Phil Johnson Talks Grace Community Church's "Peaceful Protest"/Wokeness/John MacArthur's Emoji Game
In this episode, Kyle and Ethan talk to Phil Johnson who is the executive director of Grace to You. He has been closely associated with John MacArthur since 1981 and edits most of Pastor MacArthur's major books. Phil also founded several popular websites, including The Spurgeon Archive, The Hall of Church History, and the Pyromaniacs blog. He is an ordained elder and pastor at Grace Community Church, which is in the news recently for its decision to meet on the Lord's Day for worship in defiance of California orders to socially distance. Topics Discussed Grace Community Church deciding to meet on Sunday in a "peaceful protest" Response to critics of opening the church Pot is essential, church is not Does John MacArthur read The Babylon Bee? Emoji game is strong for J-Mac Gavin Newsom and his nefarious schemes Spurgeon and smoking a good cigar to the glory of God Baptists hate alcohol though The emergent church, wokeness, and the Young, Restless, Reformed Subscriber Portion Inside scoop on John MacArthur including several stories that are unbelievable like getting into an altercation with a cultist and driving over to a house to stop an adulterous act Kyle dropping out of The Master's College Charismatic chaos and how people keep rushing the stage at GCC. The Ten Questions! Also mentioned: Phil Johnson gave a message exploring the history of "Calvinism" Also: Phil Johnson's Po-Motivators. To watch or listen to the full podcast, become a subscriber at https://babylonbee.com/plans.
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Hard-hitting questions.
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Taking you to the cutting edge of truth.
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This is the Babylon Bee interview show.
Hello, everybody.
Welcome to the Babylon B Interview Show.
As always, I'm Kyle Mann with my loyal friend, dear comrade Ethan Nicole.
Comrade Ethan Nicole.
And joining us today is Comrade Phil Johnson.
Welcome, Comrade.
Nice to you.
How you doing, Phil?
Hey, greetings.
I'm doing well.
Thanks for having me.
We're calling you our comrade because we all live in the communist country of California.
That's right.
It's just, it's normal to casually call each other comrade.
That's how we it's not.
It's not a dead giveaway of anything.
No, no, no.
Is there a dead giveaway of other things?
Like if you're like white supremacist, you call your friend like.
Yeah, I don't know.
I don't know what they do in the KKK or anything.
Hey, Bubba or something.
Bubba.
Bubba.
Hey, Bubba.
Boy.
Hey, boy.
You say that?
It's like, oh.
Maybe.
Yeah, that could be.
We'll have to figure that out.
Right now, we're getting into other topics because Phil Johnson here, he comes from a little church you might have heard of.
It's been in the news lately.
Grace Community Church.
John MacArthur.
Kyle, are you just saying words?
Kyle, you want to expand on that?
Kyle knows way more about this church and stuff than I do because he like went there.
Yeah, I did attend a few times.
I went to the master's college when it was still the master's college.
So I got that connection.
They changed it because of the word master?
They didn't change it because the word mastermaster.
They changed college to university.
Oh, okay.
So they still got to change masters.
You actually graduate from there or did they kick you out?
I know, they kicked me out.
Well, they wouldn't even let me enroll, so we're good.
Oh, perfect.
Perfect.
So we wanted to talk to Phil because there's been a little bit of a controversy over there at Grace Community Church because they're doing very controversial things like congregation.
Having church and worshiping and singing.
So do you want to give us a little rundown on what's going on over there, Phil?
Yeah, you know, when the quarantine began, we were like everybody else listening to the news and thinking, man, there's going to be bodies stacked like cordwood in the streets and we need to do something.
So when they instituted the original quarantine, you remember it was 15 days to flatten the curve.
And we did the math and said, 15 days, at the most, that'll be three Sundays.
We can't meet.
So we said, yeah, let's cooperate with this quarantine and we won't have church.
And then the 15 days became 30 and that became three or four months.
And finally, the governor of California released all of that and people started to come back to Grace Church.
And then within days, he reinstituted the quarantine and specifically named churches in the list of institutions that he wanted shut down.
And at that point, we said we were having hundreds of people meeting in the worship center, our main auditorium.
And we hadn't had any problems.
I have to say, throughout this entire quarantine, I only know personally one person who died from it.
He was a man in his 90s who lived in northern Italy.
So it just never felt like our congregation was in grave danger or that the extreme measures they were taking really, really were warranted by the things that we saw happening around us.
