I happen to be such a sheep, one who has come from darkness and is still imperfect in refraining from profanity (hence my opposition to it). Let me then ask, especially those of you in the PCA who allowed this to go on and those in the EPC who think it would honor God to bring Greg Johnson into your midst, you who are supposed to be vigilant guardians of Christ’s flock and who will be judged strictly for your performance on that point: Do you think it is wise to read such a heretic as Spufford, or to quote him approvingly? And do you think that one who does so ought to be given the sacred trust of teaching God’s church rather than admonished that “bad company ruins good morals”?

In an article at Living Out, Greg Johnson of Memorial Presbyterian (St. Louis, MO) wrote that:

Christianity says we’re all defective. As Francis Spufford writes, it’s ‘the human propensity to f*** things up’ that best points to the fact that Christianity still makes profound emotional sense.

This refers to Spufford’s Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense, in which “the human propensity to **** things up” is not just a vulgar phrase, but Spufford’s redefinition of, and substitute for, the orthodox concept of sin. As Louis Markos says in his review:

For Spufford, sin means neither more nor less than “the human propensity to f—k things up” (27), a phrase which he uses again and again in the form of a decidedly strange acronym: HPtFtU.

There are many ways to mess things up that don’t involve sinning (e.g., making a bad decision because one had incomplete information), and so Spufford’s concept here is a severe distortion. There is also the inconvenient fact that cursing (which Spufford does plentifully), is itself a sin, and therefore no professing Christian minister ought to utter it (even dulled with asterisks, as if we don’t know what’s in view).

If you doubt that cursing is sin, then please explain how it meshes with verses like Jude 9 (“But when the archangel Michael, contending with the devil, was disputing about the body of Moses, he did not presume to pronounce a blasphemous judgment, but said, “The Lord rebuke you.”) If a holy archangel who has never sinned and has dwelt in God’s will and communion perfectly throughout all history yet does not have the right to curse the most evil being that exists, then you and I certainly don’t have that right when trying to describe the holy truths of God’s revealed word. We must also emphasize that profanity and holiness are, by their very definition, opposite and exclusive concepts: and if you don’t know that our calling consists of being like God in holiness of character and speech – 1 Pet. 1:15ff. “as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, since it is written, “You shall be holy, for I am holy.” – then you don’t understand what Christian faith consists of, nor its purpose. (Comp. 2:9: “you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation … that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness”)

Let us state this plainly: a man who cannot distinguish holiness and profanity has no business being an officer in Christ’s church. Anyone who does so is in the position of the recipients of the letter to the Hebrews, and we might say to him “you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God” (5:12). And if you think that I’m being ridiculous and engaging a fit of holier-than-thou prudery because cursing is ‘not a big deal,’ then Christ himself contradicts you: “I tell you, on the day of judgment people will give account for every careless word they speak” (Matt. 12:36). All words matter to God, even ones we regard as trivial, so much so that Christ goes on to say that “by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned” (v. 37).

But the swearing which Spufford does so plentifully, and which Johnson adopts approvingly, if with slight modification (Spufford’s vile phrase is one of Johnson’s section headings in the linked article), is not my main interest. Here are some examples of error and heresy in Spufford’s book, all of them taken from a mere three pages (19-21), in which he recounts an experience listening to Mozart in a café after arguing with his wife all night long because he had committed adultery—hardly the right circumstances under which to compose theological reflections.[1] My comments are behind the Roman numerals.

1. False definition of faith

a. “It is a mistake to suppose that it is assent to the propositions [i.e. “of the Creed”] that makes you a believer. It is the feelings that are primary. I assent to the ideas because I have the feelings; I don’t have the feelings because I have assented to the ideas. What I felt listening to Mozart in 1997 is not some wishy washy metaphor for an idea I believe in, and it’s not a front behind which the real business of belief is going on: it’s the thing itself. My belief is made of, built up from, sustained by emotions like that. That’s what makes it real.”

i. This is a denial of the historic Protestant definition of faith as consisting of knowledge, assent, and trust. Spufford presents his own doctrine of the nature of faith that makes emotion its base and center, and that has the intellectual and volitional elements of it follow and be the result of an instinctive feeling that mercy is built into the nature of the world. Note his ‘faith’ is built upon and given occasion for expression more by Mozart’s music than by any Christian doctrine, and is logically prior to it. Compare the statement immediately prior in which he says “Every Sunday I say and do my best to mean the whole of the Creed, which is a series of propositions.” And in Spufford’s estimation, doing his best to actually mean the Creed’s propositions makes him “a fairly orthodox Christian.”

2. Denial of God’s providence and sovereignty

a. “I think – note the verb ‘think’ – that I was not being targeted with a timely rendition of the Clarinet Concerto by a deity who micromanages the cosmos and causes all the events in it to happen (which would make said deity [blasphemy excised], considering the nature of many of those events).”

i. This is deism, abetted by the grievous sin of him judging and blaspheming God (comp quote 3b). Of course God does control even the smallest events: “The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord” (Prov. 16:33) and “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father” (Matt. 10:29).

