So many people have weighed in the issue of what is Reformed Christianity, or what’s a Reformed church, or who’s Reformed.
About four years ago, John MacArthur delivered a scathing attack on Reformed amillennialism entitled, “Why Every Self-Respecting Calvinist is a Premillennialist.” Worse, his rant was a bad misrepresentation of amillennialism in a conference where he had also invited several well-known amillenarians. Here’s the part of JMac’s lecture where he connects amillennialists with Arminians:
But bottom line here, of all people on the planet to be premillennialist it should be Calvinists; those who love sovereign election. Let’s leave amillennialism for the Arminians… Perfect! Arminians make great amillennialists. It’s consistent … We can leave amillennialism to the process theologians … or the ‘openness’ people … Let’s leave amillennialism to the charismatics in the semi-Pelagians and other sorts of go in and out of salvation willy-nilly; makes sense for their theology . . .
If Calvin were alive, he would not only be throwing up in disgust, but furious, and would invoke the 9th Commandment against JMac. Why so? Calvin would have pointed out JMac’s gross error of millennialism:
This fiction is too puerile to need or to deserve refutation. Nor do they receive any countenance from the Apocalypse, from which it is known that they extracted a gloss for their error (Revelation 20:4), since the thousand years there mentioned refer not to the eternal blessedness of the Church, but only to the various troubles which await the Church militant in this world (Institutes of the Christian Religion 3.25.5).
