The Right Word(s) for Opposing Liberalism

In a social media group devoted to Canadian Politics last week, I saw someone make the claim that the old Conservatives have disappeared and been replaced by the Reform/Alliance types and that today’s Liberals are where the Conservatives were forty plus years ago.  She was half-right.  The part she got wrong, however, was the exact opposite of the truth, a fact of which I informed her. 

 

It is true that those who call themselves “Conservatives”, big or little c, today, are basically a watered down version of what the Reform/Alliance was in the final decade of the last century, which was a populist party that was “conservative” only in the American sense of the word, a sense which has no roots deeper than the (classical) liberalism upon which the United States was founded and which is not significantly different from the original philosophy and platform of the Liberal Party (which called itself Reform in the era of Confederation).  The shift from the old Canadian conservatism to American-style neo-conservatism is not however, as this lady seemed to think, adequately explained by the dropping of “Progressive” from the party’s title. “Progressive” was not part of the party’s title in Confederation but was added to it about a decade after the old “Progressive” party – a farmers’ populist party – dissolved.  This was done because John Bracken, the premier of my province at that time, had been asked to take over the leadership of the federal Conservatives and made this a condition of his acceptance.  Bracken had been premier of Manitoba since 1922 (he was the longest to serve in this office), initially governing as leader of the provincial version of the Progressive Party (which at first called itself the United Farmers of Manitoba), then after the party collapsed as leader of the Manitoba Liberals.  When “progressive” was added to the title of the Conservative Party therefore, it was with the sense of “western, agrarian, populist” and not the sense it normally has in politics.

 

It is not true that today’s Liberals, big or small l, are where the old Conservatives were prior to neo-conservatism.  On one important matter they are portraying themselves as taking the position of the old Conservatives, the matter of standing up for Canada against the threat of American takeover.  Note that the threat and their stance against it conveniently came at the time when they were facing an historical defeat in a Dominion election.  That Canadians bought this posturing from the Liberals - the reverse of their historical position which had been to push for closer economic, cultural and political ties between Canada and the United States – can probably be attributed to neo-conservatism’s takeover of the Conservative party, although the Conservatives having betrayed their old position for that of the Liberal Party by no means logically implies that the Liberals can be trusted to stand up for the old Conservative position.  For most of the past thirteen years, the Liberals have positioned themselves not where the old Conservatives were prior to neo-conservatism, but in territory that forty-some years ago would have been regarded as beyond the pale in the land of the looney Left.   They were taking positions on moral, social, and cultural matters that as recently as twenty years ago, liberals of my acquaintance insisted could not possibly be the direction towards which their movement was heading and which until about twenty years ago, would have been regarded as too far to the Left even by some members of the NDP. (1)  Indeed, the Liberals’ relentless insistence on shoving this looney-tunes nonsense down Canadians throats, no matter how unpopular it was, significantly contributed to the rapidly declining polls from which they were rescued by a change in leadership around the time the jackass that the Americans had recently returned to the White House started relentlessly threatening us with Anschluss.  The current Liberal leader, whom I call Blofeld due to his resemblance to the last actor to play that character in a James Bond film, (2) is not the exact replica of his predecessor, whom I call Captain Airhead for obvious reasons, that the neo-conservative media try to make him out to be.  Nevertheless the Liberal Party he leads, while perhaps somewhat closer to the centre than before, is still out there in left field.

 

In the same social media discussion I said that I am no longer comfortable describing myself as a “conservative” since over the course of my lifetime I have seen this word co-opted by the neo-conservatives and redefined to mean what it means in the United States, i.e., the older form of American liberal.  I am comfortable with the term “conservative” only in the older and better sense of the word, the sense associated in Canada with Sir John A. Macdonald and the Right Honourable John G. Diefenbaker, with humourist/economist Stephen Leacock, philosopher George Grant, and historian Donald Creighton.  The “conservative” whose conservatism is that of John Farthing’s Freedom Wears a Crown and Diefenbaker’s Those Things We Treasure rather than that of National Review and Fox News, a conservatism that looks back to Edmund Burke and better yet Richard(s) Hooker and Field, Dean Swift, John Dryden and Dr. Johnson rather than to John Locke and J. S. Mill.  A conservatism that is all about tradition, order, and continuity, which places honour, loyalty, and the virtues of Christendom and the age of chivalry above the values of commercialism and mercantilism. A conservatism which believes in freedom in community rather than in isolated and atomized individuals, which trusts the Westminster parliamentary system that has been refined during the course of a thousand years of history over any constitution drawn up on paper three centuries ago by revolutionaries who wanted a break from the past, and which believes in the institution of royal monarchy with its prescriptive authority and its superior representative ability due to its transcendence of partisan politics over the crass republicanism that makes the highest political office the prize of a highly divisive popularity contest and which is born out of thinking Satan’s thoughts after him.  Since the neo-conservatives have been so successful in divorcing the term from these associations I prefer the older term Tory and gladly self-apply the term reactionary, derived from the movement that put an end to Robespierre’s Reign of Terror, that progressives (in the normal sense of the word, not agrarian populists) have long used of non-progressives who are not content with merely questioning liberalism’s most recent ideas.

