F4F | Open Theism and the NAR

Fighting for the Faith

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Welcome to another installment of Fighting for the Faith. My name is Chris Roseborough. I am your servant in Jesus Christ.

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This is the channel that compares what people are saying in the name of God to the Word of God. All right, put your thinking caps on.

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We have got, you know, as far as difficulty of subject, you know, with one being the easiest, ten being the hardest, this is a good 10 .5

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difficulty level, but a necessary episode of Fighting for the

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Faith. If you've ever been in the NAR or been exposed to people in the New Apostolic Reformation, you might have run into a theology that you didn't even know existed in the

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New Apostolic Reformation, and that theology is called open theism.

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Now, I am no expert in open theism. I've only dabbled in doing any kind of apologetic work against open theism, and so I have invited on Fighting for the

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Faith three guests, and all of them are doctors and I am not, and so we're gonna rely heavily upon their expertise and their experiences to, first of all, identify what is open theism, you know, where does it come from, who are some of its major proponents outside of the

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NAR, and biblically, how do we combat it, what are the dangers of it, and then we'll talk, and we'll segue into a discussion about how it's actually found its way into the

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New Apostolic Reformation, and so with that, let me bring on our guests, and we've got three of them.

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All right, good to see you guys, and Evan and Vivian, how do you pronounce your last name, is it

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Peaches? Peaches like the food. Peaches like the food, okay. Dr.

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Evan and Dr. Vivian Peaches, and then Dr. Bruce Ware, if you guys can quickly introduce yourself, we'll start with Evan and Vivian, introduce yourself, tell us a little about yourselves, and then

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Dr. Ware, I think you're a lot more well -known than they are, but tell us a little bit about yourself as well, and then we'll get into our discussion.

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Well, thank you, Chris, thank you for having us on, it's certainly a pleasure. For many years, your channel has certainly been instrumental for us, so a quick,

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I guess, cap on us. I've spent about 20 years inside the New Apostolic Reformation movement.

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I came out around 2018, and Dr. Bruce Ware has pretty much a substantial part of that, helping us come out of that movement, so I'm really honored to have him here.

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Over the last couple years, when we came out of the movement itself, we wanted to really do a deep dive into how did we actually get into that theology, and with that,

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I spent about a couple, three, four, or five years now, various degrees, various research, really looking into C.

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Peter Wagner and the roots of the NAR, looking at the theological system behind that.

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Okay, how about you, Vivian? Well, thank you, it is an absolute honor to be here with Dr.

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Ware and with you, Chris. It's surreal. I think having seen your show, both having provided it to our parents, to our family, and having people who were in the

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New Apostolic Reformation watch your show, has just been instrumental in us growing our faith.

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So like Evan said, we kept asking the question, why, who, where, when, you know, all of the sixth grade report questions, and we used the phrase that we just kept pulling a thread and seeing where it would land, and just kept pulling a thread, and it led to open theism at the, actually, the first semester.

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We were in Dr. Ware's systematic theology class, and we had to research, and that's something that just we both attached to.

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What is it? Why is it here? And how do we address it? All right, and Dr.

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Ware, you're one of the world's foremost experts on open theism. Were you immediately shocked and convinced that the

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New Apostolic Reformation had open theism in it, or was there a little bit of pushback from you when the peaches came to you with their hypothesis?

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Well, I was unaware until I heard from Evan and Vivian about the connection to open theism in the

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NAR. I was unaware of that before, and I had done a lot of reading and research and writing on open theism, but I did not know that Peter Wagner, who my wife was a secretary for him at Fuller Seminary back in the day.

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You know, so, I mean, we knew the Wagners. We knew the faculty there at the

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School of World Missions at Fuller, because I was a doctoral student there during those days, and I had no idea that Pete Wagner had gone the openness direction, but it is so evident that he did, and Evan and Vivian's research have borne that out very clearly.

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So that was new to me. I know the open theism of Clark Pinnock and John Sanders and Greg Boyd and figures like that, so it was a revelation to me to see the connection, yes.

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Interesting. Now, just for the sake of the audience, where are you teaching at, sir?

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Yes, I've taught for 25 years now at Southern Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, where both

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Evan and Vivian are students, graduates and continuing students there. Such a privilege to be at this institution that the

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Lord has blessed in so many, many ways over the past 30 years that Al Mohler has been the president there.

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Indeed. I got to meet Dr. Mohler for the first time last June and had a wonderful conversation with him.

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Funny enough, at the time I was talking with him, we were talking about Rick Warren and what was going on in the

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Southern Baptist Convention, and all the way back in June of last year, he told me exactly what would happen in Louisiana this year, and he turned out to be right.

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I thought that was very interesting. All right, so we've got a little bit of the backstory.

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We know who you guys are, but what? When we talk about open theism,

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I don't know a lot of people who've read Clark Pinnock. He's not as popular as he was when

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I was growing up in the 80s. Many people who know about the emergent church movement might know a little bit about Greg Boyd, and that's where they know about open theism.

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But when we're talking about this theological system or this frame in which they do theology, let's talk about what is it and what are some of the key hallmarks of this theology.

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Let's start with definitions, and I'll leave it open to whoever who wants to jump in at this point. Well, why don't

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I take this part, because that's something I'm familiar with, the connection to NAR. I'm going to yield completely to Evan and Vivian on that part of it.

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So open theism really began in the 1980s. Richard Rice, who was a

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Seventh -day Adventist, was writing on this, but it wasn't until 1995 when a book came out entitled

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The Openness of God, written by five authors, Clark Pinnock, John Sanders, William Hasker, Richard Rice, and David Basinger.

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Those five authors presented a view in which God created the world, but he did not know, could not know, as a matter of fact, the future free decisions and actions of human beings.

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So they held the view that if God has exhaustive foreknowledge, which of course has been held in every part of Christendom, Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, every form of Protestantism has held to exhaustive divine foreknowledge, that before God created the world, he knew everything that was going to take place.

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So they rejected that notion because they came to the conviction that if God knows the future choices and actions of human beings, then they're not free in doing what they do, in choosing what they choose.

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If God is determined, or I'm sorry, if God knows exhaustively that tonight for dinner you're going to have a hamburger,

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Chris, well his knowledge is flawless, is perfect, and he's known this from eternity.

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So are you free to have pizza? And the answer is no. You cannot choose something contrary to what

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God knows you will choose. This sounds like the

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Oracle from the Matrix talking. Well, you know, it was a very serious conclusion that they came to, which led them then to deny that God knows the future.

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The future rather is open, hence the term open theism, rather than closed.

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And our decisions make a difference, then, in the shape of the world, and God does not know how things are going to turn out, even though he might have a better guess than the rest of us do, in terms of that.

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And so this is what led to this movement. So let me ask a follow -up question. That being the case, when

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God prophesied the future, when Christ prophesied the future, was that just his best guess?

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Yes. They appealed to one of two things. Either God's best guess, although they use different terminology for that, but that's the idea, or that those prophecies have implicit conditions that if they're not fulfilled, then

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God is not obligated to fulfill what he has said will take place. And so they take, for example, the statement through Jonah to the

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Ninevites, you know, 40 days and Nineveh will be destroyed. That's a prophecy, but it wasn't fulfilled because of a condition that was implicit in what

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God told Jonah to say. The implicit condition was, unless you repent, which of course they did repent, and then

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God did not bring the judgment upon them. So they take that notion and say, a lot of prophecy can be explained as conditional, even if the condition is not presented explicitly in the text.

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Or God's best guess, one of those two, tend to cover what they see prophecy to be.

