sanctifies that for his young disciples” (New Neutralism II, p. 75).
Swindoll supported Billy Graham’s 1985 Los Angeles Crusade which included Roman Catholic participation. He has spoken at Graham’s schools of evangelism. In 1986, Swindoll featured the testimony of beer brewery magnate Adolph Coors IV in the Winter issue of Insight magazine. Swindoll was featured at Promise Keepers (PK) conferences in 1994 and 1996. PK encompassed practically every denomination, including Roman Catholic. Several Catholic priests spoke at PK meetings, and three were on the PK board of directors. (Dallas Seminary teacher Howard Hendricks also served on the PK board.) Swindoll promotes rank heretics with no warning. He devoted an entire edition of his Insights for Living (April 1988) to uncritical promotion of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Swindoll calls Bonhoeffer “a saint bound for heaven,” but this “saint” promoted the “de-mythologizing” of Scripture. Swindoll praised the Roman Catholic Mother Teresa who taught that Hindus and Buddhists can go to heaven by their own faith. (See Was Mother Teresa a True Christian? www.wayoflife.org.) In 1990, Swindoll promoted the corrupt Living Bible, saying: “The Living Bible is like a stream of sparkling water wandering across life’s arid landscape: intriguing, refreshing, nourishing, comforting. My thirsty soul is often satisfied by this invigorating wellspring” (Charisma, December 1990). Actually, the Living Bible is terribly inaccurate and promotes false doctrine. (For example, the Living Bible in 2 Corinthians 5:21 says our sins were poured into Christ, and 1 Peter 3:21 says, “in being baptized we are turning to God and asking him to cleanse our hearts from sin.”) Swindoll’s hugely influential book Grace Awakening promotes a doctrine of grace that is actually license. He claims that it is “legalistic” to make prohibitions against immoral movies, music, dancing, etc. He writes, “I’m not a charismatic. However, I don’t feel it’s my calling to shoot great volleys of theological artillery at my charismatic brothers and sisters. … My encouragement for you today is that each one of us pursue what unites us with others rather than the few things that separate us. ... More than ever we need grace-awakened ministers who free rather than bind” (Grace Awakening). Calvary Contender editor Jerry Huffman observed that Swindoll’s book leaves “the impression that rules or restrictions upon the believer steal from him the exuberance and joy of the Christian life and relegate him to a morbid and dreary existence.” At the 1994 National Promise Keepers Conference in Boulder, Colorado, Swindoll entered the stadium on a motorcycle while the worship band played the 1960s rebel rock anthem “Born to Be Wild.” In contrast to Swindoll’s “grace,” biblical grace teaches a form of Christian living that encompasses strict separation from evil. “For THE GRACE OF GOD that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men, TEACHING US THAT, DENYING UNGODLINESS AND WORLDLY LUSTS, WE SHOULD LIVE SOBERLY, RIGHTEOUSLY, AND GODLY, IN THIS PRESENT WORLD; Looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ; Who gave himself for us, that he might redeem us from ALL INIQUITY, and purify unto himself a peculiar people, ZEALOUS OF GOOD WORKS” (Tit. 2:11-14). To live according to biblical grace requires a testing mindset (Ac. 17:11; 2 Co. 10:5; 1 Th. 5:21), exercising the senses to discern good and evil (Heb. 5:14), having NO fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness (Eph. 5:11), etc.
Dallas Theological Seminary has had a massive influence through its teachers and graduates (15,000 as of 2014), which include John Walvoord, Zane Hodges, J. Dwight Pentecost, Charles Ryrie, Merrill Unger, Daniel Wallace, Thomas Constable, Darrell Bock, Craig Blaising, Chuck Swindoll, Charles Feinberg, Hal Lindsey (The Late Great Planet Earth), J. Vernon McGee (Thru the Bible), Ray Stedman, Kenneth Taylor (Living Bible), and Bruce Wilkinson (Walk Thru the Bible).
