Today, I was blessed to be able to witness at a polling center and help Americans cast their ballots in a morally informed manner. The US election is taking place today.
My efforts to help out in a positive way was met with mixed results. Two poll workers came out and seemed disturbed by my signs. They were polite enough, but quite insistent I stay away from the polling station. I informed them I checked where I was allowed to stand and that I was legally entitled to stand where I was. They shook their heads and headed back into the polling station.
A couple minutes later a deranged female leftist and what was I assume was her boyfriend stopped their car in the middle of the road (I assume this act was illegal as a whole bunch of cars were suddenly forced to stop behind them), they photographed me, F bombed me, and started screaming I was a criminal intimidating voters and that my mother should have aborted me. I wished them well, told them God did not approve of Kamala Harris and Tampon Tim and they quickly moved on as all the cars behind them started honking their horns.
One elderly lady who wore an ID and I think either worked at the polls or volunteered with the apostate church came out and started what I thought was an amicable enough chat. She commented she was informed by some of the people coming inside to vote that I was out on the sidewalk protesting. I informed her I wasn’t protesting, so much as trying to give accurate election information to voters, so they could make an informed decision and cast a moral vote. To my surprise and seemingly out of nowhere the elderly woman hissed at me “Go F— yourself.” Then she turned around and went back inside the polling station. Yikes!
One woman told me I was a moron and that I informed her vote with my signs and that after reading them she was voting for Kamala Harris and Tampon Tim. Oh well…….
Others were quite polite. I got a few thumbs up by drivers driving by and looking at my signs. One voter told me he appreciated me being there and that he too was pro-life. A fellow in a pick up truck rolled down his window, smiled, and wished me a wonderful day. One young lady pulled her car into the polling station parking lot, stopped in front of my display and gave me a thumbs up before going in to vote.
Listening to various radio stations while I am driving across the United States I can see there are huge concerns across the USA there will be widespread election fraud perpetrated by the political left again.
I find it strange that Democrats are obsessed with folks getting mail in ballots, folks being able to vote without ID, and voters not even needing to prove their residence when voting. No one complains that folks need ID and an address to open a bank account. One cannot drive a car without having a driver’s license. It makes no sense running something as important as an election without insisting people who want to vote be able to prove who they are and that they are legally allowed to vote.
Anyways, tonight I will be at an election watch party with the Constitution Party in Milwaukee. I can’t vote, but I contributed. We can all pray that America’s election is free and fair. No fraud, no violence. My favourite party (most aligned with my world view) is the Constitution Party, but I will definitely be happy if Donald Trump wins tonight.
Tomorrow I am off to Columbus Ohio and then on to Boston Massachusetts before coming back to Canada as per my bail conditions.
If you would like to help with the numerous expenses related to my upcoming travels to Toronto to face my multiple hearings and second so-called “hate crime” trial you can donate here:https://www.lifefunder.com/whatcott
In Christ’s Service, Bill Whatcott
“When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice; But when a wicked man rules, the people groan.” Proverbs 29:2
On Monday October 28th I went to Colorado Sprinds to visit Matt Barber and was blessed (It was a surprise for me) to appear on the PIJN (Pray in Jesus’ Name) news network with host Chaplain Gordon Klingenschmitt AKA “Dr Chaps.” We discussed my upcoming second “hate crime” trial (I was acquitted once already in Dec 2021) in March 2026. We also discussed the general state of free speech and religious freedom in Canada, which to be honest has been palpably declining for the last few decades and appears to me to have significantly declined at an accelerated rate since Trudeau became Prime Minister in Canada in 2018.
I was told the interview will air in a couple weeks. PIJN is on eight different cable and satellite networks, as well as 17 online platforms. Dr Chaps is unambiguously Christian in his worldview and vocally opposed to sodomy, killing babies, and transgenderism, so his program is banned by the CRTC from airing in Canada. However, if my Canadian friends desire to watch the interview you will be able to access some of the online networks (at least until Trudeau’s so-called “Online Harms” law takes effect) that carry Dr. Chaps program.
Today, I am in Bowman ND with a lovely Catholic family who left Canada three years ago and who definitely feel more free and prosperous here in the United States. They have 8 kids and are a home schooling family. The oldest 15 year old shot his first deer last week and he made me and his siblings breakfast this morning after we all participated in family prayer and Bible study time.
This afternoon I will be heading to Fargo ND to visit a good friend of mine Rob Rudnick who served with Operation Rescue, protested in front of numerous abortuaries across the United States and travelled to Canada to help me a few times. Tomorrow, I will drive on to visit my former Pastor when I lived in Surrey and his family. They left Surrey BC and he now Pastor’s a church in Wisconsin.