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Of course, the problem with that is that the, well, I was going to say the vast majority, at least a large portion of biblical prophecy is prophecy in which

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God declares unilaterally that something will take place, and the fulfillment of it involves future free choices and actions of human beings, you know, and yet it takes place.

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I mean, you think of, in Isaiah 44 and 45, where God prophesies

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Cyrus will be the one who will, you know, be the instrument that he uses to bring the

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Israelites back to the land and rebuild Jerusalem, rebuild the temple, and so on, which is exactly what happens.

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Well, that's not an implicit condition in there, it's not

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God's best guess, he's actually naming the person 150 years before he's born.

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And so they just really cannot account for prophecy of that kind that is found all through the

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Bible. Right, and then I would note that when you look at eschatological prophecies, like in the book of Daniel, prophesying, you know, the 70 weeks, and then, you know, ultimately the rise of the man of lawlessness, and then the conclusion of the age of kingdoms of the earth with the arrival of Christ, that seems like a pretty clear eschatological prophecy that we can bank on, especially since the church has confessed that Jesus will return in glory to judge the living and the dead.

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That is an absolute future statement that is going to happen because Christ has said so, he knows the future.

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So we've got some interesting problems here. I do find it fascinating that the approach that they use, going to the book of Jonah, is that I can immediately see that the

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NAR would have a...there would be a temptation for them to go with open theism because of what it does with prophecy.

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We can talk about this with the peaches. But my next question is, how does the open theist view the

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Scripture, then? Is there a difference between their view of the authority of Scripture and its inerrancy and inspiration, as opposed to the historic position held by confessional

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Lutherans and confessional Calvinists? Right. Well, this was a big problem at the

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Evangelical Theological Society, where Clark Pinnock and John Sanders were brought up on charges of denying inerrancy, and of course inerrancy is part of the doctrinal affirmation of ETS.

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And they escaped being voted out by a very narrow margin, but it was very clear that their writings did indicate that indeed they denied inerrancy.

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Because they would look at prophecies and they would say things like, and of course that didn't take place. Well, you know, it's just, you can't have an inerrant

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Bible where God is declaring something that will take place with certainty, and they claim he doesn't take place.

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Well, then God doesn't know what he's saying. You know, so... Yeah, and my immediate question would be, how do they view how

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Scripture, you know, interprets Scripture? Because I can think of at least one other place, and it's in the prophet

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Jeremiah, where God specifically says that if he calls somebody to repentance and he's declared disaster for them and they repent, that he will relent of that disaster.

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God has made that very clear, and that's the operative principle in the book of Jonah. And that, in fact,

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Jonah knew that God was going to forgive them if they repented, which is the whole reason why he headed off in the opposite direction and needed a big fish to motivate him.

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So, you know, Jonah was not keen on the mercy of God. No, he was not.

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I like to point out that if it is the fact that God learned when they repented that that's what they did, and then

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God changed his mind literally and chose not to bring the judgment upon them, then Jonah had more insight into what was going on than God did.

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Yes, that's correct. This is exactly why he didn't want to go in the first place. Oh no! I mean, you would think he would love the fact that God is sending him to pronounce judgment against the

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Ninevites. I mean, this is a great day, you know, for Jonah, but no, he didn't want to go because he knew that's not what this was about from the very beginning.

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Yep, yep, and that's why in the last chapter he screams out,

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I knew this was going to happen, and he has a prophetic temper tantrum.

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And I would note that what it seems to me that the open theists are doing is they're trying to smuggle in a kind of a sneaky philosophical argument, kind of like a logical conundrum, and trying to put it on to the

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Scriptures, and then they're isogeeting to try to find passages that kind of go with that hypothesis.

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Yeah, and you know what one of the most powerful chapters in the

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Bible that argue against the openist view is Isaiah 41 to 49, in which repeatedly the argument is

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God saying to these pretender deities, these idols, if you are truly

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God's, tell us what's going to take place in the future, so that when it happens we can see that you were right about that.

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But you cannot declare the future, therefore you are not God. I declare the future, and that establishes one of the bases for his claim of deity.

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So over and over again God establishes his own exclusive deity on the basis, in part, that he declares what's going to take place, and when it does take place you know only

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God could do that. Right, and isn't that the whole point of the Christological title of Alpha and Omega?

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Isn't that really the whole point of that particular concept? He's the beginning and the end, the first and the last, and so and then it wasn't

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Christ crucified from the foundations of the earth?

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I mean, if he was crucified from the foundations of the earth, then Adam and Eve's rebellion didn't catch him off guard.

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And we were chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world. Yeah. There's just, there are so many things, you realize, when you look at the

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Bible's teaching, that the openist view just cannot account for. Yeah. And this is why it really has failed, you know, to get ahead of steam except for in movements that are not as careful with the

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Bible as perhaps, you know, you see in the NAR and the like. Right, like I said,

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I can see the temptation, you know, and then if people were looking for other passages that kind of nail this down,

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I would, two more come to mind. I think of the opening chapter of the Prophet Jeremiah where God says, before you were born

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I knew you, and that he had appointed him to be a prophet to the nations.

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And then Ephesians 2 .10 says that we are Christ, we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus, you know, for good works which he has prepared in advance that we should walk in them.

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So, you know, if God has prepared our good works and consecrated Jeremiah before he was ever born and knew him prior to his conception,

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I'm pretty sure God knows what's happening tomorrow, what I'm gonna have for breakfast. I don't even know what

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I'm gonna have for breakfast tomorrow, but God does, you know. So I don't have to worry about some philosophical game that, well, since God knows what

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I'm having for breakfast, do I really have a free choice? That's a philosophical shell and pea game, you know, that they're engaging in.

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Let me give you one more passage, Chris, and then I know I want to turn it over to Evan and Vivian, but in John 13, excuse me, in John 13 at verse 19, this is just like the

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God of Isaiah spoke, but now this is Jesus. He said, from now on I am telling you before it comes to pass, so that when it does occur, you may believe that ego a me.

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I am. The I am of Exodus 3 .14. And then later in the chapter, he prophesies,

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Jesus prophesies Peter's three denials. So here in that context,

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I'm telling you things before they take place so you'll know that I am God, and then Jesus declares

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Peter's gonna deny him three times. And the three times is a real problem for open theism, because the best they could say is, well,

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God knew that Peter would have a disposition that he might likely deny him, you know, given the right circumstances, but three times?

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Why not just once? And then, you know, go and hang himself like Judas did, or something like that, you know.

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But they just cannot account for the specificity of the prophecy and fulfill exactly as Jesus said it.

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Yeah, yeah, and that's exactly right. God does know the end from the beginning, and he absolutely has prophesied the future.

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I think all the way back to the Garden of Eden, that the seed of the woman would crush the head of the serpent, that's a clear prophecy regarding the virgin birth of Christ, you know, and God knew all of that all the way back then, you know.

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And then of course, Isaiah 7, he prophesied that the virgin would conceive and bear a son and call his name Immanuel.

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Yeah, I'm pretty sure, and then that Jesus, not a single one of Jesus's bones would be broken while he's being crucified, and that he would be crucified, betrayed for 30 pieces of silver.

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I mean, all those details are in the Old Testament. Yes, right, yeah, and they involve future free choices and actions of human beings.

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I mean, it's soldiers who chose to break the legs of the other two on opposite sides of Christ, but not break the legs of Christ.

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Those were people who made that decision, right? So, God prophesied what free creatures would do, and that is not a contradiction, as the openness people would claim.

