Stories That Must Be Told | Albert Mohler

We are back with another episode of the Room for Nuance podcast. I'm Sean DeMars, and I'm here with...

Albert Mohler. Would you mind opening us in prayer, brother? I'd be honored. Father, we just pray in the name of Christ that everything we do and say and think will bring glory to you, encouragement to your church, enrichment to the brethren, to our brothers and sisters in Christ, and Father, if there'd be anyone who hears us talk about the gospel and is drawn to Christ, may they be drawn unto faith and all to your glory in Christ's name.

Amen. Amen. I have a thousand questions to ask you, but let's start with what

I think will be, at least for me, the most spiritually encouraging. How did you come to know the Lord? Yeah, no,

I appreciate that. I am very thankful to have been born to two Christian parents. They're just incredibly faithful Christian parents.

That meant several things, but for one thing, I was truly raised in the nurture and admonition of the

Lord, the Christian faith, what was the framework of our lives, and it also meant that I was deeply involved in the life of a local church and...

SPC? Southern Baptists. Not just a little bit Southern Baptist. Tall, steeple, very establishment

Southern Baptist. First Baptist? It was more establishment than First Baptist.

Yeah, but it would be kind of a First Baptist Church. It was Southside Baptist Church in Lakeland, Florida.

It was the tall, steeple, corporate, cultural, elite

Southern Baptist Church, and my parents were not wealthy. There were many wealthy people in that church, but it was a very strong scriptural gospel -centered church, and I was exposed to many people

I would later find out were just incredibly important leaders. You know, we had a

U .S. Senator living across the street, Lawton Childs, several things like that. It was just a different environment.

It was a very rich environment for a young boy, and the gospel was regularly preached in the church.

I did not come to faith, however, directly through the ministry of my own church. Seeds were planted.

Seeds were planted, and again, I really didn't know myself not to be a Christian.

However, I knew that Christians are those who had had a conversion experience, which

I had not yet experienced. And so when I was nine, and I was the first of four children in a typical middle -class evangelical home, which meant

I didn't do Vacation Bible School. I did Vacation Bible Schools. You did the circuit.

I now realize it was kind of like Baptist daycare, but you know, we love it. It was also fantastic.

I made the same maps with food coloring and all the rest of the Holy Land at two or three different churches, and I was at just a really small church, had a bivocational pastor,

Southern Baptist Church, and on Friday, the bivocational pastor, who was a phosphate miner during the day,

I still remember that, he came and preached the gospel. And Sean, I was just sitting there as a nine -year -old boy, and I believe that's when

I was truly converted. He preached on sin, and I heard about this my whole life. My parents taught me righteously about sin, and my pastor talked about sin.

I've been to Sunday school, training union, the whole thing. But all of a sudden, at that one point, I understood myself to be a sinner in a way that had just never happened before.

And I was truly desperate. I mean, it was the one thing, it's like this is the piece of the puzzle that makes everything make sense.

I now know myself in a way, and I'm horrified by this. And what would later be known in my mind as a doctrine of total depravity and inability?

Well, I didn't articulate anything like that, but as a nine -year -old boy, I felt it. I just felt the absolute inability.

And then he preached Christ. It was just the sweetest thing. It was like, here's the condemnation, and here's the salvation.

And so, you know, who wouldn't leap at a Savior? And so I made a very quiet profession of faith, you know, in my heart.

Did that pastor ever know that he led you to the Lord? I don't think he ever knew. Wow. Yeah. He knows now.

I have tried to go back and find him. Or if he's gone to be with the Lord. He has gone to be with the Lord, actually, a long time ago.

Yeah, by the time I was president of Southern Seminary, and I was convicted, I wanted to go try to find him, and I was able to find who he was, but he had already gone to be with the

Lord. So you made your quiet profession. Yeah, and I talked to my past, talked to my parents. My parents were just wonderful gospel

Christians, and my dad just took the lead in saying, you know, what we need to do is just thank

God for what he's done in your life at this point. I think we need to go talk to the pastor. And we went to talk to the pastor, and he became such a, he was already such a big influence in my life, but even just that day, even more so, he just kindly, clearly walked me through the gospel, and it was just like connecting further parts of the puzzle.

I was actually baptized shortly thereafter. Wow. And I want to tell you, I see a continuity there.

I believe that I was genuinely converted when I was nine years old. I had a crisis of faith as a teenager, but it wasn't like going off into a life of, you know, debauchery.

It was huge intellectual and apologetic questions, and I think the Lord made me a theologian then.

So I believe I was made a Christian when I was nine. I was made a theologian when I was about 17. What was your

Christian life like between the date of your conversion and kind of the next phase?

I mean, greater conviction over sin in your everyday life? Yeah, but you know, look, I am very, very thankful for the protections that were put in my life.

I had two Christian parents, and they believed parent was a verb, you know, and so, you know, I was just surrounded by, like,

I remember the day I turned 14, okay? So just a boy turned 14.

Yeah. My dad's car is out on the curb when I got out of school. You know, this is weird.