 

Shortly after the aforementioned discussion it occurred to me that in the sphere of religion and theology I feel largely the same way about the term “evangelical.”  When I first encountered this word as a young Christian it was used to mean something like “non-liberal Protestant”.  To clarify, “liberal” in the preceding sentence does not have its political connotation but refers to someone who holds to revisionist theology, that is to say, theology that has been revised in accordance with the mistaken notion that Modern discoveries of various sorts (scientific, critical, etc.) have placed such things as the historical accuracy of the Scriptures and the possibility of miracles outside the realm of the credible.  Think of the kind of person who says that he believes in the divinity of Jesus Christ but by this does not mean what Christians have historically and traditionally meant by this - that the eternal Son of God, the Second Person of the Trinity, at one point in history entered the womb of the Blessed Virgin, took a complete but sinless human nature at the moment into His own eternal Person from the moment it was formed and from that point forward was both fully God and fully Man in One Person, the Person Who upon His birth was given the name Jesus and Who fulfilled the prophecy of the Christ – but rather means that there is a spark of divinity in all people (as the ancient Gnostic heretics taught) that was bigger or more apparent in Jesus.  Or the kind of person who says that he believes in the resurrection of Jesus Christ but who also thinks that His bones might be discovered some day.  From the moment I became aware of this kind of liberalism, I loathed it as much if not more than the political ideology by the same name. (3)

 

That having been said, even back in the ‘90’s I was not a big fan of using the word “evangelical” for Protestants who were “conservative” in the theological sense.  I learned fairly early in my Christian walk that this use of the word dated back to the 1950s when certain conservative Protestants – Carl F. H. Henry, Harold John Ockenga, Billy Graham, Fuller Seminary, Christianity Today – started to use it to distance themselves from fundamentalists.  “Fundamentalist”, while now used by progressives to refer to anyone from any religion who has not compromised the traditional beliefs of his religion to their liking, was coined in the early twentieth century by Protestant theologians actively fighting the takeover of their denominations by liberalism and originally meant a kind of conservative pan-Protestant alternate ecumenism (4).   Those who chose the term “evangelical” to distance themselves from fundamentalism, although they claimed they wanted a more intellectual approach (5), really meant that they wanted a more compromising and less combative approach to liberalism.  Twenty years later, writers within evangelicalism were warning that some in the movement were abandoning sound theology, at least with regards to the infallible authority of Scripture. (6)

 

There are other connotations to the word “evangelical” than “theologically conservative Protestant”, of course, and when the new “evangelicals” of the 1950s chose this word to distance themselves from the fundamentalists it was because the word was older and had these other connotations.  In the sixteenth century, Dr. Luther and the other Reformers used the word to distinguish themselves from the papacy and its followers.  Used in this sense it was synonymous with Protestant and in much of Europe today it retains the meaning of “Protestant” and is used of anyone who is Protestant in ecclesiastical affiliation regardless of what his theology may be.  In the Anglican Church, which retained her Catholic structure through and after the Reformation, those who emphasized her ongoing Catholicity and those who stressed her Protestantism often sparred with each other and those stressed the Protestantism formed a faction and called themselves evangelical.  In the eighteenth century, evangelical took on yet another meaning in the English-speaking world as it became attached to the emphasis upon a personal conversion experience in the revivals that attended on the preaching of John and Charles Wesley, George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards, Howell Harris, Daniel Rowland, Ebenezer Erskine, Gilbert Tennent, Theodorus Jacobus Frelinghuysen, James Davenport, Jonathan Dickinson, Samuel Davies and others.  This became the primary meaning of the word in North America and is the meaning which the new “evangelicals” of the 1950s, who largely built their movement around the success of the Billy Graham evangelistic crusades, (7) most clearly had in mind.

