Defending the authority of Scripture
Lael Weinberger talks with leading
Bible expositor John MacArthur
Dr John MacArthur
For over forty years of ministry, Dr John MacArthur has had a passion to proclaim
the authority of Scripture. His ministry has reached out from GraceCommunityChurch
in California to an ever-growing audience around the world. The ministry has taken
many forms: radio broadcasts, books, and the training at The Master’s College
and Seminary, where Dr MacArthur serves as president.
John recently shared his insights on the church, Genesis, and the interpretation
of Scripture in an interview for Creation magazine.
LW: Back in 2001, you published a book, The Battle for the Beginning,
on the creation account in Genesis. Why?
Some of the most outspoken enemies of a literal interpretation of Genesis 1-3 even today are considered sound evangelicals.
These things ought not to be so.
JM: During nearly two decades as president of The Master’s
College, I had been watching the erosion of belief in Genesis among the Christian
colleges in the national ChristianCollege association. Many of these were supposedly
conservative in their biblical beliefs, but they were quietly, tacitly
denying the authority of God’s Word in exchange for worldly academic esteem.
They were doing this by deliberately fudging on their interpretation of Genesis
in order to increase their scholastic status. For many of them, abandoning the biblical
account of creation proved to be a first step toward relinquishing other key biblical
and evangelical essentials. That’s because the eventual crumbling of all
biblical conviction is an inevitable byproduct of choosing to treat scientific theory
as a higher authority than the plain teaching of Scripture. There were more than
100 schools in that coalition, and only a handful held to literal six-day creation.
By 1997, most evangelicals had begun to treat 6-day creationism as a wholly optional
belief. In fact, many within the evangelical movement had become openly hostile
to young-earth creationism. Some of the most outspoken enemies of a literal interpretation
of Genesis 1–3 even today are considered sound evangelicals.
These things ought not to be so.
I am persuaded that the biblical account of creation is irreconcilable with macroevolutionary
hypotheses. And I wanted to make that point with an exposition of the biblical text.
LW: Where is the modern church in understanding the creation account?
JM: Liberal churches embraced Darwinian theories and abandoned
the authority of Scripture starting more than a century ago. Most evangelicals held
the line on the Genesis account until some began to waver in the 1970s and ’80s.
The vast majority of rank-and-file believers in the US still hold to the literal
interpretation of Genesis 1–3 in spite of the defection in Christian
colleges and universities. But more and more evangelical institutions of higher
learning have been shifting to the wrong side of the debate. Most Christian leaders
(including some whose personal convictions about the origin of the universe are
perfectly sound) remain silent about the issue and allow confusion to fester, rather
than dealing with a controversial issue. That’s a recipe for large-scale spiritual
disaster, as evangelical students graduate and populate churches, bringing with
them the compromised views they were taught in Christian colleges.
LW: You have long taken a strong stand for the historicity of the
Genesis creation account. What kind of reactions have you received from fellow evangelical
Christians?
JM: Actually, my personal interactions with other Christian leaders
on biblical creationism have been encouraging and fruitful. Because I have based
my stand on what the text of Scripture says, any Christians who want to challenge
my stance would need to make their arguments from the text of Scripture—and
that is impossible. My friend R.C. Sproul once embraced the ‘framework hypothesis’
and an old-earth interpretation of Genesis. He even endorsed one of Hugh Ross’s
books. But he announced a few years ago that, after a careful study of the Genesis
text, he now believes in literal six-day creation.1
I’m grateful for his courage, and I hope many others will follow his example.
LW: Why are so many evangelical Christians confused about the issue?
JM: I think this reflects the failure of evangelical leaders to
take the issue seriously, deal with it boldly, and teach Genesis with genuine conviction.
… Frankly, however, even among creationists, … not enough emphasis has
been given to the actual text of Scripture. While the ‘intelligent design’
movement has gained a little bit of helpful ground, it is a serious mistake and
a very bad tactic to shift the argument away from Scripture, making scientific,
cosmological, and teleological arguments bear all the weight of our case. The effect
has been a diminishing confidence in Scripture among evangelical creationists—some
of whom now act as if they are embarrassed to cite Scripture as any kind of authority.
