I plan to discuss several of John MacArthur’s heresies* in subsequent posts, but I want to start with the most obvious one:
His teaching of the Curse of Ham.
This one alone is so egregious and obvious that it should have instantly disqualified him from the ministry, and resulted in church discipline - and excommunication if he remained unrepentant. That anyone can consider him even a Christian, let alone a credible leader after he spewed this bilge is astonishing to me.
It is thoroughly unbiblical, historically ludicrous, and was a doctrine literally created to justify the enslavement and exploitation of humans based on skin color. It is literally Ku Klux Klan “theology,” unmitigatedly evil. And it has been and continues to be used to justify utter depravity.
This is a line in the sand that you simply cannot cross and claim to follow Christ.
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I honestly am puzzled by the fact that so many consider MacArthur to have been a great Bible teacher.
In reality, he was not even a good Bible teacher and interpreter. In fact, he wasn’t merely not good: he was laughably bad.
As in embarrassingly bad.
No legitimate ancient literature scholar would find his work remotely convincing.
I realized this over time, as I started exploring the things I was taught using sources outside of Fundamentalist Christianity. And I found that MacArthur regularly mistranslated and misdefined Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic words. He substituted his own made-up shit for actual archeological evidence.
And he constantly bent the text to fit his predetermined (predestined?) theological superstructure, rather than letting the text challenge the theology he was determined to fit scripture into.
He took a really large hammer to put those square pegs into round holes.
My theory as to his reputation is that he sounded erudite and scholarly, and he had a system that appeared to have answers to everything. I may talk about that a bit in a future post.
But for now, just understand that if he were on a panel with actual experts in ancient languages, ancient cultures…or even an informed Jewish rabbi, he would have been laughed off stage. He was that embarrassing.
MacArthur’s teaching of the Curse of Ham is probably the most embarrassing, the most ludicrous, and the most egregious example of catastrophically bad Bible interpretation and teaching one could imagine.
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* Heresy:
I am not using the word in the sense of the “official” heresies in Christian tradition, most of which are about arcane arguments about the nature of God, and were decided by councils of dudes over a thousand years ago.
Rather, I use “heresy” like we use “illogical” in real life. We rarely (if ever) mean “this violates the rules of formal syllogisms.” We mean it in the sense that it is a false argument. And I mean heresy in the sense of a false doctrine, a false teaching.
For purposes of this series, I will use a three-pronged test - we lawyers love those! So, I will call something a heresy if it meets all three prongs:
Unbiblical. And by this I mean that it is not supported by a historically informed, contextually reasonable interpretation of the whole of scripture. So, no proof texting, no taking stuff out of context, and no twisting something to mean what it doesn’t mean.
Unhistorical. In this case, I mean that the teaching is not supported by historical church doctrine or practice. For anything Christian, this would mean that it is not in accord with early (pre-Constantine) church belief or practice.
For the Hebrew scriptures, this would also include interpretations which are inconsistent with the original cultural understanding and context.
Harmful. If the doctrine harms people, it is suspect. Particularly if it cannot be squared with loving one’s neighbor, or caring for the marginalized. If it justifies power and abuse, well, it is probably heresy.
I will add that in most of MacArthur’s heresies, the problem can also be traced directly to his view that hierarchies and injustices are God’s will; his version of religion is all about maintaining those power structures and keeping those lower down from challenging their oppression.
This is 100% true in this particular case: The Curse of Ham.
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Note: I fundamentally disagree with MacArthur and other Fundamentalists regarding a lot of things about the Bible and its interpretation. I’ll put a summary of that at the end of this post. For now, understand that I am going to mostly use MacArthur’s own assumptions in discussing the Curse of Ham, and just note where disagreements are relevant.
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So what even IS the Curse of Ham?
If you weren’t raised in a family or subculture where the more arcane Bible stories were taught to you, you might not even have heard of this one. It isn’t the kind of thing you tell kids in Sunday School, after all.
I, for better or worse, read the bible cover to cover at a fairly young age, and have always been the sort to study and remember stuff.
[Related: the worst possible thing a person can do is read the Bible in its entirety, with an open and curious mind. Doing that is what caused my deconstruction from Evangelical doctrine more than anything else.]
