I’m Speechless, How Do You Respond?

Posted byChaplainmikePosted inOpen Thread, Public Issues

By Chaplain Mike

UPDATE: Read this “Open Letter to John MacArthur” from an Egyptian American at Recovering Evangelical.

I hope this doesn’t ruin your upcoming weekend, but I’m going to post some remarkable words by John MacArthur for your consideration and discussion today.

I came across this interview with brother John at the Christian Post today. I’m still shaking my head. Frankly, I am stunned and speechless at the moment, and don’t even have an introductory comment to make. So I will punt at this point and hand it over to you, our thoughtful Internet Monk community.

I. . . uh . . . well . . . I will try to join in as able, but . . . wow.

Wow.

CP: Currently we’re seeing sort of a revolution in the Middle East with protesters opposing authoritarian rule. They want their freedom. I wanted to get your response to the uprisings – what are we seeing, what does it signify?

MacArthur: I think there are a lot of ways to approach that but if you just talk about a biblical thing, they are all in violation of a biblical command – to submit to the powers that be because they’re ordained of God. I’m not saying Moammar Gadhafi is the best leader, I’m not saying that Mubarak is a great, benevolent and just leader, not when he’s got $70 billion in his own pockets at the expense of people.

But what I am saying is that whatever the government would be, even if it was Caesar in the New Testament, that the believers are commanded to live orderly lives, peaceful, quiet lives, subjecting themselves to the powers that be because they’re ordained of God. And the reason is any form of government is better than anarchy. You get a little bit of a taste of what’s going on right now – people are dying, property is being destroyed. You can’t have this. And inevitably what’s going to come out of this is going to be less order, more chaos, and perhaps what will come out of less order and more chaos is a worse kind of control, more dominating power that. You’d like to think that nothing but freedom would come out of this. That’s not what happened in Iran. It’s not likely to happen there because you got to bring all this mass, the violence, and this volatility under control; that becomes then a military issue. So I don’t think the future looks good.

But biblically speaking, I would have wished the American government, which has a history of Christianity, would have risen up and said “this is wrong, this is forbidden for people to do this, this is intolerable.” Look, if you live in Iran and you obey the law, you’re safe because that’s what happens. You might not like the law, you might not like a lot about it, but … obviously there are times when you have to break the law because the Lord commands us to do something the law forbids. I just think the upshot of all of this is more instability, more chaos, you can’t make a transition to democracy this way; it’s impossible. After all, who said democracy’s the best form of government? No matter what the form of government is, the Bible doesn’t advocate anything but a theocracy. Any form of government is going to self destruct because you’re dealing with corrupt people, sinful people. The Kingdom of God advances without regard for the government but from a Christian standpoint, a biblical standpoint this kind of behavior is not approved in the Scripture and freedom – certain freedoms, liberties and democracies – is not a justification for this kind of mass rioting and disobedience and overturning of governments.

The illusion is that these people are going to get freedom. But what we have to understand is that you’re either a slave to sin or a slave to Christ. As Martin Luther said in The Bondage of the Will, no sinner is free; that is the great illusion that the sinner is free. He’s only free to choose the sin. In other words, he’s only free to choose the course of his own damnation but he can’t do anything about it. This is another form of bondage. They’re going to end up in another form of bondage; they’re going to end up the same, sinful, corrupt, unsatisfied, unfulfilled people taking their same anxieties in a different direction. So it’s not a solution to anything. It’s a momentary reaction. I understand that like the French Revolution when they had enough. You know the story when Marie Antoinette they said to her the people need bread. She said well, let them eat cake and mocked their hunger. That’s what brought the revolution about. That doesn’t justify the anarchy but it explains it.

CP: So you see nothing good coming out of this? Even if it means possible religious freedom for Christians in the Arab world?

MacArthur: I don’t think religious freedom is even an issue in the advance of the church. If you look at China, I don’t know what the numbers are, tens of millions of believers in China when it was forbidden. Look at Japan which was open and free and you’ll search forever in any city in Japan to find one Christian. So democracy, freedom of religion or persecution, if you had to pick your poison I think you might want to pick persecution because you get a purer church. Now I’ve been to Russia a dozen times and the church there was so pure and so devout and yet you can go across the border from Russia into Western Europe and the church is dead, almost non-existent. And they had all the freedom. So you can’t make a case that religious freedom is a right. The powers that be ordained of God, God is the one who determines that – Acts 17 said the boundaries of the nations – these things happen within the purposes of God and God will rule through these things and overrule these things. But they don’t really have anything to do with the church and the advance of the Kingdom. It’s not tied to any form of government.

283 thoughts on “I’m Speechless, How Do You Respond?”

  2. Tom I wholly concur…..
    After many years of dealings with American citizens online I see a pattern…. a pattern of rebellion and a lack of humility.
    Oh of course, I love all that is good and great in the USA, who wouldn’t …. but this rebellion against the rightful rulers (who ALWAYS are injust in a sense…..) doesn’t improve things one bit.
    Especially the lack of social compassion in the USA and the ideal of the egotistical self made man who doesn’t want to pay taxes (Boston Tea Party….) or support the weak in society to me is a proof of this.
    The Egyptian military regime of the now ‘free’ Egypt has allowed iranian ships to pass through the Suez Canal headed for Syria…. for the first time since the revolution of the Ayatollahs in 1979…..
    To me these revolutions can only lead to more suffering (also for local christians) not less.

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  3. Eagle,
    ” But when I read and keep hearing outragerous stuff by Christians time and time again in my mind I think, “Wow being a Christian means one has to be an asshole and difficult with the world and say outrageous stuff….”
    I can understand how you can be upset by what some “Christians” are saying. I do not agree with a lot of people who call themselves Christians but I think you make a too generalized comment when you say “being a Christian means one has to be an asshole and difficult with the world and say outrageous stuff….”
    One thing you have to remember though is that we are all sinners. When we accept Christ as our Savior we become a new creation, the old is gone the new is come (2 Corinthians 5:17). This does not mean that we will be perfect. We will still mess up and some people will have some pretty strange ideas (like MacArthur and some others). All Christians are not like that…it is just that these “Christians” are seen more than the others. And like Walt said “NOT drive me away from ‘Christianity’…..but certainly away from ‘CHURCHIANITY'”. Every denomination will have its own downfalls because it is made up of sinful people who have been saved by grace. It all comes down to God’s Word. Whenever someone says something that seems questionable check it against God’s Word. Many times people take the Scripture out of the context in which it was written and use it in other places to support their points. You have to be careful for this and again double check it against God’s Word (sometimes you have to do your own further research). When we become a Christian God calls us to live in the world but not OF the world. We are to be holy, set apart, for God and His will. Sometimes this means going against the flow but in all cases we must ask ourselves “What would Jesus do?”
    So to close I’ll say again how I can understand some of your feeling but do not think that that generalized comment applies to all Christians.

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  4. What is the point in calling someone a “fundegelical?” What purpose does being offensive serve? Just curious. I don’t agree with Mac and enough to sit at his feet, but I appreciate his integrity.

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  7. Well, dirty word. The whole let’s-comment-on-a-book-nobody’s-read non-issue took this off Pyro’s map. I was soooooooooooo looking forward to their reaction. 😉

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  8. JMJ/Christian Monist has in-country experience, and he claims that even the strict Muslims he knew have no desire for an Islamic Republic. To many of them, that would just be trading a Mubarak for a Mullah Omar.

    (The kicker is, I’ve written an SF novel whose future-history-of-Earth backstory IS a series of Islamic Revolutions spread Strict Shari’a (strict to the point of madness) across Europe as well as the Mideast and triggered a series of “Islamic Wars” — against both Infidels and Heretics — which eclipsed both WW2 and the Cold War in the history feeds. The backlash by the surviving West (where generations of Shaikhs-al-Jebar, Osama Bin Ladens, and their WMD-armed neo-Assassins ended up creating ten times their number in Vlad the Impalers) all but destroyed Islamic civilzation, while China stood on the mountain, watched the tigers fight to the end, and picked up the pieces. I figured this as a “worst-case” situation, and a warning.)

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  9. The people protesting their governments in the Middle East are by and large not Christians, isn’t it a bit hypocritical to hold non-Christian people to a Biblical standard we as believers often fail?

    Hasn’t stopped Christian Kyle’s Moms from trying. The busybody Church Lady archetype exists for a reason.

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  11. It is also totally other-worldly to argue that people who are starving both for food and freedom… should not seek to better their earthly lives because what ultimately matters is eternal salvation.

    I’m sure a LOT of kleptomaniac dictators like Gadhafi would welcolme such a “totally other-worldly” faith among their two-legged livestock.

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  12. MacArthur claims his only source of authority is the Bible—the Bible, that is, as interpreted in a narrow, literalistic sense.

    Except it’s a Bible instead of a Koran, how does that differ from the justification for an Islamic Republic?

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  13. I truly don’t understand how a Christian can use Romans 13 as a pretext to prevent peaceful demonstrations of an oppressed people against their oppressors! Although I don’t think the story of the Exodus is merely about worldly oppression (it’s about Christ freeing us from the shackles of sin), I fail to see how one can look at the Exodus story and claim that Moses and the Israelites’ defiance of Pharaoh was unbiblical. Is anyone going to really argue that there were different rules in the Old Testament for civil disobedience? If so, the onus is on the one who makes that claim to prove it. Even the Coptic church which initially sided against the protests (advising its members to refrain from protesting) for fear that they would turn violent, eventually said that peaceful protesting was up to the individual.

    That’s my understanding of the distinction Paul makes in Romans 13. Paul’s admonition to the Romans has to do with civil insurrection. The Egyptian demonstrations were peaceful, except when the pro government, rent-a-mob types attacked them. But, by and large, these were peaceful protests.

    A demonstration is one way for the governed to air their wishes, desires and grievances to their rulers; i.e. to communicate. There’s nothing wrong with that! That’s what the people of Israel do in the psalms. They communicate to God to rescue them from defeat and oppression. See Ps. 44 for example. That’s yet another argument that peaceful protest would be biblical since it communicates to the representative of God (the authorities) the needs of the people.

    If this were an armed or violent revolution (a la Libya), that it would be unbiblical. However, the bible does not admonish us to keep silent when injustices occur. It actually admonishes us not to keep silent. That’s what most of the protesters were doing whether or not they were Christian, Muslim or atheist.

    There probably were some who harbored sinful motives and perhaps violated the point of Romans 13, but, it seems to me that the Coptic church did the right thing eventually by leaving it up to the individual to demonstrate peacefully.

    I would also argue that Paul talks about not “doing wrong” and refers to “wrongdoers” as those who will be punished by the authorities. But, who’s a wrongdoer and what is doing wrong? Is a wrongdoer one who resists evil? If so, Moses was a wrongdoer. I would argue that doing wrong should be defined in a biblical way. In other words, whatever you do, do not steal, cheat, destroy, murder, etc. Those protesters were not sinning against the Law of God in any way.

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  14. no they seem to take turns – after all it was John Piper who had to chime in when the tornado hit the ELCA meeting and that whole blah blah blah…

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  15. REVOLUTION QUIZ:

    Dr. MacArthur makes a biblical application here to “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities” (Romans 13:1).

    Which of the following additional three scenarios depict person(s) not “subject to the governing authorities”?:

    (1.) The Prophet Jeremiah experienced a profound leadership crisis in Israel and rebukes Judah for “offer[ing] up their sons and daughters to Molech” (Jeremiah 32:35). Jeremiah sees this as justification to start a 13th Tribe.

    (2.) A “taxation without representation” concern arises in the British Colonies. The Colonists view this as justification to throw off the King.

    (3.) Certain 16th Century Catholic leaders are selfishly allowing the sale of indulgences. Various Christians throw off the Pope and start a Reformation.

    Perhaps Dr. MacArthur is correct, “if you just talk about a biblical thing, they are all in violation of a biblical command – to submit to the powers that be because they’re ordained of God.”

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  16. “True Christians dont rise up, protest, picket etc.

    Ah, but where did you get the idea we’re talking about Christians here? The countries on question are Islamic, and are not interested in hearing what either the Bible or John MacArthur have to say. John MacArthur is out of line to suggest that non-believers should be living like believers.

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  17. I was expecting some Stupid Christian Tricks comment on the news. (Because in a nation of 300 million, somebody’s going to shoot off their mouth, no matter what.)

    Only, based on past track record, I expected it to be Pat Robertson. (When Robertson made his little comment about the Haiti Eathquake, somebody commented that PR might be in early-stage Alzheimers — said commenter related he’d seen similar symptoms in a former boss of his who DID have early-stage Alzheimers. This comment was not from this blog.)

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  18. I remember “Noutheic” from JMJ/CHristian Monist’s blog. He didn’t have a high opinion of it.

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  19. I think MacArthur bringing his biblical views in muddies the water.

    There is a kernel of truth: The outcome of a revolution in Egypt does not necessarily mean they will move to a democracy. They could end up in a worse place than what they are in. And if this is what John means, I agree.

