The Rev. John MacArthur, a theologically uncompromising pastor in Southern California who influenced generations of evangelical preachers and became a culture warrior late in life, died on Monday in Santa Clarita, Calif. He was 86.
His death was announced by Phil Johnson, who headed up Mr. MacArthur’s media ministry and edited many of his books. Mr. MacArthur had several operations on his heart and lungs over the years, and he had been hospitalized this month after contracting pneumonia.
Mr. MacArthur, a theological conservative and natural polemicist, preached from the same pulpit at Grace Community Church in the Los Angeles area — often at length, up to five times a week — for almost his entire career. When he was preaching, he always wore a suit and tie, eschewing the casual style of many evangelical pastors.
His church’s growth defied conventional wisdom about “seeker-sensitivity,” a model that emphasized appealing to non-churchgoers. Mr. MacArthur eschewed a more accessible evangelical preaching style that favored ostensibly real-life anecdotes and practical applications. His dogged emphasis on expository preaching — narrowly focused on the meaning and historical context of a particular piece of scripture — influenced thousands of conservative Protestant pastors who studied at the seminary he led, or simply listened to his sermons on the radio or online.
“Evangelicalism is a pulpit-driven movement, and John has driven the most influential pulpit in evangelical Christianity for more than a half a century,” R. Albert Mohler Jr., the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, in Louisville, Ky., said in an interview earlier this year.
In recent years, Mr. MacArthur increasingly waded into political and cultural skirmishes. He denounced critical race theory and became a leading Christian critic of “wokeness.” After his church closed for several months at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, it defied state public health orders and began holding indoor in-person services. The church later received an $800,000 settlement from the state and Los Angeles County, after suing on the grounds that the restrictions impinged on religious freedom.
In August 2020, Mr. MacArthur told an interviewer for a podcast associated with Liberty University that President Trump had called him to thank him for “taking a stand” on church closures. The two men discussed why “Christians could not vote Democratic,” Mr. MacArthur said. “There’s no way that a Christian could affirm the slaughter of babies, homosexual activity, homosexual marriage or any kind of gross immorality.”
Mr. MacArthur didn’t just clash with secular authorities and liberal politicians. More often, he took on perceived enemies within Christianity. He preached on the errors of Roman Catholicism and published multiple books on the dangers of charismatic theology and the prosperity gospel — strains of Protestantism that emphasize miraculous healing and promises of wealth, and that flourished over the course of his lifetime. He attacked popular evangelical figures like the Bible teacher Beth Moore and various pastors, including the televangelists Robert Schuller and Joel Osteen, always citing specific Bible verses in his critiques.
His interest in threats to Christianity from within was evident early on: He wrote his graduate thesis on Judas Iscariot, the apostle who betrayed Jesus in the Gospels’ account.
Mr. MacArthur’s preaching style was deceptively simple. He would speak for about 45 minutes, walking his congregation line by line through a single Bible passage. He also produced a popular study Bible and a 33-volume set of New Testament commentaries, among many other books.
His critics said that he misled listeners by insisting that even the thorniest passages in the New Testament had a single clear, true meaning. To his supporters, this was exactly the point. Unlike liberal pastors and academics, Mr. MacArthur believed that “there’s a historical, grammatical, literal sense to the text that can be derived through study,” said Austin Duncan, the director of the MacArthur Center for Expository Preaching at the Master’s Seminary in Sun Valley, Calif., which Mr. MacArthur had founded in 1986. “It isn’t a subjective thing, it’s an objective reality.”
In 1985, Mr. MacArthur became president of the former Los Angeles Baptist College, now known as the Master’s University. He opened the Master’s Seminary soon afterward to train men — and only men — to become pastors.
Unlike many pastors who ascend to a national platform, Mr. MacArthur never gave up his local role: He was the head pastor at Grace Community Church for more than 56 years. An online archive of his sermons includes more than 3,000 recordings. For years, he preached the same sermon three times on Sunday morning, a different sermon that night and another on Wednesday evening.
But his sermons found a much larger audience beyond his local congregation, distributed first on cassette tapes and on the radio, and then through his media ministry Grace to You. The ministry’s slogan was “Unleashing God’s Truth, One Verse at a Time.” .
Known in many evangelical circles as simply “JMac,” he had a preaching approach that translated well overseas, where it required little cultural interpretation. His books have been translated into at least 40 languages. And even his older sermons have not aged as noticeably as more recent ones from other pastors, who make frequent reference to pop culture or newspaper headlines.
Mr. MacArthur “inspired thousands of pastors to believe that explaining what the Bible means honors God, saves people and is just plain interesting,” John Piper, a retired pastor and popular theologian in Minnesota who was a longtime friend, said in an email. “To this day, from Dallas to Dubai, young people (especially men) come up to me and say that they listen to John MacArthur.”
John Fullerton MacArthur Jr. was born on June 19, 1939. He was the eldest child of Jack MacArthur, a Baptist pastor, and Irene (Dockendorf) MacArthur, who managed the home. The family lived briefly in Philadelphia and Chicago during his childhood, but he was raised primarily in Southern California, where he would spend the rest of his life.
He was an athletic, mischievous child, but he always believed in God. He could not pinpoint a particular moment of Christian conversion.
“I was one of those kids that never rebelled and always believed,” he said in a 2004 interview.
He spent a few years at the fundamentalist Bob Jones University, following his father’s prodding, and then transferred to Los Angeles Pacific College to play football and other sports.
Mr. MacArthur was a fifth-generation preacher. His grandfather, Harry MacArthur, had a live weekly radio and television program in the 1940s, “The Voice of Calvary.” His father eventually took it over, and Mr. MacArthur began preaching occasionally on Sunday evenings.
He married Patricia Sue Smith, whom he met at his father’s church, in 1963. She survives him, as do their four children, Matthew, Marcy Gwinn, Mark, and Melinda Welch; two sisters, Jeanette DeAngelis and Jane Walker; 15 grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren. Another sister, Julie Noll, died in 1997.
Mr. MacArthur earned a Master of Divinity degree in 1964 at Talbot Theological Seminary at Biola University, an evangelical institution he chose because he wanted to study under its dean, Charles Lee Feinberg, a prominent biblical scholar who had converted to Christianity from Judaism.
Grace Community Church hired him soon after, in part because of his youth, Mr. MacArthur said later. The church grew quickly under his leadership. Early on, a church member with an interest in technology began recording Mr. MacArthur’s sermons for homebound members, making him a pioneer in remote church.
He arrived at Grace Community Church in February of 1969. On his first Sunday, the 29-year-old preached to his new congregation on three verses from the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew. In the passage, Jesus says that not everyone who professes faith will enter the kingdom of heaven. Most American church members, Mr. MacArthur told his congregants, were likewise “dead spiritually.”
Mr. MacArthur intended to nurture Grace as a living church, which to him meant one that boldly proclaimed the truth, no matter if it led to conflict.
“The church must be the conscience of the world,” he said. “The church must be so well defined that it becomes the antagonist of the world.”
Ruth Graham is a national reporter, based in Dallas, covering religion, faith and values for The Times.
The post John MacArthur, Firebrand Preacher and Culture Warrior, Dies at 86 appeared first on New York Times.
