Don Retson, a Canadian writer for the The Edmonton Journal, published the following on January 27, 2007. He interviewed Tony Campolo, noting that “Christianity Today calls the 71-year-old American [Campolo] one of the most influential preachers of the last 50 years.”
Q. Do you believe non-Christians can go to heaven?
A. That’s a good question to ask because the way we stand is we contend that trusting in Jesus is the way to heaven. However, we do not know who Jesus will bring into the kingdom and who He will not. We are very very careful about pronouncing judgment on anybody. We leave judgment in the hands of God and we are saying Jesus is the way. We preach Jesus, but we have no way of knowing to whom the grace of God is extended. Q. What is the position of “red-letter Christians” on the issue of women in the [pastoral] ministry? A. All of us in this group are supportive of women in the ministry. People who are opposed to it will cite certain verses to make their case, and we respect that. We just don’t agree. **What I think of Campolo has been documented on Fide-O here.
See my comments below for more about Campolo’s heresies.
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Jason Robertson is a husband and a father and a pastor. He is dedicated to leading and equipping his the Church with God’s word and biblical theology for life ministry, using a combination of pastoral, church planting and evangelism experience. He holds a Master of Divinity from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. He is experienced in church planting, evangelism, missions, and the training of pastors and Bible teachers.
Jason has been preaching the gospel since 1985, serving the first ten years of ministry as a Southern Baptist itinerant evangelist out of Milldale Baptist Church in Zachary, LA which ordained him in 1993. He has preached in hundreds of churches in over 30 States and 4 countries. He planted churches in Siberia, Russia in the summers of 1993 and 1994. He founded Murrieta Valley Church in California, which he planted in cooperation with the SBC NAMB in 2001. He also teaches ministry students at California Baptist University.
You can hear his sermons and read his manuscripts on sermonaudio.com. Just follow the link to "sermons" at the top of this page.
Well, I see we have a “Big Tent” evangelical here. I wonder if they think that there are, as yet, some undiscovered parchments in a cave where God lays out His option B for non-christians.
What a beautiful job of sounding like he answered the question. The Q was, “Do… NON-CHRISTIANS go to heaven?”
Answer, “We don’t know to whom God will extend his grace.” Duh!
It was a yes or no question. He turned his answer into an excellent response to,”Who do you think will make it into heaven?” Of course you can’t know that.
The question to ask him is, “What would you call someone to whom God has NOT extended grace, implying he will not enter heaven?”
I believe they’re called non-Christians.
The second answer is even better,
“We don’t agree with those who support their positions with Scripture”.
Most non-Christians don’t! (Oops… did I just make a judgment?)
Campolo said, We preach Jesus, but we have no way of knowing to whom the grace of God is extended.
What does that say about his beliefs about the authority of scripture.?
Tony Campolo’s vision is to change America’s churches, with radical new ideas that are not based from the Bible or its principles. Campolo is on Renovaré’s “Board of Reference.” Renovaré is a New Age, ecumenical organization that practices the “meditative” and “contemplative” lifestyle “of early Christianity. There are also many new age influences found in his books. Campolo writes favorably of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and does not let the readers know that Teilhard’s Christ is not the Christ of the Bible but the cosmic Christ of New Age spirituality. Campolo writes, “If the Shalom of God and the peaceable kingdom of Isaiah 11 are to become real, then new ways of thinking must be established. With some help from St. Francis and Teilhard de Chardin, we just might make it” (Tony Campolo, How to Rescue the Earth Without Worshiping Nature p. 89, (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1992).
He is also an extreme “Kingdom Now” proponent writing, “When Jesus saved us, He saved us to be agents of a great revolution, the end of which will come when the kingdoms of this world will become the Kingdom of our God”(Tony Campolo, Its Friday but Sundays Coming, p.106).
This errant theology also leads to his environmentalism and anti-war politics.
