Walter Strickland's Gospel

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Welcome to Conversations That Matter Podcast. My name is John Harris. Hopefully a little bit of a shorter one today.

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We've been doing a lot of shorter ones actually this week. This is the fifth podcast and I hope those who like the shorter podcasts are enjoying this.

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Don't think that I'm gonna be doing this forever though. We'll see, I don't know. I try to get three podcasts out a week if I can and this is my fifth podcast for this week.

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But it was important enough, the subject matter we're about to go over that I felt that I needed to. I got a piece of information

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I'm about to share with you earlier this week and I had already recorded the first four and I thought I need to talk about this.

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Because it could end up affecting people who are in certain Christian schools and parents and students

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I think need to know about this. And it's kind of sad, just to set this up.

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There's two dystopian novels, famous dystopian novels that are often cited when comparing to the totalitarianism that we see being foisted upon us today.

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And one is the book Brave New World, one is the book 1984.

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And different books, but to highlight one of the differences between them, in Brave New World people usher in their own prison, they willfully just accept tyranny and it's something that you don't actually have to put them in the cage because they'll lock the door themselves kind of thing.

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And in 1984, it's a very top -down government, very oppressive, spying on you all the time.

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But in Brave New World, that kind of mechanism isn't really necessary, people just police themselves.

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And we see a mixture of that going on. Frankly, it's both in some ways. And this is a

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Brave New World moment in some ways. This is, what I'm about to share with you is an example of a

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Christian school network association willfully bringing in the diversity training and all the stuff,

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I mean, this is a Christianized version of it, but all the stuff that's happening in the world, in your place of employment, in secular schools, is now coming into a sphere that really,

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I mean, I have no, I mean, maybe there's something I'm not aware of, but it doesn't seem like there's any reason to bring this extra kind of diversity training in to this particular association of private schools,

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Christian private schools, but it's happening. And it's happening every, people are policing themselves.

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And that's what I'm seeing. And there's countless examples of it, but there's just one. And I just wanna encourage, if you have any connection to the situation

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I'm about to describe, I would encourage you try to fight this if you can. There's no reason for us to be doing it.

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It's not like the government's even mandating this. So the title of this slideshow that I just pulled together is called

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Walter Strickland's Gospel. And Walter Strickland is a professor at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina.

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That's where I got my MDiv from. I haven't actually, I don't think I've met him personally. I've seen him,

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I'm sure, but everything I know about him as far as his personality is concerned, and I don't know him, again, personally, but what

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I've heard is that he tends to be nice. I mean, he seems that way in his videos, but he's got some erroneous beliefs.

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And that's what I'm focusing on, not his personality. I know, because I've seen reactions to some of the material that I've put out in the past, people can get very defensive, and I get upset that they're being portrayed a certain way.

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And my desire here is to portray as accurately as possible. And I would look to you, the audience, if you want to research what

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I'm telling you, I'm gonna give you all the references. If you're a patron, also, you will get this slideshow.

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So you'll have everything there. But even if you're not, you can go pause the video, and you can go check out the sources that I'm going to cite for you as we go through this.

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But Walter Strickland is a professor, like I said, at the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.

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He's been doing, I'll skip ahead here. So he's got the Strickland Institute, and you can see there's a number of Christian organizations that bring him in for consultation.

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For consulting, that's what he does on the side, I guess, or I'm not sure exactly to what extent he does this along with his teaching, but this is definitely a part of what he does.

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And there is an organization called Unified that he is involved in, to the point

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I believe he's actually, I mean, the intro video is him, so I'm assuming that he's probably the founder or one of the founders.

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But he is now going to be doing some consulting to ACSI. And we'll start here.

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ACSI is based in Colorado Springs, and it exists to strengthen

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Christian schools and equip Christian educators worldwide as they prepare students academically, inspire them to become devoted followers of Christ, advances excellence in Christian schools.

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It serves more than 25 ,000 schools in 108 countries, helps more than 5 .5

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million students worldwide connect to Christian education. So this is big. If your private school is part of ACSI, then they're gonna be using, or at least

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ACSI will be using and making available information from Unified.

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Now, Unified is a center for hope and unity that aims to equip Christian educators to think cross -culturally about their school's mission.

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Their desire is to resource Christian schools to actualize the Ephesians 2 .14 reality of the dividing wall of hostility being torn down.

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Through a variety of services, including webinars, podcasts, et cetera, they seek to equip every student and Christian educator with the cultural intelligence to navigate a racially, politically, and ideologically polarized world.

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Walter Strickland, there we go, is the executive director of Unified and is also a speaker for the

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ACSI's Flourishing Schools Institute. So he's involved with ACSI, it looks like, in two different ways here.

