In the mid 1960s, Walter Martin became the first “Bible Answer Man,” exposing cults and false religions from all over the world. In 1989, when Martin died, Hank Hanegraff became the new “Bible Answer Man,” sort of like the line of the Dread Pirate Roberts in The Princess Bride. Someone else can become “The Bible Answer Man.” It’s passed down. You might not in fact be “The Bible Answer Man.” It’s just a title. You’re actually Joe Slobotnick from Walla Walla, otherwise known as The Bible Answer Man.
You can look for “Bible Answer Man” in scripture and, of course, you won’t find one. It could be a nice gig though to establish the Christian Research Institute and appoint yourself the. Bible. Answer. Man. It’s the wrong answer, however, to several biblical questions related to how God wants His work done.
Then in April 2017, Hank Hanegraff left evangelicalism for the Eastern Orthodox. In May 2017 in a sermon at Grace Community Church, referring to Hanegraff not by name, John MacArthur denounced the Eastern Orthodox doctrine of salvation as a false gospel. Shortly thereafter, Hanegraff made a podcast in defense of himself and in refutation of MacArthur.
I wrote “doctrine of salvation” in the previous paragraph, because Eastern Orthodoxy isn’t the gospel, except what we can call a “false gospel” or “another gospel” (Galatians 1:6, 9). MacArthur is right on to expose this as a false gospel. He rightly quotes
The Confession of Dositheus, 1672:
We believe a man to be not simply justified through faith alone, but through faith which works through love, that is to say, through faith and works.
That is Eastern Orthodoxy, a false gospel. I watched Hanegraff try to defend himself by quoting from James in a modern version like we’ve never seen, heard, or read James before. He really emphasizes Abraham being justified by works without mention that “justified” doesn’t always mean the same thing, that he was justified before men by his works. Hanegraff has turned from the faith.
Even within the professing church, any deviation from the true gospel of grace is a damning lie to be cursed. We understand why the world rejects this. It is, however, a very sad day when people inside the church, even the evangelical church, begin to reject this. . . . . There are about 300 million people worldwide who are in the Eastern Orthodox Church. The sister church in the West is the Roman Catholic Church that has the exact same doctrine, and there are 1.3 billion people in the Roman Catholic Church worldwide. So 1.6 billion people call themselves Christians and believe in a salvation that is a combination of grace and works. That is false Christianity within true Christianity. That is false Christianity teaching a false gospel. It is not to be joined, it is to be cursed. And as I have said, getting the gospel right is the most important reality in the world, because the true gospel is the only way of salvation. We’re not surprised that the true gospel is under assault. We’re not even surprised that it’s under assault inside the church.
Is false Christianity within true Christianity? Is a false church within a true church? Everything he said about the gospel was true, but is it true that the Eastern Orthodox are just a false church within the true church and false Christianity within true Christianity?
First, the Eastern Orthodox never was Christianity. It arose out of Roman Catholicism, which was already a perversion of true Christianity. Roman Catholicism never was Christianity. It preached a false gospel from the very start. True Christianity always remained separate from Roman Catholicism. In other words, the gospel was never lost. Justification wasn’t invented in the Reformation. True believers continued to preach it in their churches, the church, separate from the Catholic Church.
Second, the Eastern Orthodox are not a church. MacArthur and the other elders wrote this in the statement to which I referred above:
The church by definition is an assembly. That is the literal meaning of the Greek word for “church”—ekklesia—the assembly of the called-out ones. A non-assembling assembly is a contradiction in terms.
“A non-assembly is a contradiction in terms.” The Eastern Orthodox never assemble. The Roman Catholics never assemble. The only church is local, just like they are saying, because only what’s local could assemble.
The way it worked was that the true church, which preached a true gospel, remained separate from Roman Catholicism and, of course, what it spawned, the Eastern Orthodox. These branched off the true churches. They created a monstrosity that damns people to Hell. If Hanegraff was of a true assembly, he would have no doubt continued (1 John 2:19). He was never saved in the first place. He’s not a part of a false church within a true church or a false Christianity within a true Christianity. He was a tare among the wheat.
Where is MacArthur coming from? When I hear his statements, they are totally foreign to me. He believes the true church is universal. In other words, a church that never assembles, a non-assembling assembly, is the true church, which as even he says, is a contradiction in terms. To him, the separation of the tares from the wheat is a separation of a false church from within a true church. In fact, almost every church is a mixed multitude. The tares are just unbelievers temporarily with true believers.
When I say “every church” I mean the only church, a local one. Each church to a varied degree is a mixed multitude. Like Jude wrote, they creep in unawares. This is clear through the New Testament, which is written to only churches, only to assemblies, ones at Ephesus, Corinth, and in Galatia, among others. Individual churches apostatize to where they aren’t Christian and they aren’t a church, like the one at Laodecia in Revelation 3. The candlestick is removed.
Churches apostatize. These are not a false church within a true one. They aren’t even churches anymore. Until they apostatize, tares abide within, making them a mixed multitude. True churches continued. This is the perpetuity of the church promised by Jesus in Matthew 16:18. We shouldn’t even call The Orthodox Church, The Orthodox Church. It isn’t a church.
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