For the previous parts see:
The above video is an analysis of the Bethel movement by Mike Winger. He himself is a charismatic and is no enemy of Signs and Wonders per se. He's also generous toward Bethelism and doesn't deny that some of Bethel's teaching can inspire. I would call him a "soft-cop"; in fact some of the comments in the YouTube comments thread suggest he's too generous. But having listened to Winger I can only say that if Winger is a soft-cop then just how hard are those hard cops? I'll move onto a hard cop later on, but really who needs hard cops when we've got Mike Winger's devastating points of criticism! I would, nevertheless, recommend Winger's video to anyone wanting to find out more about Bethelism. On second thoughts I think he's a "fair cop"!
Winger's Verdict
The following is my interpretation of some of Winger's salient points. This interpretation can be checked by looking at the video. [I have put my own additions in square brackets]
Winger says he's watched 60hrs of Bethel video footage to come to his conclusions. He doesn't accept that they are a front for shadowy demonic influences and believes that Bill Johnson and his lieutenant Kris Valloton are Christians. He even accepts that real healings do come out of this movement. But he believes there is a lot of fake stuff coming out of it as well. He says that Bill Johnson's vision for Bethel is that of spear heading a world wide movement. Through what they claim to be an apostolic network they aim to bring revival to the world wide church after the image of their own concept of revival. Johnson believes this revival will come by proactively exporting their "Jesus culture". [It's true that the Bethel influence has popped up all over place!]
But Winger sees a mixed bag. He sees twisted theology, a theology which encourages its followers to be fake and to fake healings and prophecies. Johnson's followers call him an apostle although he never makes use of that title himself; but he doesn't stop his followers thinking of him as such. [The "apostles" of the circa 1980s "Restoration" movement adopted a very similar coy-strategy to their apostleship]
Winger shows a clip where it appears that Johnson is saying that "teaching" has less to do with Biblical text than it does in having an apostle as a channel of teaching. He thus subtly shifts the disciples attention away from Scripture to the apostolic figure himself and his authoritative teaching. [Hence, the cut, thrust and ongoing contention of Biblically based argumentation is supplanted by the authoritative quietus imposed by the apostle, where the apostle is almost a kind of embodiment of the Word.... clearly a dangerous precedent given that only Christ himself has claim to the title of being the Word]
On healing Johnson becomes even more extreme: Using Galatians 1 & 2 he informs us that anyone who doesn't accept Johnson's claim that all must be healed is in effect teaching a different gospel! Johnson talks about Jesus being "perfect theology" which for him means we simply must follow Jesus' practices and in a literal sense do as Jesus did: To this end Johnson resolves the resultant contradictions with scripture by constructing a doctrine of "Truth priorities": For Johnson some things in scripture are true but other things are "truer". His lesser truth category means that Johnson can ignore or override, for example, the tribulations of Job in favour of his "Jesus is perfect theology" prosperity Gospel. [Johnson neglects the fact it is still our responsibility to interpret the meaning of Christ's life and therefore we can make no claim to having in our hands "perfect theology" when we study and follow Christ]
To further justify Bethel's prosperity teaching Johnson uses the argument that "God can't give what he doesn't have". Therefore God can only impart health and wealth because He only has health and wealth - i.e. he doesn't have poverty and ill health. e.g. God doesn't have cancer therefore he won't give you cancer. Consequently Christians must be rich and healthy. Winger calls this shallow theology. (And see Rev 2:22-23). But did Jesus really teach a prosperity Gospel? Johnson uses Mat 6:10 to justify his position, but Winger says that this verse only finally applies in the fullness of time when there is, eventually, no death (See Rev. 21:4). In contrast Chris Volloton has said "No one in our congregation is allowed to die except of old age". So says Winger, Vollonton accepts that death does eventually come to Bethelites and therefore Mat 6:10 doesn't, after all, hold at Bethel!
At Bethel it feels as though there are a lot of healings taking place. But they get round the fact that healing doesn't always happen by poor confirmation of healing and using a doctrine of "keeping your healing"; that is, if your symptoms come back you are told that you are "losing your healing" which then triggers a process of spiritual investigation & diagnosis as to why the healing hasn't taken. They also talk about "the fragility of the anointing": Bill Johnson's son has a hearing problem which hasn't been healed. Once again Johnson finds an excuse to ignore this glaring inconsistency: He says that it will ruin his own anointing if he thinks with critical awareness about this inconsistency. Hence there is pressure at Bethel to avoid thinking about negative outcomes because if you do then Johnson's says it may badly effect your anointing. Bethel, therefore, have many ways of explaining away and/or coping with apparent failures of healing and this includes encouragement to turn a blind eye if no spiritual explanation is available .[In effect Johnson is proactively barring intellectual integrity as a harmful influence on their fellowship; hence a gullible unquestioning idiocy is actively encouraged at Bethel - Idiots for Christ!]