    I often shake my head when I see the crowd that sings the mantra that democracy is this great cure all for the world’s ailiments.

    The western world’s journey to democracy was a long process. And in the end, there had to be the right conditions and people had to submit themselves to it.

    I can give an example from Canada. About 15 years ago there was a public vote in Quebec as to whether they would separate and form a new country. They said NO by a very slim margin (sort of 55%). Those who voted YES for a new country were willing to abide by the results.

    At the time I was living in an area of the world where if it was similar circumstances, the separatist crowd probably would have said, we won’t abide, and probably cause a civil war.

    For democracy to take root anywhere, the population has to decide that they will abide by the decision of the majority. And what happens if they exercise their right and vote in an Islamist government?

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  20. Pieter F: thanks for stopping by the imonastery.

    Where you see sin and self-interest, I see making a plea, even a strong plea, for others, for justice, for more of “His Kingdom come…on earth as it is in heaven..” You right “we have no rights..” and this may be true in our approach to the all holy GOD, but this is nonsense when dealing with the horizontal level, man to man: on that level of course we have rights, and it’s up to each country, city, province, family, to work that out.

    Many folks did weigh in with opinions, sure, but it’s not as if scripture didn’t form the basis of the points that his detractors (or proponents) made. I’m glad that GOD has given you an appetite for HIS Word, maybe you could use that to instruct us in where our criticism has gone away trom the bible and the heart and mind of Christ. ??

    As an aside, was Martin Luther King being a pleasant odor unto Christ when he encouraged disobedience to the Jim Crow era segregated south of the 50’s and 60’s ??

    GregR

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  22. Thanks, Ted. I went to your blog and read all the blogposts posted while you were in Ecuador. It looks so colorful there! I have a high school friend who in the past two years has been studying Spanish and I think it is Ecuador that she has traveled to several times. I think her husband has been part of a group helping to do some building in that area. It would be funny if you folks “bumped” into each other there. She and her husband have lived in North Carolina all of her adult, married years.

    Thank you and the medical mission for the good work you do there.

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  23. Too many opinions on how people “feel” about John Mc Arthur’s comment. Insensitive? No. Truthful? Yes.
    Paul says in II Cor 12:10: I take pleasure in ….persecutions..for Christ sake:for when I am weak, then am I strong”.
    We should be dead to what the world does and how they react. We have no rights. We only reach out in love to the world. “Christianity” is not a Biblical term, it includes too many ungodly behaviours and assimilations. True Christians dont rise up, protest, picket etc. We are to be a pleasant odour for Christ, dead to the world, alive to Christ, Thanks to John Mc Arthur. I agree fully with him. I have worked through the Bible about 30 times. Love to God and all people you meet is supreme. Halleluya! I am 73 years young in South Africa.

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  27. When I heard that line in the theater, my first thought was, “wait, isn’t that an absolute statement?” I would chalk it up to irony, but I’m not sure George Lucus knows what irony means.

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  28. @Chap Mike: thanks for the Open Letter; very compact and powerful, and I would even say charitable. Good catch and share. One of my stronger take aways from all this is how easy it is to be dismissive of the larger themes of justice and the defense of the weak and disenfranchised, while leaning on a few isolated scriptures to hold onto an old prejudice. I think this can happen to anyone: may we all stay humble and alert, lest it be us.

    GregR

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  29. Wolf Paul: I liked all parts of your original post , and I know from reading your stuff the last few years that you are sensetive to those bruised by churchianity and hypocrisy. I still like the direction of your words, and at the judgment seat of Christ, all men (including and especially GregR) will be without excuse: Jesus is still present and available, and as the bumper sticker still says: “wise men still seek HIM”.

    Stay in the game Wolf Paul, we need you.
    GregR

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  30. I admit that this may be an oversimplification, especially if applied across the board.

    My excuse is that

    (a) this is what I think, accept it or not, that’s your privilege, and

    (b) this was specifically written in response to readers of this blog saying such things; people who thus have not been exposed only to silliness and insensitivity but are fully aware that there are other types of Christians as well.

    On the distinction between Christ and Christianity: I use the term Christianity to indicate being a Christian, or a Christ-follower, and all that is tied in with that. And in that sense you can’t divorce it from Christ or Christ from it.

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  32. Pingback: A Christian Response to Tyranny « Cognitive Discopants

  33. It’s nice to be home. I missed you guys.

    I think Paul designed a loophole into Romans 13. Read how many times he “praises” the governing authorities as ordained by God. And they ARE ordained by God, if you believe in God’s sovereignty…but… there’s a certain irony in the sheer amount of times he says this:

    — “For there is no authority except from God…”
    — “… [Rulers] have been instituted by God.”
    — “…what God has appointed…”
    — “…rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad.”
    — “…he [the ruler] is God’s servant…”
    — “…he is the servant of God…”

    It’s a bit like Shakespeare’s Mark Antony “praising’ Brutus: “Brutus is an honourable man.” He said that enough times for the crowd to catch the irony and become suspicious.

    Paul’s message works both ways, too. Not only did he remind Christians that their rulers are placed on the throne by God, he also reminded the rulers themselves—that they are indeed placed on the throne by God and can be removed by God. Problem is, the rulers don’t get the irony. In their own minds they become gods.

    “Know ye that the LORD he is God: it is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.” (Psalm100:3) That was written by a king who finally got the irony.

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  34. Joel, you haven’t heard hyperbole until you’ve heard me speak (in person, not through Web comments) on something that really gets me steamed.

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  36. My thinking exactly. When certain attitudes and behaviours are endemic throughout the evangelical culture how does one differentiate between the culture itself and the One that culture is supposed to represent?

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  37. Cunnudda: In a word NO. Yes we have an interest, and it mattes to those who share our beliefs who live in that country, but it’s not our country , it’s theirs, and self-governance (that is, until the LORD’s return) is their right. Unless you want to make some kind of “might makes right” argument, but I don’t think you want to go there.

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  38. After reading your insights, the thought suddenly occurs to me, would MacArthur extend his argument to include slavery? Because applying his logic to its fullest extent would have meant the perpetuation of this institution, and many preachers in the antebellum South did just that in supporting it.

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  39. I think all you’d have to do is read or listen to MacArthur to get an answer to your question. His views seem to take the calvinist doctrine of total depravity to a whole new level (as do the premises on which NANC counseling is based). He’d probably view working with nonbelivers as a waste of time at best.

    He certainly doesn’t share BIlly Graham’s view of common grace (though I think he also misinterprets Graham’s statement pretty badly).
    http://www.gty.org/Blog/B100228

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  40. Well said, but I have to agree with Kristin’s criticism that your analysis of what might drive people to reject Christianity is a little flawed. I think most would be willing to put up with flawed individuals. Everyone has quirks and foibles and failings. But what if the whole system and culture of what is presented as Christianity in a particular individual’s experience has something wrong with it? In other words, what if it’s a systemic dysfunction, at least in that portion of Christendom? I’d argue that this is the case sometimes and that it makes the whole question considerably more complicated. I also wonder how God will judge us if we continue to do things that drive people away.

    I think more people have rejected churchianity because of issues like this than have rejected Christ; at least at this point, I see the situation as perhaps salvageable if only we can get our act together.

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  41. “Anytime someone tells me that this or that action or statement by a Christian is driving him to reject Christianity, I think to myself, NO. What is driving you to reject Christianity is the fact that you don’t think you need a Saviour, because you are not as stupid … offensive … sinful … as this Christian.”

    I think this oversimplifies. Many times people reject Christianity because of what Christians tell them– or show them– Christianity is all about. They want nothing to do with that– thus showing their sense of common sense and human decency. It’s so sad that there are forms of our religion that advocate throwing common sense and decency under the bus in the name of correct doctrines. It is those doctrines that good people turn from in disgust, thinking that that is Christianity.

    So I would say, “If an action or statement by a Christian is driving you to reject Christianity, please look again at Jesus and what He said following Him meant, in order to be sure of what you’re really rejecting.”

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  42. MacArthur claims his only source of authority is the Bible—the Bible, that is, as interpreted in a narrow, literalistic sense. If he believes in “common grace,” I have never heard or seen any evidence of that. McArthur is a fundamentalist in this sense to the core. To say, as the article does, that we can engage non-believers and work with them for justice without even making reference to the Bible would not suit him.

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  47. Your comments on MacArthur are spot on. However, I have a problem with this statement:

    “Anytime someone tells me that this or that action or statement by a Christian is driving him to reject Christianity, I think to myself, NO. What is driving you to reject Christianity is the fact that you don’t think you need a Saviour, because you are not as stupid … offensive … sinful … as this Christian.”

    What you say makes for nice theory. But some of us find it just a bit difficult to separate Jesus from the church He established on this earth to represent Him.

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  48. I am confused as to exactly how they contradict each other. We can work peacefully with non believers but I don’t see where MacArthur says we cant. Could you point that out? I don’t want to remain ignorant on this, this question comes up a lot with the young people I minister to.

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  49. At the risk of offending some, I would like to say this before commenting on MacArthur:

    Anytime someone tells me that this or that action or statement by a Christian is driving him to reject Christianity, I think to myself, NO. What is driving you to reject Christianity is the fact that you don’t think you need a Saviour, because you are not as stupid … offensive … sinful … as this Christian. You reject Christianity because ultimately, you don’t accept the fact that all of us are flawed, all of us are “cracked eicons” (images of God), with the cracks manifesting in different ways in different people. Because your “cracks” are not the same and perhaps not as visible as those of the Christian whose behaviour offends you, you think you don’t need fixing. From a merely human perspective, you’re entitled to your opinion, but I don’t buy your blaming it on the stupid or sinful behavior of other Christians.

    Now to MacArthur: Apart from the fact that his answers in this interview sound awfully insensitive, they are vintage MacArthur: what I gave always missed from him is the humility of holding his convictions in an open hand, because “now we see through a glass darkly”. Given his conviction, specifically his interpretation of those verses in Romans, I would understand his rejection of the American Revolution (even while benefitting from it), but I don’t think his application to the current situation in North Africa and the Middle East can withstand scrutiny:

    All of the countries now in the news pay lip service to the notion of government by consent, and their leaders are in more or less open violation of their own constitutions by the way they govern, enrich themselves, and cling to power through various means. Thus, people gathering on a square chanting slogans demanding change is nothing but their legitimate exercise of freedom of opinion and expression, and sending in goon squads, foreign mercenaries or the regular military is what is unlawful.

    It is also totally other-worldly to argue that people who are starving both for food and freedom (the uprising in Tunisia started with a desparate man who had been deprived of his livelihood by the arbitrary action of a corrupt government) should not seek to better their earthly lives because what ultimately matters is eternal salvation. Dear John, these people are not going to listen to the gospel message as long as they are pre-occupied with the struggle to survive.

    And as he specifically addresses Christians: the assertion that if you obey the law in a country like Iran you will live peacefully borders on the ludicrous: in iran, as well as in places like Afghanistan or Pakistan, people are TODAY in jail, threatened with execution, simply for being former Moslems who have converted to faith in Christ. Surely we can marvel and be thankful at the way God grows His church in countries where it is persecuted, but to recommend to anyone, from a vantage point of relative religious freedom in North America or Europe, to choose persecution over freedom because it is beneficial to the church — any words I could use to respond to this would be either extremely rude or woefully inadequate.

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  50. lol, I’m not saying this directly about MacArthur, but that general approach to Scripture always make me think…

    In the words of the great Obi Wan Kenobi: “Only a Sith deals in absolutes.”

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  51. Have been off grid for a couple of days, logged on here, read the interview, skimmed the comments and can only say this: Why does John Macarthur have a following? I don’t get it and never will.

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  52. Man…just when you think horriffic comments like this are going away…

    THEN up to bat steps up John MacArthur!!!! (clap….clap….clap…)

    Way to go John!!! Let’s create more atheists!!!! 😯

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  53. It was hyperbole walt, and I hope that you’ll accept the apology that I already extended.

    Still though, I feel like when MacArther and his ilk look at the Bible I feel they just simply miss things that are intuitive to many others; much like someone with Aspergers cannot (or at least cannot initially) pick up on body language or other subtleties in communication.

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  55. Pingback: Glessners in Mexico » An interesting debate on Egypt

  57. Liberty is not the standard. Respect for authority is not the standard. Both of those things are the fruit, resulting from faithful acceptance of what God says to do. When a society ignores what God says to do, and the grace in Christ enabling us to do it, the end result is what we see around us — the erosion of both liberties and traditions.