For those who would like to help Bill with his court and life expenses as he attends court and awaits his second “hate crime” trial for ministering the Gospel at the Toronto Homosexual unGodly Pride parade you can donate here: https://www.lifefunder.com/whatcott
If you want to know how evil Google is, they just banned our Natural News app from Google Play, claiming that if your content OPPOSES CHILD MUTILATIONS, that’s “health misinformation.” They also claim that advocating for good nutrition is a “harmful, unapproved treatment” and that telling the truth about vaccine damage is “misleading.” Google is pure evil. Demons in charge there. This is why everyone needs to DE-GOOGLE your life, get Google out of your entire sphere of operations and stop using Google Android phones that rely on the Play Store. Get de-Googled phones with freedom-oriented operating systems instead, like the ones at AbovePhone.com
Progressives who want to criminalize discussion of residential schools are embarrassing Canada
Published Oct 26, 2024 •
417 Comments
Once again, commentators in friendly countries throughout the western world are expressing sincere alarm over whether Canada has succumbed to terminal wokeness and is voluntarily and by force of law strangling free speech and ceasing to be, by traditional definition, a free country. Leah Gazan, a Manitoba New Democratic MP, who has been a tireless propagator of the defamatory fraud that French and English Canadians attempted to perform an act of genocide against Canada’s indigenous people, is at it again. Her private member’s bill, supported by the NDP, proposes to make it a crime to question, dispute, minimize or justify the activities of the so-called Indian residential schools which she continues falsely to represent as a genocidal enterprise.
No one disputes that there were many tragic and frightful occurrences in the schools, but there is no doubt that the purpose and intent of them was to assist native children in escaping poverty and illiteracy and giving them a route to a normal and prosperous life. Nor is there any dispute that can withstand even cursory scrutiny that many of the approximately 150,000 students in those schools did in fact go on to much more successful lives than they might have led without having attended them. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission resisted with evident reluctance the rampaging temptation to try to swaddle this macabre fable in the winding sheet of genocide, but it did come to a number of conclusions that were not justified by the large volumes of accompanying documentation and the report has effectively failed as a basis of reconciliation.
There is a general consensus among thoughtful Canadians that as a society we have not adequately addressed the needs, and rightful ambitions and grievances of Indigenous communities. This has not been for many years a question of inadequate funding. Tens of billions of dollars have been poured into a cornucopia of programs designed to compensate and durably improve the lives of Indigenous communities. The residential schools themselves began contemporaneously with legislation seeking to assure that all children in Canada were educated, and the indigenous populations were so dispersed that it was fiscally impractical to build the number of day-schools that would have been required to educate large numbers of them. Tuberculosis was a widespread problem in society and not just in native communities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, even amongst prosperous families. Schools in general, including elite boarding schools, had an excessive amount of corporal punishment in that era and there was undoubtedly, in almost all western countries, inadequate monitoring of the deviant and even sadistic behaviour of some teachers.
The commitment, by Canadian governments and churches of $7 billion of reparations for claimed victims of the residential schools is excessive and if these awards and concessions had been coordinated properly, they would have been conditional on the native victimhood industry ceasing to press on what has been an open door of Canadian majority guilt while steadily escalating its outrageous demands. The former minister of justice of Canada, Jody Wilson-Raybould, went so far as to order that no claims made by native individuals or organizations against the government of Canada should be litigated: they should instead be settled by negotiation. Canada is not and has never been a uniquely deliberately or systematically unjust jurisdiction. But in these matters it has consistently been a stupid jurisdiction, and remains so.
The respected Americas commentator of the Wall Street Journal, Mary Anastasia O’Grady, recently wrote, as a number of Canadians have, (including me), that the unmarked graves scandal, after more than three years, has yet to be supported with one scintilla of probative evidence. If Canada is to be taken seriously in the world or even by itself, it must arm itself with the self-respect to investigate such controversies promptly and thoroughly, to redress matters fully and generously when that is appropriate, and to revise or debunk the allegations when that is justified. As I have written here and elsewhere before, our own government is complicit in blood libels against the founding European nations of this country. That is not the purpose of government.
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Given that our entire society has effectively capitulated to ever more extreme complaints, who seem to be cranking up to claim the estimated 200,000 mostly nomadic Indigenous people who roamed around the 3,800,000 square miles of what is now Canada when the Europeans arrived 500 years ago, were invaded and occupied in a manner legally indistinguishable from the conquest of Poland by Hitler and Stalin in 1939. What is needed is a comprehensive assessment of the past and plan of action for the future, worked out by impartial and altruistic people in intimate discussion and agreement with a representative group of Canada’s many extremely talented and successful native people.
Illustrative of the sort of semi-formalized misinformation and cant and emotionalism that obstructs serious discussion of these matters was an email sent to the eminent writer and journalist Robert MacBain (and shared with me), whose most recent book was on the tragic death of the young native boy Charlie Wenjack, from the fund that has been established in the boy’s honour. The email claimed that Charlie was “taken from his family at nine years old and forced to attend” the residential school at Kenora, Ontario; that he “had run away from the school to reunite with his family 600 km away,” and “succumbed to starvation and exposure,” and that his death “became the first to spark a formal investigation into the treatment of indigenous children in residential schools.”