Though Dallas faculty writings on Bible prophecy have helped a lot of people, the majority of Dallas Seminary’s influence is for middle-of-the-road, rock & roll, no separation, “judge not,” big tent evangelicalism. Some of the most compromising evangelical leaders are Dallas graduates, including Tony Evans, David Jeremiah, Joseph Stowell, Chuck Swindoll, and Andy Stanley.
Dallas Theological Seminary (DTS) was founded in 1924 by LEWIS SPERRY CHAFER (1871-1952) (Congregational/Presbyterian), William M. Anderson, Jr. (Presbyterian), and W.H. Griffith Thomas (Anglican). Thus it was interdenominational from its inception. The original name was Evangelical Theological College.
Chafer served as the first president until his death in 1952 and taught systematic theology.
He was called “a man of prayer with strong piety” (John Hannah, An Uncommon Union: Dallas Theological Seminary, 2009).
Chafer’s pastor father died of tuberculosis when he was 11 and his mother supported her three children by managing a boarding house.
In 1889, Chafer attended Oberlin Conservatory of Music for three semesters and began a ministry as singer and choir director for YWCA evangelist Arthur T. Reed of Ohio. From 1890 to 1896, they conducted 58 revival meetings that lasted from several days to several weeks.
In 1896, Chafer married Ella Case, whom he had met at Oberlin, and from 1897 to 1907, Chafer and Ella traveled as an evangelistic team and conducted dozens of meetings, with Lewis preaching and his wife singing and playing the organ. He preached in Baptist, Presbyterian, Congregational, and Methodist churches, and held interdenominational meetings supported by a variety of churches in an area. “He traveled widely throughout the East and the South” (An Uncommon Union: Dallas Theological Seminary). Chafer began his Bible teaching ministry by setting up classes for those who had professed faith in Christ in these campaigns.
In 1901, Chafer moved to Northfield, Massachusetts, and began a lifelong affiliation with C.I. Scofield. He met him while attending Trinitarian Congregational Church, where Scofield was the pastor. Chafer took courses taught by Scofield at the Northfield Training School that was founded by D.L. Moody. Chafer later called Scofield his “father” and described Scofield’s teaching as life changing. “My first hearing of Dr. Scofield was at a morning Bible class at the Bible school. He was teaching the sixth chapter of Romans. I am free to confess that it seemed to me at the close that I had seen more vital truth of God’s Word in that one hour, than I had seen in my life before. It was a crisis for me. I was captured for life” (An Uncommon Union).
Chafer became affiliated with the Northfield Bible Conference and was appointed president of the conference in 1909.
During his time in Northfield, Chafer published his first three books: Elementary Outline Studies in the Science of Music, Satan, and True Evangelism.
In 1911, Chafer moved to New Jersey and taught at New York School of the Bible, operated by Scofield, and traveled widely as a Bible conference teacher.
In 1913, he assisted Scofield in founding Philadelphia School of the Bible, “chiefly being involved in the writing of the curriculum” (Daniel Stanfield, Biography Dr. Lewis Sperry Chafer, biblesanity.org). It had a two-year curriculum that focused on a survey of the English Bible.
Between 1915 and 1921, Chafer continued to teach and to participate in Bible conferences, and he published five more books.
After Scofield’s death in July 1921, Chafer moved to Dallas and took the pastorate of First Congregational Church, which was founded by Scofield in 1882. It is called Scofield Memorial Church today and remains affiliated with Dallas Seminary.
