Question: What does Les Feldick teach that is false?
Les Feldick was definitely one of the most approachable Bible teachers you could listen to. My aunt watches his show daily, and I’m very happy that she does. Because of his mid-Acts dispensationalism, he got a great deal of doctrine right, especially when it came to daily Christian living. His clear distinction between Israel and the Body of Christ, his emphasis on Paul’s unique apostleship, and his unshakable teaching of salvation by grace through faith give believers a simple, solid foundation for walking with the Lord day by day.
When it came to explaining the gospel in plain terms, Feldick excelled. He had a way of cutting through tradition and making Scripture come alive for everyday life. He even got it right about there being no requirement to be water baptized, which almost no one gets right these days. On these issues there is no disagreement. There’s virtually no daylight at all between what Les taught and what Bob taught and what I personally believe today when it comes to most of what Les talks about on his daily television show. It is definitely worth the time to watch.
There are, however, important areas where I believe he fell short. I will briefly touch on a few of the most significant.
While he rejected Covenant Theology, he still carried over parts of classical theism that, in my view, distort the nature of God. Chief among these is the traditional idea of immutability that goes far beyond God’s moral character and personality, presenting Him as unresponsive and unchanging in every respect. This idea that God cannot change in any way whatsoever is the premise upon which Covenant Theology is built. Indeed, the entire system of Calvinism flows logically from that single premise. He accepted the premise and rejected its natural conclusion. I doubt he was fully aware that he was making such a clean error, but that does not change the fact that he was doing so.
While Les rejected Calvinism generally and Covenant Theology in particular, he did not reject all of the doctrines that are predicated on the belief that God cannot change in any way whatsoever. He held to views on God’s foreknowledge, sovereignty, and relationship to time that are all but indistinguishable from Calvinism’s teaching on these issues and which clearly differ from Enyart’s teaching and my own. Feldick saw God’s foreknowledge as exhaustive and definite in every respect, meaning all future events were fully known as fixed before they occurred. He often spoke of God’s sovereignty in terms of total control over everything that happens, rather than as God being the highest authority who can allow genuine freedom within His rule, which is the biblical teaching. In addition, he taught that God exists outside of time, regarding time as meaningless to Him. These positions, while common in evangelical teaching, blur God’s relational engagement with His creation and make it impossible to take the biblical record of His interactions at face value. Whole swaths of Scripture are rendered almost meaningless, transformed into lengthy “figures of speech” that must be taken to mean the opposite of what they plainly say.
Feldick also accepted the standard evangelical view of original sin, teaching that all humanity is spiritually dead because of Adam’s transgression. I believe this misses the mark in a couple of different ways. First, it ignores the whole of Ezekiel 18, which emphatically teaches that God does not hold people guilty because of the sin of their ancestors. Second, it overlooks the universal effect of Christ’s work at Calvary, which resolved the impact Adam’s sin had on his race and allowed God to act toward mankind in a manner consistent with justice, holding people responsible only for the sins they commit themselves. In this understanding, people are spiritually alive until they personally sin, and it is at that point they become in need of salvation through union with Christ. That difference changes how we think about the state of humanity and the way we present the gospel.
His view of faith leaned toward the common evangelical definition, trusting God’s word without necessarily seeking full rational grounding. I see it differently. True biblical faith is reasoned trust, rooted in objective truth and sound logic. Faith that is not anchored in reality as God has revealed it can drift into superstition or mysticism.
And then there is
Logos in John 1:1. Feldick followed the usual translation of “Word” without digging into the depth of the term. I believe
Logos is best understood as “Logic,” or “Reason,” not merely as an abstract idea but as the living rational principle at the heart of God’s being. This understanding of John’s use of the word
Logos changes the way we understand both the passage and the Person it describes, as well as the role sound reason should play in our doctrine and in our daily lives. It may seem like a small issue, but it has an enormous doctrinal impact.
So, I can recommend Les Feldick in many areas, particularly where his mid-Acts perspective shines, which happens to be the vast majority of his content. Yet it is wise to study his work with discernment, as with anyone’s teaching. His strengths are real, and they are substantial. So much so that I will say again what I said in a previous post: Les Feldick is much better than any other person who airs on Christian television, by a rural Oklahoma country mile!
Clete
P.S. I made a LOT of claims in this post that might be trying to make your head explode! For the sake be brevity, I intentionally made no effort to establish any of those claims but am more than happy to do so. Please feel free to ask me any question that this post generates in your mind. By all means, challenge me to defend anything you wish to challenge me on. That's what I'm here for!
