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Ed Smith vs. the Bobgans

I want to also address the grievance that Ed Smith has against the Bobgan expose book, which Smith wrote about in a recent newsletter, and included in the 4th edition of his book.

Ed Smith says that the Bobgans violated the Matt 18 "If a brother sins against you..." clause by publishing a book and publicly denouncing his teachings without coming to him first in private. But if so, then why did Smith respond by publicly denouncing the Bobgans' ministry and expose writings, without making any attempt to first contact the Bobgans in private? This is incredibly hypocritical. The Bobgans' position, however, is that Ed Smith did not "sin against them" in any way, so the Matt 18 exhortation was not applicable. Rather, they point out that this is an issue of doctrine in the public domain, and he should be open to and expect public scrutiny. On the other hand, Smith testifies to the fact that he believes that Matt 18 did apply, and so implicitly condemns himself by not practicing what he preaches.

What is as significant to me is that, apparently, Smith did not submit his teaching to anyone in a leadership position in the church at large today before going public with it. In fact, the first edition of his book is full of grammatical, spelling, and other errors of form, he says, because of his own haste in getting the teaching out to the public as quickly as he possibly could.

That said, I still feel that the Bobgans would have done better to have approached him in person at the start, considering theirs would be the ground-breaking expose of his teaching. They didn't sin, but I think it would have been a better decision for them to have at least made an attempt to correct him privately. And I think it would have also been a better Christian witness if they had gone that route.

Meanwhile, in the same breath that Smith condemns the Bobgans over the Matt 18 issue, he psychoanalyzes their motives on the spot and diagnoses them to be wounded people who are misdirecting their woundedness in their agenda against him. And that without ever having had a single conversation with them!

The more I read the primary source material, the more I see a man who is simply naive, spiritually and doctrinally immature and, quite frankly, not very bright either.