Christian (Cult)ure Classics: Johnny Mac

John Macarthur, or as his endearing fans affectionately call him, "Johnny Mac," is a bit of a cult classic due to his growing status as a cult leader. Like Willy Wonka, he will take you into a world of pure imagination, the world of John Macarthur's Calvinistic imagination.



However, this isn't the good kind of surreal. This isn't a chocolate factory and you aren't being invited to dine with the Mad Hatter. John Macarthur's world is a world of illogical impossibilities, apocalyptic terror, and divine egotism, all with the ironic banner "GRACE TO YOU" hanging over the gates of this dystopian nightmare. And John Macarthur has mixed up a special Kool-Aid to aid you in your journey through this world. To numb your mind and make the insanity easier.


See the resemblance?


Well, that is, if and only if you've been predestined to drink it. According to Johnny Mac, God shuffled his cards at the foundation of the world to sort out who would be vessels of wrath and who would be vessels of mercy. And to make it worse, he (arbitrarily?) decided to make way more vessels of wrath than of mercy. Lucky us.

And yes, it really is an "arbitrary" choice, and not simply "according to his purposes" as the Bible says. If you don't think so, go out and smell the TULIPS. According to the "U" in TULIP, our Sovereign beast of a master chose his ornamental saints according to his "unconditional election," which means he elected us for saint-ship based upon absolutely no conditions. Talk about relativism. And you thought postmodernism was bad.

But it only gets worse. All of those precious vessels of wrath will eternally burn simply for being sloppily made vessels. But Macarthur's Divine Potter is not ready to take the blame for having shaky hands. These vessels will burn forever on the alter of hell as they give off a sweet aroma to the nostrils of the Almighty, like a sweet Levitical offering, and it will all amount to giving him glory. And the vessels of mercy will see his glory and fall on their faces and worship him, the glorious one who showed them the error of their way which was inherited through the man's seed passed down over thousands of years from a proto-human whose will was biased to eat a fruit from the hand of a woman seduced by a cunning serpent.


But how could you resist that smile? Grace to you, my friend. If you're elect :)

Yes, Johnny Mac believes all of these things. But that's not all folks.

Unlike his reformed brothers and sisters, Dr. Macarthur also believes that the entire world will be set on fire. For God so loved the world, he sent down fire from the heavens to burn up all the infidels so that only the Word of God and a few souls of men will endure. The creation really wasn't that great anyway.

But to spare you the pain and time of having to read page after page about what exactly his systematic dispensationalist paradigm of sensationalist end-time glory looks like, I'll simply ask you to Google it. Dispensationalism. Seven Year Tribulation. Uncreation of the earth. Antichrist. John Darby.


That's right. It was this guy's idea.


So may you not drink the Kool-Aid of Johnny Mac's theology. May you always remember and revere him as a frightening and fictitious character in a Stephen King novel and nothing else. Long live cult classics.

A Defamation of (Non)Hell (Cult)ure

I guess if I was an evangelical I would be a little concerned about all these lights and cameras and shows and bands and coffee gatherings and fads and appeals to hip fashion, because quite frankly, it would all be a terrible cover-up of the awful, glaring reality of an eternity spent in unending torment for those not "in." I guess I would want my art and presentation and gatherings to reflect this terrible reality rather than my glorious, selfish "in-ness" because I wouldn't want to hide the truth from those who are "perishing."

So why do people cover this awful reality up?

The answer is simple: we as humans cannot bare it. When I was young, I could barely sustain any amount of time thinking about unending torment in my mind, no matter what justification I attempted to give it. The more I thought about it, the more atheistic I would feel. I had to block it out. I had a friend who told me he would lose sleep over this doctrine, have horrible nightmares over it, and remembers running into the other room away from his family once to cry his eyes out over it because it seemed so cruel and horrible to his young mind. He was forever scarred and traumatized.

Even the thought of it traumatizes us, so the actual experience would have to be so much worse.

The doctrine of eternal conscious torment is so horrible and traumatic that no one can stand to dwell on it for long. Consequently, we as human beings know naturally that it is harmful and unhealthy (not to mention downright immoral) to parade this doctrine around and center our religious gatherings on it.

Which is exactly why I cannot and never could believe in such a doctrine. If being a Christian means that I must believe this, I don't want in now and never will. If it is not healthy and life-enhancing, what good is it? How can we possibly believe it without a little borderline insanity?

"Whatever diminishes life is evil, and whatever enhances life is good." John Shelby Spong

Deconstructing Piper and Driscoll's Masculine Christianity

What would our society look like if John Piper and Mark Driscoll's vision of the church were to be realized as a global kingdom? Because ecclesiology isn't just about the church, but how we think the world ought to look, what we think the Kingdom of God looks like as God's benevolent society spread over the earth.

If Piper and Driscoll's vision reigned, we would revert to a pre-Enlightenment state of culture. We would see a world where women and children find no freedom beyond the marginalizing constraints of the Patriarchal household. Women wouldn't vote, they wouldn't make major decisions in public life, and more seriously, as widows and orphans women and children would suffer terribly (unless they were taken care of, in which case they would be given more rights!).

John Piper and Mark Driscoll call for a masculine Christianity, a Patriarchal ecclesiology. According to Piper,

“God revealed Himself in the Bible pervasively as king not queen; father not mother. Second person of the Trinity is revealed as the eternal Son not daughter; the Father and the Son create man and woman in His image and give them the name man, the name of the male. God appoints all the priests in the Old Testament to be men; the Son of God came into the world to be a man; He chose 12 men to be His apostles; the apostles appointed that the overseers of the Church be men; and when it came to marriage they taught that the husband should be the head.”

He argues for an "overarching godly male leadership." Now I could spend time talking about why this is shortsighted, about how an incarnational vision of God involves getting involved in the messy details of culture (i.e. kings, patriarchs, etc)  and speaking through them. I could talk about God as Good Housewife in the NT, or God as "like a womb" in the OT, or "mother hen." I could talk about Deborah the judge. The list goes on. But I want to deconstruct this ideology by its own merits to show why it doesn't work.

If God is seen as a Divine Patriarch, a Sovereign deity of phallic domination (think: the Sword of his Word) which will one day consummate his bride -- and if we are this, then is not the church female? And if the church is female, should not the church embody the virtues of the feminine, of self-sacrifice, compassion, love, humility, and submission? Should not the church be yonic, a place of opening up and welcoming and surrendering and submitting rather than a place of domination and abuse and tyranny?

There have been recent reports of Mark Driscoll as a tyrant, of firing any elder who disagrees with him at all. Mark Driscoll is a powerful embodiment of phallic tyranny--a man in love with the masculine, with talking about and practicing the masculine, and guilty of spiritually abusing his own followers (cult leader?).

I find it ironic that Mark Driscoll's book Real Marriage would be published as is by Thomas Nelson, a book that talks explicitly about Mark's sexual and emotional relationship with his wife, about sex toys, etc, etc. And yet, Thomas Nelson required Rachel Held Evans to remove the word "vagina" from her book A Year of Biblical Womanhood before they would publish it. This only points to the church's phallocentric privileging of the masculine over the feminine and its commitment to the outdated models of the Patriarchal world.