John MacArthur's church has multiple COVID cases, staff pressured to keep silent: report

The NT has apostles rebuking churches.

Something tells me you aren’t an apostle…

Second, before you fire off a critique of another church, make sure your motivations are pure. Make sure you are doing so for the sake of the Church as a whole, and not to fire another volley in some battle. I suspect a good portion of the criticism of MacArthur is rooted in, shall we say, “less than” pure motivation.

Just because someone says they speak for everyone, and set the example, doesn’t mean you have to fire back at them.

I sense a lot of antagonism towards MacArthur by lots of people. Has he earned a lot of that? Perhaps. But still it is there. I seem to remember something like make sure the beams in your eye are taken care of before you fire away at the small things in other’s eyes.

My take is that the prophets, apostles, and such are in great part there for our example. Hence the notion that we’re somehow out of line to follow the example of apostles because we’re not apostles ourselves is nonsense.

Apostles were there for

They were there for authoritative revelation to the church through direct revelation from God. If you have direct revelation from God, don’t follow their example. Just be an apostle. If you don’t have direct revelation from God, then use their direct revelation.

To the direct point, I don’t recall any place in Scripture where apostles rebuke the church for meeting. Can you think of one?

….there are any number of places, Larry, where we can not find direct apostolic example, but where I would nonetheless feel very comfortable piping up and saying “knock it off” when a church leader is dragging the name of Christ through the mud.

And really, that’s the example one sees in fundamentalism. Sometimes it’s been done beautifully, and sometimes it’s been done horrendously, but we fundamentalists have always seen at various points a need to “butt in” and warn an erring church leader that what they’re doing has the side effect of making it very hard to minister to people.

Regarding MacArthur specifically, the reason I pipe up is that I care enough about him and those who share his views to let them know that if things are as represented—and Jim’s presented a hint above that they may not be—that their neighbors are not exactly going to be impressed with how we care for the sick.

But I would say that’s not following the apostolic example. It is obeying the apostolic revelation, which I suppose might be a thin slice of sorts, but an important one. We can pipe up and say knock it off, but that has to be based on revelation, not our personal intuition or desires.

In this particular case, the NT weight is on the side of the churches who meet in spite of governing authorities’ commands to not meet. So if we are going to follow the apostolic example, we must obey God rather than man.

….precisely what is Biblically debatable when a church’s actions are knowingly going to get people hurt or killed by COVID, Larry? Is there, perchance, a Biblically permissible level of injury that one can knowingly inflict on one’s neighbors before God is displeased? Did all those bits of case law in the Torah about precisely that sort of thing disappear from my Bible when I wasn’t looking? If we become aware of a problem, does Scripture really tell us to cover it up?

To be sure, Louis Pasteur’s germ theory of disease wasn’t available in Moses’ or even Jesus’ day, and to be sure, Acts does not record the church’s response to any epidemic. That noted, the response of the Apostles to various cases of misbehavior is pretty clear: “Knock it off. You’re embarrassing the cause of Christ.”

I question the whole idea of “discernment” ministries - including Roys

….precisely what is Biblically debatable when a church’s actions are knowingly going to get people hurt or killed by COVID, Larry? Is there, perchance, a Biblically permissible level of injury that one can knowingly inflict on one’s neighbors before God is displeased? Did all those bits of case law in the Torah about precisely that sort of thing disappear from my Bible when I wasn’t looking? If we become aware of a problem, does Scripture really tell us to cover it up?

I think you are having a conversation I am not having. I am talking about the authority issue of whether a church should obey God or man.

I have long said that churches should have stopped meeting at least for a while. We have learned a lot and we know that meeting together is not necessarily exposing anyone to danger or illness. Most people do fine with common sense practices. I don’t know what part of the Torah you are referring to but typically in the Torah, you quarantine sick people, not healthy ones. The whole community wasn’t told to stay home because someone had leprousy, at least that I can recall.

I agree we should not embarrass the cause of Christ. That may require a church to meet.