Army Chaplain Under Fire for Sharing John Piper's Book 'Coronavirus and Christ'

“This book has helped me refocus my sacred calling to my savior Jesus Christ to finish strong” 

U.S. Army soldiers pray on September 11, 2011 during a protestant service at Bagram Air Field, Afghanistan. Ten years after the 9/11 attacks in the United States and after almost a decade war in Afghanistan, American soldiers gathered for church services in prayer and solemn observance of the tragic day. | John Moore/Getty Images

By Samuel Smith
Christian Post

Twenty-two military chaplains are calling on a senior army chaplain to be disciplined and possibly court-martialed for sending nearly three-dozen other chaplains an email containing a copy of John Piper’s new e-book, Coronavirus and Christ.

Secretary of Defense Mark Esper is being urged by a national legal organization to punish Senior Chaplain Col. Moon H. Kim, the command chaplain of U.S. Army Garrison Humphreys in South Korea, the largest U.S. military installation outside of the United States.

In a letter sent this week, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation said Kim sent out an email using his official military email address to 35 other chaplains on Wednesday containing an “unsolicited” PDF copy of Piper’s new e-book Coronavirus and Christ.

DesiringGod.org

MRFF, which advocates for a strict separation of church and state within the U.S. military, is representing 22 clients all of whom are Christians from mostly mainline and progressive traditions and felt if they came forward publicly in opposition to Kim’s email they would face repercussions.

The clients, some of whom are from the LGBT community, “do not subscribe to the ultra-conservative/Reformed/evangelical Christian theology of John Piper.” Piper is the chancellor of Bethlehem College & Seminary in Minnesota and the founder of DesiringGod.Org.

The clients take issue with the fact that the famed preacher’s book says that “some people will be infected with the coronavirus
as a specific judgment from God because of their sinful attitudes and actions.”

In Chapter 7 in a section titled “Examples of Specific Judgements on Specific Sins,” Piper wrote that one example “is the sin of homosexual intercourse.” Piper cited Romans 1:27 in which the Apostle Paul states that “men committing shameless acts with men” received in themselves “the due penalty for their error.”

“That ‘due penalty’ is the painful effect ‘in themselves’ of their sin,” Piper wrote. “This ‘due penalty’ is just one example of the judgment of God that we see in Romans 1:18, where it says, ‘The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.’ Therefore, while not all suffering is a specific judgment for specific sins, some is.”

Christian Post article continues

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