And so the last time this happened, I had a baby brother. Okay. Well, that's not going to happen this time. I'm pretty sure. So what have

I done? Okay. You're thinking I'm in trouble. It was my birthday, and this was just not typical.

My dad just worked in his store all the time, and so this was unusual. And I got in the car, and he said, hey, happy birthday.

And I said, well, thanks. And he said, how's it feel to be 14? I said, feels good.

He said, well, you need to get to work. He said, no. He said, we're going to the county work office, and you're going to keep your mouth shut.

Understood? Yes, sir. We went in. He did not say we need a family emergency work permit for my 14 -year -old.

He said, I want my 14 -year -old to have a work permit. Okay. So, and they gave it to him. So I started working for my dad that day in a store.

Wow. So you talk about, you know, protections. Well, one thing is, if your dad's looking at you all the time, you're not getting into too much.

Yeah. You know, and so I just was, I just, I'm thankful that this is common grace. This is God's grace in my life.

I was protected just at the church all the time, and that doesn't mean I wasn't a sinner, and it doesn't mean I didn't struggle with many things.

But it did mean, you know, I tell people, you know, had I wanted pornography, I don't know how I could have obtained it.

What a different world. It was just a completely different world, you know, and it's just a different age.

And so I'm very thankful for that protection. And I grew in grace, and I had real struggles, and I came to understand things better.

I was very hungry to understand. So you mentioned the doctrine of sin and conviction of sin. That came, honestly, with a greater theological understanding, biblical understanding of sin.

So that's just what I do. It's who I am. Yeah. So you were, I'm sure, a precocious child.

And when you get saved at the age of nine, are you all of a sudden, like, devouring the scriptures? I mean, you already strike me as a kid who would have been winning the

Bible Super Bowl. Well, I kind of did, but that doesn't mean that...

We used to have sword drills. Yeah. Yeah. That was a Bible drill. For people who don't know, what's the sword drill?

A sword drill is when you get kids together, and you put them in a line, and they all have a Bible, and you have to stand with the

Bible shut with both hands on the covers of the Bible. And then at a certain point, the moderator calls out a verse, and you have to be the first to find it.

And then you step forward. You don't say anything. You just step forward one step, and then you read the text.

That's awesome. And it's the idea of the Bible is the sword.

Right. And so there's the swords in your hand. You got to be a good swordsman. This is how you do it. That's so cool. Yeah. So you were winning those, but I mean...

Well, I was losing some too. I mean, it was a great... I look at it, and again, I want to speak of God's grace in this.

Right, yeah. You know? And it reminds me of one of the things that my dad said about parenting, about me, and he said,

I know this. If you're doing what I've given you to do in a long list of things, you're not doing something else.

You know? Yeah, that's right. And so even a sword drill like that, there were a lot of kids. There were a lot of us who were in that culture at the same time and in that church at the same time.

It was a very sweet thing. So as you get older and you start to have some of those doubts, some of those battles, can you walk us through that?

Yeah. You know, I didn't really struggle too much with the internally generated doubts.

They were externally generated. What do you mean by that? Yeah. So I was baptized in this tall steeple, very high church,

Southern Baptist church, establishment church, in what would have been the Solid South. And then my father, who's in the grocery business, gets transferred down to South Florida.

And it was like moving from, you know, Birmingham to... To Manhattan. No, more

Manhattan, you know, or New Jersey. And it was a completely different world. More secular.

More secular, more diverse. I mean, incredibly diverse. And it was really culturally different in that the people moving down there were moving to other parts of the country.

And they brought with them, at the same time, what was going on in the country in the 60s and the 70s.

And so I ended up with a very liberal, liberal school system involved in all the 60s and 70s educational experimentation, all the anti -teacher, anti -authority stuff.

It's like the critical theory stuff people talk. This was actually being lived out. You know, no more sage on the stage, just a guide on the side, groovy.

What's that? It was one of the statements of the educational revolutionaries. No more sage on the stage.

The guy who knows it all, teaching, yeah. It's just a guide on the side. Education's just calling out from you who you are.

Okay. You just need a guide along the way. That was a mantra from the 60s.

Yeah. Okay. But it was being lived out. And, you know, I tell this story because it, to me, was an eye opener.

I never had atheist teachers before. And I had teachers who identify as atheists in the eighth grade.

And then one day I'm in the boys' room and I smell marijuana. Okay.

Did you know what it was when you smelled it? I knew what it was because sometimes when you went to the beach.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And so again, but again, it's a very safe thing. And I was like, you know, anti -drug activist, um, all 13 years old, you know, just, it's just,

I, I'm not attracted to it at all. Yeah. But, but I now know there's some kids smoking marijuana in the bathroom, but as I'm going out the bathroom,

I see who's smoking the joint and it is my social studies teacher. And he just looked at me and said something like, got to do something to deal with you little people.

And, um. Wow. You know, and that was just a complete, you know, world shaking kind of event to me.

Yeah. You put all that together. It was a, this giant classroom, one room school. So basically, you know, walls divide people.

So we were going to have groupings and you're gonna be all together, but it was like, you know, a thousand sixth to eighth graders in one giant room separated by partitions.

