THE ALPHA COURSE
by Chris Hand
Presented here by Rev. Ken Silva, Southern Baptist pastor-teacher
,Nov 30, 2012
Is the popular Alpha Course leading people astray?
Many people have been greatly impressed by the
Alpha course. Designed to be an introduction to the Christian faith through
talks, video presentations, small-group discussions and a special weekend-away,
lots of churches are now employing it as part of their outreach.
In the eyes of many it has been a run-away-success
and its fame has spread far beyond the UK, and Holy Trinity Brompton, the
London church where it originated.
It is no exaggeration to say it has spread right
across the world and is now finding friends in several continents. It has been
adapted so as to be accessible to young people and has also proved versatile
enough to be used in prisons, schools and places of work.
Churches in inner cities and rural areas have
found it sufficiently flexible for their needs. Future plans for expansion
suggest that Alpha is very much here to stay. What is more, many people claim
to have been helped through going on the Alpha course and believe it has ought
them an understanding of God and how to respond to Him. Testimonies and
accounts of wonderful things that have happened to individuals abound; In the
light of all this, surely there cannot be anything wrong with it?
With so many in today’s society gripped by
materialism and atheism, can Alpha be anything other than a good thing? As
young people become hopelessly enmeshed in a godless culture, should we not
applaud the efforts of Alpha and help make it a success?
We wished that the answers to these questions
could be an emphatic Yes. But closer examination of Alpha prevents such a clean
bill of health being given to it. Why this concern? There are six vital reasons
we would like to bring to your attention.
1. The God
of Alpha is not the God of the Bible.
Alpha quotes from the Bible a lot. It cannot be
faulted on that. But for all this it does not present us with the God who has
revealed Himself in the Bible. There is much we could say about the God of the
Scriptures. He is the Creator of the universe and the one who upholds it and
maintains it. He is a great King and Sovereign over all He has made. We are
challenged to ponder:
” To whom then will you liken me. Or to whom shall
I be equal? says the Holy One. Lift up your eyes on high, and see who has
created these things, Who brings out
their host by number; He calls them all by name,
By the greatness of his might and the strength of his power; Not one is
missing.” (Isaiah 40:25-26)
He is high and holy. He dwells in heaven and is all-glorious.
Nothing impure can live in His presence. For those that fall short of His glory
and perfection, there is judgement that follows (Romans 6:23)
Now of course much more could be said. But you
will have to search hard and long in Alpha to find a God that resembles the One
just described. Nothing about Him as Creator, nothing about Him as a great
King. He is assumed rather than described. The Bible tells us “It is a fearful
thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Hebrews 10:31). But we would
not be any wiser of this from going on the Alpha Course. It simply fails to
tell us anything we need to know about God.
2. The
plight of man in Alpha is not as serious as in the Bible.
Man’s state until he is reconciled to God is not a
happy one. Psalm 7:11 tells us God is a just judge, And – “God is angry with
the wicked every day”. The gospel of John makes this abundantly plain: He who
believes in the Son has everlasting life; and he who does not believe the Son
shall not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him. (John 3:36) Man without
God is subject to the wrath of God. We are not slightly displeasing to Him. It
is not that we have occasional faults and foibles that surface. It is what we
are by nature.
The apostle Paul explains that we are “by nature
children of wrath” (Ephesians 2:3). This is very strong language and leaves us
in no doubt. We have offended against God and broken His holy law. We are
sinners in His sight and deserve condemnation. It is as straightforward as
that.
By contrast, Alpha does not use strong terms and
leaves us rather unclear about where we stand. As one follows its argument, sin
is more to be seen in the way we have messed up our lives (Gumbel 1994: 44,47).
It is an inward-looking description of man’s state that majors on his feelings
of fearfulness (Gumbel 1994:22). It is a picture of man predominated by his
feelings of sadness and unhappiness (Gumbel 1994:12-22). sup1/sup.
Now of course these things are all true. This is
what life is like for sinners. It is a miserable life for them. Yet this is to
major on the consequences of sin rather than sin itself. These are the miseries
that follow inevitably because we are sinners.
The problem, however, is more serious than simply
sin’s consequences. Alpha fails to tell us that ultimately we have offended God
and courted His displeasure. We have sinned against God and are justly under
His judgement. We are people “…having no hope and without God in the world”
(Ephesians 2:12). For all the gravity of sin, Alpha never allows us to feel too
bad about ourselves. It never permits us to see ourselves in God’s sight. That
is a big omission.
3. The
Jesus Christ of Alpha is not the Jesus Christ of the Bible.
This may surprise us. Alpha appears to have quite
a lot to say about the Lord Jesus. It tells us what He did, what He said, the
claims He made about Himself and establishes beyond doubt that the resurrection
actually took place.
But despite having part of the course entitled
‘Why did Jesus die?’, it is unable in the final analysis to answer this
question. This is a core issue.
Christ died because God’s holy justice required
it. Our lives were forfeit. We had sinned and were helpless. Christ had to die
in the place of sinners who truly deserved to bear the penalty for their sin.
Christ’s death propitiated or appeased the wrath of God (Romans 3:25,1 John
2:2). Alpha has not described God to us and therefore has no meaningful place
for God’s wrath. Christ’s death ends up having to satisfy some abstract
principle of justice that has somehow become detached from God Himself.