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Now, what role, then, does free will play in their theology? Because, you know, free will is a hot -button topic, and as a confessional

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Lutheran, I believe that when it comes to the things of God, that our wills are bound unless we are saved by Christ, unless we're regenerated.

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But when it comes to my relationships with human beings, I can make a conscious decision to feed somebody a great meal or to poison them.

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That's always a choice that I have, but when it comes to the things of God, that because I'm born dead in trespasses and sins,

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I have a bound will towards God until God frees me and regenerates me. What is their view, then, of free will in their system?

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Well, they hold to what is called libertarian freedom, and this is really the view of freedom that's held in process theology, in classic

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Arminianism, as well as open -ism. It's a very widely held view.

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It's kind of the common -sense notion that most people have, to be honest with you, and that is we're free at the moment of choice if, at the moment we choose, one thing we had the power to choose otherwise.

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So if we choose A, we could have chosen B. This notion of libertarian freedom, then, indicates that if God knows that we're going to choose

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A, then we have to choose A, because God's knowledge cannot be wrong. And so, in order to salvage and maintain libertarian freedom, they argue

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God can't know that, then. He cannot know that you're going to choose A instead of B, or B instead of A, until you make that choice.

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But their commitment to libertarian freedom is really a significant part of why they have developed this view.

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Right. And I would note, then, that their view doesn't take into consideration that there can be other explanations, you know, that they are just not aware of.

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I mean, God lives and exists in eternity. We live in time and space. And so, that being the case, you know,

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I think it's hard for human beings who are bound by time and space to understand how the knowledge of God transcends all of that, and he can see the end from the beginning, and see all the decisions that we make, and know exactly how things are going to go down, and that this would not, then, violate some philosophical rule that a human being created.

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Right, yep, very good point. Okay, so Evan and Vivian, you guys spent some time in the

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NAR, and Evan, you specifically noted it was a significant amount of time, and like anybody who's come out of a bad theological system,

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I had to do the same thing, by the way, when I came out of the Latter Rain. And that is, you tried to figure out, how did you guys get deceived?

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What was that that you guys were believing, and where did it come from? And you said that very early on, you came to the conclusion that you were exposed to, while you were in the

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NAR, you were exposed to open theism, and I can see the seduction of open theism, because of how it necessarily makes it possible for God to give prophecies, and for them to not come to pass.

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That seems to be a very convenient theological system for them, because I've noticed that NAR prophets aren't even as accurate as an old analog clock.

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An old analog clock is correct twice a day. These guys aren't even that accurate.

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So, you know, that being the case, tell us a little bit about how you exactly came to find that open theism was in your

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NAR theology, and then we'll tell a little bit more of the story as we go, but start us off with at least that.

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Absolutely, and it's a story that's certainly worthwhile getting some coffee over, it's actually quite funny, and Dr.

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Moyer had a lot to do with it, and some pithy statements that continue to laugh about to this day, and I quote, that is one way to choose a church, that he told us early on.

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But Vivian grew up in the Four Square Movement, and I grew up part of the

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Trinity Fellowship, Jimmy Evans, Robert Morris, Connecticut Church. So we, starting in around 2016 or so, we were volunteer leaders in a pre -marriage ministry at one of these churches, and we wanted to find an opportunity for us to start writing books, because that's what you do in the charismatic movement, such as NAR, that's how you get notoriety.

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So yeah, we were going down that path. Tour the circuit. Yeah, absolutely, and we were just asking around, where do we go to seminary?

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In fact, we even asked Robert Morris, where do we go to seminary? Part of that movement, our eyes were opened up when we talked to one of our pastors,

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Stephen LeBlanc, who was a former pastor as well at a Trinity Fellowship Church in Gateway, and he also came out of that movement.

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And when we reached out to him, to where can you give us some information about where you went to school so we can follow your footsteps, he said,

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I'm gonna stop you right there. I don't hold to this theology, and that was the moment that you realize there's something theologically different than what we believe, than other options out there.

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That's the only movement that we really were ever exposed to, was the ethos of the prosperity gospel and AR movements.

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And to fast forward just a little bit, we ended up going to Southern and got in touch with Dr.

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Ware, and I don't think it was about the first or second even evening that the doctrine of God is a primary focus of systematic theology the first semester for most seminary students.

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And I realized that I was actually an open theist without knowing it, because in AR, one of the things that is a distinctive, they will minimize talking any type of theological term.

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And so we adopted this system really without understanding it, and when we were able to actually start putting names to it and realize, wait a minute, this is actually the view that we hold that there's alternate paths to the future, in that that future is dependent on my prayers, is dependent on what

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I believed, it was dependent on so many things, like even my own salvation. I grew up probably every church camp all through middle school and high school, rededicating my life, if you will, in that movement, because I always had this notion that I am not saved.

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And it wasn't until my eyes were truly opened and I actually saw that I was indebted to pastors and my son, that Christ actually, the gospel made sense.

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And in anything... Yeah, I think when we were those volunteer leaders, there were two standout moments, one of which was an activation session.

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I activate a credit card when it comes in. I don't think activations existed until credit cards existed, you know.

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But it's one of those where recognizing that God has given us a name and that name combats the names that Satan has given us.

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And it is our responsibility to throw away the names Satan has given us and to adopt the name

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God has given us so that we then truly live in our...

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I think that's the spiritual warfare and that's where it all comes. So that was a huge moment.

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Another one was when we were asking what the gospel was, we were learning what the true gospel was.

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We just simply asked the question, why are we sharing about activations and not talking about Jesus?

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And we were told that we don't have time. We're giving them practical solutions. We don't have time to talk about Jesus?

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Yeah. So you don't hear that. You hear the Holy Spirit in all of... it's the

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Spirit and He comes and you invite. If you don't invite, He can't come. Yeah, right, right.

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And so all these things were just... I didn't understand open theism in the beginning, other than when

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Evan was explaining it to me and I'm reading, it's open. That's all I needed to know was, it's open.

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I've been taught that. That's what I believe. Wow. Okay. Now, I have to interject at this point because when

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I asked you about the NAR, you brought up Jimmy Evans and Robert Morris. And now,

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I don't flinch at that, but there's a lot of people that are going to be watching this interview and going, wait a second, did you just accuse

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Robert Morris and Jimmy Evans of being in the New Apostolic Reformation? I think there's no accusatory remarks to go on that.

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That is something that they hold to. That's just a fact. Yeah. Exactly. It's a fact.

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And we can certainly talk about the distinctives of that, but any church that has some type of apostolic covering, regardless of what kind of moniker they actually put on that terminology, but anything that Apostle so -and -so is going to be at some instant recognition of something to do with the

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New Apostolic Reformation. Yeah. And I would encourage people, just do a little bit of Google searching for Robert Morris and apostolic leadership, and you should find the relevant pages pretty quickly that demonstrate that the leadership structure there at Gateway Church is based upon an apostolic concept and that there are legitimate, well, they're not legitimate, there are people who legitimately claim to be apostles there, but that's a whole other topic.

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Okay, so you recognized that what you were experiencing in the

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NAR was openness. Now, how then is this different than like, you know, kind of classic

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Arminianism, you know, where they basically say that a human being still has to make a free will decision for Christ, but that God himself will give prevenient grace in order to kind of cancel out the effects of original sin so that somebody can make that decision.

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How is the openness that you ran into different than just standard kind of Arminian, you know, free will, you know, decision theology?

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That's a good question, Chris. In fact, a lot of what you just described, more of the classic theology, that is really geared towards soteriology or really the salvation of individuals.

