Ashamed of the Gospel (3rd Edition) - John MacArthur
Published in association with the literary agency of Wolgemuth and Associates, Inc.
CONTENTS
I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I first broached the idea of this book to Lane Dennis and Crossway sometime in late 1992. Lane’s enthusiasm for the project was immediate and profound. With his encouragement, we shifted into high gear, compiling and editing the first edition within three months after getting the go-ahead from Crossway.
2010 EDITION
What marvel if, under some men’s shifty talk, people grow into love of both truth and falsehood! People will say, We like this form of doctrine, and we like the other also. The fact is, they would like anything if only a clever deceiver would put it plausi bly before them.
THE END OF THE COLD WAR
A major turning point had occurred on November 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell literally overnight, signaling the failure of European Communism.
THE DAWN OF THE INTERNET AGE
The World Wide Web had quietly been implemented less than a year after the Soviet Union broke up. Still, by 1993, when this book’s first edition hit the shelves, no one but the earliest Internet insiders had even heard about the Web—much less seen it.
POSTMODERNISM: QUESTION EVERYTHING
I have examined and critiqued postmodernism elsewhere. ³ It should be sufficient for our purposes in this context to summarize the postmodern mind-set by describing it as dubiousness about practically everything.
Who did MacArthur quote in his book on Grace?
In his chapter on grace, MacArthur quotes Dietrich Bonhoeffer ’s "diatribe" (MacArthur’s word) against cheap grace in which he attacks intellectual assent. Bonhoeffer was no fundamentalist; in fact he was quite liberal.
What are some examples of MacArthur's work?
MacArthur offers three examples – the rich young ruler, Judas, and those condemned by Christ at the last judgment – in support of his argument that works are a part of faith. The fact that he does so indicates that he completely misunderstands those portions of Scripture.
Is John MacArthur a dispensationalist?
John MacAr thur is himself a dispensationalist: "Dispensationalism is a fundamentally correct system of understanding God’s program through the ages.... I consider myself a traditional premillennial dispensationalist" (25). This leads him into saying that Christ’s Earthly reign was "postponed" because of the unbelief of the Jews: "When the Israelites rejected their Messiah’s rule, they forfeited that permanent earthly dimension of the kingdom not only for their generation but for generations to follow. The earthly reign of Christ was postponed until a time yet future...."(118).