Everyone’s mother used to say, “Don’t speak ill of the dead,” but it sounds so quaint these days. If you want nice, sanitized, and gauzy words about someone who had died, family obituaries rarely disappoint. Obituaries are like those histories that all churches have written and printed: you get history but not truth. If it’s a lie to fail to tell all of the truth, then all church histories and all obituaries are printed lies.
But there’s a time and place for everything.
I rather liked John MacArthur’s commentaries and owned a few. They were fairly reliable, occasionally insightful and generally helpful in sermon preparation. Best of all, you didn’t have to listen to an entire 45 minute sermon to find something useful. I’m a fast reader but a slow listener, since most (but not all) of us understand you have to wait for it to be said to know what is said. Some of the more self-described grandees among us feel the compulsion not to be troubled by actuals words and sally forth with hasty conjecture when wisdom demands facts.
If you like hagiographies, plenty are available and easy to find on JMac. But when a major public figure dies, not even Mom’s admonition about speaking ill of the dead applies. Overall, he leaves a checkered legacy.
If your pastor is slavish and servile in a tedious, mind-numbing, and monotonous verse-by-verse, allegedly expository, march through the Scriptures, you have my sympathy. If JMac was a 45 minute preacher and could consistently and actually exposit passages for 45 minutes, good for him. Very few people can. In my experience exactly zero of the self-described “45 minute preachers” could preach a 45 minute sermon, although all of them could preach 20 minutes and inflate it to 45 with the greatest of pulpit ease but pew unease.
Topical sermons are neither good nor bad and may be either, both, or neither. Verse-by-verse preaching the same. MacArthur did have a nice, quality, distinctive tone. He was no Adrian Rogers in that regard but was above average.
Others may be certain about the long term legacy but not I. Churches may establish, maintain, and enforce whatever discipline the wish on their voluntary membership but the picture of GCC is one of unreasonable, harsh, unloving, and extreme actions. Let the buyer beware. As much as the Calvinists push regenerate church membership and active church discipline, the record shows ugly, destructive, and unchristian results. Theology has little to do with it. It’s about power and materialism. It’s not about humility but hubris. It’s often more sadistic than spiritual.
We write our own obits, as someone said long ago, by our words and deeds. If that is true, then JMac’s obit is a mixed bag.
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As a peripherally related aside, there are those occasional printed obits where the family describes the not-so-dearly departed in realistic terms: “he was a terrible father; “she was the world’s worst mother.” Other are great literature. Fiction, of course. Others are hyper-hagiographic: how can humanity continue to exist without the individual, such was their gifts and impact. Somehow we slog on.
A simple search will yield many examples of the mixed legacy of JMac.
My obituary: still being written. We will see how that comes out.
