Is NOBTS Woke?

In the Conversations That Matter podcast, my name is John Harris. I got a email or a message, I should say, about a week and a half ago from someone who basically was telling me, hey, New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary has a problem.

They got some woke stuff going on there. And I've known about this now for that issue for well over a year from more behind the scenes stuff, people who reached out to me and don't say anything, that kind of thing.

And so I haven't said anything. The thing is though, New Orleans, because it's a smaller school, I think, it does not get the same kind of attention in the Southern Baptist denomination that a flagship seminary like Southern or Southeastern or even Southwestern with the Bobby Lopez situation gets.

They've gotten all kinds of attention. Lots of people have gone through their material to just see, hey, what are they actually teaching? They found a lot of problematic stuff, especially at Southern and Southeastern, and that's gone out there.

And both schools have tried to scrub some of that. But New Orleans just, I guess it's because it's smaller. I don't know if there's another reason, but they just haven't gotten the same kind of attention.

And I thought before the convention, I know there's a lot of Southern Baptists who listen to this podcast. It might be good for you to just realize this is bigger than New Orleans. This is bigger than Southern.

It's bigger than Southeastern. It's bigger than Southwestern. It's bigger than Golden Gate. It's bigger than, you name whatever entity or school you wanna name, it's bigger than NAM. There's kind of like little pockets of this throughout the denomination.

And in some places, the pockets are bigger than others. Some places it just, it characterizes an institution or an organization or a church. And so I wanted to kind of make that point that, look, we're not hearing a lot about New Orleans, but it's not because they don't have woke stuff going on there.

They do, they have. It's, I think, because of other reasons. There's just so much attention given to these other places. And so I just wanna go through a little bit of this just to show you what's publicly available, what's kind of happened.

Some of the things, and this is not exhausted by any stretch. I haven't done what I would consider to be a deep dive at all. I probably spent an hour maybe, maybe if that, just looking up things on their website.

And sure enough, there's stuff there that I would consider to be concerning on some level. So you're not escaping social justice stuff by going to another school necessarily. Maybe it's gonna be better.

It could be better at New Orleans, I don't know. But you're not, you're certainly not getting away from it entirely. And this is the stuff that I think people going to the convention, the messengers, need to be aware of.

It's not just, hey, we corrected some stuff at Southern or Southeastern, or we, you know, there needs to be, there needs to be like a committee or something to look into this stuff, an honest committee, in the entire denomination, including schools that don't get a lot of attention.

Let me just bring your attention to a few things. Some of you remember, actually, sorry, none of you remember this, probably. This was a blog I doubt many people read, but we'll start here, because we're kind of, I think go in sequential order.

This is a blog, it's on their website now. It's still there. You can go read it from 2017. What Racial Reconciliation Is Not, Racial Reconciliation Part One. And so there's a number of parts to this. And it talks about racial reconciliation.

And the main point of the piece seems to be that racial reconciliation requires more than most people think it requires. And it's part of the gospel. And really what he does, he takes some critical race theory assumptions and jams them into the gospel.

This is on the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary blog right now. You can go check it out. I'll read for you some of it. Racial reconciliation is not what you think, first sentence. It has become a popular term in evangelical circles.

Seems like all the cool Christians are talking about it, but what do they mean by the term? Many have confused it with myths. These myths result in individuals believing that race relations aren't that bad.

I would like to dispel the myths and expand on effects. So race relations, I guess, are bad. And he goes through the myths. Racial reconciliation is only ethnic diversity. We need more minorities here.

Okay, he says, well, that's not racial reconciliation purely. Now he does say diversity is essential for racial reconciliation, but it demands more than diversity. So you do need to go and diversify your church, whatever that means.

You need to have different minorities represented. I don't know how you're gonna do that exactly. Diversify your libraries. I mean, this is what we see going on all over the place. The sharing of power, quote unquote, based on these ethnic distinctions.

But it's so much more. It's so much more than that. You can't just say, well, we're done because we diversified our board or something like that. He goes on, he says, myth two, racial reconciliation is colorblindness.

So he dispels colorblindness is not good. Racial reconciliation seeks to acknowledge and embrace differences, not dismiss them. This is also part of critical race theory that is the opposition to colorblindness.

