by David Cloud – Way of Life

 Tony Campolo, influential evangelical author/teacher, died on Nov. 19 at age 89. I read his books for research, heard him speak at Missionsfest ’92 in Vancouver, British Columbia, and interviewed him at the New Baptist Covenant Celebration in Atlanta in January 2008, which I attended with media credentials. He was a deeply confused man who misinterpreted Scripture and stumbled into many heresies, thus leading many astray. His foundational error was salvation. He was not born again biblically by his own testimony. He said that his mother, who was saved out of Catholicism, wanted to see her son have a “born-again experience,” but he admitted that “it never worked for me” (Letters to a Young Evangelical). Instead he learned from “reading the Catholic mystics, especially The Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola” (co-founder of the Jesuits), that salvation is a process, not an event (Letters to a Young Evangelical, pp. 30-31). Campolo taught that “Christ lives in all human beings, regardless of whether they are Christians” and “Jesus is the only Savior, but not everybody who is being saved by Him is aware that He is the one who is doing the saving” (A Reasonable Faith). He claimed that the Scripture is not inerrantly inspired of God and is not “the ultimate authority for faith” (Partly Right, p. 99). He held an evolutionary view of the origin of man and the universe. He was an ecumenist who associated with the most liberal of denominations, Roman Catholicism, Seventh-day Adventism, etc. He was on the editorial board for the production of the film Mother Teresa, which exalted the Roman Catholic nun and contained no warning about her false gospel. Campolo preached a social gospel. “[Jesus] saved us in order that He might begin to transform His world into the kind of world that He willed for it to be when He created it” (It’s Friday but Sunday’s Coming, p. 106). He hated and mocked dispensationalism and rejected the biblical doctrine of the imminent return of Christ. He said homosexuals should be allowed to join churches and be ordained without renouncing homosexuality and supported homosexual marriage. A major source of his heretical thinking was Catholic contemplative prayer. He said, “I get up in the morning a half hour before I have to and spend time in absolute stillness. I don’t ask God for anything. I just simply surrender to His presence and yield to the Spirit flowing into my life” (Outreach Magazine, July/ August 2004, pp. 88, 89). He said “a theology of mysticism provides some hope for common ground between Christianity and Islam” (Speaking My Mind, pp. 149l, 150). This is not biblical meditation. It is a recipe for spiritual delusion. Evangelicalism, with its renunciation of separation and its lack of boundaries, is leavened with every sort of sin and heresy. It is the incipient form of the one-world church, which will reach full blossom in the day of the Lord as described in Revelation 17.