Jesus orchestrated the brutal murder of your teenage friend and her mom. So says John Piper in a recent “Ask Pastor John” podcast episode titled, “Sovereignty and My Murdered Friend.”
The podcast begins by acknowledging it’s a “very heavy episode” before asking people to donate to their “Next Generation Vision to aggressively spread great joy in a big God to the next generation.”
Then going with the “next generation” theme, they introduce the story of a 17-year-old girl who asks Piper about God’s role in the brutal murder of two people she cares about deeply.
“A girl who was my close teammate and her mother were recently brutally murdered,” the high school student begins. “People say this was ‘her time’ or ‘God’s will,’ but I don’t understand how this can be true.” So she asks Piper, “How can I reconcile this and turn to the Lord for comfort and understanding in my grief?”
Remember, Piper’s paradigm is to “aggressively spread great joy in a big God.” And in the case of this grieving young girl, that means accusing Jesus of being big enough to murder her friends without being held responsible for it.
God disapproves what God ordains
It should be no surprise that Piper would suggest such abusive drivel. He begins by telling the teenage girl he’s already spent several podcast episodes explaining “whether God can and does will that things happen which are sinful.”
“It should be no surprise that Piper would suggest such abusive drivel.”
As I noted in a previous piece about Piper’s war on lament: “In Suffering and the Sovereignty of God, which Piper edited, Mark Talbot claims God ‘… brought about the Nazis’ brutality at Birkenau and Auschwitz as well as the terrible killings of Dennis Nadar and even the sexual abuse of a young child.’”
Then Piper suggests: “God disapproves of some of what he ordains to happen. That is, he forbids some of the things he brings about.”
In Don’t Waste Your Cancer, Piper says God gives kids cancer as a “gift” and a “purifying pathway to heaven” in order to “destroy the appetite for sin” through a “golden opportunity to show that (Christ) is worth more than life.”
So of course Piper’s God would decree the brutal murder of a teenage girl and her mom. If Piper’s God already causes sexual assault and cancer, why would murder be any different?
It’s a mystery
Piper points the girl to such verses as Proverbs 16:33, which says, “The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord.” Or James 4:15, which says, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.”
How one goes from a statement about the Lord willing life to Jesus decreeing the murder of teenage girls and their moms is unclear. So Piper goes with the typical fundamentalist approach of appealing to mystery.
“We may not understand all the psychological dynamics of how he can do that, but that he does it is taught throughout the Bible,” he says.
Threatening teenage girls
Piper often threatens women into submission by appealing to their desires to be biblical or in relationship with God.
“Piper often threatens women into submission.”
For example, he tells those who have been sexually assaulted they must confess “God’s sovereignty … at the moment of causality.” He says if they don’t believe “the sovereign God willed that,” then they are guilty of shoving God and of pushing God away.
Despite the fact these are survivors of physical abuse, Piper uses physical language to accuse abuse survivors of abusing God. And thus, he threatens if they don’t submit to his belief that God caused their sexual assault, they will “lose God.”
Similarly, he threatens the 17-year-old girl in this episode: “We will not be able to understand the Bible if we reject the reality that God can will that sin comes to pass without himself being sinful.”
A 17-year-old girl who sends Piper a message is likely a girl who wants to understand the Bible. So Piper preys on her desire to know God by threatening her that she won’t understand the Bible like he does if she doesn’t submit.
A smokescreen of sorrow
Piper closes his episode with 10 statements that name murder as evil and acknowledge the reality of grief. So conservative evangelicals who read this piece will likely point to those statements as proof I’m taking his words out of context.
But placing Piper’s sovereignty over sin language into a larger context of his recognition of sorrow fails to take his own theology seriously because Piper himself places recognition of sorrow into the larger context of God decreeing and controlling all things for self-glory.
He tells the girl, “God planned the murder of Jesus from all eternity.” So he tells her to “open your heart to eternity” by knowing that death is “seized by God and made to serve his eternal purposes of glory.”
Thus, Piper’s ultimate goal for this girl is what the podcast opened with a fundraising appeal over: Aggressively spreading great joy in a big God who murders your friends.
How Piper’s social location affects his response
There are reasons why Piper’s minions like Joe Rigney, Andy Naselli and David Easterwood have made headlines this year praying for God to smite the people of Minneapolis and justifying the murders of their neighbors like Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
The decades these men sat under Piper’s theological formation has led them to demonize empathy and lament.
With Piper’s patriarchy, there is no sitting in sackcloth and ashes in a space of lament so deep to where words cannot even be uttered. To them, lament and sorrow dissolve in their mission of finding aggressive joy in a big God.
Because they define this God in hierarchical terms, they place God at the top, decreeing the murder of teenage girls and their moms for self-glory, rather than being present in and among the suffering.
Piper’s God is the emperor, the slave owner, the sexual abuser. And that’s why anyone who desires to follow Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 25 should have nothing to do with Piper. Mark and avoid him. If we respond to the murder of the next generation through Piper’s theology of aggressively finding joy in a God who causes it, there won’t be a next generation. Our only hope is that God is a God who isn’t obsessed with self-glory, but who laments, heals and liberates.
“Anyone who desires to follow Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 25 should have nothing to do with Piper.”
As James Cone put it, Black Christians who actually understand suffering “rejected white distortions of the gospel which emphasized the obedience of slaves to their masters. They contended that God willed their freedom and not their slavery.”
Conservative Baptists are a violent mess
Of course, conservative Baptists have long positioned themselves on the wrong side of the slavery conversation. The earliest Southern Baptists promoted the idea of a top-down God who wills the submission of slaves. The independent Baptists I grew up with kept the Black kids in their own segregated church service on Sunday mornings as late as the year 2000 when I left.
Earlier this week, I wrote about an independent Baptist church dragging someone wearing a hoodie down the center aisle during a vacation Bible school and shooting his convulsing body with fake guns as the children and parents chanted, “Take him out! Blow him up!”
For many of us who grew up in these conservative Baptist worlds that glorified violence, John Piper felt like a more hopeful, healing reprieve. As the longtime pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church and the founder of Desiring God, Piper told us there wasn’t a tension between God’s glory and our joy. He said, “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.”
So we didn’t have to choose between joy or glory. Our joy could be maximized in God’s glory.
Many of my former independent Baptist friends have gotten caught up in Piper’s glory hierarchy and imagine themselves as free.
But hierarchies always strengthen the power of those at the top, dehumanize those below and wage war against those who won’t submit. Even when we venture away from the VBS assassination cosplay world of the independent Baptists and venture into the world of the supposedly more respectable conservative Baptists like Piper, we find ourselves bending the knee toward the joy of worshiping a God who orchestrates the brutal murder of our friends and their moms.
For those of us who have empathy for teenage girls and their moms, we eventually realize the truth: There is no safe space in the world of these conservative Baptists.
Rick Pidcock is a 2004 graduate of Bob Jones University, with a bachelor of arts degree in Bible. He’s a freelance writer based in South Carolina and a former Clemons Fellow with BNG. He completed a master of arts degree in worship from Northern Seminary. He is a stay-at-home father of five children and is the author of a forthcoming book, Weapons of Worship: How the Songs of Evangelicalism Form the Soundtrack of Extremism. Follow his blog at www.rickpidcock.com.