John MacArthur's denial of the existence of mental illness is shameful, harmful, and outright false

 

Beth Moore, doctor criticize John MacArthur for claiming mental illness isn’t real - by Leonardo Blair, Christianpost.com

‘There’s no such thing as PTSD, OCD, ADHD,’ John MacArthur declares - by Mark Wingfield, Baptistnewsglobal.com

I've been married to my beautiful wife Nicole for nearly 23 years.  Nicole hasn't hidden from the fact that she has suffered from clinical depression since she was a teenager.  During our years together she has had good days and bad days, good years and bad years, with respect to this disease.  At times, she hasn't needed any medication or counseling in order to live her life normally, we thank God for the blessing of those seasons of relief.  But at other times, some brief and some long, she would not be able to go about her day-to-day responsibilities without support beyond her own willpower, prayer, and a husband who tries his best to make things easier.  She can't do it alone, and her husband doesn't have the power to fill the gap.  Why not?  Because clinical depression is real, and you can't overcome it with hard work or determination.  {National Institutes of Health: Depression}.  When things have been bad, my wife has needed the health of both medication proscribed by a physician, and counseling from a trained professional.  These supports are not an admission of weakness, they are choosing a wise path.  

This is reality, and it is one that millions of families in America, and hundreds of millions of families around the world, know to be true.

Pastor John MacArthur begs to differ.

After watching John MacArthur deny the danger of Covid19 four years ago {John MacArthur jumps the shark with COVID-19 response } and then later in the year declare that true Christians must vote for one party, and one party only, in America {Beware of the Political Church: John MacArthur declares, "any real true believer" can only vote one way. }, I'm not surprised that he's continued to say things that are both untrue and dangerous to the Church.  By proclaiming that mental illness is a fabrication, and that neither medication nor psychological counseling are of any value, John MacArthur has once more tarnished his own reputation and put his considerable authority (in some circles) behind ideas that will bring real harm to Christians and non-Christians alike.

“The major noble lie is there is such a thing as mental illness."

This pronouncement from MacArthur is made without any offer of proof, any data or studies, he simply asserts it as fact, but it isn't a fact, it is a lie (or a self-delusion).

"There's no such thing as PTSD. There's no such thing as OCD. There's no such thing as ADHD. Those are noble lies to basically give the excuse to, at the end of the day, to medicate people. And Big Pharma is in charge of a lot of that,”

This is a slap in the face of every veteran, police officer, nurse, abused spouse or child, assault survivor, and on and on who has suffered in the grip of PTSD.  One would have thought that we've moved past the days when General Patton felt free to slap a soldier in the face who was suffering from, "the shakes," but in reality there still is a huge stigma attached to mental illnesses, one that contributes to the woefully high suicide rates among those who suffer from them.  John MacArthur's conspiracy theory laden words will make things worse.

Is there a conversation to be had, rationally and with evidence, about the dangers of over-medicating, especially with kids?  Absolutely, but this isn't that, not by a long shot.

“We are trying to make clear to parents that behavior is essentially the result of choices that kids make and if you parent them properly, they’ll make right choices,”

Now the circle of harm grows wider.  Parents who listen to John MacArthur and ignore sound medical advice when their child has a real mental illness by refusing to allow them to be treated will also carry with them undeserved guilt when things go awry (as they almost always will because mental illness is real) because he has told them that good parents will teach kids to make choices that lead to good outcomes.  This is dangerous with respect to parenting even without the topic of mental illness attached.  Parents lead by example, they offer wisdom and boundaries, but children are not a math formula, sometimes loving parents who do their best have kids who struggle in life; that too is a fact.

“literally turning your child not only into a potential drug addict, but maybe a potential criminal because they never learned how to negotiate and navigate life in a socially acceptable way.”

Once again, a bold statement without any evidence or proof.

In the end, MacArthur paints a picture of those who suffer from mental illness as weak people who make all of their "bad choices" in a vacuum.  Thank God that our Heavenly Father doesn't judge us in this black/white way without compassion.

How does this pronouncement from John MacArthur about mental health make me feel as a pastor, a husband, and simply as a human being that has compassion on those who suffer?  Honestly, it is a mixture of sadness at seeing a man degenerate this far into self-destruction of his reputation and ministry, and anger because I know that people who fight each day against mental illness will be harmed needlessly by this nonsense.  The cult of personality around famous pastors enables foolishness like this, the Church is worse off because of it.

As a pastor, I also want to say this: If you suffer from mental illness, please don't hold back from seeking help, every pastor I know will respond to you with compassion and understanding to help you, and we all are willing to admit that we need the help of healthcare professionals to assist in the areas in which we don't have training and expertise.  

Please seek help if you need it, don't suffer alone, don't suffer in silence.  God bless all those who, like my wife and I, and so many others, know that mental illness is all too real.

Jesus and John Wayne: A few responses to a thought provoking book

Having just finished Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted A Faith And Fractured A Nation by Calvin University history professor Kristen Kobes Du Mez, I have a few thoughts:

(1) The overall premise: that where Evangelicalism finds itself today, reveling in Culture Wars and embracing Christian Nationalism (or as she usually terms it, militant patriarchy), is not a fluke but rather the logical outcome of a fifty year trend, is compelling.  She backs the thesis up, whether you think the destination is a blessing or a curse for the Church (If you read my blog I don't need to tell you where I stand on these issues), ably tying together strands of culture, politics, and the words and actions of generations of leaders of the Evangelical movement.