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It claimed that the school changed the boy’s name from Chainie to Charlie, and has given mass circulation to drawings of Catholic nuns delousing Charlie and other Ojibway boys. It is clearly alleged that Charlie was sexually abused by the school staff. All of these assertions are false, as Robert MacBain meticulously demonstrated, Charlie attended a Presbyterian school, not a Catholic school with nuns, and there is incontrovertible evidence that all these claims are bunk. Clergy are caricatured as hideous and brutal people, and perhaps a few of them were, but the Kenora school has many positive and grateful alumni.
Until we demand and elicit the truth about all these issues, we will have no defence against the self-defamation of our country and its history and no adequate response to the Indigenous people who have so long awaited one. Canada is becoming a laughing stock in the world. This entire issue goes to the heart and moral core of this country and it has to be faced and resolved, and not by repealing free speech and criminalizing legitimate discussion of it.
Today CAFE attended the bimonthly freedom rally in Shelburne. Great sunny Autumn weather and fellowship.
I gave a short talk on the abuse -by-process often used by Canada’s politicized justice system. I reported on the case of London-area freedom fighter Clayton McAllister. He was the first trucker after Tyrant Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act. He simply lay down in the snow. He was arrested and faces charges of mischief, violating a Court order, trespass and resisting arrest. The torrent of charges are the acts of a vengeful state against a gentle non-violent trucker. His one month long trial was to open in Ottawa, October 21, 2024. At the last minute, the Crown offered to drop the charges and he would sign a one-year peace bond. Among other conditions, he would not be allowed to attend a demonstration of more than 25 people. In this way, the enemies of freedom often restrict dissidents WITHOUT a conviction. Clayton wisely refused. Now, it’s up to the Crown whether to drop the charges of go to trial.
The Crown’s tactics are abuse-by-process aimed to break dissidents.
October was a very active month for the Canadian Association for Free Expression;
We held meetings in Toronto, Ottawa, Hamilton,Calgary, Edmonton, Regina and Winnipeg.
Of course, on October 9, we awarded longtime activist and political prisoner Brad Love The George Orwell Free Speech Award maintaining the tradition started by the late Douglas Christie. CAFE has added another wrinkle. The yearly award alternates between the West and the East.
And, of course, we participated in several freedom rallies — no, they haven’t stopped since the end of COVID — in Kelowna, Shelburne and Mississauga (twice).
We are carefully monitoring the progress — fortunately, it’s stalled in Parliament due to the filibuster because Trudeau won’t hand over documents Parliament had, by majority vote, ordered — of freedom killing Bill C-63. the Online Harms Act.
All of these activities require money.
If you can, copy to enclosed coupon and send your remittance.
Paul Fromm
Director
Time to Subscribe/Renew: Time To Commit CAFE, Box 332, Rexdale, ON., M9W 5L3 _ Please enrol/renew me as a subscriber to the Free Speech Monitor ($30) _ Enclosed is my donation of $_______ for CAFE’s’s advertising and public outreach programme for 2024 and campaign to stop Bill C-63. [Due to the vile behaviour of BMO, please make cheques payable to Paul Fromm.] Please charge _ to my VISA#_________________________________________________
Great Speeches DVDS & NEW BOOKLETS: Hidden History You Ought to Know __ GET IT BEFORE THE CENSORS BAN IT. Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (And the Truth About Residential Schools.) Softcover. $30.00 The Cult of Kalergi: The Planned Replacement of the European People by Paul Fromm. The evil architect & masterplan behind the immigration policies of Canada, the U.S. and most European countries. $7.00
Who is Kennewick Man & Why Does He Matter? by James McNallen. Toronto, February, 1911. Caucasians were here first. DVD. $10.00
__ Homicide in Kennewick. How the U.S. government & local Indians tried to suppress information about the discovery of a 10,000 year old Caucasian corpse. DVD. $10.00
__ Who Built Stonehenge? [Clue: It wasn’t Africans.] DVD. $10.00
__ The Mysterious Mummies of China. They were White, wore tartans & had red hair. DVD. $10.00
__ The Vanishing Black Family in America. An 82 per cent illegitimacy rate helps explain disproportional Negro crime in Canada and the U.S. DVD. $10.00
__ The Tragic Consequences of Confused National Identity by Mark Weber. Institute for Historical Review. DVD. $10.00
__ Why the Left Hates White People Explained. DVD. $10.00
C-293, the Pandemic Prevention and Preparedness Act, grants Public Health the power to govern Canadians under the guise of pandemic ‘prevention.’ The Act engages all levels of government and Indigenous communities. It grants omnipotent power to change land use, foods you can eat and even create a government-controlled economy to reduce any ‘risk,’ not further defined, of a Pandemic, not further defined. No term is defined within this Bill, handing dangerously overbroad powers to Public Health.
This Bill allows the World Health Organization (WHO) to make agreements with Public Health directly, attempting to eliminate jurisdiction of the courts and the constitution. It allows Public Health control over communications infrastructure, instituting interlinking surveillance.
