David W. Cloud

David W. Cloud (born 1949) is an American Independent Baptist missionary, pastor, publisher, and writer. He is also the founder and director of Way of Life Literature and the editor of the magazine O Timothy.^[1]

Personal life

David Cloud was born in 1949 and grew up in a Christian home in Florida. However, he turned away from Christianity during his teenage years, becoming a heavy drinker and served in the Vietnam war from 1969 to 1970. In 1973, he became a born-again Christian and attended Tennessee Temple University. ^[2]

Career

David Cloud graduated from Tennessee Temple Bible School in 1977, where he started his ministry, and eventually became involved with missionary work in Nepal.^[3]

Cloud has criticized Baptist churches abandoning their denominational label in favor of being nondenominational. He is a strong advocate of separationism and teaches secondary separation.^[4] He has criticized Highland Park Baptist Church in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Paul Chappell's church for not being strict enough on separation.^[5] In 2003, when fundamentalist Baptists formed the International Baptist Network, attempting to unite Independent Baptists, David Cloud alongside other strict separationists strongly criticized the idea.^[6] Cloud has also critiqued Clarence Sexton's Independent Baptist Friends International for its ecumenism between Independent Baptists and Southern Baptists.^[7]

Cloud has criticized Jack Hyles, a prominent Independent Baptist pastor, for creating a cultic church and supported Robert Sumner’s reports of sexual scandals against Hyles.^[8]

Cloud has strongly criticized Neo-Evangelicalism, the Charismatic movement,^[9] Contemporary Christian Music,^[10] and Calvinism.^[11]

Cloud has also critiqued the Left Behind series for perceived ecumenism.^[12][13]

Beliefs

King James Onlyism

David Cloud is King James only, often drawing on the arguments of Edward F. Hills, and asserts that the King James Bible should not be viewed simply as a translation of the Greek and Hebrew texts, instead he regards it as an independent variation of the Textus Receptus, rendered in English rather than Greek, and providentially preserved as the purest form of the Textus Receptus.^[14]

Cloud has criticized the Detroit Baptist Theological Seminary, Bob Jones University, and Central Baptist Theological Seminary of Minneapolis for convincing some Independent Baptist groups to adopt modern Bible translations.

Nevertheless, he has critiqued the more extreme positions of Gail Riplinger and Peter Ruckman,^[15] rejecting their claims that even the smallest change on the spelling of the King James would change a God-ordained illustration.^[16] Riplinger attempted to respond to him in her book Blind Guides.^[17]

Prayer

David Cloud has criticized mystical and contemplative prayer practices, seeing them as Catholic and contradicting the sufficiency of scripture.^[18]

Cloud has also critiqued the Sinner's prayer as unscriptural and calling it "quick prayerism".^[19]

Triadology

David Cloud is a Trinitarian, arguing against the doctrines of Modalism and Arianism among others. However, he rejects the usage of verses such as Psalm 2:7 to establish the doctrine of eternal generation of the Son, and has argued that each of the persons of the Trinity have their own center of consciousness and voltion. He also affirms the doctrine of the eternal subordination of the Son.^[20]

Other beliefs

David Cloud holds to a dispensational approach to the Bible and is thus premillennial and pretribulational in his eschatology and rejects replacement theology, the notion of the Church replacing Israel.^[21][22]

He adheres to the doctrine of the eternal security of the believer^[23]

He is a young earth creationist and opposes evolution.

He holds to the tenets of Baptist successionism but rejects Baptist Brider theology or “Landmarkism”.^[24]