Thank you for your comment! I appreciate how our language around mental illness continues to expand and help us go deeper in our understanding. I have certainly seen how more knowledge of what’s occurring in my brain impacts the way my body responds.
Amen! I have OCD with intrusive thoughts as well (including harm related like yours) and when I saw the comments of this man circling around Substack I was livid. You respond so well! And I love the Jacob metaphor, going to keep that one in my back pocket on the tough days. Like you, my struggles with OCD have done a lot to mature and deepen my relationship with God, even if that process was a painful one. That’s the cross for you, and that’s the cross he chose for me. And one of the clearest places I’ve ever seen his work in my life is in how he lead me to receive the help I needed from the best possible therapist to serve my unique needs
I have PTSD, and ADHD that combined with ASD presented a lot like OCD in my formative years. I still have BFRBs and other habits that I'll likely never break, have had open wounds that stay open for years.
He definitely stuck his foot in his mouth, but I can't help but recall many sermons I whole-heartedly agreed with, through my own discernment + trust in the Spirit. I think it's a bit much to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Granted, I haven't listened to him in many years, and most of the sermons I heard were from the 90s.
So, he's a human who has affronted, offended, and disappointed you in this fairly grave error. Still, consider his age, the society he grew up in - a society where everyone with such mental disorders had to steel through and didn't know there definitely was something wrong with them. He probably saw quite a few struggle, and they survived. Probably forgot why the ones that didn't, didn't - or never understood. He's probably presuming something lke God has the power to heal you, perhaps forgetting that this life is a learning grounds where he may allow us to endure hardships. Still, I find myself shocked, like you say - in all his years of grief counselling, shouldn't he have a more nuanced awareness of people?
In the end, God IS bigger. Who knows why he didn't heal you or me the way we wanted. I've begged for decades to be saved from myself, not just my disorders. Yet I keep making the same mistakes. I don't want to sin, yet I do what I do not want to do - why wouldn't he change my heart to stop the sin now, rather than later? I can only hope it's that life feels like a slow process to me and there is a purpose. Not machines, willing agents who choose to cooperate.
Even in completely erroneous statements, you can glean some truth from it's inversion - and I don't think McArthur is intending full malice here, just full ignorance. Hanlon's razor. I don't know about his recent stuff, but there's a lot of old sermons that remain good expositions of sound doctrine worth listening to. That's the baby.
P.S. Came from your Hi Ren reaction, it was touching and I appreciated your thoughts.
Hi Grayson! Glad to have you here :). Rosalie will be happy to know her audience is connecting with mine, as am I! You’re right; MacArthur did have some sound teaching in earlier years of his ministry, but like many of his generation is struggling to find connection with his younger congregants because of an inability—or refusal?—to reconsider his own views in light of new scientific evidence, etc. I don’t believe he held any malice in his comments, but his ignorance is dangerous and that, more than anything, was the reason for my post.
Understandable! I wholly agreed with it, admittedly I commented before I finished reading, but found that you already explored nuances I wanted to speak towards. Very well spoken, I believe I recognized the Spirit's guidance in your writing, I really enjoyed it. I understand the shock factor of the title to communicate in only a few words, but I had to moderate it a little, personally at least.
Being relatively young myself, 29, I just suppose getting old is harder than I can imagine to stay flexible - I try to understand even when the other doesn't. It is good to never just trust in a man blindly though - I like MacArthur, but is the MacArthur out there even similar enough to the MacArthur I've conjured up and am defending? After all, despite what I said; you see many men with flexible minds well into old age. Usually it's for a life long habit of engaging in critical thinking instead of militant inflexibility. (which for example, is correlated with diseases like alzheimer's...)
I suspect, the trust we have in science - it's a dangerous thing he's paranoid of being an idol. Maybe it's too much for his aging mind to test so he must presume it evil. I wonder about how cleanly we can actually delineate inability and refusal in this case. Perhaps he refuses because he is unable to integrate in a way that doesn't shake his theological foundation? Perhaps he struggles to recognize Christians can accept the scientific process without assuming all it's hypotheses, that we can think for ourselves and ask the Spirit for guidance.
No excuse though, it just really is shocking to me he would say such a thing based on what I thought I knew about him. I agree that it's very dangerous and cruel. I believe our God is a God of such order he can create it through a chaotic universe, that logic only works because he invented logic, that we can only stand to reason or leap from scientific stepping stone to stepping stone because he placed these things close enough together for mere human cognition to be able to bridge. I believe he gave us these capacities to use them to aid in sharing the gospel with all kinds of people with all kinds of struggles and beliefs.
Thank you for your comment! I appreciate how our language around mental illness continues to expand and help us go deeper in our understanding. I have certainly seen how more knowledge of what’s occurring in my brain impacts the way my body responds.