Wow. It was a nightmare. It's like the sixties just, but, but I mean, and in world, I was having to do some quick worldview analysis and I wasn't too good at it at 13, but I could tell these, the ideas these people are operating from, they are really different than the ideas of what we left, you know, in the previous town.

And, um, at the same time, it, they're huge apologetic. I had atheist teachers, huge apologetic questions.

So Sean, to answer your question, I, um, I, at that time, I think was made a theologian.

I think God made me a theologian and, and gave me the consuming interest that he gave me because I wanted to understand

I needed answers. Yeah. And a part of my testimony is, uh, it took me some time to find someone who could help me, uh, with those questions.

Who was it? Who did you find? Well, just to be honest, I, uh,

I, I scared my youth pastor to death, uh, and then he took me to see the pastor.

And so those who have heard me tell my testimony have heard this before, but it's just the only way

I know to tell the story. Sure. Uh, my youth pastor had very little training. And so I laid out these giant apologetic issues.

How do you know there's a God, you know, what we now call the doctrine of scripture, propositional revelation. How do

I, how, how, how, how can I say this is God's word? How, how does it get from God to this? And, uh, just basic questions of the existence and the nature and the character of God.

And, uh, I didn't know that Christians have been thinking about these things for 20 centuries, had pretty good hunch.

I would have thought my pastor would have known something. So my youth pastor said like, wow, those are mind -blowing questions.

That's just really cool. I bet, I bet Christians have been thinking about this for a long time. And I just, that was it.

That was all he had. He took me to see the pastor and the pastor was very, very kind and gracious.

And he basically said to me, you know, Al, many seriously minded Christians have struggled with these questions through the centuries and have, uh, have given it their best thinking in order to try to help the church to understand these issues, which is kind of a big, nothing burger.

I thought that was the introduction to what was going to follow and nothing followed. Okay. Yeah. Okay. So now

I'm like 16 years old and in panic, you know, all the big people, all the adults, I figured they were ready to talk about these things and they were not ready to talk about these things.

Now they gave me much, I don't want to sound unthankful, ungrateful. They gave me much and helped me with this.

But my youth pastor picked me up one day from school in his VW van and took me to another church where he had met the youth pastor in this church.

And the, the church was Coral Ridge Presbyterian. Uh, D. James Kennedy was the pastor. And, uh, so he became a very large influence in my life.

And, and, and frankly, through him, I got to Francis Schaeffer, uh, who's had just a massive impact on my life.

You know, Tom Schreiner was sitting there two hours ago, said the same thing. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, there's a reason for that. Right. Schaeffer's answering the questions that people like 16 year old

Albert Moeller were asking. Right. And, and, and even when I didn't understand everything he was telling me in the answers,

I thought, well, you know, for, first of all, he made it so clear. I did understand even in the title of his book, he is there and he is not silent.

I just kind of lived on that for a while, but Schaeffer's diagnosis of the problem, like his two -story universe or what the modern world tries to do is to create a first story of fact, and then a second story of, uh, uh, of ideas.

And you, uh, you separate religion from reality. You kick, you kick religion into the second story.

And so it can't be true or false. It's just you, you know, and you be you. So anyway,

I, uh, I really grew enormously at that time and I was consumed with this interest. So I can go to my personal library right now and pull out the copy of he is there and he is not silent.

I had it when I was 16 and, uh, cause it just, it just made such an impact on me. I wasn't planning on asking this, but who do you think is this generation's

Francis Schaeffer? I think the good news is, is that it's distributed. Okay. I, I, I think it's kind of like the

Reformation where Luther would say, you know, where are the Lutherans? Well, they're in pulpits all over. Uh, I think the average evangelical pastor now, if he doesn't know how to answer these questions, has had to struggle with them and has a pretty good idea of, especially in my world.

Okay. You need to read this. You need to read that. You need to, and these days it's more than that. You need to watch this, you know?

Yeah. The internet has helped. Well, you know, it's a plus and minus, right? Yeah. It was same thing with the printing press.

So Martin Luther understood you, you don't have the Lutheran Reformation without Luther's understanding of the power of the printing press.

That was a new thing. And the printing press can press, can print lies. It can also print the truth. Yeah. Okay.

So you make it through high school. Where do you go to college? Uh, I spent a year as a faculty scholar, which is an advanced program at Florida Atlantic University.

And, uh, I was 17 when that started. I just graduated from high school. So I was 17, 18 that year.

I was a political science and history major. It was a, it was spiritually a disastrous experience.

How come? It was just an incredibly liberal, uh, educational context.

I can see how the Lord used it in my life, but I was absolutely miserable. Did you know that walking into it? No, I mean, but it was kind of like the whole culture of my high school.

And like the eighth grade, it was the same kind of thing. So they were hiring all these really illustrious scholars from the

Northeast and bringing them down, you know, what, who doesn't want to live in Boca Raton and from the

Northeast. Yeah. And back then the universities had a mandatory retirement at 65 and Florida just said, okay, what we're going to do is we're going to, because the population's growing so fast, they're trying to build these universities.

Let's go to Harvard, Yale, Brown, Princeton, hire these guys when they're 63 and let them teach until they're 70.

