Rebuke Letter Against Fuller Theological Seminary | Steve Cha:
"My name is Steve Cha, and I was a student who was in the MAT graduate program. I have recently left Fuller Theological Seminary after studying one year with the school. I felt burdened to share with you why I decided to leave Fuller after much contemplation. This will not be easy for me to say, but I feel that I need to do it for the sake of God’s honor and for the future of the school.
Over the course of the year (from Spring 2011-Spring 2012), I have had an uncomfortable and unsatisfying experience at Fuller because of its teaching, which, quite frankly, borders on heresy. I’m not talking about peripheral biblical issues like charismatic spiritual gifts or modes of baptism, but the core, foundational doctrines that all Christians should agree on, as established by the New Testament and illustrated by the 16th Century Reformation.
During my five quarters at Fuller, I have had professors who defied the trustworthiness of Scripture, questioned the literalness and existence of eternal hell/lake of fire, taught a form of theistic evolution over the six-day creation account established in the book of Genesis, hinted that Jesus may not be the only way to heaven, and shaped the gospel message and Jesus’ work on Calvary to make it fit the paradigm of a cultural mandate and social justice type of message instead of the orthodox view of what the gospel and the cross means, which is God’s punishment of sinners with eternal hell, Jesus’ sacrifice and atonement to satisfy God’s justice and wrath, Jesus’ imputed righteousness, salvation by faith in Christ alone, etc.
I have many examples and stories to share, but I’ll start with some of the key ones. It first started when I took the NT Gospels class with Professor Tommy Givens. Professor Givens taught a skewed understanding of the gospel message. In general, he taught an unorthodox view of what Jesus did on the cross, and had an unbiblical view regarding heaven, hell, and the afterlife (which he didn’t really believe in). In addition, the eschatological view Professor Givens taught is not what the Bible teaches regarding the future and Jesus’ Second Coming. Givens interpreted Matthew 24 (the “signs of His coming”) to be merely pointing to the destruction of the Second Temple in AD 70 and God’s judgment on the Pharisaic Jews, when the language of the text and its worldwide scope clearly show that it is talking about the final generation before Jesus’ Second Coming to earth. My big issue, however, is not with the professor’s eschatology error.
The real dangerous issue that came about was that Professor Givens defied a central pillar of Christianity by declaring that he did not believe that there was a place of individual eternal torment that unbelievers go to after they die. In essence, he didn’t believe in hell! He believed that people go out of existence when they die (which is exactly what the WatchTower teaches) and that the lake of fire in Revelation 20: 11-15 was symbolic and figurative! Furthermore, Givens made an unproven claim that the place of “outer darkness” that Jesus talked about in the Gospels was really God’s judgment that came upon the Pharisees duringRome’s destruction of theTempleand the Jewish people in A.D. 70 and didn’t apply to us today. This is clearly unbiblical and indicative of poor hermeneutical training, since the Bible shows that the references to outer darkness, place of weeping and gnashing of teeth, and fiery furnace is the reference to eternal hell, not to some temporal earthly judgment of the past, with no real relevance today."
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