elow are my answers to several letters and/or e-mails from Dave Hunt and his chief lieutenant, T. A. McMahon. I've placed these here temporarily for the benefit of people who have seen Dave Hunt's letters and have been told by him that he has written our ministry "without any response." As you can see, I have responded to him repeatedly. He consistently ignores the main points while trying to derail our dialogue with ever-longer letters. In any case, here is the proof that I have replied to him (though I acknowledge without embarrassment that I have made no effort to match him page for page.)
Presumably, if you are here, it is because you received this link from me. Please do not post links to this page; I'm not trying to broadcast my dispute with Dave Hunt via the World Wide Web. I would prefer not to make these letters any more public than they need to be. But I keep hearing from people who have seen Hunt's letters to me and to John MacArthur—and who think we have simply snubbed or ignored him. As a matter of convenience in replying to such queries, I am posting these replies without linking this page anywhere to give the general public access to it. I might make this page more public later if the situation warrants that. But for now, please honor my request to share the link to this page only with people who have already seen Dave Hunt's letters to me or to John MacArthur.

2 June 2003 T. A. McMahon TBC PO Box 7019 Bend, OR 97708-7019 Dear Mr. McMahon, Thank you for your letter to John MacArthur. John is currently away on several weeks' vacation, so his office passed your letter on to me in order to avoid any delay in getting you a reply. I'm sorry you were offended by John MacArthur's assessment of Dave Hunt's recent attacks on Calvinism. But having read and critiqued What Love Is This? for a seminar at our Shepherds' Conference, I'm convinced John neither maligned nor misrepresented Dave Hunt. Mr. Hunt has "concocted a distorted caricature . . . and built of a kind of Calvinism that does not exist and a kind of Calvinism that nobody would affirm." Your own letter provides an example of this. You request (in all seriousness, I assume) for John MacArthur to explain why he rejects "the teaching prevalent among Calvinists that 'The lost are kept out of heaven not by their sin, but by God withholding the grace needed for salvation.'" In the first place, that idea is not prevalent among Calvinists. I don't know a single Calvinist who would deny that lost sinners are damned because of their own sin and unbelief. In the second place, the words you put in quotation marks and attribute to "Calvinists" are actually Dave Hunt's words. No true Calvinist has ever said those words or taught the equivalent. In the third place, I know that others have already pointed these things out to Dave Hunt and you, so you ought to know better than to continually ascribe such views to Calvinists. It is precisely that sort of deliberate misrepresentation of his opponents that has caused so many people to question Mr. Hunt's integrity. Another example of this (relevant to John MacArthur in particular) shows up on a video made a few months ago at Greg Laurie's church, where Dave Hunt claims to have read John MacArthur's book The Love of God and summarizes the message of the book with these words: "Basically it tells you God doesn't love everybody." Actually, MacArthur's book refutes the hyper-Calvinist notion that God doesn't love everyone. Dave Hunt also quotes a statement MacArthur spent several pages refuting--but he quotes it as if the statement reflected MacArthur's view. I realize that particular error may be the result of sloppy research rather than a deliberate misrepresentation. (Although you insist you have corroborated all the "facts" asserted in What Love Is This? I found many similar examples of sloppy research in the book.) Either Dave Hunt did not really read The Love of God, or he deliberately misrepresented MacArthur's position. Either way, he has undermined his own credibility. Mr. Hunt's well-publicized claim that the Calvinistic view of the atonement "was repugnant to Spurgeon" is another example epitomizing why Dave Hunt's integrity is in question. I know for a fact that his error on Spurgeon has been pointed out to him by many. It is my understanding that his own friends tried to show him this error before the book was published. Yet Mr. Hunt still refuses to acknowledge that he was wrong about Spurgeon. Instead, he now maintains that Spurgeon contradicted himself. (A strange stance, since Hunt's original claim was that Spurgeon "rejected limited atonement . . . [and] did so in unequivocal language.") Spurgeon did not contradict himself on the atonement. He held the same view of particular redemption consistently throughout his ministry. If Mr. Hunt cares so little for the truth when it comes to describing John MacArthur's and Charles Spurgeon's views, he cannot cry foul when someone raises a question about his trustworthiness. You complain of Calvinists who are "mean-spirited." It is indeed unfortunate and a reproach against the truth if some of Mr. Hunt's critics have been ungracious and ungodly in their communication with him. But in my assessment there has been a clear note of mean- spiritedness in Dave