Postmodern Realities Podcast Episode 456: Christian Idolatry? Evaluating Bethel Church and Bill Johnson

This Postmodern Realities episode is a conversation with JOURNAL author Anne Kennedy  about her article, “Christian Idolatry? Evaluating Bethel Church and Bill Johnson“. This also part of Anne’s ongoing column, Theological Trends. https://www.equip.org/articles/christian-idolatry-evaluating-bethel-church-and-bill-johnson/



Other articles related to this subject: Bill Johnson and the Extrabiblical Teaching of Bethel ChurchJoel’s Army Marches onThe Untouchables: Are “God’s Anointed” Beyond Criticism?The Counterfeit Revival: Rodney Howard-Browne and the “Toronto Blessing” (Part 1)The Counterfeit Revival: Visionary Hoaxes and Revisionary History (Part Two)The Counterfeit Revival: Separating Fact from Fabrication on the Pensacola Outpouring (Part Three)The Counterfeit Revival: Modern-Day Mesmerists (Part Four)The Counterfeit Revival RevisitedOther podcasts and articles by this author: Episode 451: Beth Allison Barr: Becoming the Leader She Knew Could Be: A Review of ‘Becoming the Pastor’s Wife: How Marriage Replaced Ordination as a Woman’s Path to Ministry’Beth Allison Barr: Becoming the Leader She Knew She Could Be: A Review of ‘Becoming the Pastor’s Wife: How Marriage Replaced Ordination as a Woman’s Path to Ministry’Episode 440: Reimagining ‘Snow White’: How Counterfeits Reveal the TrueReimagining ‘Snow White’: How Counterfeits Reveal the True 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:20):
Hi everyone, Thank you for tuning in to the Postmodern
Realities podcast, brought to you by the Christian Research Institute
and the Christian Research Journal. I'm Melanie Cogdill, Managing editor
of the Christian Research Journal. It's July twenty twenty five
and you are listening to episode four hundred and fifty six,

(00:41):
which is a conversation about Bethel Church in California and
the teaching of its pastor, Bill Johnson. Today's guest is
Anne Kennedy. She has an MDiv and is the author
of Nailed It three hundred and sixty five readings for
Angry or worn Out People, and blogs about Kurt events
and theological trends on her substack Demotivations with Anne. Anne

(01:06):
has written a feature article for her Theological Trends column
for the Christian Research Journal. Her article is called Christian
Idolatry Evaluating Bethel Church and Bill Johnson, and you can
read it for free at equipp dot org. That's e
quip dot org. An, it's good to have you on

(01:29):
the podcast again.

Speaker 2 (01:31):
It's great to be here. Thank you so much.

Speaker 1 (01:34):
Well, today we're talking about another installment in Anne's column,
Theological Trends and specifically about a topic we have written
on at CRI in the past. We have written an
article in Bethel Church and Pastor Bill Johnson, but the
New Apostolic Movement has been in the News of Light,
so we thought we'd revisit the topic. But probably there

(01:58):
are listeners out there that are not like familiar kind
of with the types of churches that are in this movement,
So specifically this church, which is in California, what distinguishes
Bethel Church's approach to Christianity from other Christian churches? Broadly speaking,

(02:20):
I was.

Speaker 2 (02:21):
Not I had only heard of Bethel sort of, as
I say, by the hearing of the year. I had
not really spent any time thinking about this particular congregation,
which is more like a movement, I would say, until
it kind of every now and then it percolates up
in the news. You'll hear something about things like the

(02:42):
Naar or Prosperity Gospel and that kind of thing. So
I had my eyes very much opened over the last
month or so as I've been reading and listening a
lot more, and so at first it's just it seems
like a basic kind of charismatic kind of church that

(03:05):
they believe in that the gifts of the Holy Spirit,
some of them did not cease, this is what they
would say after the Apostolic Age, but that there are
still empowered miracle workers and prophets and even apostles in
this church age that we're in. And they I think

(03:28):
they try to kind of mainstream themselves and say that
they're very much like any other church, but they are
very much beyond that. They their sort of charismaticism or
idea of the gifts goes beyond, you know, like the
Assemblies of God. They were originally Assemblies of God, but

(03:49):
they disaffiliated in the early two thousands and pushed heavily
towards more words of knowledge, prophet standing up and just
giving lots of apparently words that came that come from

(04:10):
God or the Holy Spirit. But they also have this
very strong emphasis that it's the job of the Church
and Christians to bring Heaven to earth. That they that
they say often as earth on earth as it is
in Heaven. That what God wants is for the world,

(04:35):
through the work of Bethel Church and other churches like it,
to resemble Heaven in temporal and I would say materialistic terms.
So it is talked about in a spiritual way, but
it quickly comes round to the kind of stuff that
you might have, or whether or not you're healed, and

(04:58):
that kind of in a in a physical bodily sense,
and so it goes beyond. You know, if you were
Roman Catholic, or I'm Anglican or sort of Presbyterian or
non denominational, your ideas about the world now and the

(05:19):
world to come would not align well with what Bethel teaches.
And the person's place, you know, the believer's place in
the world is also not what you would find in
most other I hesitate whether or not to say Christian,

(05:40):
what to call them Christian or not, because in many
ways they have a lot of Christian truth and Christian speech.
But the mismatch between the Gospel and what you can
expect as a Christian from Bethel and what you would
in in regular church is so different that I would

(06:03):
say they really are not within the bounds of orthodox Christianity.
But if you're charismatic, if you're comfortable with that kind
of style of theology and worship, you would probably be
you know, you might not notice some of this stuff

(06:24):
right off the bat, and so it would be very
good to be aware and knowledgeable about what they're actually
teaching and what they're doing, and what they expect of
the believer and what kind of behavior they would want
people to adopt, and just so, for example, they would

(06:50):
say that everybody could have a word of knowledge, or
the office of profit would be very important. So if
you were identified as a prophet, you would come to
have a really important place in Bethel, which is something
I would not be familiar with as an Anglican. Nobody
in our church has the office of profit at all,

(07:13):
and nobody in a church that I would be familiar
with would laugh have laughter that's sort of exaggerated and
supposedly sent from the Holy Spirit. I know there are
a lot of churches that are not, you know, the

(07:35):
Catholic or Anglican or other kinds that would have a
more charismatic view of the gifts and would accept speaking
in tongues and that kind of thing. But this goes
beyond that practice for most other kinds of churches.

