Jonathan Downie, a regular contributor to PneumaReview.com, wrote to the editors about the ongoing coverage we have featured here of John MacArthur’s 2013 book, Strange Fire. Please read his concern and our response below it.

Jonathan Downie

I am growing concerned about how much coverage the Strange Fire book is getting in the Pneuma Review. If it is as wrong as your reviewers say, I fail to see what good the extensive coverage will do. In fact, I am very concerned that it is taking over the Pneuma Review and pushing out the more practical and impactful content for which the publication has rightly become well known.

My concern is even greater given that some of the responses seem to have attempted to delineate between “true” and “false” charismatics based mostly on what TV channel they appear on or whether they have a big ministry. This is very worrying as it seems to be adding to divisions in the church, something Scripture warns us about.

Please reconsider your coverage and return to issues that have a more direct effect on church practice and the growth of the kingdom.

Yours in Christ,
Jonathan Downie

Thank you, Jonathan, for sharing your concern about how much time PneumaReview.com has spent on John MacArthur’s Strange Fire.

Since MacArthur’s challenge is about whether Pentecostals and charismatics understand and worship God wrongly, it is a subject that has gained the attention of church leaders and even some scholars. This debate has been an opportunity to explore the biblical use of the gifts of the Spirit, a subject that has always been an emphasis for The Pneuma Review and all Pneuma Foundation (our parent organization) publications.

Over the years, the Pneuma Foundation has taken time to focus on issues that have been important to church leaders. These have included “How Much Does God Control?” “How Shall We Lead the Church?” and “Postmodernism, The Church, and The Future.” While the debate concerning MacArthur’s book does not have the same scope as these discussions, all of which appeared in The Pneuma Review over the course of years, it is a timely subject which concerns the very core of the Pentecostal/charismatic movement and has been addressed by layman and scholar alike. PneumaReview.com is glad to help facilitate this discussion.

One of the editors wrote:

A good deal of space on PneumaReview.com was given to the Strange Fire controversy. Some of the content of the book was justified (aberrations and abuses) but quite a bit of it was outlandish. The Pentecostal/charismatic response to Strange Fire was either to ignore it or counter it. Apart from how the controversy was addressed by PneumaReview.com authors, MacArthur’s book set off a firestorm on its own drawing strong responses to it that were published in many other places. Also, not all of the PneumaReview.com coverage of Strange Fire was specifically about MacArthur’s book or the October 2013 Strange Fire conference. Some of the posts were reviews of Michael Brown‘s book, Authentic Fire, R. T. Kendall‘s book, Holy Fire, and Strangers to Fire, edited by Robert Graves. I think that the bulk of the conversation is behind us for now (unless MacArthur publishes a follow-up book as he said he would do).

As to your concern regarding adding to divisions in the church, authors often share opinions that garner strong responses. The renewal movement of Pentecostals and charismatics is broad, and many voices are heard. PneumaReview.com is an open forum and readers are encouraged to leave comments and challenge what they read.

Raul Mock and the PneumaReview.com editors

For our panel of contributors talking about Strange Fire, including scholars like Michael Brown, Craig Keener, Jon Ruthven, and Frank Macchia, please see: Are Pentecostals offering Strange Fire?

Are Pentecostals offering Strange Fire? (Panel Discussion)

Rob Wilkerson responds to the article, “The Elephant in the Strange Fire” by Cameron Buettel, published on November 3, 2014 on John MacArthur’s Grace to You ministry website.

Frankly, I’m a nobody in the kingdom. I’ve never published any books, though I’d certainly like to one day. I’ve never led a church larger than a few hundred people. And I’ve never had any sphere of influence larger than the people directly under my leadership before. So when the folks at PneumaReview.com asked me to respond to an article published this past Monday, by Grace to You employee, Cameron Buettel, I felt like a mouse beneath Cameron’s elephant.

I’ve never seen an elephant respond to a mouse. But it could be either messy or humorous. Hopefully in my case Cameron’s elephant will simply be still, be informed, and be educated just a little when it comes to a biblical charismatic theology. When Cameron penned a follow-up challenge to charismatics who stood in line of John MacArthur’s Strange Fire conference, held a little over a year ago, he confessed two things to his readers. First, he has a charismatic background and grew up in mainline Pentecostalism. Second, he consumed an unhealthy amount of videos and writings from influential charismatic leaders.

Cameron Buettel, from his blog.

To the second acknowledgement I’d simply agree with Cameron. Yeah, it’s unhealthy to watch really too much of anything on TBN or YouTube, assuming I am able to reasonably deduce who it was that he watched and read. And I may be totally off on that. Who knows? But here’s what I feel like I do know with some measure of confidence. The guys who seem to make enough money to spend it on television broadcasting in order to turn around and ask for more money make me angry, frustrated, and irritated that people who probably want to follow Jesus are being duped into following a charlatan.