And so when they reinstituted the quarantine and put churches under lockdown for the second time, our elders met together and said, really, does the government have power to legitimate power to order us to stay closed?
Actually, the word they used was indefinitely.
And it was pretty clear that the governor intended to maintain the shutdown through the end of the year because you remember they announced that even the rose parade is canceled this year.
So all mass gatherings, except for political protests, have been formally forbidden.
And so our question was, does Caesar really have that kind of authority over the people of God to say you cannot meet for worship?
And after quite a bit of discussion and prayer and studying what the scriptures have to say about it, we said, we're not going to close the church.
We're just not going to close the church.
People need to be taught and they need to worship.
They need to meet together.
We need the fellowship.
People were desperate to come back to church.
And it's where the hearts of our people were.
And so we said, you know what, we're just going to continue to meet.
You can come if you want to.
If you feel obliged to obey the quarantine, you can do that.
But we're going to have a sermon and worship as we usually do.
And the crowds began to increase to where last week there were 6,000 people there for one service.
I think it was probably outside of when we have a shepherd's conference and a bunch of guests come.
This is probably the largest crowd we ever had for a single Sunday morning worship service.
And I'm sure you saw the clip where John MacArthur introduced it by saying, welcome to our peaceful protest.
Because it seems peaceful protests, you know, don't ever meet with any kind of government interference.
So did you consider wearing like a Black Lives Matter shirt or carrying some kind of Atifa flag?
Yeah, Bernard Copper.
We talked about protest signs and stuff like that.
Not seriously, but yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, there's also a large tent, a massive tent that takes up most of the main parking lot.
And it was full as well.
So we had a full auditorium indoors and a full tent outdoors.
It's really quite an amazing thing and a testimony to how the people of God just sense the need for fellowship and congregational worship.
Have you had, what's the blowback been on that?
I know there's people that they see you simply like a picture of you on the internet with your family out in public and you don't have a mask on.
And they take that opportunity in Facebook comments to be like, where's your mask?
So you have that.
I'm sure you're getting like that times a million, right?
Of course, cancel culture canceled me a long time ago.
So it has no effect on me.
But yeah, the truth is most of the blowback we've gotten has been from people online.
You know, the sort of people on Twitter, the people who put the tweet in Twitter.
They're the ones who just sort of relentlessly post these shrill, shrieking comments about how we're killing people and all of that, which there's simply no truth in any of that.
We've been meeting now for eight weeks.
For at least eight weeks, there have been hundreds of people, eight weeks consecutively, hundreds of people in the worship center every Sunday morning.
And I've not heard of a single person who tested positive for the coronavirus because they were there.
It just hasn't resulted in the sort of outbreak that the media and scaremongers seem to want us to think is inevitable.
So we're going to keep doing it.
There is a risk, of course.
There's a risk.
There was a risk three years ago during the flu epidemic.
We face this all the time in the church.
And in fact, anybody who's ever had kids in the nursery knows that that's the petri dish for every kind of flu or common cold or sickness.
It happens.
And we've never stopped going to church because of it before.
So it just seems like the current shutdown is just a gross overreaction.
Yeah, I had a bit of a realization.
This last week, I was visiting my father who doctors have given about a year left.
He's had dementia.
He's got growth on his brainstem that they don't know when it's going to, they can't operate on it.
So we all, the family just got together and we wanted to be together because it could be the last time.
So I'm there with, I got my brothers and sisters.
You know, there's about five or six siblings there.
And my stepmom and my dad can hardly talk.
He used to be a real talker.
You know, he just talked your ear off and now he can't really talk.
He just kind of can say a word or two now and then.
I'm just sitting there and we're just all kind of hanging out together.
We're not talking much, but it's what we needed.
We needed to be in the same room together.
We needed that to be in each other's presence.
It was worth driving or flying all the way up to Seattle, then driving a few hours out to the middle of Washington just to sit there and be in the same room.
Zoom couldn't have accomplished that, you know, and there's something that happens when you're in the presence of other people and we act like it's not that big a deal.
Like Zoom meetings can replace it.
And it's just not true.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
And in fact, that's, I think, one of the harshest parts of the toll that the quarantine has taken on people.
If your father was in a hospital, you wouldn't be able to visit him.
You'd have to die alone.
Or if he was in a nursing home, he'd be locked down with no visitors.
And the emotional toll and the spiritual toll that takes on people is unbelievable.
During the quarantine, I've had occasion to do some funerals.
People in my fellowship group have died, none of them from the coronavirus, but from other causes.
And it's tragic.