Then myth three, racial reconciliation is a social issue. That's for liberals. And he's saying, no, it's not just, it's not for liberals. No political party has the power to bring racial reconciliation.

It takes the gospel. He goes through, here's his conclusion, fact. So this is not a myth. It's a fact. Racial reconciliation is a sanctification issue. And the telling part here, let me see if I can find it again.

We can't eradicate racism ourselves. We need the gospel, et cetera, et cetera. Here's his definition. I want you to hear this. Racial reconciliation is the active pursuit of living in harmony with one another and loving our neighbors from all ethnic backgrounds, which will be achieved through the application of the gospel through sanctification.

And it says who the author is. That's his definition. So everything that you just said, the opposition to, or the inclusion of this ethnic diversity mission, no, it's more than that, but the inclusion of that, the opposition to colorblindness, those two things at the very least are part of somehow applying the gospel.

Again, we're, again, taking the gospel and applying some kind of a social justice infused law to it. That's what we have going on here in this article. Here's another one. I believe it's the same author, is it?

Yeah, it is the same author. It's from 2018 though. The role of truth in racial reconciliation. In this blog, the author gives us more specifics on, here's the, we must actively fight sin to courageously share truth.

When it comes to racial reconciliation, there are three things that hold us back. So he's going through the three things, the barriers that exist in keeping racial reconciliation from happening because it's just not happening.

Number one, our own worldviews are limited. It's true for all of us. We have each a limited perspective on history, culture, and theology. In the case of history, most books tell the stories from a majority perspective.

And of course that's not true today at all. Most books tell the story from a, well, you could say it's majority. The majority of academics who are Marxists, that's who's telling the stories today. For culture, the information we've learned has come from papers, not people.

And theologically, our textbooks are written from an individualistic Western perspective. In other words, we don't speak the truth because we don't know the whole story. We blame poverty, miseducation, and police brutality on individuals.

We are unaware of the contributions minorities have made to theology, culture, and history. A proper exegesis of cultures requires a fuller, exegesis of cultures. Listen to that. Requires a fuller historical, theological, and sociological understanding.

So we need a sociology. We need history, right? Reconciliation succeeds a robust knowledge of our multicultural heritage. Now, again, is this a gospel? Is this the application of the gospel? I thought it was just racial reconciliation was the application of the gospel.

So now we can't apply the gospel because you've got to understand sociology. Really? It makes you wonder what kind of gospel you got. Number two, we have a colorblind doctrine. Oh no, there it is again.

How many books on your shelf are written by a minority? Have you ever asked the question? When I ask this question to my peers, they often respond in a similar fashion with statements akin to, I never thought about that.

While a colorblind theology sounds like a good thing, it's actually not. Here's why. First, it ignores rather than embraces the way God intentionally made his people. Second, it rejects rather than marvels at the beauty of Revelation 7.

I'm gonna skip it. We're gonna keep going because we don't have a lot of time here. But colorblind ethnic reconciliation does not exist. So again, the colorblind thing, apparently you can't apply the gospel to this issue because if you have a colorblind and you just accept people as who they are and not based on their racial social locations.

And underlying this whole thing is a standpoint epistemology, this idea that you need this perspective to understand truth, this ethnic Gnosticism. Then number three, we fear the consequences. If I were a betting man, I would say fear is the main reason people don't speak about racial issues.

They don't wanna be labeled Marxist, heretics or racists. Speak up can cost you a friendship. So a way forward, if you desire to have a church or ministry in pursuit of reconciliation, learn and speak truth, expand your worldview, no multi-ethnic history, confess your colorblind doctrine.

So that's a sin, I guess. And fear of consequences to Jesus. So this is, I mean, this is disgusting. This is blending the neo-Marxist stuff, the critical race stuff with Christian ethics and then infusing it into the gospel once again.

And I wanna call to your attention, just remember this. I mean, you have this, Palpatine Penn had put this out and I'm gonna make a confession here. Palpatine Penn was not the one that originally found this out.

You may think, oh, it's Palpatine Penn. Some people don't like Palpatine Penn. They think, oh, they're discredited or something. I mean, and you always check the primary source and you find out whether they are or not.

