John MacArthur (American pastor)

In 2020 and 2021, during the COVID-19 global crisis, MacArthur contravened orders from Los Angeles County public health officials regarding services at Grace Community Church, and insisted that no one from the church had become seriously ill, despite reports to the contrary. His major contention was that there was no justification for closing down churches over a disease with 94% survival rate according to misinterpreted data from the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). He stated that there was a deadlier virus killing people—the virus of sin—leading many to eternal death, in contrast to physical death. Los Angeles County sued the church over its refusal to close down, and the church counter-sued, claiming that the County was violating rights to freedom of religion. In August 2021, MacArthur told congregants that "many people" had contracted COVID-19 while it "went through" the church in December 2020 and January 2021, including both him and his wife. Eventually, all lawsuits were settled out of court with the County of Los Angeles and the State of California paying $400,000 each to Grace Community Church.

In 2019, at the Truth Matters Conference, during another word association questionnaire, MacArthur was given the prompt "Beth Moore". MacArthur responded, "Go home." Reiterating his stance on 1 Timothy 2:12, he went on to state, "There is no case that can be made biblically for a woman preacher. Period. Paragraph. End of Discussion." Moore responded to this stance by stating on her Twitter account, "I did not surrender to a calling of man when I was 18 years old. I surrendered to a calling of God. It never occurs to me for a second to not fulfill it."

MacArthur is married to his wife, Patricia. They have four children, fifteen grandchildren, and had two great-grandsons by 2017.

MacArthur is a cessationist, holding that the "sign gifts" (such as prophecy) described in the Bible were temporarily granted to the apostles to authenticate the origin and truth of the scriptures, and that at the close of the Apostolic Age these gifts had served their purpose and ceased to be granted. He is one of the most prominent voices in American Christianity against the continuationist beliefs of Pentecostalism and the Charismatic Movement, which assert that God continues to confer sign gifts today. MacArthur has written three books on the subject. In October 2013, his church hosted a conference called "Strange Fire" to mark the launch of a book of the same name. The event featured a number of speakers who argued for cessationist theology and strongly critiqued the Charismatic Movement.

In 2012, at the annual Shepherd's Conference, MacArthur was participating in a word association questionnaire when the moderator gave the name "Steven Furtick." MacArthur responded "unqualified" and proceeded to argue that Furtick, pastor of Elevation Church, was not qualified, by Biblical standards, to be a pastor. Furtick responded to this comment in his 2016 book Unqualified: How God Uses Broken People to Do Big Things.

Nearly 43 years after beginning in the pulpit of Grace Community, MacArthur completed one of his own life goals, that of preaching through the entire New Testament on June 5, 2011.

MacArthur advocates Young Earth creationism in his book The Battle For the Beginning (2001), and in his sermons. Speaking about evolutionary theory, he writes that Christians "ought to expose such lies for what they are and oppose them vigorously." He argues that "the battle for the beginning is ultimately a battle between two mutually exclusive faiths – faith in Scripture versus faith in anti-theistic hypotheses. It is not really a battle between science and the Bible."

In 1983, MacArthur first published his belief in the doctrine of "incarnational sonship." In 1989, after some criticism, he defended his views in a plenary session of the annual convention of the Independent Fundamental Churches of America (IFCA). A decade later, he announced he had retracted this view via an article from Grace to You.

MacArthur believes "that if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved" (Romans 10:9). This submission to Jesus as Lord when converting to faith in Jesus Christ became known to Arminians as the “Lordship salvation controversy” in the 1980s. MacArthur argues that confessing Jesus Christ as Lord is a necessary component of free grace theology. He states, "You must receive Jesus Christ for who He is, both Lord and Savior, to be truly saved (Peter 2:20)." Regarding eternal security, he states, "It should never be presented merely as a matter of being once saved, always saved—with no regard for what you believe or do. The writer of Hebrews 12:14 states frankly that only those who continue living holy lives will enter the Lord's presence." These views raised controversy within American evangelicalism and were challenged in print by non-lordship dispensationalist theologians Charles Ryrie and Zane C. Hodges, who argued that MacArthur's ministry was teaching a form of works-based salvation. MacArthur denied the charge, as attested on two tapes recorded in 1989 when he was asked to “reason together with the IFCA man.”

MacArthur's daily radio and television program, Grace to You, now broadcast throughout much of the world, was created by the Grace media team to publicize audio cassettes of sermons; in 1977, it was first broadcast in Baltimore, Maryland. In 1985, MacArthur was made President of Los Angeles Baptist College, now The Master's University, a four-year Christian liberal-arts college. In 1986, he was made President of the new Master's Seminary.

While at Bob Jones University in South Carolina, MacArthur’s father recruited him to the Voice of Calvary singing quartet, often broadcast on Christian radio in Southern California. From 1964 to 1966, MacArthur was hired by his father as associate pastor at the Harry MacArthur Memorial Bible Church (now Calvary Bible Church in Burbank, California), which his father Jack had planted and named after his own father. From 1966 to 1969, MacArthur was hired as the faculty representative for Talbot Theological Seminary. On February 9, 1969, he was hired as the third and youngest pastor at the nondenominational Grace Community Church of Sun Valley, California.

The grandson of Canadian Anglican minister Harry MacArthur (died 1950) and son of Baptist radio preacher Jack MacArthur (born in Calgary, Canada) and Irene Dockendorf, MacArthur was born in Los Angeles. During a 1979 interview, Pastor MacArthur stated he is "distantly related to General Douglas MacArthur." He went on to say, "I understand that I’m a fifth cousin, and so it’s quite a distance but nonetheless we are related." MacArthur followed in his father's footsteps to enroll at the fundamentalist Bob Jones College from 1957 to 1959. In 1960, after a year off, he was accepted to the Free Methodist Church’s Los Angeles Pacific College, where in his senior year he observed two games of football, going on field once for one play (see 1962 yearbook statistics). In 1963, he was granted a Masters of Divinity from the Bible Institute of Los Angeles's new Talbot Theological Seminary, in La Mirada, California, with honors. MacArthur was also given an honorary degree from Talbot Theological Seminary (Doctor of Divinity, 1977) and from Grace Graduate School (1976).

John Fullerton MacArthur Jr. (born June 19, 1939) is an American Protestant pastor and author known for his internationally syndicated Christian teaching radio and television program Grace to You. He has been the pastor of Grace Community Church, a non-denominational church in Sun Valley, California since February 9, 1969. He is currently the chancellor emeritus of The Master's University in Santa Clarita and The Master's Seminary.