(2) While the book contains many examples of men and women claiming to represent God which are cringeworthy, even painful, in how far from biblical ethics and any attempt to model the behavior of Jesus Christ they have strayed, the chapter that hits with the most punch is the sad litany of Evangelical leaders in the last decade that have been shown to be either sexual abusers themselves, or willing to enable and/or cover-up abuse {Chapter 16, Evangelical Mulligans: A History}.  This isn't news, the steady drip of new horrific stories has been poured forth for years and shows little sign of abating, but seeing how the individuals and institutions that had played so prominent a role in the earlier chapters largely turned out to be led by hypocrites who preached male leadership and female submission to them while at the same time preying on the vulnerable and protecting monsters, listed one after another in the chapter, is brutal.  If you grew up in the Evangelical cultural/religious atmosphere, you will likely find that your heroes have feet of clay, if not worse.  It is hard to take the theological claims, especially about the roles of men and women in God's design, of men like John MacArthur or John Piper seriously when looking at their roles in abuse scandals and/or supporting theological allies accused of the most un-Christ-like behavior {Doug Wilson and Mark Driscoll for example}.

(3) A sub-thesis to the overall one is that the current Evangelical state-of-mind is more conditioned by culture than theology.  In my experience, this has been proven time after time.  Whether the issue is racism, immigration, sex abuse, or materialism (to name but a few issues), there is a disappointingly low willingness on the part of many (those at one or more steps removed from my ministry here, I'm not bashing my own congregation, rather reflecting on conversations in wider contexts) to hear what the Word of God has to say, and instead a willingness to treat its moral commands as a luxury we can't afford in the battles before us.

In the end, even if you are a complementarian (the theology of firm male leadership and female submission exemplified by MacArthur and Piper), and will likely gnash your teeth at Du Mez's egalitarianism, her criticism of this movement's tactics and leadership has a firm basis in history and fact, reading this book will have value for you.

On the other hand, if you've grown frustrated by the state of Evangelicalism, tired of banging your head each time cultural values displace biblical ones in the words and actions of those who proclaim their fealty to the Bible, Jesus and John Wayne won't make that headache go away, but at least you'll understand how and when things went so awry.  

Sermon Video: "whoever is not against us is for us" - Mark 9:38-41

 The Church has struggled (and Israel before it) throughout its history to properly define what it means to be 'one of us'. We either subtract something that God has required, or more often, we add hurdles and restrictions of our own. Here Jesus tells his disciples to not hinder someone who was using the power of God, in Jesus' name, to help people, even though the disciples did not know who this person was. He punctuates his command with a profound statement, "whoever is not against us is for us." In this context Jesus is saying that anyone who is helping the Kingdom of God, who is furthering God's will, is on our team. Why? Because nobody can access God's power without being in relationship with God, therefore anyone who is able to work via the Spirit of God must indeed be 'one of us.'

Christian Worldview self-destruction: A culture without Facts is a culture without Truth

 The trend away from general acceptance of the idea of universal Truth, with a capital "T", has been centuries in the making.  It was helped along by the individualism of the Enlightenment, even inadvertently by the stand against collective authority taken by Martin Luther.  While Truth was losing ground in the realms of ethics, philosophy, and religion, Fact (again with the capital letter) was gaining ground in a host of scientific endeavors through the Industrial, Agricultural, and Modern Medicine revolutions.  We, as humanity, knew with certainty more facts about the universe we inhabited than our ancestors could have imagined possible.  Their senses were limited to their own eyes, we could examine the world through both microscopes and telescopes.  Even if we were losing firm ground in the spiritual realm with the breakup of Christendom into competing Catholic and Protestant camps, and the splintering of Protestantism into still further groups, we were gaining a common understanding of objective reality that led, not without bumps along the way, away from Thomas Hobbes' description of life outside of society's embrace as 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.'  Life expectancy was on the rise, starvation and childhood death rates were plummeting, work was less back breaking, leisure was invented.  In short, aside from the rude wake-up calls of war and genocide, optimism was a warranted conclusion.

In this world of increasing scientific fact, there was an opportunity for religion, Christianity in particular, to trumpet God's proclamation that lying is beyond his nature.  In other words, Christianity should have embraced scientific discovery as a further revelation of God's nature.  The relation between science and religion, which could have been harmonious, was instead rocky.

Hebrews 6:17-18 (NIV) 17 Because God wanted to make the unchanging nature of his purpose very clear to the heirs of what was promised, he confirmed it with an oath. 18 God did this so that, by two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled to take hold of the hope set before us may be greatly encouraged.

The Church made the mistake of viewing Scripture as a scientific journal rather than simply observational reporting.  The prime example is the way in which the heavens are described, the 'firmament' of Genesis 1, as it was observed by the ancients.  This was not a scientific description of what lay beyond earth's atmosphere, but only how it looked from where they stood.  Without telescopes, what more could they have known, and why would God have explained it to them in ways they could not have understood?  Thus when Copernicus and Galileo revealed through observation that the earth revolves around the sun, the Church should have welcomed this new insight, but instead insisted that Scripture declared that the geocentric model was correct.  Thus began a long and fruitless fight against scientific discovery that later encompassed numerous fields beyond astronomy, all fought misguidedly in the effort to defend things that holy scripture had not asserted.

Fast forward to 21st century American Evangelicalism (and to a lesser extent American Christianity in general).  The cause of objective spiritual Truth is seemingly at a nadir, long held moral beliefs are challenged forcefully by the culture at large, and what is the response of the Church?  A seemingly all-out assault on Fact.  Rather than defend Truth, American Evangelicalism has largely embraced a no-holds barred war against science.  It began, in earnest in 1925 with the Scopes Trial pitting an interpretation of the Creation account in Genesis against the theories of biology, but quickly expanding to hold that interpretation also against discoveries in archaeology, astronomy, geology, physics, and more as the defense of an earth that could be no more than 6,000 years old was seen as the Rubicon of scriptural inerrancy.  If Science is allowed to explain the origin of the universe and of life on earth, the war would be lost and religion would be discarded, so we have been warned with increasing fervor.

With what end result?  A significant portion of evangelicals now believe that the scientific community is engaged in a massive demonic conspiracy to discredit the Bible.  It is now common belief among many that your average paleontologist or astronomer is an atheist that hates God.   On the flip side, many of the West's most educated people have grown cynical about spiritual things in general, and Christianity in particular, in part because of this anti-science stance.  What we are left with is never ending trench warfare with evangelicals touting attempts to refute science through organizations like Answers in Genesis, a process that has inevitably become more and more political, less and less theological.

