He Answers His Calling With Radio Bible Show

To every man an answer, a reason for the hope that lies within you.

1 Peter, 3:15

This is “talk radio” of a very different kind:

Mark, from Sacramento, calls to ask if there is any biblical justification for civil disobedience. Robert, from Bakersfield, wants to know in what language the New Testament originally was written. Buddy, from St. Louis, would like some information about the occult. Dale, from Prescott, Ariz., asks whether--as some televangelists preach--human beings can become “little Gods” through faith and prayer. Janet, from Atlanta, wants to know whether it is proper to prepare and serve food in the church. And Linda, from Ogden, Utah, needs some advice about her job.

At the other end of the line is Walter Martin, “The Bible Answer Man,” host of what the National Religious Broadcasters calls “one of the . . . most controversially stimulating programs in Christian radio.”

“The Bible Answer Man” is beamed live from Irvine each weekday afternoon to more than 100 radio markets coast to coast, via three satellite systems. The fast-moving, 55-minute program that airs locally on KKLA (99.5 FM) at 3:05 p.m., also is heard in Zaire, Burma and Canada.

Martin credits his seemingly encyclopedic, multilingual knowledge of the Bible to two factors: He “reads omnivorously” and “absorbs like a sponge.”

Yet, despite this and four earned college degrees, Martin admits that even he occasionally is caught short on the program.

For example, one California caller wanted to know how tall Jesus was. Martin replied that he does not know, but he assumes that Jesus was of average size for a Hebrew of the time--no biblical information to the contrary exists--and thus, based on archeological studies of doorways in Israel, he was about 5 feet, 8 inches to 5 feet, 10 inches.

“I never for a moment thought I had all the answers,” Martin said later.

Martin is founder and director of the nonprofit Christian Research Institute, a 48,000-square-foot, nonprofit think tank in the Irvine Spectrum area where the Santa Ana and San Diego freeways meet. The institute, which has 41 employees and operates on about $1.5 million a year, produces a newsletter and monthly magazine, as well as Martin’s radio show, and maintains an 80,000-volume library. Available for sale, rent and loan are more than 5,000 audiotapes and several film series.

All this work, and Martin’s dozens of personal appearances each year, share a common thread: Martin’s mission, as he sees it, is to confront “cults” and “unbiblical beliefs” and to “help the church reach out in love, bringing the truth to those who have believed a lie,” his code word for any differing interpretation of the Scriptures of various groups, many of them Christian, in the United States over the past 150 years.

Until a permanent studio is built, Martin broadcasts from a first-floor office at CRI, purchasing time from the various stations. As the late-afternoon sun dapples into the room, he fields questions coming in on the toll-free line while leaning back in a worn armchair, his feet propped up on an open desk drawer, a diet soft drink in front of him.

There are two personal computers in the office, both programmed to produce scriptural and commentary citations in an instant, and in half a dozen languages. One system is software in a console that comes and goes, depending on technological glitches. The other personal computer is Craig Hawkins, Martin’s assistant and co-host, who never seems to misfire.

Martin, wearing a headset, answers the phone as a console on his desk prints out the name and hometown of the caller. Usually, after responding for several moments, Martin will ask Hawkins, sitting at another desk several feet away, if he has anything to add, which he usually does.

Hawkins will, for example, provide the complex etymology of a biblical term, sometimes in three languages, or an understanding of the context of a passage and the history of its translation.

An honors graduate of UC Irvine, Hawkins, 30, met Martin 5 years ago while taking one of Martin’s classes at the Melodyland Center in Anaheim. He now is completing work in a master’s program at Simon Greenleaf School of Law, a Christian institution in Anaheim. In addition to acting as host for the show when Martin is lecturing on the road, Hawkins is host for “CRI Perspectives” on KKLA Sunday nights. “He’s a first-rate intellect,” Martin says.

Martin started “The Bible Answer Man” in 1964 on a single station in New Jersey (patterning it after the popular 1930s radio show “The Answer Man”). In 1974, he moved to a small suite of offices in El Toro, and the show began locally on KYMS-FM in Santa Ana. Six years later, satellite distribution began.

The continuing success of the program over nearly a quarter of a century, Martin says, has been “beyond my wildest dreams.”

This kind of influence carries with it a considerable responsibility, he adds: “You’re not playing messiah or Siggy Freud.”

Indeed, Martin does not ask the dozen or so callers who get through each hour to rely on his word alone. He recommends books, articles and cassettes, and not just those available through CRI.

“I’m not going to do your homework for you,” he tells one caller, after suggesting some reading matter. Other times, he pauses in his answers to instruct the listener to “make notes on this.” And he urges people not to be “John and Mabel Doormat” when it comes to defending their faith.

More than a decade ago, Martin hit on the idea of preparing tapes--several recorded live at Orange County churches--for people to use in confronting various proselytizers working their way through the neighborhood. The series, called “Dialogues on the Doorstep,” feature Martin confronting former members of the best-known groups, which run the gamut from Unitarians to Jehovah’s Witnesses to Scientologists.

“I teach Bible-believing Christians how to give reasons for their own faith,” Martin says. “The best defense is a good offense.” The tapes have become the institute’s best sellers.

In these tapes and during his lectures, Martin returns to his own legal background.

“Call the Apostle Matthew to the witness stand,” he says on one of the tapes, “so that his testimony may be heard.”

Martin comes by this approach naturally. His father was a Yale-educated judge in the New York criminal courts. His sister was a district attorney, his brother was also a lawyer, and he fully expected to join their profession. But as an undergraduate, he recalls, a professor “challenged me to an examination of the claims of Jesus Christ. The evidence warranted faith, and I ended up a theological lawyer.” He now teaches apologetics--the defense of Christian doctrine--at Simon Greenleaf.