Hunt's own attacks on Calvinism ever since he began this campaign a couple of years ago. It is cynical and uncharitable of Mr. Hunt to insist that he knows better than Calvinists what they believe--especially when so many have pointed out repeatedly how grossly he is misrepresenting them. I can also say with all honesty that in my 20 years at Grace to You some of the most mean-spirited correspondence I have received comes from people who agree with Dave Hunt on this issue, and lately it is coming mostly from people who have been influenced by Hunt's book. So that problem exists on both sides, it seems. Neither of us should use it as a convenient excuse to blow off legitimate criticisms. Dave Hunt needs to retract his error regarding Spurgeon and his misrepresentation of John MacArthur. He also needs to make an honest effort to understand why all Calvinists universally (and some knowledgeable Arminians as well) agree that Dave Hunt's presentation of "Calvinism" is a grotesque caricature. If he won't do that, you aren't really in a position to take umbrage when people wonder whether he is really concerned for the truth, or just being argumentative. I say all of that without hostility and without rancor. I am aware that you and Mr. Hunt profess an appreciation for straightforwardness, so I have tried to answer you as plainly as possible, but without any "mean-spiritedness," I assure you. May God "equip you in every good thing to do His will, working. . . that which is pleasing in His sight" (Heb. 13:21). Sincerely in Christ, Phil Johnson Executive Director

From: Phil Johnson To: T. A. McMahon Subject: For Dave Hunt Send reply to: Phil@spurgeon.org Date sent: Fri, 20 Jun 2003 16:50:08 -0700 Dear Mr. McMahon, Please pass along to Dave Hunt this reply to his recent letter. I did not have his e-mail address, and since his letter arrived while I was out of town last week, I did not want to delay getting my reply to him any longer than necessary. Thank you. __________________________ Dear Mr. Hunt, Thank you for your letter. You raised a few questions and asked for my reply. You wrote: > Why is it an attack for me to critique Calvinism and to > earnestly seek to compare it with Scripture, but it is > not an attack for Calvinists to accuse me of "deliberate > misrepresentation" (i.e. dishonesty), concocting a false > Calvinism, etc.? Frankly, you sound like Catholics. You are the one who took umbrage at the word _attack_. I meant nothing pejorative by it. It would be astonishing to me if you tried to deny that your recent polemical onslaught against Calvinism was an "attack," but if you know of a better word, I'll be happy to use it next time. I never accused you of "Calvinist bashing," and I never suggested that "it is not an attack for Calvinists to accuse" you for having misrepresented what we believe. If you had described my review of What Love Is This? as an attack--or more appropriately, a counterattack--against your book and your position, I would not pretend that you have offended or wronged me. Frankly, on that point, you are the one who sounds like a Catholic, because you are turning away from the substantive doctrinal and biblical differences between us and trying to focus the discussion on a dispute about words to no profit (2 Tim. 2:14). Regarding the question of whether God is to blame for the fact that people go to hell, you wrote: > This is what makes any discussion with Calvinists so > difficult. Of course no Calvinist says the above in so > many words. But this is the teaching of Calvinism as you > well know. As you well know, that is not true. No Calvinists teach that; they deny it. No credible Calvinist author has ever said anything like what you attribute to them. What you are presenting is your own twisted misunderstanding of Calvinism, and the reason you cannot cite a single Calvinist author who agrees with your description of their position is that they do not believe what you SAY they believe. Yet you stubbornly and uncharitably insist that you know their position better than they do. You ask, > How can it be the sins of the non-elect that keep them > out of heaven, when the equally bad if not worse sins of > the elect don't keep them out? Is not the overriding > reason anyone is in hell the fact that God did not elect > them to salvation? Everyone DESERVES hell because of sin. The fact that God sovereignly chooses to save some does not make Him guilty for the damnation of those who are not saved. The only way you could transfer blame to God for those who are damned is if you think salvation is something they deserve or if you think God is obligated to show the same mercy to everyone. But those ideas are patently unbiblical and contrary to the very notion of grace. > So again, according to Calvinism (not the Bible), it is > not one's sins that send anyone to hell, but the fact > that God has withheld from them "the grace [payment for > sin by Christ, ability to believe, etc.] needed for > salvation," exactly as Mr. McMahon said. Your conclusion is a complete non-sequitur. It's like the drunk who argues he's not to blame for the death of the child he ran over in a crosswalk, because if the kid's mother had been more attentive and held her child back, he wouldn't have been killed. He