Category Archives: John Piper

The false glory of John Piper’s god

Posted by on January 16, 2012 23 comments

Recently I was asked (by Kait Dugan, check out her blog) about how John Piper (check out this video for some context), about whose perverse theology I’ve written about previously, manages to come to understand God’s glory as a sort of self-directed hegemonic tyranny. What are the theological moves that lead one to come to think “the glory of God” in terms of chauvinistic self-aggrandisement? Why would one come to conceive God as a self-directed center of power whose “glory” consisted of simply asserting and impose his own supremacy and domination?

My first instinct in responding to this question is to point out that it really isn’t as much of a formally (and that word is the key qualifier here) theological issue as it is fundamentally an issue of gender and power. Piper interprets God as a self-directed man, concerned ultimately which the maximization of his own power (which is of course “good” because this one particular male really is supreme and thus deserves and warrants this rigorous self-fixation). I think it really is just the upshot of thinking God according to the logic of patriarchy.

If there is a theological reason for it, I’d have to say that it is the functional (though not acknowledged or admitted) rejection of the doctrine of the Trinity. The doctrine of the Trinity speaks of a God that does not seek the maximization of any singular self or, but rather of a united yet multidirectional and primordially other-directed love. The God who is Triune never is concerned with “himself.” Rather “the Father loves the Son and has given all things into his hand” and the Son has come “not to my will but the will of him who sent me” and the Spirit “will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears.”

The Triune God is never concerned with the maximization of a “self” since God is not a self, but rather a singular reality of three identities (to borrow some language from Robert Jenson). No identity of the Trinity seeks their own, but always and only seeks the maximization of the other(s). Thus the Son offers up the kingdom to the Father and the Father places everything in subjection to the Son and so on. The glory of the Triune God is thus the glory of an othering that seeks only to empower, never to claim power for one’s own. Piper’s nontrinitarian theology of self-directed glory is the denial and opposite of this. Indeed the “glory” that he proclaims is nothing less than the projection onto God (at the expense of the witness of the Cross) of patriarchal, homicidal power, the power of sin and death. This is the “glory of God” that he so adores.

John Piper’s False God (3)

Posted by on August 24, 2009 47 comments

In answering some comments I came across some more crazy stuff from Piper on what he believes about his god and evil. Try this one on for size:

After the planes flew into the Twin Towers in New York, I was interviewed and people would ask me, “Where was God in this?” I said, “Well, God could have very easily blown those planes off course by a little puff of wind, and he didn’t do it. Therefore God was right there ordaining that this happen, because he could have stopped it just like that.” Everybody who believes in God should say that, because that is how powerful he is, as it was said of Jesus, “The winds obey him” (Matthew 8:27). And so just a simple wind by the command of Jesus would have blown those planes away and they would have crashed and 60 people would have died instead of thousands of people. But he didn’t do that. Why is it comforting to believe that?

The answer is because there are 10,000 orphans who wonder if they have a future. Will they have a future if God isn’t powerful for them? I’m coming to those families and I’m saying when they ask me, “Do you think God ordained the death of my daddy?” I say, “Yes. The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. But the very power by which God governs all evils enables him to govern your life. And he has total authority to turn this and every other evil in your life for your everlasting good. And that’s your only hope in this world and in the next. And therefore, if you sacrifice the sovereignty of God in order to get him off the hook in the death of your daddy, you sacrifice everything. You don’t want to go there.”

The sovereignty of God, while creating problems for his involvement in sin and evil, is the very rock-solid foundation that enables us to carry on in life. Where would we turn if we didn’t have a God to help us deal with the very evils that he has ordained come into our lives? So yes, absolutely, I believe in the sovereignty of God and I believe in its comforting effects.

Please take note: “Where would we turn if we didn’t have a God to help us deal with the very evils that he has ordained come into our lives?” Come again? If God wasn’t the one bringing down evil on us, who would we turn to for help? It doesn’t get crazier than that.

Piper’s god is a crazy sociopath, not the God and Father of Jesus Christ. I don’t feel like I’m making any sort of stretch in saying that.

John Piper’s False God (2)

Posted by on August 24, 2009 17 comments

As already noted, for John Piper evil, suffering, and death are all ultimately determined and decreed by his god as part of his own plan for self-glorification. For Piper this is inestimably a good thing. Because God is God it is good for God to seek to magnify himself in all things. And, moreover the presence of suffering and death in the world adds to God’s glory in that through these events God’s wrath and justice are manifested in the world. This is a crucial point. God’s wrath against sin must be displayed through the inflicting of punishment in order for God’s glory to be seen.