Not only did were they forced to die alone in most cases, the funerals have been almost non-events.
There is, I don't know if the rule is still currently in place, but a few weeks ago, I did a funeral graveside service at Forest Lawn.
And the rules they have in place there are just absolutely absurd.
They allow no more than 10 people at the graveside, which means a large portion of the family couldn't even come.
Everybody has to be masked and socially distanced, even though you're outdoors.
You have to be six feet apart from the closest person to you.
And you're with people.
In most cases, right?
That's right.
And if you're the pastor doing the service, you have to be masked, which makes it kind of hard for people who are hard of hearing to understand what you're saying.
And that's ridiculous because you're outdoors on a hillside with the wind blowing.
Yeah, in the sun.
Yeah, that's right.
And in the sun.
The odds that you're going to get infected in a situation like that are virtually zero.
And yet, oppressive rules like these have affected pretty much everything in our society.
And the number of people who are all for it and think, this is great, we need to obey this, it boggles my mind.
There's a lot of churches that are trying to comply with social distancing guidelines, regulations.
They're opening, but I don't know.
Maybe they're following Newsom's guideline not to sing.
But a lot of them are.
just talk the lyrics but a lot of them are doing like you are good you are good You are a good, good father.
But a lot of them are doing like the six feet apart, the masks, the 50% capacity, or whatever.
But I noticed at Grace, it was very like not that.
Is it something you just let people do, make their own decisions?
Yeah, no, everybody makes their own decision.
If you want to socially distance on our campus, there are places where you can do that.
But it would be physically impossible to get our entire congregation together and follow all of those rules.
In fact, I'm writing a blog post that I hope to put up sometime this afternoon answering some of those very questions.
But I mentioned we have this massive circus tent set up in the parking lot, covers most of the parking lot.
And we did the math on that.
If you put the chairs six feet apart so that everybody is technically and properly socially distanced, it would only seat 400 people.
That's less than one, I forget the fraction, but that's such a minor fraction of our congregation that it's totally impracticable to do that.
And our people wouldn't put up with it.
You know, we need to be free to worship.
The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution recognizes that that is not a privilege granted to us by our government.
It's a right given to, it's an unalienable right given to us by God.
So, you know, that's our argument that Caesar has no authority to stop the of God or limit it in such a draconian way.
So we intend to continue doing what we've always done and what we're doing right now.
Yeah, it feels like this quarantine, the lockdowns, it's really exposing the real values of our culture in ways that we probably wouldn't have spoken about.
Like we haven't had to give a defense of why we all need to get together forever.
It's been a long time since we've had to think about that.
Like why is it so important to be together in the same building?
Why is it so important to be in person at somebody's funeral or on their deathbed?
Like all these things.
And it's interesting that we're our culture is so physically naturalistic, right?
Like we think everything's just cells and organisms evolving.
And so they're applying that value, right, to taking out any need for anything that could have a spiritual connotation because it's like, well, we don't really know, but we do know that we need to not die from this virus or whatever.
And it's, to me, it's just fascinating how it's that created that division.
And I do think it's up to Christians.
I think John MacArthur is doing an awesome thing here, creating a defense of that and a theology behind why we need to be together.
We can't bow down to this virus that's, you know, let's be honest, has a 99.8 survival rate.
Yeah.
And you make a great point.
You make an excellent point that this one of the one of the effects of the quarantine has been to really highlight something that exists in our subconscious, but we don't think about, and that is the clash between things that are spiritual and things that are material.
And we do live in a materialistic culture where everything is supposed to be materialistic.
So the government doesn't recognize the deep spiritual need that people have.
And they think, I mean, they've literally classified worship services as non-essential.
Right.
While, you know, marijuana dispensaries and gambling casinos, these things are deemed essential.
But a gathering of people to worship God, they say that's non-essential.
We don't need that.
And that is how the secular mind thinks.
And what you see in our church and the enthusiastic response to reopening our worship services is how this has awakened in the souls of true believers a sort of fresh understanding of how important it is not to neglect the gathering of ourselves together to encourage one another and worship God together.
I did a message the other night on one of the Psalms, Psalm 27, where David writes, you know, one thing I've desired from the Lord, and that is to be in his temple.
And he's the whole psalm and several of the psalms are about David's craving for congregational worship, to be in the temple with the people of God worshiping together.
You know, why couldn't he just do online temple?
Yeah, well, you know, it does kind of blow my mind that there are people who think, you know, that should be absolutely sufficient.
