Whitten (2)

What is God’s REAL attitude?

God’s Real Attitude Clearly Expressed is in all scripture’s indicative texts, the ones that tell you who you are.

God’s real attitude is that He loves you, not only in spite of your sins, but even in all your sin. The Father is just fine with who you are and doesn’t get all hung up on your behavior! God unquestioningly affirms everything that you are and everything that you do, regardless of whether it is ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Your behavior does not and cannot alter God’s real attitude towards you in any way. He has always loved you from eternity past. You can sin a little or sin a lot, it doesn’t matter to Him. (Sound familiar?)

Exacting a level of obedience to the law is just the religious mumbo jumbo that churches throw at you. They are only interested in managing your sin so that they can claim to be doing God’s work. The imperative texts are for the unconverted. The ‘religious’ church leaders twist these imperative texts and use them to control you. Christ deleted your sins when you believed that He died to give you all that He has in store for you.

Reminder

Don’t conflate ‘died to give you’ with ‘died to graciously save you from your sins and transform your physical life, empowering and enabling you to obey the law and live for Him’. Believing that Christ died for you is different than believing in Christ’s death and resurrection. Believing ‘in Christ’ is an idea that was missing from the book. Also, the book does not mention Christ’s Lordship over those who believe.

A few points about Whitten’s ideas on union with God … the Father

Page 27, “I believe that if you aren’t made perfect now, you cannot be in union with God, and you won’t go to Heaven!” In other places he states that progressive sanctification is a lie told to you by the churches who want to keep you in legalistic bondage. ‘Sanctification is full and complete’; wasn’t that a claim made by Connie Meyer sometime before 2018?

Page 28, “Let’s look at what really happened to me when I was born again and what Jesus had to accomplish to bring me into union with my heavenly Father. It is not what most think, and it certainly is not what religion teaches. It is bigger, better, more far-reaching, and more permanent than most anyone believes. Grace is better than we think. The finished work of Christ is more complete than we have dared to dream.  And, Salvation is not getting me out of earth and into Heaven; salvation is getting God out of Heaven and into me! God had to prepare me for His presence”. 

Page 29-31, “My sin could not accompany me into God’s presence, and because God’s goal was union with me, He could not simply cover my sin as in the Old Covenant. … To be in His presence, I must be as sinless as Christ. … Again, that is a state of being that Christ accomplished in me. That is why I believe progressive sanctification is nonsense. It is a religious teaching to control behavior and manage sin. Legalists and religionists simply do not trust in the finished work of Christ and the efficacy of His blood to produce His intended result. Therefore, they feel compelled to help Him control the behavior of His new creations….” . [All emphasis ours]

Whitten makes a new ‘state of the believer’

Whitten spends an entire chapter on the righteous ‘state of the believer’ and his idea of complete salvation. This is where he really merges sanctification and justification into one thing. He needs it to form his ideas about union with God. “God will not live in a dirty house”, page 85.

According to Whitten, you experience this union with the Father within yourself (in your own consciousness). In other words, you feel it, in your inner self. Whitten combines the gift of the new state with the experience of the new state. According to Whitten, forgiveness happens only at the beginning of your spiritual discovery of grace and this is what translates, or transitions you immediately into the fullness of your new state. Viola, it’s all finished. You don’t even need to ‘receive Christ’. In the book, we only must believe that He died to unite us to the Father, and receive this new state unquestioningly.

Whitten is typical of many hyper-grace teachers, once you wake up to the free grace, God becomes your Father, your Daddy. Whitten has Christ paying the price, but union is with the Father. Apparently there is an angry God to be appeased after all? He does not teach that our union with the Father is through our union with Christ, our Savior and our Mediator.

Why so much angst against the ‘three contaminants’ in the church?

Whitten feels that these concepts are the ones that led him away from Christ and into his legalism.  

First, he sees confession and repentance as something the believer conjures up in their minds and by their own strength; see 2^nd paragraph of page 98. This is the typical understanding of a legalist regarding all of the believer’s activity. One can see this in Christ’s parable of the Pharisee in Luke 18. The Pharisee thought that he kept the law, ‘I thank thee God that I am not as … I fast, I tithe …’.

His second problem is that his sanctification is a state of righteousness; but it is only a state. You receive this gift upon believing, and this is as close as he gets to a form of justification. He uses this one term, ‘state of righteousness’, to explain the spiritual ‘life’ of the Christian. This effectively treats justification and sanctification as one in the same. He doesn’t really even say anywhere that you live out of that new state, nor that you ‘live by faith’.

Some more of his problems include:

Whitten does not see the preaching as an efficacious power. He does not see preaching as something the Spirit would even use to apply any of this ‘state of being of holiness’ to a believer. To Whitten, the Spirit works in a more direct manner and apart from the preaching. Once one receives the ‘gift’, the Spirit works with one’s conscience or consciousness to convince you, and affirm to you, that you are completely holy. (Maybe like Jiminy Cricket?) You can ‘trust’ this Spirit because you will ‘feel’ that it is right.

