This is where I am today

by Phil Johnson



ook the redeye from LAX to Boston last night. (I'm sure you'll be able to tell that when this video is complete. I'll be the character asleep in the corner.) The video promises to be intriguing: a free-ranging conversation among three very intelligent men and one jet-lagged blogger. I proposed calling it "Band of Curmudgeons" or "The Emergency Room." Abendroth didn't go for my suggestions.

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The Gospel as Performance Art

by Phil Johnson



f you subscribe to my Twitter feed, you already know that I flew back from Ukraine yesterday. It's great to be home, of course, but it was a remarkable privilege to teach pastors and seminarians at Irpin Biblical Seminary. It was an even greater thrill to spend a day with the saints in Grace Bible Church, Kiev. Last Sunday was one of the truly great and joyous highlights of my life—rich worship followed by a full afternoon of fellowship with the people of that church. It's a day I will never forget. The only thing that would have made it better would have been if Darlene could be there.

Anyway, this past week I've been thinking a lot about my first visit to Kiev, with John MacArthur, more than 20 years ago. I remember those days clearly. It was late September and early October 1991, exactly 50 years after the Nazis slaughtered 33,771 Jews at a Kiev ravine called Babi Yar—and less than two months after the collapse of the Soviet Union. People were hungry—starved—for the gospel.

Since then I have been to some 35 countries on five continents, and I've never seen any culture more eager to listen to the gospel than Ukraine (and the rest of the former Soviet Union) in 1991. The churches I visited were all crowded. A steady stream of recent converts gave their testimonies in every service I attended. Each new believer was brought to the front of the church and encouraged to "repent." And they did—confessing their sins with heartfelt remorse, and verbally professing their newfound faith in Christ with overflowing joy and enthusiasm. It was amazing and uplifting and deeply convicting to someone like me, who had become somewhat sluggish spiritually with the comforts and refinements (and superficiality) of Western evangelicalism.

Anyway, one of my most vivid memories of Kiev in 1991 was a day we were walking across a public square in downtown Kiev with a bundle of Russian gospel tracts and Scripture booklets. Ukrainian people crowded around us, clamoring to get one. I was caught quite off guard by the suddenness and enthusiasm of people's response. The moment was unforgettable.

But we weren't the only Western Christians in the square that day. There was a group of "gospel clowns" and mimes from some American church, and we inadvertently interrupted their performance, because even the people who had been watching them suddenly ran over to get gospel literature from us as we approached the center of the square. One of the mimes glared at me. And then, breaking character, he said something to me in English. He wanted us to move on so that they could get on with the task of pantomiming the gospel.

To this day it amazes and appalls me that anyone confronted with the openness of Eastern Europeans in the wake of the Soviet collapse would think wordless "performance art" is a better medium for declaring the gospel than straightforward preaching, simple one-on-one witnessing, and plain-language gospel literature. It's like anti-contextualization—culturally insensitive, incomprehensible to the target culture, and tainted with the scent of spiritual jingoism—but I'm certain those mimes believed their method was the very epitome of innovative "relevance."



And it occurs to me: That reflects precisely how multitudes of American evangelicals still think. They are more enthralled with their clever methodologies and ingenious "contextualizations" than they are with the gospel itself. Honestly, they seem at times to love their own flamboyance far more than they care about lost souls.

At least Rob Bell was honest about what he was trying to do. He openly called himself a "performance artist." But let's face it: the typical Noble/Furtick/EdYoungJr-style shtick is nothing more than bad performance art, too. The recent Code Orange Revival was promoted by garish floor gymnastics that looked like a poor imitation of something from Cirque du Soleil. Virtually all Mark Driscoll's major gaffes are products of a mind that has been overexposed to movies, rock concerts, cage fighting, Chris Rock, and whatnot. Even the Elephant Room, heavily promoted as a rare moment of candor and tough questions, turned out to be carefully scripted and strictly controlled so that no opinions were harmed during its filming.

A lot of what's called ministry these days is mere spectacle. Authentic apostolic-style gospel ministry is nothing like performance art.

When evangelical megachurches gave up the pulpit for a stage; traded psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs for AC/DC tracks; hired vaudevillians instead of pastors; and turned away their ears from the truth to follow fables, they chose a path of apostasy.

The only way back starts with repentance.

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Clowns and Hypocrites; Serpents and Vipers

by Phil Johnson

In view of numerous Tweets and comments from several people who were outraged and angry about Friday's post, we take up the subject only obliquely today. Most of my critics since Friday have regarded it as a given that Jesus would never, ever—ever—be anything but friendly, deferential, polite, and sweet-tempered to men of stature who teach in religious settings. Here's a reminder that such a saccharine view of Christ by no means reflects who He really is. In fact, the opinions of today's evangelicals about what constitutes "civility" and authentic Christlikeness are sometimes about as far from reality as it is possible to get.


ear the conclusion of The Jesus You Can't Ignore, John MacArthur makes this observation about Matthew 23:

The other word that dominates this sermon besides "woe" is "hypocrites"—which likewise appears eight times. In the course of pronouncing those eight woes, Jesus was addressing many of the doctrinal and practical errors that illustrated what deplorable hypocrites [the Pharisees] were. These included their pretentious praying (v. 14); their misguided motives for "ministry" to others (v. 15); their tendency to swear casually by things that are holy, plus the corresponding habit of playing fast and loose with their vows (vv. 18-22); their upside-down approach to priorities, by which they had elevated obscure ceremonial precepts over the moral law (vv. 23-24); and above all, their blithe toleration of many gross, often ludicrous, manifestations of hypocrisy (vv. 27-31).