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And by the way, I just wanna highlight that word, cultural intelligence. This was a word that I actually first heard,

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I think, about a year ago, and it's possible that there's some people using it in a non -social justice way, but I knew as soon as I heard that,

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I thought that is going to be one of the next buzzwords because the progressives tend to jump from word to word.

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As they get identified in one area, woke, critical race theory, they wanna abandon that one because it gets vilified and they choose something else.

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So just a heads up on that. If you hear that word, I believe that's gonna be one of the new buzzwords, cultural intelligence.

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But Walter Strickland is involved with ACSI. And some of you may have children that go to an

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ACSI school, they do pay for this, believe me. They have to pay to have these consultation resources.

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Now, I'm gonna read for you. This is from, this is what was sent to me. It's just a few quotes from it earlier this week that prompted me to wanna make this video.

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The Association of Christian Schools and Unified are partnering to provide Christian educators with biblically -based resources on diversity, inclusion, and racial reconciliation.

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Dr. Walter, and before I keep going, just remember what's going on in the world right now. Remember what's happening just at your place of employment.

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If you know people in secular school, realize what's happening there. When you turn on your

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Amazon Prime, if you still have that, to watch something, I got rid of mine, but what's staring you in the face?

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What is around you just in the milieu, everywhere in your world right now?

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It's this kind of language. And so it's happening in some ways through government action, but in other ways, people are just volunteering to have diversity training and these kinds of things.

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And so this is what we have here, I believe, is this was a decision that was made by ACSI, the

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Association of Christian Schools, to bring in Unified. Dr.

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Walter Strickland, this release says, is the executive director. He defined the effective pursuit of unity as one that is theologically oriented, data -driven, and aptly resourced.

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Cultural intelligence is a prerequisite to reconciliation and a necessity for every ambassador of Christ, despite the demographics of their school, he said.

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So if you go to an all -white school in Iowa, then it's a

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German town, they're all German, then this is, somehow you need to do something, you have to have this cultural intelligence.

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He's gonna help provide that. I mean, right now, this is a great marketing strategy.

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I mean, it's not a bad, I'm sure they're probably making a lot of money on this. Scripture, he goes on, is the source that provides the motivation and methods for our approach to pursuing unity.

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So there's something broken, that's the assumption, and he's gonna come and fix it. We're not unified, right?

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Even if you go to a school that's completely German or something, you're still not unified somehow, and you need to have this cultural intelligence.

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Unified offers a variety of services for Christian educators on the topics of diversity and cultural intelligence, including,

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I think I read that before, they have resources. Christian schools have more diverse classrooms today than perhaps ever before.

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Unified aims to help leaders integrate biblical principles of justice and unity into school culture and classroom pedagogy.

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So that means the philosophy of education is going to be impacted by this partnership with unified.

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Our desire for unity is not politically or socially driven, but rather is given to us by God. Today's challenge of racial division allows us to answer the biblical call to cultivate a school environment in which all of God's children can flourish.

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So another assumption that there's such a big issue, right, all of God's children right now cannot flourish in these

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Christian schools. That's the assumption. So you have these Christian schools that are all over the place, and all of God's children just aren't flourishing there.

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There's racial division there. Now, look, I haven't heard about this in the

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Christian schools. Maybe you go to a school that has some of those problems. I don't know, but I would encourage you if you're a parent and your child goes to an

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ACSI school, just think about this. Is this program even, let's say it's all good, which

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I don't believe, but let's say it is. Is it necessary? Is this something that's worth spending money on, which does come out of your pocket if you trace it back, because there may be no problem like that in your school.

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You may have other problems that need different solutions. So I would just encourage you to think through that because right now we're in this time when because of critical theory and social justice movement, people are identifying all these problems that are supposed problems that don't actually exist all over the place.

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And it's just like, well, if you can't see it, you're not looking at it with the right lens or the right cultural intelligence or something.

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So this is something for parental accountability in my opinion. Now, here's gonna be the main focus of this video.

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I want to go through some things. These are some quotations, direct quotations from Walter Strickland over the years.

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And some of this, some of you may have heard of, but there's some new stuff as well. And the disturbing thing to me, more than anything, this is a

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Christian school network. Walter Strickland is a Christian, claims to be. And his understanding of the gospel in multiple quotations is deeply impacted by liberation theology slash social justice.

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And it renders what amounts to a false gospel. And to me, that is more damaging and more concerning than any of the other issues that relate to the social justice movement.

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Because a false gospel can damn. I mean, it does damn, if that's what you're trusting in.

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If you have the wrong gospel, right? If you have the wrong Jesus, if you have wrong theology that is so basic to the fundamental

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Christian message, it can have eternal implications. And so I'm gonna point out some things in some of the quotes that I've chosen to focus on here.

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Again, you can go and you can check out the sources if you really want to check, hey, did you pull that out of context?

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My goal is never to do that. In order to examine anything though, you have to examine the, you have to do some amount of organization.

