Baptist Hero ping
About the time I started subscribing to the Sword of the Lord, John R. Rice got crosswise with Bob Jones Jr. over something. Exactly where their differences lay was never really very clear to me. But for a couple of years or so, Rice refused to carry any ads for Bob Jones University in his newspaper. That war was going on when I first encountered the fundamentalist movement. These two men, each of whom wanted to be seen as the dominant voice in the fundamentalist movement, were publicly at odds with one another. My strong feeling even then was that if fundamentalists allowed their movement to continue in that direction, they would soon be so fragmented that it would soon be impossible to speak of fundamentalism as a single, coherent movement. That is exactly what happened. And it happened sooner than I anticipated. When John Rice died in 1980, there was a war among his followers about who would become his successor and take his place as the de facto spokesperson and figurehead at the helm of the movement. Twenty-five years later, there is still no clear successor to John R. Rice as the leading figure of the fundamentalist movement. Today’s fundamentalists are more fragmented than ever. There are no clear leaders in the movement who are recognized and affirmed as leaders by the movement as a whole. Fundamentalists are not moving together in any clear direction. The fundamentalist movement is virtually dead....Excerpt from Dead Right: The Failure of Fundamentalism, by Phil Johnson, Executive Director of "Grace to You".
....it seems to me that any movement that could lionize Jack Hyles and produce hundreds of Hyles clones while deliberately exaggerating petty disagreements in order to portray almost every conservative evangelical outside the fundamentalist movement as a dangerous heretic really needs to die. And it would be my hope that whatever takes its place would be less superficial, more sober-minded, more doctrinally sound, and more faithful to Scripture than the party that always dutifully agreed with John R. Rice when he insisted that he was a great scholar....
....most fundamentalist leaders regard Charles Finney as a hero. They overlook his Pelagianism. They imitate his pragmatism. And some of them have even absorbed elements of his perfectionism. But Finney denied that the righteousness of Christ could be imputed to sinners, or that the guilt of sinners could be imputed to Christ. In other words, he denied the doctrine of substitutionary atonement. He rejected the classic Protestant understanding of justification by faith and held the view that it was the sinner’s own duty to convert himself. Yet fundamentalists have made him an icon. John R. Rice called Finney one of the greatest evangelists who ever lived. Yet the same fundamentalists who try to make a hero out of a heretic like Charles Finney will look for reasons to criticize any living Bible teacher or popular speaker who is outside the boundaries of the fundamentalist movement. They have to do that in order to justify a cultish devotion to their unbiblical application of the principle of separation.
I'm from the West and don't trust strangers that are hatless, dressed in a suit & tie riding into town on a light horse with a fundamentalist message. I guess that's why I like Pace, it ain't no NY salsa!
OUTSTANDING ARTICLE!
PRAISE THE LORD WE STILL HAVE BROTHERS LIKE JOHN RICE IN THE PULPIT!
Well, I don't see where he's he's ever been to Tibet, but he does appear to rank right up there with great evangelists like Brother Cloud and Billy Graham.
(Ducking for cover)
My church uses some of Dr. Rice's tracts.
I have a pamphlet by Dr. Rice on the last days. He does not seem to go deeply on what happens after the rapture.
On the other hand Curtis Hutson, current leader of the independent Baptists, is fully into Schofied's doctrine.
I heard Dr. Rice in the Triple Cities campaign mentioned in the article (note my screen-name). We also had his brother Bill for a campaign in our church in Binghamton. Bill also used the song leader Harry Clarke (mentioned in the article) in his meetings. I was very taken as a young boy in the Northeast with the "cowboy" connection. As a matter of fact, I believe it was Harry Clarke that wrote a chorus entitled "Sing as you ride" that was used in the meetings.
bump for later
On page 4, in the October 19, 1973 issue of Rice's The Sword of The Lord magazine, Rice wrote a book review titled "Tremendous! Remarkable! The Best Ever!" In the review of said book, Rice says "I am amazed at this encyclopedia of scholarly answers to these Bible questions."
The book reviewed was Dr. Rice, Here Are More Questions. It was his own book. Even though Rice "never accepted a salary for his ministry as editor" of Sword of the Lord, he wasn't above using it to generate for-profit sales of his own book.