False Teaching and New Religions

John writes to churches that have been shaken. Some of their own members have left, and they have left teaching something different about Jesus. 'They went out from us, but they did not belong to us' (1 John 2:19). His instruction is short: 'Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God. For many false prophets have gone out into the world' (4:1). The word for test, dokimazo, is used for assaying metal, testing it to see whether it is genuine. The aim is not suspicion of everyone. It is discernment that can recognise the real thing.

Scripture gives several tests, and they work together. The first and most important is Christ. 'Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God' (4:2). The opponents in John's churches seem to have denied that the divine Christ truly became a man; others since have denied that the man Jesus is truly God. Either way, a teacher who is wrong about who Jesus is cannot be right about the gospel. The second is the gospel itself: 'even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be under a curse!' (Galatians 1:8). The third is faithfulness to what God has already revealed. Deuteronomy 13:1-3 says that even if a prophet's sign comes true, if he leads people after other gods, 'you must not listen to the words of that prophet or dreamer.' The fourth is truthfulness: when a prophet's message 'does not come to pass or come true, that is a message the LORD has not spoken' (Deuteronomy 18:22). The fifth is fruit: 'By their fruit you will recognize them' (Matthew 7:16), which includes the teacher's character, his use of money and power, and what his teaching produces in others. And the sixth is scripture, which the Bereans examined 'every day to see if these teachings were true' (Acts 17:11).

Notice what is missing from that list: success, miracles and size. Jesus warned that many will say, 'did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?' and he will answer, 'I never knew you' (Matthew 7:22-23). A large church, a powerful healing service and a prophecy that came true are not, on their own, evidence that a teacher is from God.

One more distinction is essential. Not every disagreement is heresy. Christians have long distinguished the core of the faith, held by the church across the centuries and summed up in the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds, from questions on which faithful Christians differ: the mode and subjects of baptism, the gifts of the Spirit, church government, the order of the last things, and many others this course treats as open. Heresy is a denial of something at the core: the one God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the full deity and full humanity of Christ, his death and bodily resurrection, salvation by God's grace. If you call every Christian you disagree with a false teacher, you will have no words left when you meet a real one. In what follows, Jehovah's Witnesses, Latter-day Saints and oneness believers differ from the creeds about who God is; prosperity teaching is mostly found inside churches that confess the creeds, and its error is about the gospel's promises. They are not all the same, and you should not treat them as if they were.

Before you answer any group, describe it as its own members would. Both the Witnesses and the Latter-day Saints have free official websites, jw.org and churchofjesuschrist.org, that set out what they believe in their own words. Read them. Many Christians attack positions these groups do not hold, and their members are rightly unimpressed.

Jehovah's Witnesses trace their beginnings to a Bible study group formed in the 1870s around Charles Taze Russell in Pennsylvania, in the United States. The movement took the name Jehovah's Witnesses in 1931 under Russell's successor, Joseph Rutherford, drawing on Isaiah 43:10, 'You are My witnesses.' It is led by a Governing Body, publishes The Watchtower and many other materials in hundreds of languages, and is known everywhere for its door-to-door witnessing. Witnesses meet in Kingdom Halls, study the Bible intensely, and are often more familiar with their own translation, the New World Translation, than many church members are with theirs.

As Witnesses describe it, they worship the one true God, Jehovah, and follow Jesus Christ, whom they honour as God's Son and the Messiah. They believe Jesus was God's first creation, through whom God made everything else, and identify him with the archangel Michael. They believe he died on a stake rather than a cross, was raised as a spirit, and began to rule invisibly as king in heaven in 1914. They believe the holy spirit is God's active force, not a person. They teach that the soul is not immortal and there is no hell of torment; the wicked will cease to exist. A limited number, 144,000, will rule with Christ in heaven, and a great crowd of the faithful will live forever on a paradise earth. They refuse blood transfusions, do not celebrate birthdays or Christmas, and stay politically neutral, refusing military service and the saluting of flags. For that neutrality they have suffered severely: thousands were imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps, many were beaten and driven from their homes in Malawi in the 1960s and 1970s, and in 2017 they were banned in Russia as an extremist organisation. You can honour their courage and their devotion to scripture even while you disagree.

The central disagreement is about who Jesus is. The New World Translation renders John 1:1 as 'the Word was a god.' Witnesses point out that the Greek theos in the last clause has no article, unlike the earlier clause about the Word being with God, and argue that the Word is divine in a lesser sense. Answer carefully, because grammar alone will not carry the whole argument. Most Greek scholars hold that a noun without the article placed before the verb, as here, usually describes the quality or nature of the subject: what God was, the Word was. The New World Translation itself renders theos without the article as God, not a god, elsewhere in the same chapter, for example in John 1:6, 1:12 and 1:13, though Witnesses reply that those verses are built differently, and they are right that grammar alone does not decide the question. But the stronger answer is the whole of scripture. If Jesus is a second, lesser god, then there are two gods, and God himself says, 'Before Me no god was formed, and after Me none will come' (Isaiah 43:10), and 'Is there any God but Me? There is no other Rock; I know not one' (Isaiah 44:8). The first of those verses, Isaiah 43:10, is the Witnesses' own name-verse.