Throughout the movement there seems to be a general unwillingness to draw any explicit
connection between the intelligent Designer and the God of Scripture.2 If every major scientist finally acknowledged that
intelligent design is a clear necessity, but apologists bartered away the authority
of Scripture in the process, it would be a very foolish bargain. It’s a prospect
that genuinely concerns me.
LW: You have said that those who advocate an ‘old earth’
interpretation of Genesis have done so on an inconsistent and faulty reading of
Scripture. Why are so many Christians going this way?
JM: It’s a sinful tendency of the fallen human heart to crave
worldly respect, and secular culture has been highly successful in making people
think creation is unsophisticated, unscientific, and superstitious. In reality,
nothing could be more absurd and superstitious than the belief that everything evolved
out of nothing with no intelligent plan.
I do think American evangelicals have clearly become too comfortable with bending
the rules of interpretation and playing games with the meaning of the text to reconcile
Scripture with whatever is politically correct at the moment (or to achieve whatever
other end they desire). You see this not only in the violence that is done by old-earthers
to the plain sense of Genesis, but also in the way postmodern evangelicals reimagine
so many difficult doctrines—the atonement, the role of women in church leadership,
the biblical prohibition against homosexuality, and others.
LW: Would you say that western Christians, including in the US,
are hermeneutically illiterate?
JM: Yes, and those who aren’t hermeneutically illiterate
are often hermeneutically inconsistent. The illiteracy is the fruit of church-growth
philosophies that do everything to capture people’s interest except
proclaim and teach the Word of God. For decades evangelicals have been entertaining
themselves and calling it worship. The church is now largely untaught and devoid
of biblical conviction. It’s not merely a hermeneutical deficiency
(though it surely does include that). The bigger problem is a lack of confidence
in the efficacy of God’s Word. Christians doubt the power of the Gospel to
reach unsaved people and change their hearts, so they have substituted other, artificial
means of stimulating church growth. They have lost their confidence in the authority
of Scripture as well. As a result, they are susceptible to the worldly lie that
science and human reason are better judges of truth-claims than the Bible is.
LW: What can we do about this?
JM: What we need to do is get back to preaching and teaching the
Scriptures in the corporate gatherings of God’s people. God’s written
Word will not return void.
LW: Many ‘old-earth’ evangelicals say that they’re
removing a stumbling block to faith by showing people that you can believe in the
Gospel without giving up evolution and billions of years. Is this really a slippery
slope of reinterpreting Scripture to conform to naturalistic science?
JM: Of course. The idea that getting in step with the latest scientific
theories is ‘best for evangelism’ is a natural result of the loss of
confidence in biblical authority. It is much worse than merely a slippery
slope; it represents the abandonment of the most important aspect of faith in the
Bible—the conviction that Scripture is God’s Word and that it’s
the ultimate, inviolable authority over every thought or theory of the human mind.
Evangelicals need to recover their biblical convictions and creationism, and believe
what God has plainly said—whether or not worldly minds approve of it.
The so-called ‘framework hypothesis’ and every other literary trick
designed to prove that Genesis 1–3 doesn’t mean what it seems to say
are all de facto rejections of the authority and perspicuity of Scripture.
They represent a refusal to allow Scripture to mean what it plainly says, while
relying on novel theories no one ever imagined before to explain the ‘true’
albeit hidden meaning of the text—as if no one unsophisticated enough
to deconstruct the literary genre could possibly understand what God was trying
to tell us. That is as wrong-headed as it is arrogant.
Evangelicals need to recover their biblical convictions and creationism, and believe
what God has plainly said—whether or not worldly minds approve of it. We especially
need to have confidence that the Gospel (not clever arguments or human reason) is
the power of God unto salvation. The salvation of every sinner is a sovereign miracle
of God by the Word of truth (1 Peter 1:23); not a work of man by clever means (John 1:12–13).
LW: Thank you, Dr MacArthur.
Related articles
Further reading
References
- See
Famous evangelical apologist changes his mind; creation.com/sproul.
Return to text.
- Ed: Hence the release by CMI of the important book by Jonathan
Sarfati:
By Design: The evidence for nature’s Intelligent Designer—the God of
the Bible. Return to text.
| They say the Bible has been proven wrong by science. Whoever said that hasn’t been to creation.com. Please give so we can give … information that leads people to Christ our Savior.  | | |
|