Once enacted, C-293 imposes mandatory medical treatments, explicitly controls your personal autonomy, affecting your freedom of movement and privacy, can expropriate farms and other property and relocate rural and urban dwellers (to 15 minute cities), for absurd reasons like ‘deforestation increases the risk of pandemics.’ Even with the absurd grants of power C-293 still gives more powers ‘as appropriate,’ not further defined.
C-293 alters everything we now know about Canada. There is a serious concern that this Bill alone will change forever how Canada is governed. No other bill represents such a clear threat to Canada and the rule of law given the complete absence of definitions of terms coupled with its comprehensive overreach into every aspect of life.
This Bill is on the cusp of being enacted. It has been passed by the House and has had first reading in the Senate. To prevent this dangerous Bill from becoming Canadian law, please take the following actions.
Provincial MLAs and Premieres should have an immediate legal review of the broad jurisdictional assaults of this Federal Bill in order to preemptively go to Court to stop the operation of Bill C-293. They are not protecting our rights in our province when a Federal Bill has totalitarian reach into their Constitutional authority.
Use the Action item on this page to send your letter to your MP, Senators, MLA, Governor General.
Share this link https://oneclickpolitics.global.ssl.fastly.net/promo/602 as widely as possible to mobilize your entire Circle of Influence to help save Canada.
Copy the action letter and send to your Mayor and Councillors.
Organize and / or attend the 9-11 rallies in your community at court houses, MP and Senator offices, and parliament buildings on 17 September at 10:00am local time. (911! SOS CANADA)
For more information: https://rumble.com/v5dnhvd-open-letter-to-the-senate-parliament-of-canada..html https://youtube.com/clip/Ugkx9_Hqfdsiu4JTCGnwBKIBNPOZOpDoo586
I had not intended to write this essay. I was only going to share a link through e-mail to a video that the online Christian (Presbyterian) apologist Redeemed Zoomer had made about the Nestorianism of John F. MacArthur Jr. In what was supposed to be a brief explanation of why I thought the video was important, I mentioned that MacArthur had taught several other false doctrines. That grew into a full essay so I decided to share that here. Here is the Redeemed Zoomer video: Is John MacArthur HERETICAL??? – YouTube
Nestorianism is a heresy that many prominent evangelical leaders of the last century or so have shared with John F. MacArthur Jr. Several years ago, for example, I pointed out in an essay that an article the late R. C. Sproul had written criticizing Charles Wesley’s hymn “And Can it Be” for the line “that Thou my God shouldst die for me” was based entirely on Nestorian assumptions and reasoning.
Nestorianism is not the only heresy that John F. MacArthur Jr. has taught over the years. The only one of his heresies of which he has publically recanted is Incarnational Sonship. This was his doctrine, shared by J. Oliver Buswell Jr. and Walter Martin among others, that Jesus Christ was eternally the Logos, the Word of God, but that He became the Son of God in the Incarnation. This is heresy. Many evangelicals don’t recognize it as such because they think “he’s got three co-equal, co-eternal, Persons, Who are one in essence, that’s the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity, this is just quibbling about names and titles.” This is not the case. If Jesus is the Son of God only because of the Incarnation, in which He was born of the Virgin without a human father, then the persons of the Father and the Holy Spirit are confused. This is because in both St. Luke’s nativity account and that of St. Matthew, the Holy Spirit is identified as the Agent in the conception of Jesus by Mary. If Jesus’ Sonship is due to this then the Holy Spirit is His Father. The confusion of the Persons of the Trinity is one of the most ancient heresies. Tertullian addressed it under the label Patripassionism in his second century work Against Praxeas. Historically it was known as Sabellianism after Sabellius who taught it in the early third century. Today it is called modalism and is taught by the kind of Pentecostals who call themselves “Unity” or “Oneness” Pentecostals.
The orthodox doctrine is the Eternal Sonship of Jesus Christ. The Father was always the Father because He always had the Son, and the Son was always the Son because He was Son of the Father. Closely related to the doctrine of Eternal Sonship is the doctrine of the Eternal Generation of the Son. Jesus Christ is eternally the Son of God because while there never was a time when the Father was without the Son, the Son’s sharing the Godhead, the numerically singular essence/nature/substance of God is derived from the Father in a relational sense that is called Generation because begetting/siring/generation is the closest analogy we have to it. The implication of the Scriptural references to Jesus as the “only-begotten”, it was articulated by Origen of Alexandria in the third century and was incorporated into the Nicene Creed to combat Arianism in the fourth. It has been denied by apologist William Craig Lane and theologian Wayne Grudem, although Grudem has apparently since recanted the denial. MacArthur taught Incarnational Sonship from 1983 until the end of the twentieth century. He apparently recanted it in 1999, although the article on his website containing the recantation was published in the Journal for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (the flagship publication of complementarianism, the weenie compromise position promoted by John Piper and Wayne Grudem for evangelicals who have enough sense not to fully buy in to feminism and egalitarianism but don’t have the gonads to take a stand for patriarchy) in 2001. The doctrinal statement of Master’s Seminary has finally been redacted to teach the orthodox view of Eternal Generation and Eternal Sonship. This was not the case a couple of years ago. It only took him a quarter of a century after his recantation to do this.