Martin’s degrees include a master’s from New York University and a Ph.D. from California Western University. He also worked for a decade as an editor for Zondervan Publishing House, which publishes religious books. Besides apologetics, his academic field is hermeneutics, the science of the interpretation of literature.

He makes few apologies for the form these defenses and interpretations take.

Among other Christian and Eastern religions, sects and doctrines that Martin criticizes in his books and on his program--either for being cults or for having origins in cults--are Mormons, Christian Scientists, Religious Scientists, members of the Unity Church, members of the Unification Church, Bahais, Theosophists, Swedenborgians, Masons and Rosicrucians.

Martin has criticized many other area religious broadcasters, including the Crystal Cathedral’s Robert H. Schuller, Trinity Broadcasting Network’s Paul F. Crouch and Gene Scott, and such nationally known figures as Kenneth Copeland.

“I’m sure God has raised you up to be a real theological troublemaker,” an admiring interviewer once told Martin in an interview on the Trinity network.

Billy Graham has called Martin “one of the most articulate spokesmen for evangelical Christianity that I know.”

A big man with a booming voice still faintly resonant of his New York upbringing, the 60-year-old scholar has a tendency to shoot from his learned lip, using a staccato delivery and snappy one-liners like a stand-up comic. And, in some respects, Martin’s shows are reminiscent of Lenny Bruce, who used to ask audiences: “Is there anyone here I haven’t offended?”

However, in “The Kingdom of the Cults,” Martin’s best-known book (nearly half a million copies have been sold in the past 24 years), he writes: “It is not my desire in any sense to make fun of adherents of cult systems, the large majority of whom are sincere, though I am not averse to humor when it can underscore a point. A study of cults is a serious business.”

Martin insists that what he presents and defends on his program are the “historic beliefs of the Christian church,” but he stresses that he is not intolerant of other beliefs.

“I think I’m intolerant of hypocrisy and intolerant of evil, of evil practices and evil theology that is unbiblical. But of another person’s right to believe what they feel is true? I am not intolerant of that.”

There are times, he confesses, “when I can’t convert them and I can’t convince them.”

Still, on one of his “doorstep” tapes, he says “somebody has to be offensive sometimes, because the truth itself is offensive at times.”

Martin ran into a brief but intense firestorm several years ago when he appeared on Dennis Prager’s “Religion on the Line” show on KABC radio in Los Angeles. Martin cited Scripture and other sources in assigning blame for Jesus’ crucifixion to some Jewish authorities of the time, rather than the Romans. He insists that he did not suggest that the Jews as a people, then or since then, were responsible for the execution.

“I wasn’t holding Jews today accountable for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ,” Martin says.

But Prager says this distinction is an odd and “subtle one, given that an innumerable number of Jews have been killed and tortured on the basis of that charge. Mr. Martin came very close to raising the specter of medieval Christian charges of deicide against the Jews.”

According to a tape of the broadcast which Martin himself provided to The Times, he said that “any Jew or Gentile alive today that hears the gospel of Jesus Christ and turns away from God’s love in the cross is participating in that crucifixion.”

When pressed by Prager, Martin defended the passage in John 8:44, which characterizes the Jews who rejected the divinity of Jesus at the time of the crucifixion as children of the devil. Some liberal Christian scholars have pointed out the passage as an example of New Testament anti-Semitism.

In the 6 1/2 years that he has been doing his own program, Prager says, “no Christian--whether fundamentalist Protestant or liberal Protestant, conservative or liberal Catholic--ever said anything approaching Mr. Martin’s concept of the crucifixion.”

Despite the controversy, though, on Prager’s subsequent shows and in the local Jewish press, Prager has said the problem with Martin is more one of being a “misanthrope” than an anti-Semite.

“He doesn’t have a good word for anyone who isn’t identified with his theology,” Prager says.

Martin’s own early background was liberal and agnostic. He grew up in the Bedford Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn and went to an Episcopal Church--”I was designed to be an Episcopal priest”--while attending a Roman Catholic school.

Martin now characterizes himself as an intellectual, Reformation Christian, an Evangelical Baptist, as well as a charismatic, meaning that he believes in speaking in tongues and healing by faith.

Like many fundamentalists, he believes that the Bible is “inerrant”--error free--but he emphasizes that not every word is to be taken literally, that the Scripture includes metaphors and allegories and other literary devices.

Martin speaks at many mainline churches, including St. Andrew’s Presbyterian in Newport Beach and Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, and he teaches regular Bible classes at Newport Mesa Christian Center in Costa Mesa and Capistrano Valley Baptist Church.

The televangelism scandals of the past 2 years have had an effect on Martin, as they have on many religious broadcasters. Martin volunteers to his radio audience that at CRI there are “no relatives on the payroll, no air-conditioned doghouses, no Mercedes.”

According to documents filed with the Internal Revenue Service, Martin receives an annual salary of $59,000 from CRI, which leases a single 1988 Pontiac. His San Juan Capistrano home is assessed at less than $200,000.

Like Robert Schuller, Martin says he assigns to his ministry all royalties for his books and tapes sold through the Institute. He does receive royalties for books sold through religious and secular bookstores. He accepts offerings for his speeches and lectures in churches, and reimbursement for his travel expenses.

And he certainly is not above soliciting his listeners, directly or indirectly. At the midpoint of each show, there is a brief pitch for contributions that concludes: “If you have no money at all, you pray for us and we’ll pray for you, that God will supply both our needs.”