might try such an argument in court, but every court in the land would find him guilty. The mother's failure to rescue the child does not diminish the guilt of the drunkard. Again, the only way you can blame God for the damnation of those who are not among the elect is if you argue that He is obligated to save them. If you do that, grace is no more grace. But this seems to be precisely your argument: that if God shows special grace to anyone, He is obligated to show equal mercy to all. Thus grace in your system is not grace at all, but something God is bound to do. That contradicts the very point of Romans 9. > Does not the teaching of irresistible grace state that > God irresistibly calls and causes to believe those whom > He chooses for salvation but leaves others in their sin > to be damned? So again it is not their sins that send > people to hell but God's withholding of irresistible > grace, without which they cannot be saved. This is > Calvinism! Why deny it? Because it isn't "Calvinism." It is Davehuntism. No Calvinist has ever taught such a thing. And you would know it if you had done your homework--nay, you DO know it, because you have already acknowledged that you can't quote a single Calvinist who ever said what you claim they teach. > I am weary of being accused of dishonestly concocting a > caricature of Calvinism. In all candor, I am weary of hearing you doggedly insist that your caricature IS Calvinism, when I know you know better. If you cannot cite one significant Calvinist who ever said such things, you ought to have the integrity to admit it. You might be able to justify in your own mind your lie about the content of John MacArthur's book The Love of God, but the way you have rationalized that lie is not convincing to me, nor will it convince any objective reader of the book. I'm sorry you are choosing to take that approach. As I said in my letter to Mr. McMahon, you are destroying your own credibility. By your persistent refusal to admit your wrong--including your embarrassing attempt to explain away your blunder regarding Spurgeon's stance on particular redemption--you have shown a willful ignorance that is impervious to any rational argument. When someone acts that way, it becomes impossible to reason with him and fruitless to try to dialogue with him. All a faithful shepherd can do is expose him.

From: Phil Johnson To: "Tom M" Subject: Re: Letter reply Send reply to: Phil@spurgeon.org Date sent: Wed, 18 Jun 2003 16:17:39 -0700 Dear Mr. McMahon, I just returned from a week's travel to Oklahoma and Missouri, so I was unable to reply to your message until today. You wrote: > the main issue of my letter to him necessitates hearing > from him personally. That issue is what John had to say > about Dave's integrity and, by direct implication, the > integrity of his ministry, of which I am the executive > director. I spoke to John about this. He regrets the error about Dave Hunt's degree, but he stands by the substance of his review. The question of whether Dave Hunt majored in accounting or mathematics doesn't really alter any of the basic concerns he was expressing. That was a minor and unintentional error of fact. If correcting it would alter the thrust of John MacArthur's review, we would be glad to send a correction to everyone who was in the audience. If Mr. Hunt seriously wants a personal apology from John for getting his degree wrong, I would be happy to have John put it in writing. But the point is picayune. The fact that Mr. Hunt majored in math rather than accounting hardly bolsters Mr. Hunt's credentials as a theologian. John MacArthur certainly wasn't deliberately trying to distort Mr. Hunt's position the way Mr. Hunt does with his opponents' views. Again, the one most substantive issue John raised would seem to be the rather serious lack of integrity in how Dave Hunt has characterized his opponents' positions. Mr. Hunt himself admitted in a recent letter to me that he was aware John MacArthur's book The Love of God "says a number of times that God loves everyone," and yet he deliberately turned the basic message of the book on its head, claiming John MacArthur teaches "that God doesn't love everyone." If you can't see the dishonesty of twisting someone's teaching like that, I'm afraid there's little point in arguing with you about it. Mr. Hunt's refusal to acknowledge his error about Spurgeon's position on the atonement also speaks for itself. Either Spurgeon spoke "unequivocally" or he "contradicted himself." Both cannot be true. Mr. Hunt is the one who has contradicted himself. And anyone who reads Spurgeon with the slightest degree of attentiveness knows he never wavered on his view of the atonement. Dave Hunt cannot go around accusing all Calvinists of irrationality and self-contradiction, imputing to them things they have never said, refusing to let their own words speak for themselves--and then take offense when someone questions the integrity of how he portrays Calvinism. Objective readers do see this. Dave Hunt is undermining his own credibility. He cannot blame his critics for that. > We plan to review your talks at the recent Shepherd's > Conference to ascertain whether or not you also went > beyond the theological issues of Dave's book to impugn > his character. If that's the case, and should we go the > Matthew 18 route, you will be included. My secretary sent you a copy on CD by FedEx this afternoon. I think you'll find it helpful in explaining and further documenting why we stand by our assessment of Mr. Hunt's book. You can also listen online at: http://www.swordandtrowel.org

