The Voice Of One Crying Out In Suburbia

This is an unfortunate sermon all around. Dr. James White flagged this on his webpage and I hope he will have the time to break this down, error by error. I know he has a lot of confused people to deal with, but this is so out of whack that it bears correcting. I would think he was trying to be funny if I had not heard the same guy preach the message that R.C. Sproul is a heretic.

Apparently Pastor John Modene has sole authority to declare who is or who is not an "authentic" Baptist. Here is a hint, his church is authentic and anyone who disagrees must not be. I guess Spurgeon is not an authentic Baptist. I guess Bunyan was not an authentic Baptist.

His historical view is goofy as can be. Apparently he thinks that the name Reformed Baptist is an indication of a "new gospel". He seems to think that these teachings are "new" to Baptist circles, when in fact they are the historic Baptist traditional teachings. The 1689 London Baptist Confession precedes Pastor Modene's church by about four hundred years, but I guess they were not authentic Baptists. He has apparently had a whole gallon of the Ergun Caner Kool-Aid. His sermon is all over the place, painting with the same broad brush both Reformed Baptist churches and seeker-friendly churches. How he can say that our creeds are all over the place when we hold to the same confessions that we have held since the 1600's. Now which one is it, are we heretics because we hold to 400 year old confessions or because we are are constantly changing? It can't be both. He thinks that Reformed Baptist are "moving towards Rome". Are you kidding me? He is just all over the place.

Which is more important, what the Bible says in the original languages or which version of the Bible we preach from? According to Pastor John Modene, if you don't use the same English translation every single time you preach, you are somehow heretical (he does know that Paul didn't speak Elizabethan English, right?)

I love how he talks about how great George Whitefield and B.B. Warfield are, perhaps not aware that they are both solid Calvinists. Their's was "a solid Gospel" but that same Gospel today is a "new" Gospel. He rails against the Westminster Confession on the one hand and yet his "solid" guy B.B. Warfield is described as thus in Wikipedia:

Underpinning much of Warfield's theology was his adherence to Calvinism as espoused by the Westminster Confession of Faith.

What I found funny was that while he was crowing about following the Bible (including the tired old claim "I ain't a Calvnist or Arminian, I am a Biblicist!"), he made no Biblical arguments against Reformed theology. Probably because he hasn't even the vaguest notion of what Reformed theology really says. He was so all over the place that it wasn't even remotely coherent. I guess that is because I am just a "rotten, dirty, lying hypocrite" according to John Modene.