 

My degree of comfort with the term varies in accordance with these connotations.  None of them is entirely unproblematic.  The one with which I am the most comfortable is Dr. Luther’s.  He used the word because he did not want his followers to be called by his own name (8) but by the name of the Gospel.  The implication, however, is that the doctrine of justification by faith alone is “the Gospel”, that it had been lost, and that he had rediscovered it.  Dr. Luther did not actually think this way, but since him it has been taken this far.  I know of some, for example, who think that all of the ancient Churches, not just Rome, but the churches of the East and the further East, lost the Gospel ages ago and that it was only rediscovered in the sixteenth century.  These are blissfully ignorant of the fact that their view of Church history is both heretical and identical with that of all the sects that they label “cults.”  The doctrine of justification by faith alone, important as it is, is not the Gospel.  If it were the Gospel, then Christianity would be saying to the world “we’ve got good news for you, all you have to do is believe” and worded that way the doctrine ceases to be a precious truth and becomes the noxious heresy of antinomianism. (9) Any truth can become a heresy if focused on to the point that we lose sight of other necessary truths.  In the early Church, the deity of Jesus Christ and His humanity, the oneness and the Threeness of God, were each twisted into heresies that denied their complementary truths.  The same is done to justification by faith alone when it is made out to be the Gospel, rather than ancillary to the Gospel.  The Gospel is that Jesus Christ, the Eternal Son of God become Man for us, died for our sins, according to the Scriptures and was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures and was seen by a multitude of witnesses (1 Cor. 15:3ff). This message, the Good News that Christianity is commanded to preach to the world, is central to the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, the Creed that is most truly universal being confessed by all the ancient Churches, including the Roman, and by the three main Reformation traditions.

 

I am less comfortable with the North American meaning of the word than with Dr. Luther’s.  The revivalist message, that each of us needs to internalize our faith, to repent of our sins and commit to personally following Christ, rather than relying upon external Church membership and attendance, is sound enough.  Unfortunately, it is often preached in an unhealthy way that has the opposite effect to that of Dr. Luther’s evangelical message.  Dr. Luther, in emphasizing justification by faith alone, directed the believer to look outside himself, through the eyes of faith, to his Redeemer proclaimed in the Gospel (that He died for our sins – it is finished – and rose again, objective, external, historical facts).  North American evangelicalism, by contrast, tends to turn the believer’s eyes back onto himself, to get him to constantly question whether his faith experience is real, and to answer the call of the evangelist repeated times, with decreasing levels of assurance each time.  If sixteenth century evangelicalism tended towards the error of confusing the ancillary doctrine of justification by faith alone with the Gospel itself, North American evangelicalism tends towards the error of confusing “ye must be born again” with the Gospel, a worse error because these words, by stating the need of the soul of fallen man, are closer in nature to Law than Gospel.  It lends to the problem of the inner-directed gaze by tying the re-birth, contrary to the Church Fathers, the ancient Churches, the three branches of the Magisterial Reformation, not to the Sacrament of Baptism which like the internal work of the Holy Spirit of which it is the outward symbol cannot (and need not) be repeated and in which the recipient is passive but to a personal act of repentance and (re-)dedicating oneself to Christ which is active on the part of the participant, which can be repeated, and which ought to be repeated as the need arises. (10)

 

