Perth Bible College, 1 College Court, Karrinyup

Reviews

• Joshua Beck

  21.01.2018
  ★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
  Perth Bible College advertises itself as Evangelical, but teaches the following. I studied two years of a BMin before pulling out _because_ of the College's stance towards the Bible, so don't confuse me with the negative reviewer whose name was not known to the College. I can attest to this information firsthand and am not confused or mistaken. I asked many questions from many different angles, and remained there for two years. I know what I'm talking about and have no grudges against PBC apart from the fact that it teaches all this and claims to be an Evangelical Bible College, equipping people for ministry. This is what PBC teaches:
  - the Bible is riddled with errors and inconsistencies
  - future-predicting prophecies (which were fulfilled later) were written after the event, and made to "appear" as though written earlier
  - God does not know the future
  - God is not omniscient. Does he even know what you're thinking, if you pray silently? Who knows? His knowledge is limited.
  - God makes mistakes. E.g. in the garden of Eden. Oops. Should have put a fence around that tree. NOT that the garden of Eden was real (according to PBC), however PBC will happily use it for some purposes, including to show that God makes mistakes.
  - The creation account is a myth, containing no factuality. In fact it is a refurbished Babylonian myth. If you believe in any part of it as literal, or even semi literal, or even symbolic of anything that really happened (in creation or even evolution), you are simplistic, naive and you don't understand the point of the creation account. It's not there to tell us what happened; it's there to .. um.. tell us something about God, but NOT that he is the creator.
  - Most accounts of things that happened in the Old Testament are to be read as stories, not taken at face value. PBC will say that "story" _was_ face value, and you are _not_ taking it at face value if you impose "factuality" on it. So, everything: creation, flood, Abraham, Moses, Exodus, Joshua, Samuel, Chronicles, Job, Jonah, Daniel - anything containing apparent historical information - is to be taken with a pinch of salt in terms of whether it really happened.
  - Demons in the New Testament are.. well.. actually, lecturers are very coy about saying anything about them, except that they can't exist outside of a person... so, there'd be no demons if there weren't people (with problems) so...
  - New Testament letters claiming to be written by someone, e.g. Paul, may have been written by someone else, who was in fact fraudulently claiming to have been the more famous guy.
  
  In fairness I don't know if all lecturers would agree with all of the above points, however, the main academic authority figure does hold to all of this. The CEO was taught by him, and has kept him in the position of academic authority for many years, knowing all this. Together, they hire and fire the other staff. I also had other lecturers whose views aligned with the above when I was at PBC. Yes, I raised my concerns with PBC directly - in class, out of class, to the CEO, to the lecturers.
  
  In the end, your faith will rest not on the Bible, but on scholarship. What scholarship? That's up to you. Whatever suits your opinions. But you'll probably be exposed to scholarship which helps you to end up thinking like PBC.
  
  Why isn't PBC's biblical stance more widely known? I've asked myself this question.
  - PBC does not initially release the full knowledge of what it teaches upon first year students; it understands that their brains have to be massaged before they will be willing to receive this stuff without being scandalised and letting the secrets get out into the community. So there will be first or second year students who have not yet had exposure to it.
  - Students who remain and graduate with a degree.. are obviously comfortable with these things, and will want to protect their investment.
  - So it really takes someone like me. A student who left before the end, and so has nothing to lose, but who also stayed long enough to be sure.

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