Woodbury said he had experiences of the “baptism in the Holy Spirit,” and seems to be describing his “mystic” involvement in the 1950s Southern Baptist Convention. He later said that these “love” feelings were from the devil, because they never led him to repentance and faith in the cross. According to him, the pastoral circles he was associated with were into a sort of Christian universalism and ecumenism. As a result of this, they downplayed the authority of Scripture and there was absolutely no preaching on sin, righteousness, and judgment; no preaching on eternal punishment, repentance, or substitutionary atonement, which he eventually found was being preached in the Sword of the Lord IFB type churches that followed Dr. John R. Rice. He had used the NRSV Bible, adhered to neo-orthodoxy (Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr), and theistic evolution. God was viewed only as Love, but not as a holy Judge that punishes the wicked eternally. There were a lot of smokers at the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, NC. And then he went to Crozer Theological Seminary in Upland, PA, which is an American Baptist school, which had cussing professors, who denied the deity, virgin birth, blood, and resurrection of Christ, preached universalism, and had a Jewish rabbi as a teacher. He said he never called Jesus “Lord” in prayer until after he was saved (1 Cor. 12:3). “I left the Southern Baptist Convention. I became an Independent Baptist preacher” (36:47), he said, because the SBC was filled with “modernism,” and this was in 1951: he said the SBC preachers didn’t really believe in the Bible as the Word of God. I’m sad to say, that I fear these sentiments are still alive and well in the SBC today, but there is some good among younger SBC pastors who look up to Paul Washer and Voddie Baucham. I fear that the same kind of liberal beliefs and attitudes are probably very alive and well in Assembly of God, Church of God (Cleveland), and the Pentecostal Holiness Church. I’d say that both Baptist and Pentecostal preachers that want to do right should not lose sight of Dr. John R. Rice and his Sword of the Lord materials. I’d also remain extremely wary of entering pastoral ministry at this point; and would be more inclined towards building an itinerant evangelistic ministry that feeds on the KJV Bible, Spurgeon, Finney, Wesley, Edwards, Whitefield, Ravenhill, Sword of the Lord, Kregel, and old books from Gospel Publishing House and Pathway Press. –J.B.

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R. A. Torrey, ed. The Fundamentals. 4 vols. (Baker Books, 2000).

Dr. Thomas C. Oden, After Modernity…What? (Zondervan, 1990).

Dr. Shelton Smith, Liberal Choices: Losing Causes (Sword of the Lord, 1997).

Carl Woodbury, How a Modernist Preacher Was Saved (Sword of the Lord, 1960).

J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (2009). HAS AUDIO BOOK.

Roger Olson, Against Liberal Theology (Zondervan, 2022). HAS AUDIO BOOK.

Dr. John R. Rice, The Evangelist (Sword of the Lord, 1968).

Mack Tomlinson, In Light of Eternity (Granted Ministries Press, 2019).