Statement About Family Radio, by Mark Talbot
During 2001, Harold Camping, co-founder and president of Family Radio Network, began announcing "the end of the church age." Mr. Camping claims that God is no longer blessing and using local churches. He claims that God has now taken the task of evangelization away from the church and that he will only complete his call to all nations "by means of an organization like Family Radio." True Christians are no longer to submit to the authority of any local church body; indeed, obedience to God now requires them to remove themselves from the church, which is under God's judgment for its apostasy. On his week-day evening radio talk show "Open Forum" and at the Family Radio website, Mr. Camping actively urges local church bodies to disband and individual church-members to leave their local congregations.
Mr. Camping attempts to establish the truth of his claims from Scripture. Initially, his interpretation of Scripture may seem plausible. Yet it is based on drawing unwarranted associations between some biblical passages and reading inappropriate meanings into others.
The Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals has been gravely concerned about Mr. Camping's claims from their first airing. We, with Christians everywhere, affirm that the church is Christ's bride which he has promised to cherish and preserve until he comes again. We find Mr. Camping's claims regarding the end of the church age to twist the Scriptures in a way similar to that against which the apostle Peter warns at the end of his second letter; and so we admonish our fellow Christians, in Peter's words, to take care not to be carried away by these errors and thus lose their own stability (see 2 Pet. 3:16, 17).
At the Alliance's April 2002 board meeting it was agreed that several representatives of the Alliance should meet with Mr. Camping to beseech him to acknowledge his errors. This meeting took place in June 2002 but to no avail.
We note that Mr. Camping has misinterpreted the Scriptures before. In a book entitled 1994? he predicted that Christ would return in September of that year. His conclusions then, as now, were based on faulty and indeed fanciful biblical exegesis. Nineteen-ninety-four has come and gone without our Lord's return, exposing the unreliability of Mr. Camping's exegetical methods and the folly of following him.
We at the Alliance take no joy in noting the declension of an organization that God has used since its founding in 1956. Yet we would not be faithful to our Lord and God if we were not to warn those who come in contact with it that Family Radio Network has become the home of serious error.
-Mark R. Talbot, Vice-Chair of the Alliance Council
Note: A fuller defense of our position will be available on the Modern Reformation website in September.