Larry has been accused by foes of being a Walter Martin robot. Who was Walter Martin? Walter Ralston Martin (September 10, 1928 – June 26, 1989), was an American Evangelical Christian minister and author who founded the Christian Research Institute in 1960 as a para-church ministry specializing as a clearing-house of information in both general Christian apologetics and in countercult apologetics. As the author of the influential "The Kingdom of the Cults" (1965), he has been dubbed the "godfather of the anti-cult movement". From 1955 to 1965 Martin enjoyed a relationship with Zondervan publishers where he was appointed as director of cult apologetics publications. During this period Zondervan released several publications about cults under his direction, with at least eight books and four booklets written by Martin. His earliest countercult books included Jehovah of the Watchtower, The Christian Science Myth, The Christian and the Cults and The Maze of Mormonism.
In his first handbook, The Rise of the Cults, he wrote about Jehovah's Witnesses, the Theosophical Society, Mormonism, Christian Science, the Unity School of Christianity, and Father Divine, with an exhortation to the church to treat the cults as an important mission-field. Most of the contents of his earliest books reappeared in his major textbook The Kingdom of the Cults, which was first released in 1965, and has reputedly sold more than 1,000,000 copies worldwide.
Martin's primary approach to assessing cults was to focus on doctrinal issues, particularly those concerning the person, nature and work of Christ. Martin emphasized research and quoted directly from the teachings of the cults. |
