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But the group has not renounced Lee's most controversial teachings, and that's the key problem for critics such as Calvin Beisner, formerly of CRI.

Beisner faults Lee on a number of points, including two forms of modalism condemned by the early church's ecumenical councils, and said no critics who have changed their mind—including his sister, Passantino Coburn—have yet documented how former concerns about Lee were actually misrepresentations.

"Merely issuing doctrinal statements that are orthodox so far as they go but do not explicitly repudiate the contrary statements of Lee is not sufficient," Beisner said. "As Francis Schaeffer insisted again and again, in our postmodern world we must not only say what we believe, but also must deny what we don't believe. The Worldwide Church of God set a good example in the 1980s, repudiating the heretical teachings of its founder Herbert W. Armstrong, and it is not asking the Local Church too much to do the same."

But Hanegraaff says members of the local churches demonstrate theological acumen: "I have witnessed in them a keen interest in doctrinal precision sadly missing today in major segments of the evangelical community."

Passantino Coburn says the group's remaining critics should engage in deeper research. She said that further reading about the group's teachings revealed connections with persecuted churches and ancient Eastern church history, such as a "less purely analytical but more fully personal theology."

"When I applied the templates of the persecuted church and Eastern church to the local churches, I saw that, regardless of their formal association or derivation, the similarities were unmistakable, understandable, and fully within orthodoxy," she told Christianity Today. "This does not mean that I agree with every local church teaching, nor does it mean that I do theology like the local churches. But it does mean that I can more fully understand and appreciate that theology, and can be confident that while different, it is not heretical."

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The booklet is available at the Defense and Confirmation Project's "Contending for the Faith" site.

Previous Theology in the News columns are available on our site.

Earlier Christianity Today coverage of the dispute includes the February 2003 news story "Local Church fights for evangelical ID card" and a March 2006 editorial, "Loose Cult Talk: There just might be a better way to solve theological disputes."

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January (Web-only) 2009, Vol. 53