18 August 2003 Dave Hunt The Berean Call PO Box 7019 Bend, OR 97708-7019 Dear Mr. Hunt, I'm sorry so much time has elapsed between your 18-page letter to me and this reply, but the day I received your letter I left the office for several weeks, traveling to Virginia and back for my son's wedding. Then I returned to a full week of intensive meetings with the directors of our international offices, followed by a wedding reception this past Saturday for our west-coast friends. So this is literally my first opportunity to write you a thoughtful reply. I appreciate the time and labor you must have put into your rebuttal of my review. I read it carefully, and I do think you made a few valid points. For example, I can see how your reference to Calvin's work on "Seneca's De Elementia" might have been a typographical error--an instance of careless editing or inattentive proofreading rather than sloppy research. I ought to have given you the benefit of the doubt on that. Moreover, you complained that I "overstated [my] case," and there may indeed be a place or two in my review where that complaint may be valid--such as when I referred to your "claim on page 19 that Charles Spurgeon was an Arminian." Of course I meant only that you ascribed to Spurgeon an Arminian view of the atonement (and I assumed that would be clear by the context of the remark). On re-listening, however, I think it's possible that my statement might be misunderstood by some listeners not familiar with the controversy your book has caused, and therefore I ought to have been more precise. More significantly, I want to acknowledge that you are correct to point out that when I said you believe God "is obliged to love everyone the same," I also ought to have observed, in fairness, that sometimes you make comments where you seem to acknowledge that love and grace cannot be obligatory. (It does seem to me that the main point of your book-- reflected even in the book's title--is the argument that God would be unjust and unloving to exercise His sovereign prerogative to save some people while decreeing that He would pass over others and leave them to suffer eternal condemnation for their sin. According to you, the very nature of true love constrains God to do all He can to save everyone alike. You even claim that if He does not love everyone redemptively, His "love" for those who perish is not a genuine love. I do not see how you can make such an argument unless you think God is in some sense obligated by either justice or love to extend the same saving grace to all. But perhaps it would have been more accurate for me to say that while you claim on the one hand that God "has the right to limit His mercy" [p. 217], you insist on the other hand that authentic "love" would not permit God to withhold his saving grace from some while He gives it to others. If he does that, you claim, His pleas for the repentance of all and His proposals of mercy to the reprobate cannot be well meant. This is admittedly one of the most confusing and muddled points in your presentation, even though it is central to the case you want to make. Your argument at that point closely parallels the rationale of hyper-Calvinism. And it is disturbingly similar to the claim of those who suggest that a God who is truly love would never be able to send anyone to hell.) In any event, since you do make disclaimers about God's "right to limit His mercy," I ought to have noted that fact in my review. I assure you that my failure to do so was unintentional, and owing to the constraints of the ninety-minute format--not motivated by a desire to misrepresent you. But you are quite correct to point out that in making those remarks the way I did, leaving out any reference to your qualifying statements, I was guilty of an offense similar to your offense against John MacArthur. I'm happy to acknowledge that fact, ask your forgiveness, and publish a clarification by posting this letter at my Web site, and/or by giving you permission to publish this letter in whatever forums you choose. In addition, in any future public remarks or published reviews of your book, I will be careful to clarify all those points. On the other hand, most of your arguments miss the point while niggling about incidentals. You did mistakenly attribute authorship of Decisional Regeneration to Jay Adams. If you had actually read the book, you ought to have known the difference between the two Adamses. The error was made repeatedly--in the text, the endnotes, and the bibliography of your book, so it is an example of sloppy scholarship, not merely an instance of careless proofreading. Your quibble about whether text, endnote, and bibliography add up to multiple references or "one and only" doesn't really alter the point I was making: this wasn't a typo; it was a case of mistaken identity stemming from poor scholarship. You ought to admit it. I also think you missed my point about your over-reliance on secondary