Then show what the New Testament does with Jesus. Thomas says to him, 'My Lord and my God!' (John 20:28), and Jesus accepts it. Hebrews 1:6 says, 'Let all God's angels worship Him,' and Hebrews 1:5 asks 'to which of the angels did God ever say' that he was his Son, which is hard to square with Jesus being an angel. When John fell down before an angel, the angel said, 'Do not do that! I am a fellow servant with you,' and 'Worship God!' (Revelation 22:9). Yet Jesus says, 'I am the First and the Last' (Revelation 1:17), the title the LORD claims in Isaiah 44:6. Witnesses have answers to each of these: the New World Translation renders the worship of Hebrews 1:6 as obeisance, and reads Colossians 1:15, 'the firstborn over all creation,' as meaning Jesus was the first created being. You will need to know their replies and to show from the context, for example that Colossians 1:16-17 says all things were created through him and he is before all things, why you read the texts differently.

Two other points are worth raising gently. The Holy Spirit is spoken of as a person: he speaks (Acts 13:2), teaches and reminds (John 14:26), and lying to him is lying to God (Acts 5:3-4). And the Watch Tower organisation's past expectations about the end, associated with dates including 1914, 1925 and 1975, did not come to pass as many members were led to expect. Deuteronomy 18:22 is the relevant test. Ask a Witness, without mockery, how he understands those disappointments. Some Witnesses, especially younger ones, know little of this history.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, often called Mormons, a nickname its leaders have asked people not to use, was founded by Joseph Smith (1805 to 1844) in New York State. Latter-day Saints believe that in 1820 the young Smith saw God the Father and Jesus Christ in a vision, that an angel named Moroni later led him to golden plates which he translated by divine power as the Book of Mormon, published in 1830, and that the church was organised that year as the restoration of the church Christ founded. They teach that after the apostles died there was a Great Apostasy in which the true church and its priesthood authority were lost, and that God restored them through Smith. Their scriptures are the Bible, which their Articles of Faith accept as far as it is translated correctly, the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants and the Pearl of Great Price, and they are led by a living prophet and apostles. The church reports more than seventeen million members worldwide, and its young missionaries, often eighteen or nineteen years old, serve in pairs in many countries.

Latter-day Saints sincerely regard themselves as Christians. They worship Jesus Christ as the Son of God and Saviour, speak often of his atonement, and stress faith, repentance, baptism and a life of obedience. They are known for strong families, generosity, service and clean living. Their teaching about God, however, is very different from the creeds. They understand the Godhead as three distinct beings united in purpose, and teach that the Father has a glorified body of flesh and bones (Doctrine and Covenants 130:22). They teach that human beings lived before birth as spirit children of heavenly parents, and that the faithful may be exalted to become like God. A couplet attributed to their fifth president, Lorenzo Snow, put it this way: as man now is, God once was; as God now is, man may become. The church's own 2014 essay Becoming Like God discusses this teaching and its limits. Temples are central, where marriages are sealed for eternity and members are baptised on behalf of the dead, a practice they connect with 1 Corinthians 15:29.

Answer at the root. The Bible's God is not one of a kind of being who were once men. 'God is not a man, that He should lie, or a son of man, that He should change His mind' (Numbers 23:19). 'God is Spirit' (John 4:24). He is the only God there has ever been or ever will be: 'Before Me no god was formed, and after Me none will come' (Isaiah 43:10), and 'I am the first and I am the last, and there is no God but Me' (Isaiah 44:6). God himself says of other gods, 'I know not one' (44:8). If human beings could become gods, God would know of a great many. On the Great Apostasy, Jesus promised that 'the gates of Hades will not prevail against' his church (Matthew 16:18), and Jude speaks of 'the faith entrusted once for all to the saints' (Jude 1:3), which needs defending, not replacing. And Galatians 1:8 warns against a different gospel 'even if we or an angel from heaven should preach' it, a verse a Latter-day Saint will need to think about given the role of an angel in his church's founding.

There are also historical questions. Latter-day Saints believe the Book of Mormon records peoples of Israelite descent in the ancient Americas. Most archaeologists and geneticists, including scholars who are themselves Latter-day Saints, have found no evidence of such peoples, and DNA studies point overwhelmingly to Asian ancestry for Native Americans; the church's own 2014 essay on DNA studies acknowledges this and argues it does not settle the question. Raise this gently, as a question about evidence, not as mockery.

Some evangelicals and Latter-day Saints have modelled a better conversation. Craig Blomberg, an evangelical New Testament scholar, and Stephen Robinson, a Latter-day Saint professor, wrote How Wide the Divide? (1997), setting out where they agreed and disagreed. Richard Mouw's Talking with Mormons (2012) urged evangelicals to describe Latter-day Saint belief accurately and to listen. Such dialogue does not blur the differences, which are real and serious. It makes it possible to discuss them honestly.

The prosperity gospel, sometimes called the health and wealth gospel or Word of Faith teaching, is the false teaching most of this course's students will meet most often, because it is preached from many pulpits, broadcast on many television and radio stations, and spread by phone across Africa, Latin America and Asia as well as North America. It has roots in the teaching of E. W. Kenyon in the early twentieth century, was developed by Kenneth Hagin and others in the Word of Faith movement, and was popularised by preachers such as Oral Roberts, whose idea of seed faith taught that money given to God's work is a seed that will return as a harvest. The historian Kate Bowler, in Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel (2013), summed up its themes as faith, wealth, health and victory.

State it as its preachers would. God is a good Father who wants his children to flourish in body, mind and circumstances. Poverty and sickness are part of the curse, and Christ 'redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us' (Galatians 3:13) so that the blessing of Abraham might come to us (3:14). Paul says Christ became poor 'so that you through His poverty might become rich' (2 Corinthians 8:9). John prays that his friend 'may prosper and enjoy good health' (3 John 1:2). God 'gives you the power to gain wealth' (Deuteronomy 8:18). Jesus came that we 'may have life, and have it in all its fullness' (John 10:10). Faith speaks God's promises aloud and claims them; giving is sowing, and God returns a harvest. Some scholars of world Christianity have noted that this message gives hope and dignity to the poor, rejects the fatalism that says nothing can change, and encourages hard work, sobriety, saving and enterprise. Those are real goods, and many sincere believers sit under this teaching because they long for God to act in their daily lives, which scripture says he does.

Now test it. 3 John 1:2 is a standard letter greeting, much like wishing someone good health at the start of a letter today; it is not a promise. 2 Corinthians 8:9 comes in Paul's appeal for a collection for poor believers in Jerusalem, and its point is that the Corinthians should give, 'that there may be equality' (8:13), not that they should expect to get rich. The riches Christ's poverty brings are the riches of grace. Jesus himself had 'no place to lay His head' (Matthew 8:20). Paul learned 'to be content regardless of my circumstances' (Philippians 4:11), and the famous verse 'I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength' (4:13) is about enduring hunger as well as plenty (4:12). Paul's own prayer for healing was answered with, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is perfected in weakness' (2 Corinthians 12:9). Hebrews 11 lists heroes of faith who were 'destitute, oppressed, and mistreated' (11:37). Even Jesus' promise of a hundredfold return in this age comes 'along with persecutions' (Mark 10:30).

And scripture names the pattern directly. Paul warns of men who 'regard godliness as a means of gain' (1 Timothy 6:5), adding that 'godliness with contentment is great gain' (6:6) and that 'the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil' (6:10). Peter warns that 'In their greed, these false teachers will exploit you with deceptive words' (2 Peter 2:3). When a teacher grows rich on the offerings of the poor, promising them a harvest that does not come and blaming their lack of faith when it does not, the test of fruit has been failed. In 2008 and 2009 the Lausanne Theology Working Group, meeting in Akropong, Ghana, issued a statement on the prosperity gospel that affirmed God's care for the whole person while rejecting the teaching's distortions of grace, faith and the cross.

Christians who reject the prosperity gospel still differ over how to name it. Some call it another gospel in the sense of Galatians 1:6, because it changes what salvation is for and makes God a means to wealth. Others call it a serious error that coexists, in many churches, with real faith in Christ crucified and risen, and warn against writing off millions of believers who sit under it. Both agree that praying for healing and provision is biblical, and that the cross, not prosperity, is the shape of the Christian life. You can say to a member of such a church: God does care about your body and your rent, and he does answer prayer, but he has not promised you wealth, and anyone who sells you that promise is selling something God has not given.

Oneness Pentecostalism, sometimes called Jesus Only or Apostolic Pentecostalism, arose within the early Pentecostal movement. At a camp meeting at Arroyo Seco near Los Angeles in 1913, a sermon on baptism in the name of Jesus set some preachers, among them Frank Ewart, to teach that converts should be baptised in Jesus' name only, and that the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit in Matthew 28:19 is Jesus. When the Assemblies of God adopted a Trinitarian statement in 1916, the oneness ministers left. The largest oneness body today, the United Pentecostal Church International, was formed in 1945, and there are large oneness churches in many countries, including the True Jesus Church, founded in China in 1917, and significant movements in Ethiopia, Colombia, Indonesia and elsewhere. A standard modern statement of the view is David K. Bernard's The Oneness of God (1983).