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  59. The article you quote is good, but I don’t see how you can commend it and at the same time agree with JMac. It undercuts his entire approach. For example, this part of the article:

    Because of God’s common grace, Christians can work with unbelievers in attempting to promote justice and civic peace – and we can do so not only because it is good for believers and religious liberty, but because it is good for all people (Galatians 6:10; 1 Thessalonians 5:15). Writing on this very matter, the authors of The Search for Christian America have stated:

    Some Christians speak as though there is an absolute antithesis between Christian and non-Christian thought, neglecting the degree to which Christians themselves are hampered by sin and error, and the degree to which God’s common grace allows substantial room for communication and cooperation among all people in practical everyday life . . . Because we all live in God’s world, we have, in God’s common grace, some basis for discussing and shaping public policy without explicit appeal to the Bible. In fact, people from all nations of the world have been able to agree on many principles of justice and human interest, as for instance, in agencies and statements of the United Nations. That they violently disagree on other points or on the application of their common principles should not obscure this degree of commonality. So Christians and non-Christians may be able to agree on the value of charity toward the poor and the starving, on the undesirability of genocide, that literacy should be encouraged, on the virtue of loyalty to friends and parents, and on many other things (pp.135-136).

    The sentence, “Because we all live in God’s world, we have, in God’s common grace, some basis for discussing and shaping public policy without explicit appeal to the Bible” would be anathema to him.

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  61. Thank you. Couldn’t have said it better. Please be comforted by the many postings here who support your sentiments.

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  62. Are you kidding? Rich white overlords want totalitarian dictators who can be bought. It is way easier for corporate fatcats to negotiate/pay-off one nasty sumbitch who will keep his country quiet while its resources are exploited than it is to pay fair market rates to all the actual people who suffer from our desire for cheap gas, water, minerals, etc.

    Democracy and capitalism are American mythologies that make us all feel good but don’t get much real playing time in the Big Game.

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  63. I think that is precisely one of the key problems with this reasoning. At what point do we realize that our Anglo Christian perspective is not the only lens through which the Gospel can be perceived. ( Seems our missionary influence in Jamestown did the same thing to the Native Americans. What I mean is, that in the name of converting them they were stripped of their culture. How does that ever square with Scripture? )
    Just a thought.
    I found the article very troubling.

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  64. Whoa, hold on a minute. “Any form of government is better than anarchy,” but “Any form of government is going to self destruct because you’re dealing with corrupt people, sinful people.” So aren’t we all doomed to anarchy anyway?

    It becomes very obvious to me that John MacArthur has never read the Declaration of Independence and is familiar with neither American history nor any history at all. This is my first encounter with him, and I’m glad that I know now not to take him seriously. The guy is dangerously ignorant.

    The author of the letter was wise when he pointed out that MacArthur denies the possibility of God using world events for good. This is the time to pray for Egypt and the other countries undergoing change, so that anarchy or more oppression does NOT happen.

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  65. I have to be honest, according to Scripture, I have a difficult time disagreeing with JMac on this one.

    And according to what Scripture says, the founding fathers were in the wrong. Now has God used that mistake to further the Gospel? Yes but that still does not make it right.

    Here is a superb article on Christians and Politics. It answers many questions that have been posted here Scripturally.

    http://www.5solas.org/media.php?id=89&print=1

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  66. No, just take it as the example that “MacArthur trying to understand the Bible is WORSE than someone with Aspergers trying to understand love stories.”

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  68. It now has been answered, the question, “So, John, just how beholden to pandering to corporate, white, right-wing “America” ARE you??” Admittedly, I’ve got about 4 of his sermons on my gym mp3 player, Grace To You, the college, the website, forgot more about Scripture than I’ll ever know, lotta good in this world…
    having said that, would it kill him to mask his giddy glee when the subject turns to hell and Damnation, just a TAD regarding his tone?

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  69. Appreciated this. Wright is a consistently good and thought-provoking writer and thinker. The depth of his approach and the gentleness of tone stand in contrast to much of what passes for interpretation and instruction these days.

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  70. Agreed. This is just about exactly the pattern I’ve experienced (the family member is a NANC counselor, btw). The danger is that it’s can be easily used to rationalize and justify some pretty awful behavior. Won’t go into detail, but have seen this and seen other family members hurt pretty badly by it.

    It’s nice to know I’m not the only one who’s questioning this approach. Peace.

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  71. Great to see all the comments. Given time limitations, I will admit, I scanned over most and read a few, so I might have missed something in the previous postings. I would like to see or hear of the perspective of various Middle East Christians on this subject and recent happenings. I have had some limited contact in the past with our brothers and sisters from this region and I always walk away with a deeper and better appreciation of what they have personally experienced both past and present. Just a thought.

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  73. Michael, I agree with everything you said. You said it so eloquently. As a Christian (Lutheran) American (Egyptian by birth), I feel compelled to affirm as a Lutheran not only what you said that “Christ would have died for each one of them.” but that He unequivocally did die for each of them!

    Thanks for your support of Egypt’s aspiration to freedom, equality and dignity, things we take for granted here! May the Lord have mercy on us and on the Egyptians and the rest of those in the Middle East.

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  74. By MacArthur’s logic, John the Baptist should have knuckled under to the religious establishment (also the civil government anwerable to the Romans) in Jerusalem, and Jesus should have worn a “Support Your Local Saducee” T-shirt. Like so many evangelicals, he has a myopic, one dimensional view of scripture. Sad. The whole story is so much larger than that!

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  75. Joel: Quote:”MacArthur trying to understand the Bible is like someone with Aspergers Syndrome trying to understand love stories.”[/quote]
    I understand (I hope) that you didn’t mean anything ‘personal’ in that comment…..although often, ‘not personal’ merely means…..it wasn’t ‘personal’ to YOU.

    I’ve worked with children/youth with Autism and, yes, Aspergers….for 8 years now…..and I’ve known many who can exhibit far greater human compassion and, yes….love….than this man….supposedly WITHOUT debilitating ‘disabilities’ has exhibited.

    Blessings,

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  76. I think a very important distinction has to be made between peaceful, non-violent protest and armed uprising. In Egypt, the gov’t was brought down by peaceful means: a huge, non-violent protest before the eyes of the whole world pressured Mubarak to step down. If we lump peaceful protest in with violent actions, the discussion gets muddied. As a Christian I have to say violence is wrong; if I am shot at, I need to pray for the one shooting, not pick up a gun and shoot back. (Of course, this gets us into just war theory, which is a very big topic.)

    Also as a Christian, I believe I have a purpose to bless the world – but how does that work? How does that play out? Only in sincere devotion to God and prayer do I discern this so that I can be utterly purposeful and confident in what I do. When it comes to other peoples’ fights I have to acknowledge that the factors involved are very complex – only God knows what is right. The Christian leaders in these countries are leading their flocks and the flocks are responsible to listen to their shepherds. I believe the Coptic church was telling the Christians in Egypt not to protest. I also heard yesterday of a monastery which was shot at by military soldiers because the monks put up a protective fence in the absence of police protection. Several monks were shot while praying “Lord have mercy,” according to the report I heard.

    The other question: does John MacArthur get to say what ppl in the mid east should do? Is he the voice for the Copts and Orthodox in those regions? Well, no. He has his opinion based on Scripture and that’s all it is. He is not an international Christian authority. Let the middle eastern Christians be governed by their own spiritual fathers. Our job standing here at a distance is to pray for everyone involved. Lord have mercy!

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  77. Eagle: Quote:”actually though others here may disagree its stuff like what MacArthur says that drives me away from Christianity alltogether.”

    I understand your feelings….and agree….however, what this kind of stuff (and much more) does….is…..NOT drive me away from ‘Christianity’…..but certainly away from ‘CHURCHIANITY’. I’m entering my 3rd year of a ‘Sabbatical’ from ‘Churchianity’…..but I’m no less a ‘Christian’ than I ever was.

    Quote:”I read and keep hearing outragerous stuff by Christians time and time again in my mind I think, “Wow being a Christian means one has to be an asshole and difficult with the world and say outrageous stuff….”

    Nah…..assholes are assholes….simply because they are….and THAT appelation crosses all barriers. NO ONE has a ‘corner’ on that aspect of ‘humanity’.

    As a Canadian….it always amuses (and bemuses) me….to read some of the egocentic and zenophobic writings coming from Americans who ‘should’ know better…..who’ve often forgotten, IF they ever knew….that their very system of government….their very lifestyle….was founded upon rejection of ‘God-given and instituted ‘authority’….and outright rebellion (can anyone spell ‘murder’?) against such.

    Blessings,

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  80. Christine, we Canadians were also a British colony and gained our freedom without an uprising. This is why I don’t see the American Revolution as a righteous fight. That being said, nothing is ever black and white, but we have to trust God to be the judge of what is righteous. He sees what we cannot.

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  81. Mike S, as I said above, one reason why I’m not so impressed with Mr.(Dr? Rev?) MacArthur’s position (and I hope that we’re taking him up the wrong way, because I hate to think he’s really saying what he seems to be saying) is that we’ve had nice Evangelical-minded folk telling us here in Ireland much the same thing; Sir Charles pronouncing the will of God to the likes of these people:

    http://multitext.ucc.ie/d/Famine

    “… a vast number of impotent folk, whose gaunt and wasted frames and ghastly, emaciated faces were too obvious signs of the suffering they had endured. The little boys and girls presented a hideous sight. In many instances, their heads had become bald and their faces wrinkled like old men and women of seventy or eighty years of age. [Thomas Armstrong, My life in Connaught (London 1906) 13; repr. in L. A. Clarkson & E. Margaret Crawford, Feast and famine: a history of food and nutrition in Ireland, 1500–1920 (Oxford 2001) 140]

    … We entered a cabin. Stretched out in one dark corner … were three children huddled together, lying there because they were too weak to rise, pale and ghastly, their little limbs … perfectly emaciated, eyes sunk, voices gone, and evidently in the last stages of actual starvation. On some straw … was a shrivelled old woman, imploring us to give her something,—baring her limbs partly, to show how the skin hung loose from the bone. [William Bennett, ‘Extracts from an account of his journey in Ireland’, Transactions of the Central Relief Committee of the Society of Friends during the Famine in Ireland 1846 and 1847 (Dublin 1852) 163; repr. Clarkson & Crawford, ibid.]”

    Telling people dying of hunger and the associated diseases during famines (typhoid, typhus, cholera) that this is God’s judgement on them for their rebelliousness against the established government – hmm. No.

    Telling people living under the spectre of petty tyranny in their everyday lives (remember, what flashed this whole movement across North Africa off was the suicide of Mohammed Bouazizi: “Twenty-six year old Mohamed Bouazizi had been the sole income earner in his extended family of eight. He operated a purportedly unlicensed vegetable cart for seven years in Sidi Bouzid 190 miles (300 km) south of Tunis. On December 17, 2010 a policewoman confiscated his cart and produce. Bouazizi, who had such an event happen to him before, tried to pay the 10-dinar fine (a day’s wages, equivalent to 7USD). In response the policewoman slapped him, spat in his face, and insulted his deceased father. A humiliated Bouazizi then went to the provincial headquarters in an attempt to complain to local municipality officials. He was refused an audience. Without alerting his family, at 11:30 a.m. and within an hour of the initial confrontation, Bouazizi returned to the headquarters, doused himself with a flammable liquid and set himself on fire.”) – telling people that ‘I live under the benefits and protections of a Constitution developed under arms against our rightful Lord, the King, and his government, but you cannot have the same because it is against God’s will” – hmmm. No.

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  82. ” it would be foolish to say that democracy, or any other human establishment, is worth dying for in rebellion against the human establishments God has put in place.”

    Mike S, the logical corollary to that is that God put Muamar Gadaffi and Hosni Mubarak in power. This, I submit, is going a bit far.

    Besides, you’re talking to someone whose grandparents were subjects of the Queen-Empress of the British Empire and who is proud (despite our various governments and their failures) of being herself a citizen of a Republic.

    Today we’re counting the votes in our General Election. We didn’t need an armed revolution to kick out the government in power. However, in order to have elections of our own, we did need an armed revolution in the first place. Over the course of the Eight Hundred Years, the English preached that we were rebellious against the Pope (who, in the person of Adrian IV or Nicholas Brakespear, the only Englishman to be Pope to date, had in the Papal Bull “Laudabiliter” of 1155 allegedly given the Angevin King Henry II of England the right to assume control over Ireland and apply the Gregorian Reforms in the Irish church, and hence the Norman Invasion); when the Pope was out of favour, we were rebellious against God for rejecting the righteous authority of the King/Queen (depending on which monarch was in power at the time), particularly in their role of bringing true, reformed, Gospel religion to the backward natives (this attitude persisted into the 19th century, as a significant minority – even those in power! – believed the Great Famine to be God’s punishment of the rebellious Irish: Sir Charles Trevelyan*, who was in charge of the administration of Government relief to the victims of the Irish Famine, limited the Government’s actual relief because he thought “the judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson”) and when God was less significant in English policy (thanks to a combination of Darwinism as interpreted by social engineers and Victorian progressivism), we were ungrateful wretches who depended on English largesse and who bit the hand that fed us.