Yeah. So I had like giant names in higher education, academia. I didn't know that at the time came to understand it later.

I also had some really young guys they'd hired who really were like a couple of Frankfurt school, you know, cultural

Marxists. Like straight out of it. Straight out of it. I mean, one of them had actually studied with Marcuse. And, you know,

I'm fascinated by what he has to say. And look, he helped me a lot. He helped me a lot. He didn't mean to in the way he helped me, but his understanding...

What he meant for evil. Yeah. No, no, no. And I have to say, you know, one of the things that confused me was

I liked them. I hated what they were saying, but I liked them. And that's been helpful to me because even as a teenager, it really led me to step back in a moment and say, where I have these radical disagreements with secularists and atheists and, you know, cultural

Marxists or whatever. I should not impugn to them evil motivation.

They believe what they believe is actually going to lead to human happiness and human flourishing. But Schaefer really helped me to understand, well, the problem is they're wrong at the most fundamental level.

So they're going to try to create a notion of what's going to help humanity and what will lead to human happiness or liberation or whatever they're going to call it.

They're going to build that on the wrong foundation. But it really helped me because I kind of as a younger teenager thought people with bad ideas are just going to show up as bad people.

Well, some of them do. And some people who have the good ideas are the bad people.

Yeah. Yeah. And so you have to kind of understand and grow up and figure out a lot of things.

Were you ever tempted with any of that? I mean, it sounds like you walked in there and you were the conservative stalwart from beginning to end, but were there any professors or classes?

I want to be really honest. I was probably scarily conservative. Okay. What does that mean?

What do you mean by that? A foundation had, and by scarily conservative,

I mean, I really was pretty stalwart and active. Okay. Gotcha. Working in the

Reagan campaign in 1976, going to meetings, trying to figure out who

I was and by hanging around with people in the political sphere of ideas. And some of them were, at least

I recognized at the time, well, that's an extreme position. Okay. Yeah. Gotcha. But I was exposed to it.

So no, when I got there, look, again, I had a very strong Christian and, frankly, a very strong conservative kind of framework of mind.

In the high school library, I read National Review Magazine. That's just such a weird thing for a high school.

It is and it isn't. Let me tell you why. In the state of Florida and in many other states, a major foundation,

I think it may have been the Olin Foundation, paid to put National Review in high school libraries.

Wow. I think I was like the only reader, but every 14 days I was in there trying to find the next issue because it opened an entire world to me.

People like Russell Kirk and Buckley himself and so many others. Are you a big William Buckley guy? I am and I'm not in the sense that I think

I'm more conservative than he is in terms of the Christian understanding of society and things.

But no, his incisive wit and his ability to lay bare what's really at stake,

I think it awakened in me not only a lot of ideas and a deepening worldview, but also a desire to write.

When you read good writing, you go, oh, I would like to do that. I just was amazed at what he could do with words.

Yes. Did you ever watch the documentary Frenemies about him and Gore Vidal? The answer is yes.

Okay. Did you not like it? Well, I mean, it's not an attractive thing all around, but it's an important historical moment.

Yeah. Fascinating. Yeah. Okay, so... William F. Buckley, like I said, he's a Catholic. He's a bon vivant.

Which means? A liver of the good life. He spends his life sailing and hanging around on the

French Riviera. That is not what was attractive to me. What's attractive to me is what

Buckley can do on Firing Line with ideas. And so what I do with thinking in public, it's not the same thing.

It's not the same thing. However, even as a teenager,

I watched William F. Buckley Jr., and he had read their books better than anyone else.

So when he's interviewing an author, he knows who they are. He can get inside the book.

And he enjoys the exchange of ideas. That's what I loved. What I got from Buckley is you don't have to be afraid of any conversation.

Yeah. He looked like he was genuinely having a good time. Well, and I, when I'm doing thinking in public, genuinely have a good time.

Oftentimes, I'm talking to someone who's just on the opposite spectrum. And just had a conversation, again, with the head of the chairman of the economics department at Harvard, second program

I've done with him, Benjamin Friedman. And I know we're coming from two different worlds, but he's a very gracious man.

He's a very honest man. He deals with really big ideas. And I was thrilled that he was glad to do it a second time.

Let's go do this. And I think he probably will go back to the faculty lounge at Harvard knowing that very few of those people ever have that kind of conversation.

And I'll go down the halls here and think that's kind of true in my world as well. What a terrible dip for you to go from the

Harvard professor guy to me. A little bit of a whiplash. Well, let's just say that there's a commonality between us that is far more fundamental and for which

I'm just incredibly thankful. That was the sweetest Jesus juke I've ever experienced. It was very good.

Okay. So you finish up college. Then what? Well, I didn't finish up college there.

So I really experienced a call to ministry during that period because I was incredibly tempted by politics.

But the Lord brought several experiences into my life to disillusion me with politics.

Such as? Being a volunteer, just a teenager in the room and watching politicians make deals.

And right out in the open, like they don't care if a teenager sees it. Bringing them coffee, you know.

Just the whole feel of it. Yeah. Icky. Icky. And by the way, my theology says we need people who do give themselves to that world and are invested in it.

