I had not intended to write this essay. I was only going to share a link through
e-mail to a video that the online Christian (Presbyterian) apologist Redeemed
Zoomer had made about the Nestorianism of John F. MacArthur Jr. In what was supposed to be a brief
explanation of why I thought the video was important, I mentioned that
MacArthur had taught several other false doctrines. That grew into a full essay so I decided to
share that here. Here is the Redeemed
Zoomer video: Is John MacArthur
HERETICAL??? - YouTube
Nestorianism
is a heresy that many prominent evangelical leaders of the last century or so
have shared with John F. MacArthur Jr.
Several years ago, for example, I
pointed out in an essay that an article
the late R. C. Sproul had written criticizing Charles Wesley’s hymn “And
Can it Be” for the line “that Thou my God shouldst die for me” was based
entirely on Nestorian assumptions and reasoning.
Nestorianism
is not the only heresy that John F. MacArthur Jr. has taught over the
years. The only one of his heresies of
which he has publically recanted is Incarnational Sonship. This was his doctrine, shared by J. Oliver
Buswell Jr. and Walter Martin among others, that Jesus Christ was eternally the
Logos, the Word of God, but that He became the Son of God in the Incarnation. This is heresy. Many evangelicals don’t recognize it as such
because they think “he’s got three co-equal, co-eternal, Persons, Who are one
in essence, that’s the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity, this is just quibbling
about names and titles.” This is not the
case. If Jesus is the Son of God only
because of the Incarnation, in which He was born of the Virgin without a human
father, then the persons of the Father and the Holy Spirit are confused. This is because in both St. Luke’s nativity
account and that of St. Matthew, the Holy Spirit is identified as the Agent in
the conception of Jesus by Mary. If
Jesus’ Sonship is due to this then the Holy Spirit is His Father. The confusion of the Persons of the Trinity
is one of the most ancient heresies. Tertullian
addressed it under the label Patripassionism in his second century work Against Praxeas. Historically it was known as Sabellianism
after Sabellius who taught it in the early third century. Today it is called modalism and is taught by
the kind of Pentecostals who call themselves “Unity” or “Oneness”
Pentecostals.
The orthodox doctrine is the
Eternal Sonship of Jesus Christ. The
Father was always the Father because He always had the Son, and the Son was
always the Son because He was Son of the Father. Closely related to the doctrine of Eternal
Sonship is the doctrine of the Eternal Generation of the Son. Jesus Christ is eternally the Son of God
because while there never was a time when the Father was without the Son, the
Son’s sharing the Godhead, the numerically singular essence/nature/substance of
God is derived from the Father in a relational sense that is called Generation
because begetting/siring/generation is the closest analogy we have to it. The implication of the Scriptural references
to Jesus as the “only-begotten”, it was articulated by Origen of Alexandria in
the third century and was incorporated into the Nicene Creed to combat Arianism
in the fourth. It has been denied by
apologist William Craig Lane and theologian Wayne Grudem, although
Grudem has apparently since recanted the denial. MacArthur taught Incarnational Sonship from
1983 until the end of the twentieth century.
He apparently recanted it in 1999, although
the article on his website containing the recantation was published in the Journal for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (the
flagship publication of complementarianism, the weenie compromise position
promoted by John Piper and Wayne Grudem for evangelicals who have enough sense
not to fully buy in to feminism and egalitarianism but don’t have the gonads to
take a stand for patriarchy) in 2001.
The doctrinal statement of Master’s Seminary has finally been redacted
to teach the orthodox view of Eternal Generation and Eternal Sonship. This was not the case a couple of years
ago. It only took him a quarter of a
century after his recantation to do this.
MacArthur
has not recanted to the best of my knowledge for the false teaching over which
Bob Jones Jr. of Bob Jones University raised the first red flag in an article
for Faith for the Family back in 1986. This is his teaching that the blood of Jesus
Christ has no value in se but merely
as a sign or symbol representing the death of Jesus Christ. The
following is from a sermon MacArthur preached in April 1976:
The
term “the blood of Christ” is a metonym that is substitute for another term:
“death.” It is the blood of Christ that simply is a metonym for the death of
Christ, but it is used because the Hebrews used such a metonym to speak of
violent death. Whenever you talk about the blood of somebody being poured out,
to the Hebrew that meant violent death. And when you commune with the blood of
Christ, it doesn’t mean the literal blood of Christ, that is a metonym for His
death; you commune with His death.
