Why I Cannot Support
MacArthur’s
Shepherd’s Conferences
“Several who disagree with my views have said in print that the lordship controversy is a matter of eternal consequence. This means that whoever is wrong on this question is proclaiming a message that can send people to hell. On that we agree…. The two sides in this argument have distinctly different views of salvation.” (Gospel According to Jesus, pg.xiv)
“The new nature is not added to the old nature but replaces it… Biblical terminology, then, does not say that a Christian has two different natures. He has but one nature, the new nature in Christ.” He also mockingly refers to the doctrine of the two natures of the believer as “spiritual schizophrenia.” (Macarthur Commentary on Ephesians, chapter 13, p. 164)
The Resolved Conference which Macarthur promotes and at which he speaks incorporates worldly rock music, in direct contradiction to his earlier excellent statements against such music. Go to resolved.org and listen for yourself.
His speakers have included John Piper (extreme Calvinist; believer in sign gifts), R.C. Sproul (believes in baptismal regeneration), C.J. Mahaney (charismatic); etc.
R.C. Sproul has been one of the nation’s leading critics of Dispensational theology and yet has been a featured speaker at Macarthur’s conferences. Many of his speakers are Reformed and decidedly anti-dispensational.
Macarthur on Dispensationalism: “I will try to condense this because I don’t want to get too bogged down. Dispensationalism is a system. It is a system that got, sort of, out of control.” He calls himself a “leaky dispensationalist” and does not like to use the term because he said it carries too much “baggage.”
(i.e. dispensational & anti-dispensational; premillennial & amillennial; charismatic & non-charismatic)
Many of the speakers are Reformed Theologians who hold and promote their extreme Calvinistic views at the conferences.
Most of his speakers refer to themselves as “conservative evangelicals” which is the new name for those who seek to distance themselves from fundamentalists. They are characterized by a lack of separation, a lowering of music standards, a disparaging of dispensationalism, and the acceptance of charismatic style worship.
In a day when churches are losing their young people to the world and worldly churches, we don’t need another “bridge-maker” to lure them away from Dispensationalism to Reformed Theology and away from traditional, sacred Christian music, to loud, raucous, “Christian” pop and rock, and away from reverential worship to a casual, worldly, charismatic style of worship.
“Now I beseech you, brethren, mark them which cause divisions and offences contrary to the doctrine which ye have learned; and avoid them.” (Rom. 16:17)