Several years ago, we broke the news that Hank Hanegraaff — known as “The Bible Answer Man” — had departed the faith deeply held by Protestants rooted on the five solas and, particularly, salvation by grace alone through faith alone, and joined the Eastern Orthodox Church. This news left us the victim of vicious attacks from people from the Orthodox community as we made no bones about the fact that Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism are not valid expressions of Christianity.

But Hanegraaff’s apostasy not only exposed himself as one who is not devoted to the doctrinal truths found in Scripture and Scripture as the final authority — Hanegraaff now teaches the mystic lie that the Church gave us the Bible and is not the foundation of truth. But it also opened the door for others to follow in his footsteps into apostasy and legitimize the practice of such aberrations as transubstantiation.

Right now, this is exactly where Francis Chan appears to be. A few months ago, we reported that Francis Chan had embraced the Roman Catholic aberration of transubstantiation — that the Eucharist is the real, physical body and blood of Jesus — and is now moving further away from the Protestant Christian faith.

In a recent interview with Hanegraaff, Chan discusses the doctrine of transubstantiation as they make a number of dubious claims about the origin and authority of God’s word, the relationship between Protestantism and aberrant expressions of Christianity such as Roman Catholicism. Around the 40-minute mark, it becomes clear that none of these men are satisfied in Christ by hearing His word preached — they all demand more than that. They all affirm that they want to “experience more” and that His Word is insufficient for them. Then Hanegraaff talks about how we’re supposed to become more “deified.”

This is the first of a four part series. The question remains, is Francis Chan preparing to follow Hanegraaff in abandoning the faith altogether and embracing something foreign to true Christianity?