In recent decades this war over the Facts of Creation has expanded to touch upon other scientific discoveries.  Because millions of evangelicals look at science with disdain once reserved for Voodoo witch doctors, there is little wonder that an anti-vaccine movement has developed, that Climate Change is one of the most divisive political issues in America today, or that we now live in an era when a phrase like 'alternative facts' can be uttered with a straight face.

Is Science, if something so nebulous can be taken as a whole, blameless in all this?  Certainly not, one need not be a fan of Michael Crichton (I am) to recognize that human genetic engineering requires significant safeguard and raises massive ethical questions, nor to agree that recreating carnivorous dinosaurs would be a bad idea, if it were possible.  In virtually every field Science has ethical questions to answer.  As Crichton's character Ian Malcolm says in Jurassic Park, “Scientists are actually preoccupied with accomplishment. So they are focused on whether they can do something. They never stop to ask if they should do something.”  Here's the irony in all this, Science can't answer questions about what whether or not they should do something.  Those questions are ethical questions, and ethics lies in the realm of philosophy and religion.  Science NEEDS the spiritual realm to answers questions that go beyond the test tube, that are not answered by a peer reviewed study, but rather than act as a counselor and guide, much of American Christianity has treated Science as the enemy.

No matter what you believe about HOW God Created the World, the war on Science has already begun to boomerang. 

I know that many Christians are firmly convinced that only a literal 6 Day Creation occurring approximately 6,000 years ago can possibly do justice to Genesis.  {I've written about this issue previously: Faith, Science, and Creation, is there a way forward?}  If this is the only option, we are at an impasse, for scientific discoveries have not invalidated previously put forth theories about the age of the universe.  To continue in this stalemate is a lose-lose situation.  The more Facts are eroded by religion, and especially by the politics of the religious, the less and less trust will be placed upon Truth by the culture at large.  Facts and Truth are inextricably linked, you can't have one without the other.  Faith and Science NEED each other, whether either side is willing to admit it or not.

If there are no objective Facts that can be agreed upon, there is no Truth either.  On what basis will you build the case that the Bible is True while at the same time you preach that human beings cannot trust their own senses?  Radical empirical-ism, that each of us can only trust what we sense and no objective reality lies beyond our senses, is a death knell not only for any hope of a democratic republic, but of organized religion as well.  But that radical individualism is the foreseeable end result of a constant dismissal of Facts.  If Facts and Truth do not exist independent of us, but are rather subject to our will to believe or disbelieve them, they cease to have any useful meaning.

2020 has shown us the acceleration of this process.  Recently highly influential evangelical pastor John MacArthur has declared against a mountain of scientific evidence, "there is no pandemic", a statement that was met with thunderous applause by the 3,000 non mask wearing people in the sanctuary of his church.  Here's the problem, the virus doesn't care if you believe in it or not.  Science denial is now a political badge of courage, but this is not surprising, it was the next step in the ongoing assault on Fact by many Christians.

{John MacArthur fails to distinguish between necessary and unnecessary risk, plus End Times anti-government speculation}

{John MacArthur jumps the shark with COVID-19 response}

It doesn't have to be this way, we don't need to sow the seeds of our own destruction.  We can't have Truth without Facts.  When you assault one, you attack them both.  If Christians want to be people of Truth, they need to be people of Facts too.

For more on the topic of Truth and its relationship with Fact: 

The apparent blasphemy of My Pillow founder Michael Lindell regarding a COVID-19 'cure'.

2020 has taken the measure of the Church, and found us wanting

Why is the Truth treated like a second rate commodity? Life lessons from an ESPN article: Happy 59th! Or is it 58th? Cracking the mystery of Don Mattingly's birthday - by Sam Miller

Faith is not anti-fact, at least it's not supposed to be.

The ungodly growth of Holocaust Denial

Those are just the last two years, when you minor in philosophy the idea of Truth is never far from your mind. List of 37 posts on my blog about Truth

Beware of the Political Church: John MacArthur declares, "any real true believer" can only vote one way.

This trend has been a long time coming within American Evangelicalism, and we have seen similar claims before, but Pastor John MacArthur, one of Evangelicalism's most noteworthy leaders, has declared that in 2020, in order to be a "real true believer" you can only vote for one political party. {John MacArthur interview, quote at 5:44 mark} {John MacArthur says 'true believers' will vote for Trump, can't affirm abortion and trans activism - by Michael Gryboski, the Christian Post}

The question, as John MacArthur is framing it is not, "Which candidate/party more closely adheres to Biblical principles and Christian ethics?"  But rather, "Are you a real Christian or not?"  These are monumentally different questions revealing a significant difference in Christian Worldview.  The first is a position of Grace that realizes that in this world we have no perfect choices, that every vote taken by a committed Christian is an act of compromise, for no candidate, and no party, can truly represent the leadership ideal embodied by Jesus, nor the fullness of his command to us, John 15:12 (NIV) "My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you."  In other words, a position influence by Grace and Christian Liberty will recognize the anguish felt by many Christians, both now and in generations past, when choosing between two imperfect choices, and would even recognize the possibility that a Christian might, in obedience to his/her own conscience and with principled understanding, choose to vote on the basis of other moral issues than the three or four MacArthur considers to be primary, might vote for a third party candidate, or even to NOT vote at all.  The second position reflects a binary (only two choices) position of Law: "either you're with us or against us."  There is no room here for discussion, debate, or nuance.  The choices are light and dark, good and evil, only a fake Christian (still then, presumably NOT redeemed and still headed toward Hell) could think otherwise.
This is not the first such binary choice that John MacArthur has embraced recently.  Following the controversial reopening of Grace Community Church for in-person worship {links to my two responses below}, Pastor MacArthur declared that churches that obeyed government mandates were not real churches, their leaders not real shepherds. {Excerpt from 1st sermon after reopening: “There has never been a time when the world didn’t need the message of the true church,” he said. “I have to say, ‘true church.’ I hate to think of that, but there’s so many false forms of the church. Let them shut down.” Evangelical pastor John MacArthur suggests churches that remain closed during COVID-19 are not “true” churches}.  A pattern of adding to the list of things that differentiate, in John MacArthur's opinion, true Christians/churches/pastors from false one is growing.
1. How any Christian votes is NOT a test of faith.
I know that John MacArthur takes Martin Luther's Five Solae seriously, in this case Sola Fide and Sola Gratia, so why is he (inadvertently?) adding to the Reformation's declaration the need for 'real true' Christians to vote the way he believes they must?  Instead of judging John MacArthur's intentions, let me simply observe that it has becoming increasing evident that he believes that the Church is on the precipice of a cliff, that America is lurching toward oblivion, and that these increased stakes have seemingly resulted in increasingly politically partisan stances. 
Here's the thing, even if everything John MacArthur believes about the Democrat Party is true, even if the Republican Party are the saviors of America, even if there is only one morally acceptable way for Christians who respect the authority of the Bible to vote, that would still fall far, far, far short of being a way to determine who is a genuine Christian and who isn't.  One of John MacArthur's regular emphases is (rightly) the sufficiency of Scripture {Sola Scriptura}, but where in Holy Scripture does it tell us that we can judge the sheep and the goats by how they vote?  Matthew 25:31-16 contains a dire warning from Jesus that God will separate the true believers from the frauds on the basis of acts of charity toward those in need, for these actions (or lack thereof) will be sufficient to demonstrate who is living by faith and who is not.  What Jesus doesn't mention, nor does any other NT writer, is a civic test of faith.  The reason for this is pretty straightforward:
2. Our citizenship is in Heaven.
One of the inconsistencies of John MacArthur's very public, and very partisan insistence upon opening up his church's 3,000 seat sanctuary without any social distancing and without masks {John MacArthur fails to distinguish between necessary and unnecessary risk, plus End Times anti-government speculation} {John MacArthur jumps the shark with COVID-19 response} is his very clear repudiation of the idea that Church and State have overlapping jurisdictions.  He even went so far as to write, "the church does not in any sense rule the state."  And yet, at the exact same time that he is fighting the state of California in court, and doing interview after interview in support of that fight, John MacArthur is also declaring that every "real true believer" in America is required to vote for one particular political party.  You can't have it both ways, either there is separation of Church and State or there isn't.  You cannot posit simultaneously time that Christians must be allowed by the government to do their own thing, without any restrictions, and that Christians should be intimately involved in the way in which government is run.  How can we be on the outside, and in charge, too?
In the end, whoever wins in November will have ZERO impact upon whether or not you, me, or John MacArthur is welcomed into heaven with the phrase, "Well done, good and faithful servant!" (Matthew 25:23). 
Why can't our civic responsibilities be the basis of judging our faith?  Philippians 3:20 (NIV) But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ.  That I was born an American has nothing to do with my standing before Almighty God.  It doesn't help me or hurt me in any way.  That 95% of the world's population was not given this blessing at birth, has nothing to do with their standing before Almighty God.  Each and every genuine follower of Jesus Christ has a superseding citizenship, has been adopted into a heavenly family.  The Word of God has chosen to define its own tests of faith, to tell us how we can judge ourselves, and how we can evaluate others.  We have no right to add to that list.

John MacArthur fails to distinguish between necessary and unnecessary risk, plus End Times anti-government speculation

 

As his fight with the state of California continues, John MacArthur has shown, unfortunately, a lack of understanding about how pandemics work, and in this case fails to see the distinction between necessary and unnecessary risk.

In the short video, MacArthur urges, "Go to church...go in the building, don't sit in your parking lot."  The Church of Jesus Christ is NOT its building.  If the people of God worship in a park, that is the Church.  If the people of God worship in a parking lot, in a tent, or online, that too is the Church.  I don't understand this insistence that only when the sanctuary is used can the Church be fulfilling its call to corporate worship.  The text of Scripture makes no such distinction, Matthew 18:20 (NIV) "For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.”  Of course, the Early Church had no public buildings, but met in homes or in public squares, down by the river, wherever they could.  The Church in China and other hostile countries is forced underground (The Early Church in Rome literally underground in the catacombs during periods of persecution) to survive, but that persecuted Church is certainly being faithful, even if they never meet in a public building.

"You're not going to kill grandma".  Once again, John MacArthur minimizes the pandemic, insisting that the risk isn't real, as the death tolls climbs past 180,000, and that with less than 25% of Americans having been infected thus far, with the CDC reporting 5,799,046 cases, which is no doubt an under-count of the true total, but still leaves room for well over 200,000,000 infections if the virus were to run rampant in America.  From this week's CDC report: Based on death certificate data, the percentage of deaths attributed to pneumonia, influenza, or COVID-19 (PIC) for week 33 is 7.8%. This is currently lower than the percentage during week 32 (12.6%); however, the percentage remains above the epidemic threshold and will likely increase as more death certificates are processed.  Whether one agrees or disagrees about specific restrictions, whether from the local government or otherwise, it serves no useful purpose to build your position upon the false-hope that the pandemic isn't really a threat.  I've responded to this misconception on his part before, when GCC first decided to meet in-person with no social distancing and no masks {John MacArthur jumps the shark with COVID-19 response}.  Evidently, John MacArthur continues to refuse to believe the 'narrative' offered by the scientific community as a whole.  This points to a larger issue within the Church in America, and Evangelicalism in particular, of hostility toward science, and a refusal to accept scientific evidence that is politically/culturally unappreciated.  {Why I signed "A Christian Statement on Science for Pandemic Times" from BioLogos}