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You have to take quotations, you have to take passages and you have to think through them systematically, put them together.

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And that's all I'm doing. That's just what the educational endeavor is. If you wanna study anything, you have to do it that way.

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So I'm only saying that because I know for some odd reason, some people in academia in the

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Southern Baptist Convention don't quite seem to understand that. And they will accuse you of taking things out of context because I've been accused of it.

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When no such thing has happened, you ask them to give you specifics and they can't really do it. And so my challenge back, before that accusation is even made is show me where, show me specifically where if that's what you think is going on.

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One other thing I'm gonna head off at the pass is this idea that you have to, did you talk to the person?

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This is another, I've done whole podcasts on this. I think I did one on a guide for whistleblowers.

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Whistleblowers guided the universe a few weeks ago where I talked about this. But the idea that you have to go, did you go to the person before you talked about these things publicly?

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And these are all public quotes that I'm gonna share with you. It's public error. And then the model we have in scripture is when there's public error,

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Paul confronts Peter, Jesus confronts the Pharisees. It's in public. And the concern is that people might believe it who are hearing it in public.

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It wouldn't be loving to go to that person in private and never share it, never oppose these very harmful and damaging things in the public sphere where people are actually adopting these ideas and they're leading them astray.

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So in order to get the true meaning of what someone says, we examine their words.

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If someone believes that, because this is the other thing I hear is you have to go to that person to have them clarify their words.

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Then that can lead to an infinite regress because then what happens when you get the clarification and then you trot that out, then you have to clarify that clarification.

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It has to stop somewhere. At some point, someone is responsible for the words that they put out there.

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And yes, you wanna interpret them in context according to authorial intent, which is my goal here.

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So I wanted to head those things off before we get into it, but let's start, let's read some of these quotes.

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This is, we're gonna start back in 2016. This is from the

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Balance Scholar, The Life and Work of J. Diotys Roberts, and this was Walter Strickland.

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And he talks about James Cone and J. Diotys Roberts, both of them liberation theologians.

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Not, if you read their works, and you don't even have to be that careful, to be honest, because the heresy is so blatant, you will find that they are not orthodox.

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But the first theologian Walter Strickland references is James Cone, and here's what he says.

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Oftentimes, what happens is that people get wind of Cone, primarily because he is considered the godfather of black liberation theology.

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He's prolific, he's written monograph after monograph, hitting you every year, especially the beginnings of the movement.

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And then also most recently, he came out with, I think it's his most beautiful monograph, The Cross and the

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Lynching Tree. If you have not gotten that, you need to read that. You may agree with more or less of what he says, but either way, you'll be blessed by that.

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And so people have sort of latched onto Cone because he's more of a lightning rod. He's intentionally trying to wed the

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Christian faith of Martin Luther King with the black power of Malcolm X, hence his book, Martin and Malcolm in America, A Dream or a

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Nightmare. And so because of that, he's in this sort of seminal, powerful figure, almost like a wrecking ball, right?

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He is sort of deconstruct, I'm not sure this is a transcript, so I'm not sure how this makes sense grammatically.

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He is sort of deconstructing, I think would be how it should read, deconstructing and blowing up this sort of stranglehold that white men have had on academic theology in America.

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So this is Walter Strickland's description of James Cone, and he calls it a beautiful monograph. He says, you'll be blessed by The Cross and the

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Lynching Tree. Now, what does The Cross and the Lynching Tree say? Well, it says a lot of things, here's a few of them.

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And this is just, we could have put so many more things here but the gospel is found wherever poor people struggle for justice.

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Really? The gospel of Jesus is not a rational concept to be explained in a theory of salvation, but a story about God's presence in Jesus' solidarity with the oppressed, which led to his death on the cross.

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Okay, The Cross and the Lynching Tree interpret each other. So I guess The Cross of Jesus Christ is interpreted by the lynching tree.

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I mean, this is straight up liberation theology. Salvation is broken, spirits being healed, voiceless people speaking out and black people empowered to love their own blackness.

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Is that from scripture? Do you ever read about that? You know, it's black people loving their own blackness, that's what salvation is.

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The lynched black victim experienced the same fate as the crucified Christ, and thus became the most potent symbol of understanding the true meaning of the salvation achieved through God on the cross.

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We go on and on with this. This is not the same gospel as is preached in the New Testament. This is not even close.

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This is totally political and totally Marxist infused. And if you don't believe me, you can read another book by James Cone from 1980.

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And I referenced it two podcasts ago where he talks about the black church and Marxism.

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And it admits, yeah, I'm using Marxism. It's okay to use Marxism. Well, Walter Strickland says you're gonna be blessed by this book.

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It's a beautiful monograph. Still in 2016. So here's another one.

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Deotis Roberts comes along in 1971, Strickland says, he publishes Liberation and Reconciliation, which is my favorite theological book of all time.