In Campolo’s book Partly Right the New Age philosophy of pantheism and man is divine is promoted: “We affirm our divinity by doing what is worthy of gods, and we affirm our humanity by taking risks only available to mortals. God had to become one of us before He could become heroic … Robert Schuller affirms our divinity, yet does not deny our humanity … isn’t that what the gospel is? Isn’t God’s message to sinful humanity that He sees in each of us a divine nature of such worth that He sacrificed His own Son so that our divine potentialities might be realized? … The hymn writer who taught us to sing “Amazing Grace” was all too ready to call himself a “wretch” … Forgetting our divinity and over-identifying with our [Freudian] anal humanity [Freud is responsible for a host of maladies that plague our contemporary society] … Erich Fromm, one of the most popular psychoanalysts of our time, recognized the diabolical social consequences that can come about when a person loses sight of his/her own divinity …”
In a television interview with Charlie Rose, January 24, 1997, speaking in the context of a Buddhist monk’s claim to know Jesus Christ, Campolo says, “I am saying that there is no salvation apart from Jesus, that’s my evangelical mindset. However, I’m not convinced that Jesus only lives in Christians.”
In an address at Prestatyn (UK) in 1988, Campolo expressed his “Jesus is in everyone” philosophy: “One of the most startling discoveries of my life was the realization that the Jesus that I love, the Jesus who died for me on Calvary, that Jesus, is waiting, mystically and wonderfully, in every person I meet. I find Jesus everywhere. The difference between a Christian and non-Christian is not that Jesus isn’t in the non-Christian–the difference is that the Jesus who is within him is a Jesus to whom he will not surrender his life. You say, “Are you saying that Jesus is present in everybody?” I am only telling you what it says in John 1:9; He is the light that lighteth every man, every woman that cometh into the world. The minute you start saying that God isn’t in some people, you’re on the verge of Fascism. Why? Erich Fromm saw that. The minute you can look at somebody and say God isn’t in him–he is only in Christians–that person is pure demon.”
Though Campolo denies he is a universalist he does say You can be saved by Jesus without believing in Him; even many who have rejected the Jesus of Evangelical preaching: “Many people have experienced the humanizing influence of Jesus through “I-Thou” encounters without being aware that they are experiencing Jesus. Their “I Thou” encounters revealed a presence that was totally other than the cultural deity they had come to know by that name . . . He is so different from the God of the theologians and philosophers” (A Reasonable Faith: Responding to Secularism, Anthony Campolo, p. 175).
In his book 20 Hot Potatoes, Campolo claims that homosexual behavior is not contrary to the will of God (p. 115).
In his book, Carpe Diem: Seize the Day (Word: 1994), he explains how he has discovered God’s feminine nature! (Chapter titled “Embracing the Feminine Side of God”): “There is a feminine side of God. I always knew this … It is this feminine side of God I find in Jesus that makes me want to sing duets with Him … Not only do I love the feminine is Jesus, but the more I know Jesus, the more I realize that Jesus loves the feminine in me. Until I accept the feminine in my humanness, there will be a part of me that cannot receive the Lord’s love. … There is that feminine side of me that must be recovered and strengthened if I am to be like Christ … And until I feel the feminine in Jesus, there is a part of Him which I cannot identify.” (pp. 85-88).
Campolo is aware his apologetics can be considered aberrant . In an appendix called “Warning from Mission Impossible: This Message Will Self-Destruction;” he presents a case of his beliefs are counted among others who brought reform: In some respects my theology, like any theology, is heresy, if by heresy we mean a presentation of God’s message that is incomplete, inadequate, and potentially dangerous. However, what can be said about what I have done can also be said, perhaps to a much lesser degree, about what was done in other stages of social-historical development by Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and Wesley (pp. 190-191).
In his book A Reasonable Faith he writes: “There are some warnings that I wish to issue to anyone reading this book. The first is to be aware that the theology expressed in this short volume represents a personal attempt to state my Christian faith in a way that might prove meaningful for my secularist friends. I am sensitive to the fact that any attempt to state the Gospel in the dominant categories of a culture inevitably leads to a distortion of the Gospel. Consequently, anyone who accuses me of violating the biblical message is correct” (p. 190).
One does not need to refute Campolo when he does such a good job of it himself.
http://www.answers.com/topic/tony-campolo
I have always contended that red-letter Bibles had the potential to harm. Having been converted out of liberal Anglicanism, I know how harmful it is to believe some parts of the Bible are more inspired than others. Tony Campolo and his ‘red-letter Christians’ are nothing more or less than old-fashioned liberals.