The primary source checks out in this case. But I do need to say this. I was the one that initially found, I found this before Palpatine Penn published this. I didn't have a big following at that time.

And I had posted it somewhere. I don't remember, it's a long time ago. This is from May, 2019 and Palpatine Penn picked it up and then they did a whole story on it. But this was verified apart from any Palpatine Penn, anything I knew about this before this.

And it was because I had a friend who went to New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and told me, hey, John on the phone, I'm standing in the lobby and I'm looking right now at a teleprompter or not teleprompter, a television with scrolling advertisements.

And they're advertising a minority only job fair. And he couldn't believe his eyes. And he called me and he said, John, do you know anything about this? I said, no. Looked at, you look it up on the website, it's there.

It's and you call the verify and yep, it's happening. This did happen. They did have a minority only faculty job fair at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary in 2019. Have they had other ones? I don't know.

But I wanna talk about diversifying segregation. I'm not sure what, however you wanna characterize this. That's certainly, this is on the social justice train. This happened in 2019. If you just type in and if you wanna do further research, type in New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, what is racial reconciliation?

And for now, things haven't been scrubbed, I guess, you'll come up with a number of articles. They just keeps going. I haven't read all of them. I just posted two for you just to look at, but there's a lot of them there.

Here's another one from a different author in 2019, my dream for racial harmony. I dream of blacks and whites having a genuine gospel centered relationship with Christ as the foundation. I guess we don't, you don't have that.

It's again, the way that they use the gospel in all this is just interesting to me. I have a dream that black scholars will be recognized as experts in all areas of Christian theology and ministry. He goes through, Jesus died for racial reconciliation.

Did you know that? That was part of what Jesus died for. Is it racial reconciliation that we just discussed? Cause that doesn't sound like it, but this I'm not gonna go through this whole thing, but this is on the website as well.

This is what happened when Jamie Dew was elected the president of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. This is from 2019. I want you to hear this. This happened in 2019 at the Southern Baptist Convention.

Just listen to this.

I'm very delighted to say that when I announced in October my retirement, I did so in order to give the trustees an opportunity to have somebody present for the Southern Baptist Convention and they hit their mark.

And now I want to turn the remainder of the report over to the chairman of our presidential search committee, Dr. Frank Cox, to introduce you a wonderful, wonderful man who's going to be the incoming president of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.

Thank you, Dr. Kelly. Southern Baptist, thank you for the privilege of serving as a trustee at New Orleans Seminary. Today will be my last official act as a trustee. And I want you to know I'm proud to stand here today as the former chairman of the trustees, also the chairman of the presidential search team.

They gave me a great committee and it was made up of two Asians, one African American, one sweet lady, Ms. Jackie, that kept us all in line, one professor, one student. And when we look at diversity, we had one Cajun.

And if you know Cajuns, that's a whole culture within itself, if you know Southeast Louisiana. We've been hard at work since last October when our president announced his plans to retire, 20 residents.

I'm going to stop it there. You have, the whole introduction of Jamie Due as the president is, hey, we made a good pick. You know why? Because we had a diverse committee. That's apparently what makes for good decisions now.

I mean, underlying this is this assumption. You can't have a good pick. You can't have insights that are legitimate unless you get all available social locations together, even the Cajuns. And this is someone who was just recently a trustee at the seminary.

This is how Jamie Due comes into the seminary. So I just, it's there, and this is the trustee board. This isn't even the seminary, this is the trustee board and the chairman of the board, I guess, that we're talking about here at one time, very recently.

Let's move on here. Let's see what else we got. We got the joint statement on the death of George Floyd. Now, a number of people signed this, all the entities, I believe, or the seminaries at least signed this.

But, and I've talked about it many times. This is, it makes the assumption that that situation was motivated by racism. And we grieve because of fellow citizens of color and how they're being treated.

And somehow this is connected to Jim Crow and slavery, what happened in Minneapolis. Of course, there's no evidence for any of this, but one of the authors was J .D. Greer. The other author, and I kind of skipped over this at the time when I first talked about it, was Jamie Due, president of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.