You don't really need to be face-to-face.
You know, that's the response of someone who really has suppressed all of his natural spiritual longings.
It's sad.
Now, a lot of the opposition that you guys have faced with this, is it coming more from other churches that are more moderate in their response to lockdowns, or is it coming from secular sources?
No, it's mostly, you know, evangelicals and woke evangelicals, especially.
I don't know why support for the quarantine goes hand in hand with being woke, but it does.
So weird.
Woke are the same ones who don't want the church to meet, except, yeah, and so there are people who are saying, look, our society and our government is shot through with systemic injustice, but let's let the government tell us when we should worship.
Two ideas don't go together to me, but yet you see them married in the minds of so many people.
And I don't know if it's because most of the people who would follow me on Twitter are also evangelicals.
That could have a factor.
But I have to say, at least 99% of the negative feedback I've received from people online has come from professing evangelicals.
When is John MacArthur going to get on Twitter?
Well, there's a Twitter account with his name.
But I assume it's not him.
I assume it's someone else running it.
Yeah, yeah, no.
In fact, you know, he's pretty amazing.
It's well known that he prepares all of his sermons with a fountain pen.
Not just a writing instrument, but one that is very high maintenance.
I also hope it was a foundation pen.
I don't get it.
You have to dip.
But for years, for years, he was resistant to any kind of new technology.
He didn't want to use a computer, didn't want to learn how to use a computer.
He didn't want to be out of the habits he was in the way he prepared, and to this day, prepares his messages in that way.
But then one day out of the blue, I got a text message, and it was signed, John MacArthur, on my phone.
And my instant response was I wrote back and said, who is this really?
John MacArthur.
I got a smartphone.
I said, no, he's not John.
He said, yeah, I had to do this because it's the best way to communicate with my grandchildren.
So his grandkids taught him how to text.
And so he's got a smartphone.
He can watch what you guys write and all that.
All the jokes in the Babylon B about him, he sees.
Oh, nice.
Uh-oh.
Be careful.
Yeah.
He's watching.
What's John MacArthur's favorite Babylon B article?
Boy, that's a tough one.
Is he there?
I don't know.
But no, seriously, every now and then he'll text me a link to one of your articles.
So I know he sees him.
Oh, nice.
What kind of emojis does he put next to the article?
Laugh, cry.
Yeah, that's another thing.
It sort of amazed me.
A couple weeks ago, he sent me an article about some bizarre thing.
I don't remember what it was, but it was someone who had a truly bizarre opinion.
And he put that emoji where the face has like one crossed eye and looks crazy or whatever.
So he's figured out how to do the emoji.
He's doing the emojis.
Strong emoji game.
Does he sign his text J-Mac?
J-Mac.
No.
He doesn't sign them.
If they come from his number, he expects me to know who it is.
I like those people that sign all their texts.
They have a little signature.
Yeah, it's dedication.
Yeah, it is dedication.
So you're getting a lot of, are you getting a lot of people that are coming to Grace Community Church that previously went to other churches now that, you know, because their church is closed?
We thought about going because our church isn't open.
We're like, it's an hour away from us, but we're like, oh, they are worshiping.
An hour.
That's nothing.
Sunday morning before church, before the service began, I met four families who had come from out of state just so that they could be there.
It's like a historic moment.
And, you know, in a sense, I think that's right.
Sunday sermon from John MacArthur shot to the top of my list of all-time favorite John MacArthur messages.
I thought it was great.
And it is sort of a historic thing that I think people, if the Lord doesn't return first 100 years from now, people are going to be talking about John MacArthur and his refusal to bow to the governor of California's requirement to close the church.
So it's an interesting time to be there.
And yeah, several other people who are from places closer to us told me that they came because it's the only church in the area that was open in that way.
There are churches, I think, where you can go and they meet outdoors in the park or whatever.
And I say more power to them.
I'm fine with that.
But it is a physical impossibility for our congregation to get together.
There is no place in all of Southern California that you could meet outdoors with our entire congregation where there would be sufficient restroom facilities and things like that.
It's just, it would be an impossibility.
So for us, the choice would be either either cancel worship altogether or do it online or limit the congregation in such a way that we're simply not willing to do.
So people make their own decisions and they've been coming crowds of six, seven thousand for the Sunday morning service.
What kind of measures is the state and city and all that threatening against you guys for this?
I know I read they were talking about cutting the power to places that had parties and churches.
Yeah, yeah.
Threatening arrest and fines.
