An Interview With Phillip Johnson
Contributed by Kevin Stilley
Phil Johnson is the executive Director of Grace to You, a Christian tape and radio ministry featuring the preaching ministry of John MacArthur. Phil has been closely associated with John MacArthur since 1981 and edits most of MacArthur's major books. Phil pastors an adult fellowship group called GraceLife at Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, CA. He is a board member of The Martyn Lloyd-Jones Recordings Trust in England, and a member of the Fellowship of Independent Reformed Evangelicals (FIRE).
More than fifteen years ago I met Phil Johnson on the old Reformed Listserv. Since that time I have benefited greatly from his Biblical exegesis, theological formulation, and cultural insight. I am privileged to share here some answers he provided to questions we posed to him.
P&C: I have on occasion referred to you as the internet's most famous Phil, to differentiate you from some other Phil Johnsons. To help readers understand how you became the internet's most famous Phil, can you explain the genesis of Pyromaniacs?
Phil Johnson: I may be the Internet's most famous Phil Johnson (and I don't know whether that's a good distinctive or something to be ashamed of), but there are at least two other Phil Johnsons who are a lot more famous than me. One is the late architect who designed (among other things) the Crystal Cathedral. The other (much more a hero of mine) is the Berkeley professor known for his critiques of Darwinism. I sometimes get e-mail meant for the Berkeley Phil Johnson, and I am certain he is properly chagrined to be confused with me. He's much smarter and far less irritating than I am. Much more distinguished looking, too.
I think I noticed the earliest weblogs almost a full decade ago and immediately thought blogging would be a fun and profitable way for me to develop some of my ideas in written form. But I put it off for years. I knew it would be very time consuming and I'd be tempted to be obsessive about it--and I certainly didn't need more writing deadlines in my life. But about two and a half years ago a very popular post-evangelical blog published a twisted critical account of something I had written, along with a very unkind personal assessment of me. When I tried to point out some fundamental factual errors in their post, they deleted my comments from their blog (and even closed their blog permanently to all commenters). So I decided to start blogging more or less out of self-defense. I enjoyed the exercise, so I stayed with it.
I originally thought I might get (at most) 500 readers per week--which is about the size of the Sunday School class I teach. Almost from day one, the daily traffic was double that number. So after what was supposed to be a six-month experiment, I decided to keep blogging, but I recruited a handful of other writers to help fill out the week with daily posts. Frank Turk and Dan Phillips have stuck with it for two full years now, and the three of us have turned out to make a great team. (Traffic is up, too. We've had more than two million readers since I first started blogging.) I barely knew the other members of TeamPyro when we started team-blogging, but I chose them because I thought they were some of the freshest, finest, most thought-provoking writers in the blogosphere who also happened to share most of the same theological convictions as me.
P&C: Regarding "politics" and Christianity, WWSS (What Would Spurgeon Say)?
Phil Johnson: Spurgeon was a devoted liberal in an era when being liberal really did mean taking the moral high ground, truly caring about the needs of the poor, disadvantaged, and disenfranchised, and opposing the institutionalized abuses of Victorian society that tended to depersonalize the lower classes. He lived in the era of Dickens and Jack the Ripper, when orphans were routinely sent to workhouses, large sections of London were cesspools of crime and unspeakable poverty, and public welfare barely existed. "Liberals" like Spurgeon advocated public policies that sought to remedy rather than exploit those problems.
If Spurgeon saw the state of American liberalism today--championing the abandonment of moral values, choreographing poverty and race for political advantage, and taking a deliberately tolerant stance on crime and national security--he would be appalled. He would probably eschew the label "liberal."
P&C: Some months ago you wrote "evangelicalism right now is at least as much in need of Reformation as Medieval Roman Catholicism was before Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the castle church." Does this have implications for Christian efforts to reform and inform the cultural milieu? Do you think we must get our own house in order before we encourage Christian involvement in politics, government and public policy?
