I have had excursions over to Pyromaniacs blog that average about once per year, and in every case at the behest of a reader who wanted me to weigh in on something going on over there. The latest news was no exception. Phil Johnson, the author of the blog and a John MacArthur crony posted his farewell essay yesterday. He also announced that the two remaining contributing authors, Frank Turk and Dan Phillips, will continue to maintain the blog. Phillips is the: The Father and the Holy Spirit are important too conscience of the blog. And Frank Turk? Let me share what a jewel he is: before he banned me from the blog, I was informed that I was not qualified to comment on John Piper’s theology unless I had read everything Piper had ever written (i.e., 600 books on joy). He also made a comment that went something like this: “To know Piper is to understand Piper.”  Johnson mentioned that the blog was started seven years ago which means I might have been there five times before I was banned from their online Geneva.

No big deal according to Johnson who states in the farewell post that Phillips and Turk are better bloggers than him anyway. This is because for the most part, Johnson primarily regurgitated Charles Spurgeon, who mostly regurgitated the murdering mystic despot John Calvin. In Calvin’s Geneva, people were imprisoned for falling asleep in church and at least one young girl was beheaded for striking her parents. Calvin was directly responsible for the execution of two men who disagreed with him theologically. One individual had his tongue pierced with a hot iron for calling Calvin a hypocrite. Apparently, in Calvin’s case, a tree isn’t known by its fruit because to know Calvin is to understand Calvin.  Moreover, Calvin quotes St. (as in Catholic saint) Augustine more than 400 times in the institutes (which has about 900 pages total).

Johnson also stated that, “I started blogging 7 years ago because I was concerned about the drift of postmodern evangelicalism and the Emerging Church Movement.”  This is also indicative of Johnson’s clueless perspective as the Neo-Calvinist movement that he is a part of is barely any different theologically from the emergent church (http://goo.gl/W6TbA).

Johnson is making a choice to step away from blogging; a choice not afforded me and many others because of all the other spiritual tyrants like him left in the blogosphere. Many of them like “elder” Chad Bresson, said farewell to Johnson in the comment section of the post:

Thanks for the valuable time you gave us. We’re the better for it.

And that’s the problem. The likes of Johnson make other spiritual tyrants “better.” And you wouldn’t think Bresson would need to be any better at tyranny as his ministry at Clearcreek Chapel in Springboro, Ohio has left a mass of human carnage in its wake.

I am not happy to see Johnson go because he says to do so will give him more time. More time to make spiritual tyrants the very best that they can be.

paul