What kind of stuff have you guys faced?
Right.
You know, I should start by saying they haven't made, as far as I know, they have not made any direct threats against Grace Church.
Somebody asked me when this whole thing started, what will the government do if they decide, you know, they're not going to let you meet?
And I said, well, what they've threatened to do is turn off the power.
And what I meant by that was that was the original threat that the governor made against businesses or any gatherings that violated the curfew.
I didn't mean to imply that they had called up Grace Church and said, we're going to shut down your power.
But people misunderstood my intent because it was a tweet and I didn't spell it out very carefully.
And I got up the next morning and that thing had gone viral and everybody was like, they're going to shut the power at Grace Church this morning.
I don't think there's any imminent danger of that.
That is the threat they're making in general to businesses and gatherings that don't meet the requirements.
But they haven't, as far as I know, they haven't done it yet to anyone.
And I don't think it would be a good look for the government to shut the power off on a church or turn the, if they turn the water off, they expose us to a great fire hazard too, because that shuts down the sprinkler system and everything else.
So I don't think they're going to do that.
But the threat sort of hangs out there.
And it's the government's way of letting us know they don't approve of what we're doing.
But I don't think we're going to see the police come in, frog march, handcuff John MacArthur out of the congregation in the middle of the Sunday service.
Don't think that's going to happen.
Are you getting a lot of prank phone calls at all hours of the night from a guy who sounds mysteriously like Gavin Newsome?
No, no.
Nothing like that.
No, I've never seen that.
You know, both the governor's office and the press almost seem like they've purposely ignored Grace Community Church.
They've gone after that church in a smaller church in Ventura.
You know, and they threatened that guy with, actually, they had a restraining order against that church on Sunday that they were not to meet.
They met anyway.
And I understand there were several demonstrators who came, again, people who self-identify as evangelicals, but protesting the church's decision to go ahead and have their worship service.
So they had signs and everything.
And some of the church people were yelling at them and all.
And the sheriff's department was there.
And they said they were there just to make sure that the demonstrators and the church people didn't get into a real fight, that they weren't intending to cite or arrest anyone or try to stop the service.
So I don't think the government's really going to intervene.
They have to act like they're serious.
What's your response to Jonathan Lehman from Nine Marks, his criticism of the reopening?
What is it?
Well, I wrote a response.
I don't know what it is.
I wrote a response to him.
And he protested that he wasn't, he said, you know, I wasn't really being fair with him because he wasn't disapproving of our decision to reopen.
He was just trying to point out that there are other options and that each church should make its own decision.
And that probably is what was in his heart.
He started out the article, though, by saying, if you're going to follow John MacArthur, stop, wait.
And he puts it in big letters with an exclamation mark.
So his article started out like saying, don't do what John MacArthur's doing.
I gather from things he said that that's really their position.
He doesn't approve.
I've tried to point out that sort of contradicts everything Nine Marks is really known for.
They don't like online churches or multi-site churches or even they don't even approve of multi-service churches.
They think the entire congregation needs to meet together in one meeting.
And I'm pretty sympathetic to that view.
And so it surprises me that one of the points Jonathan Lehman made in his article was that he's pretty well on board with the decision of other churches who've said, let's not meet, but break up into little home churches, including one church that is going to break up into, they said, 2,400 home groups for the duration of the duration of each church member.
Yeah, and it just doesn't seem to me like there's any way to reconcile that with what Nine Marks has always said about the importance of corporate worship.
But there you are.
Because they are woke, I guess, this has created a crisis for them where it's hard to defend what they've always taught and still justify where they're at today.
Yeah, it seems like kind of back on that idea of how this is exposing our values, you know, it's like it's exposing this desire to use outrage to politicize everything, to isolate us from each other.
There does seem to be a movement, especially in the secular, but even just in the, I don't know, in the wokeism and everything that's going on to divide people, divide people by politics, divide people by race, divide people by sexuality.
There's almost like a drive for division.
And there's this drive that there is no spiritual.
There's just the physical.
We're evolved animals.
And all this stuff is like now being tested.
It's like we're having to live it out through this period.
And I feel like the stuff we know is true, that there is spiritual, that division is a bad, you know, division in the ways that it's happening are bad.
And it seems like it's a time for the church to be taking leadership, standing up.
I've felt through most of my life that it's very hard for the church's voice to be heard in our culture.
It's drowned out by a lot of stuff.
And it seems like right now, there's an opening, a huge opening to be heard because I think people are hungry.
I think they're actually sick of the division.
