In an earlier article, “Kingdom Now: Bringing Heaven to Earth,” I said Bill Johnson of Bethel Church in Redding California distorts the meaning of Scripture to support his theology. I argued he is systematically deconstructing the theology and structure of the modern church. Johnson and Bethel assert a theology of the supernatural that goes beyond what Scripture and the church have claimed from the time of Pentecost. In his 2003 book, When Heaven Invades Earth: A Practical Guide to a Life of Miracles, he made several assertions that approach—if not go beyond—the boundary of heresy. Here we will examine the validity of Johnson’s claim, that “Jesus could not heal the sick.”
The above quote was the opening statement in chapter 2 of When Heaven Invades Earth. Johnson had just told of a healing miracle when he and other members of his church had prayed for a man. He commented that stories like this were becoming the “norm,” as people make room for God, “believing Him to be good 100 percent of the time.” He concluded chapter 1 with: “Our mandate is simple: raise up a generation that can openly display the raw power of God. This book is about that journey … the quest for the King and the Kingdom.”
He then said Jesus couldn’t heal the sick, raise the dead or deliver the tormented from demons, supposedly because of the self-imposed restriction to live as a man. Johnson cited John 5:19, saying “Jesus Christ said of Himself, ‘The Son can do nothing.’” He focused on the word “nothing” having the same meaning in the Greek as in English—nothing—understanding Jesus to be saying,
He had NO supernatural capabilities whatsoever! While He is 100 percent God, He chose to live with the same limitations that man would face once He was redeemed. He made that point over and over again. Jesus became the model for all who would embrace the invitation to invade the impossible in His name. He performed miracles, wonders, and signs, as a man in right relationship to God … not as God. If He performed miracles because He was God, then they would be unattainable for us. But if He did them as a man, I am responsible to pursue His lifestyle. Recapturing this simple truth changes everything … and makes possible a full restoration of the ministry of Jesus in His Church. (p. 29)
In Reckless Christianity, Holly Pivec and Doug Peivett noted this belief was a version of kenotic theology or kenoticism. According to the New Dictionary of Theology, kenoticism refers to, “a number of related Christological theories concerning the status of the divine in the incarnate Christ.” It is not a popular way of expressing the nature of the incarnation. “The reality of Jesus’ temptations, his single (as opposed to double) consciousness, and the depth of pathos of the cry of dereliction from the cross are universally affirmed today. In the 19th century these were often considered part of the kenoticists’ heretical innovations.” Modern evangelicals are “justifiably sceptical of any metaphysical speculation concerning the process of incarnation and sees the use of kenotic language as almost always inviting such speculation.”
They [Bethel] have this really, foggy kenosis with Christ that they keep tiptoeing around that isn’t good because … he’s [Jesus] either fully God and fully man or he’s not—because God can’t change. We can’t have a God that was God, stopped being God; only performed miracles as man and then became God again.
This quote was from a YouTube talk given by Jesse Westwood, “Breaking Bethel Episode 2 (Part 2).” Jesse is a graduate of Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry (BSSM), who thought “’everything Bethel’ was normal Christianity.” He eventually walked away from all things Bethel and Bethel affiliated churches and now seeks to help others on that same path. You can also listen to him on AGTV, Breaking Bethel, “Your First Week at BSSM (Part 2).
In Counterfeit Kingdom, Pivec and Geivett also said other NAR leaders beside Bill Johnson teach that when Jesus came to earth, He gave up the use of His divine powers and worked all His miracles as a mere man. Johnson and the other NAR leaders do not claim that Jesus ever stopped being divine, which would be heresy (and then should be condemned as such). But Johnson’s teachings on Scriptures such as John 5:19 and Philippians 2:7 subtly distort what they do mean, compounding the danger of this so-called “new” interpretation.
Distorting Scriptures
John 5:19 in the ESV says: “So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise.” Notice where Johnson edited his quote of the verse in When Heaven Invades Earth, leaving out that Jesus could do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. D.A. Carson said in his commentary on John, that a better translation would be ‘on his own initiative,’ and it does not mean that Jesus had even partial independence from the Father. Carson said 5:19-23 is structured around four gar (‘for’ or ‘because’) statements, and:
It is impossible for the Son to take independent, self-determined action that would set him over against the Father as another God, for all the Son does is both coincident with and coextensive with all that the Father does. ‘Perfect Sonship involves perfect identity of will and action with the Father.’ It follows that separate, self-determined action would be a denial of his sonship. But if this last clause of v. 19 takes the impossibility of the Son operating independently and grounds it in the perfection of Jesus’ sonship, it also constitutes another oblique claim to deity; for the only one who could conceivably do whatever the Father does must be as great as the Father, as divine as the Father.
Similarly distorted, when Philippians 2:7, says, “but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men” Paul did not teach that Jesus emptied Himself of His divine powers. In Counterfeit Kingdom, Pivec and Geivett pointed out the significance of Jesus emptying Himself is explained in the very next verse: “Jesus’s Incarnation is a manifestation of divine humility.”
By making Jesus out to be a model miracle worker, and looking for a way to justify this claim in Scripture, NAR teachings [and Bill Johnson] lower Jesus’s status and mislead people into thinking they can perform the same miracles He did.
