THE TRUTH WAR

Title: THE TRUTH WAR Author JOHN MACARTHURPublisher THOMAS NELSONISBN 0-7852-8895-4

Subtitled “Fighting for Truth in an Age of Deception” here is a book from a man of experience as a teaching minister in the American church.  He is in his early seventies, and greatly disturbed by the trends and directions the evangelical churches in the United States and throughout the world are taking.  I would rather listen to a man of his years than the fifty year old teachers rising to prominence and the thirty something year olds seeking to be ‘cool’ and make the truth of God palatable to what is popularly known as the postmodern age.  This book is based around the Epistle of Jude and in particular verses three and four in which Jude specifically writes of the need to contend for the faith once and for all delivered to the saints.  He continues by acknowledging that this was necessary because certain people had crept in unawares and were propagating deviations from the truth of God that were perversions of various kinds.  I doubt that John Macarthur’s book will do much to convince those already committed to some of the trends present in the churches today but it will serve as a helpful warning to those flirting with the attractiveness of the arguments that prevail in this post modern age.  Those dipping into the writings of Don Miller, Brian Maclaren and drawn to some of their ideas would do well to read this book as balance.  The tone is irenic but clear, exposing the way the Emergent Church leaders are mirroring the trends of the post modern world rather than the apostolic doctrine, the magnifying of tolerance at the expense of truth, the removal of absolutes and the tendency to tone down any clear statements as to what constitutes immorality. The toying with attempting a marriage of ideas and so called ‘truths’ that make the message of the gospel of Jesus Christ attractive to post moderns without the need for deep change.  MacArthur handles things well in his critique, his style is readable and he makes the contemporary situation in the days in which Jude wrote extremely relevant to the scene today.  There are also distinct parallels in the way certain heresies concerning the Person of Christ emerged later in early church history and it became necessary to contend for the faith such errors are present though somewhat hidden in some teachers claiming to be evangelical today.  The repetitiveness of certain tendencies to entertain teachers of subtle and sometimes overt error throughout church history is very salutary and serves as a grave warning to us.  Of course, those who are mentioned by name as moving on the edges of the true gospel of Jesus Christ as opposed to its center will regard MacArthur as a dinosaur and pay little heed, but he has done a good job, a scriptural one, one drawing on church history and one that has the weight of truth behind it. 

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