Appendix E: The Phil Johnson Exchange

Context

In January 2005, Phil Johnson, executive director of Grace to You and the right-hand man of John MacArthur, published a series of articles on his blog identifying what he called “hyper-Calvinism.” He created a public list of websites he considered to represent the worst of this tendency.

Pristine Grace was on the list.

Johnson wrote that pristinegrace.org was “hyper-Calvinism of the most virulent kind” and that the site was “doing more to befoul and degrade the doctrines of grace than practically any other Web site” he had seen. He described me as “naturally drawn to radical ideas.”

He wrote all of this without ever contacting me. Without a phone call. Without an email. Without a single conversation.

The Response

I was twenty-nine years old. I had no seminary degree. I had no denominational backing. I had a website I built myself, a set of convictions I had built from Scripture, and a framework I had been developing with Bob Higby for several years.

I sat down and wrote a point-by-point response titled “Hyper-Calvinism is the Truth!” (pristinegrace.org). The response was civil, thorough, and direct. It addressed every one of Johnson’s accusations, defended the positions he attacked, and challenged him to engage with the arguments rather than the labels.

Johnson never responded.

The Positions Defended

The article defended:

1. The denial of common grace. God’s provision to the reprobate is common bounty, not grace. Calling it grace profanes Christ’s love for His bride.

2. The denial of the “well-meant offer” of the gospel. The gospel is proclamation, not offer. Christ accomplished salvation. The preacher announces what was done. There is no offer contingent on human response.

3. The denial of human duty/responsibility to savingly believe. Men are accountable (answerable) but not responsible (duty-bound) to believe. A reprobate cannot be duty-bound to believe a gospel that was not intended for him.

4. The identification of Pristine Grace theology as sovereign grace, not hyper-Calvinism. The label “hyper-Calvinist” is used by mainstream Calvinists to distance themselves from positions they find socially unacceptable but cannot refute from Scripture.

The Significance

This exchange marks the moment when the framework that would become this book was publicly attacked by one of the most visible figures in Reformed Christianity. I was twenty-nine, with no credentials and no backing. I answered every accusation from Scripture. And Johnson’s refusal to engage with the response was itself a vindication. He had no answer. And in more than two decades since, neither has anyone else.

The full article is available on pristinegrace.org.

See also: “Modified Covenant Theology” (pristinegrace.org), which laid out the full MCT framework publicly for the first time, and “Confession of a Hyper-Calvinist” (pristinegrace.org), written in November 2004.