Our culture wants to control people using outrage in politics.
And I see that this situation is that.
That's why I think people can't let go of it, right?
Because it's like we're actually getting people to do what we want by using outrage, using division.
It's a prime opportunity.
So I commend what you guys are doing over there.
Yeah, thanks.
I agree with you.
This is an opportunity.
As difficult as things seem at the moment, you know, and as many threats as there are hanging over, you know, Christians who really do believe the Bible, we feel like we're threatened.
We're such a small minority now, and everything we believe is politically incorrect and all that.
But this is a great opportunity because people, whether they are conscious of it or not, are spiritually hungry.
And the further this goes, too, the more the church's position is going to be vindicated.
They're not going to be stacking bodies in the street like Cordwood.
Let's be candid about that.
It's not going to happen.
And so all the noonsayers.
Yeah, right.
Sorry.
And so in a way, I'm kind of hopeful that when our position is vindicated, we'll actually gain some ground.
I would think that, but if you just think back through the list of secular doomsday stories that have dominated the news since, I don't know, the Y2K disaster.
They've all been wrong.
They've all been proven wrong.
And yet, it seems to me that the culture is more and more looking for the final doomsday.
They expect it to happen.
And of course it will, but this isn't it.
And it's obvious that this isn't it.
And you'd think people would wake up and acknowledge that, but people don't like to admit they were wrong about anything.
We're forced to face the question of is there something more important than just living as long as possible and not dying.
Like, is there something better than, you know, just is natural death the worst thing on this earth?
And we're going to be faced with that question of what about spiritual death?
What about, you know, what is life?
If it's so important to not die, then what is life and why is life important and what is it?
And nobody really has a good answer for that outside of the church.
Yeah, right.
Kyle?
Do you have any Joel Osteen books behind you?
No, I don't.
I do have a section on my bookshelves that I keep behind the door.
So when the door to my office is open, it obscures that part of the bookshelf that are my rank of heretics.
All the heretical books go behind the door.
What's the worst one that you have?
Oh, I honestly don't remember.
It's probably some prosperity gospel charismatics book.
But no Osteen, you don't have to do it.
Witness Lee.
No, I don't have anyone.
Nothing.
Has Stephen Furdick actually written a book?
Someone has published a book that says Stephen Furtick on the cover.
I don't know if...
Yeah, he paces around a room and just talks, and then some poor person has to make that into a book.
Yeah, I'm sure some.
No, I don't have any of those.
I don't have any of those.
Jeff Foxworthy.
Probably be legit.
I don't know.
A Jeff Foxworthy book?
Is he Christian?
I don't know.
I don't have no idea.
I think he professes to be.
Oh, he does.
So you said you might get him to.
Oh, go ahead.
He's funny.
You might get him to write for the B if you.
Yeah.
Why not?
Get him on.
So you have a bunch of books behind you.
You said that every wall is covered in books, so much so that you had to buy a Kindle just because you can't fit them all.
That's right.
If I buy a new book now, I have to get rid of an existing one because all the shelves are just full.
And you said that you have a couple of the walls are John MacArthur books, and then a couple of the walls.
A couple shelves.
I know.
Two shelves of John MacArthur and two big walls of Spurgeon.
Okay.
So Spurgeon.
Yeah.
What do you think of, so we enjoy a good cigar, and Spurgeon did too.
He did.
What's your position on the cigar?
Well, I agree with Spurgeon.
I don't think there's anything inherently sinful about it.
It's probably not a healthy habit, and so I don't personally indulge in it very often.
Kyle's always leading me to believe that these Baptists and stuff hate super anti-smoking in a religious, like they have theology behind it.
Well, that's the same thing.
That's what I was expecting.
That's a satirical tech.
Oh, the satirical tech.
No, in fact, if you do a Google search on Spurgeon and cigars, you'll find a long article I wrote where I collected everything I could find about Spurgeon's smoking, his defense of it, the controversy that it stirred up.
It's quite an interesting thing.
A lot of old newspaper articles that I dug out and one letter that was given to me, a private letter that Spurgeon wrote to someone who asked about the smoking scandal.
And then because I had so much Spurgeon stuff online, his great-grandson, who was living at the time in Dublin, he's died now, sadly, but he owned Spurgeon's personal cigar case and the half-cigar that Spurgeon smoked on the day he died.
He didn't finish the cigar before he died.
You know, there's some mythology out there.
He dropped dead halfway through the house.
I don't know.
