Mike Interviews Phil Johnson

Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ. Based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the apostle Paul said, but we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.

In short, if you like smooth, watered down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn't for you. By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we're called by the divine trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her King.

Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth.

Editing John MacArthur’s Books and the Difference Between Editing and Ghostwriting

Welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry. My name is Mike Abendroth, and our slogan around here is always biblical, always provocative, always in that order. And today is no different. I have someone on the phone with me that I'm going to interview that I think most listeners will know of this man, and I'm excited to have Phil Johnson on the line today.

Phil Johnson, welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry. Thank you, Mike. Good to be with you. Phil, I don't know why, but I'm nervous. Now, I'm the one who should be nervous. Well, that's true. Listen, No Compromise listeners, Phil Johnson is the executive director of Grace to You, and he is closely associated with the preaching ministry of John MacArthur.

Phil, you've edited many of John's major books over the years. Tell us about that editing process.

Well, I actually started doing this while I was still working for Moody Press in 1981. The first book I ever edited for John MacArthur was a book called The Ultimate Priority, a book on worship. And interestingly, Moody is getting ready to do a 30th anniversary edition of it, so I'm re-editing that book now, 30 years later.

In fact, that's what I was doing when you called. It's the very thing I first began editing. And the process pretty much works like this. I take a transcript, a set of transcripts from a sermon series that John did, or perhaps a collection of different sermons on a related topic, and then I edit that material to make it read like a book, rather than words from a sermon.

So hopefully when the book is finished, you read it, you'll recognize the content is John MacArthur's, but it doesn't sound like reworked sermons, hopefully.

Do you get offended if people call you a ghostwriter?

Well, I don't get offended. I recoil a bit because ghostwriting has such a stigma attached to it because of the way people abuse it. They'll hire someone to write material that never even went through their brain, you know?

And that, I share everyone's apprehensions about that. That's not even honest. Absolutely. But what I do is different from that. It's still sometimes called ghostwriting because there is an element where you're rewording someone else's material, you're rewording the content, and often abridging it or disassembling it and then putting it back together in a slightly different order or whatever.

John gives me quite a bit of liberty to rework his material, but it always goes back to him, and then he reads through and rewrites whatever he needs to in the material I give him so that when he's finished with it, it's his material.

When we start with it, the only thing I do along the way is some rewriting.

Well, Phil, it's been a long time since I've been a member at Grace Community Church, but I still read his books and I hear him in his books. I hear the cadence and style and delivery and, of course, content.

And so I think you do a great job of editing because you keep the voice and material of John MacArthur while putting these sermons into book form. Yeah, thank you. By the way, the ultimate priority MacArthur book, I love the whole Jesus tortilla thing.

Am I correct? Is the Jesus-looking tortilla in that book?

Yeah, that's right. In fact, that is the opening illustration of the book. And one of the things Moody wanted to do with the 30th anniversary edition is ask if any of the illustrations are dated and need to be updated and whatever.

And so I looked that up, and there's an interesting sequel to the story of the Jesus tortilla. For those who may not know what you're talking about, a woman in New Mexico who was frying tortillas and suddenly thought she saw the face of Jesus in the burn marks on the tortilla.

So she built a little shrine and it became quite a tourist attraction for a couple of decades, really. People would go to see the shrine of the Jesus of the tortilla. And I'll tell you the sequel because it's kind of funny in a way.

She gave it, she let her granddaughter take it to school for show and tell, and it got dropped and broke into pieces.

Well, that was, you know, this is his body broken for you or something. It was some kind of... I think they sell now the Jesus toasters. You can get the burnt toasters. I don't know if your son posted that on Pyromaniacs or someone did.

You actually burned the look of Jesus into the toast, but I think it's $39 .95. Phil, I initially asked you about working with John MacArthur. In the years that you've worked with John, what's the most surprising controversy you've found yourself in?

I guess in other words, what stand did he take and you with him that you never thought would cause such a stir, brought the biggest negative response?

Boy, that's a hard one. I think I saw the controversy coming on every one of the major controversies. There've been four or five major ones. The lordship debate, controversy that was sort of stirred up artificially by some people who complained about John MacArthur's teaching on the blood of Christ and how literal that expression is supposed to be taken.

And some other things. I would have to say it probably is the lordship issue. Even though I knew this was going to be a huge controversy, it was much bigger of a thing than I thought it would be.

Well, the thing about the lordship controversy that maybe I'm wrong on as I analyze it, wasn't there a mini controversy in the controversy that is some dispensationalists were angry with John and the forward I believe had, or our preface had R .C. Sproul endorsing the book and maybe James Montgomery Boyce, if memory serves.

