In the wake of the Presbyterian Church (USA)’s recent decision to celebrate same-sex “marriages,” celebrity pastor John MacArthur of “Grace to You” has come out with some strong statements condemning “false churches” that abandon Biblical teachings against homosexual behavior.
“They have no allegiance to the Bible,” MacArthur told The Blaze online news service. “You go back to every one of those seminaries … for a century [they] have been deniers of biblical authority, they have no relationship to scripture, they are the apostate church, they are Satan’s church.”
While it seems clear MacArthur was implying that self-professed Christians who accept gay “marriage” are doing Satan’s work, not necessarily worshiping the devil, it is worth noting that the actual Satanic Temple of America has called same-sex “marriage” one of its “sacraments.”
MacArthur, who is Baptist, believes in the teachings of John Calvin regarding the inerrancy and literal truth of Scripture. The PCUSA also has its roots in Calvinism, but in 1967 the church updated its precepts to distance itself from Calvin and adopted a more flexible view of Biblical truth.
During a 2001 debate over whether the denomination would permit the ordination of openly homosexual pastors, PCUSA officials said, “We acknowledge the role of scriptural authority in the Presbyterian Church, but Presbyterians generally do not believe in biblical inerrancy. Presbyterians do not insist that every detail of chronology or sequence or pre-scientific description in scripture be true in literal form. Our confessions do teach biblical infallibility. Infallibility affirms the entire truthfulness of scripture without depending on every exact detail.”
In his interview with The Blaze, MacArthur lamented the cultural decline of mainstream denominations like the PCUSA, and said their watered-down approach to theology is a major factor in the increasing secularization of America, which he argues was founded on “cultural Christianity.”
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According to MacArthur, the historical “cultural Christianity” of Americans has long been a stabilizing force for society. It didn’t mean that everyone belonged to the same church or worshiped exactly the same way, but it did mean that the culture as a whole had a shared set of values and generally believed they would have to answer to a higher power in the afterlife.
The founding fathers, MacArthur told The Blaze, “knew you couldn’t compel people to goodness” unless the majority of people believed in God. But in our increasingly agnostic society, the very idea of “goodness” is open to debate.
“Cultural Christianity … is dying at a warp speed,” MacArthur said. “In the last election … the Democratic platform was pro-killing children and pro-homosexuality. The young generation has bought into the corruption and lack of ethics morals by media entertainment [and] educators.”
MacArthur cited the unwillingness of mainstream pastors to speak out on controversial issues like homosexuality and abortion as the reason society has begun to embrace immorality as goodness. He challenged church leaders to meditate on Romans 1, which reads in part:
For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.
“Romans 1 describes exactly what is happening in America,” MacArthur told The Blaze. “It defines the wrath as God giving them over, giving them over, giving them over.”
To read the rest of The Blaze’s interview with John MacArthur, click here.