Anon versus Wartburgwatch's attack on John MacArthur

Yes, finally I have found someone who has called some "bull shovel-lings" on this matter- to use the parlance as you have (at the risk of being impolite). 

Now look, as a lawyer, former journalist and ex-military police investigator, I have quite an in-built lie or embellishment detecting instinct, but I can be fooled when its on paper and I can't read other cues (e.g. body language, demeanour, tone of speech, etc). But in this case, the write up done up by one Ms Marci is quite obviously an amalgamation of some kind of input by other writers and contributors (possibly editors) in the way the material is laid out and constructed- both in its arbitrariness and inconsistencies of factual narrative, so much so that I kept sensing that this was one of those messy, recollects that was then slap bang and put together to be deployed for effect and, more clandestinely, to achieve a certain desired "effect". 

I think this blog is the first one to call the content the BS for what it is, and it seems these are all trumped up (no pun intended) as part of a rising/growing leftist attack on conservative Evangelicals both across the land and whilst that is not new, has taken on more insidious forms in the past couple of months ever since Antifa and the Marxist Socialist Left have been engaged in dialectical back and forthing and in the end Christians who stick to Biblical inerrancy and hold to doctrines of Biblical authority and truth become the new "hate groups" to be castigated and censured. 

 I have no doubts that is what this whole thing is about. Lest someone say I have taken away from the ostensible and alleged nub of the alleged matter/case, and say I have turned a woman's right to speak up (cue her emotive title: "Do you hear me?") into yet another spin attempt to make this a political issue, between right and left, I assure you, I am not. 

Christians like me, and I am proud to say I am a Bible-believing one (albeit a sinner no better than anyone else but saved simply by the Lord's sovereign electing grace to reach out and grab me), we have no agenda in being either leftist or right. Our agenda is to be in allegiance to Christ and preach Christ and Him crucified, and His glorious gospel of salvation offered through faith alone, by grace alone, in Christ alone, to each one who acknowledges their sin and are willing to repent and seek redemption. 

As Christians we are not about oppressing women, but serving and loving them as fellow image bearers of God. Now, it's one thing for us to be for women and women's rights to equality, freedom and speaking up, and another to completely go down the path of drawing a straw man fallacy and misrepresenting Dr John MacArthur and the Masters' Seminary and College (now University) by broad-brushing them as rabid opponents of all of the above and then take aim at the misrepresented position; using this alleged "Jane" case as a convenient example for ammunition. 

1. Dr John MacArthur and team are complementarians who believe in loving, honouring and respecting women as equal yet different (by gender roles and biological differences) by God's design and standards. This means that to misrepresent Dr John MacArthur and co, is part of a fallacious attempt to discredit them, and more sinisterly, part of a possible bigger level attempt to tarnish their image. Likewise, Dr John MacArthur and team have never sought to be anything other than believers who teach the Bible and lovingly reach the world for Christ. Their message is viewed in the current climate as "hate speech" only because they preach what the Bible says on homosexuality as sin etc, and take the Biblical stand that the world and current zeitgeist refuses to accept (without basis). With that as a background, this point is critical because you need to know that there are many groups out there with an agenda against Dr John MacArthur and his team. They could be from anywhere: people who felt unloved in the church he pastors, people who felt hurt/scorned, people who do not accept his certain and authoritative stand on the Word of God, people who seek to discredit him publicly, etc as he is a very prominent proponent of truth. Demons want to get him, and as the society gets more reprobate and unable to see truth, the more these kinds of accusations will be raised. 