I just quickly understood that the ideas that I was most passionate about and the sense of calling

I had was to serve the church. And a call to ministry just kind of fell into place.

And so there's a direct line from that to me sitting here having this conversation with you. I didn't know then

I'd be for 30 years plus, you know, president of a seminary. Did you think you were going to be a pastor? I just assumed that.

I mean, that's all I knew to think about. So what happened? Walk us from... Well, I mean,

I still think that's the main calling. My main calling is to teach and preach the Word of God, which

I do stalwartly and constantly. Remember that influence of Schaeffer and some others that came into my life, you know, about that time.

I clearly was called to the more scholarly, I'll just say intellectual side of Christianity.

And so at some point, knowing that I was going to do the PhD and give myself to that,

I thought that maybe where the Lord would call me would be as a pastor and as a seminary or college professor or either one just...

And then, look, God's will in my theology is something that we find out when there's an opportunity and we are drawn to it.

And so I'm here because there was an opportunity and I was drawn to it. So I didn't premeditate as a 17 -year -old believer to become president of the

Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. I hardly knew it existed, but it does all make sense in retrospect. Where did you go to seminary?

Here. You went to Southern? I did. I went to Samford University and finished the undergraduate degree in Religion and Philosophy.

I was at Southern Baptist University in Alabama. Had a very good experience there.

Was also introduced to some things I would later know were liberal theology. But at the time,

I'm very thankful that I had that kind of a foundation given to me by my pastors who preached the word and by people like Schaeffer and influencers like Kennedy.

So you self -consciously said, I need to get out of this secular environment and go to a Christian... Oh yeah, I was just miserable at the

State University and miserable in that particular program. And like I was miserable for more than one reason.

Spiritually, I think the Lord is using it to call me into ministry and to call me to give myself to that. But I was also,

I was younger. I was the youngest person in my high school graduating class. And I don't want this to sound braggadocious, but they used to let you clep out.

It was your credit. Okay, so I clepped out of enough that I entered college as a 17 -year -old junior.

Okay, so that's kind of academically impressive, I guess, but it's sociologically disastrous. Not only that,

I was with a bunch of Vietnam vets who had come back from the war. I can't even imagine. And it's just,

I mean, and they were not unkind, but I was like 10 years younger than they are. You probably were bringing a briefcase into the classroom.

You pretty much got it. I mean, you actually do have it. And you guys are still like, they have fortunate son playing in the background of their minds.

I don't even know, but I do know that they were not unkind.

Good. But sociologically, they're in a different stage of life. And this was an unusual university.

It's growing so fast. It was just kind of being established and building buildings everywhere. Florida is just exploding in population.

And it's a major university now, football team and the whole thing. It was not then, but it was just clear to me this is not where I'm happy.

And by the way, that has really helped me to understand theologically and experientially the will of God.

I think God can have you in some very unhappy places to show you through your unhappiness, both what is the truth and what is

His will. Yeah. So then how do you hear about Southern? Is it through Samford? The answer is yes.

And look, I see myself as a hinge figure in time, a hinge figure.

Are you saying that now? I'm saying this now. Which may seem arrogant to someone watching this, but I actually think it requires a lot of humility for you to be able to say that.

I don't mean history is turning on me as the hinge. I mean, I'm sitting at the hinge. Okay. So here's the thing.

It's very, very humbling, but I'm the last person alive who knows many people who were integral to the life of the

Southern Baptist Convention and to Southern seminary in years past.

So I was born in 1959. I'm now 65. You can do the math. My pastor had a

PhD from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He had done it under A .T.

Robertson, who had studied with the founders and was the son -in -law of John Broadus.

Okay. Do you realize how humbling that is to me? I mean, my spiritual formation came...

The robe I wear at commencements and at convocations is Rupert Coleman's robe. Okay. He was hooded by A .T.

Robertson, who was the son -in -law of John Broadus. Okay. So just understand it was like God meant this to happen.

Yeah. It reminds me of Spurgeon pastoring the same church where John Gill... You know what I mean?

Yeah. So I knew these people. And so at Southern, it's a different story than elsewhere.

You know, I met Duke McCall when I was a boy, and he doesn't remember it. And I just remember him preaching in my home church and it being a very big deal when he was president of Southern He became president in 1952.

Okay. All right. He was president when I came as a student. And I had a wonderful relationship with him all the way until the point he died in which

I was one of the preachers at his funeral. That just doesn't happen in other

SBC institutions. It's just not there. Yeah. So back to your point, this is a hinge.

But I'm the people who know these people, and I'm talking to you today. Yeah. Okay. So just to understand, if I talk about a hinge,

I go from the tall steeple Southern Baptist establishmentarianism that I knew as a boy, and now

I'm talking to you, and it's a continuous story. And it's a story I thank

God for. Does that make sense? Yes, it does. Okay. What did you study while you were here? Did you just get your

MDiv? I did my MDiv and I did my PhD here. And what was your dissertation on? My dissertation was on evangelical theology and Karl Barth.

Oh. Yeah. Okay. Let's come back to that. Was the seminary liberal when you were here?