In addition, John MacArthur offers up a false analogy, one that others have used, equating the risk of the pandemic to the risk of car accidents.  In the first place, they're not the same kind of risk.  Exposure to the pandemic can be controlled, it can be mitigated, even if only partially, thus by choosing to increase that risk, in callous ways for yourself and for others, by ignoring scientific expertise regarding social distancing and masks wearing, one is taking an unnecessary risk.  Automobile travel is a necessary risk, transportation needs to occur in some form or other.  Car accidents only become unnecessary risks when those doing so text while driving, refuse to wear seat belts, drive too fast for the conditions, drink and drive, etc.  Otherwise, car accidents are a risk that is already being minimized, as much as possible.  It is not government tyranny to post speed limits, nor to require seat belts, nor to enforce the law through traffic stops.  This entire analogy is a false one, meant to make the arguments in favor of minimizing COVID-19 risk seem ridiculous, but false analogy are just that, false.

Lastly, John MacArthur is viewing the pandemic through End Times tinted glasses, as the first round in an all out assault upon the Church by a government intent upon destroying it.  He said, "More onerous attempts to lock the Church down in the future" are coming.  The host readily agreed with this assessment.  This is, of course, speculation; the future is unknown.  This view is relatively common in the Church today, I often hear people speak as if the government is chomping at the bit to send us all to the gulag.  There's just one problem with this 'sky is falling' mentality.  It isn't based in reality.  Are there elements within the government that are hostile to Christianity?  Yes, but hardly enough to justify the hysteria.  With nearly 70% of the country's population identifying as Christians, whom does John MacArthur think will be carrying out the crusade against the Church?  Which army will enforce the closure of the roughly 315,000 churches in America, where will the several hundred thousand ministers be incarcerated as 'enemies of the state'?  If you take the suggestion to its logical conclusions, the hype falls apart.  Also, when compared to the persecution of our brothers and sisters in hostile countries in the world today, or with that of the Early Church at the hands of Rome, can we really justify Apocalyptic warnings?  The Church in America has enjoyed for centuries, and enjoys still, a place of privilege.  We are not martyrs, to claim that mantle is a disservice to those who have indeed suffered for the name of Christ.

In the end, the reality of the pandemic is not a 'narrative' that you can choose to believe or reject, it is scientific fact, it is reality.  On the contrary, the narrative being advocated here by John MacArthur is one based in End Times anticipation, anti-government sentiment, and seemingly the influence of politics.  We, the Church, can do better than this, no matter whether we are able to safely meet in-person at this time, or due to the reality of COVID-19, must continue to fellowship and worship outside of the sanctuary.  We are the Church, those called by the Spirit to redemption by the Blood of the Lamb, not the building in which we meet.

 

John MacArthur jumps the shark with COVID-19 response

John MacArthur preaches to a nearly full sanctuary with virtually no masks.

Let me start off by saying, Pastor John MacArthur has accomplished many great things for Christ's Church over his many decades of service.  Grace Community Church and The Master's Seminary are tremendous legacies, and of course there are likely thousands of people who have come to know Christ as Savior because of MacArthur's ministry.  That being said, nobody is beyond reproach.  In the past I wrote about my disagreement with John MacArthur's very limited ecumenism {Are 95% of self-proclaimed Christians really still Lost? An answer to John MacArthur} and more recently, when John MacArthur indulged in snarky laughter at Beth Moore's expense, I called him on it. {Why does John MacArthur think it is ok to tell Beth Moore to 'Go home'?}.  I'm sure if John MacArthur spent an hour reading my blog or watching my sermons on Youtube he'd find something worth criticizing, and if he did so from a place of principle, he'd be doing what I'm attempting to do right now: seek the Truth.
A number of well reasoned responses to the reopening of Grace Community Church in defiance of the restrictions put in place by the state of California have already been written: When John MacArthur Reopens His Church Despite COVID-19 Orders Civil disobedience, conscientious objection, and what to make of believers defying the government. - by Morgan Lee, Christianity Today

A Time for Civil Disobedience? A Response to Grace Community Church’s Elders - by Jonathan Leeman, Editorial Director of 9Marks

Response to John MacArthur's Statement of Defiance - by Jeff S. Kennedy, Senior Pastor of Christ Community Church / Idaho Falls, ID.

Let me, then, focus in on the brief interview given by Pastor MacArthur to Fox News' Tucker Carlson on July 28th, (to see the interview: John MacArthur on Tucker Carlson) which contains a number of troubling statments.

“First of all and foremost, it is a first amendment right,” MacArthur said. “This is the United States of America and the government cannot intrude into worship. We stand on that amendment.”

At this point, I'm already concerned.  Rather than address his primary responsibility to his congregation in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, that of a shepherd watching over his sheep, MacArthur chooses to lay claim to First Ammendment rights.  What the government can or cannot do legally in America with respect to the Church is primarily a legal issue for politicians and lawyers.  What the Church should do is a moral question for pastors and church leadership.  MacArthur chooses to focus on what he believes his church can legally do, not what it should morally do.

“The second thing that makes this so sensible is that in the State of California there are 40 million people. 8,500 of them have died with COVID. That is .002 (percent),” MacArthur said. “So, in California you have a 99.99 percent chance to survive COVID. So why would you shut down the entire state?

Here's the thing, let's assume MacArthur's numbers are correct, that as of the end of July 2020, 8,500 Californians have died from COVID-19.  But COVID-19 is a pandemic, it isn't over yet, and tens of thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands, of Californians will die in the future before it ends.  The chance of dying is not static, it can, and almost certainly will, continue to rise as the pandemic spreads.  The way in which MacArthur cavalierly embraces these stats without concern for the future, is bizarre.  This pandemic is not history, it is an ongoing threat.

A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, unfortunately, neither Pastor MacArthur (nor whomever is advising him) are statisticians or epidemiologists.