MacArthur has not recanted to the best of my knowledge for the false teaching over which Bob Jones Jr. of Bob Jones University raised the first red flag in an article for Faith for the Family back in 1986. This is his teaching that the blood of Jesus Christ has no value in se but merely as a sign or symbol representing the death of Jesus Christ. The following is from a sermon MacArthur preached in April 1976:
The term “the blood of Christ” is a metonym that is substitute for another term: “death.” It is the blood of Christ that simply is a metonym for the death of Christ, but it is used because the Hebrews used such a metonym to speak of violent death. Whenever you talk about the blood of somebody being poured out, to the Hebrew that meant violent death. And when you commune with the blood of Christ, it doesn’t mean the literal blood of Christ, that is a metonym for His death; you commune with His death.
Now let me say something that might shake some of you up, but I’ll try to qualify it. There is nothing in the actual blood that is efficacious for sin. Did you get that? The Bible does not teach that the blood of Christ itself has any efficacy for taking away sin, not at all. The actual blood of Christ isn’t the issue. The issue is that His poured out blood was symbolic of His violent death. The death was the thing that paid the price, right? “The wages of sin is” – what? – “death.”
He died for us. It is His death that is the issue. The Hebrews spoke of it as His outpoured blood because that was something that expressed violent death. And they believed, for example, in the Old Testament it said, “The life of the flesh is in the blood.” And so, the pouring out of blood was the significance of death.
And so, when it says here we are communing with the blood of Christ, it does not mean the literal blood of Christ is efficacious, it does not mean the literal blood of Christ is involved; it means we enter into a genuine, vital participation in His death. But it is not the blood; the blood is only the symbol of the poured out life.
Do you recognize what is wrong this doctrine (which MacArthur shared with the late Col. Robert B. Thieme Jr. of Berachah Church in Houston, Texas)?
There are different aspects to the Atoning work of Jesus Christ. The Scriptures speak of it as a ransom paid for the release of hostages. This was emphasized in the early Church. The New Testament and the book of Isaiah also use the language of vicariousness and substitution to speak of Christ dying for us. This was emphasized in the Reformation and this is what MacArthur emphasizes. There is nothing wrong with that. However, when the language of blood specifically is used, it is the Atonement as a sacrifice that is being emphasized.
Now a blood sacrifice involved more than just killing an animal. In the Old Testament, there are three identifiable elements to animal sacrifices – the slaying, the offering, and the eating. The first is when the animal brought as an offering was killed at the door of the Tabernacle/Temple. (Lev. 1:3-5) This killing of the animal alone did not make it a sacrificial offering. Indeed, the priests were not the ones who did the killing unless they were offering the sacrifice for themselves. The priest would burn the portion of the animal that was to be burned – the fat and fatty portions – on the altar (Lev. 1:8-9). The priest would also take the blood of the animal and sprinkle it on the altar (Lev. 1:5) which was near the door of the Tabernacle/Temple. If it were Yom Kippur and he was the High Priest he would take it further into the Holy of Holies and sprinkle the Mercy Seat (Lev. 16:14-15). It is these actions by the priest that turned what otherwise would have just been the slaying of an animal – which the Israelites were permitted to do themselves in their own homes if they lived too far from the place (Jerusalem) appointed for sacrifice (Deut. 12:15, 21-22) – into a sacrificial offering. Finally, except for the olah or whole burnt offering which was entirely burned, the rest of the animal was divided between the portions assigned to the priest (Lev. 7:31-35) and the portions assigned to the ones who had brought the offering and eaten (Lev. 7:15-20, ; Deut. 12:6-7).
In the epistle to the Hebrews St. Paul, for it is he who wrote that epistle, tells us that Moses was given a vision of Heaven on Mt. Sinai, that the instructions for the Tabernacle and system of worship he was given were imitations of the pattern he had seen there, (Heb. 8:5) and that it was into this Tabernacle made without hands that Jesus Christ, as High Priest after the order of Melchizedek, entered with His own blood to make the one offering that effectively takes away sin (Heb. 9:11-14, 23-28). This is not symbolic language for the crucifixion. The crucifixion took place in time and history, in a specific place on a specific date. It corresponds to the slaying of the animal in the Old Testament sacrifices. Note that as the OT sacrifices were slain at the door of the Tabernacle, so Jesus was crucified on Calvary outside the walls of Jerusalem. Of course, His suffering and dying had precisely the vicarious significance with regards to our salvation that MacArthur et al. assign to it. However, the offering of His blood that makes the whole thing a sacrifice is not something that took place in time and history, in a specific place on a specific date. This offering occurred once, but in the Holy of Holies of the Tabernacle in Heaven, which is situated in eternity, outside of time and space as we know them because time and space are dimensions of Creation. The death and the offering of the blood are two very distinct elements in the dispensation of Atonement, this is clear in both Testaments, and MacArthur missed it all. Astonishingly, he repeated this error in his commentary on Hebrews of all places.