    Still not convinced I should be seeking to be a subject of the Queen 😉

    *http://multitext.ucc.ie/d/Charles_Edward_Trevelyan

    “In 1840 he became Assistant Secretary to the Treasury in London and held that office until 1859. This position put him in charge of the administration of Government relief to the victims of the Irish Famine in the 1840s. In the middle of that crisis Trevelyan published his views on the matter. He saw the Famine as a

    ‘mechanism for reducing surplus population’.

    But it was more:

    ‘The judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be too much mitigated. …The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people’.”

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  84. Marc wrote;

    “Should the American congress disband, the president resign and submit once again to the British crown, as our very nation is illegitimate, being founded on a rebellion?”

    I respond…

    No more so than the British Parliament should disolve and the country return to a pure monarchy.

    Were Cromwell and the Puritans right? They thought so….

    When it’s all said and done Mac is right about one thing–all of us must be freed from the bondage of sin. After that the only important question is, “What will you do with this freedom?”

    T

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  86. If a policeman (representing the civil authorities) entered my house and proceeded to assault my wife, would JM think I should submit per Rom 13? I hope not because I am going to do everything in my power to stop him. That’s what the Egyptians were doing (and in some cases literally). It’s really that simple.

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  90. Yeah, that’s basically what I’m trying to say. MacArthur and his camp do violence to scripture in their attempts to interpret scripture they way they do. As far as I can tell their approach is this:
    1. The Bible gives us everything we need to know about everything or anyone.
    2. We should not permit the lives and experiences of human beings to inform our theological projects because of premise 1.
    3. Everything we say is right.

    I mean, I though NANC, counseling was bad, but these latest statements are awful.

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  91. I think Paul thought that Jesus was coming back in his lifetime which would, perhaps, have given Paul more of a reason to recommend that people just “go along” with the authorities at that time. If the world as they knew it was about to end, there would not be much profit in attempting to oust the powers that be.

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  93. “Makes me so glad that I’m not an Evangelical anymore.”

    JMJ I agree….actually though others here may disagree its stuff like what MacArthur says that drives me away from Christianity alltogether. Macarthur is very prominent in the circles I once moved in…some of the people I knew pushed and encouraged me to read his material. I couldn’t stomach it. But when I read and keep hearing outragerous stuff by Christians time and time again in my mind I think, “Wow being a Christian means one has to be an asshole and difficult with the world and say outrageous stuff….”

    But I do enjoy your blog JMJ…you do a great job!!

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  95. I’ve become more and more disillusioned by John MacArthur lately, and this is the last straw. Should the American congress disband, the president resign and submit once again to the British crown, as our very nation is illegitimate, being founded on a rebellion?

    This statement is quite heartless. Would he have just submitted to Hitler, saying “Sieg Heil” and condemning the Confessing Church for disobeying the Third Reich? There are more scriptures than just Romans 13, and his narrow interpretation of it, disregarding the rest of Scripture which speak of justice, is simply wrong.

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  97. ” ‘Are our enemies men like ourselves?’ let me begin by asking. ‘Yes.’ ‘Upon what ground? The ground of their enmity? The ground of the wrong they do us?’ ‘No.’ ‘In virtue of cruelty, heartlessness, injustice, disrespect, misrepresentation?’ ‘Certainly not…Not because they do such deeds are they men. Their humanity must be deeper than those. It is in virtue of the divine essence which is in them, that pure essential humanity, that we call our enemies men and women. It is this humanity that we are to love–a something, I say, deeper altogether than and independent of the region of hate. It is the humanity that originates the claim of neighbourhood; the neighbourhood only determines the occasion of its exercise.’ ‘Is this humanity in every one of our enemies?’ ‘Else there were nothing to love.’ ‘Is it there in very deed?–Then we _must_ love it, come between us and it what may.’ ”
    – George MacDonald, from “Unspoken Sermons”.

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  98. In my experience, those in the MacArthur camp really aren’t much interested in Scripture as story because it isn’t particularly compatible with a literalist approach (stories don’t give you the answers or create a comfortable theological system within which one can exist; they often do the opposite). The sad irony is that this literalism is considered a high view of scripture but often misses the spirit of what Scripture as a whole is saying.

    I started to understand this when I gave Frederick Buechner’s book, “Peculiar Treasures” as a gift to a family member who is in this camp and they really didn’t know what to make of it.

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  99. “These Egyptian people were created by God and have His breath in their nostrils. Christ would have died for each one of them.”

    AMEN.

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  103. I finally found what I was looking for. I think his understanding (along with a lot of evangelicals) is based on a misunderstanding of Paul and first century Judaism. Politics then may not have been like politics now. N.T. Wright of whom I am a fan (yes fan) puts it this We should note carefully what is being said, and what is not being said. What is here ruled out is an attitude which would flout magistrates and police; which would speak and act as though it were above or outside all law and social restraint. What is enjoined is not a meek submission to whatever an authority wishes, but a recognition that, by being Christian, one has not thereby ceased to be human, and that, being human, one remains bound in ties of obligation to one’s fellow-humans, and beyond that to the God who, as creator, has called his human creatures to live in harmony with each other – and such obligations are, to a lesser or greater extent, enshrined in the laws which governments make from time to time. Paul’s point is not the maximalist one that whatever governments do must be right and that whatever they enact must be obeyed, but the solid if minimalist one that God wants human society to be ordered; that being Christian does not release one from the complex obligations of this order; and that one must therefore submit, at least in general, to those entrusted with enforcing this order.

    “This implies, I think, neither quiescence before, nor acquiescence in, totalitarianism. The history-of-religions background to Paul’s thinking is instructive: Jews holding views broadly analogous to his were quite capable of political activity in the Empire, and of reminding governments of their business. What Paul says is clearly anathema to the totalitarian: the point about totalitarianism is that the ruling power has taken the place of God; that is why it is always de facto, and frequently de jure, atheist. For Paul, the ‘state’ is not God. God is God, and the state is thus relativized, as are the powers precisely in Colossians 1:15-20, where they are created and reconciled but not divine.”

    http://www.theologicalstudies.org.uk/article_state_wright.html

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  104. This is American civil religion speaking, and the god he is describing is the civic deity. It’s a commonplace confusion of the Gospel today, and I am perhaps surprised at his take which mimics comments of another great politico-theologian, Sarah Palin.

    On a more sobering note, why should we limit the discussion to temporal authority? It seems to me, carried to the logical extreme, MacArthur opens an argument as to why the Reformation should ever have taken place. Was it scriptural to break from ecclesiastical authority?

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  105. Oh good heavens. I need a computer with bigger font. I meant to say “I certainly WASN’T Anti-American.” Having had a dad who served on the beaches of Normandy and in the military myself I am deeply grateful for the country in which I live.

    I’ve also had the chance to go back and read a few more posts. I’m glad that there are plenty of others who are not in the MacArthur camp on this one.

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  106. Love of neighbor? Justice? Peace? Human dignity? Apparently Jesus and his church have nothing to do with these values.

    James, you nailed one of the main problems with the hyper-narrow worldview of JMac.

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  107. I think the folks over at Slactivist have it right when they identify one of the main problems about MacArthur’s approach:

    He’s relying on an absolutist reading of the opening verses of Romans 13 as holy writ to be consulted apart from all other scripture, theology and reason. He’s relying on the idea that the beginning of Romans 13 must be read as a unique and privileged prooftext that should be interpreted as overruling and nullifying the rest of the scriptures…

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  108. *sign*, Cunnudda, Sharia law means different things to different people and there are many different interpretations of it (just as there are many different interpretations of what Biblical law is)

    I know the world woud be much simplier to understand if the Fox News spin were always correct, but unfortunately, the world is much more complicated than that.

    And as for the Coptic pope, Coptic leaders have been in bed with Mubarak’s regime for a long time, and also came out against the recent Coptic protests for religious freedom. It’s protesting and making a stink in general that the pope was opposed to, not this particular revolution.

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  110. Eagle,

    God bless you. I hope and pray that you become a follower of Christ again. I, like you, struggle with views like those of John McArthur. In all my doubts, I keep coming back to the fact that God loved me enough to have his Son die for me on the cross. I don’t need to love conservative, evangelical Christianity to love God. I read the gospels and I think that portions of the evangelical church have much of their theology and worldview wrong.

    Best wishes.

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  111. Ah, but let’s go back and look at what “Mac” said:

    “…if you just talk about a biblical thing, they are all in violation of a biblical command.”

    The clear statement here is JM expects non-believers to adhere to biblical commands. So how do you reconcile that with your statement; “…it is not right to demand adherence to biblical teaching from unbelievers”?

    JM is clearly attempting to apply a “biblical command” to non-Christians.

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  112. ” KNOWS God’s Will better ”

    Expanded the Trinity maybe?

    More like “Someone who does God’s Will if God Only Knew What Was REALLY Going On.”

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  113. “Revolutionary spirit is not sinful because it topples unjust regimes; revolutionary spirit is sinful because it exalts a particular form of government or a political leader to the place of Savior.”

    You’re kidding, right?

    Needing Christ has absolutely nothing to do with wanting out from under a brutal regime that is profiting from the misery of it’s people, and I think both you and “Mac” do them an injustice by reducing everything to a Fundegelical salvific formula.

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  114. I am stunned and saddened. I understand what he is saying, but part with his application of scripture. His reading is simplistic.

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  116. If not democracy per se, these are Islamic people trying to find a “third way” between the Saddams and Gadhafis and the Ayatollahs and Mullahs. Because both the other ways have smashed them down. Now they see a third choice.

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  117. No. I have several Asperger’s symptoms (missing the hyperfocus ability), and love stories spark this longing and understanding in me. Most of my fiction uses romance tropes. It’s something I’ve longed for all my life but could never have. I understand love stories, and I’m a borderline Aspie.

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  118. Marie- yup. Talked to every one. 🙂 A recent poll put Egyptian support for Sharia (strict – stoning for apostasy, etc.) at 70+%. The Christians, of course, don’t want that. But nobody cares; whatever they want, they won’t get. Egyptian army just plowed down a bunch of protective barriers around some monasteries. Interestingly, Coptic pope initially told Christians not to participate in protests.
    Greg r – It’s not our business, even if they want Saudi-style Sharia, which includes vicious oppression of our fellow Christians?

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  119. A friend of mine posted that.

    All I can say, is that I really hope that this hurts his credibility. That was incredibly callous and hurtful.

    MacArthur trying to understand the Bible is like someone with Aspergers Syndrome trying to understand love stories.

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  120. @Martha…. you are correct , as usual; the tattoo on 007’s right arm: SCOTLAND FOREVER should have given me a hint…. thanks for your excerpt of Tommy Aq. , btw, we need large doses of sane, historical thought to offset the……other stuff…

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  122. well whatever it is they want, if they can peacefully work out a revolution to get it, they should have it, and I fail to see how it’s the western christian’s business to say “no, no , no….against the bible….”

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  123. It’s surprising how few of us actually responded specifically to JM’s interpretation of Romans in our comments. I understand that Mike just asked us for our gut response, but still…

    Speaking of Hitler, this discussion does remind of some aspects of the Barmen Declaration. I think Bonhoeffer’s appraoch to Romans 13 was that the church was being obedient in its role of submission to rulers by helping the rulers see where they were going against God’s will for justice (my paraphrase).

    Bonhoeffer and Barth developed the Barmen Declaration in part through a theology that emphasized Jesus to be the Word of God, perhaps moreso (for Barth) than man’s interpretation of scripture to be the “word”, which then might ally God towards our human culture and how we manipulate the “word”. This was one reason that Barth was not a fan of biblical inerrancy.
    So I don’t think inerrantists (perhaps including JM) are big fans of Barth, even though the Barmen Declaration did provide the framework for the Confessing church in Germany to stand up to Hitler.

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  124. That’s right! Who are we to say genocide and oppression are any worse than the people controlling their own government? Before ’03, voting for anyone in Iraq but Saddam Hussein would get you executed. It’s so arrogant to say that our way is better than that.

    That’s sarcasm, by the way.

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  125. Yes, it is not right to demand adherence to biblical teaching from unbelievers. But as a nation, we are encouraging the revolutions–and is that the right thing to do? If we, as believers, are to adhere to peaceful, non-revolutionary living under our rulers, is it not hypocritical to encourage the opposite in non-believers?

    There are many ways to oppose a ruler–some are sinful, some are not. It is not immediately clear to me which are which, but I find it believable that some valiant clergy may have sinned in their opposition to Hitler, while some may not have.

    Again, I think that it is not opposition in itself that is condemned–it is the revolutionary spirit which believes that some (presumably just) human ruler can save us from an unjust human ruler.

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  126. Having lived in Egypt, having one of my kids born there, I think I know the hearts and minds of the Egyptian people, I find MacArther’s words sickening. In general, American Christians come across to the world as so arrogant and self centered. We demand the freedom to buy the chemicals for our hot tubs at a reasonable price, but when a people who have no rights, who’s family members are imprisoned for life without trial, for simply speaking against the president, ask for more personal freedom . . . then we have the nerve to criticize them . . . what gives? I’m very proud of the Egyptian people for taking great personal risks to stand up for freedom and doing it in peace. I was in touch with people on the ground on a daily basis during the whole ordeal.

