Thursday, August 07, 2008

Frazer Defends MacArthur at WND:

I blogged about Dave Welch's WorldNetDaily article attacking the anti-dominionist position of John MacArthur here. I alerted Dr. Gregg Frazer -- who teaches at the college where MacArthur is president -- to the article and suggested that he submit his reply to WorldNetDaily. Well he did and to their credit, WND published it.

Read the whole thing. There's lots of great stuff in it like the orthodox biblical case for anti-dominionism, how America's Founders arguably violated Romans 13 by rebelling against Great Britain, and how many of the patriotic preachers supporting the American cause were not orthodox Christians and used an unorthodox interpretation of Romans 13 to attempt to justify rebellion against Great Britain. Here is a taste from the article on Jonathan Mayhew, one of the most important pro-revolutionary preachers:

It is also instructive to point out that Mayhew is not exactly the most reliable authority on what the Bible says. His reputation for unorthodoxy was so pronounced that his ordination had to be rescheduled because not enough ministers attended. He was a unitarian (did not believe in the deity of Christ) and a rationalist who believed that reason was the ultimate determiner of what counts as revelation. He specifically denied the doctrines of imputation, justification by faith, the virgin birth and original sin and held an unorthodox view of the atonement. He denied them because he found them to be unreasonable. Doctrines, which he called "niceties of speculation," were not of particular interest to him, though, because he believed that there were many roads to God and that one walked them through works. He listed Plato, Demosthenes, Cicero, Sidney and Hoadly among his intellectual influences. His quoted remark in the article that a king can "un-king himself" is completely without biblical foundation. Mayhew's view of Romans 13 had nothing to do with what Paul said and everything to do with what Mayhew found reasonable under the circumstances.

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