Now
let me say something that might shake some of you up, but I’ll try to qualify
it. There is nothing in the actual blood that is efficacious for sin. Did you
get that? The Bible does not teach that the blood of Christ itself has any
efficacy for taking away sin, not at all. The actual blood of Christ isn’t the
issue. The issue is that His poured out blood was symbolic of His violent
death. The death was the thing that paid the price, right? “The wages of sin
is” – what? – “death.”
He
died for us. It is His death that is the issue. The Hebrews spoke of it as His
outpoured blood because that was something that expressed violent death. And
they believed, for example, in the Old Testament it said, “The life of the
flesh is in the blood.” And so, the pouring out of blood was the significance
of death.
And
so, when it says here we are communing with the blood of Christ, it does not
mean the literal blood of Christ is efficacious, it does not mean the literal
blood of Christ is involved; it means we enter into a genuine, vital
participation in His death. But it is not the blood; the blood is only the
symbol of the poured out life.
Do you recognize what is wrong this doctrine (which MacArthur
shared with the late Col. Robert B. Thieme Jr. of Berachah Church in Houston,
Texas)?
There are different aspects to the Atoning work of Jesus
Christ. The Scriptures speak of it as a
ransom paid for the release of hostages.
This was emphasized in the early Church.
The New Testament and the book of Isaiah also use the language of
vicariousness and substitution to speak of Christ dying for us. This was emphasized in the Reformation and this
is what MacArthur emphasizes. There is
nothing wrong with that. However, when
the language of blood specifically is used, it is the Atonement as a sacrifice that is being emphasized.
Now a blood sacrifice involved more than just killing an animal.
In the Old Testament, there are three identifiable elements to animal
sacrifices – the slaying, the offering, and the eating. The first is when the animal brought as an
offering was killed at the door of the Tabernacle/Temple. (Lev. 1:3-5) This
killing of the animal alone did not make it a sacrificial offering. Indeed, the priests were not the ones who did
the killing unless they were offering the sacrifice for themselves. The priest would burn the portion of the
animal that was to be burned – the fat and fatty portions – on the altar (Lev.
1:8-9). The priest would also take the
blood of the animal and sprinkle it on the altar (Lev. 1:5) which was near the
door of the Tabernacle/Temple. If it
were Yom Kippur and he was the High Priest he would take it further into the
Holy of Holies and sprinkle the Mercy Seat (Lev. 16:14-15). It is these actions by the priest that turned what otherwise would have just been the slaying of an animal – which the
Israelites were permitted to do themselves in their own homes if they lived too
far from the place (Jerusalem) appointed for sacrifice (Deut. 12:15, 21-22) –
into a sacrificial offering. Finally,
except for the olah or whole burnt
offering which was entirely burned, the
rest of the animal was divided between the portions assigned to the priest
(Lev. 7:31-35) and the portions assigned to the ones who had brought the
offering and eaten (Lev. 7:15-20, ; Deut. 12:6-7).
In the epistle to the Hebrews St. Paul, for it
is he who wrote that epistle, tells us that Moses was given a vision of Heaven
on Mt. Sinai, that the instructions for the Tabernacle and system of worship he
was given were imitations of the pattern he had seen there, (Heb. 8:5) and that
it was into this Tabernacle made without hands that Jesus Christ, as High
Priest after the order of Melchizedek, entered with His own blood to make the
one offering that effectively takes away sin (Heb. 9:11-14, 23-28). This is not symbolic language for the
crucifixion. The crucifixion took place
in time and history, in a specific place on a specific date. It corresponds to the slaying of the animal
in the Old Testament sacrifices. Note
that as the OT sacrifices were slain at the door of the Tabernacle, so Jesus
was crucified on Calvary outside the walls of Jerusalem. Of course, His suffering and dying had
precisely the vicarious significance with regards to our salvation that
MacArthur et al. assign to it. However, the offering of His blood that makes
the whole thing a sacrifice is not something that took place in time and
history, in a specific place on a specific date. This offering occurred once, but in the Holy
of Holies of the Tabernacle in Heaven, which is situated in eternity, outside
of time and space as we know them because time and space are dimensions of
Creation. The death and the offering of
the blood are two very distinct elements in the dispensation of Atonement, this
is clear in both Testaments, and MacArthur missed it all. Astonishingly, he repeated this error in his
commentary on Hebrews of all places.
In each of these instances MacArthur’s serious doctrinal error are
arguably the result of his taking Protestantism too far. Protestantism, in the sense of the branch of
the Christian tradition that emerged from the sixteenth century Reformation, is
alright in itself, since the Reformation was a necessary response to real
abuses on the part of the Roman ecclesiastical authorities in the late Middle
Ages. When one acts as if the history of
orthodox Christianity took a hiatus after the completion of the New Testament
canon until All Hallows Eve in 1517 and so sets his Protestantism against the
Catholicism that is the general tradition of first millennium Christianity
prior to the East-West Schism, then one can go very far astray. If he looks with suspicion on Catholicism as
defined in the previous sentence, then he feels free to ignore the Creed with
which Christians around the world have confessed their faith for almost two
thousand years when it says that Jesus is “the Only-Begotten Son of God,
Begotten of the Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, Very God
of Very God, Begotten not made.”
Furthermore he feels free to ignore the rulings of the Ecumenical
Councils to which the bishops of the entire Church were invited (whether they
attended or not is another matter) to address problems of doctrine and
discipline, the decisions of which were received as authoritative by the Church
such as the ruling of third Ecumenical Council, that of Ephesus in 431 AD, that
it is heresy to reject the term Theotokos,
God-Bearer or Mother of God, for Mary, as Nestorius did on the basis that Jesus
did not derive His deity from Mary, because in Jesus deity and humanity, while
remaining distinct natures, are united in One Person of Whom Mary was Mother. John
MacArthur wrote “It’s heretical to call the blood of Jesus Christ the blood
of God, and it demonstrates a failure to understand what theologians have
called the hypostatic union, that is the God-man union in Christ.” Ironically, it is MacArthur’s sentence here
which is heretical precisely because he himself fails to understand the
hypostatic union a consequence of which is that whatever is the property of
Jesus in either of His natures is His property as a Person and can be
attributed to Him as such even when speaking of Him in terms of the other
nature. For example, a counterpart in
the Scriptures to calling Mary the Mother of God (an equivalent of which also
appears in the Scriptures in Luke 1:43) is when Jesus tells Nicodemus “And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from
heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven” thus identifying Himself by His
humanity in the same breathe in which He references His omnipresence.
Finally, it is because of His suspicion of the Catholic tradition
of the first millennium that MacArthur refuses to acknowledge that Christ’s
offering of His blood is not just metynomic language for His death on earth,
but is rather referring to the one offering Jesus made in His priestly office
in the Heavenly Tabernacle in eternity.
If he acknowledged that, then He would have to admit that it is from
that offering in the Heavenly Tabernacle, which being situated in eternity is
therefore equidistant to every single point in time in history from Creation
until the Last Judgement that the benefits of Christ’s Atonement come to us
where we are in space and time. This
would be admitting the foundation of the Catholic understanding of the
Eucharist (the first millennium understanding before it got twisted into a
caricature of itself in the late Middle Ages) that the earthly offering of
bread and wine in the Eucharist is mystically united to Christ’s Heavenly
oblation so that when the faithful receive the bread and wine, Christ’s one
sacrifice becomes the meal that sustains the new life as Jesus explained in His
Bread of Life Discourse in John 6, which completes the correspondence of the
New Testament sacrifice with those of the Old Covenant. Slaying of animal – Crucifixion. Offering of blood on altar/Mercy Seat –
Offering of blood in Heavenly Tabernacle.
Eating of the sacrifice – the Eucharistic meal.
One might think from this that MacArthur must at least sound in
the teachings that were important in the Reformation. MacArthur certainly sees himself as a
champion of Reformation orthodoxy. When
Hank Hanegraaff, Walter Martin’s successor at the Christian Research Institute,
joined the Eastern Orthodox Church in 2017 MacArthur acted as if Hanegraaff had
converted to Islam or Buddhism or just apostatized. Hanegraaff, quite capable of defending
himself, provided clips from MacArthur’s remarks in his response. By
joining the Eastern Orthodox Church, MacArthur felt, Hanegraaff had abandoned
or was close to abandoning the Gospel.
Not the Gospel as St. Paul identified it in 1 Corinthians 15, that
Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures, and was buried, and rose
again the third day according to the Scriptures, of course, because that Gospel
is confessed in the Nicene Creed which Eastern Orthodoxy confesses, but the
doctrine of justification by faith alone.
Justification by faith alone is, of course, a central doctrine if
not the central doctrine of the Reformation.
While it was not until the sixteenth century that it was put in that
wording it is essentially identical to St. Paul’s doctrine of justification by
faith and not by works. In St. Paul’s
epistles, especially Romans, it is stressed that justification is by faith and
not by works. It has to be by faith and
not by works, St. Paul argued, because only then can it be by grace, that is,
by God’s favour, a gift freely bestowed.
If it were by our works it would be a wage or reward rather than a
gift. This is an important truth and,
indeed, in Ephesians 2:8-9 St. Paul says that salvation, which is larger than
justification, is a gift of grace by faith and not works. The importance of this truth should not be
minimized, but it does need to be kept in perspective. It is a truth about what is sometimes called
the mechanics of salvation. The Gospel
is the Good News of that salvation proclaimed to the world of sinners, Jew
first then Greek. Its content is Jesus
Christ, the Son of God, Who He is and what He did. The Gospel is all about Jesus Christ. Justification by faith and not works is about
us, what we believe and what we do or rather what we don’t do to receive what
Jesus Christ has done. It is an
important truth, but truths in which we are the subject rather than Jesus Christ
are not on par with the Gospel truths about Jesus Christ and we ought not to
make them out as if they were. The
evangelical Protestant habit of referring to the doctrine of justification by
faith alone as if it were itself the Gospel rather a truth about ourselves
derived from the Gospel is a very bad one.
Any truth can become a heresy when it is taken out of its proper
context. The proper context for Sola
Fide is as the answer to the question “what is the hand with which we reach out
and appropriate to ourselves the gift of salvation that God has given to us in
Jesus Christ” because this is the role that belongs uniquely to faith.
In his negative remarks on Hanegraaff’s chrismation into Eastern
Orthodoxy MacArthur treated justification by faith alone as an essential
article of faith to which one must formally subscribe to be a Christian. How much is such subscription worth, however,
when you affirm the doctrine formally while stripping it of all real meaning?
One of John MacArthur’s best known books was The Gospel According to Jesus, first published by Zondervan in
1988. This book was his response to a
real problem afflicting evangelicalism.
MacArthur called the problem “easy believism” but it would have been more
accurately called “mass production evangelism” because it was basically large-scale
evangelism, designed to get as many conversions as possible no matter how
shallow, through a lowest-common denominator approach to the Christian message.
Had MacArthur written a book denouncing the factory assembly-line approach to
evangelism and its bad “decisionism” theology and tracing it back to the
neo-Pelagianism of Charles G. Finney in the early nineteenth century it could
have been a very worthy volume. It would
have been a completely different book from The
Gospel According to Jesus, however. Instead, MacArthur’s book retained the basic
structure of evangelical decisionism but called for the decision to be defined
in the much more demanding terms of total commitment, which arguably merely
returned it to the point at which it went wrong in the teachings of
Finney. MacArthur wed this with a type
of Dortian Calvinism that is entirely incompatible with it producing
theological incoherency. He is heavily
indebted to heretical, liberal, “God is dead” theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer
for his thesis, although Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship is not listed
in the bibliography, at least in my copy (the 1989 paperback edition), nor is Bonhoeffer
listed in the index. There was a revival of interest in Bonhoeffer at the time
MacArthur was writing this book, brought about in part by the dishonest
promotion of Bonhoeffer as a “martyr.” A
martyr is someone who is put to death for his faith. Bonhoeffer was not executed for his faith but
for his political activities, including his involvement whether actual or
merely assumed due to his associations in an assassination plot. No matter how worthy political activism may
be or how deserving of assassination an intended target may happen to be it
does not make the person executed for such into a martyr, much less does it
transform a heretical theologian into a sound one. Nor did MacArthur succeed in
turning Bonhoeffer’s bad theology sound by slapping lipstick on the pig and
rebranding it in The Gospel According to
Jesus.
In
The Gospel According to Jesus,
MacArthur affirmed justification by faith alone as an essential article of
faith, but gutted it of all its meaning.
Remember that Romans St. Paul argued that justification had to be by
faith and not by works so that it might be by grace and therefore a gift rather
than a wage. A gift is something that
someone gives and another person receives.
It is not something that one person gives to another in exchange for
something else. MacArthur however wrote “The
important truth to grasp is that saving faith is an exchange of all that we are
for all that Christ is.” (p. 143). This
does not describe the giving and receiving of a gift but is precisely the sort
of transaction that St. Paul says that justification/salvation is not. In his next sentence MacArthur says “We need
to understand that this does not mean we barter for eternal life.” However, when you say “the water is full of
sodium chloride” you cannot clarify your sentence by adding “this does not mean
that it is salty” because this is contradicting not explaining yourself and this
is the case with MacArthur. A barter is
precisely what MacArthur had described in the first sentence. Nor is this the only place in this book where
he speaks of salvation as a two-way exchange.
Clearly the man who pastors Grace Community Church and whose radio
program is entitled Grace to You understands the word grace rather differently
from St. Paul. Since he has difficulty
with the entire concept of a gift of grace that is St. Paul’s reason for
stressing justification by faith without works it is not surprising that
MacArthur’s book is also chock full of statements like this “True faith is
humble, submissive, obedience.” (p. 140).
Note that this does not say that true faith is accompanied by humility,
submission, and obedience. It says that true
faith is these things. Basic deductive
reasoning here. If X = Y and Y = Z then
X = Z. Obedience and works are the same
thing. If faith is obedience then faith
is works. If faith is works, then saying
that justification is by faith and not works or that justification is by faith alone
is utterly meaningless. It would be one
thing if this were a one-time slip of the pen, but is basically what MacArthur
argues for throughout the entire book.
Nor is he merely saying what Jesus said when He answered the question of
“what shall we do, that we may work the works of God?” with “This is the work of
God, that ye believe in him whom he sent.” (Jn. 6:28-29). Indeed, his intent is clearly the opposite of
Jesus’ in this passage.
Ironically,
much of this book is dedicated to justifying disobedience, disobedience, that
is, to Matt. 7:1. True, as is indicated
elsewhere in the New Testament or even in the verses that immediately follow,
Jesus did not intent to prohibit all judgement in this verse. However, statements like “If a person
declares he has trusted Christ as Savior [sic], no one challenges his
testimony, regardless of how inconsistent his life-style may be with God’s Word”
(p. 59) variations of which complaint are found repeatedly in these pages are
evidently calling for a kind of judgement that if it is not fall under Jesus’
prohibition, nothing does.
The
title of the second chapter “He Calls for a New Birth” displays just how
muddled MacArthur’s theology is in this book.
When Jesus told Nicodemus that he must be born again this was not a call
for a new birth. It was an indicative
statement of the necessity of the new birth.
A call for a new birth would take the form of Jesus telling Nicodemus
that he requires a new birth from Nicodemus, that Nicodemus is capable of
meeting the requirement and needs to undergo such a birth to meet the
requirement. That, however, is not the
conversation Nicodemus and Jesus had.
Nicodemus does not understand Jesus’ statement and when he asks for
clarification Jesus tells him that the new birth is the work of the Holy
Spirit, and is like the wind which blows where it blows, and can be identified
by its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it going (Jn.
3:8). If the new birth is the work of
the Holy Spirit, it is not something Jesus calls for from us. Jesus does identify in this same passage
where our responsibility lies and that is to believe in Him. MacArthur’s attempt to confuse the simplicity
of what is conveyed in this part of the interview involves a textbook example
of the meaning of eisegesis “In order to look at the bronze snake on the pole,
they had to drag themselves to where they could see it. They were in no position to glance flippantly
at the pole and then proceed with lives of rebellion.” (p. 46) Exposition like
this makes one wonder what the expositor was smoking at the time he wrote it. Oddly, MacArthur’s treatment of the new birth
in this chapter is very much at odds with his Reformed theology in which
regeneration is very much a sovereign act of the Holy Spirit.
Less
oddly, he divorces regeneration from baptism.
With regards to the water of John 3:5 he writes “This has nothing to do
with water or baptism – H2O. It cannot be accomplished by a bath” (p. 40). This comes from his Hyper-Protestantism. That regeneration is a work that the Holy
Spirit accomplishes, that baptism is the sign and seal of this work, and that
as a Gospel Sacrament it is used instrumentally to convey the grace it
signifies is not merely the Roman understanding but the Catholic understanding
of the entire Church of the first millennium.
It is also the understanding of the Lutherans, Anglicans, and even the
more orthodox of the Reformed. Dr.
Luther and the English Reformers saw no contradiction between this and their doctrine
of justification because there is no contradiction. There is no contradiction for two reasons, a)
Baptism is a Sacrament not a work, and b) the role of Sacraments such as
Baptism in salvation is not the same as that of faith. Faith is the instrument we use to appropriate
the gifts God gives us in His grace.
Sacraments and the Church that administers them are like the Word
proclaimed the instruments that God uses to give us those gifts.
If
in his error discussed in the previous paragraph MacArthur departs from where
the traditions of the Magisterial Reformation are in full agreement with Rome
and not only Rome but the entire Catholic tradition when it comes to assurance
of salvation he departs from the Reformation tradition on what was one of the most important issues in the Reformation and
one on which Dr. Luther and Calvin very much disagreed with Rome. “Genuine assurance comes from seeing the Holy
Spirit’s transforming work in one’s life, not from clinging to the memory of
some experience” (p. 23). This statement
is true in what it denies. Assurance
does not come from “clinging to the memory of some experience.” It is very, very, wrong in what it
affirms. This is because assurance and faith
are the same thing. It says so
explicitly in the Bible. St. Paul in
Hebrews 11:1 writes “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the
evidence of things not seen.” While I am
quoting the Authorized Bible and very much hold the position that translations
of the last century or so are in general greatly inferior to it in this case
where they generally have “assurance” where the Authorized has “substance” or “certainty”
in the case of the NASB (the NIV uses “assurance” where the Authorized uses “evidence”)
it is helpful in making the meaning of the verse clearer. Faith is assurance or certainty of its object
and content. The Holy Spirit’s transforming work in our lives manifests itself
in works. Saying that assurance comes
seeing this transformation, then, is the same thing as saying that we must put
our faith in our works. That assurance
is faith, and that faith/assurance is not to be placed in our works or anything
else in us but in Jesus Christ as He is proclaimed in the Gospel was Dr. Luther’s
position and remains the Lutheran view to this day. John Calvin taught the same thing. Both men told their flocks not to look for assurance
within themselves but to find it outside themselves in Jesus Christ. John Calvin famously wrote “But if we are
elected in him, we cannot find the certainty of our election in ourselves;
and not even in God the Father, if we look at him apart from the Son.
Christ, then, is the mirror in which we ought, and in which, without
deception, we may contemplate our election. For since it is into his body
that the Father has decreed to ingraft those whom from eternity he wished to be
his, that he may regard as sons all whom he acknowledges to be his
members, if we are in communion with Christ, we have proof sufficiently
clear and strong that we are written in the Book of Life.“ (Institutes of the Christian Religion, 3.24.5) MacArthur’s Puritanical view of
assurance is a greater departure from the Pauline and Reformation doctrine of
salvation by faith and not by works than that of Rome.
MacArthur,
in my opinion, missed his true calling.
Instead of teaching the Bible, he should be peddling snake oil or
selling used cars.