    When I hear the right-winged rhetoric spouted as Christian truth, such as these are really Muslim extremist wanting to create another Taliban state, attack America and drain our hot tubs and kill our babies, I know they are ignorant about the rest of the world.

    I stood on the street in our small town holding an Egyptian flag in support of these people. Across the street were a bunch of people holding American flags, playing patriotic music and Gospel hymns over a loud speaker. Then the leader of the pro-American (and I certainly was anti-American, but supporting human dignity) spoke over the megaphone saying I was an asshole and I should “put down that shitty flag and hold up a real American flag” I just don’t get it. What would Jesus do? And I hate chiches.

    I won’t say more here because this hits such a raw nerve. Makes me so glad that I’m not an Evangelical anymore.
    I usually read all the posts before I post. However, MacArther himself got me so upset on this issue, that as I glanced at some of the postings who were saying the same things, I knew that my blood pressure would rise by reading them.

    Doesn’t anyone get it? These Egyptian people were created by God and have His breath in their nostrils. Christ would have died for each one of them. But Americans, and it seems like American Evangelicals more so (in a confused Evanag-o-patriotism) are the worst, see these Egyptians as pawns in some kind of glorious Hal Lindsey end-times fansey

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  127. “in rebellion against the human establishments God has put in place.”

    But that would be assuming we believe that God put those establishments in place. I know we say things like “he’s got the whole world in his hands” and “God is sovereign,” but don’t we also think that God wants human beings to live on the earth in certain ways as opposed to other ways? “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” Jesus taught us to pray. Would it be God’s will to have a people brutalized by their so-called leaders? Do we pray just for the heck of it or do we believe Jesus that we are participating in bringing about the will of God through our prayers and actions? I know where I stand.

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  128. I think that would be the only problem with Mac’s view. But he is not going to encourage them in their revolt, because to encourage the revolt is to say to them that what they desire is what they need. What they need is not democracy, it is Christ. So he must discourage the revolutionary spirit.

    Revolutionary spirit is not sinful because it topples unjust regimes; revolutionary spirit is sinful because it exalts a particular form of government or a political leader to the place of Savior. If we know that governments don’t save and that all governments are corrupt because they are human, it would be foolish to say that democracy, or any other human establishment, is worth dying for in rebellion against the human establishments God has put in place.

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  129. The Scripture appears to apply to believers – as a threshold matter, most Egyptians and others in the mideast are Muslims. I can’t understand MacArthur’s use of this Scripture for this situation.

    The application, even to believers, is problematic. Was HItler ordained by God? If so, were the valiant clergy who opposed him disobeying Scripture? What does it mean to submit to authority? Is civil disobedience a proper form of submission? I welcome reasoned discussions on this subject but, at least as summarized, Pastor MacArthurs application of the Scripture is disappointing.

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  130. Martha, full props for this quote.

    Imagine if a violent coup overthrew our government and killed the president. Would we then be obligated to obey the usurper, since he now has authority? A wooden interpretation of the Romans 13 would say yes. But surely this is to obey the letter of the command while ignoring its meaning and the limitation of its application.

    Again, thanks so much for the quote.

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  132. That is what he would say. To say otherwise would violate his conscience, because of what he reads in Scripture.

    To say that those who fought against British tyranny were righteous in their actions because of the nation that resulted would to to say that the ends justify the means. Which Mac would certainly not admit.

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  133. The angel of the Lord in Acts 12 busted the Apostle Peter out of jail. Oh no!! Did he violate a Biblical command to obey and honor the governing body?! (For anyone just visiting here for the first time…I am being sarcastic.)

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  134. Wow, even the Christian protesters? Amazing!

    I can tell you’ve done your research by talking to all of the protesters involved. Well done.

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  135. Let’s say Christians live under such a regime. Instead of revolting, they pray for the murderous despot’s salvation or removal. Others, to save their country, families, and friends, become stirred up to oust or kill the tyrant, and they succeed in killing him and ending his reign of terror, thereby answering the Christians’ prayers. Who did God’s will – the prayers or the slayers?

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  136. He didn’t say it was foolish. He said; “they are all in violation of a biblical command .”

    Interesting that a fundegelical (to borrow Eagle’s term) would expect non-believers.to act in accord with his understanding of the Scriptures.

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  137. So were the early American patriots being ungodly and bad Christians when they tried to overthrow the English king and establish an American democracy? This so-called “Christian nation” was founded by an uprising. I’m perplexed by his comments. And I pray for those in the Middle East in all its turmoil.

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  139. What would have been the loving thing for him to say? To wish for war or civil war in all nations where oppressive rulers have control?

    Mac loves people enough to know that to die for country or government is a sad thing, not a happy one. These people are willing to fight and die for something temporary. To him, the loving thing is to discourage such a thing.

    Of course, having an Irish last name, his tone sucks. But having grown up in Macarthur’s church, and knowing people who have been close to him, I can’t believe what he said was, at heart, unloving.

    And, he spend his early years in ministry in opposition to unjust rulers: http://www.wadeoradio.com/blog/videos/91-john-macarthur-and-the-civil-rights-movement. He doesn’t think it’s wrong to oppose unjust rulers–he just thinks it’s foolish to fight & die to overthrow an unjust, temporary ruler, only to set up another one. He believes that God can build the only lasting Kingdom without the aid of violent political revolts.

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  143. “here are so many times I quietly hope that I can be a Christian again…but then I read BS like what MacArthur says and it reinforces why I am agnostic. I feel the push back… Who wants or can stomach garbage like that? Why be associated with a movement where people really revere and spread his teaching?

    Man where’s a barf bag….”

    That’s what happens when “Christianity” is (erroneously) thought/understood to be a *religion* instead of a Relationship.

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  144. Hmm. My first response is to recall this old quote:

    “Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God” -who knows who coined it (various folks claim it was William Tyndale, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, etc)

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  146. Go back and read Martha’s comments and her citations of Aquinas as well as a number of others who have made thoughtful contributions here before you paint with such a broad dismissive brush, Brendan.

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  147. There is a ‘group’ of people who call themselves ‘Christian’ but they mock Christ in their contempt for others, especially those who are ‘not like them’; some of these people have chosen to bring that contempt into the public sector through politics. That group of people listen to commentators on television who ‘preach’ that the Islamic people rising up to seek democracy are wrong to do it. And one of our political parties is also involved in condemning those who stand up for their rights, even those in our own country!

    They will say, ‘this is not a ‘democracy’.
    Well, this country has a government that is ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people’, for now, at least..
    Until the ones among us who despise democracy get their way,
    which is something I hope never happens in our land.

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  148. What political / worldly organization in America would possibly be paying Johnny Mac to say this? Our entire political & cultural system is in support of the protesters. Mac is saying something totally different than what our culture says.

    To say that he must be trying to maintain the status quo is misinformed–the status quo in our culture is to support democracy in the world. Protests like the ones we are seeing are always regarded with approval. No, MacArthur is not trying to satisfy rich white overlords in America. All the rich white overlords want democracy and capitalism to thrive in all corners.

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  150. Ad hominem argument, followed by personal attack. Then degrading a particular theological position followed by self-righteous comment.

    Yep, I’ve become an approved iMonk commenter.

    Awesome.

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  152. For a long time I’ve suspected that MacArthur doesn’t know the first thing about Jesus Christ, and now I’m certain.

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  153. ““Nothing’s worse than a monster who thinks he’s right with God.”
    – Captain Mal Reynolds, Free Trader Serenity

    HUG, good choice of quote.

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  154. Wow. How sad. What MacArthur says here is so vile and repugnant I cannot even begin to deal with it rationally. He has violently twisted the scriptures to promote his own worldly political positions. He is rich, authoritarian, and in complicity with evildoing here. He doesn’t even care that millions may read his comments and think to themselves, “Yeah, those hateful Christians are at it again, I don’t want to be one of those people.”

    The Bible says governments are ordained by God FOR specific purposes. When governments no longer function to pursue those purposes, frankly, they are no longer ordained by God. I would hope thousands of protestors would picket his church every time it opens its doors until he is forced to resign in disgrace.

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  155. Yep, Tommy boy spread his thought over a wide range of subjects 🙂

    But you know, this is exactly the point we’re dealing with here: “He who seizes power by violence does not become a true holder of power. Hence, when it is possible to do so, anybody may repel this domination, unless, of course, the usurper should later on have become a true ruler by the consent of the subjects or by a recognition being extended to him by a higher authority.”

    Declaring yourself (more or less) President for Life, or coming to power in a military coup, or making yourself president in a coup d’état cannot be said to be governing with “the consent of the subjects” and, although these regimes may be recognised by the United States, still this does not, I think, constitute the requisite “higher authority”.

    Yes, there is a legitimate concern about the transference of power and the chaos and anarchy that may result; yes, there’s a good chance that weak or corrupt governments may come into being. Yes, there’s a question about how much real democracy will eventually arise. But what there is no question about is the right of the people to self-determination or to protest (even violently) against illicit or usurped leadership.

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  157. Okay, I wasn’t going to pick up on his line about “Look at Japan which was open and free and you’ll search forever in any city in Japan to find one Christian.” but what the hey, why not?

    Obviously he’s never heard of St. Paul Miki and Companions, but nearer our own time, what was the largest centre of Catholicism in Japan? The city of Nagasaki. Hmm, whatever happened to that place?

    Then again, from what is being said on here, MacArthur doesn’t seem to think of Catholicism as Christian.

    It’s always struck me as the irony of history: St. Maximillian Kolbe ended up in Auschwitz because, due to health problems, he had returned to Poland from his missions in Japan. Had he remained in Japan, he might well have died during the bombing of Nagasaki (though the monastery he founded there apparently survived the atomic blast because it was located on the opposite side of a mountain to the main blast).

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  158. I’m not sure how I see this issue, but realize McArthur isn’t saying he doen’t love this country and apprecitate the outcome of the Am revolution he is simply saying it was a violation or Romans 13……and yet God was in control of the outcome.

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  159. I quickly realized that I didn’t like MacArthur at all when I read “The Battle For The Beginning.” I see my initial impressions were not misgiven. First: The people protesting their governments in the Middle East are by and large not Christians, isn’t it a bit hypocritical to hold non-Christian people to a Biblical standard we as believers often fail? I believe Jesus had some choice words about that. Second: What kind of impression does supporting tyrannical dictators simply because they support the US’s policies send to nonbelievers? Third: America was founded on revolution (albeit one based on returning to previous values/way of life rather than starting a new one, as the French did) and MacArthur treats America like it’s God’s lightning staff and favorite country. Make the pain stop, please.

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  160. G. K. Chesterton somewhere (I can’t find the relevant piece) tells of an English lady of his acquaintance trying to get a cup of tea in America, and looking mournfully at the drink she was offered, said “If that’s the kind of tea we sent you, no wonder you threw it in the harbour”.

    On another American note, he says in his 1922 book “What I Saw In America”:

    “It may have seemed something less than a compliment to compare the American Constitution to the Spanish Inquisition. But oddly enough, it does involve a truth; and still more oddly perhaps, it does involve a compliment. The American Constitution does resemble the Spanish Inquisition in this: that it is founded on a creed. America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature. It enunciates that all men are equal in their claim to justice, that governments exist to give them that justice, and that their authority is for that reason just. It certainly does condemn anarchism, and it does also by inference condemn atheism, since it clearly names the Creator as the ultimate authority from whom these equal rights are derived. Nobody expects a modern political system to proceed logically in the application of such dogmas, and in the matter of God and Government it is naturally God whose claim is taken more lightly. The point is that there is a creed, if not about divine, at least about human things.”

    Perhaps Mr. McArthur should have another read of the Declaration of Independence?

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  163. “Calvinism, like Islam, is very much into Predestination as God’s Will.”

    So can we see Christian suicide bombers…will hard core Calvinists go that far? Could they form a “Christian” version of Al Qaeda?

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  164. And let’s face it, even while appealing to God and Christianity and whatnot, the American Revolution was definitely more a product of 18th Century Enlightenment than the Bible. The Bible and Christianity may have been important to the US Founding Fathers, but it was totally interpreted via the lens of the Enlightenment. The Revolution was based on Enlightenment, not biblical principles.

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  165. Please don’t paint all Calvinists with this. Just take a look at what John Murray says on this in his commentary on Romans:

    “Again Paul does not deal with questions that arise in connection with revolution. Without question in these two verses [1 and 2 of Romans 13] we are not without an index to what we ought to do when revolution has taken place. “The powers that be” refer to the de facto magistrates. And in this passage as a whole there are principles which bear upon the right or wrong of revolution. But these matters which become acute difficulties for conscientious Christians are not introduced in this passage. The reason lies on the surface. The apostle is not writing an essay on casuistical theology but setting forth the cardinal principles pertaining to the institution of government and regulating the behaviour of Christians.”

