Last Night on Larry King

(Posted by Nathan Busenitz of Pulpit Magazine)

In case you missed last night’s Larry King Live episode (in which John MacArthur participated as part of a panel discussion toward the end of the show), you can read the transcript here.
Below are a couple highlights:

* * * *
KING: You’re definitely a fundamentalist Christian.

MACARTHUR: Yes, in the positive sense of proclaiming the fundamental truths of the Scripture.

KING: Is there a danger in some aspects of fundamental Christianity?

MACARTHUR: No, I don’t think there’s any danger in it. I think there’s a danger in the prostitution of Christianity. Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world.”
Jesus said to Peter, “Put away your sword.”
There’s nothing in Christianity that calls for any kind of dominant power, national power, government power, takeover, war, none at all. This is about a personal relationship with God through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.

KING: But so many of the fundamentalist Christians are what might be called political hawks, aren’t they?

MACARTHUR: They are. And that is not, in my judgment, a true representation of biblical Christianity.

* * * *
MACARTHUR: . . . the [political] power will never belong to me [or to] those who represent true biblical Christianity because the Kingdom advances one soul at a time through the belief in the Gospel in Jesus Christ. Anything [else] is a prostitution. Look, the New Testament says the powers that be are ordained of God. That was the word of God to people living under Roman government, under a Caesar. Don’t overthrow that power. That’s what God has put in place. We work within that to advance the Kingdom one person at a time.

KING: Barry?

[BARRY] LYNN: See, I would disagree with that. That is a literal belief. Many of us do not have a literal belief in the words of the — not God written and produced but man written and produced Holy Bible for Christians.

MACARTHUR: Well, there’s the huge divergence right there.

LYNN: That’s a huge difference. It is a huge divergence, but it’s one of the things that makes the Christian community and many of the other communities we’re talking about here very diverse and very different.

MACARTHUR: Barry, if you don’t believe the words of the Bible, then you can’t be legitimately called a Christian because that’s all the Christianity there is, [it] is what is revealed in the word of God, not the Christianity you can invent outside of the meaning of Scripture.