In his commentary on Philippians, Grant Osborne noted Paul saying that Jesus Christ “emptied himself” in 2:7 has fueled debates for centuries, including what is known as the kenotic heresy, a view that Jesus emptied himself of divinity when he became human. Osborne said the key issue was whether the Greek verb kenoõ (to empty) was literal or figurative—meaning “to take the lower place” or “to make of no effect.” A modified kenotic approach, which seems to be what Johnson implies, sees Jesus divesting himself not of his deity, but his divine prerogatives such as omnipotence or omniscience, when he became the God-man. “The problem with this is that he still could demonstrate divine power, as in his nature miracles, and omniscience, as in his knowledge about Simon, Nathaniel, and the Samaritan woman (John 1:42, 47–49; 4:16–19).” A footnote for Philippians 2:7 in the Reformation Study Bible says:
Christ is not said to have removed from Himself either His deity or His identity as God. Instead, the Son of God added to his person a human nature without surrendering any of his divine attributes. The phrase means that He humbled Himself (v. 8), not relinquishing His divine being but embracing dishonor by becoming human.
In Reckless Christianity, Pivec and Geivett also noted that Jesus performed at least some of his miracles with his own, direct, divine power, giving as examples the calming of the sea, raising Lazarus from the dead, and others. But Johnson either doesn’t believe this, or he rejects the biblical evidence cited by Pivec and Geivett. They said Johnson likes to say, “Jesus modeled what it looks like to be full of the Holy Spirit.” (See a sermon by Bill Johnson at Bethel Church in 2021, “Jesus, Full of the Holy Spirit.”) After citing several Scriptures where Jesus is said to be full of the Spirit, Pivec and Geivett said: “It is a mistake to assume that we may be filled with the Spirit in the same way Jesus was in this instance, and that we can therefore do all that Jesus did in the same way Jesus was in this instance, and that we can therefore do all that Jesus did in dependence on the Spirit.”
In another sermon titled “When Heaven Invades Earth,” Bill Johnson alluded to how he was frequently misunderstood on this point, namely that Jesus lived his earthly life with human limitations. Here he paraphrased John 5:19 and did mention how the Son of Man could do nothing but what he sees the Father do. However, he again asserted the interpretation he gave of the verse in the book, When Heaven Invades Earth: “He couldn’t do anything.” All the stuff he was famous for, all the miracles he did were because the Spirit of God came upon him and revealed to him the very word of the Father. Although he doesn’t say so, it seems he almost thinks about Jesus the God-man as having two independent natures within one person. See this quote from the sermon:
So he was modeling something that could be done by any other believer. Now if I see Jesus doing extraordinary miracles in Scripture, and he did them as God, I’m impressed, but I’m not compelled to follow. . . But when I found out that he did it through Jesus, who in a sense put aside his access to everything as God, and instead tapped into it as an obedient yielded man, that was Spirit-filled if you will. When I realized that he did it as a man, yielded and surrendered to God, then suddenly I can’t stay where I’m at. I’m suddenly … I am compelled to pursue an example that was given to me, that changes everything.
Creedal Foundation of Orthodoxy
Bill Johnson’s view of Jesus Christ deconstructs an orthodox view of the Trinity and Christ, classically expressed in the Chalcedon and Athanasian Creeds. With the Athanasian Creed, Christianity confesses one God in three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Father is God, but not the Son or the Spirit. The Son is God, but not the Father or the Spirit. The Spirit is God, but not the Father or the Son. Nothing in this Trinity is greater or smaller; the three persons are coeternal and coequal with each other. The Athanasian Creed says:
Accordingly there is one Father, not three fathers;
there is one Son, not three sons;
there is one Holy Spirit, not three holy spirits.Nothing in this trinity is before or after,
nothing is greater or smaller;
in their entirety the three persons
are coeternal and coequal with each other.
In The Creeds of Christendom, Phillip Schaff noted the leading ideas of the Christology of the Creed of Chalcedon included an actual union of two natures, divine and human in one person. Christ as the God-man was not a double being with two persons; but one person both divine and human, without division or separation, “so that the divine will ever remain divine, and the human ever human, and yet the two have continually one common life, and interpenetrate each other, like the persons of the Trinity.” As Hebrews 13:8 says, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.”
The whole work of Christ is to be attributed to his person, and not to the one or the other nature exclusively. The person is the acting subject, the nature, the organ or medium. It is the one divine-human person of Christ that wrought miracles by virtue of his divine nature, and that suffered through the sensorium of his human nature. The superhuman effect and infinite merit of the Redeemer’s work must be ascribed to his person because of his divinity; while it is his humanity alone that made him capable of, and liable to, toil, temptation, suffering, and death, and renders him an example for our imitation.
In When Heaven Invades Earth, Johnson wrongly said: “Jesus lived His earthly life with human limitations. He laid his divinity aside as He sought to fulfill the assignment given to Him by the Father: to live life as a man without sin, and then die in the place of mankind for sin.” Jesus did not lay his divinity aside. He was one divine-human person who wrought miracles by virtue of his divine nature and suffered through his human nature. As stated in the Chalcedon Creed, Jesus Christ is:
Acknowledged in two natures unconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, and inseparably; the difference of the natures being in no way removed because of the union, but rather the properties of each nature being preserved, and both concurring into one person, one hypostasis; not as though He was parted or divided into two persons, but one and the self-same Son and only-begotten God, Word, Lord, Jesus Christ.
To support his extreme continuationist beliefs, Bill Johnson imposes a theology of the supernatural onto Scripture that distorts the coeternal and coequal Trinity and presents the God-man Jesus Christ as a divine person with a multiple personality disorder. For more critique of When Heaven Invades Earth, see “Deconstructing the Lord’s Prayer.”