First, let me set the context up a bit here. The story of Noah and his sons is found in the first book of the Christian version of the Hebrew Torah, Genesis. This book is the first installment of the origin myth of the ancient Kingdom of Israel.
This book and the others in the Hebrew scriptures were compiled in more or less their current form in the 5th and 6th centuries BCE. Older sources were used, leaving multiple versions of some stories, factual contradictions, and other artifacts of ancient literature.
Traditional belief has attributed the writing of the Torah to Moses, who, according to Jewish calculation, probably lived (if he was a real person) around 1250 BCE, or about 700 years before the Torah was compiled.
This is a longer time period than from the writing of The Canterbury Tales and our own time. So even then, Moses was a really old story. This is important, so keep it in mind.
But there is more than that!
The story of Noah and the flood was not original. Rather, it was a retelling of a far older story. You can find a flood narrative that has a shocking number of details shared with the Noah story in The Epic of Gilgamesh.
How old is that book? Well, the oldest versions date to 2400 BCE. That’s 1200 years before Moses could have existed.
Those are actual established facts, not opinion. There is solid archeological evidence of everything I said above.
I mention this, because this is one area I strongly disagree with MacArthur. I do not believe that Noah was a real person, or that anyone understood the story as being literally true when it was added to the Torah. The literalist approach to the story is a modern affectation - a heresy, I would argue.
A good way to think about this might be to use the King Arthur stories as an example. If I were to write a version of King Arthur now, most English speakers would instantly know that I had taken a story from more than a thousand years ago that everyone was familiar with, and put my own twist on it.
Literally nobody would think that I had somehow written the “real” version of the story and that mine was now definitive.
I go through all of that because the importance of the story of the Curse of Ham is deeply embedded in its historical context and meaning.
Okay, so let’s look at the story itself.
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From Genesis 9 (NIV):
The sons of Noah who came out of the ark were Shem, Ham and Japheth. (Ham was the father of Canaan.) These were the three sons of Noah, and from them came the people who were scattered over the whole earth. Noah, a man of the soil, proceeded to plant a vineyard. When he drank some of its wine, he became drunk and lay uncovered inside his tent. Ham, the father of Canaan, saw his father naked and told his two brothers outside. But Shem and Japheth took a garment and laid it across their shoulders; then they walked in backward and covered their father’s naked body. Their faces were turned the other way so that they would not see their father naked. When Noah awoke from his wine and found out what his youngest son had done to him, he said,
“Cursed be Canaan!
The lowest of slaves
will he be to his brothers.”
He also said,
“Praise be to the Lord, the God of Shem!
May Canaan be the slave of Shem.
May God extend Japheth’s territory;
may Japheth live in the tents of Shem,
and may Canaan be the slave of Japheth.”
Okay, that’s a really weird story, right? Noah gets drunk off his ass, passes out naked. The version we get in English is a bit bowdlerized, though. It would have been understood in the original that Ham didn’t just see his dad’s dick. He did something lewd to his father, something so bad that it was a disgrace. What it was isn’t stated, and there have been plenty of arguments about it.
But there are also all kinds of difficulties in the text that have been argued about for literally millennia. Why is Canaan described both as Ham’s son and as the brother of Shem and Japheth? And why was Canaan cursed for what Ham did?
I will not claim to have the answers to those questions. But I can explain a bit about why this story exists.
The key to that lies in who Canaan was. In the Israelite origin myth, the Children of Israel left enslavement in Egypt and returned to their promised land - the land of Canaan.
The LAND OF CANAAN?
Yep, it was the land the was occupied (in the myth) by the descendants of Canaan, the one who was cursed.
And the Children of Israel were given the mandate to conquer, slaughter, and enslave the Canaanites.
So, this story exists as a form of propaganda.
Why was it okay to commit genocide and enslave people? Well, their ancestor was so bad he butt fucked his dad.
See how that works?
That’s the story, and that’s what it meant for…thousands of years.
[Note: there is zero archeological evidence for the exodus, and zero evidence of the Canaanite genocide. Those stories are just myths that were used to explain the origin of Israel. In reality, it is highly probable that the Israelites and the Canaanites were the same people group. YHWH worship arose as a religious sect, and the origin myths were created to justify the religious wars that resulted.]