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You need to pick up Liberation and Reconciliation. It's just as applicable as it was then. And so here's some quotes from that particular book.

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And I have, as you can see, a bunch of them. If you're a patron, you can go download this and read these various quotes.

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I'm just gonna give you a few of them here because there's so many that I wrote down. Let's start here.

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Consciousness of collective guilt does not allow whites to enter into self -pride concerning racism. They should be haunted by the sins of their fathers and mothers to such an extent that they would seek to remove the blight of racism upon an entire people in their midst.

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Is that how Christians talk about sin? They should be haunted by the sins of their fathers and mothers, not their own sins, the sins of their fathers and mothers.

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The black Messiah encounters the black Christian on the level of personal experience in the black church in its setting in the black community, enabling black

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Christians to overcome their identity crisis, having been alienated, despised and rejected by the larger community and even in integrated congregations.

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So there's a black Messiah now. This is liberation theology. The black Christ participates in the black experience.

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In some sense, Christ makes contact with what the black Christian is aware of in his unique story and personal experience.

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He encounters Christ in that experience and is confronted by the claims of Christ also in his black experience.

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I mean, it just goes on and on. It's this language. The universal

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Christ reconciles the black man with the rest of mankind. Blacks must not allow whites to solve their consciences through reparations.

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Too many whites are pleased to be rid of the black presence by funding some empowerment project in the black community.

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So look, Deitis Roberts wants white people to live in perpetual guilt. Just, I mean, let's do one more quote and then

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I don't think I can take any more. There were the black nationalists, some were religious and sought liberation through a separation of the races.

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Liberation was to be by whatever means necessary. This included violence as a means to liberation.

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On the other hand, there were persons among us who were willing to be reconciled with whites based upon their understanding of the gospel as a gospel of love only.

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They were willing to allow whites to teach them what to believe. The often Bible -based gospel knew nothing of justice in the here and now.

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It was often an individualistic and otherworldly gospel. The attempt was made to present both liberation and reconciliation as a balance within the gospel message.

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So J. Deitis Roberts does not like the Bible -based gospel. And this just goes on and on and on.

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Talks about Freud, talks about Marx's analysis, says that you have to be informed by not just the

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Christian faith, but by those two. This is awful. And this is,

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I'm gonna go back to the quote from 2016, Walter Strickland, who's basically in charge of advising on issues of racial unity, et cetera, inclusion, diversity, large

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Christian school network. He says in 2016, that Liberation Reconciliation, which

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I just read you quotes from, is his favorite theological book of all time. Here's another quote from Strickland in that same 2016 video interview.

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He's talking about J. Deitis Roberts. He says, for him to talk about Christology and the blackness of Christ. He says, you know,

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Jesus is not ontologically black. He is whoever you are, wherever you are. So God to him looks black, but for the person who's

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Asian, he looks Asian or Japanese, et cetera. He's restoring brokenness and he will meet every individual in particular where they are, but there are still these universal ideas of restoration.

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These universal ideas that God is bringing about in every context, but it looks a specific way in a specific context.

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So guys, this is where the standpoint theory starts coming in. The horizons approach, the hermeneutical spiral, all these things you've heard me talk about that liberation theologians love.

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Gadamer, Heidegger, this is not objectivity.

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This is subjectivity. I mean, Jesus was Jewish. He literally came.

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There is, sure, I understand in your specific context, you could create art and these kinds of things that portray him a certain way.

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Your imagination, you know, goes into that in some cases, but that doesn't take away from the reality of who

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Jesus actually was. And just because he's portrayed a certain way in certain contexts, it doesn't mean that you have your little own reality carved out or anything like that.

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In his essence, let's see, making him black so that he's, Jesus black, so that he's therefore non -application to other

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Christians. So here's what Walter Shicklin's saying. If Jesus isn't black to black Christians, he can't be applied to them.

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They have to kind of see him as black. It's interesting, they don't ever say this about white.

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It's just, it only works in one direction. He says that, let's see, we wanna escape the extreme of making

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Christ and his work in salvation so ethereal and so theory driven that it's no good to anybody in any context because you haven't done the work to apply it anywhere.

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And so if there's anybody who has done the work of being a theologian, of understanding the universal imperatives of the gospel of Jesus Christ, but also articulating it so clearly and so profoundly in any of the contexts,

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I think it's J .D. Roberts. This is where you start seeing that there's another gospel at play here.

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Because he's bringing in the universal imperatives of the gospel, imperatives, commands.

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There's commands of the gospel apparently. And J .D.

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Roberts has done the work of understanding these commands of the gospel, which somehow include portraying

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Jesus as black to black people and Asian to Asian people, et cetera. Where do you find this anywhere in scripture?

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Jesus just isn't relatable. Well, I guess he's gotta look like your social group then. Then you can somehow relate to him.