Speaker 1 (07:52):
Before we dive a little bit deeper into some of
these theological issues that brought up, I just wanted to
point to an article that Anne wrote about five years ago,
because some of our listeners are probably saying, why would
we even critique teachings of other Christians? So if you

(08:16):
go to our website, we will link it in the
description of this episode. And wrote an article that's called
Naming Names why it's okay and necessary to call out
false teachers and fugitives from church justice by name, So
that will answer your questions about why we would even
cover this in the first place. And some people, I

(08:37):
want to ask Anne a little bit about their music later,
because a lot of just evangelicals or other Christians like
they have had some in roads into the Roman Catholic
Church congret parishes that they might have been familiar with
some of the music that comes out of this church.
But I want to ask you something a few things
about your article. In it, you suggest that Bethel Church's teachings,

(08:59):
you know, like you were just saying, there's this mismatch
between the Gospel and what they're saying. So it might
to the uninitiated or not that familiar with certain Pentecostal movements,
it gives us appearance of affirming the sovereignty of God
and the authority of Scripture, but in reality, it's teaching
actually undermines those theological truths. So can you flesh this

(09:22):
out for our listeners? How is this kind of an
example of this mismatch that you were talking about.

Speaker 2 (09:29):
Well, I should say I've listened to a lot of
Bill Johnson's sermons over the last little bit here, and
he's a really engaging preacher. He's very funny, he's very
warm in his manner, and he speaks very fluidly. He
walks up and down the stage. It doesn't look like
he has notes, but he must. It's very hard to

(09:51):
search for specific sermons because if you look at a sermon,
they'll be like, there'll be a long list of Biblical
texts associated with it, which he was sort of just
brush over, So he doesn't exegete any specific text all
the way through almost all of his preaching. I would

(10:14):
say lacks an essential element for anybody who's really interested
in the Bible, and that's context. He takes texts out
of context, he uses them to support points he's making,
and he really doesn't get what he's saying in any

(10:35):
particular sermon from the text. It's like he takes his
view of the world and theology and sort of just
applies it over the text instead of the other way around. So,
but his fluidity, the ease with which he speaks makes
him sound very authoritative and like he really believes the

(10:59):
Bible is the word of God. In fact, I listened
to maybe more than one sermon in which he explained
how important it is to study God's word and how
you will feel like you're starving if you don't. He
has this clever phrase that reading the Bible makes you
more hungry. You know, normally, when you eat food, you

(11:21):
feel less hungry, whereas if you read the Bible, you
feel more hungry, and so you should go deeper and
deeper in So if you heard that and you did that,
that would be amazing. That's a very good thing to do,
and it's true. But then the way that he preaches
through the scriptures is not even a little bit going

(11:41):
to satiate you because you don't go into them. So
on the surface, it appears as though God is the
actor in the world. He's the creator, and he would
say that God is sovereign, but the way that it
works out is not sovereign. So I have a couple

(12:03):
of examples that I really thought were useful. Two sermons.
One is well, first of all, I was surprised to
find that that Bill Johnson dead did preach recently on Job,
or he seemed to preach about Job, but he so
he brings it up. He brings up the question of suffering,

(12:26):
but then he just quickly passes over what Job's relationship
with God is and how God. I mean, the whole
point of Job is that God allowed, sovereignly allowed Job
to undergo suffering that none of us think we could withstand,
and Job felt that he couldn't withstand it. And so

(12:47):
for almost forty chapters the Bible, you have Job wrestling
with God and the meaning of his suffering. And it's
an incredible ble book that all Christians, everybody in the
world should read well. So Johnson brings it up, and
then he just passes over essentially the entire book and

(13:11):
goes from the first chapter where Joe loses everything to
the last chapter where Joe receives double of everything that
he lost, and then he leaps to other texts of
people who lose things and then get double, and then
he sort of just assigns you, the listener, the task

(13:35):
of believing in God or having the kind of faith
that produces double or gets increase or you know, one
of those phrases that he uses a lot, and so
you pass by. I mean, he brings it up the question,
but he passes over the central point of the text,

(13:56):
and God is just sort of lost along the way.
The other example that I thought was fascinating was his
sermon on the workers in the Vineyard, where Jesus gives
the same amount of money to all the people or
not the sorry. Jesus tells a story of the master
of the vineyard who gives the same wage to those

(14:17):
who came to work in the morning and those who
came to work in the evening. And uh, it starts out,
I mean, he talks movingly about how greed is through
very wicked and bad, and how if you are discontent
with what you have, you're you're in a bad place spiritually,
and that's true. So he begins with this sort of

(14:39):
very true, moving exposition, it feels like of this text,
but then he jumps over the meaning of the text,
which is that when you come to Jesus, you all
get a full amount of Jesus if you if you
believe and love the Lord, whether you come in at

(15:01):
the last minute before you die, or you're there your
whole life, you get a full amount of the Lord.
He gives all of himself to you, and he bypasses
that to talk about how if you don't have, if
you're not happy for other people when they are getting
good things, God won't give you good things. He's waiting

(15:26):
for you to have the proper attitude before he gives
you blessings material blessings, and so you need to work
on your attitude. So it's very subtle shift from the
grace of God and the love of God to your
particular attitude and what you can get based on how

(15:46):
you kind of manipulate your own sense of things and
your own thoughts and your quote faith and manage yourself
in other words, So it's very subtle. It goes from
it feels like it's going to be about God, but
then it ends up being about you. In the final hour.