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We have a story, we have an ancient meaning. There is plenty of debate around the meaning within Judaism. But none of that has anything to do with the modern teaching of the Curse of Ham.
That heresy was specifically invented in modern times, no more than 500 years ago. And it was invented for a very specific purpose.
John MacArthur was probably fully aware of the origin of the modern heresy and why it exists. He had every reason to know that it was not supported by the Bible itself, was not a historical teaching of the church, and was created expressly to justify evil.
So why the hell did he teach it? I’ll look at that later.
For now, I want to talk about the modern Curse of Ham.
***
By the time Columbus kicked off his voyages of discovery, plunder, enslavement, and genocide, European Christianity was already running into some philosophical issues.
On the one hand, there was SO MUCH MONEY to be made in conquering, plundering, and enslaving people in Africa.
On the other, people with consciences knew at some level that this was fully contrary to the teachings of Christ.
In addition, things were rapidly changing in the broader culture. The Renaissance revived the knowledge of the Classical Era. The Protestant Reformation and the first dawning of the Enlightenment challenged authority of all kinds, and offered reason and science as alternatives.
This meant that a whole new set of doctrines and beliefs were needed in order to justify the greed and oppression that would prove to be lucrative beyond belief.
To get into all of them would be beyond the scope of this post, but I want to mention a few that came together in the Curse of Ham.
First, the idea of different “races” of humans. Scientifically speaking, there is only one race: human. But if you can divide humans up into different “races,” then you can ascribe different value to each.
This idea came to be widely believed, not just in religious circles, but among Europeans and their diaspora generally. Pseudoscience was enlisted to give a gloss of respectability to the idea.
But make no mistake, the entire point of dividing humans into races was to justify the enslavement of one set of humans by another.
The religious sorts got into the act by inventing the modern “Curse of Ham.”
In their telling, the story of Noah was literally true. There were only eight humans left alive after the flood (Noah, wife, sons and their wives) and these eight people populated the entire earth.
Furthermore, the three sons gave birth to the three races. Shem’s descendants were the Jewish people. Ham’s descendants were black Africans. Japheth’s descendants were white Europeans.
And, because of the curse put on Ham (well, Canaan really, but who’s counting?), the descendants of Japheth were entitled to “extend their territory” - that is, conquer and colonize the planet - while black people were condemned to be enslaved by white people (and maybe Jewish people too?)
This is, in every possible way, balderdash.
Factually speaking, the idea of all humans descending from eight people less than 5000 years ago is genetically ludicrous, of course.
The spread of humans is well known to have come from Africa, not the Middle East.
There is zero evidence whatsoever of the three sons of Noah leading to three races of humans.
And anyway, how does that account for, I don’t know, the huge proportion of humans who live in Asia and the Americas before conquest? Which son did they come from?
(Unsurprisingly, this has been the subject of debate among those who believe the heresy of the Curse of Ham. The most common conclusion seems to be that Shem = Jewish people, Japheth = white people, and Ham = everyone else. Because of course.)
So, even from a basic level of factual accuracy, this is clearly a false teaching.
But let’s examine it according to my three-prong test.
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One: Is it Biblical?
The Curse of Ham fails at every possible level here.
In context, the story is about justifying another story, that of the Canaanite Genocide. There is nothing whatsoever in the text that indicates that it was intended by its authors to be a global permission for enslavement, let alone enslavement on the basis of skin color.
Second, it is Noah who makes the curse. Literally, this is the story of a father cursing a grandson for what a son did. God isn’t even mentioned in the story - and God certainly is not the one cursing.
And you know what? Who gives a flying fuck what Noah thought or said? He got drunk off his ass, and then was furious that one of his sons didn’t show respect. This is hardly the sort of stuff to make into a doctrine of human enslavement.
This is the kind of misuse of scripture that MacArthur was so fond of doing.
This is also an egregious example of “proof texting.” The inventors of this doctrine needed a reason to salve the consciences so they could continue to enslave and exploit other humans based on skin color, so they made this shit up to justify what they were doing. That’s straight up fucking evil. And we should say so.
Two: Is it historical?
Again, the Curse of Ham fails at every possible level here as well. Nothing in the Jewish interpretive tradition indicates a belief that white people were entitled to enslave black people based on this story.