In each of these instances MacArthur’s serious doctrinal error are arguably the result of his taking Protestantism too far. Protestantism, in the sense of the branch of the Christian tradition that emerged from the sixteenth century Reformation, is alright in itself, since the Reformation was a necessary response to real abuses on the part of the Roman ecclesiastical authorities in the late Middle Ages. When one acts as if the history of orthodox Christianity took a hiatus after the completion of the New Testament canon until All Hallows Eve in 1517 and so sets his Protestantism against the Catholicism that is the general tradition of first millennium Christianity prior to the East-West Schism, then one can go very far astray. If he looks with suspicion on Catholicism as defined in the previous sentence, then he feels free to ignore the Creed with which Christians around the world have confessed their faith for almost two thousand years when it says that Jesus is “the Only-Begotten Son of God, Begotten of the Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God, Begotten not made.”
Furthermore he feels free to ignore the rulings of the Ecumenical Councils to which the bishops of the entire Church were invited (whether they attended or not is another matter) to address problems of doctrine and discipline, the decisions of which were received as authoritative by the Church such as the ruling of third Ecumenical Council, that of Ephesus in 431 AD, that it is heresy to reject the term Theotokos, God-Bearer or Mother of God, for Mary, as Nestorius did on the basis that Jesus did not derive His deity from Mary, because in Jesus deity and humanity, while remaining distinct natures, are united in One Person of Whom Mary was Mother. John MacArthur wrote “It’s heretical to call the blood of Jesus Christ the blood of God, and it demonstrates a failure to understand what theologians have called the hypostatic union, that is the God-man union in Christ.” Ironically, it is MacArthur’s sentence here which is heretical precisely because he himself fails to understand the hypostatic union a consequence of which is that whatever is the property of Jesus in either of His natures is His property as a Person and can be attributed to Him as such even when speaking of Him in terms of the other nature. For example, a counterpart in the Scriptures to calling Mary the Mother of God (an equivalent of which also appears in the Scriptures in Luke 1:43) is when Jesus tells Nicodemus “And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven” thus identifying Himself by His humanity in the same breathe in which He references His omnipresence.
Finally, it is because of His suspicion of the Catholic tradition of the first millennium that MacArthur refuses to acknowledge that Christ’s offering of His blood is not just metynomic language for His death on earth, but is rather referring to the one offering Jesus made in His priestly office in the Heavenly Tabernacle in eternity. If he acknowledged that, then He would have to admit that it is from that offering in the Heavenly Tabernacle, which being situated in eternity is therefore equidistant to every single point in time in history from Creation until the Last Judgement that the benefits of Christ’s Atonement come to us where we are in space and time. This would be admitting the foundation of the Catholic understanding of the Eucharist (the first millennium understanding before it got twisted into a caricature of itself in the late Middle Ages) that the earthly offering of bread and wine in the Eucharist is mystically united to Christ’s Heavenly oblation so that when the faithful receive the bread and wine, Christ’s one sacrifice becomes the meal that sustains the new life as Jesus explained in His Bread of Life Discourse in John 6, which completes the correspondence of the New Testament sacrifice with those of the Old Covenant. Slaying of animal – Crucifixion. Offering of blood on altar/Mercy Seat – Offering of blood in Heavenly Tabernacle. Eating of the sacrifice – the Eucharistic meal.
One might think from this that MacArthur must at least sound in the teachings that were important in the Reformation. MacArthur certainly sees himself as a champion of Reformation orthodoxy. When Hank Hanegraaff, Walter Martin’s successor at the Christian Research Institute, joined the Eastern Orthodox Church in 2017 MacArthur acted as if Hanegraaff had converted to Islam or Buddhism or just apostatized. Hanegraaff, quite capable of defending himself, provided clips from MacArthur’s remarks in his response. By joining the Eastern Orthodox Church, MacArthur felt, Hanegraaff had abandoned or was close to abandoning the Gospel. Not the Gospel as St. Paul identified it in 1 Corinthians 15, that Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures, and was buried, and rose again the third day according to the Scriptures, of course, because that Gospel is confessed in the Nicene Creed which Eastern Orthodoxy confesses, but the doctrine of justification by faith alone.
Justification by faith alone is, of course, a central doctrine if not the central doctrine of the Reformation. While it was not until the sixteenth century that it was put in that wording it is essentially identical to St. Paul’s doctrine of justification by faith and not by works. In St. Paul’s epistles, especially Romans, it is stressed that justification is by faith and not by works. It has to be by faith and not by works, St. Paul argued, because only then can it be by grace, that is, by God’s favour, a gift freely bestowed. If it were by our works it would be a wage or reward rather than a gift. This is an important truth and, indeed, in Ephesians 2:8-9 St. Paul says that salvation, which is larger than justification, is a gift of grace by faith and not works. The importance of this truth should not be minimized, but it does need to be kept in perspective. It is a truth about what is sometimes called the mechanics of salvation. The Gospel is the Good News of that salvation proclaimed to the world of sinners, Jew first then Greek. Its content is Jesus Christ, the Son of God, Who He is and what He did. The Gospel is all about Jesus Christ. Justification by faith and not works is about us, what we believe and what we do or rather what we don’t do to receive what Jesus Christ has done. It is an important truth, but truths in which we are the subject rather than Jesus Christ are not on par with the Gospel truths about Jesus Christ and we ought not to make them out as if they were. The evangelical Protestant habit of referring to the doctrine of justification by faith alone as if it were itself the Gospel rather a truth about ourselves derived from the Gospel is a very bad one. Any truth can become a heresy when it is taken out of its proper context. The proper context for Sola Fide is as the answer to the question “what is the hand with which we reach out and appropriate to ourselves the gift of salvation that God has given to us in Jesus Christ” because this is the role that belongs uniquely to faith.