One other characteristic that makes this sermon stand out is Jesus' liberal use of derogatory epithets. Those who think name-calling is inherently unchristlike and always inappropriate will have a very hard time with this sermon. In addition to the eight times Jesus emphatically calls them "hypocrites!" He calls them "blind guides" (vv. 16, 24); "Fools and blind!" (v. 17, 19); "Blind Pharisee[s]" (v. 26); and "Serpents, brood of vipers!" (v. 33).

This was not an attempt to win esteem in their eyes. It was not an attempt to persuade them with smooth words a friendly overture. It was not the kind of soft word that turns away wrath.

But it was the truth, and it was what the Pharisees, as well as those potentially influenced by them, desperately needed to hear.

Just before closing that final chapter of the book, MacArthur writes,

In fact, the very last thing we can afford to do in these postmodern times, while the enemies of truth are devoted to making everything fuzzy, would be to pledge a moratorium on candor or agree to a cease-fire with people who delight in testing the limits of orthodoxy. Being friendly and affable is sometimes simply the wrong thing to do (see Nehemiah 6:2-4). We must remember that.

Punctuating the chapters in this book are call-out quotes from famous authors of the past who likewise pointed out that the popular conception of Jesus often fails to appreciate just how militant He was in defense of the truth. In one of them, for example, J. B. Phillips writes, "Why mild? Of all the epithets that could be applied to Christ this seems one of the least appropriate."

Here's another:

We have all heard people say a hundred times over, for they seem never to tire of saying it, that the Jesus of the New Testament is indeed a most merciful and humane lover of humanity, but that the Church has hidden this human character in repellent dogmas and stiffened it with ecclesiastical terrors till it has taken on an inhuman character. This is, I venture to repeat, very nearly the reverse of the truth. The truth is that it is the image of Christ in the churches that is almost entirely mild and merciful.
        G. K. Chesterton (The Everlasting Man)

You really ought to read The Jesus You Can't Ignore—especially if you are the type who thinks theological disagreements should never be brought out into the open until they have been delicately spun into pretty clouds of cotton-candy—and then handled only by people who have carefully painted phony clown-smiles on their own faces.

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"Performance Artist"

by Phil Johnson

ee, this kind of stuff is why I keep saying the historic meaning of the word evangelical will probably never be recovered. (You might want to read The Boston Globe's religion section and then come back here. The rest of this post will be more relevant if you have the full context.)

I do agree with Rob Bell about one thing. (Quick. Somebody wash my mouth out with soap. Please.) He's <cough>right</cough> when he points out that the way the secular media usually employ the term evangelical—as a synonym for religious right-wing politicos—is a misnomer. Bell says, "For many, the word has nothing to do with a spiritual context."

Well, yeah, OK. I suppose that's part of the problem. More precisely, the term evangelical has been systematically evacuated of any reference to its historic doctrinal roots. People today therefore feel free to assign it any meaning they fancy—religious or non-religious. Practically everyone in the world of popular religion now claims to be "evangelical" in one sense or another. That includes not only old-line Moral Majority types who think the Republican Party agenda is gospel truth; hip middle-class Willow Creekers who couldn't care less about either doctrine or politics but just want to be entertained; crypto-Socinians like Bell and McLaren; crass socialists like Jim Wallis and Sojourners; heavily politicized left-wing wingnuts who think Tony Jones, Doug Pagitt, and Al Franken are all good medicine—or whatever.

In fact, listen to Bell's own cockamamie claim about what the term properly describes: "I embrace the term evangelical, if by that we mean a belief that we together can actually work for change in the world, caring for the environment, extending to the poor generosity and kindness, a hopeful outlook. That's a beautiful sort of thing."

So is that what Bell considers "a spiritual context," or did he already forget what he had just been saying about how the term became politicized and corrupted in the first place? Hmmm.

An interviewer at The Boston Globe evidently wondered the same thing. He tells Bell, "I'm struck by the fact that I don't hear a lot of explicitly religious language, or mentions of Jesus, from you."

Bell's answers to that question and others in a similar vein are instructive. Among other things, he admits, "I have as much in common with the performance artist, the standup comedian, the screenwriter, as I do with the theologian. I'm in an odd world where I make things and share them with people."

One thing is clear: Bell himself is no true evangelical in any historic sense of the term. The Boston Globe's headline ("Bell aims to restore true meaning of 'evangelical'") is exactly backward. Bell has no agenda to "restore the true meaning" of the term evangelical, much less encourage a revival of true evangelical belief. In fact, Bell has made a career of attacking historic evangelical convictions—laying siege to the doctrine of substitutionary atonement, the wrath of God against sin, the authority and perspicuity of Scripture, the necessity of the virgin birth, the coherence of the biblical testimony about the Resurrection, the exclusivity of Christ, and whatever other historic Christian doctrines Bell finds politically incorrect.

In fact, if you have the stomach to read the complete version of The Boston Globe interview, don't miss Bell's arrogant skepticism about the sovereignty and omniscience of God: "For a lot of people, dominant questions center around, 'Why is this happening? Why me? Why now?' Unfortunately, the religious voice often enters into the discussion at an inappropriate time—'God just planned this.' Really? Your God planned this, not mine."

If any popular figure "in the evangelical movement" (or on its copious fringe) deserves the label "heretic," it is Rob Bell. The guardians of evangelical politeness don't like that kind of candor, but when a secular newspaper like The Boston Globe is publishing pieces implying that the best, most promising alternative to right-wing civil religion is a mish-mash of Open Theism and performance art—and that whatever "evangelicalism" is, it must be one or the other of those two abominations, it's time for people with historic evangelical convictions to speak up clearly and make the biblical message heard again.

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