Rather, there is a long tradition of discussion about the meaning in the context of Jewish history. I encourage the exploration of these ideas.
There was also a Christian interpretive tradition, which wasn’t centered on skin color until far later. I won’t say that the use of the story to justify serfdom was a good interpretation - and identifying poor Europeans as the “sons of Ham” with the nobility as “sons of Japheth” is as genetically ludicrous as the racial interpretation.
What is clear, however, is that the modern “Curse of Ham” as used to justify white skinned people enslaving black skinned people is not a traditional doctrine at all, but arose less than 500 years ago specifically as theological justification for race-based slavery.
Three: Does it harm?
Of course it does. The very existence of the doctrine was intended to justify harm. To justify enslavement based on skin color.
If you think that the enslavement of millions wasn’t harm, we clearly do not share basic beliefs about right and wrong.
This doctrine continues to harm today. It is literally white supremacy, the belief that white people are better, more blessed by God, than black people. Which justifies the enslavement and oppression of black people by white people. And there is literally NO possible reason for teaching this doctrine except to justify racial inequality and injustice.
I’ll also mention as a bonus here that the very history of this doctrine is evil. It is the doctrine of the Ku Klux Klan. It is the doctrine of demons. And we need to say so.
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Teaching this doctrine should disqualify anyone from ministry. Full stop. And it should also be an inarguable proof that a person is not a follower of Christ.
Let me just offer a couple of key teachings here.
First, you cannot simultaneously love your neighbors and enslave and exploit them. It is completely impossible.
Second, Christ clearly taught that no one can serve two masters. You cannot serve God and money. The very essence of the enslavement system was money. It was the use and exploitation of humans for profit. And it was DAMN profitable. At the start of the Civil War, the “monetary value” of enslaved humans was greater than all the non-land wealth in the United States combined. It was the single greatest “economic interest” in the entire Western Hemisphere as the Southern enslavers put it.
Exploiting others for profit is wrong, and it is fully incompatible with Christ following.
We need to be honest and say this.
One of my frustrations, starting in childhood, with purported Christians, including my parents, was their refusal to give a satisfactory answer to whether enslavers could be good Christians or not.
I have always believed - always, even as a small child - that the answer has always been no. You cannot.
But because white Evangelicalism is descended from Slaveholder Theology - especially Robert Lewis Dabney’s teachings - Evangelicals struggle to get this basic moral question right. In part because that leads to the conclusion that a lot of people who claimed the name of Christ were liars and not actual Christians.
There is another reason too: if we admit that slavery was always wrong and always incompatible with Christ following, then we have to consider that segregation was always wrong and always incompatible with Christ following, and even consider that our current systemic injustice and racial inequality is in fact wrong, and that Christ followers will work to bring justice and equality.
And that, to people like John MacArthur, is unthinkable. (I hope to discuss that in a future installment.)
Because MacArthur believed that inequality and injustice (in his favor, of course!) was God’s will, he found this heresy an easy way to justify his own evil.
There is no good reason to promote the Curse of Ham. It is unbiblical, unhistorical, factually ludicrous, harmful to people of color, and deeply rooted in America’s national sin of white supremacy and exploitation of brown bodies.
This alone makes MacArthur a heretic, a false prophet, and an evil man.
Anyone praising him should be ashamed of themselves.
***
A quick summary of how I disagree with MacArthur and other Fundamentalists regarding the Bible:
One: I believe “inerrancy” is a fatal category error, that only arises out of a misconception about what the Bible is. This error is only possible if you believe that God literally wrote the Bible.
MacArthur believed in “verbal plenary inspiration,” which is a fancy way of saying that he believes God wrote every single word of the Bible. Humans were mere meat widgets - flesh robots taking dictation.
This belief is problematic in so many ways.
If God did indeed write every word of the Bible, then he sure was a terrible author. I mean, the thing is full of contradictions, right from the start where there are two different creation myths, with disagreements about the order of creation and the days on which they happened. Maybe God needed an editor?
But worse than the factual contradictions are the theological contradictions. There are mutually incompatible viewpoints, which sure look like arguments between different writers, not God struggling to decide what his position is.