For Bill Johnson's Bethel any nice and positive sounding words that someone feels they should say are liable to be ranked as prophecy; but only positive, happy words are allowed. Negative prophecies are banned at Bethel. Hence Bethel becomes the source of many fake prophecies. Bethel also has such a thing as "Destiny cards" which are suspiciously like Tarot cards.
Bethel are trying to engineer a revival in their own image. They are a contrived movement.
So that finishes with Winger's assessment. I now want move on to.....ressurection.
A Prayer for Resurrection
The ethos of unwillingness to face the tricky realities of Christian life with critical awareness recently had a very sad nemesis at Bethel. In a very public display the Bethel fellowship prayed fervently for the resurrection of the deceased daughter of one of their worship leaders. The matter was reported in a news item in the February 2020 of Premier Christianity magazine. But the affair also got a wide airing in the secular media; the full glare of public attention as the magazine puts it. The Christianity article tells us how for several nights Bethel held services where they implored God for a resurrection, but after a week they faced the heart-breaking and tragic reality of the infant's death.
The article quotes Johnson's well known position on healing, a position which is based on the notion that Christ's sacrificial death has already "purchased healing" (A common theological cliche among prosperity healers), a position that encourages a witch-hunt seeking spiritual pathology should God not deliver (My emphases):
"When he bore our stripes in His body He made a payment for our miracle. He already decided to heal. You can't decide not to buy something after you've already bought it.....All lack is on our end of the equation".
Well, that tells us where Johnson is going to look for spiritual failure when his prosperity expectations aren't fulfilled! And I don't think Johnson is the sort of guy who is just going to tell us that his church was merely trying to be obedient to Christ's command to raise the dead (Mat 10:8) as Christianity quotes him, and then leave it at that. No, rather than just shrugging his shoulders Johnson looks like a man who is going to angle for a source of blame. But one thing you can't accuse these Bethelites of and that is a lack of belief. So where is Johnson's theological logic going to take him? Perhaps he'll blame those Christians who criticise his "perfect theology"? After all, those who criticise his prosperity line on healing will, according to Johnson, be teaching another gospel!
But undaunted by Johnson's theologically threatening position Christianity magazine, partly through the mouths of various pundits, arrays a strong critique of Johnson and Bethel. It is in great contrast to the Christianity article I quoted in part I where the reporter seems to be a Johnson convert. In this latest article, however, we hear that:
The episode was grounded in really poor theology....you just take little snapshots of the Bible and pick out phrases here and there to extrapolate these huge expectations to command how God should act in a situation......they were praying for only one possible outcome...A wise pastor would stand with the bereaved parents while also gently sharing that God may have other plans as well.....Many evangelical writers have expressed similar concerns....Bethel's theology results of a transactional view of God....God is seen as a genie who will always say yes to our requests if we just say the magic formula.....my anxiety is around the mental health of the parents and the wider community when the miracle was not forth coming.
But Johnson takes no responsibility for the event. He says that they...
...had no option but to ask for resurrection, because that was what Jesus commanded his disciples to seek after.
...and remember if you don't accept Johnson's view without qualification then you may be accused of preaching another gospel!
Christianity magazine tries put a brave face on it along and the best gloss. The hope was that....
....this story would encourage small churches to pray for healing miracles not out of habit but in the hope that God may actually act....all Christians should trust God enough to ask for big outlandish miracles even if they don't happen.
I doubt it: More like it will make Christians wary of such public failure. The Christianity article still talks about "the struggle against the giant of unbelief". I don't see any unbelief at Bethel (although I do see a lot of gullibility). Talk like this will only create more unresolved conflict, loss of confidence, heart searching and guilt in the lives of believers about their "lack of faith". Pray for healings and miracles by all means but don't think they are a reward for faith and if they don't happen don't then embark on a witch hunt for a lack of faith and/or spiritual failure somewhere. So in spite of starting well, in the final analysis the Christianity article falls down badly, yet again.