Exceedingly. Exceedingly. And you knew that going in? No. Or no? No. Once again, you're just... Okay. So just to understand, there's a novelist in the

South who wrote a novel years ago in which he said, to a boy raised right in the

South, the word seminary in Louisville had the same resonance as to a Jewish boy temple in Jerusalem.

Yeah. I don't mean that arrogantly for Southern, but that's what I grew up in. Yeah. It is the

Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. My pastor was both a

BD and a PhD graduate of the school. I don't know what a

BD is. Oh, it was an old MDiv. It was what became the MDiv. And I mean, that's just massive.

It's just absolutely massive. And my pastor later was a

Southwestern graduate who told me I should go to Southern because of my academic interest.

Yeah. So you come here, you don't know it's liberal. What's it like being a student? Well, I mean, I'm awakening to this, but recognize the conservative...

So I'm very thankful for that background, Jim Kennedy, Francis Schaeffer.

Okay. So I'm recognizing someone I'm hearing in the classroom, even at Samford, was kind of the two -story pattern.

And I did really well at Samford. I won their academic awards and was sent on to seminary with that Samford identity.

And I'm very thankful for that. God used that massively for good in my life. And for one thing,

Lord, I married my roommate's sister. Oh, that worked out. I lived with more than a degree.

It was just fantastic. And a very warm, warm, warm, good, healthy place for me to have been.

But I came here. And when I came here, so the conservative resurgence in the

SBC starts in 1979. I mean, obviously their roots, but Adrian Rogers is elected in June of 1979.

I arrived here in the fall of 1980. Okay. So this thing is a... It's live combat.

And I loved my professors here. I did. I just loved them. That's a very perplexing thing.

It's one of the reasons why, you know, I think Luther and Calvin and Augustine in particular, Augustine, you know, there is a reciprocity of love between a teacher and a student.

Okay. And that is, you know, Augustine's understanding of the love that produces teaching and learning.

It's just really important to me. It's the love of God, first of all, it should be for the Christian scholar.

And then it's a love of the subject matter. Right. It's a love of the church. And it's a love of the student.

If you don't love your students, you can't teach them. And if they do not love you in the sense of being trusting and, frankly, excited to hear what you're going to teach and trust you, then true learning is not going to take place.

So I was produced by this institution. I never became a theological liberal.

I did question some of the things that were very much in combat.

I didn't deny the inerrancy of Scripture, but I wasn't sure that that was where the dividing line should be.

I was in the wrong on women in ordination. You were an egalitarian.

Well, no, it wasn't that. It wasn't that sophisticated. So you're talking about language that didn't exist at that time.

This is just emerging. And that came to a pretty fast...

I didn't even sign the public declaration after the 1984 Southern Baptist Convention. But I was challenged by people, including

Carl Henry later. And so all I had to do is just kind of stop and just look at the...

I'm working in historic and systematic theology as a doctoral student. All I have to do is kind of look at this and recognize, wait, wait, wait,

I'm way out of line here. But that was not at all clear. And there was no recovering biblical manhood or womanhood.

There was nothing like that. That came later. And I've been very active for 40 years, basically, in that movement to defend biblical complementarianism.

But I can do so by saying, look, I understand how important these arguments are, because if these arguments don't exist, then all you're going to fall into is the idea, well, a woman could be a surgeon.

Why can't she be a preacher? That's right. So you finished your studies here. And then what was the plan?

Were you assuming you would go to be a professor or a pastor? I was open to any number of different permutations there.

And I don't mean this arrogantly, but I mean, a lot of people did a good job. I think I did a pretty good job.

And I was also serving as assistant to the president here in what was originally a fundraising position that got a little larger in terms of assignment.

And I was very close to the president. There were some defining moments in that.

So at one point, Dr. Roy Honeycutt, who was the president at that time, he followed Duke McCall. He and I are going up,

I'd set this up as part of my job, I'd set up a meeting with a major foundation, it was the Kresge Foundation.

So we were flying into Detroit. They were up in Troy, Michigan. We flew into Detroit and I had prepped

Dr. Honeycutt for the presentation. And we got a multimillion dollar grant for the building of what would become the

Honeycutt Center. And I mean, it was the biggest single gift Southern had ever received.

And it was a very big deal. And I was the point person to help put all this together. And the meeting up there with the directors and staff of the

Kresge Foundation was the big deal. Okay. So it was a big day for me.

And I'm with Dr. Honeycutt and he did a wonderful job in the meeting. We were pretty sure we'd secured the gift and it went to such good use.

But when we go back to the airport, there's just a horrifying thunderstorm. And so we're delayed.

And a lot of the controversy had been directed towards Dr. Honeycutt. Now, again, I love him.

I mean, just in terms of the working relationship. I could tell you so many wonderful things about Roy Honeycutt.

He's an incredibly likable man. And he invested in me. And he trusted me.

And so we're in this situation. He had, as an Old Testament scholar, written one of the volumes in the

Broadman Commentary that had attracted an awful lot of conservative attention because it was just, it appeared to be reflective of the higher criticism and, you know, again, separation of fact and meaning.

And, you know, it's a very, very liberal approach. So we're stuck there in an airport in the

Delta Club. And so I ask him point blank what he really thought. He took out a napkin and starts diagramming.

It was about the axe head floating. The bottom line is, he didn't think an axe head actually floated.

He thought something happened. And I don't want to just do a complete autopsy of that conversation.

Sure. But the fact that I can tell you, you know, exactly how I was sitting in the chair when

I'm talking to him, that's how determinative that conversation became for my life. Yeah.

I just realized, oh, it's worse than I thought.

And it is not worse than I thought. Please hear me. It's not worse than I thought in that I liked him less.

No, yeah. And it's not worse than I thought in that he doesn't mean ill for the

Southern Baptist Convention. He just, this is a disaster, but he doesn't know it is.

And, you know, so a lot of things you think, and I'm realizing, well, this is what he was taught. And this is what, you know, I will tell you that part of it was the liberals in the

SBC looked at the SBC as horribly backward. And in some ways it was. And they were trying to pull the

SBC into, you know, modern American religious leadership. And so the establishment, the

Seven Sisters, as they're known at the mainline Protestant churches, they had all the social cachet and they had all the smart people.

And so you had a generation, especially after World War I, and then again with an infusion after World War II, all these young scholars are going off to do doctorates in Germany and elsewhere.

They're bringing all that back. The SBC looks so backward. They think they're rescuing the SBC from theological backwardness.

And I'm right there sitting in the Delta Crown Room thinking I want to go backward real fast. And it was devastating.

But the Lord used that really to call me to this job.

I didn't know. How old were you at that time? Oh, I had to be like 23, 24. And you assumed this position at 33? 33, yeah.

So what happened in that decade? Well, I kept working here until 1989. And then

I was elected editor of the Christian Index in Georgia. And this was before the internet.

So this is one of the big four Southern Baptist newspapers, which meant it was a very loud microphone.

For our listeners and viewers who don't know, a newspaper is these things we used to get on our porch in the morning. You'd open them up, there'd be pictures.

The Christian Index is the oldest continuously published religious periodical in the United States, started by Luther Rice.

So that was a big deal. It was a very big deal. And it's in the middle of the

SBC conflict. And I am coming from having just finished a

PhD at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, liberal institution. Right.

And having worked as assistant to Roy Honeycutt. Liberal guy. Yeah, more or less. In the SBC would have been called a moderate, but yes, very, very much in the liberal team.

And so the conservatives in Georgia are not real happy about my name being brought forward.

And so I just got to tell the story the way it happened. The war just used that.

Because Nelson Price, who is just a very faithful pastor in Georgia, is in conversation with Paige Patterson, who is one of the leaders in the conservative movement, the most important leader, frankly, in the conservative movement in the

SBC. And Dr. Price says something like, you're not going to believe they're trying to pull.

They're trying to pull Moeller from this guy named Moeller from Southern Seminary at the Index. The board had fired a notoriously liberal editor at the

Index. So the board has mixed conservatives and liberals, but the conservatives have a majority.

So they can block something bad from happening. And I think he expects Paige Patterson to say, don't hire him.

But Paige Patterson instead says, well, you get the conservative guys and you hire him.

And he says something like, why? And it's because I was a member of the evangelical, I was an evangelical. I was a member of the

Evangelical Theological Society. I was committed to the inerrancy of Scripture. I had presented an academic paper at the

ETS regional meeting at Criswell College where Paige Patterson was president. And I got to know him a little bit during that.

Dr. David Dockery and some other young evangelicals were on his faculty. The Lord had arranged in His sovereignty for David and for me to be sitting beside each other in a

Karl Barth subsection of the American Academy of Religion. And he had David Dockery, Criswell College, and I had

Albert Mohler Southern Seminary, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. And like in the SBC, that's like...

Or the water. Or it's like, you know, war. And instead we developed a friendship sitting right there.

And I ended up giving the paper at the ETS. And I'd gotten to know Paige Patterson a bit, and he'd gotten to know me.

And anyway, I became editor of the index. And I became editor of the index because I am like a conservative from a liberal institution.

And at that time... And look, I wanted Southern to be very different than it was. I wanted Southern to be the

Westminster of the SBC. I wanted Southern to be the old Princeton of the

SBC. And that's where it started. That's the thing. I knew that's where it had started. Mark Dever had become one of my closest friends and has been ever since.

And we were graduate students here together. And the two of us would spend time digging into the archives and photocopying all these original materials.

And so Mark and I have dual sets going back 40 years, you know, of John Broadus and James P.

Boyce and all this. And so we're all connecting the dots. And I'm just saying, man, this place was started as the

Baptist Princeton. It became something different. Mark used to say, I went back into the

Southern Baptist Convention to kick people out of my house. Like, this isn't your house.

This is my house. I'm a conservative Baptist. I believe what your great -grandparents used to believe about Baptist theology.

Well, and that's why when I became president here, you know, the charter has the abstract principles in it.

And what I'm going to tell you is what I have had to say, I don't know how many hundreds of times.

It's the conversation I have with every member of this faculty, anyone who teaches here. And I have the conversation with them.

