Robert Bowman: The Word-Faith Controversy
Bowman then evaluates some specific Word-Faith teachings on the basis of Scripture and hermeneutics. In many cases, he concludes that much Word-Faith teaching is vague, inconsistent, contradictory, or unclear, sometimes suborthodox or aberrant, but not often as blatantly heretical as critics charge. Bowman acknowledges the movement has had some good fruit, but also much bad fruit.
Over all, Bowman has presented an irenic critique of the Word-Faith movement, with a more subdued, reasoned, and even-handed approach using scientific methodology and logic, unlike some of the harsh polemic rhetoric and diatribes of earlier critics. Bowman more accurately and fairly describes the Word-Faith positions in their contexts, without exaggeration and caricature. Significantly, Bowman at one time worked with Christian Research Institute (CRI) under Hanegraaff, yet disagrees with many of his conclusions.
Bowman makes a noteworthy point, mentioning that he had read a statement to a fellow-researcher at CRI, who then responded that the statement was heresy (p. 53). It was, in actuality, a statement made by Walter Martin, Hanegraaff’s deceased predecessor at CRI that was almost identical to a Word-Faith teaching condemned by Hanegraaff as heretical. My own research has turned up many such quotes from Spurgeon, Chambers, Simpson, Murray, Bounds, Tozer, etc., that sound virtually identical to statements made by Word-Faith teachers that have been condemned by their critics. Ironically, although Bowman has attempted to be even-handed with the Word-Faith teachers, some of what even Bowman calls “unbiblical” comes from these earlier classic evangelical writers.
In some areas Bowman continues to propagate mistaken conclusions of faith critics. For instance, Bowman perpetuates the error of McConnell and Hanegraaff that all translators and commentators deny the “faith of God” interpretation of Mark 11:22. While that may be the majority interpretation today, it is not the unanimous interpretation of scholars today, nor of evangelicals in the past. No less a theologian than McConnell’s faith critic mentor (and mine), the late Oral Roberts University professor Charles Farah, (Ph.D., University of Edinburgh), had accepted the “faith of God” view as valid.
Further, Bowman paints Simpson as a radical faith-curist opposed to all use of medicine and then shows strong similarity to Kenyon. What Bowman does not show (and perhaps does not know) is that even others outside of the faith-cure movement propagated similar teachings regarding healing, such as Spurgeon, Chambers, Taylor, and Bounds. A comparison of Murray and Simpson shows them almost identical in their beliefs of on healing, even though developed independently and almost simultaneously of each other. Simpson himself eschewed the term “faith cure.”
Being an ordained minister of the Christian and Missionary Alliance founded by Simpson, I have examined most of Simpson’s extant and non-extant writings regarding healing. While it may be true that Simpson was more radical in his views on healing in his earlier days, he and the C&MA modified their views as they matured. Contrary to the claim that he was totally against medicine, he and the C&MA viewed faith without doctors and medicine as an ideal, not as a rule. Bowman cites a seemingly radical statement of Simpson in his book The Gospel of Healing regarding doctors and medicine, but fails to recognize that later in the same book Simpson modifies his earlier statement, advising against presumptuous abandonment of medical treatment. Other writings of Simpson show that he was not opposed to doctors and medicine, assuring believers that there is an appropriate place and time for their use.
Category: Ministry, Spring 2004
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