In 1924, Chafer founded the Evangelical Theological College (later Dallas Seminary), and in 1926 he published Major Bible Themes, which was the precursor to his multi-volume Systematic Theology. It covered 52 themes. “Major Bible Themes was revised after Chafer’s death by one of his successors, John Walvoord, in 1974 and stands as a single volume or ‘lite’ version of Systematic Theology” (Stanfield, Biography Dr. Lewis Sperry Chafer). Chafer’s Systematic Theology (1948) is fundamentalist (biblical inerrancy), dispensational (e.g., literal interpretation of prophecy, distinction between Israel and the church), pretribulational, Presbyterian in ecclesiology, and Calvinistic (except for rejecting limited atonement). It was the first dispensational systematic theology and had a major influence against amillennialism and theological liberalism. John Walvoord said, “Its appearance in a day when liberal interpretation and unbelief have riddled the Biblical basis for theological study is in itself highly significant.”
One of Chafer’s goals with the Evangelical Theological College was to encapsulate the Bible conference movement into an educational program. “Chafer ... envisioned the institutionalization of its best qualities” (An Uncommon Union: Dallas Theological Seminary). The emphasis of the training was on dispensational theology, Keswick holiness, the literal interpretation of prophecy, and the teaching of the whole English Bible.
There was an emphasis on training men to be effectual expository Bible preachers. This is an important thing that has largely been missing from the training of fundamental Baptists in general. Chafer believed that effectual expository preaching requires a strong knowledge of the whole English Bible, as well as of the biblical languages. “Chafer believed that ... without knowledge of the whole Bible, men would be left unprepared for the task of expository preaching” (An Uncommon Union). We believe that this is the correct approach whenever possible.
In the early years, prominent Bible conference speakers taught at the school by turns, teaching through books of the Bible.
Chafer and the founders of Dallas Seminary believed that the Bible institutes “did not offer a curriculum of adequate breadth or depth to prepare men to be pastors and teachers” (An Uncommon Union). We would agree, but the solution is not a parachurch entity that has no biblical authority to train or ordain preachers.
From its inception, Dallas held to the Calvinist interpretation of sovereign election and irresistible grace, but rejected limited atonement and the doctrine that regeneration precedes faith.
Dallas has held to dispensational theology, and its faculty members have written some of the most influential books on this topic. This includes Chafer’s eight-volume systematic theology and works by Henry Thiessen (Systematic Theology), Merrill Unger (Unger’s Bible Handbook, Commentary on the Old Testament), Charles Feinberg (Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Minor Prophets, Revelation, Israel at the Center of History, Jesus the King Is Coming, Premillennialism or Amillennialism?), John Walvoord (Bible Knowledge Commentary, The Millennial Kingdom, Every Prophecy in the Bible, The Rapture Question), Charles Ryrie (Dispensationalism Today, Come Quickly Lord Jesus, contributions to Everyman’s Bible Commentary), Thomas Constable (Expository Notes), and Dwight Pentecost (Things to Come, Thy Kingdom Come, Prophecy for Today).
Even from its inception, Dallas was only mildly fundamentalist. It was not separatist and was not very outspoken against error and compromise. The stance was “conservative” and scholarly. Chafer was not a “come outer”; he remained in the liberal Presbyterian denomination.
Chafer and his friends were educators, not fighters. They wanted a positive face on their Christianity, which fit in perfectly with the mood of the New Evangelicalism that swept into the school beginning in the 1950s.
“Though Chafer was a premillenarian evangelical/fundamentalist, he was not a willing participant in the militantly aggressive attitudes of the WCFA [World Christian Fundamentals Association, founded by W.B. Riley]. He despaired over the negative, vitriolic posture of this faction and sought to remain distanced from it” (An Uncommon Union).
The term “vitriolic” is a typical New Evangelical slander of a fundamentalist stance. It means “filled with bitter criticism or malice; spiteful; vicious; vindictive.” There is no evidence that W.B. Riley and his fellow preachers in the WCFA were any of that in their defense of the faith. As for being “militantly aggressive” and “negative,” the Bible is absolutely filled with examples of preachers who were aggressive and negative, including all of the prophets and apostles and the Lord Jesus Christ Himself!