Speaker 1 (16:07):
Please don't skip today's break because if you have been
skipping it the last couple of episodes, you might have
missed the information about a huge research project we've been
doing at the Christian Research Institute that would be published
in a very special print edition of the Christian Research Journal.
That's one hundred pages. That is, for more than a year, CERI,

(16:30):
President hand Cantagraph and research staff have been doing primary
research on a Chinese cult called Eastern Lightning. Now, if
you're a long term subscriber to the journal, you might
remember that we did a short news piece about them
decades ago. But this particular cult has more than four
million followers worldwide. It's also known as the Church of

(16:53):
Almighty God. And this group claims that a Chinese woman
is the reincarnated Christ, the Almighty God and the fulfillment
of Jesus' all of the discourse. So that is very concerning.
And the thing about this cult that not only are
they contradicting historic Christian doctrine with obvious blasphemy and heretical teachings,

(17:20):
they actually also encourage violence, and so they have more
of a resemblance to a Chinese folk religion than Christianity.
So you will not want to miss out on one
hundred pages devoted completely to this end depth research about
this group. And how would you get this particular special
print edition? Since I note all the time that the

(17:43):
Christian Research Journal is now an online publication. While you
can do that through a partnering gift with the Christian
Research Institute, and you can go to our website equipped
dot or hit donate And as a matter of fact,
we are offering the ish you right now for this
particular focus, and it's one hundred pages. So you don't

(18:06):
want to miss out on that because you'll want to
know about this group that has very dangerous practices, including
having their followers sever all ties with their family. Now,
I will say as a trigger warning that there is
some graphic depictions of violence, both in the text and

(18:27):
in images, but you won't want to skip over. This
is very important research. But now back to my conversation
with Anne Kennedy. We are just describing some of Pastor
Bill Johnson's sermons at Bethel Church, and it sounds like
it starts out good and then it makes these big leaps.

(18:49):
That is not what really scripture says. So it seems
like it's kind of truth adjacent to what the scripture
is teaching. Does that make his message? Would you say
it's heretical or is it because you said it was subtle?
These nuances? It sounds good, but it's not biblical. You know,

(19:09):
how how is someone able to you know, discern it
is it just well, it's a dangerous thing, I should say,
or is it? Would you call it heretical?

Speaker 2 (19:20):
Well, I mean, I hate to throw around the word
Heresy's there's a lot of bad stuff out there that
might be really bad, but might you know not, might
not keep you out of the Kingdom of God. I
would say that this, this kind of teaching that Bill
Johnson's theology and way of handling the Bible is really

(19:44):
I mean, I would I don't know if I'd say heresy,
Probably I would, but it's definitely soul crushing. It definitely
would so confuse and mangle the Christian's spiritual world and
relationship with God that it would be really hard to

(20:05):
come out and really know what's true and what's not true.
So I would say it is really dangerous, and I
think that's because there is so much truth mixed into it.
He holds to a very conservative moral standard from all
that I've seen. Bethel doesn't allow for people to get

(20:31):
away with adultery, and he often preaches against sins. They're
very toxic for the soul and that need to be
repented of. But the way out of them is not
usually repentance. It's that you get into another sort of
frame of reference, you kind of work on yourself in
this way. It's very like progressive theology, which I've seen

(20:54):
many people point out that it's very workspased. You just
are trading one set of laws for another. But I
feel like the heart of it what's so dangerous is
that it really does have to do with the question
of Jesus. He did in sin. If you don't know
who Jesus is, and you don't know that you're a

(21:16):
sinner and in what way you're a sinner, then you
won't go to the real Jesus for mercy and forgiveness.
And central to that is the question of faith. Traditionally,
in Orthodox Christian churches, faith is your relationship with Jesus.

(21:38):
It's the trust that you put in Jesus. You lean
on him for salvation and for good things now and forevermore,
and you have a relationship with him. You know, may
not be full of happy feelings all the time, but
you trust God. You trust Jesus, and he's not like

(21:59):
a mechanistic sort of somebody that you get stuff out of,
whereas for Bethel, faith is like a force that you have.
It's kind of like karma. It's you know, it sounds
very much like manifesting things. You really have to be

(22:19):
careful about what you think and what you say and
in what kind of state you're in. And then if
you have quote faith, you can heal, you can get
words of knowledge, you can bring heaven to earth. You
participate in the world as a very powerful actor whose

(22:45):
relationship with God is really secondary. I would say so,
I would say it's very dangerous. And the problem is
that so many Christians today don't have good definitions of things.
They don't have a solid basis in the Bible. They
have sort of a smattering of ideas that may or

(23:07):
may not be related to the truth, and they are
not able to reason well through the scriptures. And so
because there's so much that sounds true and sounds common sense,
I think that it would be very dangerous to listen
to Bill Johnson preach.

Speaker 1 (23:28):
One of the things I want to ask you about
that you mentioned your article is one of the staff
pastors at Bethel Church. His name is Seth Dahl, and
he has been interviewed a number of times by various
Christian media, and he is like the Children's and families
pastor there and you talk about he had this specific

(23:50):
vision with Jesus, So can you tell us what his
vision was, because he seems to be telling that story
quite a bit, even in media.

Speaker 2 (24:00):
He's a clip on YouTube. I think this was almost
ten years ago, maybe not quite ten years ago that
even you can go and see the clip, and then
there's some people have taken it down who've taken it apart.
I think Alibastuki has a funny reel where she just
says that's not true. So he's preaching and he's kind

(24:21):
of got, he's got. It looks like he has a
Bible open on the podium, but he describes this vision
that he has where he had been hurt by a
pastor through words. Somebody had said something to him that
was really painful, and he was just very grieved and sad,

(24:43):
and then one day he had a vision where Jesus
came and picked him up in his arms. He said
and looked at him and apologized for the harm that
this other pastor had caused to seth Thal and then
he kind of tries to reason it through. So that's

(25:04):
pretty shocking because when you say that that Jesus, you know,
became sin for us. We wouldn't ever say that Jesus
actually sinned, and he really doesn't have anything to say
sorry for we are the ones that say sorry to him.
That's how this all works. And you get a sort
of a hint that I reme, maybe I'm reading too

(25:27):
much in but I watched it. It seemed like he
was he was fully committed to what he was saying,
but he was also trying to make it okay. It
felt like, you know, because he says, of course Jesus
didn't sin, but it's as though he was taking because
we're all bound together in the body of Christ. When

(25:50):
this pastor sinned against Seth Dall, it was as though
Jesus had sinned against Seth All, and he's so identified
himself with Seth Doll that he was going to apologize.
So it's kind of the opposite of how it should go.
You would say, when you're talking about the body of Christ.
It's an amazing clip, and I would encourage people if