Whitten does not teach that the Holy Spirit works in the believer through the preaching. He does not teach that the Holy Spirit empowers people to live obediently in this life. He teaches that your repentance from thinking wrong thoughts about God’s attitude towards you is a gift. However, he does not see repentance of sin as a gift of God.

Correct on what the problem is, but way off on his answer to the problem

Once Whitten realized his problem (legalism), his answer misses the biblical answer to legalism. Now, anyone would be glad that he finally realized his problem of legalism. And, he knows sanctification has to be present in salvation. However, his answer to his legalism is to redefine what sanctification is and how sanctification functions. Thus, he remains a legalist, but with a different world-and-life view than he had before. Now, instead of being confident in his obedience, he is confidant in his sin. Now he can manufacture all kinds of assurance based on what God’s real attitude is about him while he sins.

Whitten based his incorrect answer on what he thought about it all. He relied on his own human logic for an explanation. His scriptural ‘proof’ amounts to selected texts; and what he thinks they mean based on what they meant to him personally. He also uses personal anecdotes to prove his points. Page 108, “What I have observed in my own life and what I have heard from the testimony of many … I believe that much of the repentance … is a form of penance …”. This is a typical hyper-grace use of personal observation serving as proof of his ideology. But this is not any form of proof. His answer to the problem is not the biblical answer. Human logic formed his answer, and guided his gospel.

Contaminant #1: confession

He essentially discards the idea of confession of sin, except upon the occasion of the need for your own healing. He writes that to make confession for sins to God is a waste of time. On page 89, he teaches that once you are a believer, confession is only one thing. Confession is “to agree with the Word and verbalize that agreement.” Confession of sin can be to others; he states that there is a place for that.

Whitten’s response to 1 John 1:9 is, “it is the most abused, misinterpreted, misapplied verse in the Bible”, page 91. This verse is only for new converts. Whitten asks, ‘what if we forget to confess a sin’? This creates his treadmill of: sin, feel bad about it, confess it, repent of it, over and over and over. It didn’t make sense to him, so it had to be wrong. On page 95, he loftily writes, “Confession is for my healing, not for God’s forgiveness”. Whitten goes on to teach that we are “not required to ask for or receive further forgiveness [from God]”.

Contaminant #2: repentance

Whitten thinks that religion hijacked repentance. Religion tells you to repent “to keep an angry God happy enough with you to be willing to bless you”. Churches tell you to repent to “maintain your standing with God by ongoing good behavior”. This creates a treadmill, or as Whitten calls it, a ‘rat maze’ of religious activity. To Whitten, the reformed [biblical] understanding of repentance is “making God change His mind about punishing the evil doers”.

Now, it would be true, if that is all repentance is to you. You need to learn what true repentance is, so does Whitten. If you think that repentance is the manner in which you ‘perfect the flesh’, then you are a legalist. He (correctly) affirmed that often in the book. Because that was his personal experience, he did know what he was describing.

Whitten’s metanoia

Whitten teaches the metanoia of repentance is: us conforming our minds to the mind of God by accepting what God thinks of us in our new state, apart from our behavior. It is not: us changing our minds about sin. Yet, while sounding almost right if one reads it from a reformed perspective, he still redefines repentance. It becomes merely a change in our minds about what God thinks about us. God doesn’t think about us as sinners but as perfect and fully sanctified; in ourselves, not in Christ. And, it is certainly not us changing our attitude about sin, nor our actions.

Whitten does not tie repentance to sin

Whitten does not like to tie repentance to sin. In Whitten’s explanation, repentance becomes relational in nature; it is now your “interchange of love with the Father”. It is now your loving response. Neither you nor God are “holding anything back” in this relationship. God “treasures this uniquely and divinely created being [you] who has the exact DNA as Himself”. Remember that ‘repentance’ is you changing your mind about how God sees you. This ‘loving response’ is you affirming in your own mind, to yourself, and confessing to others, what God says about you in all the indicatives in scripture. Quotes from pages 97-102. Didn’t AL write something about repentance as love for God this spring? Did he get the idea from Whitten?

Whitten never uses ‘in Christ’ language. He also teaches that repentance becomes the coach that guides us to be Christ-like in the way that we think. Nothing coaches us about our behavior. “Repentance is not for God’s sake or benefit, but for our sakes and benefit”. Whitten’s repentance is changing ‘how you see yourself, seeing yourself as perfect like God sees you’.

Contaminant #3: conviction

Whitten is adamant that the Holy Spirit does not tap your shoulder to convict your conscience once you are a converted believer. His work of convicting is only towards unbelievers. “He convicts the world of sin … 1 Jn 1:9″. Tying conviction to sin in any other sense is “the Devil’s attack. Satan … is perverting and limiting the life-giving power” [that you are already perfect in God’s eyes and fully sanctified].

