Saturday, April 5

A Contradictory Combination: Mission Frontiers & Dr. Gregory Boyd?

Missions Frontier's is a wonderful organization that seeks to bring the Gospel of Jesus to Muslim lands led by men like Dr. Ralph Winter and Greg Livingstone who have poured there lives out for the sake of seeing the lost found and saved by Jesus. However, I was very saddened to find yesterday in the Missions Frontiers magazine from the US Center for World Mission an article taken from Dr. Gregory Boyd's book Is God to Blame? Gregory Boyd is an articulate proclaimer and defender of open theism, the view that says that God does not know all of the future because some of the future has not been created by humankind's free actions for God to know. This article was no different.

I do not understand why men like Winter and Livingstone would include this in their publication. I had thought a more robust view of the sovereign Triune God over all the nations, all humans, and all events would have been there conviction and passion. I had thought this view of God would have fed their passion for missions, and they would have turned from Boyd's distorted view of God's knowledge and sovereignty. Am I missing something here?

I had hoped the view of God that would characterize this missions organization would have been more like missionary to the New Hebrides John G. Paton, who stated:

"My heart rose up to the Lord Jesus; I saw Him watching all the scene. My peace came back to me like a wave from God. I realized that I was immortal till my Master's work with me was done. The assurance came to me, as if a voice out of Heaven had spoken, that not a musket would be fired to wound us, not a club prevail to strike us, not a spear leave the hand in which it was held vibrating to be thrown, not an arrow leave the bow, or a killing stone the fingers, without the permission of Jesus Christ, whose is all power in Heaven and on Earth. He rules all Nature, animate and inanimate, and restrains even the Savage of the South Seas." (Source)
Compare that to Dr. Gregory Boyd's article in this publication which reads:
"Indeed, many people who refuse to believe in God do so because they have a picture of God they find untenable. They assume that believing in God means acepting that he orchestrates the kind of misery Melanie was experiencing...Everything that happens would be the working out of his plan. And since these people can't with integrity accept that, they reject God. This book offers a very different picture of God..." (p. 20-21, "Missions Frontiers", March-April 2008)
Boyd's vision of God and of missions is severely skewed and I did not think it matched what the men of this magazine stood for.

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