Thus regardless of how much good it accomplished in Bible education, and it was a lot, Dallas wasn’t a thoroughgoing biblicist institution, first, because it was parachurch, secondly, because it neglected the command to earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered to the saints” (Jude 3). This is not a “negative, vitrolic posture”; it is a biblical stance. It is the stance of the prophets and apostles of old and of Jesus Christ Himself. Paul was not only a teacher, he was a warrior for the faith. He was most definitely “militantly aggressive.” He called out heretics publicly by name. He smote them with blindness and cursed them and even ridiculed them. A reading of Acts and the Pauline Epistles confirms this.
Dallas Seminary’s official publication is the Bibliotheca Sacra. It was founded in 1843 by Edward Robinson of Union Theological Seminary, and subsequently passed to Andover Theological Seminary, then Oberlin College, then Xenia Theological Seminary (Presbyterian). The journal was purchased by Dallas in 1929.
Dallas was closely affiliated with the Independent Fundamental Churches of American (IFCA), which was founded in 1930. Prominent Dallas teachers who were influential in the IFCA included John Walvoord, Charles Feinberg, and Merrill Unger. The IFCA was permeated with New Evangelicalism by the 1960s. At the IFCA national meeting in 1963, there was a move to “eliminate criticism of ecumenism and new evangelicalism from the Voice magazine” (John Ashbrook, New Neutralism II, p. 67). Obviously there was a terrible softening of stance and “mood” within the IFCA by then. Soon the IFCA’s Voice carried news of Campus Crusade and other ecumenical, New Evangelical organizations.
Dallas Seminary itself was thoroughly committed to the New Evangelicalism by the 1960s. The speaker for the 1963 Founders’ Banquet was Ted Engstrom, President of Youth for Christ, which already practiced inclusive ecumenism with the Roman Catholic Church. Dallas faculty member Haddon Robinson headed up the Dallas Youth for Christ. The speakers for the 1974 Dallas Seminary conference on evangelism included W.A. Criswell (Southern Baptist), Luis Palau (ecumenical evangelist who works closely with Roman Catholics), Tom Skinner (kingdom theology, social gospel), and George Beverly Shea and Cliff Barrows of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.
Dallas Theological Seminary was at the forefront of promoting modern textual criticism among fundamentalists. My Greek teacher at Tennessee Temple in the 1970s was a Dallas graduate, and he considered the great differences between the Received Text and the Critical Text a non-issue.
From 1953 to 1986, John Walvoord was president of Dallas. Under Walvoord’s leadership, “[I]t continued dispensational theology and a methodology and cooperation with New Evangelicalism” (David Beale, In Pursuit of Purity, p. 249). Walvoord held to “the fundamentals of the faith” (inerrant Scripture, the deity of Christ and His virgin birth and substitutionary death on the cross, bodily resurrection and future literal return), but he didn’t expose error in any clear, effectual way. Everything was upbeat.
“The Seminary continues to train men for ministry in the apostate denominations and many United Presbyterian, American Baptist and other denominational pulpits are filled with Dallas men, and with Seminary commendation. Naturally these men are without convictions in matters of Biblical separation. The teaching at the Seminary, with but few exceptions, is in the all positive, inclusivist mood. This spirit is well confirmed in a conversation which Dr. Bob Jones, Jr., had with a high Dallas official who said, ‘We are in the conservative camp but we don’t like to be called fighting fundamentalists” (William Ashbrook, Evangelicalism The New Neutralism, p. 62).
In 1975, Walvoord wrote a positive report about Billy Graham’s International Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne, Switzerland (called Lausanne I). It was published in the March-April 1975 issue of Voice magazine (IFCA). Earnest Pickering, a Dallas graduate, wrote to Walvoord as follows:
“I was deeply disappointed in the article. It contained no real exposure of the subtle dangers and open compromises of this gathering which had first been manifested in the Berlin Congress several years ago. You did mention the fact that there were those there whose theological orthodoxy could be questioned, but you did not attach the importance to this that I believe the Scriptures do. ... This is a very key issue. Whether or not there were persons assembled there who had a heart for world missions and a concern for lost people is beside the point. The issue is whether or not this concern was expressed within a biblical framework. I believe that it was not. ... The kind of compromised position represented at Lausanne should be thoroughly exposed by those in places of leadership and influence” (Pickering, The Tragedy of Compromise, p. 42).
In contrast to Walvoord and Dallas Seminary, Pickering was a defender of the faith. He exposed the Lausanne Congress for its ecumenism, its heresy of contextualization, and its heretical statement on biblical inerrancy, which says only that the Bible is “without error in all it affirms,” leaving room for error in its “geographical, scientific, or historical details.” Pickering was willing to speak against his own alma mater. Not only did he write to challenge Walvoord, he published the communication in a book to make the matter public. This kind of thing requires real spiritual conviction and courage, because it brings reproach, it closes doors, it limits one sphere of ministry and fellowship; but it is right and biblical and pleasing to the Spirit of Truth.
In 1979, Walvoord said, “Dallas has never taken a position against Billy Graham, and it never will as long as I am President” (John Ashbrook, New Neutralism II, p. 100). So Dr. Walvoord took a strong against taking a stand!
This soft, compromising evangelical philosophy has spread far and wide through the influence of Dallas Theological Seminary.
From 1962-1976, George W. Peters was Professor of Missiology at Dallas. He claimed that many Roman Catholics are “quite evangelical.” “According to student reports he frequently refers to officials of the World Council of Churches as ‘Christian gentlemen’ and gives them fulsome praise. He has openly advocated socialism in his classroom, according to these reports, and often springs to the defense of Karl Barth” (William Ashbrook, Evangelicalism The New Neutralism, p. 62).
In 1968, John E. Walvoord, son of Dallas president John F. Walvoord, co-authored New Sounds (Yesterday Today and Tomorow), a “psychedelic song book” that was on the cutting edge of Christian rock. All of the authors were Dallas graduates (Walvoord, Don Wyrtzen, son of Jack Wyrtzen of Word of Life, and David MacCorkle, son of the president of Philadelphia College of the Bible). Following is a sample of the nearly meaningless lyrics from the New Sounds song “Bread,” which was set to a “Beatles-like tune.” “Ever feel hungry, ever feel empty/ Take a look inside--Get off the joy ride/ You only need some bread, You only need some bread./ Bread, bread, that’s what the man said./ Where you gonna get the bread/ When you’re always in the red? What did it mean when He said, we only needed bread? People still today--Look the other way/ But the broken bread--Came when His blood was shed/ It was the way He said--It was the way He said./ Bread, bread, that’s what the man said/ Bread, bread, that’s what the man said/ He’s the one that is the bread/ Even when we’re in the red/ That’s what He meant when He said/ ‘I am the bread.’”
In 1968, Stanley White, a third year Dallas graduate student, son of missionary parents and affiliated with the GARBC, withdrew from the seminary a few months before his scheduled graduation. This was a courageous protest of the school’s errors (Ashbrook, Evangelicalism The New Neutralism). He documented his reasons for leaving in a 13-page paper. White told of professor Haddon Robinson’s admiration for the rank heretic Karl Barth, who denied the infallible inspiration of Scripture and the virgin birth of Christ. White told of professor George Peter’s support for the welfare state. He reported that Peters spent a whole class period advocating that conservatives join the World Council of Churches. Dallas Seminary responded to White’s serious accusations by questioning his “stability of mind”! The executive committee of the GARBC labeled White’s position “extreme” and stated, “We reject Mr. White’s contention that Dallas Seminary is a New Evangelical school.” This was signed by Joseph Stowell and four other men. They refused to recognize New Evangelicalism because they themselves were New Evangelical!
In 1974, Dallas president John F. Walvoord and other professors participated in Billy Graham’s ecumenical/social gospel-oriented Lausanne ’74 Congress.
Dr. Charles Woodbridge, who formerly lectured at Dallas, withdrew from the school because of its compromising stance. He warned,
“Friends of Dallas Seminary, in this hour of crisis, had hoped that the institution would take a firm, resolute, positive, public, unequivocal stand, not only for the integrity of the Bible, but also against the entire theological orbit of compromise represented by the New Evangelicalism. ... This is precisely what Dallas Seminary has not done. A battle of great intensity is being waged between truth and error. The Seminary seems content to teach exegesis, Hebrew and Greek, and to let the enemy triumph. She will not raise the flag against the foe” (William Ashbrook, Evangelicalism The New Neutralism, p. 62).
This is the “Sinful Silence” that Charles Spurgeon warned about.
“Treatises in abundance have been produced upon the sins of speech; but are there not also sins of silence? ... A man may transgress as truly by holding his tongue as by speaking unadvisedly with his lips. If by being quiet we could escape from all responsibility, life would be an easy matter and the coward’s millennium would have arrived. ... To refrain from warning the unwary when we see that they are being deceived is to be an accomplice to the imposition. To quietly listen to false doctrine without seeking a fit occasion to enter a protest may soon amount to participation in the error. ... ‘To him that knoweth to do good and doeth it not, to him it is sin.’ When God calls us to speak, we sin if we are silent. ... Take the velvet out of your mouths, O ye whose business it is to denounce sin. ... Silence is unseasonable when sin reigneth and roareth. When men are dishonoring God, it is sad that our tongues should be nailed. ... By this silence we are injurious to God, in that we do not vindicate His glory.”
In 1992, Dallas Seminary’s National Pastor’s Conference featured Chuck Colson, one of the fathers of the dangerous Evangelicals & Catholics Together venture. That year, Dallas also brought in modernist Bruce Metzger. In the New Oxford Annotated Bible, Metzger claimed that the Pentateuch is a mixture of myth and legend that gradually evolved over a period of hundreds of years, that Job is a “folktale,” that Jonah is a “popular legend,” and that the biblical account of a global flood is merely a “heightened version of local inundations,” etc.
Ecumenist Leighton Ford, brother-in-law to Billy Graham, was the Dallas Seminary commencement speaker in May 1997.
In 1998, Dallas hosted D.A. Carson, who promotes form criticism in An Introduction to the New Testament (Zondervan, 1992), which was co-authored with Douglas Moo and Leon Morris. Form criticism is the hypothesis that the Gospel writers depended on “a shared common oral tradition,” there was a mysterious “Q” document from which some of the Gospel writers drew their information, and Mark was first written, then Matthew and Luke based their Gospels on that, etc. When discussing the origin of the Gospels, Carson, Moo, and Morris make NO MENTION OF DIVINE INSPIRATION and instead buy into the unbelieving theories of form criticism. They blatantly reject the “verbal inspiration” of the Gospels for a “voice inspiration.” They say, “But their [the Gospel writers] failure to preserve the ipsissima verba Jesu (the authentic words of Jesus) does not mean that they have tampered with the ipsisima vox Jesu (the authentic voice of Jesus)” (p. 44). This is the argument that the Gospels give only a semblance of what Christ said rather than His actual words. They say, “Moreover, many of the assumptions on which form criticism is based appear to be valid: there was indeed a period of mainly oral transmission of the gospel materials; much of it was probably in small units; there probably was a tendency for this material to take on certain standard forms; and the early church has undoubtedly influenced the way in which this material was handed down” (An Introduction to the New Testament, pp. 23, 24). For example, they claim that Matthew in Mt. 13:58 changed the words “COULD NOT do any mighty work” (that appears in Mark 6:5) to “DID NOT do any mighty miracles,” in order to remove “the potentially troublesome implication that Jesus was incapable of working a miracle.” This is to say that Matthew made this change on his own authority apart from divine inspiration, which is a blatant denial of the infallible, plenary, verbal inspiration of the Gospels.
Dallas professor Daniel Wallace also supports the form criticism approach to the four Gospels. In “The Synoptic Problem,” Wallace says, “It is quite impossible to hold that the three synoptic gospels were completely independent from each other. In the least, they had to have shared a common oral tradition. But the vast bulk of NT scholars today would argue for much more than that” (page 1). This approach to the Gospels, now parroted by many scholars claiming to be “evangelical,” was devised by unbelieving modernists who unhesitatingly deny the infallible inspiration of Scripture. These evangelicals have been infected by unbelief by studying from, associating with, and ministering with unbelievers. God’s Word forbids this and warns of its corrupting influence (Ps. 1:1; Ro. 16:17-18; 1 Co. 15:33; 2 Co. 6:14-18; Eph. 5:11; 2 Ti. 3:5), but evangelicals have renounced “separatism” since the 1940s. We are not left to surmise how the Gospels were written. The Lord Jesus Christ promised that the Holy Spirit would guide the disciples into all truth and remind them of past events concerning Himself (Joh. 14:26; 16:13-15). It would have been humanly impossible for the apostles to have recalled the exact words of Christ’s various conversations, and the details of the various events infallibly, but the apostles were not dependent upon their own resources. They were not dependent upon their own thinking to select which material to present and how to present it. They weren’t dependent on their own words. By the miracle of infallible inspiration, they wrote a perfect four-fold portrait of the Son of God. They did not need to copy from one another. They did not need secondary materials, and there is no evidence that they used such materials. If they did use secondary materials, we aren’t told, we can’t know what it might have been, and it matters not one whit to the issue, which is the divine inspiration of Scripture. Redaction theology is based on speculation, and it is an exercise in vanity, at best. That Dallas Seminary has not disciplined Wallace but has allowed him to influence the students by his lectures and writings is indisputable proof of the school’s descent into apostasy.
Chuck Swindoll was president of Dallas Seminary from 1994 to 2001 and took the school into an increasingly compromised direction. When he took the leadership of the school, Swindoll told the board, “I am not a fighting fundamentalist” (An Uncommon Union). That is an understatement! Swindoll is a big-tent ecumenist who can be counted on not to shake the boat by speaking out plainly against error and compromise and worldliness. Swindoll was listed as one of the nine chief “Popularizers” of the New Evangelical philosophy by John Ashbrook in New Neutralism II: Exposing the Gray of Compromise.
“If health authorities are to battle the outbreak of any new disease, they must determine how that disease spreads. I would submit that the men whom I have called ‘the popularizers’ are an effective network for spreading the virus of new evangelicalism. They speak with and for those who are more liberal than they are--the National Council of Churches, Southern Baptist Convention, National Religious Broadcasters or some Billy Graham program. Then, they speak with and for those who are more conservative than they are. The latter group would not associate with the former group. However, the popularizer speaks for both and forms a bridge between them. In so doing, he softens the attitudes of the more liberal and more conservative to each other. Both sides decide that the other can’t be that bad, because the popularizer speaks there. So, the virus spreads. As they move from school to school the popularizers soften the attitudes of impressionable young people. Many of us remember sitting in college chapel and considering as spiritual heroes those who spoke in the pulpit. Because we got a blessing from the speaker we assumed that wherever he spoke must be all right. ... The popularizers’ presence with any group, speaker or school sanctifies that for his young disciples” (New Neutralism II, p. 75).
Swindoll supported Billy Graham’s 1985 Los Angeles Crusade which included Roman Catholic participation. He has spoken at Graham’s schools of evangelism. In 1986, Swindoll featured the testimony of beer brewery magnate Adolph Coors IV in the Winter issue of Insight magazine. Swindoll was featured at Promise Keepers (PK) conferences in 1994 and 1996. PK encompassed practically every denomination, including Roman Catholic. Several Catholic priests spoke at PK meetings, and three were on the PK board of directors. (Dallas Seminary teacher Howard Hendricks also served on the PK board.) Swindoll promotes rank heretics with no warning. He devoted an entire edition of his Insights for Living (April 1988) to uncritical promotion of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Swindoll calls Bonhoeffer “a saint bound for heaven,” but this “saint” promoted the “de-mythologizing” of Scripture. Swindoll praised the Roman Catholic Mother Teresa who taught that Hindus and Buddhists can go to heaven by their own faith. (See Was Mother Teresa a True Christian? www.wayoflife.org.) In 1990, Swindoll promoted the corrupt Living Bible, saying: “The Living Bible is like a stream of sparkling water wandering across life’s arid landscape: intriguing, refreshing, nourishing, comforting. My thirsty soul is often satisfied by this invigorating wellspring” (Charisma, December 1990). Actually, the Living Bible is terribly inaccurate and promotes false doctrine. (For example, the Living Bible in 2 Corinthians 5:21 says our sins were poured into Christ, and 1 Peter 3:21 says, “in being baptized we are turning to God and asking him to cleanse our hearts from sin.”) Swindoll’s hugely influential book Grace Awakening promotes a doctrine of grace that is actually license. He claims that it is “legalistic” to make prohibitions against immoral movies, music, dancing, etc. He writes, “I’m not a charismatic. However, I don’t feel it’s my calling to shoot great volleys of theological artillery at my charismatic brothers and sisters. … My encouragement for you today is that each one of us pursue what unites us with others rather than the few things that separate us. ... More than ever we need grace-awakened ministers who free rather than bind” (Grace Awakening). Calvary Contender editor Jerry Huffman observed that Swindoll’s book leaves “the impression that rules or restrictions upon the believer steal from him the exuberance and joy of the Christian life and relegate him to a morbid and dreary existence.” At the 1994 National Promise Keepers Conference in Boulder, Colorado, Swindoll entered the stadium on a motorcycle while the worship band played the 1960s rebel rock anthem “Born to Be Wild.” In contrast to Swindoll’s “grace,” biblical grace teaches a form of Christian living that encompasses strict separation from evil. “For THE GRACE OF GOD that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men, TEACHING US THAT, DENYING UNGODLINESS AND WORLDLY LUSTS, WE SHOULD LIVE SOBERLY, RIGHTEOUSLY, AND GODLY, IN THIS PRESENT WORLD; Looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ; Who gave himself for us, that he might redeem us from ALL INIQUITY, and purify unto himself a peculiar people, ZEALOUS OF GOOD WORKS” (Tit. 2:11-14). To live according to biblical grace requires a testing mindset (Ac. 17:11; 2 Co. 10:5; 1 Th. 5:21), exercising the senses to discern good and evil (Heb. 5:14), having NO fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness (Eph. 5:11), etc.
Dallas Theological Seminary has had a massive influence through its teachers and graduates (15,000 as of 2014), which include John Walvoord, Zane Hodges, J. Dwight Pentecost, Charles Ryrie, Merrill Unger, Daniel Wallace, Thomas Constable, Darrell Bock, Craig Blaising, Chuck Swindoll, Charles Feinberg, Hal Lindsey (The Late Great Planet Earth), J. Vernon McGee (Thru the Bible), Ray Stedman, Kenneth Taylor (Living Bible), and Bruce Wilkinson (Walk Thru the Bible).
Though Dallas faculty writings on Bible prophecy have helped a lot of people, the majority of Dallas Seminary’s influence is for middle-of-the-road, rock & roll, no separation, “judge not,” big tent evangelicalism. Some of the most compromising evangelical leaders are Dallas graduates, including Tony Evans, David Jeremiah, Joseph Stowell, Chuck Swindoll, and Andy Stanley.
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