sources. I realize that you have given citations for primary documents in your endnote references wherever possible. But it is also quite evident that you regularly give primary source info in your notes even when you have actually gleaned your quotations from secondary sources. For a few obvious examples, see notes 3-4 on page 45 (where you quote secondhand material you admit having taken from Vance, yet in your references you cite the original sources) and notes 11-15 on pp. 220-221 (where you again are merely quoting from Vance but your documentation cites the original sources). I'm convinced you have done this throughout the book, citing snippets of Calvin, Spurgeon, and Pink you have actually borrowed from sources critical of those authors, rather than carefully and thoroughly reading the Calvinist sources themselves. Why do I think so? In the first place, virtually all your quotations from Calvin and Spurgeon duplicate the very same references used by Vance, Fisk, Bryson, and others. In the second place, the twist you put on these out-of-context quotations shows little understanding of their original contexts. In the third place, you often repeat, in very similar words, the slant put on those quotations by the authors you have apparently borrowed from--and you invariably quote them with the same ellipses, spelling variations, etc. The most famous example of this, of course, is your embarrassing error about Spurgeon. I return to this because you have consistently denied the obvious point. Despite what you now say, you did not accuse Spurgeon of being self-contradictory; you claimed he "rejected limited atonement--and he did so in unequivocal language." I think you were simply parroting your actual source, Fisk, who wrote, "It is best to let Spurgeon speak for himself here. And that he did in strong words. . . ." (and then Fisk quotes the very same excerpt from Spurgeon that you cited). You go on several pages later to make the spurious claim that "limited atonement. . . was repugnant to Spurgeon" (not that he wavered or was ambivalent on the point). And then you erroneously state that "especially in his later years, Spurgeon often made statements which were in direct conflict with Calvinism" (p. 35). On page 122, you borrow yet another quotation about Spurgeon from Fisk. It is clear that your understanding of Spurgeon owes more to your reading of Fisk than to your reading of Spurgeon. The spin you have lately tried to put on these Spurgeon references is completely unconvincing. No one who seriously looks into the matter will be fooled by your claim that you merely meant to accuse Spurgeon of contradicting himself. You made unqualified claims about Spurgeon that were simply wrong. You said this, for example: "Certainly Spurgeon rejected [limited atonement] as heresy." (p. 241). That is a glaring error--a wholesale misrepresentation of Spurgeon's opinion. If you had simply read Spurgeon on the atonement carefully in context before publishing your book, there is no way you could have honestly made such a claim. (You are not even making such a claim now. Instead, you have switched to accusing Spurgeon of contradicting himself.) You ought to have the courage and the integrity to admit you were wrong about Spurgeon. As I demonstrated in my review of your book, Spurgeon's remarks on the sufficiency of Christ's atonement said precisely no more and no less than the Canons of the Synod of Dordt on that issue. Far from rejecting limited atonement as "heresy," Spurgeon always defended the classic Calvinist understanding of the atonement, because he believed only Calvinists hold consistently to the doctrine of substitutionary atonement. In the excerpt you cited, Spurgeon was teaching classic 5-point Calvinism against the hyper-Calvinists of his day. Where you have accused him of deviating from Calvinism, he was actually defending it! So your remarks reflected an egregious misunderstanding of both Spurgeon and Calvinism. The Spurgeon issue may be the most-publicized error related to your over-reliance on secondary sources, but it is by no means the only one. There are many similar errors in your book. As I said in my review, most of your quotations are selective and often misleading, usually divorced from their proper context or immediately reinterpreted by you in a pejorative sense and restated in your words rather than allowing the author to speak for himself. Thus you twist what the author actually said in order to make the point you want to make. You asked for proof of that allegation. Fair enough. Here are a couple of examples chosen at random (literally by flipping open your book and dealing with the first quotations my eyes happened to light upon): 1. On page 238, you have a subheading titled, "Honoring God's Love Is Heresy?" Then you write, "To the Calvinist, as Stanley Gower . . . declared, there is no greater heresy than the suggestion that 'God loveth all alike, Cain as well as Abel, Judas as the rest of the apostles." In the first place, Gower did not declare that "there is no greater heresy." (He did not even use the word heresy. That is your word.) Far from treating this notion as the one supreme heresy of heresies, Gower actually dealt with it as one of two errors upon which Arminianism is based ("two rotten pillars on which the fabric of Arminianism. . . doth principally stand"). And when he said it is one of the twin errors underlying Arminianism he was not saying that it is the greatest of all anti-Christian heresies. (If overstatements are so distasteful to you, you ought to do a better job of avoiding them in your own work.) In the second place, a reading of Gower's remarks in their context would have revealed that he was placing stress on the word alike. ("The one [rotten pillar] is, That God loveth all alike, Cain as well as Abel, [etc.]"