He authored it. So this is the president of that seminary, co-authoring the statement on the death of George Floyd. Then we have, you can say, okay, that's just their blog. That's just their board. That's just their president.

Well, what about their classes? Are they, you know, are they teaching? Well, look, I don't know intimate detail. I've had communication with individual and individual. I think individuals, I'm trying to think now, at least one who I couldn't get the primary source stuff, but yeah, you know, they're teaching this.

But if you go on their website, you can just find out some of the, from the syllabus, some of the things they're teaching. I'll just give you a little sample. Here's a course called the Apologetic Preaching, New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary course, PMTH 8300.

This is from 2020, January 13th of 15th, 2020. It's not ancient history. It's happened last year. And if you look at, let's see, let me read for you just the mission here first. The core values, or what do I want to read?

I guess that, yeah. Well, the mission statement and core values, they're pretty, they're designed to prepare servants to walk with Christ, proclaim his truth, and fulfill his mission, right? So that's basic stuff.

We'd all agree with that. In their list of books for contextualization, that, hey, these are good books to get. James Cone, Black Theology and Black Power, New York 1969. I'm not bothering to look to see what other stuff they have, but that's, at the very least, okay, James Cone is a positive in this class to get his book.

If you think that's isolated, here's another one. LCCF 2340 -65 Hybrid Course in Christian Doctrine. Christian Doctrine, I guess, 211 is what that is. So what do we have there? We have a course that's designed to help students understand biblical theology, apply the principles of theology, communicate theologians' doctrinal perspectives, and you gotta choose a theologian.

Gustavo Gutierrez is in there. James Cone is also in there as a theologian in one corresponding doctrine from the list below. So you can write about his theological method, is the God or salvation from James Cone, and from Gustavo Gutierrez, write about salvation.

Of course, this is heresy. And you look at this, and there's some other maybe problematic people, but not like that. I mean, these are blatant false teachers. You're gonna learn from these people in this class.

It's presented, in the syllabus at least, it's kind of presented in a positive way. This isn't an apologetics class. This is a class on Christian doctrine, okay? This isn't like, here's all these heretics, let's critique them.

This is in a list of Martin Luther, and Jonathan Edwards, and C .S. Lewis. Now, C .S. Lewis, you could say there's some issues, but they're, in general, Tertullian. I mean, Augustine, people, Talvin, that are within the boundaries of what's mostly considered orthodoxy.

And then you have James Cone, and you have liberation theologian, Gustavo Gutierrez. Here's another one, systematic theology. Theology 5 ,300. And this one also has the same kind of issues going on. They have their bibliography, so these are the recommended books, dictionaries and encyclopedias.

Systematic and general theologies. You got Karl Barth there. You got, where's the one that I'm looking for? Probably James Cone, there it is. Yeah, James Cone, Black Theology of Liberation. Different James Cone book, 1986.

So you have James Cone being treated in a positive way in multiple classes at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. And then, of course, you have their policy to increase faculty, ethnic, racial, and gender diversity at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.

You can search this. It's there online. Policy to increase the faculty, ethnic, racial, and gender diversity. Biblical theological rationale. So they give their whole rationale for why they wanna do this.

And then, basically, this is what they're gonna do. This multicultural focus is our mission at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. Because of the increasing diversity represented in Southern Baptist churches, the multicultural urban setting in which the seminary's base campus is planted and the seminary's initiatives to offer theological training to a diversity of ethnic, racial, and gender students, New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary desires to increase the ethnic and racial diversity within its faculty.

Underscoring this desire is the fact that Southern Baptists have become intentionally more diverse in the last two decades. And the key word there is intentionally. Such that minority ethnic congregations now constitute about 20 of the SBC churches.

So this is what they're doing. We have to do this. This is part of the mission. This is what we must do. And so it's not hiring a person who's qualified as much as it is hiring the person who fits a certain, I guess, social location.

Some kind of ethnic, racial, or gender class. And hire them because we gotta increase diversity. Because look, we're in a multicultural setting and we're intentionally trying to plant more multicultural churches.

And this has been going on since 2010 at least in the Southern Baptist Convention. This trying to decenter whiteness, quote unquote. And they think it's a demographic thing. We gotta get out ahead of this.