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  166. I wonder if MacArthur’s view on Romans13 can have other ominous intentions. If he considers a government to be Christian and passing laws, etc.. can people commit murder, atrocity, etc.. under authority of that governmnet claiming Romans 13?

    Can you see the defense…”But sir I’m a Christian I’m only following Romans 13…” Would that be any different than the Nurmeburg defense? This may be a stretch…I realize that and I wouldn’t raise it otherwise….BUT we are talking about evangelical fundementalists here…and after my ten years of drinking the kool-aide daily by the gallon, etc.. I’ve come to expect anything. Nothing shocks me anymore…actually one thing does… I’ve wondered if there are more agnostics posing as Christians becuase of crap like this… Hell who knows…maybe I wasn’t the only one.

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  167. I guess MacArthur has never read Exodus. Who did this Moses think he was? What God told him to rebel against legitimate authority?

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  168. “An authority acquired by violence is not a true authority, and there is no obligation of obedience, as we said above.”

    I like that, Martha. Aquinas was a real smarty-pants!

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  169. I am glad to hear you like William Temple, Randy. I will check out some of his writings. So far, I think I have only read snippets from him or about him. I respect your viewpoints here at internetmonk, so if you like Temple, I am quite certain I will too. 🙂

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  170. Then he’s rolled the worst possible combination. HyperCalvinist plus hardcore Dispy. A Protestant of Mass Destruction who KNOWS God’s Will better than God.

    “Nothing’s worse than a monster who thinks he’s right with God.”
    — Captain Mal Reynolds, Free Trader Serenity

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  171. The problem is that he does understand the difference between spiritual and secular kingdoms. His response is classic ‘two-kingdoms’ view (with a healthy, or rather unhealthy, dose of dispensationalism thrown in). One can excuse all kinds of evil in the ‘kingdoms of this world’ as long as all is well in our own little ‘spiritual kingdom’. Think ‘Peasant’s Revolt’ of 1524.

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  173. Like the Christians For Nuclear War who rode in the wake of Hal Lindsay — “IT’S PROPHESIED! IT’S PROPHESIED! GOD WILLS IT!”

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  174. greg r, first Sean Connery is not Welsh, but Scots.

    Secondly, Sean Connery can always stand in for anyone 🙂

    Thirdly, Richard Burton (God rest the man) was Welsh. Should a Welsh actor of comparable talent come along, of course he may be considered. Sorry, Ioan Gruffudd, you’re pretty enough but I don’t think you’ve got the same acting power, though to be fair, I’m judging him on his performance as Reed Richards in the “Fantastic Four” (my opinion: he was miscast, but that’s not his fault; everyone in that film was miscast, as far as I can make out) and not as William Wilberforce in “Amazing Grace” ;-).

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  175. Do not worry, John, the American government has in the past prevented several attempts to create democratic regimes, notably in Latin America.

    And caused and nurtured resentment against the Colossus of the North throughout all Latin America, helping strongmen like Castro and Chavez stay propped up by whipping up that resentment against Los Yanquis.

    “you can go across the border from Russia into Western Europe and the church is dead, almost non-existent.”

    As a Western European Christian, I always appreciate this kind of comment. It is so uplifting and encouraging. Well, when I see my dead my dead church, I still think it’s healtier that American Evangelicalism

    Somewhere in the IMonk Archives, there’s a posting about American Evangelicals and their Romanticized Yearning for Persecution. To which I have always replied: “So God can only be glorified when His people live under North Korean conditions?”

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  176. Once again, Thomas Aquinas has done the heavy lifting on this (emphases mine):

    http://dhspriory.org/thomas/DeRegno.htm#12

    “6. Scriptum Super Libros Sententiarum II, dist. 44, q. II, a. 2.

    [The problem is whether Christians are bound to obey secular powers, especially tyrants.]

    The procedure in discussing this problem is this: It seems that they are not bound to this obedience… The fifth argument: If it is a legitimate and even a praiseworthy deed to kill a person, then no obligation of obedience exists toward that person. Now in the Book on Duties [De Officiis I, 8, 26] Cicero justifies Julius Caesar’s assassins. Although Caesar was a close friend of his, yet by usurping the empire he proved himself to be a tyrant. Therefore toward such powers there is no obligation of obedience.

    On the other hand, however, there are the following arguments proving the contrary position: First, it is said: Servants, be in subjection to your masters (1 Pet. 2:18.) Second, it is also said: He who resists the power, withstands the ordinance of God (Rom. xiii, 2.) Now it is not legitimate to withstand the ordinance of God. Hence it is not legitimate either to withstand secular power.

    Solution and determination. Obedience, by keeping a commandment, has for its [formal] object the obligation, involved in the cominandment, that it be kept. Now this obligation originates in that the commanding authority has the power to impose an obligation binding not only to external but also to internal and spiritual obedience—“for conscience sake”, as the Apostle says (Rom. xiii, 5.) For power (authority) comes from God, as the Apostle implies in the same place. Hence, Christians are bound to obey the authorities inasmuch as they are from God; and they are not bound to obey inasmuch as the authority is not from God.

    Now, this not being from God may be the case, first, as to the mode in which authority is acquired, and, second, as to the use which is made of authority.

    Concerning the first case we must again distinguish two defects: There may be a defect of the person acquiring authority inasmuch as this person is unworthy of it. There may also be a defect in the mode of acquiring authority, namely, if it is obtained by violence, or simony, or other illegitimate means.

    As to the first of these defects, we say that it does not constitute an obstacle against acquiring lawful authority. Since, then, as such, authority is always from God (and this is what causes the obligation of obedience), the subjects are bound to render obedience to these authorities, unworthy as they may be.

    As to the second of those defects, we say that in such a case there is no lawful authority at all. He who seizes power by violence does not become a true holder of power. Hence, when it is possible to do so, anybody may repel this domination, unless, of course, the usurper should later on have become a true ruler by the consent of the subjects or by a recognition being extended to him by a higher authority.

    The abuse of power might take on two forms. First, a commandment emanating from the authority might be contrary to the very end in view of which authority is instituted, i.e., to be an educator to, and a preserver of, virtue. Should therefore the authority command an act of sin contrary to virtue, we not only are not obliged to obey but we are also obliged not to obey, according to the example of the holy martyrs who preferred death to obeying those ungodly tyrants.

    The second form of abusing power is for the authority to go beyond the bounds of its legal rights, for instance, when a master exacts duties which the servant is not bound to pay, or the like. In this case the subject is not obliged to obey, but neither is he obliged not to obey.

    Consequently… to the fourth argument the answer is this: An authority acquired by violence is not a true authority, and there is no obligation of obedience, as we said above.

    To the fifth argument the answer is that Cicero speaks of domination obtained by violence and ruse, the subjects being unwilling or even forced to accept it and there being no recourse open to a superior who might pronounce judgment upon the usurper. In this case he that kills the tyrant for the liberation of the country, is praised and rewarded.”

    Nevermind the fact that, in the case of the countries currently undergoing revolution, these are not majority Christian nations nor Christian leaders, so I have no idea what the authority of the Bible is over them, much less the United States.

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  177. Like a bueaucracy, progressing imperceptibly from Lawful Neutral through Lawful Stupid into Lawful Evil.

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  178. i’m just surprised he’s not making some end-times prophecies. Maybe he’s been missing Glenn Beck’s Mormon Islam-Socialist End-times hysteria.

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  179. OK, I am shocked. I have rarely seen such a mass of theological, historical, political mistakes put together in a relatively small numbre of lines.

    Please allow me to comment:

    “But biblically speaking, I would have wished the American government, which has a history of Christianity, would have risen up and said “this is wrong, this is forbidden for people to do this, this is intolerable.”

    Do not worry, John, the American government has in the past prevented several attempts to create democratic regimes, notably in Latin America.
    Now, I do not see how someone with any kind of common sense could imagine U.S. officials giving Bible lessons to Muslim countries! That would for sure improve the reputation of America in the Muslim world.

    “you can go across the border from Russia into Western Europe and the church is dead, almost non-existent.”

    As a Western European Christian, I always appreciate this kind of comment. It is so uplifting and encouraging. Well, when I see my dead my dead church, I still think it’s healtier that American Evangelicalism

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  181. “told me that Mac Arthur was a heavy-duty Calvinist. At which point it all sort of makes sense”

    Except as I mentioned above, he’s a Calvinist wholeheartedly committed to dispensationalism, which is why his particular brand of horror is so powerful.

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  182. American revolutionaries developed a complex argument based on the inalienable rights of man endowed by their Creator. The ability for a ruler to rule came from his adherence to the social contract, In other words, he did not have a right to rule as he wished. The ruler must rule according to the consent of the governed. His authority was not inherent – it was derived from a contract with the people and that contract was based on the concept of inalienable rights. When those rights were violated or dismissed, as the colonists believed that their’s were through “taxation without representation” then the only correct thing to do would be to assert their own God-given liberty and defend their rights that were given by God and not by man. That was the general view of the colonists, I believe, and why they did not feel that they were operating outside of Biblical truth. Of course, Enlightenment thought was also very much present.

    And yes, MacArthur has criticized the American Revolution along these lines, I believe. He would have been a Tory, no doubt.

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  183. My short response to MacArthur: “What is you smokin’?”

    The same thing Gadhafi was on when he made his Brown Turban and Hallucinogenic Nescafe speeches from his Leader Bunker earlier this week.

    Gadhafi Must Fall, and Fall HARD. Assad of Syria (Baath Arab National Socialist Party) bragged that “Only pro-Western regimes can fall — because they’re too soft and squeamish to kill everyone they have to.” (A redress of the “Soft Decadent Democracies” rhetoric of the Baath’s political parent the NSDAP.) Gadhafi Must Fall, to put the lie to Assad.

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  185. P.S. I am a Canadian, and I have wondered in the past how the American Christians justify their revolution against King and country, in light of Paul’s admonition to obey your authorities.

    You’re not the only one, Werner of The Great White North.

    The most common blast about Mac Arthur’s mouth over at Slacktivist is “Then why is he living in America instead of under the British Crown?”

    And here’s Christian Monist’s comment on the subject:

    “I’ve lost all confidence in John Mac Arthur. No one seems to get it. How would the Evangelicals be acting if Obama treated them the exact same way these dictators have treated their people? They would be taking up arms in a “Godly” rebellion.

    “Who gives Christians in America the right to enjoy all our great freedoms, and then condemn people of brown skin who just want a taste of the same?????????”

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  187. His statement that one will not get in trouble as long a they obey the laws, regardless of what government they are under, is simply ludicrous.

    Tell that to the enhanced carbon in North Korean steel.

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  188. I couldn’t stomach him. He also commented and said something ot the effect that Catholcism was from Satan or sometihng like that, and his teaching about Catholicism showed a lot of “grace to you” What bullcrap….

    The Treaty of Westphalia ended the Reformation Wars in 1648. Apparently we’ve found another one who never got the news.

    He belongs on South Park, right beside that other “cartoon of himself”, Gadhafi.

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  189. But here’s another twist….in the whole and mighty “LETS BE RAPTURED SO WE CAN BE WITH JESUS” bs…is the situation in Libya throwing a wrench in those who cling to End Time Prophecies?

    I came to the same conclusion. Arabs have replaced Communists as the Orcs in the Antichrist’s Horde — How Dare They interfere with the End Time Prophecy Checklist!

    Except I don’t know if Mac Arthur is a Dispy — I don’t think Calvinists normally subscribe to PMD, except maybe in the sense of “Protestants of Mass Destruction”. Either way, this is the type of shooting off the mouth that Pat Robertson has become infamous for — I figured we’d see a Crazy Christian Response to Libya, but I expected it to come from Pat Robertson or Fred Phelps.

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  191. I’ll just give a short answer, Werner.

    In the Pauline passage (Rom. 13:1-7) Paul’s point seems to be that we should submit to those in authority by doing what is right. The authority God gives the ruler is to punish evil. This is the normal course of business.

    However, sometimes civil disobedience is necessary in order to do good. An example of this would be Martin Luther King’s movement here in the US. The law was evil and obedience to God required civil disobedience. In pre-Christian Rome, the Christians would be civilly disobedient by rescuing abandoned babies in order to obey God’s standards for sanctity of life. That said, Christians are not to do things that are against God’s moral standards in their civil disobedience. Thus Dr. King’s insistence on non-violence in his movement.

    Finally, often the last bit of the passage is ignored: “Render therefore to all their dues: tribute to whom tribute is due; custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honour to whom honour.” Sometimes those in power abdicate their “dues.”

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  193. In a church setting, should we submit to a pastor who is teaching and leadingly un-biblically? Wonder what JM would say to this. Heb. 13:17 — Obey your leaders and submit to their authority. They keep watch over you as men who must give an account. Obey them so that their work will be a joy, not a burden, for that would be of no advantage to you.