--emphasis in original.) In other words, what he is attacking is not (as you suggest) the doctrine of God's love per se, but the error of thinking that God loves ("nay is bound, 'ex debito,'" to love) everyone equally. Gower was certainly not suggesting that it is "great heresy" to "honor God's love," nor did he in any way imply that it is "dishonoring to God to take at face value that verse familiar to every Sunday-school child." You were indulging in wanton caricature there, as you do throughout your book and your lectures. 2. On page 147, you quote Calvin and add an editorial remark. He wrote: "I feel pleased with the well-known saying which has been borrowed from the writings of Augustine, that man's natural gifts were corrupted by sin, and his supernatural gifts withdrawn . . ." You immediately add: "[In fact, man was never 'supernatural.]" Your bracketed statement was ostensibly intended to refute Calvin. But if you had examined his words in context and simply put back what was removed in the ellipsis, you would have known that Calvin was not claiming Adam himself was ever "supernatural." Calvin's very next words explain what he means: ". . . meaning by supernatural gifts the light of faith and righteousness, which would have been sufficient for the attainment of heavenly life and everlasting felicity" (emphasis added). If you want more examples of quotations you have mishandled, I'm sure I could go on. But there's no need to multiply examples. As I said both above and in my review, the reason you tend to miss the obvious in the contexts from which you quote is that too many of your quotations appear actually to have been gleaned from secondary sources like Vance, Fisk, Bryson, and other critics of Calvinism, then regurgitated by you without any real grasp of the authors' original meaning or the fuller context, which you would have seen if you had simply read the primary source with a modicum of care. You might claim it is just coincidence that you quoted so many of the same excerpts from Calvin and the Calvinists that are found in other popular books critical of Calvinism. But since you did study those anti-Calvinist works and wrote your own book only a few months after admitting that you had neither the time nor the inclination to study the Reformers' actual writings, I'll stand by my assessment that your view of Calvinism comes primarily from anti-Calvinist sources rather than from your own objective, careful, serious study of what Calvinists themselves have written. In light of your own admission that you are "very ignorant of the Reformers [and] have not had time to read them," I think my assessment is fair and reasonable, and I stand by it. The clear and irrefutable proof that you have misrepresented Calvinism is easily seen in the fact that not one Calvinist anywhere on earth (including and especially some of the men whom you have "cited") believes you have given a fair and dispassionate presentation of what they really believe. That ought to make you reexamine your work with at least as much energy as you have sought to defend it. At the very least, you ought to be willing to acknowledge when your theological adversaries explicitly disclaim the views you ascribe to them. But instead, you insist that your opponents believe what you say they believe, even when it flatly contradicts what they say--and in the case of MacArthur and Spurgeon, you have done so without even mentioning that they expressly deny the very views you have attributed to them. Here is precisely why your "scholarship" lacks integrity. Moreover, you play with words in order to justify such glaring inaccuracies and misrepresentations in your work. In one of your letters to me, you wrote, "In my talk in Riverside I did not say that John 'teaches that God doesn't love everyone.' You misquote me." I did not misquote you. The words I cited from you in my review were carefully transcribed from the videotape of your message. Here is a verbatim transcript of everything you said about John MacArthur in your Riverside message. Notice the immediate context: I often have to say, "Don't get angry with me if I quote someone. I didn't say it; they said it. And if they really meant it, then they would be happy I'm giving broader distribution to what they've said. For example, a good friend, John MacArthur, Jr., whom some of you would know. Ten years ago you wouldn't have known he was a Calvinist, but it comes out more, and more, and more. He wrote a book in 1996 called The Love of God. Basically, it tells you God doesn't love everybody. And his study Bible came out in 1997--it's a Calvinist treatise. So, in fact, you prefaced your remark by claiming that all you were doing was quoting. And