Phil Johnson: Well, yes. I'd go even further and say that a large part of getting our own house in order would be to realize that the church's main priorities lie outside the political process anyway. And we need to wake up and face that fact. Given all the energy and resources evangelicals have invested in the political process over the past three decades, they have precious little to show for it. But surely preaching the gospel ought to consume as much of the believing community's time, energy, and resources as lobbying for a secular party's agenda--and if we had done that as vigorously as we have lobbied against government policies that are hostile to religion, perhaps we would actually have made better progress in both areas. Christians are outraged that the government took prayer out of public schools and wants to get religion out of the public square. But I think it's an even bigger outrage that so many churches and Christian ministries have effectively taken the gospel out of the message they proclaim to the world, and replaced it with incessant talk about earthly and political issues.
I'm not saying the political issues are unimportant. I'm saying they are far less important than the gospel. Paul ministered while he was literally bound in chains by order of Rome, and he didn't expend his energies lobbying for religious freedom in the empire. He preached the gospel.
P&C: There is a reason why the word "political" prefaces political correctness. Do you think that if would be fair to say that a salient pragmatism and a twisted understanding of tolerance has resulted in a form of civil religion that is infecting Evangelicalism? Should we be concerned? What should we do about it?
Phil Johnson: Yes, there are two major factors that have given rise to the problem you describe. One (as your question suggests) is the climate of popular postmodernism, where "tolerance" has been redefined as an attitude that eschews clarity, certainty, authority, and strong convictions in favor of a soft and pliable approach to every truth--especially moral and spiritual principles.
The other problem is that the more savvy Christians get in the political realm, the more apt they are to tone down or capitulate on the very distinctives that set them apart from non-Christian and secular conservatives--toning down the gospel for the sake of strengthening political coalitions. After all, ecumenical broad-mindedness is the oil that keeps those political coalitions going. But it has been severely detrimental to evangelical clarity and conviction.
The evangelical movement is no longer even truly evangelical in the doctrinal and historic sense of the word. A lot of factors--worldliness, pragmatism, and spiritual entropy--have contributed to that problem. But putting so much of our time, energy, and resources into political activism certainly accelerated the demise of evangelical doctrinal conviction as much as any other factor.
P&C: You have written about the left-leaning politics of the emerging church and quoted Scot McKnight who characterizes them as "a latte-drinking, backpack-lugging, Birkenstock-wearing group of 21st-century, left-wing, hippie wannabes. Put directly, they are Democrats." Do you think this is another example of the emerging church asking the right questions but arriving at the wrong answers?
Phil Johnson: Yes, precisely. Anyone who is truly concerned about the health of the church, church history, and sound doctrine can hardly fail to notice the negative effects I've been describing, which problems stem (to a large degree) from the shallow evangelical obsession with Republican Party politics. Emergents seem to think the answer is a swing to left-wing politics. That's exactly the wrong answer, and an even more stupid way of burying eternal gospel truth under temporal political concerns. I think a lot of Emergents (influenced by secular media propaganda) think their liberalism is a badge that proves they are more sophisticated than the Evangelical right. In reality, they have made the same kind of error they profess to deplore. They're selling their spiritual birthright for a mess of partisan pottage. (And it's even less nutritious pottage than the Republican variety.)
P&C: You make available a couple of audio downloads
Phil Johnson: I think Don Carson's Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church
P&C: What are you currently reading? Can can you recommend a few books that would help us to have a more Biblical understanding of the intersection of politics and Christianity?
Phil Johnson: I'm reading Derek Kidner's commentary on Proverbs and Tim Keller's The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism
P&C: And, is it really true that your beagle Wrigley always agrees with you?
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For those of you who were confused by that final question and response, Phil once had a disclaimer on his blog which read:
NOTE: Phil Johnson bears sole responsibility for these remarks. They do not necessarily reflect the opinions of his pastor, his employer, his wife, his children, or his friends. Only Phil's beagle, Wrigley, always agrees with Phil.
I usually agree with Phil also, but I try to avoid having my "
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Want to read/hear more of Phil's thoughts? Check out the following:
Theology From A Bunch Of Dead Guys
In the interview above Phil mentions his associates Frank Turk and Dan Phillips. In addition to posting at PyroManiacs, they both have their own blogs;
Biblical Christianity: A Blog By Dan Phillips
... And His Ministers A Flame Of Fire - Frank Turk aka Centuri0n
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