And, since this god has determined every specific event of suffering—all for the sake of his glory—it follows that all human suffering and death that takes place is willed by him and brings him greater glory. Thus, for Piper it is of the utmost importance that, rather than blaming his god or being angry with him in events of suffering and death we ought instead to rejoice in the fact that through these displays of his wrath against sin, Piper’s god is glorified.

As such, then I submit that on Piper’s view of god it is actually immoral for Christians to be angry about suffering and death in the world. In fact, it is absolutely essential that Christians be delighted about it because anything that contributes to his god’s glory is worthy of delight. Thus, Piper is supremely inconsistent in his constant opposition to abortion. Piper’s god requires aborted babies in order that god’s wrath against sinful human beings. Remember we are all born totally depraved; the fetuses deserve what they get! However, Piper is utterly inconsistent about this, in his constant opposition to abortion:

Abortion is a God issue, and I think the first way you see that is in Psalm  139 where it says “I am fearfully and wonderfully made” (verse 14). And the language that is used is that a baby is knit together in its mother’s womb. Well who’s the knitter? The knitter is not nature. The knitter is God, which means that what’s happening in a woman’s tummy is that God is at work. God is making a human being.

Now, you don’t mess with that. You just don’t get in God’s face and say, “Let me at it! I’m going to take it out! I’m going to chop it into pieces.” You don’t do that.

And you don’t do it for God’s sake. God gives, God takes away, God makes babies. We don’t make babies. We put the pieces together through sexual relations and God causes a being that never was and now is and always will be to come into being.

In complete contradiction of his whole doctrine of god, here Piper says that in committing abortions, human being interfere with and circumvent his god’s own work, getting in the way of his god’s attempts at creating life. But how is this possible, since Piper’s god is ultimately in control of everything and, in fact, actively determines all events of human death and suffering for the sake of divine self-glorification?

The point of all of this is to again underscore how deeply demonic Piper’s  god is. Piper’s god loves to see people suffer and die because it glorifies him. Piper’s god needs and desires aborted babies. If Piper or his followers were to be consistent in their attempts to follow this god, they would praise him for every baby that is aborted. If they truly delighted in this god’s glory, they would sing songs of praise whenever a baby was aborted, whenever a bomb fell on a random home, whenever an orphan was denied care. All of these events of suffering and death glorify their god—they should love them.

The fact that Piper cannot be consistent with his view of god is just another sure sign of the false and demonic nature of the theology he espouses. And it constitutes yet one more reason why the false god of Piper should be abandoned in favor of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who in the Spirit comes to us “to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners.” (Isa 61:1)

John Piper’s Latest Statement

Posted by on August 21, 2009 35 comments

"In a controversial sermon yesterday, John Piper argued that gay men would be cured if they could only experience the joy of squeezing a good pair of breasts."

Credit for this one-liner goes to Ben Myers. You funny, funny Aussie.

More on the tornado God didn’t send against the gays

Posted by on August 21, 2009 10 comments

Greg Boyd has a good and even-handed rebuttal to John Piper’s raving comments about how God sent a tornado to warn the Lutherans not to accept gay clergy. Boyd should be respected for taking this kind of measured and rational tone with something as ludicrous as Piper’s claims. I’m sure I could take some sort of lesson from him. . .

Here’s just one of his points:

One has to wonder why God would single out the ELCA’s discussion of homosexuality as worthy of a tornado hit while by-passing so many other serious issues. To give one example, there are over 400 distinct passages encompassing over 3,000 verses in the Bible that address issues related to poverty. Compare this with homosexuality, a topic that is explicitly mentioned a total of two times in the Old Testament and three times in the New. On top of this, the most frequently mentioned reason God judged cities and nations in the Old Testament was because they failed to care for the needy. And, finally, if there’s any sin American churches fail to seriously confront, it’s this one.

In light of this, wouldn’t you assume that if God was going to send warnings and/or inflict punishment with tornados he’d strike some of the many American churches and denominations that condone, if not Christianize, greed and apathy toward the poor? Yet John would have us believe that God had his tornado skip past these churches (and a million other punishment-worthy locations, like child sex-slave houses) in order to damage the steeple of a church because the people inside were wrestling with issues related to homosexuality. If John is right, God’s priorities must have radically changed since biblical times.