then you told your audience that MacArthur's book "basically. . . tells you" precisely the opposite of what it actually says. There were no qualifying statements in your remarks, no acknowledgement that MacArthur says God loves all humanity, no indication that you were not really quoting MacArthur but merely summing up Dave Hunt's interpretation of what a Calvinist like John MacArthur ought to believe. You were not accusing him of being irrational or self- contradictory. You plainly and unequivocally said his book basically tells us that God doesn't love everyone. Taking your remarks in their immediate context, your listeners had every reason to assume you were actually quoting something MacArthur himself had said. But you weren't, and you knew it. You were putting your own spin on his position, claiming he holds a position antithetical to the position he actually teaches, deliberately misrepresenting him to your listeners. (By the way, it is not at all true that "ten years ago you wouldn't have known [MacArthur] was a Calvinist." Dave Hunt might not have known it, but it was plenty obvious to those of us who actually listened to him. His exposition of Ephesians 2 (which is what persuaded me of the truth of Calvinism) was preached in 1979. His series on election from 1 Peter--"Chosen for Eternity," was first aired on "Grace to You" in 1988. Chapter 1 of his 1988 book The Gospel According to Jesus summed up his stance in the lordship debate with a straightforward Calvinistic affirmation that salvation is a sovereign work of God. The whole argument of that book is overtly Calvinistic. MacArthur's Calvinism has never been a secret.) Your responses to me prove that your failure to be fair with the view you oppose is a willful refusal. You have admitted that you know Spurgeon and MacArthur explicitly repudiate the views you have attributed to them. But you doggedly defend your caricatures anyway. That approach to controversy does lack true scholarly integrity, and I make no apology for saying so and standing by that judgment. Since you demand meticulous objectivity from your critics, you cannot righteously cry foul when others point out how grossly you have distorted and misrepresented Calvinism. Your dismissal of your Calvinist critics as "elitists" is a convenient complaint that appeals to anti-intellectual and lazy-minded people. But for the record, I have never suggested that you are mentally incapable of understanding Calvinism (nor has that charge been made by anyone whose criticism of your work I have read). My complaint is that you refuse to understand. You are too eager to anathematize Calvinism to be bothered with listening carefully to what Calvinists actually teach. So I stand by the gist and the substance of my review: You have misconstrued Calvinism, just as you have misrepresented what John MacArthur and C. H. Spurgeon teach. Your work does lack scholarly integrity, and your well-documented refusal to acknowledge even obvious errors and misrepresentations in your book and lectures underscores this fact. I do not need to prolong what has apparently been a fruitless controversy by getting bogged down in a point-by-point response to eighteen pages of your latest letter and six pages of the letter before that. There is much I would like to reply to in your treatment of historical and doctrinal issues. (For example, despite what you claim, the Albigenses were heretical dualists, who borrowed from Manichaeism, teaching that Christ only seemed to have a body. They were strict ascetics. You are wrong to portray them as Bible-believing evangelicals, and you are also wrong to equate them with the Waldenses, who were indeed more doctrinally sound, but--ironically for you--were essentially Calvinistic.) But I frankly don't have the time or the desire to dispute with you over the smaller, peripheral points when you refuse to acknowledge your obvious errors on the larger, central issues. So I'll just urge you once again to look at the big issues in this debate, and deal with the major errors I and others have singled out for you, without burying the point in twenty pages of pettifoggery. Frankly, you could advance the debate quite a lot and go a long way toward redeeming your own credibility simply by acknowledging that mainstream Calvinists have always made a significant and careful distinction between Calvinism and hyper- Calvinism, and that your book basically attempted to blur or erase that distinction, rather than dealing with it. You're welcome to publish or distribute this letter as widely as you like, as long as you include the complete letter so that the full context of my remarks is clear to all who read. "May the Lord direct your heart into the love of God and into the steadfastness of Christ" (2 Thess. 3:5). Sincerely in Christ, Phil Johnson (e-mail: phil@gty.org) Executive Director PS: Jackie Alnor contacted me during my trip to Virginia and sent me a copy of a letter she says you sent John MacArthur several months ago. Neither John nor his office has any record of receiving that letter from you. If you or your office mailed it to John, it apparently went astray in the postal system. If you desire a reply from him, please resend the letter, and I am certain he will be glad to reply personally.