The connotations of evangelical in the Anglican context, to the extent they are distinct from the previous two sets, are those with which I am least comfortable.  In the sixteenth century, evangelical as applied to the reformed Church of England had Dr. Luther’s meaning, today it is closer to the generic North American meaning, but in between it was the name of a faction or party within the reformed Church of England.  That forming a faction or party within the Church is a bad thing to do is one of the main themes of St. Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians.  Of course, someone might respond that this point could be raised against the Anglican Church’s post-Reformation status as a distinct Church.  The answer to this, of course, is that in the New Testament there was a huge difference between the factions within the Corinthian Church declaring themselves to be “of Apollos”, or “of Cephas” or “of Paul” on the one hand, and the distinction on the other hand between “the Church in Galatia” or “the Church in Thessalonica” or between the seven Churches to whom letters are addressed in the second and third chapters of the Apocalypse.  In the English Reformation, when the Church of England in conjunction with Parliament declared herself free from the usurped authority of the Patriarch of Rome, she did not excommunicate said Patriarch nor did she excommunicate the Latin Church that remained under his authority.  The excommunication ran entirely in the opposite direction, demonstrating where the spirit of schism truly lay. (11)   Indeed, apart from its factionalism what I dislike the most about the Anglican Church’s evangelical faction is the low value it places on the efforts of the English Reformers to not be schismatic, to maintain continuity with the pre-Reformation Church, to keep the reforms moderate and conservative, and to be guided by how the Church of the first millennium and especially the early Patristic centuries interpreted the Scripture in making what reforms she made.  The evangelical faction of the Anglican Church has undergone many internal changes, (12) what has remained consistent about it is that it stresses things that we have in common with only the Lutherans, Reformed, and some of the separatist sects above the faith, spelled out in the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds which we have in common with all of the ancient Churches as well as the Lutherans, the Reformed on their best days, and slightly fewer of the separatist sects and other things (liturgical worship, three-fold historical ministry with episcopal government, etc.) that we have in common with the other ancient Churches and some of the Lutherans.  The proper hierarchy of value is that the common faith is most important, followed by the other things we have in common with all the ancient Churches, followed by the things we have in common with the Lutherans and Reformed.

 

With these misgivings about these three historical uses of the term and especially since the one with which I am most comfortable, Dr. Luther’s, has decayed into the contemporary European usage in which it is a synonym for Protestant regardless of theology, I would very much prefer that another term be used for a theological conservative.  Fundamentalist would be better except that around the time that the new evangelicalism was distancing itself from fundamentalism, fundamentalism was narrowing its own self-identity in less-than-desirable ways (13).  Catholic would be better yet were it not for the fact that most Protestants have conceded it to Rome making it impossible for anybody else to use it without a disclaimer as long as the Oxford English Dictionary.  This leaves us with orthodox, which has never been conceded to the Eastern Church the way Catholic has been to the Roman (traditionalist Roman Catholics and fundamentalist Protestants have always used it and it has long been the preferred term of those Anglicans who stress the importance of maintaining continuity in doctrine, structure, worship and practice with the Church of the first millennium, especially the first five centuries), and would have been the best option regardless since it has been the term for doctrinal soundness since the very beginning.

 

 

 

 (1)   It was roughly twenty years ago that one NDP member, Bev Desjarlais, voted against Bill C-38, which established the legal fiction of same-sex marriage across the Dominion, although it cost her the nomination of her party in the next election. The Liberals of the last thirteen years have moved much further down the slippery-slope from the Civil Marriage Act.

(2)   The resemblance is almost as remarkable as that between David Bentley Hart, the lay Eastern Orthodox theologian whose liberal Protestant views pass as traditional Eastern Orthodox ones to Westerners who are not sufficiently read in the theology of the East to know the difference and the late M*A*S*H actor David Ogden Stiers (after Stiers grew a beard in the mid ‘90’s) or between Captain Airhead’s current girlfriend and actress Zooey Deschanel.

(3)   The term “liberal” in both instances refers to the acceptance of Modern ideas over older, classical and traditional ideas.  About a century ago “liberal” theologians were called Modernists which is more accurate label.  The term “liberal” comes from the Latin word for “generous”.  Whether in the realm of politics or theology, it is a form of self-flattery and those who do not themselves identify as “liberals” seldom see in “liberals” the generosity and broad-mindedness they claim for themselves, quite the opposite.

(4)   As represented, for example, by the volumes The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth, edited by A. C. Dixon, Louis Meyer, and R. A Torrey, originally published in twelve volumes from 1910 to 1915, then rebound in the four volumes they have been published as ever since in 1917.  Dixon was a Baptist minister, Meyer a Reformed Presbyterian, Torrey a Congregationalist, and the contributors included Presbyterians such as James Orr, A. T. Pierson, and B. B. Warfield, Baptists such as E. Y. Mullins, G. Campbell Morgan, and Thomas Spurgeon, Anglicans such as Dyson Hague, W. H. Griffith Thomas, Handley Moule, G. Osborne Troop and C. T. Studd, Methodists such as A. C. Gaebelein and John L. Nuelson, Lutheran Frederic Bettex, A. J. Pollack of the Plymouth Brethren, and various other contributors from these and other denominations.

(5)   A laughable claim since they were hardly more scholarly then the men who contributed to The Fundamentals, note 4 vide supra.  Mark A. Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994) was a tremendous indictment of the movement’s efforts in this regards after four decades.  Perhaps if “intellectual” is taken in the uncomplimentary sense with which Tom Wolfe used to use or as is used by historian Paul Johnson in his Intellectuals (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988) it might be defensible.

