The Men Who Inspired...

If you want to know what we are trying to build here, look at the friendship between John MacArthur and R.C. Sproul.

The strength

MacArthur was a Baptist and a premillennialist. Sproul was a Presbyterian who baptized infants and held that the millennium began at Christ's first coming, not His second. Those are not small differences. In most of church history they have been enough to keep men in separate buildings, and in a good deal of the present they still are.

In 1997, at a Ligonier conference in Pasadena, the two of them stood up and argued it out in front of everyone. MacArthur preached believer's baptism. Sproul preached the historic paedobaptist position. Then they took questions together.

MacArthur later said the invitation terrified him and that he had never studied so hard for anything in his life.

After Sproul's death, MacArthur said the exchange had been vigorous, that his friend was as bold with him as he would have been with any opponent, and that their friendship "was not sabotaged but strengthened" by it.

Read that again. Not survived. Strengthened. The arguing was part of how they loved each other: iron sharpens iron (Proverbs 27:17).

The humility

There is something Sproul said about MacArthur more than once, in more than one setting, which is how you know he meant it rather than reached for it.

He said that if he ever disagreed with MacArthur about anything, large or small, and could go to the text and show him that his understanding was wrong, MacArthur would change his position on the spot — no matter what it cost him. Because what MacArthur wanted more than anything was to be faithful to the Word of God.

Then he added the part that stings: he had never met anyone more open to correction from Scripture than this man, because MacArthur would rather be accurate than have his ego massaged (Proverbs 9:8).

That is the highest compliment one teacher can pay another, and notice what it is a compliment about. Not eloquence. Not being right. The willingness to be shown wrong and to move (Proverbs 15:31).

And it was not a hypothetical. In 1999 MacArthur put out a public statement saying he had abandoned a view of Christ's Sonship he had taught for years, because careful study of the text had shown him it was wrong. In the same statement he said he had made many such revisions over the years — pulling his own tapes, and preaching passages again with a better understanding of them.

Sproul was not guessing about the man. He was describing what he had watched him do.

The levity

At one of their appearances together, MacArthur made the point that some truths are absolutely non-negotiable — that a man who denies the Trinity or the deity of Christ is simply false, whatever else he claims.

And then he said you can misunderstand baptism, or something like that — and slowly turned and looked at the Presbyterian sitting beside him, and the room exploded in laughter.

It was a needle aimed at a friend he had publicly debated, and it was funny because it was exactly true. It is the whole architecture of this site in one sentence: some errors put a man outside the faith, and some are held by brothers inside it. Everyone here has a brother or sister who is wrong about baptism. Some of you are going to marry one.

The fight

Half the lesson is that they disagreed and stayed friends. The other half gets left out, and it matters just as much.

After Sproul died, MacArthur wrote it down plainly: no nationally known Christian leader had ever been a better friend to him, and for decades, in every major theological controversy he was engaged in, Sproul stood by his side. Every one. When the gospel was being emptied from within, when evangelical leaders were making peace with Rome, when the sufficiency of Scripture was under assault, when Christ as the only way was being quietly abandoned — each time he took the field, the Presbyterian was already on it.

Count those fights. Faith alone. Grace alone. Scripture alone. Christ alone. And underneath all of them, he said, one unshakable shared conviction: the glory belongs to God alone. Five fights, five solas — the five words at the top of every page of this site. The battles they fought side by side were for the very things this place is named after.

They were friends because both of them were passionate about Christ and His Word, and that passion outran anything they held apart. When two people are truly in Christ, they can disagree, and disagree hard, and the relationship holds, because the thing that made them brothers was never the thing they were fighting about.

The door

People will look at our doctrinal statement — the affirmations, and then the list of errors rejected by name — and some will ask how the door can be that narrow. Others will ask how it can be that wide. It is both, and both come from the same two men.

Here is the honest answer. The door is drawn where those two men stood together, and the room is as wide as the ground where they differed.

Deny the Trinity or the deity of Christ, and MacArthur told you plainly what you are. Deny the inerrancy of Scripture and both of them spent years fighting you. Empty the gospel of grace and you are on the other side of the line they spent their lives defending together.

Disagree about baptism, the covenants, church government, the Lord's Day, or the millennium, and you are disagreeing about exactly what they disagreed about — publicly, at length, in front of thousands, for decades, without either of them ever once suggesting the other was not a Christian.

The sharpening

There is one more reason the room is this wide: God sharpens His people with the "one anothers."

Those two men sharpened each other, and MacArthur said so. It was Sproul, he said, who "opened up my life to the riches of Reformed theology" — a Presbyterian enriching a Baptist across the very line they debated. And at Sproul's memorial he went further and called himself a follower: "I follow him as the leader of this explosion of truth." Sproul, for his part, said he loved to hear MacArthur preach because it was plain the man had been in the text. Each made the other sharper and steadier by standing close enough to see him clearly.

And there was something to sharpen, because every camp inside this door was shaped by its own long fights, and each has its gaps. MacArthur, on a stage beside Sproul, said it of himself: "I know there are errors in my theology. I'm not under any illusions. I know that. And I said that one time and somebody said, 'Well, why don't you change them?' And my response was, 'I just don't know where they are. I know they're there, but I don't know where they are. If you show me where they are, I'll change them.'" That is every honest man's condition. The errors hardest to see are your own, and the men least able to see them are the ones who share them. Every camp has its blind spots, and a blind spot is precisely what no one can check for himself. A community drawn from one camp is not just smaller. It is missing the brothers most likely to catch what it missed.

Put men and women from different camps in one set of rooms, holding the same gospel, and the same thing can happen: the brother who can see your gap is the one who can help you close it, and vice versa.

The standard

When MacArthur spoke at Sproul's memorial, he did not call him a colleague or an ally. He called him his friend and his fellow soldier, and said plainly that there was a hole in his life where the man used to be.

Two men who disagreed about baptism, the covenants, how a church is governed, and how the world ends. One of them grieving the other as a brother.

So here is the standard. Hold yourself against it:

If those two could do it for decades, you can do it in a chat room.

You are going to meet people here who are wrong about things you consider important. Argue with them. Bring the texts. Be as bold as Sproul was, and be as willing to be corrected as he said MacArthur was — assume the errors are there, and want them to be found. Laugh with them, across the line, the way that room laughed. Stand beside them against the errors that are the enemy, and do not let arrogance or pride cost you a brother. And when the argument is over, stay friends, because you both hold the same gospel and the thing you were fighting about was never the gospel.

That is what this place is for: friendship across real differences, held by people who know where the line is. But that is the floor, not the ceiling. The hope is that the arguing goes somewhere — that one of you is shown from the text and moves, as Sproul said MacArthur would; that a man and a woman who start in different camps talk their way into the same one; that we leave these rooms in more unity than we entered them, because the truth prevailed and not because anyone stopped caring. Always reforming — that is what we hope to build here.

Those two showed it could be done. The rest of us have no excuse.