04.08-CHAPTER 8 FALSE DOCTRINE

CHAPTER 8 FALSE DOCTRINE

THERE WAS ALSO A DOCTRINAL ELEMENT that made me at first hesitant as to the Movement and presently decided me against it. It was laid down very definitely that to speak with a “tongue” was the indispensable sign that a person had been baptized in the Holy Spirit. This was the general view in the English-speaking world. On the Continent leaders mostly allowed that other signs might prove the anointing. Perhaps no other factor contributed so powerfully to urge earnest souls to seek passionately this one sign. It mattered nothing that most of God’s mightiest servants through the centuries had not received it, though their work was manifestly done through the fulness of the power of the Spirit and could not have been done without it. It did not count that the New Testament does not show that the vast majority of the apostolic believers ever spoke in a tongue.

Three instances in Acts, spread over twenty five years (Pentecost. ch. 2, Caesarea, ch. 10, and Ephesus, ch. 19), were assumed to be proof that the many thousands of other believers did so speak in a tongue. I could not feel that the Spirit of truth was the author of such dubious exegesis.

It could be urged to the contrary that in 1 Corinthians 12:29-30 the apostle asked a series of questions each of which demands a negative answer: “Are all apostles? (No!); are all prophets? (No!); are all teachers? (No!); are all workers of miracles? (No!); have all gifts of healings? (No!); do all speak with tongues? (No!): do all interpret? (No!).” To meet this objection it was asserted that in this passage, and in ch. 14, Paul was speaking of the permanent use of tongues, not of the initial baptism. This, however, would involve an impossible contradiction. As to the regular continuous gift, the Lord laid down peremptorily that its use must be marked by self-control, decency, and order; but, according to the manifestations in the Movement, the initial gift was all too often marked by absence of self-control, indecency. and disorder. Such a manner of avoiding a difficulty confirmed me that the Spirit of God was not the Teacher of these teachers, as regards this dogma, which they held as vital. To support the distinction between the initial and the permanent gifts it has been urged that in 1 Corinthians 14:27 it is ordered that in the church speaking in tongues was to be “in turn,” not two or more together; but that at Pentecost (Acts 2) they all spoke simultaneously. But where does the narrative say this? The saints then gathered were the church of that time and the rule as to order should apply. Moreover, had 120 men and women been all talking at the same time it would have been difficult for the hearers each to pick out his own language. For long the Movement in general insisted on these doctrines, though some have now wisely abandoned them. In this connection it ever seemed to me remarkable how very few really capable teachers grew up in the Movement, judging from its extensive literature. Testifiers and exhorters abounded; few showed even natural aptitude for teaching, not to say a spiritual gift for it. In a Movement claiming quite special enduement of the Spirit it should have been the reverse of this, seeing that teachers are one of the distinct gifts of the ascended Lord (Ephesians 4:11), this gift being of far more general value than the use of tongues. But far more serious doctrinal error developed. On January 24th. 1918, J. Holland, an earnest Christian, who went to prison for his conscientious objection to military service, told me that he had been a member at a Mission at Caeran, Glamorganshire. In 1910 or 1911, and thus quite early in the Movement, a group of members of the Movement who belonged to that district, but who had, he believed, been to Sunderland, came to the Mission, and one of them, speaking at the gospel service 31declared that Christ surrendered His deity on becoming man and only resumed it after His resurrection. The others of his party supported their speaker. The outcome was division in the Mission. But there was a doctrinal lapse more serious and distressing because it occurred at the chief centre of the Movement in England and was uttered by one of its chief persons. In 1909 there was an International Congress at Sunderland, the proceedings at which were reported in Mr. Boddy’s magazine “Confidence” (June 1909, 132, 133). One of the speakers was Mrs. Boddy. It may be remarked that she spoke as a teacher, her address being the expounding of a doctrinal theme. From 1 Corinthians 11:4-5, it is clear that women as well as men were used by the Spirit in praying and prophesying in the church: but from 1 Timothy 2:12, it is equally clear that women were not to teach in the church; the reason being that the office of teacher carries authority, and the woman is not to rule over the man. This direction should have prevented the present feature in the Assemblies of God branch of the Movement that they now have women “pastors.” In those very early days there were several very prominent women teachers who, with the concurrence of the brethren, simply ignored the injunction in 1 Timothy 2:12. At the Congress mentioned Mrs. Boddy offered instruction upon the topic “Everything Yielded to Death,” and she said, We must remember that our Lord was the God man. He was human though without sin, but so controlled by the Divine Spirit of God that of Himself “He could no nothing.”

Everything He did was to fulfill the Scriptures. He was the living Word carrying out the Written Word, and giving the world the pattern of a God-possessed man. Step by step He brought everything human under the power of God. The last thing He did was to commend His own Spirit unto the Father, having proclaimed to Heaven and Hell in “It is Finished” the stupendous fact that on the Cross everything carnal had been brought to an end and there remained only a body born of incorruptible seed, “begotten out of God,” soon to be “raised by the glory of the Father” to be “the firstborn of many brethren.”