Was that a mini controversy besides the lordship issue that John is associating himself with reformed people?

Yeah, that's true. In fact, there were two forwards to the original edition of that book. And one was by Boyce and one was by James Packer. And Sproul endorsed it. So it had, the cover of the book carried quite an array of non-dispensationalists recommending the book.

The book itself, I thought was pretty even handed in the way it treated dispensationalism. John MacArthur affirmed that he is a dispensationalist. But nevertheless, there was quite a group, I think of old line dispensationalists, loyalists on dispensationalism.

They really didn't see the relevance of the issue to the gospel. What they treated it out as was a threat to their theological system, their dispensationalism.

Pyromaniacs, Spurgeon.org, and Why Charles Spurgeon Still Matters

We're talking to Phil Johnson on No Compromise Radio today, Philip R. Johnson, that is. And Phil's site, Spurgeon .org is an excellent website. And you can learn a lot about Charles Spurgeon there from Charles' own writing.

And Phil is also, I don't know if you're the blog master or what these things are, what the coinage is, the verbiage, Pyromaniacs. Phil, how has Pyromaniacs changed your life? I love reading the site.

I don't get into Twitter and tweets and all these things because I don't really care what people think. But I usually like to listen to what you're thinking about when you Twitter something. So how has Pyromaniacs changed your life?

I guess that's my original question, I'm sticking by it.

Well, it sort of took up all the time I ever had for any kind of hobby or sideline activity, you know. Once I started the blog, it pretty much took over my spare time. I started it in like June 1st of 1995, or rather 2005.

So a little over six years ago, I think. And they're coming up close to six years. And, you know, I thought if this goes really well, it could be as many as four or 500 people reading it on a daily basis.

It could be as influential as, you know, my Sunday school class or something. That's really the way I looked at it. And I had no anticipation that it was going to take off the way it did. But we average at least 3 ,000 unique readers per day.

You know, when you add that up, in fact, I think we're approaching, I haven't looked at the counter in a long time, but I think we're coming up on five million readers over the five year span.

If you're listening today on the radio station, either here locally in Massachusetts or on podcast, you need to look up Pyromaniacs and see what's going on on the website. All kinds of good articles post by Spurgeon.

Phil, tell me a little bit, when it comes to Spurgeon, tell our people why you love Spurgeon. Secondly, why they would love Spurgeon. And thirdly, why do Arminians love Spurgeon?

Everybody, it seems, loves Spurgeon. And I'll tell you that I was a slow learner when it came to coming to appreciate Spurgeon. I became a Christian at age 17 from a background of theological liberalism.

I grew up in the United Methodist Church, where nobody ever talked about Spurgeon. I'd never even heard of him. But after I became a Christian and began to go to a church where the Bible was taught, I heard that name all the time.

And so early on in my Christian experience, I think within just a few months after I became a believer, I got a catalog of Christian books. And there were several in there by Spurgeon. And so I ordered some collections of Spurgeon sermons, little paperback books that had like 12 sermons on heaven and 12 sermons on prayer.

You've seen those. And I thought, you know, this guy must be great because everybody quotes him all the time. And when the books arrived, I was really disappointed. They were very small type, long, long paragraphs, almost no paragraph breaks, hard stuff to read, and in a sort of Victorian vernacular that just wasn't easy for a 17-year-old to make sense of.

And the first one I opened up and read was 12 sermons on prayer. I remember the first sermon I read was called Order and Argument in Prayer. And I got about three pages into it and thought, I'm not getting anything out of this.

And I put it aside and I didn't read Spurgeon again for almost 25 years. And it was in the early 90s when John MacArthur was, we were in the process of assembling material for his book, Ashamed of the Gospel.

And he gave me some material, just a little illustration that I think had torn out of a magazine or something that was an excerpt from Charles Spurgeon, something he'd written during the Downgrade Controversy.

And it was so good, that little excerpt, that I said, yeah, let's put that in the book, but I want to find more about this. And so I began to read about the Downgrade Controversy and Spurgeon, I found a collection of Spurgeon's writings on the Downgrade Controversy and just devoured it.

And I took it back to John and said, and I had marked it all up. I said, look at this stuff. I said, he wrote here the same arguments you're using in your book. It's the same issue. He was dealing with the very same thing you're writing this book to deal with.

And I gave it to him. He read the book, marked it up himself, and we ended up blending that material from Spurgeon into Ashamed of the Gospel. And that was really the beginning of my appetite for Spurgeon.

