I'm not here to slander John Piper. He's a brother-in-Christ and a man who has, by all accounts, picked up his cross daily to preach the hope of Christ and Christ crucified to a broken world.
With that being said, Piper has come to some odd conclusions in recent years, starting most notably with the idea that voting for the worldly bravado of Donald Trump was just a morally wrong as the utter institutional corruption, unfettered support of abortion, and woke totalitarianism of Joe Biden.
In a new article, however, Piper goes even further off the deep end – either unable or unwilling to see past the veneer of Everything is Fine™ that's been peddled by the leftist politicians, the woke media, the "progressive" academy, and the neo-Marxist Big Tech offices.
Look at that headline!
What in the world?
You might be thinking this is just a "gotcha" headline and that Piper will ultimately discuss the freedom of conscience, evils of tyranny, and the truth of the current narrative surrounding the vaccines.
Nope. This is what he writes:
My aim in this article is to encourage Christians to be vaccinated, if they can do so with a good conscience and judicious medical warrant.
The people I have especially in view are those who are not vaccinated because of fear of being out of step with people they respect, and in step with people they don't admire. My message to them is simple: You are free.
The idea here is that unvaxxed Christians need to be freed from those evil, likely conservative, heathens who are telling them that Jesus won't love them if they get the jab.
Here's another quote:
Christians are owned by no man — no society, no company, no clan, no family, no school, no military, no government, no political interest group. God alone owns us. And God alone rules us. We are not ruled by any man. We are free from all human ownership and rule.
Qualified by this:
But woe to us Christians if this radical freedom makes us cocky. "Live as people who are free, not using your freedom as a cover-up for evil" (1 Peter 2:16). And the greatest evil is the pride of self-exaltation. Peter is clear about how God's ownership and Fatherhood should affect his slave-like, son-like people.
This is all true, of course, but then here's how Piper applies it:
My point is this: Don't be enslaved by fear of man. Don't be enslaved by the fear of breaking ranks with ideological allies. The old name for this is peer pressure. You are free...
Your conscience is increasingly clear. It says, "Get vaccinated." But there is this niggling fear of looking left wing, or progressive, or Democratic, or compromised, or woke! ...
You are free to say with integrity, "My decision to be vaccinated is not a political decision. It is not right wing, or left wing. It is a biblically informed act of love."
Again, what audience is Piper writing to? The pressure to be vaxxed is overwhelmingly in one direction. There is a massive global push by the most powerful people on the planet to ensure that everyone – even your kindergartener – is injected with these recipes from a handful of all-powerful pharmaceutical companies.
Sure, there are places, especially within family and church circles right now, where someone might be mocked for getting the vaccine.
But Piper mistakenly thinks this is the rule, not the exception. You'd have to be living under a rock to think this way!
That is, unless you've been listening to the media, where Covid is deadly to everyone, where the vaccines have near-total effectiveness and no side effects, where January 6 was the darkest day ever, where a bunch of mostly-peaceful protests broke out in 2020, where Donald Trump tear gased protestors outside the White House to get a Bible photo op... the list goes on.
Dr. James White, another prominent Reformed theologian, felt strongly enough about Piper's article to write a thoughtful critique that, well, blasts Piper's arguments out of the water.
White comes at the topic with a strong stance against the vaccines. Regardless of your position, I would encourage you to read the whole thing and see which man is applying biblical teachings correctly into a proper framework of the issues at hand.
John Piper made a major mistake in late 2020 when he weighed into the US Presidential election with an article that emphasized the sinfulness of arrogance in a candidate that, at the same time, naively missed the reality of the arrogance of the worldview of the other candidate. Today we live with the results of that mistake as the US government overthrows all restraints in its promotion of ungodliness all across the nation and the world, from the murder of the unborn to the profanation of marriage, to the demand that we celebrate the destruction of male and female in our law. For some reason, Dr. Piper has a form of tunnel vision that causes him not to see (or to entirely dismiss) vital and important worldview issues that go beyond the moment of his spiritual vision.
Oof. These are painful words, but White makes it clear he is not attacking Piper himself, but the thought patterns and beliefs that have led Piper down a certain path of thinking.
The bulk of the article, comprising numerous biblical citations about freedom, is not the issue. Instead, the problem is found in the section that reads like a Pfizer promotional advertisement, and then the application portion at the end. Thus we should consider the "facts" as Dr. Piper presents them...
The article has a section titled "What Fuels the Cooking Fire." Here Piper presents the current, mainstream narrative found throughout Western media. To summarize: the vaccines are safe and effective, and the only people dying now are the unvaccinated. After citing all of five sources (none of which were actual medical papers, all of which were secondary media sources) he concludes that, "The team called ‘vaccination' just made a first down, even if monkeys are holding the chains." In other words, without even acknowledging the other side, Piper has concluded the dominant narrative is spot-on: the vaccines are great stuff.
The trouble with this is that Piper is simply wrong about the facts.
White goes on to describe the problems with the source material that Piper lists in his argument for the efficacy and safety of the vaccines.
He then concluded with this:
Dr. Piper completely missed the reality of the connection of the governmentally mandated, "take these or lose your job, your business, your freedom, your children, your life" vaccines and the rest of the current rush into global secular totalitarianism. How can this not be a part of one's calculations? We all know this jab will not be the end of the series. The "boosters" are already being administered. Once one submits to the first in the series, upon what basis does one object to the next, and the next? Upon what basis do we define "public health emergencies" in the future? The CDC has already, at the very same time they are in control of our lives and livelihoods regarding Covid, proclaimed the use of transgender pronouns a "public health" issue.
It is undeniable that the vaccines are not a solo issue. They are coming to us after mask mandates and church closures and pastoral imprisonments and before the next onerous demands from governments drunk on the power that inevitably comes from the rise of secularism. The secular state is far worse than the ancient pagan context of Rome (which was bad enough), for by its very definition it must be ultimate in all things as there is no Creator. Why Piper does not see the role the vaccines play in the overall demands of the newly empowered totalitarianism I cannot say, but it is not the first time he has missed the role a particular element plays in the whole.
Mean, arrogant tweets are, in the overall scheme of things, significantly less important than the fact that the Biden regime is intent upon forcing your children to celebrate drag queens and likewise just as intent upon taking control of every aspect of your life to force you to live in denial of the lordship of Christ.
What Piper has missed, badly, is the role these vaccinations play in a much bigger, much more basic movement into a technologically based, chemically and medically controlled secular totalitarianism. That elephant is intent upon staying, and until we are all intent upon removing him from the living room, he will continue to create soul-destroying havoc for all. Oh that John Piper would stop examining the tip of one of his tusks and help us all with the bigger issue.