Alpha’s own illustrations and attempts to explain
get us no closer to the heart of the matter (Gumbel 1994:19-20;47-48). Christ’s
death upon the cross becomes an act of love but without any real connection
with the reality of judgement and God’s wrath. All we are left with is the
impression that Christ has sacrificed Himself to rescue us from the
consequences of sin because that was required by some impersonal and rather
arbitrary justice system. It is all rather mysterious. This is not the Christ
of Scripture.
4. The love
of God in Alpha is not the love of the God of the Bible.
The Bible is clear that ‘God is love’ (1 John
4:8). Alpha tells us this too. There is a difference, however. In Alpha God is
love and little else. There is not much else that He can be as the course has
missed all the aspects of His great character that refer to His holiness and
glory. We are left with love.
The God of the Bible is love but it is love that
is seen in His willingness to save sinners. We are told, “For God so loved the
world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should
not perish but have everlasting life.” (John 3:16)
Why did the Lord come? To save sinners. What moved
God to do this? His love. This is what makes His love so special and wonderful.
It is that such a holy and glorious God should save sinners. This is clear from
Romans 5:8 as well, But God demonstrates his own love towards us, in that while
we were still sinners, Christ died for us. God’s love is evident in that He
acted to save sinners. Here we see the glory of Christ’s love. But without the
context of God’s holiness and absolute perfection, the meaning of that love is
lost to us. Instead God merely becomes an emotional being of unconditional love
divorced from any true understanding of His true nature and being. Alpha’s God
will give us an emotional high and make us feel special. The God of the Bible
will give us eternal life. There is a big difference between the two.
5. The Holy
Spirit of Alpha is not the Holy Spirit of the Bible.
There is more space in Alpha devoted to the Holy
Spirit than to the Lord Jesus. This is surprising given what Scripture says
about the Holy Spirit (John 16:13-14). Why does Alpha do this? It is because
Alpha’s ‘Holy Spirit’ is the agent for giving to people an ‘experience’ that is
going to make God real to them.
The main focus for this is the ‘Holy Spirit
Weekend-Away’. People doing Alpha are told to expect all manner of things might
happen to them. We are told, Sometimes, when people are filled, they shake like
a leaf in the wind. Others find themselves breathing deeply as if almost
physically breathing in the Spirit. (Gumbel 1994:136). It is not restricted to
this, however.
Physical heat sometimes accompanies the filling of
the Spirit and people experience it in their hands or some other part of their
bodies. One person described a feeling of ‘glowing all over’. Another said she
experienced ‘liquid heat’. Still another described ‘burning in my arms when I
was not hot’. (Gumbel 1994:136)
This is all very interesting but it has nothing to
do with the Holy Spirit as known through the pages of Scripture. Nowhere are
any phenomena such as these attributed to the work of the Holy Spirit. Alpha’s
‘Spirit’ appears to work in ways that lie outside the confines of Scripture.
Whoever it is that people are ‘introduced’ to at the Alpha Weekend, it is not
the Holy Spirit. But whoever the mysterious guest is, he is equally at home
among the ecstatic gatherings of New Age enthusiasts and non-Christian
religions alike.
6.
Conversions in Alpha are not like conversions in the Bible.
On the Day of Pentecost, Peter’s hearers were
‘…cut to the heart…'(Acts 2:37). The Philippian jailer asked urgently ‘Sirs,
what must I do to be saved?’ (Acts 16:30). They understood that they were
sinners. They realised that they needed mercy. It was clear to them as it was
to the believers in Thessalonica that the gospel was ‘…in truth, the word of
God…’ (1 Thessalonians 2:13).
Conversions in Alpha come differently from this.
More often than not it is an emotional experience about the love of God but
without any understanding of holiness or the need to be saved from our sins.
There is no recognition of the need to repent and to turn to God as a matter of
life and death. People feel forgiven but do not seem to have realised the depth
of their sinfulness or repented of their sin. People feel cleansed without
having consciously put their faith in Christ. Often this happens when people
are in some ecstatic state. Alpha may regard this as conversion but it is not
what we find in the Bible.
For all its efforts, Alpha does not help us to
know God. It does not describe the true and living God for us. It does not
diagnose man’s condition accurately enough. It is unable to adequately account
for Christ’s death and substitutes an unbiblical view of God’s love and God’s
Holy Spirit in its place. To cap it all, the whole issue of conversion is
grievously misunderstood. By sparing us the ‘bad news’ about ourselves, it is
unable to supply us with the ‘good news’.
The needs of our souls for biblical and
life-saving truth are far too precious and important to be ought down to this
level. It needs the unvarnished truth of the Scriptures. We may merely succeed
in adding people to our churches who have never been converted. That will be no
help to them and no help to our churches either.
To leave someone believing they are converted when
they are not is an awful prospect. Yet that is what we are risking using
defective tools such as Alpha, ‘having a form of godliness but denying its
power’ (2 Timothy 3:5). We must do better. Failure is too high a price to pay.
(Nicky Gumbel quotes in this article taken from “Questions of
Life”, Kingsway, Eastbourne, 1994)