I want to give you a standing ovation. 💕
Thank you, friend ❤️.
Amen! I have OCD with intrusive thoughts as well (including harm related like yours) and when I saw the comments of this man circling around Substack I was livid. You respond so well! And I love the Jacob metaphor, going to keep that one in my back pocket on the tough days. Like you, my struggles with OCD have done a lot to mature and deepen my relationship with God, even if that process was a painful one. That’s the cross for you, and that’s the cross he chose for me. And one of the clearest places I’ve ever seen his work in my life is in how he lead me to receive the help I needed from the best possible therapist to serve my unique needs
Yes! He has worked glory through medicine, therapy, and people. I’m so glad you’ve been able to experience this, too.
I am standing with Audria in the ovation!!
Thanks, Trisha!
👏👏👏
I didn’t need to read past the headline to heart this.
Lol that made me chuckle.
I have PTSD, and ADHD that combined with ASD presented a lot like OCD in my formative years. I still have BFRBs and other habits that I'll likely never break, have had open wounds that stay open for years.
He definitely stuck his foot in his mouth, but I can't help but recall many sermons I whole-heartedly agreed with, through my own discernment + trust in the Spirit. I think it's a bit much to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Granted, I haven't listened to him in many years, and most of the sermons I heard were from the 90s.
So, he's a human who has affronted, offended, and disappointed you in this fairly grave error. Still, consider his age, the society he grew up in - a society where everyone with such mental disorders had to steel through and didn't know there definitely was something wrong with them. He probably saw quite a few struggle, and they survived. Probably forgot why the ones that didn't, didn't - or never understood. He's probably presuming something lke God has the power to heal you, perhaps forgetting that this life is a learning grounds where he may allow us to endure hardships. Still, I find myself shocked, like you say - in all his years of grief counselling, shouldn't he have a more nuanced awareness of people?
In the end, God IS bigger. Who knows why he didn't heal you or me the way we wanted. I've begged for decades to be saved from myself, not just my disorders. Yet I keep making the same mistakes. I don't want to sin, yet I do what I do not want to do - why wouldn't he change my heart to stop the sin now, rather than later? I can only hope it's that life feels like a slow process to me and there is a purpose. Not machines, willing agents who choose to cooperate.
Even in completely erroneous statements, you can glean some truth from it's inversion - and I don't think McArthur is intending full malice here, just full ignorance. Hanlon's razor. I don't know about his recent stuff, but there's a lot of old sermons that remain good expositions of sound doctrine worth listening to. That's the baby.
P.S. Came from your Hi Ren reaction, it was touching and I appreciated your thoughts.
Hi Grayson! Glad to have you here :). Rosalie will be happy to know her audience is connecting with mine, as am I! You’re right; MacArthur did have some sound teaching in earlier years of his ministry, but like many of his generation is struggling to find connection with his younger congregants because of an inability—or refusal?—to reconsider his own views in light of new scientific evidence, etc. I don’t believe he held any malice in his comments, but his ignorance is dangerous and that, more than anything, was the reason for my post.
Understandable! I wholly agreed with it, admittedly I commented before I finished reading, but found that you already explored nuances I wanted to speak towards. Very well spoken, I believe I recognized the Spirit's guidance in your writing, I really enjoyed it. I understand the shock factor of the title to communicate in only a few words, but I had to moderate it a little, personally at least.
Being relatively young myself, 29, I just suppose getting old is harder than I can imagine to stay flexible - I try to understand even when the other doesn't. It is good to never just trust in a man blindly though - I like MacArthur, but is the MacArthur out there even similar enough to the MacArthur I've conjured up and am defending? After all, despite what I said; you see many men with flexible minds well into old age. Usually it's for a life long habit of engaging in critical thinking instead of militant inflexibility. (which for example, is correlated with diseases like alzheimer's...)
I suspect, the trust we have in science - it's a dangerous thing he's paranoid of being an idol. Maybe it's too much for his aging mind to test so he must presume it evil. I wonder about how cleanly we can actually delineate inability and refusal in this case. Perhaps he refuses because he is unable to integrate in a way that doesn't shake his theological foundation? Perhaps he struggles to recognize Christians can accept the scientific process without assuming all it's hypotheses, that we can think for ourselves and ask the Spirit for guidance.
No excuse though, it just really is shocking to me he would say such a thing based on what I thought I knew about him. I agree that it's very dangerous and cruel. I believe our God is a God of such order he can create it through a chaotic universe, that logic only works because he invented logic, that we can only stand to reason or leap from scientific stepping stone to stepping stone because he placed these things close enough together for mere human cognition to be able to bridge. I believe he gave us these capacities to use them to aid in sharing the gospel with all kinds of people with all kinds of struggles and beliefs.