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And this is somehow a gospel imperative. That's really where the danger ends up being more than anything else, making that as part of the imperative of the gospel, the command of the gospel.

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I mean, you're mixing then law imperative with grace, gospel. This is the problem that the

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Galatian heresy was about. And if you doubt me on this, wait till you see some of the quotes that we're about to see.

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This is from 2018, so we're jumping two years now. This is the end of 2018, Walter Strickland again.

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This is at Southeastern, he says this. For the evangelical, let's do, see, or have an understanding of the temporary implications of the faith, but it can't be dislodged from the eternal significance for the salvation of our souls, and also for what we're going to see in the kingdom.

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So I think the evangelical would do well to hear the voice of Dr. Cone in drawing us toward the reality that the gospel, the resurrection of Christ, has implications for the here and now, but make sure we don't lose the eternal realities of the gospel as we begin to balance and have a wise appropriation of temporal and the sort of eternal.

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So Dr. Cone, James Cone, is drawing Christians, evangelicals, he says specifically, toward the reality of the gospel.

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Someone who did not have the gospel, who had a different gospel, is going to help evangelicals understand the gospel.

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How is that possible? It's not. October 15th, 2018,

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Walter Strickland says this. Trying to understand that Dr. Cone was one who wanted to see social vitality of the gospel, and that's well and good, but that also needs to be balanced with the spiritual vitality of the gospel.

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I think that evangelicals do well to have a spiritual vitality. Evangelicals are people who do devotional reading, scripture memory, and Bible study, and I say they, but I mean we, do those things very well.

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Here's the key quote, we fast and we pray, that's fantastic, but that person needs to hear the voice of Dr.

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Cone, beckoning us to the fact that that person is the one who is best suited to do the work of the social implications, the social outworkings of the gospel, and understands the brokenness of creation from scripture, and go about fixing it under the kingdom that's to come.

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Needs to hear the voice of Dr. Cone beckoning us to do the work, again, works, work.

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And this is an outworking of the gospel. Can you see this yet? Can you start to see, is it starting to get a little clearer for you?

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You have law over here, and it's not even God's law, it's liberation theology, it's

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Marxist -infused principles of fake justice, I mean that's

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James Cone. You have law, and that's somehow part of the grace, the good news of the gospel, that Christ has come and taken our sin, and put us into a right relationship with God, it's the power of God to salvation for those who believe, that's the gospel, and look what he's doing with it.

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Here's another quote, also from 2018, about James Cone, and I'm gonna start,

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I don't think I have time to read all of these, I have a lot of quotes here, but he says that James Cone, in his talking about the context where he is theologizing from, you can actually hear the cries of those people in his theology, and again, he's talking about oppressed people, if you agree with his constructive conclusions, and where we should go, or his ethical implications, or not, you can still hear the cries of the people that are in need of being ministered to.

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And so, and that's why evangelicals should care about Dr. Cone, so he says, why should you care about this guy, James Cone?

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He's not even orthodox, I mean, strictly even admits, he says that he doesn't quite agree with him, he says, on his understanding of the atonement, and the authority of scripture, but you should listen, because he's somehow been able to encapsulate the cries of the oppressed into his theology, well, that's the liberation part, that's the liberation theology part.

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As a professor, Strickland says, Dr. Cone really saw his role as a discipler, he was prophetic, he was prolific in his writings, prophetic, wasn't a

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Christian, but he was prophetic. Despite my substantive theological differences, being introduced to systemic sin in Cone's work was an important theological insight.

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So he's saying, this is what I gained from him. Why is it so important, just for those who don't know, in liberation theology, to encapsulate, somehow embody the cries of the oppressed?

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Because the point of salvation isn't to go to heaven and be with God, or it's not to be in a right relationship because the chasm between God and man has been eliminated by Jesus Christ, and so you have a million sins that you've committed, but you don't have to pay for one of them because of Christ, and Christ has given you the faith to believe in him.

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No, the gospel is about political here and now, as well as some kind of eternal eschatological reality, but it's tied to the here and now political liberation of oppressed people, and that colors every text.

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It becomes the hermeneutic by which you study the Bible, and you can start making some really goofy interpretations, but it's because you start with this presupposition that that's what salvation is, that's what the

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Bible's about, that's the story of redemption. And so you see that that's what he's getting from Dr.

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Cone. He's saying, well, that's what Cone gave me, and he also thought of sin as systemic, which is very part and parcel of this, to rip down systems that are supposedly oppressing people, whether they are or they aren't, it's important to be converted to this certain, it's really a

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Marxist diagnosis of the way reality is. And so this is what he's gleaning from Cone.

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He says, again, he says, Cone allowed me to see, you know, there are questions that arise from your experiences that you then bring to the biblical text.

