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Book Review: One Biased View Condemning Another

November 13th, 2009 at 11:19am Albert McIlhenny

The Jesus You Can’t Ignore: What You Must Learn from the Bold Confrontations of Christ – John MacArthur Thomas Nelson (July 2009) Topic: Bibliology, Hermeneutics, & Exegesis Summary: Criticism of those who would seek to compromise the Christian Gospel to “get along” Rating:

John MacArthur has over the last decade become a leading light in the renewed interest in Reformed theology. Like many in this neo-Calvinism, he has leaned more on the non-sacramental end of that belief system and fallen into the tendency to reduce the score of volumes of Calvin’s Institutes down to five-point mnemonic device. That part of Calvinism that disconnects Calvin’s soteriology from his ecelesiology and sacrametology has often ended up enthralled with legalism and hair-splitting and MacArthur has been no exception.

Such tendencies do not mean that everything MacArthur writes is tainted by this and much of what appears in The Jesus You Can’t Ignore is absolutely spot on. His main target here is the tendency “Emergent Church” movement and its tendency to avoid all questions of doctrinal clarity. This, as might be expected, does not sit well with many in the Reformed camp and MacArthur quickly gets to the point by placing the “Evangelical Manifesto” of 2008 in his sights. He uses this as a launching pad to attack other elements of the Emergent movement as he quickly points out the many places in the New Testament speaks directly to confronting the world with the truth of the Gospel and holding those in the Church accountable for proclaiming and defending it.

MacArthur is extremely critical of those who would compromise the message of the Gospel in order to conform to contemporary standards of the world or to paper over clear distinctions with other Christians. He points out the many places where Jesus refused to compromise with false teachers of his own day and expectations that Christians should expect to be out of step with the world.

In all of this, one might heartily agree but the great irony here is that MacArthur fails to realize some elements of his own beliefs are no less ahistorical and cobbled together from disparate traditions than those he criticizes. While certainly “Emergent Church” leaders take a smorgasbord approach where they pick and choose things according to their tastes and often do so with violence to the original content and purpose, can we not say the same of MacArthur? Is his not merely a smorgasbord taken some decades earlier?

MacArthur’s own faults show up in some very odd places. In writing on the notion of being “born again”, he, based on his own biases, misses the obvious link to Baptism and desperately seeks to find another interpretation of “by water and the Spirit” via Old Testament verses. However, these are themselves commonly interpreted as pointing to Baptism and the “born again” passage has Jesus ending his discussion by going with the disciples to baptize. Similarly, he jumps through all sorts of hoops to deny the obvious sacramental implications of the “bread of life” passage.

It is odd that he would insist on a non-sacramental interpretation given it is clearly in violation of both the historical setting and the text itself. Moreover, it has no bearing on the questions regarding the emergent church movement since they are every bit as anti-sacramental in their views as him. It seems merely to be an anti-sacramental flash point that he inserts to move the discussion away from the obvious reading of the text he cites. At no point does he consider that both passages, contained in John, were written after the Christians had been celebrating the Sacraments for decades and such clear allusions to their current praxis would not have been used if something else was intended.

Overall, The Jesus You Can’t Ignore makes some very good points but is flawed by MacArthur’s own theology being often as selective as that which he condemns. Those who seek to pick and choose those things in Jesus’ message according to their own whims certainly deserve criticism. But where MacArthur presents view mixing and matching Calvinist soteriology, free church ecclesiology, and dispensationalist eschatology in a confused brew, one wonders if it is all that much of an improvement.

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