If the state is not allowed to meddle in Church affairs, should the Church refraining from administering public health policy?  As a Baptist, I continue to warn about the need for separation of Church and State, in this case, Grace Community Church is upset about what they perceive to be the state crossing the line in their direction, while aggressively returning the favor (by belittling social distancing and mask wearing, refusing to meet outside, etc.) in the other.

“We have had 21 weeks with no ministry to a thousand little children, to a thousand university students, to junior high students, to high school students to senior adults,”...“We’ve had no funerals. No weddings. I can’t go to the hospital. I’ve had to go on the phone to talk to dying people at the hospital,” MacArthur said.

When the church can't meet in the sanctuary for worship, does ministry stop?  The pandemic restrictions have indeed been troublesome, but the work of the Church continued, as it has always been more than what happens on Sunday morning.

“Finally, I started preaching in an empty auditorium. I did it two weeks, three weeks and then the people without saying anything started coming back. They didn’t buy the narrative,” MacArthur said. “They kept coming back and last Sunday 3,000 of them came back and they rejoiced. They hugged each other and they didn’t wear masks and they sang songs. They understand the reality of it.”

Where is the leadership at Grace?  People just starting coming back in, on their own, without the church's chosen leaders considering the implications and having a plan in place?  Before we re-opened for in-person worship with social distancing in June, my board met virtually to discuss the issues, until that moment, the only people allowed in the sanctuary were those responsible for making the service happen online.  What 'narrative' did his congregation reject?  The one where 150,000 (and rising rapidly) Americans have died?  The one supported by the CDC?  This is a serious issue with modern American Evangelicalism, scientific facts are not a narrative for us to buy or sell, they are facts.  This is a dangerous trend that is growing among Evangelicals, and sadly John MacArthur is endorsing it.  In addition, why couldn't they have met AND practiced social distancing, AND mandated the wearing of masks?  Are these precautions forbidden by the 1st Amendment?  Is there no room for caution, wisdom, compassion, humility?  By celebrating this decision, and the open defiance of social distancing and mask wearing, Pastor MacArthur has left himself and his church only one chance at a positive end to this path: If COVID-19 is an overblown hoax they'll turn out looking ok, if instead, as doctors around the world continue to warn, this is indeed a pandemic that is far from over, they will have helped spread it, and people will die when a church service at Grace Community Church becomes a super-spreader event.  What then will be the value of insisting upon rights while ignoring reality?

After decades of ministry, why risk it all on the hunch that you know more than those who have dedicated their lives to the study of medicine?  Sadly, for his congregation and his legacy, John MacArthur has jumped the shark.

{Update: John MacArthur believes the Bible trumps COVID-19 public health orders. Legal scholars say no - by Alejandra Molina, Religion News Service}

{Update: MacArthur asserts ‘there is no pandemic’ - by Mark Wingfield, Baptist News Global, 9/3/20}

Why does John MacArthur think it is ok to tell Beth Moore to 'Go home'?

During a conference held at Grace Community Church, Sun Valley CA, Pastor John MacArthur responded to a word-association game when the host gave him the name: Beth Moore, with a simple answer, 'Go home'.  The crowd erupted in laughter with John MacArthur continuing his comment by disparagingly linking Beth Moore to feminism, female politicians, the MeToo movement, Paula White-Cain, and comparing her to a TV jewelry salesperson.  It was designed to make headlines, and it did, before considering my observations below, take a moment to read some of the news articles about it:

John MacArthur skewers Beth Moore, Paula White, evangelicals who support women preachers by Leonardo Blair of The Christian Post

John MacArthur Tells Beth Moore ‘Go Home’: 3 Ways to Disagree Better by Ryan Denison of Christian Headlines

John MacArthur Tells Beth Moore to 'Go Home,' Says Bible Doesn't Support Female Preachers by Jenny Rose Spaudo of Charisma News

1. The question asked by Tom Friel was intended to draw the response it received.
When Tom Friel prefaced his question by asking for a 'pithy' response, and then said, 'Beth Moore' to that panel, at that conference, he knew that whatever the answer was the crowd would hoot and howl with laughter.  The question was asked so as to humiliate Beth Moore, and belittle those who do not agree with a complimentarian view of the role of men and women.  There are God-honoring men and women who hold a complimentarian view, and God-honoring men and women who hold an egalitarian view (and those in between).  Mockery is not debate, derision is not enlightening, such behavior is expected from a late-night comic, disappointing from a politician, and unbecoming of a leader of the Church of Jesus Christ.

2. The sustained and loud laughter of the audience, aimed at another human being, especially one who claims Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord, is a poor testimony to the many who will hear it.
What exactly is funny about 'Go home'?  It seems that the vast majority of the audience has an extremely low opinion of Beth Moore, and while it is their right as Americans to express their opinion, even in derisive laughter, having the legal right does not make an action morally right.  If this is how we treat each other, and sadly we do much worse than this too, what are we telling non-Christians about our unity in Christ?  {I know, some are reading this and thinking, "Beth Moore is a heretic!  She has defied the Word of God by teaching men, she deserves what she gets!"  There are two flaws in that line of thought: (1) To invalidate a person's salvation in Jesus Christ based primarily, if not solely, upon a differing interpretation of the role of women in the Church is a prime example of Majoring in the Minors, that is dangerously elevating a secondary theological position over and above the Gospel, thus in essence making that particular position more important than whether or not a person trusts in Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of his/her sins. (2)  Does God delight in the destruction of sinners?  Even the vilest among us began life as a child of God, made in the image of our Creator; our glee at the downfall of even those who richly deserve it does not reflect well upon our own appreciation for how we are entirely dependent upon the grace of God for our own salvation.