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You grapple with them, see how it answers the questions brought, and then you take those answers out and you try to embody them, live out

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Christ in that environment, which raises the questions. So it's a process, it's sort of a circle. That's the hermeneutical spiral, guys.

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Now, granted, Dr. Cone and I would have a lively conversation about where the authority is in that.

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Actually, I'm gonna keep going because I think the rest of this isn't as relevant, but his whole point in this quote is that he is, you bring these questions and these experiences to the text.

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You live them, which cause more questions, and you take the answers, and it's this circle.

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You go back to the text with the new questions you have. But it's very, your interpretation is very driven by your experience.

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And that's one of the things in liberation theology you'll often find is liberation theologians become very sensitive to the idea that, they'll say, we, if they're accused of being subjective, or you're saying there's multiple meanings to the text.

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There's not multiple meanings, there's one. They'll be very defensive and say, no, we believe there's one meaning. At least some of them will.

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But then they'll say, but there's multiple applications. But the thing, here's what you gotta remember in liberation theology, interpretation and application are one and the same.

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They just kind of like justification and sanctification in liberation theology are pretty much tied together.

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They're like one and the same. So when you interpret, as you interpret, you're taking actually your applications to your interpretation, and then your interpretation to your application, your application back to your interpretation.

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And that's how you should understand scripture. And Walter Strickland describes what

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I've read other liberation theologians talk about right here. He also says that Dr.

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James Cone opened my eyes so that the idea that Christ is trying to restore brokenness. He says that, that God's redemption is seeing both an individual and is both individual and social because Christ said it himself to his disciples that a summary of the gospel is not to bifurcate loving

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God and loving neighbor, but it is to love God and neighbor. Dr. Cone allowed me to see a new vista, a new space, a new avenue to allow the gospel to be made manifest.

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So I sort of look at what the gospel is doing as a more broad reality now, not that I've switched the spiritual for the physical or the social, but both.

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So he's adding to it. He's saying, it's not just the spiritual redemption. The gospel is not just good news that Christ has taken your sins.

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This individualist thing, he's saying, no, no, no, the gospel, it's more general. It's this redemption in general.

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But what is it that he actually cites here as the gospel? Loving God and loving neighbor.

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Let me ask you again, hopefully this is becoming more clear. Is loving God and loving neighbor the gospel?

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That's what Walter Strickland says that Jesus thinks the gospel is, loving God and loving neighbor. He says, Jesus summarized the gospel that way.

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Is that the gospel? That's not the gospel. What was that? It was the law.

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Loving God and loving neighbor is the law. That's actually what condemns you because you can't do it. And that's why you need

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Jesus who could do it. So this is a gospel that doesn't save. If that's the gospel, it has no ability to save you because none of us can do that.

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Even if we do it the biblical way and not the Marxist way, we can't do it. This is very common though in liberation theology to make that conflation.

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Now we're in 2019, lecture on global theology, Walter Strickland says this, to be honest with you,

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I think many Christians who are well -intended in their desire to uphold the authority of the text slip into a desire of protecting the text from misrepresentation, which they are trying then to read the

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Bible so objectively that they, because they cannot escape their own cultural trappings, assume their own cultural realities into this reality of inerrancy.

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And then we come up with this very simplistic reading of the text. So he's, again, you're seeing the subjectivity kind of start to emerge here, that this desire to uphold the authority of the text is to be objective.

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You can't escape your cultural trappings. I mean, if you can't escape them, then how does,

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I mean, Walter Strickland must be speaking out of his own cultural trappings then. How does he transcend cultural trappings to make the determination that you can't escape your cultural trappings?

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This is logically incoherent. There's no way to actually believe this because it's postmodern. I think the publisher needs to have a missiological disposition to go in and find these voices that are drastically underrepresented ideologically.

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The context here is he's talking about publishers of Christian books. And he says, we need diversity in ideology.

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We need people who think differently and publishers should be looking for that. They should be going to people that are in different cultures that are formed through those cultures to think differently and then publish in it because we're gonna get closer to the truth somehow that way.

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And that desire I pointed out before, you'll never be able to arrive at the truth if you need diversity to find it because there's so many tribes and people groups that don't even exist anymore.

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And you never got to get their understanding of what they would have thought the Bible was had they had the chance to interpret it.

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So this is self -defeating. It's logically, it's incoherent.

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It's just not true. And so you have a logical problem in addition to a biblical problem here.

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Fast forward to 2020, this is on a hermeneutics panel that Walter Strickland was on. He said, the information that I'm going to bring to my understanding of the words on the page are informed by the ways those words are used in my own background.

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If you look at the story of the Exodus and the role that it plays and how it is situated in the African -American Christian tradition, it becomes sort of like a hermeneutical lens to understand the reality of God interacting with his people.

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So because there was some relatability with the plight of the

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Hebrews with some of the slaves and in the churches that those slaves went to, that story became just, it was a very dear story to them.