People used to ask me and say, what brand did he smoke?
I don't know.
It was some kind of Cuban cigar.
But yeah, there are these legends that Spurgeon gave up smoking.
A lot of Baptists used to tell this story that's totally fabricated.
He didn't give up smoking.
He smoked half a cigar on the day he died.
It's probably what killed him.
Yeah, it's funny.
It's like how we always say that Charles Darwin, you know, there's a maid.
Repented of death between the two.
The Baptists have this story.
Yeah, they have their own repentant cigars.
That's why he smoked half.
He's like, I'm quitting now.
However, he was legitimately a teetotaler, though.
The Baptists aren't lying about that.
He gave up drinking alcoholic beverages fairly early in his ministry.
He was sympathetic with the prohibitionists.
Now, you guys were some of the original bloggers back in the blogging days.
You guys did the Pyromaniacs blog.
And I remember reading this.
And you guys, I mean, it was the precursor to the Babylon B in a lot of ways.
Pyromaniacs.
Because you guys had the demotivators.
Was that you or was that the other guys that came up?
Yeah, no, those were all mine, the Po-Motivators.
And I feel like compared to what you guys do, those are so lame.
You guys have elevated the level of sarcasm and humor to a level that I could have only dreamed of.
But yeah, the Poe Motivators.
I've often told people I wrote for several years critical articles full of concerns about the emerging church movement and the liberalizing drift in that movement.
And met with nothing but opposition and skepticism and all of that.
But when I started doing the Poe Motivators, these were like mock motivational posters that defined some of the jargon of the emerging church, postmodern jargon, and mocked them.
That, I think, did more to get my point across than all of the substance articles I'd ever read.
To this day, I have people who say, yeah, I was into that till I, you started doing those posters and I could see the silliness of it.
That's why I appreciate what you guys do so much.
I think there's a there, what people don't realize is because postmodern people have this fluid view of truth, you can't rationally argue them out of their positions.
What they won't stand for and what actually influences them is mockery.
So satire turns out to be the best polemical weapon against someone who's ardently postmodern.
Yeah, and you guys are making fun of those emerging church guys.
And I remember at the time there was a lot of criticism like, you guys are being too, you guys are going too far.
You know, you're being, you need to be more gracious, you know, or whatever.
And a lot of those guys that you made fun of are like totally not Christians anymore, you know, or whatever.
Now they've publicly disavowed it all and Ira Bell's off surfing somewhere in the Pacific Ocean.
Yeah, the emerging church really did kind of fizzle out.
I mean, there's emergent y-churches around.
What do you think the movement really fizzled?
Did the emerging church turn into something else or did it disappear entirely?
Yeah.
Yeah, no, this is my view of that.
The movement died.
But the ideas that they unleashed into the evangelical world are like dandelion seeds that maybe lay dormant for a few years, but then sprung up into wokeism.
And woke doctrine is simply a subset of what the emergence, they were all woke too.
They were talking about social justice long before it was a fad to do that.
And they were the ones, I think, who sort of brought those ideas into the evangelical realm.
And it's the one part of emergent doctrine that never really was successfully answered by the critics of the emergent movement.
Because who wants to argue against something that sounds like justice?
So those ideas kind of lay dormant.
And now you've got a new generation of people who really didn't experience the emerging moment.
And they read that rhetoric, they hear that stuff and instantly jump on board.
And so that's my view of wokeism, that it's a remnant of the emergent idea.
I think the church has always had a, at least as long as I've been alive, a kind of disappointing tendency to want to go along with culture and show them that, yeah, we're cool too.
So I feel like we're relevant.
Yeah.
Yeah, trying to be relevant in hip.
So I feel like there's a big element of that too.
Exactly.
In fact, I said that at the time, that although emergent Christianity appeared on the surface to be a reaction to and a rejection of the seeker-sensitive shallowness of, you know, Rick Warren and Bill Heibels and all that, they rejected the cultural features of seeker sensitivity, but they totally imbibed the philosophy that underlies it, you know,
that if we're going to reach the world, we have to watch what the world's doing and buy into it as much as we can, imitate it.
And so it was just a different generation of pragmatism, but it was the same kind of pragmatism that gave rise to the seeker-sensitive church that ultimately resulted in the emerging church.
And now you see it even in the young, restless, and reformed.
I loved the reform part of and the young part of that.
But the restless part, it seemed to me, was driven by a similar sort of pragmatism where, you know, we have to do this or we it's the same thing that fires up a lot of the criticism against us for not observing the quarantine.