But here’s the stickler. Just because they can afford to put their wares on the air doesn’t mean they are the poster children for the charismatic movement. It just means they are the poster children for the charismaniac movement. There’s a big difference. Biblical charismatics know that. And refusal on the part of cessationists to admit that there is a difference continues to be part of the dishonesty that creates a divide between us. I am charismatic. But I am not charismaniac.

To the first acknowledgment I’d respond that everyone will find little to much that is or was wrong with the denomination they grew up in. I grew up Southern Baptist. There is much to be praised there, like the fight for inerrancy. But there is much that is wrong there, from my personal viewpoint. And here’s the rub I felt in Cameron’s article. He writes from what seems to be a reactionary perspective rather than a responsive one. The answer to the bad charismatic and pentecostal theology he personally experienced is not zero charismatic and pentecostal theology. Ditching the whole thing, Cameron asserts a bullet-pointed list of what he perceives to be a standard, predictable, step-by-step, “codified playbook of sorts” for “self-defense.”

John MacArthur, Strange Fire: The Danger of Offending the Holy Spirit with Counterfeit Worship (Nashville, TN: Nelson Books, 2013), 333 pages, ISBN 9781400206414.

Strange Fire by John MacArthur is a vicious and callous attack on the worldwide Pentecostal/Charismatic movement, and a great affront to the hundreds of millions of born-again Christians in every nation of the world who have found Christ directly through the work of the Holy Spirit as He works through Spirit-filled ministries. This is especially true in China, where I have lived and worked for the past forty-five years. The majority of the estimated 100 million Chinese believers have come to Christ through Holy Spirit anointed preaching and teaching, and the work of the Holy Spirit in healing the sick and performing all kinds of miracles.

While MacArthur has been accurate in pointing out some errors in doctrine and practice as well as moral failures among some well-known Charismatic leaders, the book is full of doctrinal errors and a severe distortion of the truth. And by relegating what is clearly the work of Jesus through the Holy Spirit as being that of Satan and false teachers, he is certainly bordering on the sin of blaspheming the Holy Spirit. We are used to attacks from certain overseas Chinese ministers like Rev. Stephen Tong of Indonesia, but even their condemnations of the Pentecostal movement do not begin to approach the acrimony, distortion of facts and malevolence that permeate this book.

First, his theological defense of the cessation theory can in no way stand up to solid Biblical exegesis. The supernatural manifestation of God’s power through miracles, healing of the sick, casting out of devils, and God speaking directly to people is recorded throughout the Bible and is at the foundation of the Christian faith. There is not the slightest hint anywhere that these have ceased or would cease in the future. Secondly the two thousand year record of church and mission history following the death of the apostles when these supernatural gifts and ministries were to have ceased, prove without a doubt the falsehood in the writings of MacArthur. Thirdly, the testimonies of millions of Christians today totally refute everything in this book.

Others have addressed the first and second points more thoroughly and efficiently than I can do, but I think after 52 years in the Pentecostal movement—having travelled to almost every nation in the world—I can address the third point. I have personally seen and witnessed hundreds of miracles of healing, casting out of demons, miracles where God intervened in the course of nature, supernatural and extremely accurate words of knowledge as the Holy Spirit speaks through people, people speaking in tongues in fluent foreign languages they have never learned and accurate fulfilled prophecies. And the result of all the above has been literally millions of people in China and other nations I have visited turning to Christ.

I certainly would not recommend any Christian to read this book, for the contents are in no way objective or factual and is as close to hate speech as anything I have ever read. But for those who have not read it, this paragraph on page xvii in the Introduction summarizes MacArthur’s position: “In recent decades, the Charismatic Movement has infiltrated mainstream evangelicalism and exploded onto the global scene at an alarming rate. It is the fastest-growing religious movement in the world. Charismatics now number more than half a billion worldwide. Yet the gospel that is driving those surging numbers is not the true gospel, and the sprit behind them is not the Holy Spirit. What we are seeing is in reality the explosive growth of a false church, as dangerous as any cult or heresy that has ever assaulted Christianity. The Charismatic Movement was a farce and scam from the outset; it has not changed into something good.”

“Strange Fire”? Not in a Global Pentecostal Context of Ministry

An international panel of ministry veterans responds to John MacArthur’s Strange Fire

Dony K. Donev with Dennis Balcombe, Hanny Setiawan and Marius Lombaard

John MacArthur, Strange Fire: The Danger of Offending the Holy Spirit with Counterfeit Worship (Nelson Books, 2013).