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And Walter Strickland is saying that the role that story plays is actually, it's more than just a story.

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It's a hermeneutical lens. In other words, they're reading the reality of God interacting with his people through this lens.

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They're seeing themselves as the Jews. This is, he's saying this is a cultural thing.

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This is a cultural background they're bringing to the text. And it's a good thing in his mind.

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And this is a very positive thing. And I would say it's, look, it's fine if you wanna,

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I mean, there's gonna be individuals even who relate to certain texts. They stand out to you at different times in your life.

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Some people even will say they have life verses and things like that. There's really nothing wrong with that.

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But as soon as you start making a hermeneutical lens, in other words, a way by which you interpret everything else, a way that you understand the reality of God, and it colors your understanding of the rest of reality, well, then you've lost objectivity at that point because you're imposing a meaning onto things that don't have that meaning, a foreign meaning.

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So that's a problem for biblical interpretation and comes straight out of liberation theology.

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Once again, here's another, this is from 2020, another quote from Walter Strickland in How to Shepherd Your Church Through Racial Injustice.

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He's talking about the rioters. This is, I believe it was put out in June or July, I think it was June, when there were riots going on, cities burning down, and Walter Strickland had this to say.

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There are people who are trying to get the attention of civil government and have their voice heard because every other time they're not being heard.

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There's nobody clamoring for their votes. There's nobody doing town halls in their neighborhoods, listening to them.

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So they're like, man, if they're not listening to us, what we need to do is get busy and throw a brick through a window.

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Any simple answer is a wrong answer because it is very complex. How can we leverage our own voice for the sake of those who don't have one?

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And I wanna seriously ask you, if you're a parent and your children go to one of these schools that Walter Strickland is going to be involved in helping and bring about racial reconciliation, how in the world does that quote that I just read for you, how does that factor into racial reconciliation whatsoever or any kind of biblical reconciliation?

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This is the guy that's the authority on this. He's gonna teach this. People who are burning down cities, damaging property, robbing, stealing, plundering, looting, he paints them with this white kind of, he whitewashes them.

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Yeah, they did it wrong, but there's nobody clamoring for their votes because I guess they deserve that.

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They deserve someone to come and pander for their votes. Even though this is just out of touch with reality, of course people are pandering for their votes.

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That's what the whole BLM thing was about. BLM was funding the Democrat candidates. I mean, it's just amazing to me.

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Like, how do you even make that statement? It's literally the opposite of that. But even if it were true, is there some kind of entitlement there?

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There's nobody doing town halls in their neighborhoods, listening to them. Nobody, huh?

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So they're gonna throw a brick through a window. And the answer to this whole problem is just so complex.

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No, it's not. Why is the answer to this looting so complex? So the problem in his mind is they're not being heard.

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That's what's causing them to commit these crimes. They're just not being heard. Is that remotely biblical?

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James talks about why, about desires and why things happen the way they do, why sin takes place.

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I mean, does this apply to those walking into Walmarts and Best Buys, carrying out big screen TVs and expensive tennis shoes and things like that?

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I mean, they're just not heard. If they were heard, that this wouldn't happen. I mean,

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I'm pretty sure that every business in the country just about, I mean, it was like things I had, I didn't even subscribe to, but I shopped there once like 10 years ago or sending me emails about how they think

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Black Lives Matter during that time. I'm pretty sure they have the biggest megaphone in the entire world if they want it to draw attention to the

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George Floyd incident or any of the other ones from last summer that got media attention. This is the guy who's gonna teach racial reconciliation.

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This is the guy who's gonna help you overcome whatever racial animosity exists at your school.

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And here he is taking the side in a sense, in a sense, not fully,

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I know, not fully, but at least he's acting almost like a lawyer in their court.

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He's trying to justify this kind of crime. I don't care if the people who are doing this, these evil things, let's call it what it is.

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I don't care if they're Republicans. I don't care if they're conservatives. I don't care who they are.

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If that's what they are doing, they're damaging property, private businesses, guys.

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Is that loving your neighbor? No, then it doesn't matter if they're being listened to or not. Anyway, the outcome of this is to leverage our own voice, to speak for them, not to correct them with the biblical language on this kind of sin, but to try to be a voice for them, represent them, because they're not being represented apparently.

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Here's another quote from 2020. This is an honest conversation on race and justice from the urban perspective.

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Christianity and race in America were intertwined at its inception because Christianity was the thing used to say, how can we enslave these people yet evangelize them?

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So how is it that we can construct or imagine a faith that sets someone soul free but keeps their body belonging to us?

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But the issue is, is that as that gospel was preached to slaves to keep them in check, the people who were propagating that gospel to them actually took it on themselves.

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And so now we have a gospel that's a half gospel that says your soul can be free, but your body doesn't matter.