The Hard Cop
We find our really hard cop on this web site:
http://watchman4wales.blogspot.com/search/label/Bill%20Johnson
Now I'm not sure I would want to meet this guy in a dark alley because he would likely hard-cop me and accuse me of heresy as soon as look at me. But then Bill Johnson, as we have seen, is himself a hard cop who is likely to tell us we are preaching another gospel if we don't tow his line on healing. One hard cop deserves another! So here we go with our stern Watchman4Wales' verdict on Bethel and the Johnsons:
It is
important to note that the Ffald-y-Brenin bookshop is also very well-stocked
with the works of Bill and Beni Johnson, the Senior Pastors of Bethel
"Church" in Redding, California. This has to be one of the unsafest
"Christian" couples on the planet, their "Christianity"
having all the authenticity of a paste diamond, with Bethel having far more in
common with sorcery and New Age mystical spirituality than with Biblical
Christianity. From gold dust to glory clouds, from falling feathers to fire
tunnels, from floating orbs to a born-again "Jesus," from waking up
sleeping angels to grave-sucking necromancy, absolutely anything goes at Bethel
under the Johnsons' (mis)leadership.
The
Ffald-y-Brenin bookshop can thus lamentably be seen to be recklessly
disseminating to the unsuspecting an alternative form of faith that is
assuredly NOT the true Faith, but instead a deeply fallacious mystical New Age
delusion, a cunning counterfeit of Biblical Christianity inspired not by the
Holy Spirit but by a subtle and seducing utterly unclean spirit, working
stealthily out of the war-camp of the Enemy!
To back up the charges of necromancy we are provided with pictures of "grave-sucking". Below I include these pictures with their captions:
And
here's Beni Johnson herself, soaking up the anointing of C.S. Lewis's bones by lying on his grave in
Oxford. She also uses a 528HZ tuning fork for prophetic purposes...
A group
of students from Bill Johnson's Bethel School of the Supernatural engage in
sucking up Evan Roberts' anointing from his grave at Loughor in South Wales...
Hard copping done! Need I say more?
Summing Up
Large swathes of Christian culture lack intellectual integrity. In fact I've long since come to terms with the fact that Christianity as a faith is extremely idiot proof - that is, it has a high resilience to the large numbers of gullible idiots (some of whom actually classify as malign idiots) who enter the faith. But in spite of taking onboard hoards of these idiots the integrity and dignity of Christianity's high sounding cosmic message of salvation is no more compromised than is the majesty of deep space in the presence of a few deluded "grave suckers" who inhabit one small corner of the cosmos. If I didn't believe this there would be no Christian faith for me (See
here and
here). In fact the only other (intolerable) alternative to the
Open Gospel would be to join one of Christianity's mean little "holy remnants" of huddled Christian crazies who think of themselves and their sect as the one and only true church and all others to be potentially demonic. Like Winger I don't believe Bethel are demonic but they do have a high density of gullible stupidity in their ranks, a stupidity which allows people like Johnson and Valloton to peddle their prosperity gospel justified as it is by a shallow, muddled and incoherent "quip theology".
 |
| Stay comatose! |
As we have seen in this series Johnson's strategy is to do what he can to block any self reflecting & self critical stance, a stance which is liable to endanger the Bethelist philosophy of comatose forgetfulness. Critical-think, Johnson effectively warns, may lead to the loss of your all-important "anointing". Any apparent inconsistencies of Johnson's philosophy with scripture are dealt with by a doctrine which ranks and prioritises truths so that some truths can be regarded as overriding other truths. (Winger rightly identifies this notion as gobbledegook). As Winger says Johnson has therefore found ways of preventing scripture as a whole of correcting his contention that Jesus' life entails a prosperity gospel. This prosperity gospel, according to Winger, flies in the face of Job. The ultimate backstop to critical thought is found in the notion that apostles are a kind of incarnation of scriptural teaching. Hence when the chips are down they can pull out this authoritarian card in order to further help ease through their theology. A claim to authority is the ultimate device to stultify a Berean assault on Johnsonianism. This is, however, not an original strategy: I remember reading the restorationist Arthur Wallis where he claimed that the chief way restorationist leaders exert their authority is via their Bible teaching. Thus, in effect they claim a special almost priestly right to interpret scripture authoritatively (for more on restorationism see
here).
At one point in his video Winger remarks on how Bethel teachers teach in a cheeky humorous way. This can be seen with other popular teachers of this ilk; see
here. A brash humorous quip theology has great folk appeal.
All in all Bethel have contrived plenty of auxiliary hypotheses for explaining away failed miracles and stopping critical analysis of this failure in its tracks. Let us recall, however, that Bethel is a highly predatory sect determined to stamp their image on the rest of Christianity: They are pulling out all the stops to spread Johnson's teaching. But they may now have pulled out one stop too many. Like the Restorationism of circa 1980 its empire building appeal will eventually peter out.
Note:
Early posts I did on Johnson:
