|
| Christian news worldwide |
 Home |
 Archives |
 Subscriptions |
 Adverts |
 Find a church |
 About us |
 Contact us |
 Site Map |
 PrintableVersion Not as bad as the truthPawson at 75NOT AS BAD AS THE TRUTH A puzzling book. An enigmatic man. Experiences that are riddles. Here David Pawson shares ‘who he is’ as he surveys 75 years of his life. Puzzling because there is a very uneven feel about details. We are treated to fascinating insights into his early life as part of a prominent Methodist family in the North East. He walks us through his change to becoming a Baptist, and then a charismatic. He is very open (with his family’s permission) about some of the struggles and heartaches they have faced. He tells us about the weakness of his body as he combated a breakdown. But there is also a disappointing lack of detail. He tells us virtually nothing about his relationships with other church leaders, and about his views on some key issues that have affected the church. There are only snippets on what made Millmead such a flagship church in Guildford and England. The ‘travelogue’ doesn’t really help us understand the significance of his ministry apart from learning that his tapes are circulated widely. Perhaps it is deliberate; David wants to be remembered as ‘a man who taught the Bible’. But that underscores the enigma. He self-consciously says that he ‘doesn’t fit’ evangelicalism. He teaches the Bible, using wonderful gifts and seeking to be sensitive to the Lord’s leading. But his beliefs derived from the Bible don’t always seem to ‘stack up’. On the one hand he has taken a very strong stand about the eternal nature of hell, the importance of the atonement, and the need for reverence before a great God. He is very ‘conservative’, for example, about male leadership in the church. Idiosyncratic?On the other, his views seem idiosyncratic. He provocatively states: ‘I simply cannot find their [the Calvinists] Five Points in my Bible’, but the reasons he gives for rejecting them point to a lack of interaction with great Bible teachers past and present. His teaching on becoming a Christian (found in the book he calls his ‘classic’, The Normal Christian Birth) are reiterated. What he says puts him at odds with classic evangelicalism. He separates faith from repentance, he seems confused over justification, and argues for both water baptism and a conscious reception of the Spirit before someone can be accepted as ‘a Christian’. On the last point, although he doesn’t follow ‘mainstream Pentecostalism’ on the baptism of the Spirit, his ‘conscious experience’ is ‘the standard charismatic line’, which effectively puts believers who disagree with his interpretation in a strange ‘no man’s land’ in their relationship with God. As for the riddles. David has experienced some marvellous providences, amazing leading, and mind-blowing grace both to himself and to others through his ministry. But he interprets all this through a charismatic theo-logy. For those not persuaded by his theo-logy, the challenge is to gladly recognise that God works through what may be spiritual weakness and mistaken ideas to accomplish his purposes. It’s worth celebrating the truth that those who consciously depend on the Lord experience blessing sometimes despite confusion, rather than because of correctness. Francis Schaeffer, whom David mentions in the endnotes, despite having a very different theology of spiritual gifts, was a man who also taught a ‘moment by moment dependence on the work of the Spirit based on the finished work of Christ’ and who also saw some most remarkable works of God. Do we similarly depend on him? Final thoughts? A strong man, by his own admission a somewhat isolated and lonely man, a convinced man, an eloquent man, but, in the light of what other Christians have found in the same Bible David evidently loves, a confused and confusing man. Ray Evans, © Evangelicals Now - August 2006 |
|