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I think one thing that's unique about the New Apostolic Reformation, you almost have to take that notion of free will as it's related to salvation, separate them.

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In fact, one of the things that we ended up having to do, and Dr. Ware was certainly helpful for us in coming up with this idea, that we had to come up with new theological terms to actually describe what it is that we're talking about, because many of the theological terms, such as Arminianism, certainly there's theological spectrums, very orthodox believing

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Christian on all sides of the aisle, and that spectrum is actually not even really what we're talking about here.

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And that was one of the things that was really difficult for us when we were coming out of it, because we saw that there's so many aspects of open theism that when you lay it down on the framework of the

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New Apostolic Reformation, it absolutely made sense, but yet the terminology of most seminarians, most historical theological words didn't match.

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Yeah. And I think breakthroughs, but that's really it.

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It's partnering with God. I hate that word. I hate that word. Yeah. It's the presence.

35:17

It's power evangelism. So the power that the Holy Spirit gives us, and this partnering with God is a large tenant of the

35:27

New Apostolic Reformation. And that's just it. I think, so when we, if we want to talk a little bit about kind of the overall framework of like how this fits into the

35:36

New Apostolic Reformation, why it's so different from classic Christianity, when we were coming out of it, out of that movement, we kept asking, why is this not

35:46

Christian? They're using Christian terms. They're talking about prayer. They're talking about Christ. They sometimes talk about the gospel.

35:53

But yet when we were part of that, we were like, there's something that's just not connecting.

35:59

Something is different. It's almost like the terms were redefined. That's exactly really what we found.

36:07

And so part of our research, and this is before we went into doctoral studies, just on our own, just looking at like many do coming out of a movement, like where, who mentored who, is this pastor good?

36:21

Is that pastor good? Is this church good? And we just started trying to somewhat group these theologies together.

36:27

And then a pattern started to form. And again, we were ignorant of a lot of the

36:33

Christian history, certainly within the 20th century, certainly within the own movement itself.

36:40

But all we knew is just these, often what they call the generals or the faith in the

36:46

New Apostolic Reformation movement, those are the people that we knew. And when we back up and actually look at the system of the

36:59

New Apostolic Reformation, I think this was one of the things that was really helpful for us, and I think when our research, we somewhat, when we were able to identify this theological framework, the entire

37:11

New Apostolic Reformation movement made sense to us in a way that we can actually help those coming out of it.

37:18

And like, let's not focus on the church, let's not focus on the individual people. Let's help you understand this movement that you're a part of theologically so that we can help reorient you.

37:28

So it goes like this. So C. Peter Wagner, many know this gentleman is,

37:36

I wouldn't call him the father of the New Apostolic Reformation movement. We can call him someone who put a term to the movement, and he called it the sequence, and when he calls it the sequence, he's looking at the historical development of the

37:53

NAR over the course of the 20th century. So many hear a terminology called the first wave, second wave, and third wave, while that is the historical development from his perspective of the

38:06

New Apostolic Age, which he said started around, there's some discrepancy in his point of view to the 1998 to 2001.

38:15

I argue it's 2001, that's the year that he introduced open theism in a public way. But when we look at the first wave, we're looking at early

38:22

Pentecostalism, the Azusa Street Revival, many have already talked about the roots of the

38:30

Pentecostal movement. So C. Peter Wagner called that that is when God started this

38:35

Holy Spirit movement on the earth. Fast forwarding to the second wave, the in the 50s or 60s, if you will, the charismatic renewal revival, if you will, kind of ecumenical movement.

38:49

Fast forward to the 80s with the bringing back the prophets in his perspective.

38:55

So the I'm sorry, the second wave was kind of bringing back the intercessors. The third wave is bringing the prophets.

39:01

And then at that point in the 90s, that was the actual NAR. But what's interesting about that, he was actually laying out this entire theological system, even though he was doing it in the span of kind of a progressive development at NAR, but that is the entire theological system.

39:19

And it goes like this. Because God chose to limit his sovereignty and specifically

39:26

C. Peter Wagner, he takes the view of open theism in the sense that God has chosen to limit himself.

39:33

There's some who say that God cannot know the future. C. Peter Wagner didn't make too much of a distinction of that.

39:39

He was more along the camp of God just chooses not to know. Either way, God's understanding and foreknowledge of the future is just not there.

39:48

So because God does not know the future, when Adam and Eve fell into sin.

39:55

Then that that whole aspect was unknown to God, so he didn't see the fall.

40:03

And so at that point, Christ became a contingency plan. And the dominion that was that was bestowed to Adam and Eve to take dominion of creation was then given to Satan.

40:16

So then Satan was and you'll hear it a lot in the New Apostolic movement that he's the

40:23

God of this age, and that is absolutely biblical language, but that is very different than what

40:28

Orthodox Christianity would believe. And so in the God of this age, essentially, that this is

40:34

Satan's dominion. And at that point, God cannot intervene in creation because it is now that dominion and authority has been given to Satan.

40:45

I can hear Ken Copeland saying that, too. Exactly. And this really is the foundation. It's not just the

40:51

N .A .R., but it's the same theological back end of the prosperity movement as well. OK, which is rooted in, you know, kind of the mind science cults.

41:00

So it really is. So now now we start looking at the idea of spiritual warfare because you have a dualistic cosmos, whereas God is in heaven and here on Earth you have

41:16

Satan. Do you want to? Yeah, the the dualism really surprised me and recognize.

41:25

So oftentimes I hear, well, Satan is implanting. Satan is giving me thoughts.

41:31

Satan knows. And so it really is giving Satan the sovereignty that belongs with God alone.

41:38

And if if God has limited his knowledge, Satan hasn't.

41:45

Satan has the as the God of this world has whatever all knowledge that we have given him, which now real quick, when we talk about dualism, one of the big dangers of it is you lose the sovereignty of God in the midst of dualism and you exalt

42:02

Satan to the same level. And it's basically a duel between equals.

42:09

And and that that to me just is bizarre. So so this is clearly part of what's going on in the

42:16

NAR is that their open theism has led to a duality that makes Satan a heck of a lot stronger than he really is.

42:25

Yes. Yeah. And with that dominion and sovereignty that Satan has, this is why you need those intercessors.

42:35

And this is why you have strategic levels, spiritual warfare and why you have so many of these other power ministries, because the the spirit of the kingdom of light is needed to push through whatever is out in this cosmos that Satan has.

42:55

And only when intercessors pray and bring about that can prophets then hear from God.

43:03

So when we hear breakthrough and we hear that people are getting healed or they're getting this or that because they had a breakthrough, this is what is really meant.

43:13

So since we if we get a visceral picture of it. Duality, right,

43:19

Satan and God in a world that's almost filled with fog in that when the intercessors pray, they're praying away this evil

43:29

Satan's dominion into a breakthrough, like you said, to where now the potentiality that God can do something is now possible because we prayed away this kind of evil dominion of Satan.

43:46

So when we hear things such as the atmosphere of God, have your presence come into this place or we want to feel you build this room or even inviting him because he cannot until we do.

44:02

Wow. Okay, we got a comment on this.

44:08

So Dr. Ware, they come to you and they're kind of pitching this idea that they've been exposed to open theism.

44:13

But it's very clear from what I'm hearing and also having read their dissertations that this is open theism that is now applied.

44:24

This is applied open theism, not just some kind of speculative open theism. Oh, we just lost the

44:30

Wares. Oh, hey, it's the Peaches. Nice of you guys to come back.

44:39

We're going to start all over again now, you know. No, no, we're not. Just don't listen to Ware. This is what we call

44:45

Satan thwarting the efforts of God. So we need to really work.

44:51

And I don't mean this to make fun of the theology, but this is what I remember praying because I would feel burdened by whatever spirit was around that Satan was attacking me.

45:05

And the anxiety of that, it was a lot. All right, so let me make the point that I was making and where we left off.

45:15

And I'm going to pitch something to Dr. Ware because, you know, so the point that I see in all of this is that where Pinnock and Boyd are kind of like hypothetical open theists, they're talking about it in the abstract.

45:29

What the NAR has done is taken open theism and they've created an applied version of this theology.

45:35

This is applied open theism. And so when you heard about this for the first time from the

45:40

Peaches and they've got a linguistic issue because they've got terminology that isn't classic to open theism because this is an applied theology.

45:51

What was your initial thoughts on their hypothesis? Well, I mean,

45:58

I was surprised that it had that application because I just didn't know about that, but it made perfect sense because here was a movement that really did rely upon a diminished

46:08

God and an exalted Satan. So you have this kind of reducing and elevating going on in ways that are exactly wrong.

46:23

You know, I mean, you think of the creator -creature distinction and God is God. Goodness gracious.

46:29

I mean, you know, he is the omnipotent. He holds Satan's life in his hands moment by moment.

46:36

Could snuff him out like that. There is no competition between Satan and God, but nonetheless, they have diminished

46:42

God and open theism kind of allows for that because God has decided that he's going to limit himself, right, in not knowing these things that are going to take place in the future and learning and trying to respond in ways that are needed when he finds out what we do and that sort of thing.

47:00

Well, you diminish God in those kinds of ways and you elevate Satan and then you end up with this kind of dualism that they've been talking about.

47:09

And you even see this in the writings of Greg Boyd who went from his kind of open theism defenses then on to, you know,

47:20

God at war and these ideas of this cosmic warfare that's going on between God and Satan.

47:26

So it's there as well. Yeah. So if I can like come up with like a mental picture of what

47:33

I'm hearing the peaches describe is it's almost as if you have two equally matched football teams on the iron grid and the prayers and the intercessors are helping to give

47:46

God the home field advantage so that a breakthrough would end up being like a touchdown or a field goal or something like that to help

47:53

God score. Is that a fair way of looking at what it is that you're describing?

48:00

Yeah. Well, at least from the openest view, I think they would want to say all of this is because of God's self -condescension, right?

48:09

He could have been the God of Reformed theology, you know, who determined everything that comes to pass, but he didn't want that kind of a world.

48:18

So they would want this caveat to say this was by God's free choice. But nonetheless, once he's made that free choice, you've got this limited

48:26

God that depends upon our prayers and our actions and those kinds of things in order to get done what needs to be done to fulfill his purposes.

48:37

Is it any wonder that canonicism seems to be the going Christology in this movement, the canonic view that Christ lays aside his deity and then does everything he does as a fully submitted and obedient man under the power of the

48:53

Holy Spirit? And that's one of the things that I would say surprised me, but it didn't surprise me.

49:01

So in my dissertation, what I was actually looking at is if C. Peter Wagner was an open theist, professed open theist at the end of his life, well, what does that mean for the entire church group?

49:12

I mean, what does that mean for the mission movement of 70s, 80s, and 90s and onward back? Well, in 1956,

49:19

Wagner himself wrote in some defense of the kenosis and that God designed the condescension of Christ into creation, but did so in a way that suspended all use of any deity.

49:44

And in that— They try to, on the one hand, affirm the hypostatic union, but at the same time, denying its implications.

49:53

And then you got clear passages, like in the Gospel of John that said, this is the first sign that Jesus performed to demonstrate his glory.

50:02

And then how do you— So they've got some big problems because this is an absolutely diminished deity, but they're hijacking

50:12

Christian lingo and semantics and then pouring different meaning into it, which the late

50:18

Walter Martin, who had a profound impact on my early formative years as a Christian apologist, he would say is kind of like hallmark number one of how the cults work.

50:30

Mormonism believes in Jesus, Mormonism believes in God the Father, the problem is that those words don't mean anything, even remotely biblical.

50:38

So— We had to completely deconstruct from all terminology. Yeah. All right, so you gave us phase one, what's phase two in all of this?

50:49

So again, phase one, you have the fog, and God cannot implement his will on earth.

50:55

Phase two, now when the intercessors prayed away that hole on earth, right, have a breakthrough of heaven, open the doors of heaven.

51:03

So now it comes down to the prophets. Now the prophets specifically in the

51:09

NAR are gifted individuals who have the ability to hear what it is that God is saying to people.

51:17

I'm assuming you're saying that from their point of view, because I don't think they're gifted in anything except for nonsense, but yeah.

51:24

Of course. But yeah, so now you have the role of the intercessor, and now you have the role of the prophet who now has got to say,

51:35

I have this desire, my volitional will that I need to have happen on the earth.

51:41

I can't do it until the intercessors prayed away that darkness. And now the, essentially like an outfielder in baseball with the catching the fly ball that's coming their way, they now have to catch that, but they don't know what to do with it.

51:56

So the interpretation then is now for the apostles. Oh wow.

52:01

And so the apostle, now we get into this. So for prophets, I think what we see a lot in the

52:07

NAR is prophets who have a, and I'm getting like the name

52:13

Linda, and it's like a white house. And so these thoughts, ideas, words strung together make no sense.

52:26

Because they're not the interpreters of that. Right. And that's also the best that a diminished

52:32

God can give. I think about the fact that I have

52:38

Vincent, this character I created years ago, and Vincent, I used him because every time

52:45

I would hear these NAR folks talk, and they would talk about the Holy Spirit as if he was completely and utterly powerless.

52:52

And so I created an actual character, a voice character, and I call him Vincent, and he talks like this,

52:58

Hi, this is the Holy Spirit. And I'm reaching out to you because I really don't know how to use email and stuff.

53:07

And so could you fire up your video and make a YouTube thingy to get a word out because I'm really struggling here.

53:14

This is really difficult for me. And I had no idea that I was dealing with,

53:21

I got the diminished deity bit, but I didn't see it as part of an actual system in their theology, where of course the

53:30

Holy Spirit has to be this utterly powerless and completely incapable and incompetent.

53:36

What's the phrase Jack Hayford uses? God won't because we...

53:42

God can't because we won't. Yes, God can't because we won't.

53:47

And I think that's the cornerstone of all of it, is God's hands are tied. He tied his hands behind his back, and he's now in an arm wrestling match with Satan.

53:59

And with no arms. Right. And he cannot because no, we won't.

54:07

If we don't, God won't. So much for the God who can choose from these stones to raise up children of Abraham, you know?

54:16

I don't know. And that's, I think, the moment the open theism light bulb went off.

54:24

Wait a minute. Why am I looking for these apostles who they're the ones who can listen to God?

54:30

And I always have this desire, like, why is everyone else getting these words of knowledge from the

54:37

Lord? And why am I sitting over here like a radio that's turned off? It never came my way.

54:43

So then this idea now probably fast forward into the idea of the apostles and the deception.

54:50

Now, this is where I think the cult comes in. We're now looking to the apostles who actually implement

54:56

God's will on the earth, right? So I guess just to finish that string of thought there, so the whole sequence, that is how

55:03

God implements his will on earth, but he does it dependent upon those intercessors, prophets, and apostles.

55:10

But that's not all. So that's how he gets his will, his desires to the earth.

55:15

But we have to remember, going back to Adam and Eve, what was given to Satan was dominion.

55:23

Well, the idea that God is needing to create disciples, and this is where our research on C.

55:30

Peter Wagner, the whole church group movement, this modern idea, let's get churches as big as we can.

55:37

Let's bring in people. Let's go make disciples, which sounds absolutely biblical. And in some sense, the question is, why are we making disciples?

55:46

And this has everything to do with open theism in the NAR. So because God can't get his will on the earth, he needs more and more intercessors to pray away the darkness and to have more and more apostles actually creating, taking back that physical dominion until now we get into the seven mountain mandate.

56:05

So now God cannot come back. Christ can't come back and reign until Christians have taken back that dominion on creation.

56:16

So Christ is up there, unfortunately, twiddling his thumbs until we get more and more disciples to have more of an impact on God's will on the earth.

56:25

And I think something that was really interesting was looking at what is a disciple.

56:32

So Dr. Wary mentioned earlier that a disciple is one who was chosen in Christ.

56:40

So we sit at the feet of the master and we learn. A disciple is one who learns. And if we are a disciple,

56:50

Wagner said a disciple is a good church member who grows the church.

56:56

It's one who chooses to work for God to bring the kingdom back.

57:04

So it's dominionism. It's a disciple of dominionism, not a disciple chosen in Christ who is building

57:12

God's kingdom by teaching and following all that the Lord commanded.

57:19

And this is a good test. If churches use the spiritual giftings test and to determine where people's giftings are in the church, whether they can be prophets, apostles, intercessors, that is a litmus test.

57:34

Regardless if church leadership has apostle in the name, it's the whole theological system behind that idea that the spiritual gift is all dependent on that.

57:46

Yeah. And one of you had asked the question earlier in the interview, considering the great impact that C.

57:54

Peter Wagner, because he was at Fuller and he was part of their church growth school, he was the doctoral advisor for Rick Warren's dissertation, is what impact then does this open theism have on other movements like the purpose -driven church movement or things like this?

58:15

And I would note that once you see what this is, this diminished deity who needs us to be able to do things, that all of a sudden you can see elements of it in how the leadership is set up in purpose -driven churches.

58:32

So Rick Warren in his purpose -driven church book, he basically makes a strong appeal for the abandoning of the historic understanding of the role of a pastor and the replacing of the pastor with what would become known as a vision -casting leader.

58:48

And this actually has more to do with Rousseau's views on how government is supposed to work than on how the

58:55

Bible works. But at the end of the day, these vision -casting leaders, these pastors in the mega churches, they're functioning as apostles.

59:06

And then the job of the leadership team is to then make the vision that this vision -casting leader has received from God, to make it reality.

59:17

Everything is geared towards action and discipleship in the truest sense of actually studying the scriptures and learning and doing all that Christ has commanded.

59:27

That falls by the wayside to other activities related to growing the church. Yeah, Chris, you're exactly right, and that's one of the interesting aspects of Rick Warren, and I didn't spend a lot of time looking into that outside my current scope, but Wagner had extensive praise for Warren.

59:53

In fact, he charged Warren to actually implement his theological system into North America, and every generation of Wagner's leadership, kind of depending on where someone was mentored with Wagner, be it the 70s, 80s, 90s, or post -NAR, they're going to take different aspects of C.

01:00:19

Peter Wagner. So now when we do look back at the church growth movement of the 80s and Rick Warren, Wagner is unapologetic saying, even back then what

01:00:28

I was doing was based on an open theistic paradigm. At the time, that system didn't exist, so he didn't have any kind of theological framework, but yet he was a functional open theist all along.

01:00:42

And so then you really do have to take a look at the missionaries and the ethos of this church growth all through the 80s and 90s, and even we see today, is it open theism?

01:00:57

And one could argue that there's some absolute aspects that are open theistic, and that's one of the things we've seen a lot of pastors in Christian Delight who are adopting functional open theism without realizing the system that they're getting into.

01:01:13

Yeah, it's a functional open theism, but it may not be a tacit, they may have made a free will decision to be open theists.

01:01:21

How's that for irony? Wagner actually laid out,

01:01:28

I think it was 14 or 17 things within the church that need to change. Worship needs to change.

01:01:34

We're not going to have theologians, we're going to have apostles. We're not going to have pastors, we're going to have vision casters.

01:01:41

And it was, we're going to diminish God and we're going to build up the

01:01:46

Holy Spirit. So all of these things were hallmarks of a path, and specifically with Warren, Wagner charged him with doing the seeker -sensitive movement.

01:02:00

And in that seeker -sensitive, we don't see people are dead in sin. We see this libertarian freedom, but it's a free for all.

01:02:11

And it's actually going out into society and asking if you, even though you're not a church member, even though you claim you're not a

01:02:20

Christian, what would entice you to come to church? And then that's what we're going to do.

01:02:26

And so it was Saddleback Sam was created in order to get people in. So oftentimes we hear that modern churches are pragmatic.

01:02:36

Well, again, that has everything to do with C. Peter Wagner, but we have to ask what kind of pragmatism that we're doing and why we're doing it.

01:02:43

So this is a great example that we have to come up with a new theological term, what we're calling commissional pragmatic consequentialism.

01:02:51

So if we think about what that would mean. That just rolls off the tongue, by the way. When we can remember.

01:02:57

Yeah, when I can remember. But it's an idea that the end justifies the mean.

01:03:04

Yeah. But that's not a philosophical sense in that the end justifies the means and whatever.

01:03:11

They're saying that it's a righteous end. The righteous end is that we want to implement God's will on earth.

01:03:17

We are to make disciples. So they're always tying back to the commission, which sounds absolutely biblical, but they're saying it doesn't matter what we do, the end goal is for us to make disciples.

01:03:32

And so now when you look at... In order to tip the balance in God's favor, not because we're supposed to make disciples the way

01:03:40

Jesus said, but because then we'll give God a strategic home field advantage so that Jesus can finally come back.

01:03:49

You'll often see it's not necessarily salvation. It is about making disciples, but what is left out of the

01:04:02

Great Commission is teaching. So you see baptizing, but you don't see teaching, and it's intentionally left out because we're teaching.

01:04:13

Wagner would say that when we're teaching the Church, what we're doing is we're teaching them how to make more disciples.

01:04:21

Yeah. I do find it within the ethos of those types of churches that they legitimately think that biblical teaching in an in -depth manner, verse by verse, expositional type preaching, is an impediment to making disciples.

01:04:41

They legitimately think it is something that creates a barrier so that it just slows the whole process down and keeps us from efficiently being able to make more disciples.

01:04:57

Which subverts any notion that we are to read our own Bible, that we are to test anything that comes from a pastor or a teacher and truly see if that is of God.

01:05:11

And that subversion is exactly what we noted, and even our family. The most common phrase is,

01:05:18

I just didn't read my Bible. Yeah. Once I did, my eyes were opened.

01:05:25

But I think to your point, Chris, that is the hallmark of cults, right? So we're dependent now on the apostles and prophets and the whole sequence to tell us what it is that God desires for us.

01:05:39

But one of the things that we realize, and Dr. Ware has everything to do with helping us reconstruct after our deconstruction in a righteous way, that we had no language skills in the sense that we had no idea of the theological history in Church history, that the terms, we had no theological concept, which we can start hanging our hat on, like, oh, sovereignty, well, what does that mean?

01:06:06

We were without language. So when we were without theological language, we had no ability to really read for ourselves.

01:06:14

We weren't taught, like, what are the guardrails? There's a reason that when you look through the passage of time that Christianity shouldn't have changed.

