Question

About a year ago a friend of mine came to me and let me read one of his books called, The Fourth Dimension. It was written by Dr. Paul Cho, the pastor of the world’s largest church. I was very distressed as I read the book. My question to you is, “Have you read the book?” and “What do you know about the man?”

Answer

Paul Cho is a Korean pastor, pastor of the world’s largest church, I guess. At least they have a lot of people going there. They have probably 200,000 members or something. Part of it is a Korean phenomenon, it’s a cultural phenomenon. I feel that basically, I have read much of what Cho has written, I have interacted with a lot that’s been written about him. In fact, I just finished last night, sitting in my easy chair, reading a book called The Seduction of Christianity by Dave Hunt. A book which I had prior read when it was in manuscript form and it was about twice as long and had a lot more to say until the editors got a hold of it, you know. But, in that he deals very, very carefully with men who are on the Christian scene, who are in one way or another deceiving people. Men like Kenneth Hagen, Kenneth Copeland, Frederick Price, Robert Schuller, and Paul Cho. Cho comes across on the surface as an evangelical and he identifies very overtly with evangelicals, but if you begin to look deeply into his theology and his viewpoint, you see that it basically is syncretistic, it’s an eclectic, it’s a collection of all kinds of things. It’s strongly Pentecostal/Charismatic. It is strongly into what Hunt likes to think of as forms of sorcery, white magic and the occult. It is also infused with some of their old traditional ancestor worship and some of their old religion. 

For example they have this place called Prayer Mountain, where people go for hours and hours and pray, and we would say isn’t it wonderful that they pray, but if you were to go there, you would see them doing this kind of thing, which is a genuflecting and repeating the same thing over and over, hour after hour. So, he is a hybrid of many things. It’s difficult to put the finger on it because there are times where he will articulate the Gospel as we know the Gospel, but it is laced with all of that health, wealth, prosperity, healing, kind of thing, that’s sort of a white magic approach. In other words, if you put all of the right gimmicks together and say all right words…in fact much of that stuff is almost like a mantra in transcendental meditation (TM), where you just keep telling yourself something is true over and over and over again. You keep reciting it and claiming it and claiming it and claiming it and claiming it until it happens, so I do not believe that Cho is a full thorough going Biblical evangelical. I think that he is a syncretistic eclectic who has collected a whole lot of different things. He has a high appeal in his nation because a lot of the things that those people look for and experience in their own culture are made available through that religion, and there is the promise of health and wealth and happiness, which is always the ticket to some amount of success, but I don’t want to deny that in the middle of it all, he articulates the Gospel and no doubt that has an affect on people…a positive affect. But that’s what makes it difficult.