There are also numerous factual errors in the Bible, from basic science to medicine to history to even basic math grade schoolers learn like the value of pi.
Looked at objectively, what the Bible actually IS, is a collection of human-written books, written and collected over centuries, with many different writers writing in different times, places, cultures, and situations. They have different perspectives as they attempt to understand live, morality, and connection to the Divine.
That’s actually quite beautiful, and understanding that is the reason I am able to love the Bible today, despite its many human flaws.
(I cannot recommend enough Dr. Christine Hayes’ excellent free online Yale course on the Hebrew scriptures. I learned so much from them. And also really realized what an embarrassing hack MacArthur was by comparison.)
Once you realize what the Bible actually IS, then the whole idea of “inerrancy” is revealed as a ludicrous category error, akin to claiming that a Beethoven symphony or a Rembrandt painting is “inerrant.”
Two: I do not believe the Bible was ever intended to be either God’s Little Instruction Book™ or a book of systematic theology.
This is related to the above. The evidence is overwhelming that there were many writers, many perspectives, and multiple theological viewpoints involved in the creation of the Bible.
Even the councils that selected the books of the New Testament were clear that the criterion for inclusion was whether the book was helpful in Christian practice and experience, not a belief that a book was literally written by God or some sort of inerrant truth.
As far as that goes, the proof-text for inerrancy itself doesn’t claim what Evangelicals think it claims. (And, for that matter, I Timothy, among other books, was almost certainly a forgery - written much later than Saint Paul’s life.) The claim - which applies only to the Hebrew Scriptures, because the New Testament didn’t yet exist - says the scriptures are “profitable.” That’s not the same as “inerrant” or “an instruction book.”
What the Bible actually is, is a record of what devout men (and unfortunately, probably only men, not women) at particular times and places thought about God and morality and meaning. And also about the history of a particular nation in antiquity.
That’s not a bad thing. But taking it as the literal words of God is a stretch. The evidence is to the contrary. It’s a deeply human book. And that’s okay!
Third: I do not believe that God only spoke to a small number of people in a particular place for a limited time in history. I believe in a far bigger God than that, one who has always spoken to all people in all times and places.
That old poem, The Blind Man and the Elephant is a great picture of the greater truth, which one of the writers of the Bible described as “seeing through a glass, dimly.”
I also, unlike MacArthur, believe that God didn’t cease to speak to humankind once the books of the New Testament were selected.
Of course, MacArthur didn’t really believe this. Because he believed that God gave white males like him the right to say what the meaning of the closed canon is. God just stopped speaking to the plebes, to say nothing of women or people of color.
Fourth: I believe in a different framework for interpretation of scripture and formulation of moral and theological belief.
There are some different versions of this, but I use a modified Wesleyan Quadrilateral. There are four points to this: scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. These all work together, and all are necessary. That said, as Richard Rohr pointed out in one of my favorite podcasts of all time, ultimately experience is what steers everything. If experience proves that something isn’t working, that it is causing harm, that it fails to match reality, then it is the theology that has to give. By definition, harmful theology is wrong theology.
Which is why for me, the idea of approaching the question of “is slavery moral?” by reading the Bible to be silly. And certainly not by looking for a story - any story - that can be twisted to justify enslavement, which is how the modern Curse of Ham came to be.
Rather, the experience of the enslaved persons is the place to start. If they are being harmed, then enslavement is wrong, full stop.
This can be applied to so much else, but that is beyond the scope of this already far too long post.
(For further reading, I wrote about why I believe there is no such thing as a One True Interpretation.)
Stay tuned for more.
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A final, personal note: one of my kids had the misfortune of taking a history class at our local community college from Daymon Johnson. I believe he is TradCath, but he is also a leader in an ultra-right-wing group of professors who have made it their business to antagonize everyone else, from other professors trying to do their jobs, to students who aren't white, male, straight, and right wing.
During that class, among other things, he repeatedly threw the Sieg Heil (the Hitler salute) and openly claimed white people were superior.
And, he used the Curse of Ham to explain why it was fine to enslave black people. Understandably, he was unable to keep black students from dropping his class. In a better world than we have, his racist ass would have been fired long ago. I can't make that happen, but I want to do my part to expose him for the evil man he is.
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