3. Pantheism

a. “I think that the reason reality is that way, is in some ultimate sense merciful as well as being a set of physical processes all running along on their own without hope of appeal, all the way up from quantum mechanics to the relative velocity of galaxies by way of ‘blundering, low and horridly cruel’ biology (Darwin), is that the universe is sustained by a continual and infinitely patient act of love. I think that love keeps it in being.”

i. Here he makes his own idea of love the ground of the world’s existence. Love is for him an element of the universe itself, not an act of God working in or upon the world to maintain and govern it. It is also a nonsense concept, for on his view the “horridly cruel” realities of biology are an expression of love rather than proof that the world is fallen and full of woe.

b. “I think that I don’t have to posit some corny interventionist prod from a meddling [blasphemy excised] to account for my merciful ability to notice things a little bit better, when God is continually present everywhere anyway, undemonstratively underlying all cafes, all cassettes, all composers.”

i. More blasphemy and a denial of the possibility of miracles or at least of the supernatural operations of the Spirit in salvation (as illumination, conviction, regeneration, etc.). He also denies that many other expressions of God’s character enter into his government of the world (as wrath, righteousness) besides patience (and of course Spufford’s pantheistic notions of patience are not notions of a fact about God’s character).

4. Quotes a false prophet approvingly

a. “As the Qur’an says with a slightly alarming anatomical specificity, when God ‘is as close to you as the veins in your own neck.’”

5. Agnosticism

a. “That’s what I think. But it’s all secondary. It all comes limping along behind my emotional assurance that there was mercy, and I felt it.”

b. “I don’t know that any of it is true. (And neither do you, and neither does Professor Dawkins, and neither does anybody. It isn’t the kind of thing you can know. It isn’t a knowable item.)”

Time will fail to tell of his many other offenses, as his graphic descriptions of addiction, physical abuse, sodomy, and prostitution. For Spufford the faith is just a part of a healthy emotional life, and has its primary existence in the subjective feelings of the believer (better: feeler), not in God’s revelation of himself in nature, scripture, and the person of Christ. What is this but a new, more popular form of the school and method of Schleirmacher, the father of liberalism? Spufford has not the courage, honesty, or faith in God’s trustworthiness to maintain that Christianity is a revelation of truth, and so he tries to take refuge in emotion. Christ will have none of that:

And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain.  We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified about God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.  (1 Cor. 15:14-17)

If Christianity is not objectively, historically, factually true, then we are doomed. If it is only a helpful emotional crutch that might, kind-of, sort-of be true after a fashion, then it is as vain and short-lived as any human emotion. Now Johnson has exposed his readers to all of this by his approving use of Spufford’s language.[2] One should not quote heretics approvingly,[3] nor expose himself to them; and to pretend that Spufford’s book is anything other than full of corrosive filth and falsehood, is redeemable or commendable in some way, is to betray Christ’s sheep.

I happen to be such a sheep, one who has come from darkness and is still imperfect in refraining from profanity (hence my opposition to it). Let me then ask, especially those of you in the PCA who allowed this to go on and those in the EPC who think it would honor God to bring Greg Johnson into your midst, you who are supposed to be vigilant guardians of Christ’s flock and who will be judged strictly for your performance on that point: Do you think it is wise to read such a heretic as Spufford, or to quote him approvingly? And do you think that one who does so ought to be given the sacred trust of teaching God’s church rather than admonished that “bad company ruins good morals”? Better: where did Christ or his apostles do similarly? Did they not quote falsehood except in refutation? Did they not commend shunning false teachers? By what authority can you presume to do otherwise?

Tom Hervey is a member of Friendship Presbyterian Church in Laurens County, SC. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not of necessity reflect those of his church or its leadership or other members. He welcomes comments at the email address provided with his name. He is also author of Reflections on the Word: Essays in Protestant Scriptural Contemplation, and helped modernize Volume I of James Hervey’s classic dialogue on evangelical faith, Theron and Aspasio, available now at Monergism.

[1] What about David and Psalm 51? David wrote that after he sincerely repented his sin adultery with Bathsheba (not after he argued with his other wives or Nathan who came to rebuke him), and did so under the verbal inspiration of the Holy Spirit, not the common mental stimulus or comfort of caffeine and music. The Spirit used a repentant David to write scripture; his own flesh drove Spufford to muse heretical nonsense. The cases are not analogous.

[2] And it’s not just him: lots of believers have handled Spufford’s filth and nonsense more generously than it deserves: Trevin Wax saw its problems clearly, yet calls it “brilliant” and says “I still recommend people read Unapologetic.” Louis Markos highlights various of its problems, but still says it’s “an orthodox book.” Christianity Today gave it an award. To which we might say that ‘being brilliant is no virtue if one is only brilliantly wrong,’ and that, no, Unapologetic is not orthodox in any sense of the term. Many heresiarchs were brilliant, and many of them were vastly more orthodox than Spufford. Yet they were rejected by God’s church. (N.B., that phrase about being brilliantly wrong is not original to me, but I cannot find its source.)

[3] One can find truth in much greater purity elsewhere, and without the difficulty of straining out a very large chunk of falsehood to get a very small kernel of truth. But what I state here and in the text is a general, not absolute rule, as there may be exceptions in polemic or evangelistic argument where it is helpful to quote a heretic (e.g., a phrase like ‘even the Arians admit doctrine A [insert quote here as proof]’). Still, there was no need for Johnson to quote Spufford as he did here, and there were much better ways he could have made his point.