Almost one year ago, internationally known author John MacArthur began campaigning for his new book Strange Fire. With lots of material written beforehand by many who had not even read the book, the actual premiere was at a conference with the same name, not without some scandal to help its wide popularization. But scandal was hardly needed when the book classified most (if not all) Charismatics around the world as heretics. Тhe bottom line for MacArthur’s work was deconstruction modern day Charismatic theology and exposing it as unbiblical.

Do Pentecostal churches really offer a “strange fire” as MacArthur proposes? Could charismatic extremes practiced by some be evident in all Charismatic churches and classical Pentecostal denominations? And is it possible to declare a world wide movement of half a billion strong as heretical by observing random examples among less than 3% (three percent) of its representatives residing in North America?

The premise of this ad hominem attack is surprising, when even in Pentecostal scholarly circles we have long debated some Charismatic praxis as wrong and destructive to the movement as a whole. So, when an outsider to Pentecostalism as MacArthur jumps in and claims all Pentecostals are bad because some Charismatics have been found in the wrong, the normal response is simply to disagree. Especially when these extremes do not concern Pentecostalism globally, but as MacArthur himself admits, are defined to a North American context of ministry and even more strict and limited Charismatic circle of neo-Pentecostalism.

The purpose of this article, therefore, is to present the view of Classic Pentecostals, as deferred from the variety non-Pentecostal Charismatics. And to discuss MacArthur’s assumptions in an international Pentecostal context, though Strange Fire refuses to view Pentecostalism as the global power it has become. Perhaps, the very weakness of any theological work that seeks international recognition, but fortifies its argument only within the perimeter of westernized theology. To provoke an even deeper discussion, the study explores five of the major arguments of Strange Fire within the ministry context of Pentecostals from Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia.

Apostolic Relevance or a New Apostolic Reformation?

Admittedly, MacArthur strongest point within his attack on Pentecostals is outlining Peter Wagner’s New Apostolic Reformation movement. And even quoting Vinson Synan, who was invited to join the network for $69 a month, but declined with the response, “I could not afford to be an apostle.” But how concerned is the larger Pentecostal world about this apostolic movement? And how important is NAR in global Pentecostalism today?

Are Pentecostals offering Strange Fire? (Panel Discussion)

Excerpts from Pouring Holy Water on Strange Fire: A Critique of John MacArthur’s Strange Fire & Charismatic Chaos by Frank Viola.

The central focus of this critique is simply to show that both Scripture and church history yield strong evidence that spiritual gifts are still extant in the church today.

My primary intention in writing it is to help my non-charismatic brethren who have been influenced by MacArthur’s books to reconsider and re-examine their understanding of the present-day work of the Spirit. My hope is that my non-charismatic brethren will open up their hearts more fully toward their charismatic brethren and sistren and vice versa.
(page 11).

3. Commending & Criticizing MacArthur’s Charismatic Blasting

Having read both Charismatic Chaos and Strange Fire, I want to cut to the chase in this Introduction and tell you where I think MacArthur is dead-on and where I think his conclusions are flawed and even outrageous.

The rest of this critique will provide evidence and examples supporting each point:

1. The charismatic world is an easy target for any critic because there are a lot of problems within the camp.

There is no doubt that a number of high-profile charismatic leaders are guilty of outlandish teachings, absurd practices, stunts, gimmicks, exaggerations, and even fraud. And so are some of their followers. MacArthur is right about this and he articulates the problem well.

However, MacArthur is not the only person who has made this observation. Many charismatic leaders have as well. MacArthur even quotes some of them in Strange Fire.

Just as those charismatic leaders were not able to reel in the excesses that exist within the movement, I do not think MacArthur’s attempts will do so either. In fact, MacArthur’s latest book is his third attempt on this score (The Charismatics, 1978; Charismatic Chaos, 1992; Strange Fire, 2013).

(page 13).

3. MacArthur is wrong in that he paints the entire charismatic world–which would include all charismatics and all charismatic churches–with the same broad brush.

The fact is, I have met many charismatics who were not guilty of any of the problems that MacArthur benightedly lays at their feet.

For example, the late David Wilkerson was a tremendous help to me when I was in my 20s. He encouraged me to make Christ, not the Holy Spirit, preeminent in my life.

Wilkerson—a charismatic leader—wrote a classic article called A Christless Pentecost on this subject.

I would encourage anyone who buys MacArthur’s arguments to read The Cross and the Switchblade and ask yourself if it is possible that the supernatural gifts of the Spirit are still operative today.

In addition, I wonder if MacArthur would admit that Teen Challenge, founded by Wilkerson, has been a blessing to many lost young people.

Throughout his books, MacArthur continually uses phrases like, “Charismatics believe … such and such.” “Charismatics think … such and such.” And then “the charismatic movement is guilty of . . . such and such.”

This is simply false. It would be accurate to say, “some charismatics believe” … or even “many charismatics believe …” or “some in the charismatic movement believe… .”