01:06:25

And so there's a reason we have 2 ,000 years and more of saints helping us really understand the

01:06:32

Word and interpret the Word, and we took all that for granted. And the

01:06:37

NAR teachers are very explicit about trying to call that old wineskin, and with the new wineskin, there's new revelation for today.

01:06:48

We were theologically very naive. So one of the things I see as a common feature, in fact, as I've been preparing new episodes of Fighting for the

01:06:58

Faith and doing my pre -production work, I keep running into this, is the constant, kind of reiterating this idea that God's about to launch a billion souls harvest.

01:07:11

There's going to be a billion new Christians coming in. And I even heard the guy who put the

01:07:17

Passion Translation together, he claims that 20 % of the current pagan population of California is going to be converted to Jesus during the billion souls harvest.

01:07:29

Is that really, when you consider where that would fit into the framework of this assumed open theism, that's basically a major breakthrough so that God can really kind of definitively tip things in His favor.

01:07:49

So there's an eschatological, almost post -millennialism that is a necessary component of this applied open theism.

01:07:57

Can you talk about that a little bit? Dr. Ware, is that normal that kind of a victorious post -millennialism would be wrapped up in an open theistic system?

01:08:11

No, it really is not, because again, in an open framework, God doesn't know.

01:08:18

He has desires and hopes, but He has to wait and see what we do.

01:08:25

So I guess that the NIR application of this adds the dimension of the things that we do that make it possible for God to do more.

01:08:36

And so isn't God lucky? We're here, you know, and we're doing the things that will need to be done.

01:08:44

You know, poor God if it weren't for us. So I think that's the, you know, as you mentioned before, the applied theology, the application of open theism here is this notion of the things that we do that make it possible for God to do more.

01:09:02

And I think that's when you'll see it happening. But it's really not part of the openness view that I studied, that I had read from Pinnock and his companions.

01:09:14

Yeah, and I can't recall Greg Boyd being a post -millennial, but I can't say

01:09:21

I've extensively read his work. But I got a version of this when

01:09:28

I was in the latter reign, so I was kind of caught up in third wave back at the end of the 80s when prophets were restored to the church.

01:09:37

Prophets, yeah, they weren't really prophets. But, you know, over and again, the eschatology that I was pitched and taught was this idea that the bride has to make herself clean, the bride has to make herself ready, the bride has to conquer so that the bride groom can finally come.

01:09:55

And they would say that the reason why it's taken this long for Jesus to come back is because the bride hasn't gotten her act together.

01:10:03

And so, that same concept is kind of clunking around in the seven mountain mandate.

01:10:10

And so, I think it's fascinating that the God who is so diminished that He doesn't know the future is reduced to strategies to ultimately have to be implemented by human beings, which would then ultimately make it possible for Him to have the final victory.

01:10:30

But wouldn't it be our victory instead of His? Yeah, good point, good point. Yeah, who gets the glory in this?

01:10:37

Yeah. You're definitely right, Chris, and that's when you look at, in parallel with this, a lot of folks ask, well, how did this fit in with the healings of the folks of Todd White and that type of idea, and how did that fit into Joel's army?

01:10:55

And this had everything to do with it. To your point, the NAR specifically has a very over -realized understanding of what the end times are, and it's all going back to that dominion.

01:11:07

So, in Genesis, when God gave dominion to Adam and Eve, that is

01:11:13

God's ultimate end goal is to go back to Eden and bring back the dominion on earth.

01:11:19

That was His original design. So, He's trying to get back to His original creation. And Wagner had the victorious eschatology, and it very much is that,

01:11:33

I mean, his 2008 book Dominion just lays out dominionism in one of the clearest ways

01:11:41

I think I've ever read, and it makes total sense. I remember reading

01:11:47

Dutch sheets, and I remember just thinking about, well, if Adam doesn't have it,

01:11:56

I need to take it. How do I take it? How am I victorious? I have to pray.

01:12:02

What happens if I don't? And so all of these questions come with it, and you start to question

01:12:08

God, and you really start to question, is God good? And if Satan is bad, and God is good, but God can't implement unless I do something, how good is

01:12:20

He? And so many questions just really start swirling around, and it just unravels anything that has any semblance of orthodoxy.

01:12:31

But the system makes sense. When you look at it, just these

01:12:38

Christian words, it makes sense. It's more akin to Mormonism or any other religion than it is has any semblance of Christianity.

01:12:45

You are not wrong there. You are more right than you can imagine. The only thing missing is polygamy, but give it a few weeks.

01:12:53

I'm sure that'll show up. But all of that being said, what your hypothesis does is give an ability to come up with an explanation as to why are they doing the things that they are doing.

01:13:11

As an observer of Chuck Pierce's so -called church, and when we pray prophecy bingo and do things like this,

01:13:18

I just scratched my head going, what are these people thinking? Why do

01:13:25

I have these prophecy bingo words? Breakthrough, suddenly, Kairos season that just constantly keeps showing up in these word salad so -called prophecies.

01:13:38

It's all wrapped up in an over, kind of a framework theological system that they almost, because here's the thing,

01:13:47

I can never really accuse the NAR of engaging and teaching real, true, systematic theology.

01:13:54

They are taught this almost by inference and practice, where it's hard to actually kind of get them to speak out in the open clearly theologically.

01:14:06

And then, of course, Wagner tried, and now he's dead, and a lot of people are trying to still distance themselves from him while holding on to a lot of the weird stuff that he came up with.

01:14:18

Yeah, you're exactly right. Yeah, and I think the suddenlies do come along with breakthroughs, and they do come along with that absolute sequence.

01:14:31

It truly is. That is the key that unlocks the door of the mystery of the

01:14:38

NAR. And I think this is the, at the end of the day, the so what, right?

01:14:43

So what that we've been able to somewhat systematize the NAR in a like, what's the so what?

01:14:51

And for us, it's really, we've been able to use it to have people, like, let's not focus on, is this church bad?

01:14:59

Or let's not focus on, this person said that they're a prophet, or going to looking at, are apostles wrong?

01:15:06

Yes, but let's focus first at the very core. If you have the understanding of God wrong, it doesn't matter what all the logical conclusions at the end, like, even if you correctly understand that apostles were more historical in the early church, if you don't have the version of God right, then your entire theological system itself has nothing to build upon.

01:15:34

So this is a way for us to help others, and including ourselves, it's kind of mapping our own journey, like, we got to get right.

01:15:43

Yeah, no, and you're dealing with the doctrine of God, and which is you got to be your primary doctrine. You know, because the first commandment is you shall have no other gods.

01:15:52

And, and so if you get this wrong, you're not going to get anything right.

01:15:59

Yeah. Yeah. So, Dr. Ware, let me ask you, I'm going to ask you a thorny question.

01:16:06

Okay. When somebody has a theology that is assumed or intentional, open theism, and you have a diminished deity, are you believing in the biblical deity, the one who has revealed himself in scripture, or are you believing in a false god?

01:16:26

Yeah, that is such a good question. And it's so difficult to answer for this reason, that there's a spectrum of, as it were, misunderstandings about God.

01:16:38

For example, I would never say of Arminians as a whole category of people, that they don't know the true

01:16:48

God. I would say they have misunderstandings about who

01:16:54

God is, that need to be corrected. And, you know, you think of A. W. Tozer, he was an

01:16:59

Arminian, and yet he's the one who wrote, you know, famously, the opening line of chapter one of Knowledge of the

01:17:05

Holy, what comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us. And I agree with that statement.

