Reformed Ayatollah(s)
By: Deji Yesufu
In September 2024, Alistair Begg, pastor at Parkside Church, Cleveland, USA, announced that he would be retiring from ministry in September 2025. He was giving the church a full year to consider the matter and to find a replacement for him. This month, June 2025, Alistair Begg preached his last sermon at Parkside Church. He had moved his retirement three months forward – perhaps the church had found a replacement for him. Begg will not be retiring from ministry but he will cease from carrying out active pastoral duties. Someone commented on a video on the subject on YouTube and explained that she was convinced that Alistair Begg had never gotten over the reaction that many in the Church had over his comment to a grandmother on the subject of homosexuality. He felt betrayed – especially by many of his friends who he believed were quite uncharitable to him in their comments about the subject. I agree with that lady’s comment. I would even go further to say that there is a militancy among reformed Christians that is not Christlike. In light of the current crisis between Israel and Iran, I think it is even possible to compare some in the leadership of Reformed Churches to something of an Ayatollah. I will explain more.
The Ayatollah is the supreme religious leader of Shia Islam in the nation of Iran. In 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini led an Islamic revolution that overturned the government of that country and established an Islamic theocracy over the country. Ruhollah Khomeini died in 1989 and was succeeded by the present Ayatollah – Ali Khamenei. Ruhollah Khomeini was an extremely religious individual and those who know something of his private life testified to his moral purity. He is one of the few Muslim leaders who married only one wife and remained committed to her all his life. The People’s Profile documentary on his is worth the time to watch. So, when Khomeini declared a fatwa on Salman Rushdie in 1988, he was speaking with an authority that is only second to the voice of Allah. Khomeini died in 1989, but the fatwa hung on Rushdie’s head until August 2022, when he was attacked with a knife in New York and lost an eye. The Ayatollah’s authority does not only exhume from the office he occupies; it is also something that exhumes from the false sense of righteousness that his moral uprightness gives him. The Ayatollah is not only the religious leader of Iran; he is also their political head. He is the supreme leader. I will now turn my attention to the subject of the “false sense of righteousness” that fundamentalist leaders could possess that can make them into something of an Ayatollah. A phenomenon we could find even in churches – including reformed churches.
If religion will produce anything at all, the minimum we should see in anyone who professes religious beliefs is some moral rectitude. All religions come with their standards of righteousness and holiness; all religions propound laws that a deity enumerate to the people. The religion that gave rise to Christianity was Judaism – the religion of the Jews. The Jews received laws directly from God – the maker of the heavens and the earth, and the overall testimony of the Old Testament was that the Jews were unable to keep God’s holy laws. God enacted a New Covenant in the person of his Son Jesus Christ mainly because the end of every religious pursuit is always a false righteousness. False righteousness is a sense of moral purity that a man may have because of the belief that he has succeeded at gaining moral ground mostly above his peers. Nothing depicts this more than the prayer of the Pharisee in Luke 18, where he approached God in the confidence of what he has succeeded at doing in religion; while the publican is weighed down heavily by his failures. Suffice it to say here that Jesus commended the publican’s prayer instead, and pointed out that that man went away justified.
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Therefore, the place Christianity triumphs over other religious professions is never in how well God’s people keep religious laws; rather, Christianity triumphs in a solid comprehension of the concept of grace. The whole idea is that God has saved a sinner; God forgives our sins; God gives us the space to triumph over our sins; God commands that we show the same mercy to others that we have received from him; etc. Christianity brought grace, love, forgiveness, freedom, and joy to our world through Jesus Christ. On the other hand, fundamentalism is replete with hate, retribution, bondage, and depression. That, my friends, is a description of fundamentalist Islam. It is what informs the violence that they carry out on Christians and Jews. What we fail to realize, however, is that fundamentalism can also be found among Christians who carry the same spirit of hate, retribution, bondage, and depression.
The United States of America can no longer be regarded as a Christian nation. However, the Christian worldview that informed the birthing of that great country has benefitted the whole world. Before the coming of America, the concept of freedom and religious tolerance was almost non-existent in our world. America taught the world freedom – freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of association, freedom of commerce, freedom of ideas, etc. The downside of religious freedom in the United States of America is that the country is replete with cults of all kinds. Anyone can just rise and preach whatever he likes, gather a following and influence people – the American authorities will not do anything to him. As long as such an individual keeps to the law of the land, America will never infringe on the religious profession of a people. The upside of American freedom is the proliferation of ideas. It is what informs commerce and productivity in that country that has made it super wealthy today. On Saturday, the 21st of June, 2025, American B-2 stealth bombers invaded Iranian airspace and destroyed the nuclear weapon facility that the Iranians had been developing for more than two decades now. That operation was based on the work of one individual in the American military who had discovered in 2009 that Iran was building underground facilities in Fordow and had advised his superiors on developing a unique bomb that could destroy such a facility when the need arose. The American versatility is based largely on the freedom of ideas they give their people, and the resources they use to support the realization of those ideas. Fundamentalist societies will not give liberty to their people; they will not permit freedom of ideas; and they will not encourage economic prosperity among their people. Anything the people must do will revolve around the narrow mindset of the fundamentalist leader.
My concern in this essay is the need to discourage every kind of religious fundamentalist in Christian circles. We must remind ourselves of the bedrock of our religion – grace. We must remind ourselves that we are sinners who have been freely forgiven by our Lord. We must enjoy the grace of the gospel, and we must allow this grace to extend to others also. We must not reach that point in our religious profession where we think that the standard of religion stands and falls by what we do. We must thank God daily for the progress we have made in sanctification, but we must never have that sense that we are the only standard of religion for all people. We must accept that Jesus Christ is working in all men who are professing his name. We should maintain our denominational peculiarities but we must never have an exclusive bent to our denominational profession. We must accept that Christ is working in every denomination and that there is something we all can learn from other Christian groups. We must commend our religious beliefs through charity – and never by force. We must understand that the most acceptable religious actions are not those that are dictated by a religious leader, but those that exhume from a heart that has come to accept the grace of God – especially as it is found in Christ Jesus. We must allow God to freely motivate his people towards sanctification. We must wait for God to do a miracle of grace in the hearts of men – just as he has done to us via his profound patience. As we do this, we get a glimpse of how Christ works through diversity in our world to bring to pass his good purposes.
It has been eighteen months since the Alistair Begg controversy erupted, and I have no regrets at all in standing with that good man in that debacle. Since that time many religious leaders who criticized Begg have themselves failed woefully in Christian ministry. I had warned that the danger of condemning Begg during that controversy was that we would encourage a religion of Phariseeism. What Pharisees do well is that they cover their sins, while they rejoice over the failures of others. Pharisees also love hierarchy. They enact religious leaders that become the face of their sect – their own Ayatollah. If there is one thing the Protestant Reformation gave Christianity, it is the idea that one man can no longer rule the Christian Church – there are no Popes among believers today. Christ alone is the head of the Church. The Ayatollah is as much a sinner as the least person in the church. Where these ideas are rejected, we find the rise of fundamentalism in the churches and the coming of Christian Ayatollahs – even Reformed Ayatollahs.
Deji Yesufu is the pastor of Providence Reformed Baptist Church Ibadan. He is the author of HUMANITY. He can be reached at [email protected]
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