Using MacArthur’s logic and approach, one could easily write a book about the toxicity of the Reformed movement by painting all Reformed Christians as elitist, sectarian, divisive, arrogant, exclusive, and in love with “doctrine” more than with Christ.

by Frank Viola

Someone has asked me, “Why waste your time on responding to MacArthur’s writings against the charismatics?”

When I was in my 20s, I wrote a critique of John MacArthur’s Charismatic Chaos because a brother in the Lord broke fellowship with me and my friends after reading MacArthur’s book. Jesus said to His disciples, “If they reject you, they’ve rejected me.” So to my mind, restoring a brother to fellowship was enough of a reason for me to try to persuade him that MacArthur’s views needed to be challenged.

For similar reasons, I am re-releasing my critique and revising it to include my response to Strange Fire. I want to clear up the confusion created when cessationists like MacArthur bring forward legitimate criticisms. I argue that theological errors and bad practices must be dealt with, but not by condemning the entire charismatic movement or implying they are not Christians.

My hope is that my critique will change the minds of some cessationists who have bought into MacArthur’s argument and confirm the views and experiences of those who have experienced the power of God today.

Frank Viola’s Pouring Holy Water on Strange Fire: A Critique of John MacArthur’s Strange Fire & Charismatic Chaos is available at http://www.patheos.com/blogs/frankviola/strangefirefree for $5.99. Endorsements by Craig Keener, Sam Storms, Dr. Michael Brown, and Adrian Warnock.

By Guest Panelist Jonathan Storment.

“We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade, the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito.” -C.S. Lewis

Maybe you’ve noticed that over the past few weeks, there has been a lot of talk around charismatic vs. not charismatic protestant Christians. Some people held a conference, and John MacArthur wrote a book about it. Mark Driscoll even showed up at the conference and started giving away his newest book and just confused everyone.

But what caught my eye is what these non-Charismatics called the conference.

They called it, “Strange Fire.”

Which may not mean much to you, but it means a lot to me. Because growing up in the Restoration Movement, that is a reference to an obscure little story in Leviticus that no other branch in Christian tradition really paid attention to.

It’s the story of Nadab and Abihu, some of the first priests in the Torah. It’s 10 little verses that end with God smiting Nadab and Abihu because they offered “Strange” or “Unauthorized Fire.”

When I heard the name of the conference it felt … reassuring. I thought, “Hey, we’re not the only ones who misread the Bible after all!”

And let’s call that’s what it is.

To name this conference that, is a way of misreading the Bible. I don’t care where you go from there, but if you start with that story as your metaphor, you will have a  bad view of God when you’re reading the Bible.[1]

Trust me on this.

But when I saw in Christianity Today, that Mark Noll actually compares this new anti-charismatic movement to Restorationist I had two thoughts, “Christianity Today knows about us?” and then as I read the comparison I realized “Yes, they know us well.”

Here’s what they said:

Perhaps the major flaw of the book is more attitudinal than methodological. In claiming to see things so clearly–so black and white–MacArthur falls into a restorationist mindset, identified by historian Mark Noll as “intellectual overconfidence, sectarian delusion, and a stunningly naive confidence in the power of humans to extract themselves from the influences of history …”

Apparently Mark grew up in my church.

Now I love Churches of Christ, and the Restoration Movement, I’m not just saying that. I  really do. And I’m glad to be a part of Protestant Christianity … except for this one tiny slice of it. We protest … a lot … and often.

We love to argue and parse words and ideas, and I love the idea about Sola-Scriptura, but like Mark Noll hinted at, Sola Scriptura is naïve if you don’t acknowledge that you are a person culturally conditioned to read the Bible in certain ways and ask certain questions (one that the Bible might not be trying to address) and not ask the questions the Bible is trying to answer.

Why are W. A. Criswell and John MacArthur wrong when they claim that all tongues today are counterfeit?

Is Peter Wagner right in saying the apostles are returning?

Is MacArthur right when he claims Paul said he was the last of the apostles?

What are the qualifications of true apostleship in the church today?

Do Pentecostal/charismatics treat the Holy Spirit, as MacArthur alleges, like an impersonal force?

Do classical Pentecostals insist that all Christians should speak in tongues?

More on the topic:

• John MacArthur’s Strange Fire: Estranged by misinterpretation?
• John MacArthur’s Strange Fire, Reviewed by R. Loren Sandford
• Frank Macchia on the Gifts of God to the Church
• John MacArthur’s Strange Fire, Reviewed by Eddie L. Hyatt
• John MacArthur’s Strange Fire, A Brief Biblical Response by Jon Ruthven
• John MacArthur’s Strange Fire as Parody of Jonathan Edwards’ Theology, by William De Arteaga