(6)   Harold Lindsell, The Battle for the Bible (Zondervan: Grand Rapids, 1976) followed by his The Bible in the Balance (Zondervan: Grand Rapids, 1979) for example.  A decade later Francis Schaeffer addressed the declining doctrinal standards of evangelicalism in his last book The Great Evangelical Disaster (Wheaton: Crossway, 1984).

(7)   Apart from doing what he was most famous for doing, Billy Graham was the founder of Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of the new evangelicalism.  Carl F. H. Henry was the magazine’s first editor.

(8)   As Robert Burns said “the best laid scheme o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley.”

(9)   Gospel means “good news”.  If “justification by faith alone” were the Gospel this would mean that it is itself the central content of the message of Christianity.  The very wording, “justification by faith alone”, however, should make it obvious that this is not the kerygma but a theological formulation.  If you try to express what “justification by faith alone” means as a message addressed to people in the second person then you end up with “all you have to do is believe”.  There is a huge difference between saying that “all you have to do is believe” is Christianity’s message to a fallen and sinful world and saying that Christianity’s message is “God has given us a Saviour, His Only-Begotten Son, Who became a man just like us except without sin, Who died for our sins upon the cross that He might take them away and defeat the enemies that have held us in spiritual bondage since our first parents, Who after He was buried showed His triumph over these enemies of sin and death by rising again from the dead, leaving the grave behind, showing Himself to His followers, and ascending back to His Father” and that we are to believe this message and trust this Saviour rather than in our own efforts to please God.

 

The second wording shows where the doctrine of justification by faith alone belongs, in the unrolling of the implications of the Gospel for us, that because the Saviour God has given us is so perfect and the salvation He accomplished for us so complete, He and not our own efforts is the proper object of our faith, just as He and not our own faith, is the proper content of the Gospel.  The first wording, however, expresses what you get when you make justification by faith alone itself out to be the Gospel.  This is not what those who call justification by faith alone the Gospel usually intend to convey, they have just not thought through the implications of what they are saying. 

 

In the text of the essay I identified the heresy which they unintentionally make themselves guilty of by sloppy thinking as antinomianism.  This is because if “all you have to do is believe” is itself the “good news”, this translates into “you don’t have to do good” which is the historical meaning of antinomianism (more precisely, antinomianism is the idea that Christians do not have to obey the moral part of the law), whereas justification by faith alone in its proper place, does not tell you that you don’t have to do good, it tells you that your efforts to do good cannot save you or assist in your salvation, and that you are to trust in Jesus Christ rather than them. 

 

Anti-protestant apologists, usually for Rome, like to refer to the heresy of “solafideism”.  This suggests that “justification by faith alone” is itself, and not merely its being placed in the centre of the Christian kerygma bumping out Jesus, His death, and resurrection, a heresy.  This, however, ignores the very nature of heresy.  At the core of every heresy is a truth which has been misplaced, taken out of its proper context, so that other truths are diminished or denied.  The truth at the core of Sabellianism (modalism, the denial of the distinct Persons of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) is the unity of God.  The truth at the core of Tritheism (the denial of the unity of Being of Father, Son, Holy Spirit so as to make them three Gods) is the distinction of the Persons.  The truth at the core of Nestorianism (the separation of the deity and humanity of Jesus Christ so as to divide His Person) is that His human nature remains distinct from His divine nature even though they are united in His Eternal Person so that whatever is true of either of them is also true of Him, the Person. 

 

If there is a heresy of Solafideism this can only be because there is a truth of Solafideism.  If there is a heresy of Solafideism  which denies James 2:24 (and the larger passage in which it is found), then the truth Solafideism is the affirmation of Romans 4:3-5 (the wording of verse five is much stronger than what could be conveyed by the word “alone” or “only”), the entire chapter in which it is found and those before and after, the epistle of Galatians, Ephesians 2:8-10, Titus 3:4-8 (notice how the last two passages make the good works, the need for which they declare in the final verse, rest upon the foundation of their not having contributed to salvation by grace) and all the passages in the Johannine corpus (far too numerous to list but take the best known verse of the New Testament, John 3:16 as an example) which promise everlasting life to “whosoever believeth” in Jesus. 

