You should care because Clark Whitten acknowledges Jack Taylor as his spiritual father. Therefore, Taylor’s charismatic ideas influence the hyper-grace movement.
Hyper-grace teachers, and charismatics like Taylor, teach experiencing God as a spiritual exercise that draws one closer to Papa God. They teach that one’s obedience and walk springs forth spontaneously from that experience. This is because, to them, your sanctification is strictly a new state of being of holiness.
Therefore sanctification has no progression for you in this life. Taylor’s teaching also affirms the idea of ‘no progress in holiness’ since the Spirit leads individuals directly, as already fully holy.
Charismatics and the RPs
It cannot be overlooked that the rhetoric of the Reformed Protestants echoes these same ideas. “Obedience is the inevitable fruit of experiencing fellowship with God by faith”, Sara Doezema, Acts of Synod 2019, page 214.
Many have stated from at least 2017, that sanctification is full and complete, particularly Mrs. Meyer. By this emphasis she, and her followers, could be understood to be teaching that sanctification is strictly a new state of being of holiness, just like hyper-grace teachers. These people have stated often over the years that ‘progressive sanctification’ is heresy and legalism. Whitten also calls it heresy, and legalism.
Why you should care about the Father/Son Paradigm
You should care because this paradigm retains the kernel of truth that the covenant is a relationship; a living relationship that believers enter already here on earth. But as Taylor teaches this pattern, he emphasizes a personal relationship with God that omits true christian faith. And, he omits preaching as the means through which the Spirit works that faith.
Taylor does not explain the relationship as one through Christ, but as one passed from a ‘spiritual father’ to a ‘spiritual son’. It’s called a ‘baptism of love experience’. This pattern is not a picture of the covenant but the actual structure of the covenant.
For Taylor, Christ and His Bride, the church, is not part of his ideology. And marriage is not the picture of the covenant.
‘Experience’ vs faith
In Taylor’s ideology, covenant life is: a shared intense spiritual experience with God by fellowship between fathers and sons at multi-generational gatherings. Taylor’s idea sounds like the biblical teaching of the ‘line of generations’, but it leaves Christ out as the mediator of our fellowship with God.
For Taylor and others, this is the system through which the Spirit powerfully reveals himself to man. Get that, the Spirit reveals himself, not Jesus Christ.
So, the charismatic teaching that the Spirit gives us direct experience of God puts the Spirit as another mediator.
But, a believer’s focus needs to be Jesus Christ, the “author and perfecter of our faith”, Hebrews 12:2; not on oneself, one’s experiences, or even the Holy Spirit. One of the cardinal Reformation principles was that of solo Christo. Jesus said that the Holy Spirit would point to the Son, not himself.
Something to note
Many of the charismatic leaders became charismatic after a time of what they considered personal spiritual draught. Hyper-grace teachers make the same claim of spiritual drought, or spiritual lethargy due to a ‘treadmill’ they found themselves on. Both groups blame the doctrine of the message.
They also all conclude that their new, illumined understanding sets them free to ‘do nothing’.
Taylor’s spiritual son, Leif Hetland relates, “I always had to do something to have something to become something and I just realized that this has become an issue (min 1:50) … I get my value based upon what I do (min 7:04)”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTMgZpKOprE
The subtitle of the video states, “Papa God is transforming hearts, so his children no longer have to DO something in order to HAVE something in order to BECOME something. God wants to heal hearts, so we no longer live from pressure but from his pleasure.”
Now, there is real truth in his statement, we do nothing in/for our justification. But this does not mean there is no purposeful obedience to Christ’s commands in sanctification. Hetland blurs justification and sanctification.
Why it matters here at A Strait Betwixt Two
It shows that the hyper-grace movement is not a new, distinctively reformed improvement on the former Reformation.
Like charismatic thinking, hyper-grace replaces Christ, and faith in Him, with experiences.
Looking into Taylor shows the hyper-grace movement is in fact, rooted in the charismatic movement.
Hyper-grace teachers already dabble in its many errors of practice. Crowder promotes mystical ways of ‘experiencing the Father’ as does Whitten and even Tullian Tchividjian. This experiencing is more important than obeying the words of Christ in scripture.
They, and others like Joseph Prince and Ryan Rufus, also teach additional, revelatory messages. And, as noted in another post, Nate Langerak has already claimed, “I heard from my God … that word came to me as the living desire of my heart … And God said …”.
Think on these things
Think about all this charismatic emphasis on spiritual experience and experiencing the Spirit. And, out of that experience, one lives.
In light of that teaching, consider what Sara Doezema writes, “It must be clear that all of our obedience comes after, as the inevitable fruit of our experience of covenant fellowship by faith”, Acts 2019, page 216.
In other words, obedience is the fruit of fellowship, it’s the fruit of experiencing fellowship, it comes after the experience.
Like the charismatics, spiritual experience in the RP camp trumps faith. Experience even produces fruit! Whereas faith does not. The experience saves.
However, experience is subjective, faith is objective; that object is Christ.
Spiritual ‘experience’ itself does not show us God, or connect/unite us to Him. Faith in Christ is how we are united to God in Christ by the Holy Spirit; and faith is lively.
In summary
To charismatics, hyper-grace teachers, and now Reformed Protestants, it is a foreign idea that faith produces fruit. They accuse reformed phrases like: ‘we obey out of faith’ or ‘by faith we obey’ to be legalism, works-righteousness, or earning with God. To them, faith does nothing, it is not lively.
But experience of covenant fellowship, from our perspective, is obedience – faith’s fruit. We can’t use our eyes to see faith, we can’t run a test in a lab to find it. But ‘faith worketh by love’. How do I know God loves me? I walk in His ways. How do I know I love God? I walk in His ways. John 14:15, John 14:21-23, and 15:10.
Obedience does not wait for experience of fellowship, it is our covenant life of fellowship, Prov. 4:3-5, 7:1-2.
“Such a faith … that worketh by love, which excites man to the practice of those [good] works, which God has commanded in His Word.” ~BC, art. 24.
Listen here for more from Prof. Huizinga on true fellowship.