In his negative remarks on Hanegraaff’s chrismation into Eastern Orthodoxy MacArthur treated justification by faith alone as an essential article of faith to which one must formally subscribe to be a Christian. How much is such subscription worth, however, when you affirm the doctrine formally while stripping it of all real meaning?
One of John MacArthur’s best known books was The Gospel According to Jesus, first published by Zondervan in 1988. This book was his response to a real problem afflicting evangelicalism. MacArthur called the problem “easy believism” but it would have been more accurately called “mass production evangelism” because it was basically large-scale evangelism, designed to get as many conversions as possible no matter how shallow, through a lowest-common denominator approach to the Christian message. Had MacArthur written a book denouncing the factory assembly-line approach to evangelism and its bad “decisionism” theology and tracing it back to the neo-Pelagianism of Charles G. Finney in the early nineteenth century it could have been a very worthy volume. It would have been a completely different book from The Gospel According to Jesus, however. Instead, MacArthur’s book retained the basic structure of evangelical decisionism but called for the decision to be defined in the much more demanding terms of total commitment, which arguably merely returned it to the point at which it went wrong in the teachings of Finney. MacArthur wed this with a type of Dortian Calvinism that is entirely incompatible with it producing theological incoherency. He is heavily indebted to heretical, liberal, “God is dead” theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer for his thesis, although Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship is not listed in the bibliography, at least in my copy (the 1989 paperback edition), nor is Bonhoeffer listed in the index. There was a revival of interest in Bonhoeffer at the time MacArthur was writing this book, brought about in part by the dishonest promotion of Bonhoeffer as a “martyr.” A martyr is someone who is put to death for his faith. Bonhoeffer was not executed for his faith but for his political activities, including his involvement whether actual or merely assumed due to his associations in an assassination plot. No matter how worthy political activism may be or how deserving of assassination an intended target may happen to be it does not make the person executed for such into a martyr, much less does it transform a heretical theologian into a sound one. Nor did MacArthur succeed in turning Bonhoeffer’s bad theology sound by slapping lipstick on the pig and rebranding it in The Gospel According to Jesus.
In The Gospel According to Jesus, MacArthur affirmed justification by faith alone as an essential article of faith, but gutted it of all its meaning. Remember that Romans St. Paul argued that justification had to be by faith and not by works so that it might be by grace and therefore a gift rather than a wage. A gift is something that someone gives and another person receives. It is not something that one person gives to another in exchange for something else. MacArthur however wrote “The important truth to grasp is that saving faith is an exchange of all that we are for all that Christ is.” (p. 143). This does not describe the giving and receiving of a gift but is precisely the sort of transaction that St. Paul says that justification/salvation is not. In his next sentence MacArthur says “We need to understand that this does not mean we barter for eternal life.” However, when you say “the water is full of sodium chloride” you cannot clarify your sentence by adding “this does not mean that it is salty” because this is contradicting not explaining yourself and this is the case with MacArthur. A barter is precisely what MacArthur had described in the first sentence. Nor is this the only place in this book where he speaks of salvation as a two-way exchange. Clearly the man who pastors Grace Community Church and whose radio program is entitled Grace to You understands the word grace rather differently from St. Paul. Since he has difficulty with the entire concept of a gift of grace that is St. Paul’s reason for stressing justification by faith without works it is not surprising that MacArthur’s book is also chock full of statements like this “True faith is humble, submissive, obedience.” (p. 140). Note that this does not say that true faith is accompanied by humility, submission, and obedience. It says that true faith is these things. Basic deductive reasoning here. If X = Y and Y = Z then X = Z. Obedience and works are the same thing. If faith is obedience then faith is works. If faith is works, then saying that justification is by faith and not works or that justification is by faith alone is utterly meaningless. It would be one thing if this were a one-time slip of the pen, but is basically what MacArthur argues for throughout the entire book. Nor is he merely saying what Jesus said when He answered the question of “what shall we do, that we may work the works of God?” with “This is the work of God, that ye believe in him whom he sent.” (Jn. 6:28-29). Indeed, his intent is clearly the opposite of Jesus’ in this passage.
