The couple explained that Gothard and other IBLP leaders would tell stories to illustrate these beliefs. Jeremy remembered a story of a businessman who bought a strip mall that he leased out to different businesses and who, despite honoring God in his business dealings, suddenly started to experience financial disaster. Then the man realized one of the businesses in the strip mall had a liquor license. So he got rid of that business from the strip mall, and everything got better for him.
“He didn’t know he was violating a principle, and so God was punishing him for that,” said Jeremy.
Instead of keeping people safe, what this view of sin does is “it actually cultivates…secrecy within the home,” Jeremy said. “And this is the major theological miss there. They miss the reality that sinfulness, or human rebellion against beauty and goodness, is a heart issue, not an ‘out there’ issue.”
“Christianity is a heart religion,” he emphasized. “It’s dealing with a transformation of the heart.” What Bill Gothard was actually promoting was asceticism, “this belief that we can attain holiness and purity by setting up external boundaries, removing bad influences from our lives.”
When people are “propping [themselves] up with these man-made rules, well, it’s just a matter of time before that’s all going to come crumbling down,” Jinger agreed. “And that’s where the difference between that and Christianity is, that when you are walking with God, the Spirit of God is working within you and causing you to walk in his ways.”
It is not that Christians are perfect or sinless. The difference is that Christians take their strength from “the work of Christ in our hearts, and the love of Christ constrains us,” she said.
Jeremy shared several Bible passages, particularly drawing from Colossians. “What hurts me, or or any Christian really,” he said, “is to see headlines and for people to go, ‘See that’s what Christianity produces,’ and to know, ‘No, Christianity is the opposite of that.’”
In Colossians 2, Paul wrote that he did not want the church to be deceived with “plausible arguments.” In verse 8, Paul said, “See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces of this world rather than on Christ.”
Gothard’s teachings “were plausible,” said Jeremy, but they were not centered on Christ. He described listening to more than 60 hours of Gothard’s teaching and wondering, “Where’s Jesus?”
Notably, at the end of Colossians 2, Paul warned against the futility of dealing with sin by means of asceticism:
Since you died with Christ to the elemental spiritual forces of this world, why, as though you still belonged to the world, do you submit to its rules: “Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!”? These rules, which have to do with things that are all destined to perish with use, are based on merely human commands and teachings. Such regulations indeed have an appearance of wisdom, with their self-imposed worship, their false humility and their harsh treatment of the body, but they lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence.
Jeremy and Jinger related the passage to Gothard’s rules on courtship, as well as Gothard’s encouragement that people make a commitment to God not to date or court for two, five, or even 10 years. These were “long commitments people would make, which is just completely wrong,” Jinger said, “and they would make these commitments and then have to hold to it. And then he would be like, ‘Okay, now when you’re courting, you have to follow all these rules for purity.’”