3. The answer, 'Go home', reflects a cultural position, not a theological one.
John MacArthur doesn't believe that culture should be used to interpret the Bible (As an aside, we are all products of our culture, we don't live in a vacuum, so no interpretation can be entirely devoid of cultural influence.  Our goal should be awareness of our own culturally inherited presuppositions and biases, thus allowing us to counter-act them when necessary), but in this case his view that "a woman's place is in the home" isn't a Biblical one, certainly not one that would be understood in the 1st Century Greco-Roman world where both men and women worked primarily from home, but rather is itself a product of the Industrial Revolution's sharp divide between employment and family life.  In other words, the idea that a man is supposed to earn a living, and a woman is supposed to raise the children and take care of the house, is the by-product of modern culture, hardly the definitive basis for a sound biblical doctrine of what a God-honoring society ought to look like.  {For more on this idea, read the article from Christianity Today by Jen Pollock Michel: A Message to John MacArthur: The Bible Calls Both Men and Women to ‘Go Home’ }  Had John MacArthur responded, 'Shut up', it would have also been crass, but at least it would have reflected his complimentarian theology, and not his modern conservative cultural viewpoint.  If the egalitarians are wrong to view the NT passages regarding the role of women in the Church with a post-modern cultural lens, so too must the complimentarians be wrong when they view those same NT passages through a modern one.

4. 'Go home' reflects a deeper distrust/dislike of female leadership, beyond discussion of biblical standards for pastors/elders, and a desire to deny them that in America.
Again, had John MacArthur confined his answer to the question of whether or not Beth Moore ought to hold a position of leadership within the Church, even those who disagree with him regarding the interpretation of the relevant scriptural passages would have been having a discussion about an age old, and worthy issue in the realm of biblical interpretation: timeless vs. time-bound commandments.  This very question is central to much of the book of Acts as Peter and Paul must come to grips with how to apply the Mosaic Law to the new gentile converts to Christianity.  However, as John MacArthur further explained his answer he said this, “The primary effort in feminism is not equality. They don’t want equality. That’s why 99 percent of plumbers are men. They don’t want equal power to be a plumber. They want to be senators, preachers, congressmen, president. The power structure in a university, they want power, not equality and this is the highest location they can ascend to that power in the evangelical church and overturn what is clearly scriptural, so I think this is feminism gone to church. This is why we can’t let the culture exegete the Bible.”  {For that last sentence, see #3 above} Are we supposed to be fearful that women want to be senators, congressmen, even president?  How is this any business of the Church?  Should the Church oppose the election of godly women?  We ought to judge any would-be leader of our country by the same standard, regardless of whether that candidate is a man or a woman.  Let me give John MacArthur the benefit of the doubt here, and assume his fear is of women with a non-biblical worldview gaining power in society, but again the point must be made, what has this to do with Beth Moore?  By connecting Beth Moore to the female politicians whom his audience strongly dislikes, (Hilary Clinton for example) it makes the actual teaching of Beth Moore, her actual goals and attitudes, irrelevant, she becomes one of 'them'.  If on the other hand, John MacArthur does want to extend the complimentary theological viewpoint from its current turf, the home/marriage and the Church, to a general crusade against female politicians, in any form, that would be extremely troubling; let us hope this was simply a poor attempt at guilt-by-association.  A woman holding a position of power is no more or less moral or immoral than a man; we must judge people based upon the content of their character, nothing else.

5. The jewelry insult by John MacArthur was demeaning and sexist: “Just because you have the skill to sell jewelry on the TV sales channel doesn't mean you should be preaching.”
There doesn't seem to be much explanation needed. 

6. Paula White-Cain is not a legitimate comparison to Beth Moore.
To lump his objections to Beth Moore, based upon complimentary theology, to those that many have toward Paul White-Cain, based upon objections to her Prosperity Gospel message and willingness to promise blessings/miracles to those who give her money, is to unjustly smear Beth Moore with guilt by association.  If Beth Moore has made mistakes in what she has said or written (as have we all), then refute those, don't connect her with a dangerous charlatan/heretic and say, "see, this is what happens when women are allowed to preach."  After all, the Prosperity Gospel's who's who is primarily populated by men, not women, and I wouldn't lump John MacArthur in with Joel Osteen just because they're both American men who preach.

7. To attack 'MeToo' as solely a guise of feminism, and not a legitimate concern, is allowing political concerns to distract the Church from a moral imperative.
Modern American feminism has issues when it comes to biblical morality, in particular regarding abortion, on this many within the Church would agree {Even if we can't agree on what those concerns are, nor the extent to which we should be concerned}.  However, to pretend that there is not a long overdue reckoning of sexual predators and sexists within the Church (as well as society as a whole) is massively short-sighted.  The Church must rid itself of a culture that protects sexual predators, that blames rape victims, and that is willing to treat men and women as anything other than equal before God.  The Church, as a whole, has committed grave sins in failing to police itself, in hiding its sins from law enforcement, and in treating the sexual/physical/verbal abuse of women and children as a secondary issue.  Unfortunately, this is not the first sign of a dismissive attitude toward the reality-check of the MeToo movement: Founders Ministries released a trailer for an upcoming documentary that showed images of rape survivor and victim's advocate Rachel Denhollander, lumping her in with those who, in the words of the producers of the film, were advocating a 'godless ideology'.  {This despite the fact that Rachel's testimony about how God has helped her overcome the abuse she suffered is entirely orthodox; her 'crime' was to be associated with the MeToo movement.  To read my rebuttal to the Founders Ministry trailer click here: "By What Standard?" - A shameful trailer made by Founders Ministries utilizing the worst political ad tactics}. 

8. 'Go home' doesn't reflect the Biblical narrative.
The inclusion of the stories of prominent, and influential God-fearing women in the Bible are not a fluke.  The inspiration of the Holy Spirit intended that we hear the story of the prophetess Deborah whose courage exceeded that of Barak, of Mordecai's utilization of Esther to effect God's salvation of the Jews, of the crucial and amazing role of Mary in the birth and life of Jesus, of Jesus' commendation of Martha's willingness to sit with the men and learn from him while Mary worried about 'woman's work', and of the women who came to the tomb and first heard the glorious news of the resurrection while Jesus' hand-picked 11 male apostles were in hiding.  The bible certainly celebrates the role of wife and mother, but at the same time demonstrates a repeated emphasis on God's willingness to utilize women, along with men, to accomplish his will.  If God had wanted women confined to the home, caring solely for chores and children, he would have made that clear, but the biblical narrative itself hints at no such call for the sequestering of women.