State it as oneness believers do. God is absolutely one, as the Shema says, not three persons. Father, Son and Holy Spirit are not three persons but titles or manifestations of the one God: Father in creation and as the source of the Son, Son in the incarnation, Holy Spirit in God's work in believers. Jesus is the one God himself in the flesh: 'in Christ all the fullness of the Deity dwells in bodily form' (Colossians 2:9). He is called 'Mighty God, Everlasting Father' (Isaiah 9:6), says 'I and the Father are one' (John 10:30) and 'Anyone who has seen Me has seen the Father' (John 14:9). The Father is the deity in Jesus and the Son is his humanity. The apostles baptised 'in the name of Jesus Christ' (Acts 2:38), so that is how believers must be baptised, and many oneness churches teach that the new birth includes repentance, baptism in Jesus' name and the gift of the Spirit with speaking in tongues. Oneness believers usually reject the label modalism, insisting that they do not teach that God was Father, then Son, then Spirit in succession, but that he is all three simultaneously. Notice that oneness believers confess the full deity of Jesus more strongly than Jehovah's Witnesses or Latter-day Saints do. In that they stand with historic Christianity.

The disagreement is whether the Father, the Son and the Spirit are distinct from one another. Scripture shows them in relationship. At Jesus' baptism the Son comes up from the water, the Spirit descends, and the Father speaks from heaven, 'This is My beloved Son' (Matthew 3:16-17). Jesus prays to the Father, 'Yet not as I will, but as You will' (Matthew 26:39), and asks to be glorified 'with the glory I had with You before the world existed' (John 17:5), which speaks of the Son with the Father before the incarnation, not only of a human nature. Jesus promises 'another Advocate' (John 14:16), and calls on the testimony of himself and the Father as two witnesses (John 8:17-18). John begins his Gospel with the Word who 'was with God' and 'was God' (John 1:1). Trinitarians read Acts 2:38 as describing baptism by Jesus' authority and into his lordship rather than prescribing a formula, and point out that the earliest church order outside the New Testament, the Didache, gives the threefold name of Matthew 28:19 as the baptismal formula (Didache 7), though oneness believers note that it also speaks of those baptised into the name of the Lord (9:5).

The early church faced a similar teaching. In the third century Sabellius and others taught that Father, Son and Spirit were modes of the one God, and Tertullian, writing against a teacher named Praxeas around 213, accused such teaching of making the Father the one who was crucified. The church's creeds rejected it, confessing one God in three persons. Trinitarian Christians differ about how to regard oneness believers today: some treat them as brothers and sisters in serious error about God, others as outside historic Christian faith, and the answer may differ with how strictly a particular church teaches that only those baptised in Jesus' name are saved. Either way the difference is not about words alone. It concerns whether God's love has been eternal love between Father, Son and Spirit, or whether God was alone until he made the world.

When you meet a new teacher, a new movement, or a sermon on your phone that excites you, put these questions to it, and put them gently and honestly, including to the teachers you already like. Who is Jesus, according to this teaching: truly God and truly man, the one who died for sins and rose bodily? What is the gospel: is salvation God's free gift through Christ, or does it depend on an organisation, a special revelation, a formula, or a gift of money? What is the final authority: scripture, or a book, a prophet or an organisation that stands over scripture? What happened when the teacher's predictions failed: did he repent, or explain them away? Who benefits: where does the money go, and how does the teacher live compared with those who give? And how does the group treat questions and those who leave: are they free to ask, and are former members slandered or shunned?

When members of these groups come to your door or your workplace, be kind. They are usually sincere, often young, sometimes lonely, and many have been told that Christians will be rude to them. Offer water. Some Christians read 2 John 1:10, 'do not receive him into your home,' as forbidding any conversation with such visitors; others note that John was writing about churches that met in homes and hosted travelling teachers, and read it as forbidding giving false teachers a platform and support rather than forbidding kindness or conversation. Whichever way you read it, do not argue about a dozen verses. Ask to read one passage together, such as John 1:1-18 or Isaiah 44:6-8, and ask what they think it means. Ask what they believe about grace. Be honest about what you believe and why. Then pray for them, and do not be discouraged if nothing seems to happen. Many former members say that the Christians who influenced them most were the ones who were kind and knew their Bibles.

Your practical step this week. Choose the false teaching most present where you live, whether one of these four or another. First, describe it in your notebook in half a page, in words its own members would accept, using its official website or literature if you can find them. Second, write down three passages of scripture that answer its central error, and for each write one sentence on what the passage shows and one on how a member of that group would reply. Third, write out the six questions of this section on a card or in your phone, and use them the next time a new teaching reaches you, even, and especially, if you like the teacher.