 

Historically, if the Reformers placed too much importance on justification by faith alone by carelessly speaking as if they had recovered a lost Gospel, this is because Rome, despite having been officially committed to Sola Gratia since the days of St. Augustine of Hippo, had in practice been denying all the “to him that worketh not” and “not by works of righteousness which we have done” and the like found in these passages by exaggerating the importance and value of good works to the point of having created a treadmill theology in which people were kept on the treadmill of good works by having the carrot of salvation dangled in front of them, tantalizingly just out of reach, while they are whipped from behind with threats of hellfire or its unscriptural second cousin once removed purgatorial fire.  When challenged by the Reformers on this, Rome doubled down on this error, denied any truth to Solafideism (thus carelessly denying the truth of the passages just referenced) and made herself guilty of a far bigger and worse heresy than the one of which they accused the Reformers.

 

“Not by works”, which expresses what the “alone” in “faith alone” means much more strongly than the word “alone” ever could, occurs throughout the Pauline corpus of the New Testament.  It cannot be explained away by saying that the works in question are merely the ceremonial works of the Mosaic Law.  Titus 3:5’s “not by works of righteousness” clearly excludes this explanation.  So does St. Paul’s explanation of why justification is not by works – “that it might be by grace” (Rom. 4:16), that is to say, a gift.  Faith can receive a salvation that is freely given, works cannot, if they enter the picture then what they receive is a reward or a wage not a gift.  All “faith alone” was ever supposed to mean is that faith does not share its role in God’s order of salvation, the role of the hand that receives the freely given gift of God’s grace in Jesus Christ, with anything else.  Works cannot perform this role, neither can repentance which has the ancillary role of preparing the soul that it may trust in God’s grace, nor can the Sacraments which like the preaching of the Word are the hands of the Giver not of the recipient.  Anyone who considers that to be heresy, is himself the heretic.

(10)                       Note that the word “conversion”, while it can often mean accepting the faith for the first time, such as when we speak of someone from another religion (Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, etc.) or from a secular faith that masquerades as a non-religion (atheism, Communism, etc.) converting to Christianity, in which case it has the same one-time, not-to-be-repeated connotations of baptism and the spiritual work of regeneration, it is also  used in Scripture for occasions when a Christian is restored after a fall (see Lk. 22:32, in which Jesus speaks of St. Peter’s restoration after denying Him as a future conversion, St. Peter having already confessed the saving faith of Jn. 20:31 at Caesarea Philippi in Matt. 16:16 and been told that he was blessed because he had been enlightened by the Father Himself) and so denotes something that is repeatable (despite the nonsense which some early Christians held and which, due to the influence of the Shephard of Hermas, it took a couple of centuries for the early Church to fully repudiate, that each Christian is allowed only one big screw up and do-over after his baptism). 

(11)                       To make the point even clearer, dialogue between the reformed Church of England and the Eastern Orthodox Churches, more specifically between the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, at the time Cyril Lucaris, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, first George Abbott then William Laud, took place in the reigns of James I and Charles I in the early seventeenth century, long before Constantinople and Rome lifted the mutual excommunication they had pronounced upon each other in the eleventh century.  Although the leadership of the English Church never formally put this into writing, this early dialogue demonstrates that they regarded the excommunications of the eleventh century as political rather than valid and did not see themselves as bound by the papal excommunication of the East now that they had repudiated Rome’s usurped authority (Dr. Luther had a similar attitude).

(12)                       When the faction first formed it was very hard-core Calvinist to the point that it accused orthodox Churchmen who did not think that the canons of Dort should be binding on Anglicans or double predestination the subject of every sermon of “Arminianism” although few if any of those so accused were adherents to the tenets of the Remonstrance.  In the eighteenth century, the preaching of the Wesleys – although they were not of the evangelical faction themselves but are considered to have been evangelicals because they were among the first of the North American sense of the word – brought both a form of Arminianism that was quite modified from the Dutch original into Anglican evangelicalism.  The Calvinists remained, now as a sub-faction within the evangelical faction, somewhat ironically (the evangelicals had historically been the liberal faction of the Church) considered the more conservative sub-faction of Anglican evangelicalism.  Some of these seem to think that the Forty-Two Articles (the Reformed aspects of which were moderated when revised into the Thirty-Nine that have been the actual standard of Anglicanism for centuries) and the Lambeth Articles (which, due to Queen Elizabeth I’s wise veto, never became official the doctrine of the Church) are genuinely Anglican but that the 1549 Book of Common Prayer (mostly the work of Archbishop Cranmer) is not.  The Calvinist evangelicals are at their best today when insisting on strict adherence to the Book of Common Prayer and other classical Anglican formularies (this should include the 1611 Authorized Bible but often doesn’t) in worship, although this insistence is somewhat one-sided being the more vehemently protested against the inclusion of more traditional ceremonies and rituals than against slimming down the liturgy and making the sermon and music more resemble what you would find in a generic evangelical “non-denominational” mega-church. 