(26:12):
they want to kind of get a sense of how
things If you start with a view of the person
and Jesus that is off kilter, we're not correctly aligned,
you end up in some crazy places that you wouldn't
go I think I don't think most people would say, oh, yeah,

(26:34):
God needs to apologize to me for all the hurt caused.
I mean, I know many people feel that way, of course,
because there's a sense in our souls that when bad
things happen, because we know that God is sovereign, that

(26:54):
we can't put the blame at his hand, but we
do have to go to him and find out out,
you know, why he allowed it. It's the center of
the human experience is to wrestle with the fact that
God is sovereign. But if you don't have the proper
categories and you don't know what you're talking about, you

(27:15):
end up saying things that are manifestly untrue. In this case,
that Jesus came in a vision and held this man
in his arms and said sorry to him. So it's
a very interesting clip if people want to check it out.

Speaker 1 (27:30):
So he talked about his testimony. Does that mean that
there he's one of the staff pastors. Does that mean
that they approach visions on the same level of authority
as the Bible itself? And what does it really say
about who they think Christ is? Because that sounds very fantastical,

(27:55):
almost and not theologically correct obviously from what the Bible teaches.
So do they approach biblical authority on the same level
as say a personal vision.

Speaker 2 (28:05):
I think they probably wouldn't say it that boldly, but
in practical terms, that's what happens, because words of knowledge
and visions that profits give are really where all the
emotional weight and of everything is in a service. So,
you know the past, a preacher will stand up and

(28:27):
preach about the text theoretically, but then people will stand
up and give words of knowledge and prophecies and say things,
and those people take those very seriously and adjust their
lives accordingly. And the fact you can also go and look. Recently,

(28:50):
there's a long podcast or series of long podcasts with
somebody who came out of the Bethel movement who rearranged
his whole life, spent all of his say and to
do something that a person who claimed to be a
prophet told him to do from the stage at Bethel
said called said his name and said that God was

(29:12):
calling him to do a specific task, and so this
man set out to do it. It just turned out
that that person was getting people's information off the internet
and then making supposed prophecies about them, and none of
it was true. But the seriousness with which people take

(29:32):
those prophecies that happened from the stage from quote prophets,
it's very serious. They don't they think those are true,
and they live as though they're true and as if
they have as much weight as anything that's said in
the Bible. And of course it's really alluring because the

(29:56):
Bible doesn't tell you where you should move and like
you know what job you should have. It doesn't say,
you know that you need to go across the street
and talk to your neighbor this afternoon, because you know,
for some reason, there's nothing that specific in the Bible.

(30:17):
There's a lot of very very clear teaching and words
about how we have to behave, but we have to
read and then apply what God says in the scriptures
to our lives in practical ways, and we have to
do that hard work.

Speaker 1 (30:34):
Well.

Speaker 2 (30:35):
Words of knowledge sort of bypasses that and allows you
to sort of feel like you're moving through the world
with the direction of God that he's given through somebody
else in very specific ways, except that if that's not
true and you follow it or you do what the

(30:57):
prophet says and then it doesn't go well for you.
There's no you know, God's not to blame for that.
You're kind of out to lunch. And so it's kind
of scary and listening to people who have come out
of Bethel, a lot of them really believed with their
heart and soul that what people were saying on the

(31:19):
stage about them by name was from God, and they
did they tried to be obedient to that, but because
it wasn't from God, they ended up in really bad
places that they would not have otherwise gone.

Speaker 1 (31:33):
In your article, you say that they actually encourage people
like you're saying this person, you know, from the front
and the podium said, you know, I have a word
of knowledge about this person and you need to do this.
That they encourage people like if you don't do this,
God won't bless you. God won't you know, allow this
thing to happen that we're saying to you. So how

(31:56):
for you know, what are the spiritual consequences for believers?
I mean, talked about this guy lost everything he had,
but how does that affect how he sees God and
understanding of the gospel and just what the Bible teaches
the Gospel is and how we are to know who
God is. I mean, how does that really change they're

(32:16):
thinking about the person of God If they're saying, you
have to I have a prophecy about you and you
have to do this thing, or you know you're going
to be maybe in danger of your salvation or God
will bless you.

Speaker 2 (32:27):
Well, there's two There's two parts there that are they're
really important. The one is that, you know, Bill Johnson
says explicitly that God didn't do all the work he
was going to do in creation. He left a lot
of things that were undone that he was waiting for
people to come along and do or bring about through

(32:48):
faith their faith into the world. And so there's this
kind of I would find it stressful that if you're
not doing the things that Bethel says you should do,
you're thwarting God's mission and desires in the world. And so,
I mean, he preached on Hannah and how she desperately

(33:12):
wanted a child, and he didn't go into the question
of you know, God's covenant work and bringing Samuel as
a real prophet into Israel that eventually brought about King David.
And you know, that was all in line for the
savior and that God was able to act in Hannah's
life and give her something that she longed for. He

(33:37):
kind of works that around to be about how she
really got God to do something because of her faith, essence,
or power that she had. And so again it takes
all of the emphasis off of God's work in the
world for creation and redemption and makes it about you

(33:59):
and your work for God, which is just an ongoing theme.
But the other issue is that the gospel is not
about bringing heaven to earth or making earth into heaven.
The gospel is about the work that God did on
the cross to redeem a fallen humanity and individual sinners,

(34:21):
but collectively corporately the Church. So we fall into sin,
we're rebellious towards God. We are without help, and we
because of our sin, our rejection of God, we are
bound to death. God came in Jesus Christ, the Son
of God, and he went to the cross and he
offered himself up as a sacrifice for our sin. And

(34:44):
when you believe and repent, you believe the Gospel and
repent and join yourself to Jesus through faith, which is
a relationship you're saved to. You get to go to heaven,
and that's very important thing. That's one of the things
that we should desire. And we then have to go

(35:04):
on living in this world even though our souls are
bound to Christ forever for eternity, and eventually, in the
general Resurrection, we all will rise again and live forever
in a new heavens and a new Earth. So Bethel, though,
eviscerates that work of Jesus in the Gospel, and it