After that, everything I could get my hands on from Spurgeon, I read. And as I said, that was the early 90s. In 1995, I missed about three or four weeks of work with just a persistent cough that I had.

And I couldn't talk on the phone because I'd erupt into these coughing fits. I just couldn't do anything. And so it was that year, middle of the year or so, I was at home, caught up on all my desk work with very little to do.

And so I bought internet access. The internet was a fairly novel thing in those days. The World Wide Web was barely a year old. And when I got online, I started looking for Spurgeon material and was disappointed to find that in the entire internet, there were only eight sermons by Spurgeon.

And they were just plain text with no paragraph breaks, black text on a gray background. And because my background was publishing, I looked at that and had seen other websites. So I knew what the World Wide Web was capable of.

And so I took those sermons, downloaded them, reformatted them with margin, proper margins, and larger type, and an attractive background, and posted them back on the web. And then mentioned that somewhere in a forum that I had this small collection of Spurgeon sermons.

And as word got around, people began to email me electronic copies of Spurgeon sermons. And every time I'd get one, I'd format it and add it to the collection. By the end of the year, I think there were 50 sermons online.

And the next couple of years, I added several hundred every year. We still don't have them all on, but there's quite a vast collection of Spurgeon material now.

And that's how I got into it. Well, it's Spurgeon .org for the listeners today, if you'd like to go there. And it'd be a good introduction to Spurgeon if you don't know him. And if you'd like to continue reading, that's a great spot.

You can search different texts. It's a great site. Phil, you're good with church history. You're a good theologian. Tell us a little bit about Charismatic Five-Point Calvinist. I don't know if I've ever seen this in church history.

The Sovereign Grace folks and Mahaney and Grudem. How would you analyze this, I think, recent phenomenon of Charismatic Five-Point Calvinists?

Well, I think the beginning of it, probably the sort of linchpin that made that movement possible was Martin Lloyd Jones. Because although he was not a Charismatic, he wasn't a cessationist either. And he'd grown up.

As a youth, he'd seen the Welsh Revival and some of the strange phenomena that were there and all. And so he went through life with this notion that if the Holy Spirit moves, it sometimes produces bizarre phenomena.

And so he remained sort of open, although he investigated the Charismatic movement in the 60s and so on, and really didn't have a good reaction to it. He didn't think it was a movement of the Holy Spirit.

But he didn't want to write it off either. And so he maintained this sort of openness to Charismatic phenomena, a refusal to embrace any kind of cessationist point of view. And he influenced a lot of people, were both Calvinists and non-cessationists.

And it was a matter of time until that, you know, that continuationist view, the notion that the gifts of the Holy Spirit must be active in every age of the church. Just a matter of time, if you hold that opinion, before you're going to be experimenting with phenomena and so on that are either identical to or roughly the equivalent of.

When I was reading Martin Lloyd Jones' Ephesians commentary, chapter after chapter, just excellent stuff. And then when I got to chapter one, verse 13 to 14, on the sealing of the Spirit, he just had about an eight-part deviation into this kind of pre-Charismatic thinking.

And so I still love Lloyd Jones, but that was an interesting blip in the theology of Lloyd Jones. All right, let me ask you another question, Phil. I see, at least in my mind, and correct me if I'm wrong, this continuing trend towards minimizing doctrine.

And it seems like a lot of conservative evangelicals are willing to set aside big doctrinal issues and invite people, i .e. Piper with Warren. If this keeps going, what do you expect to see over the next decade?

And in light of this, is there going to be a movement kind of back to maybe a good form of fundamentalism even?

Yeah, you know, it's very discouraging. But if you read church history, it's not as discouraging as if you weren't familiar with church history at all. What you see in church history is that there's a sort of predictable cycle where that happens, where, you know, a period of doctrinal soundness and good teaching and perhaps even revival is followed by a time of apathy and pragmatism.

And, you know, it's not that... Doctrine is never attacked directly right off the bat, but you have a generation or more who just ignore doctrine, who think there are other things, methodologies and things like that that are more important than sound doctrine.

And so they ignore the teaching of doctrine. We've just come through 30 or 40 years of that sort of thing in evangelicalism, where evangelicals have just been utterly apathetic about doctrine. In fact, you go back to the Council on Biblical Inerrancy in the 70s.

That was really the last major doctrinal issue that the evangelical movement as a movement of mainstream evangelicals united to fight for the truth. And when that was done, they more or less set the issue aside, turned to pragmatic methodologies.

