Tim LaHaye is writing ridiculous forewords again. James White recently mentioned LaHaye's foreword for C. Gordon Olson's Getting the Gospel Right: A Balanced View of Salvation Truth. I have the original Olson effort, the 538-page Beyond Calvinism and Arminianism: An Inductive Mediate Theology of Salvation. He was having trouble giving them away at the ETS meeting I attended a few years ago, but I accepted one from him to reduce his packing burden for his return trip and browsed it briefly before growing weary. Now Olson has a trimmed down 374-page paperback to make his anti-Reformed message more accessible.

Tim LaHaye, infamous for helping Jerry Jenkins develop the eternal Left Behind series, also wrote a foreword to Dave Hunt's atrocity, What Love is This?, making the absurd claim that Hunt's collection of misunderstandings and misrepresentations "may well be the most important book written in the 21st century."

I was just about over the trauma of that endorsement when I found LaHaye weighing in on Olson's new project:

What I find interesting is that in spite of its incredible distribution, no scholar to date has attempted to refute it or anything in it. As another who was impressed with the book said, "The reason no one has attempted to refute it is that they cannot." I would agree.

Ludicrous. Embarrassing. Yes, even pathetic. I'm saddened to see that the man who co-founded the college I attended, and once watched me play foosball in the student lounge, has sunk to such depths. Did he read either this book or Hunt's? If so, I honestly have to wonder if senility has set in. If not, he has no right to put his name to glowing endorsements full of untruths about second-rate propaganda pieces. It's one thing to tell us that he enjoyed a book, but to say that no scholar has even attempted to refute the contents is laughable. The man-focused view of salvation espoused by these haters of the doctrines of God's sovereignty has been thoroughly and systematically rebutted more than once, and if few scholars have tackled Olson's work, it is because neither book has made a big enough ripple in the theological community to be noticed.

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