Instead of just letting the Lord build his church and spreading the gospel and doing so with men who are qualified according to scripture's qualifications. Here's another thing from this policy. They plan to increase faculty, racial, ethnic, and gender diversity by doing the following.

Funding permits. Continue the, so money, throwing money for Korean, Hispanic, Haitian, African American women's ministry programs. Somebody will engage internationally facilitating numerous ministry projects each year in multicultural settings in the New Orleans area.

Give official recognition to the new campus students. Group reconcile. I don't know if that's like kingdom diversity, but they have a new student group reconcile, which meets monthly to discuss issues of race, ethnicity, and culture in the student life.

Prioritize scholarships to increase, so we're gonna give scholarships to different minorities. Create at least one doctoral fellowship to provide a full scholarship to encourage minority doctoral students.

The assistant to the president will chair a series of different voices discussion meetings with students. The different voices workshop will also be held for minority students. I mean, this is the standpoint theory.

This is the postmodernism coming right in. The provost has asked the dean of the graduate program to employ at least one minority adjunct teacher per semester. Provost and dean will begin developing a database of qualified perspective minority faculty candidates.

An effort will be made to identify a qualified racial, ethnic, or female candidate for possible consideration for a new faculty position. And the author of Right Color, Wrong Culture is speaking at the faculty workshop in August, 2018, Brian Loritz.

So this was crafted before 2018, but it's still there. It's still this policy. It's on their website, at least. And this is what's going on there. So, I mean, if you're, listen, here's my advice for someone who is looking for a place to go get an education, and then, well, let's say you wanna climb the ranks.

You wanna be a professor. You wanna teach. Don't go into the SBC, then, or don't go to New Orleans. Don't go to, and I would include Southeastern at the very least. You know, these are schools that they're not looking to hire people of European descent, even if they're qualified and good at what they do and can edify and know the word of God and have good character.

That's not what they're looking for right now. It's gonna be very hard for you, at the very least. Maybe you can get in, but it's gonna be very hard because they are specifically trying to find people that are different ethnic makeups, different cultures, different genders, I guess women, to fill positions.

And they're intentionally doing that. So it is, there is a discrimination going on, just not in the direction that was happening, you know, a hundred years ago. And that's what's happening right now in New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.

And so I wanted to just get that out there before the convention so people realize, like, this is bigger than just Southern. This is bigger than just Southeastern, just those montage clips. If someone had the time, they could probably produce all kinds of montage clips about all kinds of seminaries.

I'm one guy. I don't have all that time, nor do I have the interest, but this stuff's going on. It's going on all over the place. So if you have any connections to New Orleans, hopefully this will help you.

Maybe you can confront this. And they're really, you know, I need to close with this because someone I know had told me about a conversation they had with Matt Hall from Southern Seminary not too long ago.

And there seems to be an effort with some of these guys who promoted some of the woke stuff that they want to distance themselves. They want to almost act like it didn't happen, but they certainly want to create the impression that they're not woke, they're not on the social justice bandwagon.

And the thing is, it's so easy. You just come out publicly and you retract the statements that you made publicly and you apologize for them if you disagree with them now and you move on. Maybe you take, you know, maybe you step down for a little bit, but at the very least you retract, hey, I was in error and here's the dangers of this error.

And here's why I apologize for promoting this error with the money that you all are paying, little old ladies in churches are paying for me to teach here. I'm sorry. And then you go from there and then there's forgiveness.

But if you hide it, if you don't talk about it, if you get defensive, you say, well, you can't listen to those quote unquote discernment bloggers, or you can't quote unquote listen to someone who has some element of correction or discernment or concern.

They cannot be trusted because of who they are. You're ending up, you're cutting off the truth with them. And that would just be my advice is if you have any connection, try to encourage these guys who promoted this stuff, including Jamie Dew to say, you know what?

If he behind closed doors saying, I shouldn't have worded it that way, go out and publicly and say it. I shouldn't have worded it that way. People are more than willing to forgive, but there has to be some kind of an admission there that this was wrong.

Otherwise we don't know what to think. All that we can see publicly is woke stuff. So there you go. Hope that was helpful for those going to the SBC convention.