Should We Keep Studying a Fired Pastor’s Work?

I remember reading Authentic about five years back, and suffice it to say that I felt that as a rule, MacDonald proceeded from his own biases to impose them on the Scripture, instead of reliably exegeting Scripture. It’s also worth noting that MacDonald himself said that he felt the value of his teaching was so transitory that it ought to be withdrawn the moment he retired. (John E. posted a video of this on another thread)

So we might wonder whether his works were ever worth buying in the first place. Suffice it to say that when I reviewed Authentic, I didn’t make a beeline for his other books.

Please someone tell me if I’m missing something here.

You are. There is a long history going back years. You can catch up on a lot of it theelephantsdebt.com. You can read the executive summary there and the various posts. There is a lot of information elsewhere as well.

Joe, the stated reason for his firing is what he’s saying on the tapes Mancow Muller (radio talk show host) played on WLS recently. However, his comments were in response to the other issues that are listed on The Elephant’s Debt. Do those other issues play into things? I’d guess yes, but at this point, I don’t believe any of the decision-makers are saying that.

Given the breadth of things MacDonald has done—The Elephant’s Debt uses a lot of primary sources, so a lot of it isn’t in doubt at all IMO—my take is that you’re going to have to look at anything he wrote to figure out whether it’s legitimately good, or whether a lot of it is rather self-serving. My take with Authentic was that quite a bit of it fell into the “self-serving” category, and hence I would put MacDonald’s work into the “take it with a grain of salt” category.