9. Is the Great Commission only for men, or should everyone saved by Jesus share the Good News?
I've never heard anyone take the position that only men can share the Good News, so there must be some role for women in the various ministries of the Church.  Even if one accepts the strict complimentarianism of John MacArthur, that does not exclude women from having a vital role in the health of a local church and its outreach to the world.

10. The focus on the work of ordained ministers (and other public leadership roles) is forgetting the crucial role of the laity.
While the focus of this controversy is the very public role of Beth Moore, and John MacArthur's role as a pastor in rebuking her, we ought not to lose sight of the fact that the Church needs far more help than what is given by those whose job/vocation is ministry.  The Church needs the laity: men, women, and children, to support its ministry and help it accomplish the mission given to us by Jesus.  If a church reserves the specific role of pastor/elder to men only, it still needs tremendous help from the people of the congregation, and if a church open the role of pastor/elder to both men and women, that church also needs tremendous help from the people of the congregation.  The leadership of a church is very important, but let's not let a controversy like this distract our attention away from the need to develop disciples of Jesus Christ within the church.

The response of Max Lucado: Max Lucado responds to John MacArthur's women preacher comments: 'Bride of Christ is sighing' by Sheryl Lynn of The Christian Post

Are 95% of self-proclaimed Christians really still Lost? An answer to John MacArthur

The question of who is, and who is not, a Christian never seems to go away.  I know that the Bible goes to great lengths to define how a disciple of Jesus Christ thinks, what they feel, and what they do, but the vast variety of people utilizing the name of Christ continue to bring this question to the surface.  In my book, Christianity's Big Tent, analyzing 1 John, I relied solely upon his three tests of faith: Do you believe that Jesus is the Son of God?  Do you love your fellow Christians?  And do you obey the commandments of God?  For some, however, such a broad definition leaves too many unanswered questions.

            I was watching a couple of YouTube videos last night of John MacArthur, a man whose name carries a lot of weight among Evangelicals, in which he clearly threw both Catholics and Charismatic Christians out of the defined Church.  In both cases, MacArthur believes that the vast majority of people, who belong to those Churches, are in fact non-Christians still destined for hell.  As I’ve said before, this way of defining the Church leaves us with an end result where 90-95% of the people in the world who think they are a Christian are not, and leaves us with a Church that can only be described as a pathetic version of the triumphant Church that was supposed to take the Gospel to the whole world.

            In the case of the Catholic Church, the primary objection of men like MacArthur, such as RC Sproul and John Piper, is the way in which the Catholic Church (as well as the Orthodox, Anglicans, and to a lesser extent,  Lutherans and Methodists too) defines what is happening during Communion.  Because these followers of Jesus take his words “literally”, instead of seeing it as a symbolic act, they are doomed.  There is more to it than that, such as objections about the elevation of tradition to the level of the Scriptures and prayer to the Saints and Mary, but the heart of the objection to the Catholic Church has always been transubstantiation.  The Council of Trent is still a difficult thing to deal with, its doctrines in response to the Reformation were not helpful, but then again neither was the 30 Years War.  Even with that historical baggage, shouldn’t Vatican II mean something?  Should we let the failures of the past that brought the Church to the point of schism be perpetuated?

With that in mind, here is the tally of what the average Catholic believes that isn’t supposed to help save them due to a faulty understanding of Communion:

1. There is only one God, a trinity consisting of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit

2. The Bible is the Word of God, inspired and to be revered.

3. All of humanity is sinful; each of us must repent of our sins.

4. The only hope for us to overcome our sin is the death and resurrection of Jesus.

5. Prayer and worship are important parts of being a Christian

6. Obeying God’s law is important, as are acts of loving kindness.

            Can you have all of this, and still be a “Church of Satan?” as MacArthur concludes?  RC Sproul believes that praying to the Saints is belittling the desire of God to use his grace by thinking that you need an intermediary.  Whether or not this objection is valid, isn’t saying that 95% of would-be Christians have failed due to their theology, despite the fact that they affirm the Nicene Creed, an insult to the power of the grace of God?  Did Christ really die for the sins of the world only to have that power fail 95% of the time?

            The objection to the Charismatic movement follows similar lines.  In this case it isn’t any core doctrine that is being misunderstood but an objection to the idea that the gifts of the Spirit as seen in Acts are still in use today.  Once again, this is a question of interpretation of Scripture, with one side seeing God’s work as a temporary solution and the other as a part of God’s ongoing plan.  That there are legitimate reasons to be concerned with the Prosperity Gospel movement is no reason to throw all those who still believe in the gifts of the Spirit out the door of the Church.

            One last thing that I find troubling with John MacArthur’s view of the Church is that he believes that between AD 400 and AD 1500, there was no real Church, only an Apostate Church.  Thus for 1,100 years, the Church of Jesus Christ was only a shell that required any “real” Christians to not be a part of the community of believers, but instead to be rebels and martyrs.  The Church certainly had flaws during that time period, as it does today, but to dismiss the work of God in our world for over a millennium is a startling conclusion.

            Why do so many Evangelicals, of which I am one, prefer to think that the Church is a tiny persecuted minority, a frail and threatened thing that is dwarfed by apostasy?  Is this some sort of perverse glory in being the only ones who have it right?  Is this the result of dispensational theology, a pre-tribulation emphasis that almost hopes that the world is getting worse and the Church failing so Christ can return soon?  Whatever the reasons are, I can’t be on board with that attitude, the Gospel of Jesus Christ is far too powerful to be thought of as so very weak.