And now what you've got is a generation of people who are coming into leadership in the church, who've never really sat under any kind of clear definitive teaching. They were entertained in church. And so, of course, they're going to be open to deviations.

They don't see the importance of specific doctrines. They think to fight for the truth is inherently sinfully contentious. And so there's this sort of spirit of tolerance and openness that in our generation also mirrors the spirit of the age, the postmodern age, where tolerance is to be valued more than truth.

And the idea of tolerance is actually an idea that it's at the heart of truth. And so that's found its way into the evangelical movement, and it's predictable and expected that you're going to have wide-scale apostasy in the wake of that.

We're talking to Phil Johnson. I'm sorry, go ahead, Phil.

I was just going to say, it doesn't surprise me. Yeah, sadly. Let me ask you a question that's out of left field. There's a rumor that you like to insert the word bogus into some of MacArthur's books.

Is that true or false?

That's false. That was Lance Quinn's favorite word. Oh. And, yeah.

And who in the original MacArthur study Bible put the infant baptism supported and then gave the Proverbs quote about not adding anything to the words of this book?

Yeah, actually, that came from, that didn't come from anyone affiliated with or associated with John MacArthur. What that was, that was an index that had been assembled generations ago by R .A. Torrey.

And I don't know who wrote that line, but that was part of the electronic file that actually Thomas Nelson added as an index to the study Bible. So it wasn't one of those things that any of us edited.

And, of course, when it surfaced, John MacArthur got the blame, but that was actually just part of an electronic file that's been floating around there for a long time. It was called, I think, Torrey's Topical Index or something like that.

John MacArthur’s Public and Private Character, Preaching at Grace Church, and the Covenant of Redemption

Well, I have about 15 MacArthur study Bibles, but I keep that original one because it's like a bootleg edition. It's got this stuff in there. Yeah, that's right. Speaking about MacArthur, and, of course, you're linked to John forever and I'm sure you're blessed by that relationship.

Tell us something about John MacArthur that few people know that would give our listeners insight to the man, not just the preacher.

Oh, that's a hard one. You know, one of the remarkable things about John is that he is in private exactly what he is in public. What you see with him is what you get. And it's not a private side to John MacArthur that's any way different from his public side.

I suppose the most remarkable thing about him, to me, the thing that astonishes me about him is that he is just that way to the point where, you know, it's kind of hard to make small talk with him. He doesn't have hobbies or sideline interests or whatever.

If you want to really engage John MacArthur in conversation, talk about the Bible because that's really what dominates his life and his heart and mind, and that's what he's interested in. Good answer.

We've only got a couple of minutes. We've only got a couple of minutes left. What's it like to preach at Grace Church? It's the most comfortable place for me in the world to preach. The pulpit is perfectly designed.

It's the right height and it has a huge top on it. So you can move your notes around. And a lot of people, when they design pulpits, think the way to do it is to slam the top of it up towards the speaker like a music stand.

The problem there is then your notes slide down to the gutter. And if you wear contacts or if you rely on bifocals like I do, then you're always trying to look down to see your notes. What you need is a flat surface.

And so the pulpit at Grace Church has this right height and it's just, it's a comfortable place, even though, you know, honestly, I've never really been nervous there because I feel at home. Those are people who know and love me.

I go other places, you know, where I might be speaking to a room full of 30 people and that's when I really get nervous.

Well, I've only preached from Grace Church pulpit one time and that was when I was a janitor at midnight in front of three other janitors. So I wouldn't know. Well, the time has gone by so fast. We've been talking to Phil Johnson, Pyromaniacs fame, Editing John's Books fame, Spurgeon .org fame.

Phil, thank you for being on. I've got about 45 seconds left. Is it okay for you to believe in the covenant of redemption? It's okay with me. Yeah, yeah, it's okay with me too. I've been listening to S. Lewis Johnson and I just think, okay, I've got a certain kind of theological background, but I believe in this eternal promise between the Trinity.

And that's all right to believe, isn't it?

Yeah, absolutely. In fact, I think if you listen to John MacArthur's messages on Titus, I believe it is, the very beginning of Titus, he goes into that in quite a bit of detail. He believes it as well.

That's right, Titus chapter one. Well, Phil, time has zoomed by. Thank you so much. I appreciate your ministry.

I appreciate you taking the time to talk at No Compromise Radio. God bless you and your family. Thanks for having me. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life transforming power of God's word through verse by verse exposition of the sacred text. Please come and join us.

Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at six. We're right on route 110 in West Boylston. You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400. The thoughts and opinions expressed on No Compromise Radio do not necessarily reflect those of WVNE, its staff or management.