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And so the weighty matters of the law get relegated to piety. And so then justice gets cut out from that idea of the chaos or the justice righteousness to parted reality of the gospel and what it does.

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There's so much error in here. I could probably spend an entire podcast on it, but I'm gonna try to just give you the high points here.

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Number one, this is total fake history. Like abysmally bad history.

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This is a Jamar Tisby level, bad history. The narrative he's weaving is that these

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Americans, slaveholders, I guess, specifically got together and they formed, they constructed this gospel that was gonna help save their slave soul, but keep their body in chain so they could have their body.

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Now, just without even getting into any history whatsoever, does that make any sense just anthropologically?

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They cared about their slaves so much. They wanted them to be in a right relationship with God, but they didn't care about their slaves so much that they just wanted to keep them enslaved forever.

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Does that make any sense? They were gonna construct a whole entire gospel to do this. Or is it more likely that maybe there's maybe a broad spectrum of different kinds of people who were slave masters?

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Maybe some of them even could have looked in the Bible for the instructions that Paul gives on slavery, and maybe they were trying to follow those instructions to the best of their ability.

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Maybe they inherited slaves. It wasn't even something that they chose. I mean, there's no nuance in this.

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It's just like throw out the accusation. And furthermore, they passed down this erroneous theology to us today so that now we just think the body just doesn't matter.

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Well, what does he mean by the body doesn't matter? He says the weighty matters of what? The law, the law.

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There's that word again. Justice gets cut out of the chaos, justice righteousness, two -parted reality of the gospel.

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What does the law have to do with the gospel? What's the relationship there? I mean, he says that it's a half gospel.

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We now have a half gospel. That's what he believes.

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We don't have the full gospel. This is what Walter Strickland is saying. He's saying that today we don't have the full gospel. Why? Because we're not following the law.

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The law is not the gospel. The law is what condemns you. So you need the gospel. If that's the problem, if the problem really is, well, we lost the law along the way.

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And that was part of the message of the gospel and we don't have it. Then that's a return to Rome.

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I don't know how else it's, I mean, it's liberation theology, but that came out of a Roman Catholic context.

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And it's very much that those elements are still there. It works better in a Roman Catholic context.

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Imposing it upon Protestantism is getting us, is getting us to import some

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Roman Catholic categories as well here. So there you have it again.

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That's heresy, guys. I don't know, how else would you describe it? I don't know how else to describe it. This is wrong.

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This is just false teaching. So here's to conclude. And I went way over what I wanted to go over.

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Where are we at now? We're at, oh, it's not too bad. I didn't wanna go over 40 minutes and I'm only nine minutes over that.

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So I'll be about 10 minutes over today. But let me put a cap on this. Walter Strickland has,

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I've read for you a number of these quotes. He summarizes the gospel as loving

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God and loving neighbor. It's not the gospel. That's the law. He talks about the imperatives of the gospel as taught by J.

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Diotis Roberts. Not the gospel, again. And then he talks about the half gospel.

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And it's half because the weighty matters of the law are relegated to piety. And this just shows that he does not understand the gospel.

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And that's basically my main point here. And this is very concerning to me just because I see

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Walter Strickland, he may be a very well -intentioned guy, maybe a very nice guy, but his teaching is full of so much error.

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And I would just love it if, I'm sure he's got some intelligence in many other areas.

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I'm sure there's good things about him. I don't know him personally, again, but this must be condemned in the strongest possible terms.

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This is false teaching, guys. This is dangerous teaching. And to bring this kind of teaching into your

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Christian ministry, like Gordon College and Wheaton Academy and so many other schools have done, and now the

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ACSI is doing, if that's what you're bringing in, and this is the kind of guy that you trust to lead your program on racial reconciliation, inclusion, and diversity, then it's like bringing a wolf into the hen house.

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This is going to be, this is damaging. This is bad. So my encouragement to Walter Strickland would be to consider some of these things, to repent, to believe the true gospel.

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And if that's what he's believing, then to knock off all this ridiculous false teaching that he keeps promoting out there.

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And whether he does or not, if you are a parent in one of these schools, and this is happening right now in real time, sound the alarm bell and say, we can't have this.

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ACSI can't do this. Write your letter. And keep an eye on things.

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I mean, it takes a little time for this stuff to work its way in, and by a little time,

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I mean like a semester or two. You might start noticing things. Keep an eye on it. So I say that out of love and care.

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I don't have a kid in one of these schools or anything, but I know that some of the parents who are listening probably do. So I hope this helps.

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Again, slideshow will be uploaded today on Patreon, and I hope that was just helpful for you guys.

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So God bless. Hey, enjoy your weekend. I know sometimes we talk about things that are a little heavy on this, but I know it's supposed to be a beautiful spring weekend in many parts of the country.

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I hope you can go out there and enjoy it, and some exciting announcements next week coming up.