John Piper’s False God (1)

Posted by on August 21, 2009 30 comments

In light of some of the requests that surfaced in my last post on the danger that John Piper poses to the church and its mission, I’ll be posting, over the next little while a few reflections on precisely how his theology is dangerous and false. First off, one of the central issues arising from John Piper’s doctrine of God, which he gets from Jonathan Edwards, is the claim that God requires sin and evil in order for God to be fully manifest and glorified. Without sin and evil, God’s glory would be veiled and incomplete. In his famous book, Desiring God, Piper approvingly quotes the following segment from Jonathan Edwards’s Concerning the Divine Decrees:

It is a proper and excellent thing for infinite glory to shine forth; and for the same reason, it is proper that the shining forth of God’s glory should be complete; that is, that all parts of his glory should shine forth, that every beauty should be proportionably effulgent, that the beholder may have a proper notion of God. It is not proper that one glory should be exceedingly manifested, and another not at all.…

Thus it is necessary, that God’s awful majesty, his authority and dreadful greatness, justice, and holiness, should be manifested. But this could not be, unless sin and punishment had been decreed; so that the shining forth of God’s glory would be very imperfect, both because these parts of divine glory would not shine forth as the others do, and also the glory of his goodness, love, and holiness would be faint without them; nay, they could scarcely shine forth at all. If it were not right that God should decree and permit and punish sin, there could be no manifestation of God’s holiness in hatred of sin, or in showing any preference, in his providence, of godliness before it.

There would be no manifestation of God’s grace or true goodness, if there was no sin to be pardoned, no misery to be saved from. How much happiness soever he bestowed, his goodness would not be so much prized and admired.…

So evil is necessary, in order to the highest happiness of the creature, and the completeness of that communication of God, for which he made the world; because the creature’s happiness consists in the knowledge of God, and the sense of his love. And if the knowledge of him be imperfect, the happiness of the creature must be proportionably imperfect. (Concerning the Divine Decrees, 528, emphasis added. On page 350 of Desiring God)

Piper follows this quote up with his own hearty approval: “God is more glorious for having conceived and created and governed a world like this with all its evil” (p. 351). Think on this quite carefully. For Piper God’s glory would be incomplete without all of horrors that have taken place in the history of the world. Every instance of death, suffering, murder, rape, torture, and mutilation—God needs them. God wants them to happen because without them, he would not be fully glorified. And God’s own (monadicly conceived) self-glorification, for Piper God’s sole and utter goal in the world.

Obviously this theology is deeply incoherent and does not square with Scripture, or the church’s traditional teaching concerning evil (for Augustine and most of the church after him evil is privation, not something that could “add” to the display of God’s glory). But what is worst about it is its pastoral and ethical consequences. A God who needs evil to be himself will surely garner a people who have no interest in stopping evil or comforting those who suffer. Indeed, as the Scripture explicitly tell us to imitate God (Eph 5:1), this theology implicitly encourages Christians to perpetrate violence and suffering against those who are seen to deserve it (whether or not Piper would endorse this is not the issue—his theology logically demands this conclusion whether he admits it or not).

As such, it is vital for us to see and recognize that the God proclaimed by Piper and his ilk is a false God. An idol that desperately needs to be dethroned. The omnipotent demon that Piper worships is not the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ and the sooner all Christians realize this the better off we will all be.

Why John Piper is Dangerous

Posted by on August 20, 2009 171 comments

A while back a commenter asked me to do some sort of incendiary write up about John Piper like I’ve done a few times about Mark Driscoll. One would think that it would be much harder to write such a critique of Piper because he is far more personable and, by all appearances, charitable. Driscoll is a rapacious frat boy who can’t stop flapping his trap. Piper is a pastor. It’s a good deal easier to see the absurdity of Dirscoll’s theological and social views when he preens about how often he gets oral sex from his wife and hosts mixed martial arts fights that supposedly tell real Christian men how to be. He’s patently ridiculous in almost every way. Its all theatrics and megalomania. With Piper however everything is different. Piper is measured, sensitive in speaking, and by all appearances, fairly humble. He’s far, far more palatable, personally and pastorally than Driscoll.

However, this is precisely why John Piper is far more dangerous than Driscoll. Piper’s pastoral manner renders him far more subtle, more believable, more seductive. Whatever else I may say about Driscoll at least he lives the absurdity of his theology out to nth. Piper however is able to project calm compassion and thoughtfulness onto his preaching and teaching in a way that many find appealing who woudl be immediately put off by Driscoll. This is why Piper can get away with saying the most utterly insane things. Like his recent claim that the tornado touchdown that hit a Lutheran church in Minneapolis was God’s judgment and warning to the denomination to stop their proposed initiative to allow gay clergy.

If someone like Driscoll or other more obviously crazy evangelicals like Pat Robertson were to say something like this they’d immediately be called on it (remember Falwell’s whole thing about how the gays, lesbians, and secularists made God bring about 9/11?). But Piper’s defenders flock to him when he proclaims this sort of insanity. And its all because of the image he projects of being the sensitive, strong, measured, and humble pastor.

Driscoll is an obvious yapping wolfling. Piper is the quintessential wolf in very authentic-looking sheep’s clothing.

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