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  194. It is true that he didn’t OBEY them. But he did SUBMIT to their authority by accepting the punishment.

    I hope this doens’t seem like hair-splitting. To me it make very clear sense. To accept a condign punishment is a way of affirming the law.

    It is the difference between pacifists staying in America and going to jail rather than joining the army, as many did before America had a conscientious objector law, versus pacifists who ran to Canada to avoid the judgment.

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  196. Slacktivist broke the story Wednesday; I wondered how long before IMonk would pick it up. The reaction at Slack’s was quite an explosion, best summarized in “What is he using for reality?”

    Informed Christian Monist (through comments in a related thread) as soon as I saw it. My ending comment: “I’ve experienced Christians For Nuclear War. WTF is this — Christians for Qadhafi? Or is it that overthrowing these Arab strongmen and their hellholes would interfere with the End Time Prophecy Checklist?”

    Informed my writing partner (the burned-out preacher) Wed nite. He’s long had the same opinion of Mac Arthur as most of Slack’s commenters, and told me that Mac Arthur was a heavy-duty Calvinist. At which point it all sort of makes sense:

    Calvinism, like Islam, is very much into Predestination as God’s Will. To the point of God’s Will overriding God’s Nature, to the point that God becomes Beyond Good and Evil, Willing Evil as easily as Good. As Christian Monist put it, “An Omnipotent God, not a benevolent one.” i.e. God as Raw Power, a Cosmic Qadhafi who says “BECAUSE I WILLED IT! I’M BIGGER THAN YOU, SO THERE!”

    So strict Calvinism should show many of the same characteristics (and the same ways of going sour) as strict Islam. And “Go with the Status Quo, In’shal’lah” — even when the status quo is a lunatic like Qadhafi with the power of life & death over you — is one of those characteristics.

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  197. Paul went to jail for disobedience. Jesus said render unto caesar that whicch is caesar’s and unto God that which is God’s. When the Jews captors defiled the temple and made them eat pork many died resisting. Were they supposed to submit? All these things aredebatible, but we live in the rea world where bad people want to harm us, I won’t submit.

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  198. Romans 13:4(a) – “For he is God’s servant to do you good.” I am not so sure Paul was contemplating Nero when he wrote this verse.

    When rulers go to far, we can look to Acts 4:19 and 5:29 and then we must discern what God has to say, and he may indeed say submit or peacefully object. Paul also challenged authorities in Acts 16:37.

    MacArthur bludgeoned his way through this chapter of Romans. It requires a more thoughtful analysis, otherwise one can do a lot of damage with his line of thinking. History demonstrates this quite amply.

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  199. BTW…will MacArthur be on the wrong side of history? Will he be like southerners who claimed that seccession from the United States and the defense of slavery was Biblical? (My history professor in college researched into this topic…it was frightening…) They had to eat crow 4 years later!! But here’s another twist….in the whole and mighty “LETS BE RAPTURED SO WE CAN BE WITH JESUS” bs…is the situation in Libya throwing a wrench in those who cling to End Time Prophecies?

    Not that I’ll grin at that…..

    (BTW is it wrong to say that as an agnositc I’ve prayed that the rapture will happen so that some of the people making these ridicilous comments will no longer be with us?)

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  202. Forget the individual and their need to obey, what is it that makes us think that we as Americans have the right to a) judge the “rightness” of another nation’s leadership and b) overthrow said government with a level of violence that collected up thousands of innocents as collateral damage? Who appointed us as the ultimate arbitors of which form of government is acceptable in the eyes of God?

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  203. @eric: ‘Never mind the fact that Jesus said “the leaders of the gentiles lord it over them, but it is not to be so among you! Rather, the greatest among you must be your servant….” ‘

    AMAZING!! thank you for interjecting that into the conversation!!!

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  204. “It always drives me crazy when religious leaders with little to no understanding of foreign affairs feel free to spout their uninformed opinions for their devoted followers to soak up, but this one just takes the cake.”

    As I stated above, this is a symptom of what is going on in the larger culture. Like when actors, singers, or whatever are asked their opinions about various national and international issues when they have little to no expertise in those particular areas. It’s as though we think because somebody is “famous”, that makes them an automatic authority on everything.

    “Speech is silver, but silence is golden.”

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  205. I cringed when i read this…..when I was a “fundegelical” John MacArthur was pushed, pushed, and pushed. I did a mission a few years ago and my mission team leader encouraged me to read MacArthur. I didn’t…I couldn’t stomach him. He also commented and said something ot the effect that Catholcism was from Satan or sometihng like that, and his teaching about Catholicism showed a lot of “grace to you” What bullcrap…. It was comments like his that I was thinking of when my family and I buried my Irish Catholic Grandmother.

    But getting back to what he says than I guess we sinned when we founded the US and revolted against the British. But I wonder if his all encompassing “grace filled” talk on Romans 13 would apply to Baptist or other churches who split and rebel against their denomination. In tradition of church law and Romans 13 are they violating scripture when a church splits and creates two denominations?

    There are so many times I quietly hope that I can be a Christian again…but then I read BS like what MacArthur says and it reinforces why I am agnostic. I feel the push back… Who wants or can stomach garbage like that? Why be associated with a movement where people really revere and spread his teaching?

    Man where’s a barf bag….

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  206. and i would just like to say in addition, that people fighting for affordable food, for jobs, for the liberty to believe in God or not, for their children to have a better life than they have and for basic freedoms that we in the west take for granted would definitely fit into the category that Daddy Mac espoused.

    it is worth noting, that in paul’s time there was nothing like our current western democracies on the surface of the planet. therefore, i wonder if what he had to say in Romans 13 would look different if he knew that he and others could have peaceably protested to prevent infanticide.

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  207. this is silly. macarthur specifically notes: “obviously there are times when you have to break the law because the Lord commands us to do something the law forbids.” i think Paul preaching the gospel in direct opposition to the authorities and going to prison for it would fit in this category.

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  209. Referring to the John Cleese link mentioned above. The 2.15% of us who know there is a whole word outside our American borders realize that the countries will change according to their culture, not ours. We like to think we’re the most important humans on the planet. What a delusion.

    As far as Hitler goes, didn’t he have a “Purpose Driven Life”?

    You can’t convince me that God didn’t see all this coming…

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  212. Amazing how all the first leaders of a religion that supposedly teaches submission to authority managed to get themselves executed as rebels!

    Seriously, this “authority” fetish is depressingly common in many of the more conservative corners of the church. There’s perhaps no more effective and efficient recipe for spiritual abuse than for someone to say, “I’m in authority; you have to submit without questioning or you’re rebelling against God.”

    Never mind the fact that Jesus said “the leaders of the gentiles lord it over them, but it is not to be so among you! Rather, the greatest among you must be your servant….”

    “He has cast down the mighty from their thrones and has lifted up the lowly.”

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  213. > This is obviously a misguided reading of Romans 13. This chapter assumes that the rulers are governing justly. <

    I'm sorry, Libby, but I don't think Romans 13 does assume that. Note (as I did above) that when Paul wrote the letter to the Romans, the emperor of Rome was Nero.

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  215. @andy: but the fact that paul was IN jail illustrates for us the fact that he did NOT obey the rulers of his day. if he had, he would not have been in jail. wtf!?!

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  216. We can’t know what Paul would have said about Hitler. But I believe the man on the throne at the time Paul wrote his letter to the Romans was Nero.

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  218. @phil: considering the ‘hitler issue’ from the perspective that you mention (‘what the Christian response should be to such a thing when looking in from the outside, or how should Christians respond if they find themselves being oppressed by such a leader.’) it is even simpler. can a christian who even has a modicum of understanding of the gospel even for a second feign that there is a dilemma when it comes to someone like hitler, or a situation like the one he created? i think not. the answer is clear and obvious, though difficult: we die. we lay down our lives for the persecuted.

    these are merely the conjectures of a guilty bystander, but i am so sick and tired of how silent this voice is within the church. to its disgrace, more often than not, the loudest and most popular voices speaking for Jesus are the ones which call for the state sanctioned murder of the evildoer. damn augustine and his damnable just war bs. that moment, when he injected that filth into the church of Jesus, was the moment that the church said, in effect, ‘out of the way Jesus. we got this.’

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  219. By going to jail, Paul WAS submitting to the authorities. He was saying, if the law says I have to go to jail for doing this, then I’ll go to jail.

    He didn’t flee and he didn’t countsue and he didn’t write a tell-all book. He submitted to the judgment of the authorities and he paid the price the authorities exacted.

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  220. He was also a big supporter of the ’03 Iraq invasion. So, if I understand him correctly, it’s not okay for a country’s actual citizens to peacefully protest, but it IS okay for a foreign nation to invade and militarily overthrow a leader?

    well……it they are F-16 ‘s doing the bombing while the pilots are singing “Battle Hymn of the Republic….”

    I share your angst with leaders that simply do not have an off button. Nice post, BTW

    GregR

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  222. MacArthur says:

    > they are all in violation of a biblical command <

    It is silly to assess the behavior of Libyan and Egyptian muslims according to the Bible. Whatever injunctions the Bible has constrain the behavior of believers only.

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  223. I’ve had close experience with some devoted followers of JM and have also seen astonishing lack of compassion and humanity for those who aren’t a part of the in group or who make waves. I really think there are some elements of his theology and worldview that contribute to this.

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  224. And what a LOVELY advertisement to our faith it is when we push, plead, and whine for the AMERICAN biblcal agenda to take root in predominatly muslim countries; not that his take, in this instance is really biblical, but why bang the table and push our representatives to remind people of their book to get with it and follow ours…. the mind BOGGLES…..

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  225. I for one, will voice some small agreement with John MacArthur.

    If his statements were directed at Christians alone, I believe he would be in the right. Otherwise, I have the same objections others have voiced.

    In any case, if I were a Libyan / Bahrainian / other oppressed citizen, I don’t know if i could stand idly by and watch. As Christians, we are also called to love justice.

    I got into a conversation last night about this very idea. If it is wrong to do nothing against injustice, but it is wrong to oppose your government, what do you do? The best course of action, we decided, was to simply “walk humbly with our God.” (Micah 6:8)

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  226. Oh, this is just one big hot mess.

    First of all, I’m thinking he probably wouldn’t have even been able to find Libya on a map last month, so I’m not sure why he felt the need to comment. His statement that laws are there to protect people belies his severe ignorance. He’s placing his own understanding of his American context onto other countries with completely different situations. It’s really all you can do when you are completely ignorant of the realities that exist on the ground in other places, but it doesn’t mean you can’t just keep quiet.

    Like someone else mentioned above, I also can’t help but think that his tune might be different if Egypt were not a primarily Muslim country who’s leader had been a long-time U.S. ally. Did he also condemn the peaceful revoltuions in Eastern Europe? Or were those okay because they were protesting Communist Soviet rule?

    He was also a big supporter of the ’03 Iraq invasion. So, if I understand him correctly, it’s not okay for a country’s actual citizens to peacefully protest, but it IS okay for a foreign nation to invade and militarily overthrow a leader?

    It always drives me crazy when religious leaders with little to no understanding of foreign affairs feel free to spout their uninformed opinions for their devoted followers to soak up, but this one just takes the cake.

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  227. The pastor of my home chuch (I’m a college student and away from home most of the time) grew up in New England but spent many years pastoring a church in Canada. Though we here in the States we get a bit of a chuckle (“Haha, these people should go and defect back to England”), he’s told us that some his congregants in Canada had old family stories about people moving north when the revolution began. That doesn’t lead me to automatically approve or disapprove of revolutionaries (and it’s hard to disapprove of certain revolutions), but it also makes me wonder about how a Christian should be personally approaching these sorts of issues.

    What I spend more time thinking about is the prophets who pointed out that those nations who took the Isralites captive were appointed by God to do so, but woe to those individuals who did it. I wonder sometimes if revolutions might have some of the same aspects—God allowing (and using?) certain kinds of sin to be used in addressing other kinds of sin.

    Trying to form a coherent theory of all of this leaves me feeling more mixed up and confused than when I began. I’m sure we’ll all stand corrected on certain things on Judgment Day, but I’m glad the verdict has already been decided.

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  228. I read last year a bit about William Temple who was the Archbishop of Cantury within the Church of England from 1942-44. You can read about him on wikipedia. One of the things he said was that he was “not only non-pacifist but anti-pacifist..”

    He also said, “Worship is the submission of all of our nature to God.
    It is the quickening of conscience by His holiness, nourishment of mind by His truth, purifying of imagination by His beauty, opening of the heart to His love, and submission of will to His purpose. And all this gathered up in adoration is the greatest of human expressions of which we are capable.”

    I think I would have liked this man. In 1942 he wrote the book Christianity and Social Order. (I haven’t read it.) Wikipedia also has: “Also in 1942, with Chief Rabbi Joseph Hertz, Temple jointly founded the Council of Christians and Jews to combat anti-Jewish bigotry.”