2. Which brings us to the accusations in the very "Jane" case in question- now, as this blog rightly raises, there are many red flags raised in the narrative of this matter. One, the whole account is rife with many anomalies and case findings from both Ms Marci's blogpost as well as the way the narrative was done up, which show us the story was and is loosely assembled - as this blog rightly highlights- over 10 years, and suddenly brought to the fore just at the time where the Master's Seminary is facing State level sanctions in the past few years since Gay Marriage was legalized on a national level, tax bills and a challenge on its 401k status. 
Not only is the timing of this story something that ought to raise eyebrows, the narrative itself raises some glaring omissions; namely the entire missing details- police report and charges; the other sides' story; the name of the alleged rapist in question (if the claims are true, then truth being a defense would mean that defamation would be of no issue); the police's official statement; the details of the past 10 years since the crime occurred and all the victim would logically have done to seek criminal justice; the proofs such as a scan or image file of the Masters College doctoring the results/transcripts (which as highlighted elsewhere would be a breach of Article 9 - including motivations behind why a college ranked by the WSJ for top results would dare to or want to risk that with a concerted cover up); proofs of the alleged behaviour by Dr John MacArthur and Mr Rick Holland (all we have now are emotive accusations and unsubstantiated statements)...and much much more. 
I haven't even gotten to the logical inconsistencies in the alleged account.  

What's more, the manner of the text was typed as if it were penned by several scribes who seem to emotively paint the picture of a victim trapped and issuing this first person (sometimes third person singular) shorthand that is crying inside. There would be no problem with that, except that the way in which it is written is so "tight" and "choreographed" or "designed to hit emotive notes" it borders on manipulative- there are several key factors that make me believe the entire "Jane" post is distorted and designed to manipulate the emotive senses of readers from a journalistic point of view: 

a. The use of Luis Palau and Billy Graham as so called "friends" of the alleged victim sends my antennae up- it is very convenient to name two supposed world class big name evangelicals to assert that this person is strongly evangelical and from a strong Christian background. Except: anyone who is on the side of true Christianity and has been trained under Dr MacArthur or at the Master's Seminary knows that Luis Palau is a false teacher, a charlatan who preaches a different gospel. And Billy Graham, has been accused from time to time of being part of the Ecumenical Evangelicals and Catholics movement (rightly or wrongly). No matter what you believe about Graham or Palau, the point I am making is this: no one wanting to assert they had credibility in Christian circles (certainly in Dr MacArthur's circles) would have cited those two men as examples of people "to be connected to" as if they were influential names to drop. If the author genuinely was "Jane" and "Jane" indeed had made it to senior year at the Master's College and had indeed written that, she would not have written that in that way to further discredit her own point. Instead, this reeks of being written by someone with a superficial and scant understanding of true Christianity, who could make such a mistake, and reeks of being written by some anti-Christian liberal who just randomly thought of some "powerful" Christian men to name and ironically came up with two that are not held in high esteem by the true Church. 

b. "Jane" would be in her late 20s now (if as stated this took place 10 years ago- which it does say- 2008), and yet the "article" chooses to write the whole piece from an emotive angle (by choice) - deliberately stating she is fifteen, even though she is clearly writing this in retrospect now. The fact that it is not written in typical narrative recount prose again sends my antennae sky high. When you or I relay a story or some event about something that happened to us 10 years ago, we tend to do so earnestly- avoiding all subterfuge and camouflaging our text with any literary devices- commensurate with the level of seriousness we wish to convey the seriousness of the predicament we are relating we were in; in short, you want to be taken seriously by whoever you are sharing this with as you want the listener to hear you earnestly. Here, by adopting an emotive victimological piece in literary prose that lends itself to manipulation, it goes against the grain of straight talking and straight shooting that is usually found on the lips of truly distraught and hurting victims. It reeks here of someone else writing a narrative about this person at best, and trying to making it emotive.

C. Anachronistic evidence. The idea that Masters' students could not go ballroom dancing is either a fact or it isn't. Ballroom dancing only made a comeback in the 2010s because of a throwback to the swinging 20s through 50s revival that came with the new hipster movement- in 2007, when young people went dancing it was usually to nightclubs or bars. Then, to make matters worse for the continuity error, the account then says she went to a bar. There are not many bars in the Santa Clara or Sun valley area or even in Pasadena or L.A. that adopted ballroom dancing- perhaps none even at all, let alone in 2007/08. 