Whitten does say that the Holy Spirit convinces. But according to Whitten, “[the Spirit] convinces the world that the standard of righteousness required to be in union with God [there it is again] is the sinless perfection Jesus demonstrated while on earth. He convinces believers that they are in a state of being of sinless perfection because of their faith in the finished work of Christ.”. Quotes from pages 105-110, emphasis ours. Whitten didn’t use the word ‘atonement’ in his book either.

Be discerning

Don’t assume a reformed idea behind Whitten’s ‘faith in the finished work’ as mentioned in the above paragraph. He teaches that one must believe in the finishedness and not that one must believe in the Person of Christ Himself. A word about human ‘faith’ next time.

Remember, he does not teach that your ‘already perfectness’ and your ‘fully sanctifiedness’ is a result of your being in Christ; this is you by yourself, only because of what Christ did. Even Whitten’s idea of adoption is not biblical. Our adoption by the Father is between us and the Father, solely because of what Christ did, but not because we are in Christ. For Whitten, once you believe; you, by yourself, are a new creature in the fullest, God-sized sense of the word. Whitten sweeps everything about salvation onto the biblical concept of justification. He builds his gospel out of his absorbing interest in the eternal, immanent acts of God, as we pointed out in our first article.

We can see that Whitten’s summary of the/his problem is correct. But his answer is incorrect because it is not the whole Christ.

The law

Whitten teaches three purposes of the law. 1. To bring knowledge of sin to the world and those who still do not believe. 2. It reflects God’s opinion concerning moral conduct; it gives a baseline of understanding about successful living as humans in the world. He attributes the legal system in America to the law of the OT. 3. It presents a wise way to live in society and creation. Joy is the measure for spiritual maturity, page 147; and all law obedience is ‘faith perfected through the flesh’ [human effort].

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Another video:

In this video, he basically regurgitates what is in his book. He mixes it up video by video, but his spiel is the same.
• At minute 8.04 he tells us that God will be revealing the surpassing riches of his grace … (this is apart from the preaching of course; and, aren’t those surpassing riches actually found in Christ??). There is a future quality to his message, one that points to a New Reformation, which Whitten calls a New Awakening.
• Around min 11 he tells us again how grace is scandalous and at 16.30 he says that your grace message is only correct when it is “shocking, when it blows you away”.
• Min 21 he gets into his feelings, he ‘didn’t feel like he measured up’ (proof he had a legalist’s attitude … and it was failing to fulfill him), he ‘didn’t feel good enough’, on and on about feelings.

• Min 24 has more affirmation that he was indeed a legalist with a developing sense of inadequacy and a sense that this could not possibly be right. Congratulations to him for realizing this. But his problem stems from the fact that he thought that HE was to do all of this performing apart from Christ; not out of faith and not by the power of the Holy Spirit as the reformed confessions teach us. Too bad that he never really studied the Canons, and the rejection of errors. He could have avoided all this mix-up and self-righteousness, and its resulting discouragement.
• He basically builds his ideology from his personal experience and his gut feelings. “This is what it felt like, and then I realized that Christ did it all for me”. It reminds one of the twisting of Pauls’ personal experience in Romans 7 that RPs do to build their passivity theology.
• Min 28.45 he says that it just felt like it was wrong. It most certainly couldn’t have been that HE was wrong(!). In this moment of epiphany, he still doesn’t turn to Christ in any humility, nor does he exercise any faith in Christ. Neither does he turn from living by his own strength (and wits), and live now by faith. He simply turns against the very things that he was taught, as if that was the problem. This sounds too familiar.

• Min 35 he makes his point that his random reading of the Bible is when ‘it’ suddenly hits him. He doesn’t call it special revelation but that is what he is talking about. It becomes clear that he doesn’t compare scripture with scripture to verify this ‘truth’ that hit him. He just felt it. He merely finds other random verses that seem to validate what he was hit with, and dismisses the ones that don’t.
• Min 37.35 he again talks about one’s sins all being forgiven: past, present and future.
• Min 42.28 he tells us that the covenant is between God and Jesus. He does not teach that we are ‘in Christ’.
• Min 42.46 he explains that ‘all we have to do’ is ‘properly’ interpret scripture; “you can read it, you can study it, but when you interpret it ‘correctly’ then you will understand”.

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Whitten’s ‘preaching’ is not ‘thus saith the Lord’. Instead, it has a lot of personal stories and reflection. He built his ideology on his own experience. If you do not interpret scripture the way that he does, you are stubbornly still a legalist.

“The covenant of grace, which is God’s relationship of friendship and communion with his people in Jesus Christ, so that he is their God and they are his people, is unconditional”. This is the reformed teaching about the covenant. (7th paragraph in the link)
Whitten’s covenant is between God and Jesus. That’s it. God makes no demands on the people who believe that Jesus did it all, because they are now in a free ‘state of being of righteousness’. There is no demand to change your mind about your sin, no demand to change your actions. There are no demands to even change your attitude about anything. You only need to change what you believe God thinks about you, and Whitten will clearly explain to you exactly what God’s real attitude is!