01:17:12

But even Tozer, I would claim, got some things wrong on that. But then, you know, you can multiply the misunderstandings, the misconceptions, to a point where somewhere you've crossed the line.

01:17:27

You're now thinking of God fundamentally, differently than the true and living

01:17:33

God. I don't know when it crossed that line, but it must be the case. It's kind of like, you know, when did

01:17:39

Fred go bald? We know what he had hair. We know he doesn't have hair. Well, what day was it? You know, it's really hard to know exactly when that takes place.

01:17:49

Yeah. And I would note that the N .A .R. is a dynamic movement.

01:17:55

And it's not, it does not hold a unilateral doctrinal statement.

01:18:01

It's a loose confederation, a network of people that are kind of like -minded in their theologies.

01:18:09

But just because one church is more overtly open theist doesn't mean that another group within the

01:18:16

N .A .R. is also buying into that. They might be on that same journey heading down that track, but they're not necessarily there.

01:18:24

But what we're looking at here is a way of systematically being able to define kind of a core theology that explains the practices of what's happening within the

01:18:35

N .A .R. And that core theology, at some point, can legitimately depart from the actual biblical tracts and belief in the one true

01:18:45

God into a God of their own making. And that is the actual danger of this movement. Right, right.

01:18:52

Chris, I'd like to take that one step further. And it's our hypothesis, and some of our experience as well, that the default view is open theism until one has actually been discipled into orthodoxy.

01:19:07

That view of God is the natural view of man that rebels against God, saying that I have some level of authority over you.

01:19:17

So I think that shows the importance of discipleship. That shows the importance of standing on the shoulders of giants who've gone before us, and really be a part of that true discipleship in the beautiful language of theology.

01:19:31

Yeah, that's a good point. Because you'll note that we human beings have a pretty inflated view of our abilities.

01:19:40

And at least when we're younger, as I get older, I'm beginning to think that maybe something's wrong with me.

01:19:48

But you're right. And we get this as an impact of our fall into sin, because Christ describes us as children of the devil.

01:19:58

That doesn't mean we're literally his children. The idea is that we suffer from the same narcissistic, me -focused, we're so truly bent in on ourselves that we deify ourselves and our thoughts.

01:20:14

So I'd like to wrap up this interview, because we went longer than an hour, and I knew we would.

01:20:22

And again, we've just scratched the surface. But my question is, are there any available resources that people can go to, to begin to do their homework so that they can do a little further study on this?

01:20:37

So I think of the peaches here, Evan and Vivian. I've read your dissertations, but I don't think your dissertations are easily accessible to people outside of academic communities.

01:20:49

Is there a place where you've put together any resources where you're taking some of the portions of your dissertation and then bringing them down to a level where laypeople can begin to wrap their head around this, so that they can see the things that you're putting forward?

01:21:04

Because I think your hypothesis is absolutely solid. I think you guys have argued it well. And I think it is a hypothesis that has explanatory power behind the practices that we've been covering here, my program for more than a decade.

01:21:19

So is there anything that you would recommend? What are the next steps for the people who are watching this?

01:21:26

Great question. The best place to go is specifically about open theism, Dr. Ware's book.

01:21:33

Actually, I'll let you speak about that, and then we'll talk about some of our resources.

01:21:39

Right. Well, I wrote two books. One that's more academic, God's Lesser Glory, and then another one that was written more to lay level,

01:21:47

Their God is Too Small, is the title of it. Both of these published by Crossway Books.

01:21:55

And others, of course, wrote against open theism as well. John Frame, for example. So there are some good resources available on open theism generally.

01:22:07

Now, on the NAR component, that's a whole different thing. And I think

01:22:12

Evan and Vivian are actually breaking ground here, and so I don't know much out there yet.

01:22:18

But they're going to put it out, I'm confident. I'm hoping that we have a website breakthrough that suddenly appears with some information from the peaches.

01:22:32

So to your point, Chris, one of the things we've had so many wonderful resources out there,

01:22:38

Holly Pivick's book, Kosti Kanda, there's some wonderful resources out there specifically on the NAR.

01:22:44

But one of the things that we're trying to do is, we're in the process of creating that repository site.

01:22:51

It's going to be called theprotestantcollective .com. We don't want it in our names. The goal of that is to find a resource that actually combines a lot of these other resources, but in a very methodical way to help people coming out of it.

01:23:09

For instance, we're in the process of writing a book now called Suddenly Strange, and how do you properly deconstruct out of Christianity?

01:23:17

That terminology is a scary word.

01:23:24

When we look around today, we see a lot of folks deconstructing out of Christianity.

01:23:29

Well, they're deconstructing out of this movement. So with us having come out of it, and our first doctorate of education, and really looking at what is the step -by -step process that we can actually help each other think, and building upon that actual curriculum.

01:23:47

And then the PhD section that we're looking at, putting that resource out there for people who don't have to go to seminary, who can actually give them a resource like, what is day one?

01:23:59

My whole world just crashed, but what is Christianity that I knew that I grew up in?

01:24:04

The whole world around me is suddenly strange. So we're in the process, hopefully, to get that out next year.

01:24:12

But the website, to your point, we hope to start putting out some resources. We're kind of behind.

01:24:19

We're trying to catch up. I'm trying to get some stuff out there, but in the meantime, go and download all the

01:24:25

PIVX books. I'll call Darth Vader to get you guys back on schedule. Perfect.

01:24:31

Thank you. But so, just a note for the people watching, we'll put a link, we'll put some links down below to Dr.

01:24:40

Ware's books, and also protestantcollective .com in the hope that sometime in the near future, that'll be a live link, even if it's not when we first published this video.

01:24:50

But I agree with Dr. Ware, Vivian and Evan, you guys are breaking ground here in giving people a theological overlay and making the connection between NAR's assumed open theism and their applied open theism to what's going on here.

01:25:09

And my hope is that with this framework, the other people beside myself and you will be able to have those aha moments so that they can see, wait a second,

01:25:19

I wasn't actually taught biblical Christianity. This is something different. And so you're right, because there's a lot of people who are deconstructing their

01:25:27

Christian faith when in fact, they haven't really been taught Orthodox biblical Christianity. I think of all the people who've had their lives devastated by the implosion of the

01:25:37

Hillsong movement. But Hillsong was actually steeped in NAR beliefs and practices.

01:25:43

And you can see a lot of the open theistic elements now that I know what to look for. I can easily walk through my memory lane and go, oh, that's what was ticking there the whole time, because they were clearly into the

01:25:55

Seven Mountain Mandate and things like this. And so, yeah, this is fascinating stuff.

01:26:02

So I want to thank you guys for your time and thank you for coming on and willing to talk about a complicated subject in a basic way so that we can begin to help people in the wider body of Christ see these important distinctions, so that they can warn themselves, warn their friends and family members.

01:26:25

And as the body of Christ begin to come up with a good biblical apologetic against this aberrant view of who

01:26:32

God is. By the way, Dr. Ware, I love the names of your books. Here, Your God is Too Small.

01:26:38

You don't pull any punches with those titles, do you? That's great. Yeah, poor

01:26:45

Vincent is offended. What do you mean? Well, I'm going to sign off here.

01:26:55

I'm going to ask you guys to stay on. We'll talk for a couple of minutes, but I'm going to sign off with the audience and then we'll get back.

01:27:03

Again, thank you for coming on Fighting for the Faith. Now, if you found this interview to be helpful,

01:27:08

I know it's a little bit mind bending and it requires you to do some follow -up work if you really want to do some research on this.

01:27:15

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01:27:21

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01:27:28

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01:27:37

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