It's a bad testimony.
It's a bad testimony not to be like the world.
The worst thing you can do is believe something or say something that you know the world's not going to like.
That's horrible.
That's a bad testimony, which goes against everything the Apostle Paul said.
I mean, he said, look, the Jews desire a sign and the Greeks want wisdom.
But to the Jews, we preach Christ, which is a stumbling block.
To the Greeks, we preach Christ, which is foolishness.
So the Jews want a sign.
We give them a stumbling block.
The Greeks want wisdom.
We give them foolishness.
Paul wasn't trying to please his audience.
He was trying to confront their wrong beliefs.
And it meant at times he had to give them the opposite of what they were asking for.
And I just think evangelicals today don't understand that principle at all.
Yeah, Jesus was crucified, but I really want everyone to like me.
Yeah.
And let's be honest.
I mean, most of us have a tendency to think if I make people mad or if they don't like me, that's proof I've done something or said something wrong.
And people constantly adjust their theology.
It's what wokeism is all about.
It's an adjustment to the evangelical message that's designed to make the world happier with us.
And it's not rooted in scripture.
It's rooted in secular opinion.
So Grace Community Church isn't going to get a drum set anytime soon, is what you're trying to say.
Well, there's drum sets all around Grace Community Church.
I don't think we'd take it to the point where we would say, you know, you have to wear homeschooler clothes and your music has to be, your music has to be from the 1940s.
So you're not from the city.
Yeah, but what we would say is that none of that is essential to none of that helps the gospel be more powerful than it is in and of itself.
Well, I think people are waiting.
They're hiding in their homes and they're waiting to see like who some think they're going to wait till the government finally says, all right, everybody's free.
Come on out.
But I do think that a lot of us in the back of our mind are thinking, you know, if John over there breaks the lockdown, maybe I'll break the lockdown or whatever.
I think there's something smart to the church being the ones who kind of just go, okay, this is ridiculous.
And I think that's why I love what you guys are doing.
I know that a lot of pastors listen to our show.
I would love to encourage more churches to be that bold, take that stand and say, no, this is a thing that is needed.
We need to meet because there's something real here that even if the world wants to deny it, there's a spiritual need.
And I think there's going to be a lot of hungry people who miss being together with people and who have probably come to a point where they're questioning a lot of things who might show up at the church.
You open your doors and you might lose some of your stodgy church members who want to go along with everybody, but you're probably going to get a lot of new people coming in who may never have stepped into a church because it's just, there's so many questions in the air right now and people are thinking.
So highly encourage it and I thank you for that.
I think we're going to move to our subscriber portion.
Let's do it.
In our subscriber portion, we are going to grill you about John MacArthur.
We're going to get all the dirt on John MacArthur.
All his bad habits.
We'll talk about Kyle dropping out of the Masters Seminary.
Not seminary.
Or whatever it was, dude, the Masters thing, college.
And then a charismatic, we're talking about Pentecostals or something, I guess.
I don't know.
That's in the notes.
I haven't read yet.
Oh, yeah, you got to talk about it.
You've got a podcast we wanted to mention to our subscribers.
Right?
Podcast.
Actually, I don't do a regular podcast.
I did.
At the moment, we're on hiatus.
I've been doing a thing weekly with Todd Friel, which he calls too wretched for radio, where he asks me questions about what's going on in the evangelical world.
He never preps me ahead of time for what he's going to talk about.
And so it makes me sound Maybe a little more stupid and a little more critical than I am in real life, but it's been fun.
He's funny and there's so many outrageous things to talk about in the evangelical world that I've never gotten bored with it.
We're on hiatus for the moment while he's developing a television broadcast, but hopefully we'll be back with Too Wretched for Radio.
Other than that, I've tried to stay away from podcasts because one of my jobs is editing books, and I'm overwhelmed with deadlines anyway, and I don't need one more project that I have to do every week.
That's why I stopped blogging.
I sympathize with that.
All right, let's go to our subscriber portion.
All right.
Bye, everybody.
Else coming up next for Babylon Bee subscribers.
Anyway, I was wondering your security team, you know, if someone starts speaking in tongues front row, are they going to jump up and take them down?
They were here in Southern California to do a conference titled Act Like Men and the excited car conference and act like little kids.
The phone.
And on the other end, there's John MacArthur.
He says, what are you doing there?
Are you about to commit adultery?
And the guy confessed that he was.
The cultist guy showed up and wanted to fight.
And John chased him off.
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