Ironically, much of this book is dedicated to justifying disobedience, disobedience, that is, to Matt. 7:1. True, as is indicated elsewhere in the New Testament or even in the verses that immediately follow, Jesus did not intent to prohibit all judgement in this verse. However, statements like “If a person declares he has trusted Christ as Savior [sic], no one challenges his testimony, regardless of how inconsistent his life-style may be with God’s Word” (p. 59) variations of which complaint are found repeatedly in these pages are evidently calling for a kind of judgement that if it is not fall under Jesus’ prohibition, nothing does.
The title of the second chapter “He Calls for a New Birth” displays just how muddled MacArthur’s theology is in this book. When Jesus told Nicodemus that he must be born again this was not a call for a new birth. It was an indicative statement of the necessity of the new birth. A call for a new birth would take the form of Jesus telling Nicodemus that he requires a new birth from Nicodemus, that Nicodemus is capable of meeting the requirement and needs to undergo such a birth to meet the requirement. That, however, is not the conversation Nicodemus and Jesus had. Nicodemus does not understand Jesus’ statement and when he asks for clarification Jesus tells him that the new birth is the work of the Holy Spirit, and is like the wind which blows where it blows, and can be identified by its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it going (Jn. 3:8). If the new birth is the work of the Holy Spirit, it is not something Jesus calls for from us. Jesus does identify in this same passage where our responsibility lies and that is to believe in Him. MacArthur’s attempt to confuse the simplicity of what is conveyed in this part of the interview involves a textbook example of the meaning of eisegesis “In order to look at the bronze snake on the pole, they had to drag themselves to where they could see it. They were in no position to glance flippantly at the pole and then proceed with lives of rebellion.” (p. 46) Exposition like this makes one wonder what the expositor was smoking at the time he wrote it. Oddly, MacArthur’s treatment of the new birth in this chapter is very much at odds with his Reformed theology in which regeneration is very much a sovereign act of the Holy Spirit.
Less oddly, he divorces regeneration from baptism. With regards to the water of John 3:5 he writes “This has nothing to do with water or baptism – H2O. It cannot be accomplished by a bath” (p. 40). This comes from his Hyper-Protestantism. That regeneration is a work that the Holy Spirit accomplishes, that baptism is the sign and seal of this work, and that as a Gospel Sacrament it is used instrumentally to convey the grace it signifies is not merely the Roman understanding but the Catholic understanding of the entire Church of the first millennium. It is also the understanding of the Lutherans, Anglicans, and even the more orthodox of the Reformed. Dr. Luther and the English Reformers saw no contradiction between this and their doctrine of justification because there is no contradiction. There is no contradiction for two reasons, a) Baptism is a Sacrament not a work, and b) the role of Sacraments such as Baptism in salvation is not the same as that of faith. Faith is the instrument we use to appropriate the gifts God gives us in His grace. Sacraments and the Church that administers them are like the Word proclaimed the instruments that God uses to give us those gifts.
If in his error discussed in the previous paragraph MacArthur departs from where the traditions of the Magisterial Reformation are in full agreement with Rome and not only Rome but the entire Catholic tradition when it comes to assurance of salvation he departs from the Reformation tradition on what was one of the most important issues in the Reformation and one on which Dr. Luther and Calvin very much disagreed with Rome. “Genuine assurance comes from seeing the Holy Spirit’s transforming work in one’s life, not from clinging to the memory of some experience” (p. 23). This statement is true in what it denies. Assurance does not come from “clinging to the memory of some experience.” It is very, very, wrong in what it affirms. This is because assurance and faith are the same thing. It says so explicitly in the Bible. St. Paul in Hebrews 11:1 writes “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” While I am quoting the Authorized Bible and very much hold the position that translations of the last century or so are in general greatly inferior to it in this case where they generally have “assurance” where the Authorized has “substance” or “certainty” in the case of the NASB (the NIV uses “assurance” where the Authorized uses “evidence”) it is helpful in making the meaning of the verse clearer. Faith is assurance or certainty of its object and content. The Holy Spirit’s transforming work in our lives manifests itself in works. Saying that assurance comes seeing this transformation, then, is the same thing as saying that we must put our faith in our works. That assurance is faith, and that faith/assurance is not to be placed in our works or anything else in us but in Jesus Christ as He is proclaimed in the Gospel was Dr. Luther’s position and remains the Lutheran view to this day. John Calvin taught the same thing. Both men told their flocks not to look for assurance within themselves but to find it outside themselves in Jesus Christ. John Calvin famously wrote “But if we are elected in him, we cannot find the certainty of our election in ourselves; and not even in God the Father, if we look at him apart from the Son. Christ, then, is the mirror in which we ought, and in which, without deception, we may contemplate our election. For since it is into his body that the Father has decreed to ingraft those whom from eternity he wished to be his, that he may regard as sons all whom he acknowledges to be his members, if we are in communion with Christ, we have proof sufficiently clear and strong that we are written in the Book of Life.“ (Institutes of the Christian Religion, 3.24.5) MacArthur’s Puritanical view of assurance is a greater departure from the Pauline and Reformation doctrine of salvation by faith and not by works than that of Rome.
MacArthur, in my opinion, missed his true calling. Instead of teaching the Bible, he should be peddling snake oil or selling used cars. — Gerry T. Neal