(35:29):
sort of sidelines the question of sin and makes it
about you and your ability to follow various prophecies that
are given by human people here and now, and puts
you in the center of the picture, which I think
is stressful and not good, not spiritually good for your soul. So, yeah,

(35:52):
it is. It seems very alive. You know that you
would know how to act because God had the power
to come and speak to you right now, right here
through somebody else's mouth, and he loved you enough to
do that. That's what it appears to be very good

(36:13):
and immediate and vibrant, But it takes you away from
the Cross and Christ and into other realms that may
or may not have anything to do with how you
actually should be living your life right now and I
think it takes people into a kind of a maze
of confusion of temporal and material questions that would be

(36:37):
straightened out if you had a full and certain knowledge
of Jesus and the Cross. How you should live now
would become clear to you if you knew that you
know nothing could separate you from the love of God,
for example, and that you can confess your sin and repent,

(37:00):
and God is faithful and just to forgive your sin,
and that you're free to go forward in life unburdened
by grief and trouble because of the mercy of the Cross.
All of those blessings just are not in view because
of the material things that you may or not be
able to get because of somebody prophesying over you.

Speaker 1 (37:23):
So you're just talking about how really what they really
believe about the work of Christ really eviscerates the Gospel.
And I want to ask you a little bit more
about their christology, because you write in your article that
they see Christ as more like a magical object or
something that's to the side of what you need to

(37:47):
do to know God. And in this time in culture,
at least American church culture, people just toss around Jesus
and say Jesus a lot about this and that, and
you're just not really sure, well what their christology? Who
do they really think Jesus is? And that's a big
question because some people like I want to ask you
a little in a few moments about their music. Would

(38:09):
you know they're praising Jesus? So are they thinking that
who I think Jesus is is what they're saying Jesus is?
So to unpack their christology for us?

Speaker 2 (38:19):
Well, So this is again kind of tough because Bill
Johnson says a lot of true things about Jesus. You know,
at the end of every sermon, he always gives a
sort of brief you need to accept Jesus and his
work on the cross, on your behalf for your sins.
He always kind of gives an abbreviated Gospel message quote

(38:40):
about you having faith and getting saved, and he always says,
if you haven't accepted Jesus as your personal Lord and savior,
you should see somebody on the side and somebody will
pray for you, and you've got to do that before
you do anything else. So he kind of has this
basic evangelistic language that a lot of Protestant churches have

(39:03):
that we might be used to. But it's really interesting.
It's hard to untangle, but it seems like and I've
heard other people say this as well. I've I had
this thought myself as I was listening to him, and
then I heard somebody else say it who I can't
remember exactly who, But it's not purely of my own invention.

(39:24):
But it feels very much like he has a progressive
view of a canon within a canon. So Jesus is
a person through whom you view the scriptures, but it's
not all of Jesus. It's not like you know his
suffering and death on the cross, for example, or your

(39:45):
participation in his suffering through your own suffering. The main
lens that he comes back to over and over again
is that you're going to do greater works than these.
So Jesus and the night before he died, said to
his apostles, I can't tell you everything I have to
tell you now, because you're too grieved, and I'm going
to go away and the Holy Spirit will come to

(40:07):
you and help you and lead you into all truth.
And most many people through church history have viewed that
as being a promise to the apostles who were in
that room, that they would be able to write the scriptures,
that God would recall to mind all the things that
they were supposed to remember and write down, and that

(40:28):
we would be able to trust the deposit of scripture
that was given to the church as superintended by the
Holy Spirit. Well, Bill Johnson takes that and makes it
about works and marvels that you will accomplish in through
your faith here and now. And you have to do
greater works than these. So you have to raise the dead,

(40:50):
You need to be healing people on the regular, you
need to be having words of knowledge. You need to
go to Heaven through your faith, power in your spirit
while you're he stays on earth. There's a whole bunch
of stuff you need to do. And it's all sort
of through Jesus or through the lens of Jesus, but
it's very curated. It's that what he said about greater

(41:13):
works than these, it's about when he rose from the dead,
and a few other places where he speaks about faith.
You know, I couldn't heal you because of you didn't
have enough faith in this town. It's not the full
or Jesus. And so he it feels like he creates
a canon within a canon, and then you know, certain

(41:34):
parts of the scripture there then, as a result of that,
are more useful than others. And it just allows him
to sort of wander back and forth across the text
without really dealing with any particular you know what, a
text in its entirety, in its context, and then he

(41:57):
doesn't have to deal with the really thorny issues of
and grace and judgment that if you're going to be
serious about God are going to come up for you
and you're going to have to grapple with as a
Christian or you know, any person who wants to get
along through life, you're going to have to cope with
the fact that things don't go the way you want

(42:18):
them to. And there's going to be somebody who could
have done it differently and decided not to and is
that person good or not? And you have to go
through some kind of theophany for yourself, otherwise you aren't,
you know, you just bury your head in the sand.
So he just allows people an off ramph from the

(42:42):
character and nature of Christ by i would say, continually
using the name of Jesus and never never getting never
allowing people access to who Jesus really is and the
implications of his character and what he did for you
as a person.

Speaker 1 (43:04):
So one of the themes in your article is that
you say that Bethel's theology really is idolatrous. So can
you explain what you mean by that their theology is idolatrous?

Speaker 2 (43:22):
Well, it's twofold. I mean it does come through, I
think in the music secondarily, which we can talk about,
but the business of getting a word of knowledge or
a prophecy from somebody about yourself and what you should
do in temporal terms, and because that puts you in
the center of the question and makes God kind of

(43:45):
secondary to that. The kinds of words of knowledge that
you're going to resonate with and that are going to
feel important and real for you are things that are
central to who you are or what you feel about yourself.
And so God is very quickly going to be somebody
who resonates with who you are already. Which the way

(44:07):
that the Bible says that is you know that you
make an image in your in your likeness, rather than
you being found and made in the image and likeness
of Christ. And so you get a curated view of
your own spiritual world that will resemble you and therefore

(44:30):
is sort of classically idolatrous and very dangerous, but it's
very subtle and tricky because it feels real. You know,
in the same way that if you went to a
psychic and heard something from that person about what you
were going to do, you know what you could expect

(44:52):
to happen to you that day. Your perceptions about yourself
and who you are and what's really important for you,
All of that would be given to you or reaffirmed
for you by the psychic who had some kind of
special word. It's essentially I would say the same thing
with a word of knowledge from Bethel. You're not being

(45:13):
shown Christ and God who is alien and other from
you who's holy and you're not holy. You're not having
to confront something outside of yourself that is transcendent and
real and therefore has deep and powerful implications for how
you live your life and what you do next and
who you are and how you either need to reject

(45:37):
parts of yourself that are very contrary to the will
of God and who he is and what he created,
and it affirms to you yourself and your own desires.
And so I mean I don't think, you know, most
of us don't wake up in the morning and think, well,

(45:58):
today I'm going to be an idolator and I'm gonna
not face God as who he is. I'm just going
to go with myself. But we all do it in
subtle ways. I mean, technology allows a certain low grade
level of idolatry to exist for all of us all
the time because of our phone screens. But you should

(46:20):
definitely not get something like that in a church building
from a quote pastor. You should not be confirmed in
your idolatry by the pastor of a church. That just
makes it much more dangerous than what we're all coping
with on a day to day basis.

Speaker 1 (46:37):
I also want to ask you about their view of
the Holy Spirit, because you write that their theology actually
detaches the Holy Spirit from the biblical Christ and is
really used to justify some of these various prophecies and
just kind of some of the ways that they conduct

(47:00):
their services with all of that emotion and just rahma
and you know, really spectacle and stuff. So what is
their view of the Holy Spirit and how is it
differ from what the Bible teaches about who the Holy
Spirit is and his work well.

Speaker 2 (47:17):
The Bible presents the Godhead, the Father, the Son, and
the Holy Spirit as being one in being and in
nature and will. They all desire the same thing together.
They are the embodiment and source of love. They're out
foreing love for each other is what makes the world

(47:39):
go around essentially, and so the way to the Father
is through the Son and his work on the cross.
And the Holy Spirit always draws you to the Son.
The Holy Spirit never does anything that would draw you
away from Jesus, and he doesn't ever you know, you
often might a lot of people think, oh, we don't

(48:00):
spend enough time thinking about the Holy Spirit. Well, the
Holy Spirit is always there making you into the image
of Christ. He's always drawing you to the sun. You
should always be looking at Jesus. And the Holy Spirit
and Jesus never do anything that are contrary to each other.
They are one in being and purpose and will. And

(48:23):
so the Holy Spirit is a person. It's not like
a force like karma that you can manipulate to get things.
If you just get yourself into the right perspective, and
then you know, if you can kind of get something
over on karma. I guess if you're really good, then

(48:44):
karma will owe you something. It's kind of how I
think a lot of people think, well with reading, they
want outpourings of the Holy Spirit. They want it's not
that you relate to a person. It's that there's this
sort of a mount if you are really ecstatic or
desirous that you can get more Holy Spirit. You can

(49:07):
get outpourings of the Holy Spirit. You can get the
Holy Spirit to kind of function like a force in
your life and then be the source of material blessings
for you. So it kind of veers over into prosperity,
gospel and word to faith, the kind of thing with

(49:27):
the Spirit. But just like with Jesus, the Holy Spirit
becomes adjacent to your material desires and your temporal needs,
and isn't a person, you know, a member of the
Godhead to whom you owe obedience and worship. It's kind
of the other way around. So again it's very confused

(49:50):
and kind of messy and not I would say really bad,
because it, just like with Jesus, the name of God
is often taken in vain. He's taken to be part of,
brought along in a human agenda and recast, which is
to say, he's not being worshiped as he really is.

(50:11):
So that's a vain that's like the first second Commandment.
You're not supposed to take the name of the Lord
in vain. You're not supposed to call on God for
things that God doesn't want to do, or who call
him something that he isn't And making the Holy Spirit
about your temporal material blessings is a vain request. It's

(50:35):
not why the Holy Spirit lives in each of us
and in the church if we're Christians.

Speaker 1 (50:43):
Early on in the podcast, you mentioned Bill Johnson teaching
about job and your article notes that Bethel Church downplays
suffering kind of in a similar way that people who
hold the Prosperity Gospel or Word of Faith would say
that if you are you lack faith. You know, the

(51:05):
believers have a lack of faith if they are encountering suffering.
And I think a lot of Christians struggle with that.
If they, let's say, get a bad medical diagnosis, they wondered,
was it's something that I did that caused the suffering?
That God is punishing me, and then how do I

(51:25):
get out of it and get healed? So what are
their views of suffering? Since you said he kind of skipped,
you know, at the beginning of job and then skipped
the end. And how can you encourage Christians to embrace
a real theology of biblical suffering instead?

Speaker 2 (51:43):
Yes, he I mean he acknowledges that there's suffering in
the world, but it's bad. There's no redemptive idea that
if you suffer, it might be within God's providence and
plan for you, that God might be good and you
might suffer, and that God might be allowing that for

(52:07):
some reason that you can't understand. Now he just did
skips over all of that. And so suffering, I think
plays it actually an important role because it is probably
what drives a lot of people to go to Bethel
and to go to their supernatural school and should be

(52:29):
involved in their ministries or be you know, a consumer
of their content. Is that life is really tough and
things don't go the way we want them to, and
we want to know where God is in the midst
of this, and they offer, they apparently offer an answer
to that, and that's that if you have enough faith,

(52:50):
then you're suffering can go away, you can get over,
you can be healed and materially blessed, and you won't
be lonely and sad, and your body won't get sick
and you won't be depressed, and you'll have a new car,
and everybody wants that. So I mean, in some ways,
I would say that suffering is probably at the heart

(53:10):
of Bethel's whole enterprise. Is a particular answer to it,
and that's that you don't have to have it if
you try hard enough. And I mean that sounds really nice,
but that's really no different than Rachel Hollis or you
know somebody who just says, you know, pick yourself up
by your bootstraps. You maybe you can get it through

(53:31):
a miracle, or maybe you can just you know, become
a self help guru. There's just different ways that the
world offers you to get over it. Whereas suffering in
scripture with Jesus isn't something that you just get over.
It has a really central place in the Christian worldview,
and that's because of sin. The world is thrown into ruin,

(53:56):
and it was so dire. It's such a dire situation
that God, God himself, had to come and stand between
us and the consequences of that ruin and he rescues
us out of sin and death and ultimately out of suffering,
but because of the way things turned out, which he

(54:17):
allowed to again. People need to deal with God's divine,
sovereign allowance of suffering and death to come into the world.
Why did he create in the first place, Why did
he allow Adam and Eve to sin? Or why did
he send them out of the garden? The Bible speaks

(54:39):
very profoundly and richly about this, and the answer that
he gives is that God remakes the world through his
work on the Cross. He's coming again in glory and
there will not be suffering anymore on the last day.
But you have to be part of him. You have
to be found in him. You have to belong to

(55:01):
Jesus' body and soul for you to avoid suffering for eternity.
And when you are a Christian, God turns your suffering
around and glorifies himself with it. He makes it a
participation in his work on the Cross, and you become
the visible in your suffering manifestation of God's goodness in

(55:25):
the world, which is very counterintuitive and hard to understand
and the opposite of what I every single one of
us wants. We as Christians, embrace suffering. We go willingly
into suffering for the sake of Jesus and for others
through the power of the Holy Spirit, because of the
glory that is revealed of the Cross and who Jesus

(55:50):
is and what he did and how much he loves
us in the world. So Bethel gives the opposite reason
or the opposite question of stuff, takes it in a
very worldly, very temporal direction, and I think it's like
putting a band aid on your cancer diagnosis. It makes

(56:12):
you feel good, probably in the short term, but it's
not sufficient. And I think ultimately if you listen to
people who have come out of Bethel, sends you spinning
for a long long time while you and often makes
people go away from Jesus altogether because it's not a
real answer, and it doesn't show you the face of Christ,

(56:33):
and it doesn't put into context and give meaning to
your actual problems that are more than you can bear.
You must go to Jesus to find answers and help,
but they prevent you from going there.

Speaker 1 (56:49):
Well. I wanted to save this music Bethyl music question
towards the end of the podcast because I thought if
I mentioned that the beginning, before you've unpacked their theology.
I think Christians might feel a little defensive because their
music is wildly popular across all kinds of denominations, traditions,

(57:10):
and in your article you argue that worship is one
of the primary ways that their theology in fultraits you know,
unsuspecting churches. And I just want to point out this
one song that's one of their top songs. I'm sure
most people listening to this podcast have sung this song,
and that's their song. This is amazing Grace. Now here's
how it opens up. It says, who breaks the power

(57:31):
sin and darkness, Whose love is mighty and so much stronger,
The King of Glory, the King above all kings. This
is amazing grace. This is unfailing love. That you would
take my place, that you would bear my cross, that
you would lay down your life, that I would be
set free. Jesus, I sing for all that you've done
for me. And so I think most Christians would say, well,
and what is wrong with that? That sounds theologically sound.

(57:55):
And so I think there's probably a lot of pastors
and church worship directors that have heard the song and
have sung it in another context and said, this is great,
this sounds like great theology, let's use it. So how
should they evaluate some of their worship songs because maybe
they don't know some of the theology behind this particular church.

Speaker 2 (58:18):
Yeah, I mean, I listened to a lot of Bethyl
music this month, and there's some really catchy stuff out
there that I enjoyed, and I have sung some of
these songs in churches where I've visited. I mean, my
church is kind of solidly hymns from the Hymnal, so
we don't have a lot of Bethyl. I don't think
we've sung any Bethyl music at my church that I

(58:39):
know of in recent memory. So I'm not an expert
on you know, where you would go if you were
just trying to make up a music set for your
non denominational church on a Sunday morning. But I would
say that again, it's so subtle because the words of
the song are true by and large. I wouldn't say

(59:02):
there may be as full orbed as they might be.
They're probably not as theologically rich as they could be,
but they are not wrong. And that's where the subtlety
comes in. You know. Bill Johnson says a lot of
things that are true and that lead you right up.
I would say even sort of increase a thirst or

(59:23):
a hunger for more experience of God through the way
that he talks. And the music especially does this. I
think it's it's very emotional, it's it rises and falls,
it's melodic, it's full of some good lyrics. But if

(59:44):
you really keep singing it, first of all, I don't
think you'll get a complete view of the Christian life.
I think your worship will be not as rich and
is theologically rich and as nourishing as it it could
be if you have a steady diet of Bethel. And
I think ultimately, if your congregation is singing a lot

(01:00:07):
of this and then goes online to get more of
it or on Spotify, and then they are singing this mostly,
eventually it very much function like a gateway into more
bethyl content. And for all that I know is myself
consuming over the last many weeks, Bethel Church is a

(01:00:28):
very divisive force in the Christian world right now because
people get into the thrall of Bethel through their music
and their their school for supernatural miracles, and they go
they come back to a congregation that's not thinking about

(01:00:50):
it that much, and they begin to try to introduce things,
they get people on their side, and then often pastors
will have a huge problem, theological problem on their hands,
because they're dealing with stuff that's just not orthodox Christianity.
But people are emotionally attached to, you know, the music
and the way of thinking and speaking about God and

(01:01:12):
maybe even the words of knowledge and that kind of thing,
And so I would say, you know, if you can
find something else, you should definitely not sing Bethel music
very much. I would ask, I think if you were
trying to look at questions you could ask yourself would
be you know, is there an actual biblical text that
underlines this is the foundation of this song? Is this

(01:01:34):
sort of you know all over the place, does it
have like fifteen different sort of biblical images, or is
there one theme or text that's really at the heart
of this particular chorus or song and lyric. Another one
would be like if the answer to that is no,

(01:01:55):
like does the song have any substance, biblical substance? Is
there anything logically of depth and truth in it? And
you should be able to say, you know, if it's not,
then you should just trash it for sure. But then
I would say, like, can you get a better song
from somewhere else. Can you just not use Bethel music

(01:02:18):
because they are there, they're funded. I mean, you're funding
Bethel Church when using their music, and it's not probably
that helpful for your people, And in much of it
I think is very repetitive, very emotional, and I don't

(01:02:40):
know if that's that good for your people either. I mean,
you might want to grapple with emotionalism and the depth
and breadth of the spiritual that you know, the intellectual life.
I think the believers should be engaged on many different levels.
And I mean I would not zoomed to talk to

(01:03:01):
every tradition at all about what kind of music they
should sing. But I think there, I think they're strategic
in the popularity that they have very very well done,
very popular music. They study it. It's not by accident.
The way the music is produced and what it sounds like,

(01:03:24):
it's exactly to the moment. And I think when when
tastes change, they're quick to change, so that they're kind
of always riding the wave of people's aesthetic expectations for music.
And I just think it's really insidious.

Speaker 1 (01:03:39):
Actually, Well, finally, I wanted to ask you what you
know if probably like you said it, you know, the
music is a side door into you know, their church's
theology and watching stuff on YouTube and sharing Bill Johnson
sermons with other people and those kinds of things, and
you know, he is, like you said, using like these

(01:04:00):
like sound bites to give people hope without really saying anything,
and you know, kind of like a word salad. And
so what would you say to those people who are
in Bethel or are very enamored with Bethel or moving
towards Bethel because of their music, how would you turn
them back to just the gospel and biblical truth?

Speaker 2 (01:04:25):
Well, I would say, first of all, like the experiences
that you've had there or you know what you've learned.
God meets people in all kinds of places, and a
lot of them are not, you know, theologically ideal. Well,
we had one person who in our church who opened
the Book of Mormon and read a verse and it
took him back to church. So God can speak through

(01:04:48):
the mouths of babes and donkeys and even Bethel songs.
I think it's possible for that to happen. So I
wouldn't look at everything that you know, if you if
you've been with Bethel or gone with that school or
been involved or appreciated their ministry, that it's all bad
and that you should just you know, feel like you've
just lost years of your life. I think that God

(01:05:09):
works everything that we are and do everything that we
say and think good and bad together for his divine
and sovereign plan, and we don't need to worry about
managing our lives. Are theological lives to perfection, that's not
I think anything that you've any place you find yourself,

(01:05:30):
God is going to be able to find you there
and bring you along if you are willing to go
with him. And so I wouldn't you know, despair if
you have been really in the thrall of Bethel, if
you're coming out of it and you just don't know
what to do next. But I would just have a
very big caution. And that's that the church, you know,

(01:05:53):
even churches that maybe feel dry and not that exciting
and there's not tons of exciting people on stage. Maybe
there's no stage, maybe there's just a pulpit and an
altar or a table, and maybe the music feels fusty
and it's not that great, and you just you don't
enjoy it. That much. Nevertheless, it is through the Word

(01:06:16):
of God, through the right preaching of the Word, through
the sacraments, that God brings you into His kingdom and
into His glory and heals your soul. And so the
desires that you have for healing and richness and depth
and love are given to you by God to draw

(01:06:37):
you to himself. And you should search those out and
find them in a place where the true God is
proclaimed and worshiped. And I think that over time, if
you spend a lot of time on sort of a
Bethel diet, you're going to end up being malnourished, spiritually malnourished.
You will not really learn how to pray breally or well.

(01:07:01):
You won't know how to read your Bible. You will
probably often feel like a lot of things are your faults,
but you won't have the mercy of the cross and
repentance to relieve you of that guilt. And so you'll
go maybe from high to high, but overall your life
isn't going to improve. Whereas if you really search out

(01:07:24):
Christ in a good church and you look for really
good preaching so that you're fed through the Word and
through the sacrament, you're gonna do better. Overall, it's going
to take longer. You might feel, you know, like you're
not making progress and God isn't calling you to do
anything exciting and unusual. But you are going to slowly

(01:07:46):
be healed in your soul and made ready to go
to Heaven to be with the Lord and ultimately to
live in the new heavens and the New Earth with
Him forever. So you don't have to worry about making
Earth into heaven. Now, that's just it's not your job,
it's not our job. We can't do that. We have
to look for Jesus and he will be ultimately satisfying

(01:08:10):
and worth all the struggle and the pain.

Speaker 1 (01:08:14):
Well, finally, on a much lighter note than this intensive
conversation we just have had. And I know that you've
been camping this summer, So what's one of your favorite
things about going camping?

Speaker 2 (01:08:27):
Well, when I go camping, my culinary spirit comes alive
and I like to go into the wilderness and cook
really complicated dinners, so I you know, like cooking whole
fish over a fire or something like that. So I
really spend the whole time cooking and heating myself getting
too hot over the coals.

Speaker 1 (01:08:49):
Wow, that's very aspirational. I guess. I'm not a camper
and I can't imagine cooking in the wilderness, but that
sounds delicious to eat a whole fish. Well, thanks and
for being I guess again. On the Postmodern Realities podcast.

Speaker 2 (01:09:02):
Thank you so much for having me.

Speaker 1 (01:09:05):
You've been listening to episode four hundred and fifty six
of the Postmodern Realities Podcast. Today's guest was Anne Kennedy.
She has written a feature article for her Theological Trends
column and her article is called Christian Idolatry Evaluating Bethel
Church and Bill Johnson, and you can read it for

(01:09:26):
free at equip dot org. You won't want to miss
out on subscribing to the other podcasts from the Christian
Research Institute. We have the Bible answer Man podcast, which
is published Monday through Friday, with the best of the
week on Saturday. It's hosted by CRI president Hank Handagraph
and is available wherever you get your favorite podcasts. In addition,

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Hank has a podcast called Hank Unplugged. Hank takes you
out of the studio and into his study to engage
in free flowing, essential Christian conversations on critical issues with
some of the most interesting, informative and inspirational people on
the planet, and you won't want to miss out on
the brand new podcast from the Christian Research Journal. Christian

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Research Journal Reads presents audio versions of Christian Research Journal articles.
It was a print incarnation of almost forty five years.
It's now on the web as you know, with new
articles every single week, so you won't want to miss
these audio articles of some of our most popular and
most accessed articles on our website equip dot org.