(13)                       What began as a cross-denominational cooperative movement against liberalism, became a movement which preached schism from other conservative Protestants (even within the same denomination) for not being schismatic enough (they called this second-degree separation).  While the movement remained theoretically neutral on eschatological interpretations, in practice it became even more dispensationalist than evangelicalism.  This may be due to non-dispensationalists (and non-pre-millennialists in general) moving over to the evangelical movement, but it is just as likely that dispensationalism’s bad ecclesiology appealed to their new hyper-separatism.  This, of course, meant that they became more committed to the “two peoples of God” nonsense than evangelicalism. Interestingly this did not necessarily mean they became more prone to the practical error of “Christian Zionism”, i.e., giving carte blanche support to the present state of Israel, than dispensationalist evangelicals.  Bob Jones Jr., president then chancellor of the fundamentalist university his father built for much of the second half of the twentieth century and certainly a dispensationalist devoted several pages of his memoirs, Cornbread and Caviar, to debunking Jerry Falwell’s more uncritical support of Israel by explaining that the country was secular and ungodly, persecuted Christians, hypocritically treated Arabs and Muslims the way they complained about having been treated themselves by everyone else throughout history, and at the time - as also today - were governed by a party formed and led by the leaders of the organizations that waged terrorist war against the United Kingdom in the 1940s prior to the partition of the Holy Land and their gaining independence in 1948.  He spelled out several of the crimes of the Irgun and Stern Gang in detail – can you imagine any evangelical dispensationalist doing this?  Similarly, John R. Rice of Sword of the Lord failed to get the memo that all dispensationalists must uncritically support Israel.  

 

I don’t include KJV-Onlyism in the list of undesirable elements of fundamentalism’s new self-definition.  The Authorized Bible is the preferred English translation of fundamentalism, actual KJV-Onlyism is held by some fundamentalists not by all.  While I am not a KJV-Onlyist in the sense of thinking that the Authorized Bible could not even hypothetically be improved on and that only someone involved in a Satanic New Age conspiracy or Alexandrian Cult would try I would say that until principles derived from orthodox faith are made the basis of textual scholarship again (such as, at the very least, that the correct text will be found in what has been read in the Church all along and not in manuscripts, regardless of their age, hidden away in obscure monasteries and libraries for centuries, see nineteenth century High Anglican Dean John W. Burgon for more such principles) and translators found who are at least the equals in scholarship of Bishops Andrewes, Overall and their co-translators (extremely unlikely, considering that the explosion of new translations coincided with the period of which Joe Sobran remarked “In 100 years we have gone from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to teaching remedial English in college”) a snowball stands a better chance in hell than of this happening.  By contrast with fundamentalism, evangelicalism went from a general preference for the New International Version to a general preference to the English Standard Version.   This took place because of the 2011 “update” to the NIV that made it “gender-neutral”.  Even before that, the value of the translation of which Rupert Murdoch’s company has owned the copyright since 1988, was grossly exaggerated.  In second-year Greek, one of my classmates remarked about how first year Greek had ruined the NIV for him.  I don’t remember there being much if any dissent to this opinion.  A few years after that I remember attending a service where the sermon was preached from the NIV with the text on a screen behind the preacher.  I happened to have my Greek New Testament with me, and looked up the same text.  The differences were far more than can be explained by the difference between “dynamic equivalence” and “literal” (nor could they be explained by differences in the underlying text, even if it were not the case, as it happened to be, that the Greek NT I had with me that day was not my Textus Receptus but the UBS fourth edition). Something that was a statement of fact in the Greek was a question in the NIV.  Proper names not present in the Greek were in the NIV.  As for the ESV it is the Revised Standard Version, a translation notorious for its liberal slant, the use of which was purchased from the National Council of Churches, then edited by J. I. Packer et al. sufficiently to allow for it to be sold under a different name and marketed as a “conservative” translation.

The Heresies of John F. MacArthur Jr.

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.