A year ago, Dr. Michael Brown dropped out of American Gospel: Spirit & Fire (AG3). Recently some of my critics have been repeating some of Brown's critiques of AG related to the "sin of unequal weights and measures" (claiming I spend too much time critiquing the charismatic camp, and not my own camp). There are a number of problems with this claim:
"You know the Scripture says that God hates unequal weights and measures, and that's what grieves me as I watch some of this trailer. I know there's an attempt to be balanced, but I could make a whole documentary of all of those that came out of cessationist churches and had their spiritual life totally transformed when they came into the things of the Spirit—the power of the Spirit. Churches that were totally transformed. And I could do a whole documentary about those that left charismatic, Pentecostal churches—left some of these spiritual movements and went into a cessationist church, or a Reformed Church and their faith became bankrupt and they fell away from the Lord…" —Dr. Michael Brown According to Michael Brown, the only way I could have made a "balanced" trailer and docuseries in the sight of God was if I made a film that also critiqued the dangers of both cessationism and Reformed theology in addition to the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR). I think this is coming from a mistaken view that we are offering cessationism and Reformed theology as the main solutions to the problems in NAR or the Word of Faith movement. If you've watched the previous AG films, this is clearly not the case; while issues related to cessationism and Reformed theology were discussed, the main emphasis has always been clarity on the person and work of Christ (the gospel). I also never promised to make a film critiquing those other topics, and Michael Brown knew this. My goal of a balanced film was to critique ONE movement and allow those we are critiquing to respond to those critiques (not allow them to shift the discussion to unrelated topics).
Are there dangers, errors, or sin happening in Reformed or cessationist churches? Of course! Could I address any of these errors in future films? Yes, but I am not making a film on these topics right now. It's absurd that I would be expected to conform my project to how Michael Brown views opposing "camps" of Christianity, in order to avoid being accused of committing the sin of unequal weights and measures. In the end, I realized that Michael Brown's standard of "unequal weights and measures" was his attempt to distract attention away from the topic of NAR (red herring fallacy) and an attempt to discredit me by accusing me of hypocrisy for not seeing or addressing the sins within my own "camp" (a Tu Quoque fallacy, a.k.a. "you too" or "whataboutism"). Finally, do the doctrines of cessationism or Reformed theology specifically cause a lack of spiritual life, leading to a bankrupt faith as Michael Brown claims? No. The absence of the GOSPEL (Christ) being preached within ANY type of church creates these dangers. When we critique moralistic preaching, a confusion of law and gospel, the Word of Faith movement, progressive Christianity, or the New Apostolic Reformation, we are focusing our critique on errors related to adding to or subtracting from the gospel, which are errors that any "camp" of Christianity can fall into. The gospel and its clarity will always be my primary concern, which is why I believe that viewing people through the lens of opposing "camps" in terms of secondary issues is unhealthy. My goal in this project has always been to bring both cessationists and continuationists together to critique errors in NAR that distort the gospel.
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