Obviously this is utterly subversive of the truth as to the human nature and body of the Lord Jesus. It was not His “Spirit” that He gave up to the Father at death, but it was His “spirit,” that human spirit with which He had been endowed at birth as is every child of a woman. From His Divine Spirit He was, of course, inseparable in the unity of Deity. Then again, if it was only step by step that He brought everything human under the power of God, then most of His life there was that in Him which was not subordinate to God. If it was not till the cross that everything carnal was brought to an end, then all His days there was the carnal in Him; and, by consequence, not earlier than the cross was He fit to atone for our sins, nor could have been wholly well-pleasing to the Father. Had the speaker understood and meant what she said, then the painful fact would have been that a person prominent in the Movement uttered fundamental heresy as to the Person of Christ, and taught the error publicly at an international gathering of the Movement. But other utterances of Mrs. Boddy show that this was not so. Indeed, she began here by stating the truth that our Lord was without sin, which, however, she at once contradicted. It is not likely that she was a trained theologian. The alternative is that another spirit than her own used her unconsciously to teach falsehood as to the humanity of the Son of God. This, however, confirms that at the start of the Movement, and at its very heart in England, a lying spirit was operating.

Many statements by Mr. Boddy show that he was wholly true as to the person of our Lord; he appears to have been a sound evangelical clergyman. Now as a clergyman he had been trained in theology: how was it, then, that he did not at once detect this fundamental falsehood, but went on to publish it in his magazine?

Again, Los Angeles, the place of origin of the Movement, had a magazine, “The Upper Room.” In the issue for August that year, 1909, the Editor spoke highly of “Confidence” and of the Congress and quoted Mrs. Boddy’s utterance. Thus this destructive heresy was spread worldwide by chief leaders in chief magazines of the Movement.

Seventy-five years earlier than this Congress a movement claiming supernatural gifts had arisen in the Clyde area of Scotland. Delegates from Edward Irving’s church in London went north to investigate and carried back to London the power of this movement. Prophets and prophetesses arose in Irving’s church. He did not himself receive any “gift” but he fully accredited the “gifted” persons in his congregation, declaring publicly that God spoke through them. The features of the modern Movement developed there: loud speaking, ecstatic emotion, with great emphasis on the speedy return of Christ to the earth, an emphasis not warranted, as events have shown. As far as is known, it was one of the prophetesses there who first announced a secret coming of the Lord for His people. Patently false prophecies were also made.

It is solemn and striking that in the midst of this spiritual confusion Irving announced publicly precisely the same false doctrine that Mrs. Boddy declared. To one of the chief prophets in his circle, Robert Baxter, he put this in writing, under date April 21st, 1832, as follows,

Concerning the flesh of Christ... I believe it to have been no better than other flesh, as to its passive qualities or properties, as a created thing. But that the power of the Son of God, as son of man, in it, believing in the Father, did for His obedience to become son of man, receive such a measure of the Holy Ghost as sufficed to resist its own proclivity to the world and to Satan and to make it obedient unto God in all things... I say not that Christ has the motions of the flesh, but the law of the flesh was there all present; but that whereas in us it is set on fire by an evil life, in Him it was, by a holy life, put down, and His flesh brought to be a holy altar, whereon the sacrifice and offerings for the sin of the world, and the whole burnt-offerings of sorrow and confession and penitence for others, might ever be offered up. (Baxter’sNarrative of Facts, 41).

Upon this Baxter commented justly That there was in Christ’s flesh “a proclivity to the world and to Satan,” and that Christ received “such a measure of the Holy Ghost as sufficed to resist” this proclivity, is a doctrine so fearfully erroneous that I cannot conceive anyone who has at all learned Christ, unless he be blinded by delusion, can allow himself for a moment to entertain. The words “blinded by a delusion” are the true explanation of how godly persons like Edward Irving and others here mentioned allowed and spread this fatal doctrine. For, according to these utterances, the human nature of the Lord had in it the law of the flesh, as in the rest of mankind: but by a holy life this flesh was “brought to be a holy altar” (note “brought to be,” that is, progressively: even as Mrs. Boddy later said, “Step by step He brought everything human under the power of God”), and so become at last a suitable vehicle to bear the sins of the world. This doctrine was declared by Irving’s “gifted” associates to be assuredly true. In his book, in the Days of the Latter Rain, pp. 59, 60, T. B. Barratt left himself open to the charge that, if he did not actually hold this teaching of Irving, of which he showed he had heard, he regarded it as no more serious than sundry controversial questions that divide Denominations, and which therefore could be tolerated. Now no one speaking by the Spirit of Christ would in the least tolerate it but would instantly and earnestly repudiate it.