D. In the narrative, Rick Holland, the alleged campus pastor in TMC (now TMU) interviews the victim one on one - flouting rules of counselling, and then every once in a while, walks out his room to go to consult Dr John MacArthur. Anyone familiar with Dr John MacArthur will know that Dr John MacArthur's office is not located at the College campus. Mr Holland could not have possibly got up and walked over to knock on Dr MacArthur's door just like that. He would have had to obtain an appointment for Dr MacArthur to be there in the college office that particular day- and this matter would by definition have needed to have been big enough at the time for Dr MacArthur to personally come down (usually he does not even travel due to his age- if anything Dr Phil Johnson or someone else from his office would have taken the trip). Yet the critical piece of evidence that is odd here is this: the "Jane" story claims that she is alone with Mr Holland. If Dr John MacArthur had indeed gone all the way to be there, why would he not be in the room, and refuse to see her? If the case was that big that indeed warranted his going down personally to TMC to see this one particular student (if we even grant all that), why would Dr MacArthur secretly wait in the other room and have Dr Holland have to repeat the facts back and forth from the victim to him and go back to the room to get more and then go back to Dr MacArthur? What's even more troubling is that Dr MacArthur is alleged to have said "the girl needs to be kicked out for dancing inter alia" As if Dr John would sit in the next room, while a young lady the age of his granddaughters facing such a serious crime and allegation would wait there next door and then tell Rick to go back to tell her she'd been kicked out- for dancing at that. 
It makes no sense. It smacks of defamatory accusatory smear language designed to attack Dr John MacArthur. 
 

Now, you want to know why people write this drivel? It is because this is a fictionalized piece of account writing by whoever wrote this up. Now I am not doubting that this indeed was a case/matter, and that there might have been a case where a girl got raped. As TMS' official response was that they had no such male student, they are accepting that "Jane" indeed was a student of theirs. Yet, "Jane" refused to give consent for TMS and TMC/TMU to make a statement or comment on her case/matter, forcing TMS and TMC to keep mum about their end and only state what they have stated in their public statements. Furthermore, the rapist really never attended TMS, for if he did, the mainstream media would pull out his file, and be sure to shame him and TMS in the process. They couldn't, because he never was their student. If "Jane" really wanted justice, she would bring the whole matter, hook, line and sinker out into the open- if you're going to go public, might as well go all the way, wouldn't you? If you really are about women's rights and protecting other women from this alleged institutional cover up? Surely you would produce all the evidence you could muster, wouldn't you? The report finally states that the aggressor confessed and suggests that there was an institutional cover up. If the aggressor confessed, and the victim was free to lodge a police report (they never restrained her from doing so) and she says she didn't drop the charges, and yet the police never charged or arrested the man in question? 

This is altogether bizarre on two levels: 
1. If you had been raped by someone, highlighting what just punishment your attacker got in terms of a sentence would have been your focus, or at the very least, you would write all about how your attacker is still out there and has never been charged. Instead, notice the way the article is written- it makes it seem like it is about the institution that the victim is really after. Upset at the attacker getting away, no? No. Upset at the authorities for finding insufficient evidence? No. Upset at the church and college? Yes! It's almost too convenient- so much so that it dovetails perfectly with what we are saying earlier- this is probably written and designed with one goal in mind: to attack and discredit Dr John MacArthur and his affiliates and institutions. The article gives it away. 

3. The Wartburg Watch has had its anti-Christian agenda for a long while now, so it is trying to fuel fire for any one of the big pastors in Evangelicalism- men like Dr John Piper, Dr Al Mohler, etc have also come under unwarranted and unsubstantiated attacks by the Wartburg crew. We must be able to see their presuppositional bias when they report.

I think the same should be done with the alleged victim and this account.