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  229. Uh, McArthur’s view of Romans 13 is not Calvinism. Calvinists like Christopher Goodman, John Knox, and John Ponet had a very different understanding. I think McArthur’s statement is bizarre on a number of levels, but he stands or falls on his own folly. He certainly needs a hermeneutics lesson, but don’t make him the representative for the same theological movement that produced the Marian exiles.

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  230. . Hollywood will be required occasionally to cast English actors as the good guys.

    Oh my, my wife will lead this COLIN FIRTH parade……. can a Weshman (Sean Connery) stand in, or is that horribly bad yankee taste ??? thanks for the link, Friday demands Cleese-isms en masse….or am I allowed to say that ?

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  231. Just to be clear, the American Revolution was very different from the recent Egyptian one. One was a violent, armed rebellion, the other was a largely peaceful one.

    I am not one who views the American Revolution as biblicaly justified, but that is a completely different issue than a peaceful revolution.

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  232. Well, he’s right that the church will survive any government but I think I’d have some disagreement with just about every other statement and certainly with the general tone. It all seems a bit cold and detached. It reflects the fact that he’s in (and perhaps helped create) a fairly insular movement that really doesn’t think a lot about larger social issues or matters of peace and justice, particularly in their relation to faith.

    His statement that one will not get in trouble as long a they obey the laws, regardless of what government they are under, is simply ludicrous. I wonder if he’s ever heard of the abuses of the blasphemy law promulgated in Pakistan. There are cases where one false accusation has resulted in arrests, violence, destruction and countless other acts against innocent Christians.

    I also wonder what he would have thought of the civil rights movement her in the US. Not much I’m guessing.

    I would hope that somewhere in the interview he exhorted readers to pray for the people in these countries and for the establishment of perhaps a better government than what they have had.

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  233. It has been a while since I’ve seen such mealy-mouthed, confusing double-talk. One quote in particular stands out:

    “The illusion is that these people are going to get freedom. But what we have to understand is that you’re either a slave to sin or a slave to Christ.”

    Does this guy even realize there’s a difference between spiritual and secular kingdoms? Between earthly governments and the kingdom of God? He’s talking about civil authority out of one side of his mouth and one’s status before God out of the other.

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  234. Did you ever read his Study Bible’s comments (a la Spiros Zodhiates) re: the way to tell in 1 Cor 12-14 (and Acts) if Paul was talking about “real” languages versus “gibberish” was whether the lalein glôssais was in the singular or the plural?

    😮

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  235. I don’t disagree with that… I took Joanie’s original mention of Hitler to be more from the perspective of what the Christian response should be to such a thing when looking in from the outside, or how should Christians respond if they find themselves being oppressed by such a leader. I think it would be very hard to live out loving our enemies in such a situation, or even to imagine what that would look like.

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  236. Can someone please explain what the text that is used means? That bit about submitting?? You’re all dumping on J Mac, without a word about what the WORD actually means..

    P.S. I am a Canadian, and I have wondered in the past how the American Christians justify their revolution against King and country, in light of Paul’s admonition to obey your authorities. In those instances where he disobeyed, would one look to Peter’s defence before his authorities, when he said, we must obey God rather than man? In other words, civil disobedience is justified when man forbids something God commands (i.e. Great Commission) or commands something God forbids.

    Those are the only two biblically defensible positions I can see where rebellion is justified.
    Werner

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  240. I wonder if a lot of this also has to do with the fact that in our modern culture, everyone in the public spotlight, be they pastor, author, singer, whatever, is called upon to give their opinion on every current event. (Even though they may have no expertise whatsoever in that particular area.) MacArthur probably should have said, “I am not familiar enough with the geopolitical situation in these countries to give a detailed response, so I will abstain from giving my opinion.”

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  241. ‘Yes, the Hitler issue is a tricky one.’

    i completely disagree. the hitler issue is not at all tricky. during the time of his reign the vast majority of germany was on the books christian. with that being the case, if the vast majority of germans lived out Jesus’s teachings on non-violence, then hitler never would have happened.

    peace. i’m out.

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  243. This is obviously a misguided reading of Romans 13. This chapter assumes that the rulers are governing justly. If they are not governing justly, then the question is whether one must obey God versus man.

    This type of narrow interpretation has wrought centuries of mistreatment of women because of the concept of submission.

    Finally, I really wonder if he would have said this if Egypt were a non-Muslim country or its government was not propped up by decades of US foreign policy, which as an American and Christian, I am not particularly proud of.

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  244. Interesting that in the same interview MacArthur talks about being invited to preach the message of his new book in an African-American church. I wonder if he would call the protests of MLK and others “sinful” in that context.

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  247. another point that John makes that is erroneous is to think the american government should tell the citizens of another country that their behavior is against the bible.

    since when did the government base it’s actions on the bible?
    and why would anyone expect an overwhelmingly muslim country to respect that anyway?

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  248. It would be interesting to see how MacArthur would react if persecution ever did take place in America on the same scale that it happens in many other parts of the world. Would he meekly submit? Or would he now decide that his former theology didn’t apply and help lead the rebellion?

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  251. Me neither, Christiane. I hear his name mentioned from time to time on this blog, but I never got around to reading anything by him and now I am glad that I did not waste my time.

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  252. Yes, the Hitler issue is a tricky one. I suppose sometime it is simply too difficult for us to imagine non-violent solutions to things because we live in a world dominated by violence. Have you ever read anything by Walter Wink, or have you have read Greg Boyd’s, The Myth of a Christian Nation? I think they both do a good job of least laying out a good introduction to non-violent resistance.

    Ghandi said something like he would rather be a man be brave enough to pick up a sword and fight rather than simply be a coward and run. But, if course, he believed non-violent resistance was the best way to proceed. I often think that some people lean towards pacifism simply because they want to avoid conflict altogether. That, however, simply isn’t possible much of the time. I believe that it is possible, and indeed necessary, to resist evil in a way that is God-honoring.

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  253. Abraham Lincoln had to struggle with the idea of obeying a bad law. For a while, he felt that if anyone found a runaway slave, they had to see that the slave was returned to the “owner” because that is what the law said to do. He hated the law and he found slavery to be an abomination, but he felt that as a good citizen, he had to see that the law was obeyed. Finally, though, he saw the “light” so to speak. We cannot obey a manmade law which goes against God. God is love…love does not want a man seeking freedom from an abusive oppressor to be returned to that oppressor. You could say that is just my opinion. I will say you are correct.

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  254. The irony is, if America had remained a colony of Britain, we would have an established, government-sponsored church (The Church of England). Wonder how that would have sat with MacArthur? And many of the tenets and practices of that church would indeed be the opposite of MacArthur’s point of view. Again, how would he have liked that?

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  258. “Would MacArthur say that Hilter was ordained of God, too, simply because he was in power?”

    I don’t know about MacArthur, but this is a common teaching.

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  259. Phil says, “The way we stand, though, is through the opposite spirit. We bless and love those who persecute us.”

    I don’t think this would have been the way to go with someone like Hitler.

    But I do like your “nor should we take it upon ourselves to try to advance the Kingdom of God through force or dominance.”

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  260. I am not surprised at all. I lived under several pastors who liked this kind of teaching, and they believed the pastor of a local church is ordained by a sovereign God to have authority over the church.

    The teaching about the sovereignty of earthy rulers and the sovereignty of the pastor of a local church is very common in baptist forms of Calvinistic churches. It is what happens when you combine old independent Baptists with Calvinism.

    Piper, Mohler, and others of this persuasion may not be as politically incorrect as MacArthur but the threads of their teaching lead the same way. I have heard pastors who follow them say identical things in sermons to a local church.

    On the practical side, the breaking point for me was when this type of teaching was combined with the church growth model of “Pastor as CEO”. It always leads to corruption.

    It also the main problem of the Southern Baptist Convention. Old fashioned fundamentalists sent their sons to Mohler’s seminary where they heard teachings on the sovereignty of God and delegated authority. They then read books on church growth. The three traditions come together to form a corrupted religion. Pastors I have been involved with who have mixed the three traditions are wacky.

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  261. John MacArthur tells oppressed citizens to submit to their brutal dictators.

    John Piper tells abused wives to endure all the emotional and verbal abuse until, perhaps, they get smacked one night: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OkUPc2NLrM

    Someone ought to make a movie called “There’s Something About John.” I’m sure it would be a laugh riot.

    These are definitely a couple of WTF (“What the faith?!?!?!”) incidents.

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  262. “Submitting to the authorities” certainly doesn’t mean we bend over and grab our ankles and take whatever they dole out. Actually, to a great extent it means something almost opposite. Certainly Paul did his fair share of disobeying authorities for the sake of the Gospel, and because of it he bore the punishment. What the passage means is to not have split allegiances between the Kingdom of God and the kingdoms of the world. We should not simply rebel for the sake of rebelling, nor should we take it upon ourselves to try to advance the Kingdom of God through force or dominance (the tools of the kingdoms of this world). However, I do believe it is perfectly reasonable for Christians to stand against oppression when called to. The way we stand, though, is through the opposite spirit. We bless and love those who persecute us. Romans 13 has to be read in context with what Paul says in Romans 12.

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  264. All the above: the American , armed and bloody revolution against God’s Empire (that would have been England back in the day….the irony of it) and the Boenhoffer thing….jeeeeez, we could make a list, and oh by the way, didn’t England revolt against Rome to start their day in the Son……er, sun ??? Do I want to invest the energy it takes to figure out what drives Mr. Mac’s whacky take on this ?? …..prob not.

    GregR

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  268. Maybe this is a parenthesis, but the interviewer isn’t tying the issue of religious freedom to the “advancement of the church” as MacArthur is concerned about. Maybe the point is to actually get beyond the violence/rape/fear/misery that the persecuted live in threat of.

    Why is it that we westerners always have the romantic view of persecution? While knowing that the Lord uses the worst of circumstances for his good and affirming all of the testimonies that we’ve always heard, I’m starting to get over this idealism. Sitting under veteran missionaries who have seen it and considering diving into missions myself is having that effect.

    Yes, I would be excited to spread the Gospel abroad and see the Kingdom advance in places it hasn’t before. No, I am not excited about the notion of “sacrifice” that includes putting my future wife and children in harm’s way, no matter how many westerners would laud that sort of faith from their armchairs. The cost is indeed high. But I don’t see why peace/freedom/democracy has to be antithetical to the Gospel going forth. Again, I know the arguments.

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  269. I used to own one also and got rid of it shortly after getting it. I remember his commentary for the verse “Jesus wept” after his friend Lazarus died was interpreted something like Jesus weeping over the sinful state of the people, never mind the fact that one of his closer companions died. Everything had to be “religious-ized” in his commentary.

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  270. “subjecting themselves to the powers that be because they’re ordained of God.”

    Would MacArthur say that Hilter was ordained of God, too, simply because he was in power? Should good litlte Christians have just followed in step with Hitler in order to not create chaos?

    I worry that there will be chaos as these countries reconfigure themselves, but I pray that after all the dust settles that they will have governments that are more representative of the people who live there. And yes, the US could end up with having to deal with leaders who are less friendly to us than the guys who were there before. But it is not for we Americans to determine who these countries have for leaders. It is for their people to decide. And if you have autocratic leaders who will not allow any sharing of power, then it appears that at times the people need to take matters into their own hands to get a positive change.

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  272. Ah the wonderful places Calvinism & Literalism will take you!
    These (mostly) peaceful revolutions reminds me of Leo Tolstoy’s short story ‘Ivan the fool’.
    if the choice is “christian” Theocracy ,”christian” monarchist, & secular Anarchism, I’ll pick Anarchism everytime. peace.

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  275. John McArthur. . .Tory?

    His response is an academic one that lacks any sense of humanity or compassion.

    I suppose he would probably also say that Boenhoeffer was wrong.

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  276. I come from a typical conservative evangelical “Bible church” background. I own a MacArthur study Bible. I am horrified by that interview.

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  277. Heh, I was going to also chime in with that irony. Here’s another one: the name of Mac’s ministry: Grace to you.

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  278. Funny, I was thinking about the same thing. Of course as a monarchist, I say yes-yes! but that’s another issue 🙂

    But this kind of cognitive disconnect is common with those that bind themselves with legalism. This is the second interview I’ve read about with McArthur in as many days. Frankly, I’m underwhelmed.

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  279. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

    I guess we owe King George an apology.

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  280. Easy for MacArthur to say “don’t upset the apple cart” from his rich white overlord position in America (the land of the freedom and liberty–and, oh, yeah, how did we become free?). Also he conveniently ignores the many subversive acts of Jesus, Paul, basically the whole book of Acts, and about a zillion examples of the underclass striking out against the establishment in the Old Testament.

    Does he have money ties that depend on maintaining the status quo? I wouldn’t be surprised. What a fraud!

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  281. Did he forget that the United States, with its great history of Christianity, exists because of its people rebelled against their own government?

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  283. Funny that when Paul writes to submit to the authorities . .. that he does so from a jail cell because he was not.

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