It comes down to this. You must agree to teach in accordance with and not contrary to all that is contained therein without hesitation or mental reservation or private arrangement with the one who invests you in office.

Okay. That language. Where did the founders of Southern Seminary get that language? Where did they get that confession of faith? They got it from Princeton.

Two of them had graduated from Princeton. This is Samuel Miller's contract language at Princeton Seminary, Old Bastion Orthodoxy, Princeton Seminary.

The abstract principles is a Baptist version of the Westminster Confession.

We Baptists sure do love to steal from the Presbyterians. No, we do not steal from the Presbyterians. We correct the

Presbyterians. Amen, brother. Amen. We take it and improve it. We take it and correct it.

Yeah. And you know, I say that with the most generous of hearts. Of course. Because if Princeton hadn't existed. And look, there's a great story there because you had

Basil Manley, Jr., who's one of the four faculty members who started Southern Seminary. His father is

Basil Manley, Sr. You can figure that out. Later, President of the University of Alabama, he was pastor of the First Baptist Church of Charleston.

And that's where Boy, Basil Manley, Jr. and Boy, James Pettigrew Boyce, develop a friendship because Boyce's father is the lay pillar of the church, and Manley's father is the pastor of the church.

And Basil Manley goes up to the Newton Theological Institute, which is Baptist, but it doesn't sound right.

And his father says, get to Princeton. Better to study with Presbyterians who have a real clear confessional commitment than with Baptists who do not.

Amen. Yeah. So you're working... I really went all over the place with that question. Honestly, I feel like I'm just like, tell me another story,

Dad. So this is great. The Index, you're working there. How do you get from there to here?

Well, the Index is a massive platform. And part of what falls to the editor is to write weekly on how to understand the issues of the day.

And I was clearly a conservative. And honestly, I had to put my job on the line continuously for the defense of the faith.

Were you living in Georgia? I was living in Georgia, in Atlanta. Mary and I moved there with a baby just weeks old.

What part of Atlanta? We were out in Gwinnett County. And it would take me sometimes two hours to get home in traffic.

It was just misery. But the real misery was, look, there are a lot of wonderful Christians in Georgia, a lot of wonderful Georgia Baptists.

But I was locked in a pattern of intrigue, and suspicion, and the old

Baptist mafia. And they wanted me dead. I was worse than a fundamentalist.

Because after all, I had come from them. And so it was personally very, very difficult.

And it was very difficult for my wife, Mary. And then when Southern's looking for a president,

I could tell you how it happened. But basically, it came down to me.

They asked me to do it. Okay, but why you? Well, that's an obvious question. I was 33 years old.

The other candidates, there were four candidates at the end. And look, here's one of the things, the conservative movement in the

SBC, by God's grace, kept winning elections. But they didn't have a deep bench in academia.

And they didn't have a deep bench when it came to leadership. So, you know, the obvious place to look for a lot of their leadership was the large church pastors, conservative church pastors.

Jimmy Draper from First Baptist Euless, who had been at First Baptist Dallas with Dr. Criswell, he eventually becomes president of Lifeway, you know, what was before that Sunday school award.

And so that will work in several ways. And, you know, Dr. Draper was a lifelong friend, adult, lifelong friend.

I just want to greatly honor him. But when it came to the seminaries, you needed someone, because look, this is an academic, this is a place of academic warfare.

You know, I've got a liberal faculty. We have to, they're teaching outside the confession of faith, they're going to have to go.

And you have to have the intellectual firepower. You got to have will, and you also have to have the competence to see this thing through.

And the trustees figured out that I had the will, and I guess they figured I had the competence, and they asked me to do it.

And look, I had a vision for what Southern could become, and by God's grace, the Lord has given that vision. I'm just so thankful.

The Lord's fulfilled it. I look on this campus at Southern Voice. This is what we prayed for. This is what we put our lives at risk for.

And so I'm very, very thankful. But I have to step back in awe and wonder at a search committee for the

Southern Baptist Theological Seminary that is looking for the guy to take this seminary where they want it to go, and they turned to a 33 -year -old who's been editor of a

Christian index for four years, and before that, very few people knew he existed. But why did they want to turn it around?

I mean, they were pretty content to be liberal for so long. Well, they were, but remember, the conservative resurgence in the

SBC is a grassroots resurgence in which grassroots Baptists are saying, we're not going to keep paying money for this.

We're not going to keep paying for this. They actually had this wild -eyed idea that maybe we can elect presidents who could elect trustees who would eventually affect change.

And I just have to tell you, honestly, it was the longest of long throws. I know there's some people in the beginning of the conservative resurgence who said, look, we can do this thing.

I think the vast majority of people thought, we need to try this. But Adrian Rogers, who was one of the greatest leaders and the indispensable man in many ways of the conservative movement in the

SBC, he didn't think they'd ever get Southern. And he was very gracious to me.

He became such a dear friend. And he invited me to preach at Bellevue. The first church I preached in as president of Southern Seminary was

Bellevue Baptist Church in Memphis. And he had me there, and I only found out later that what he said to his team is, he's an outstanding young man.

I'm going to pray the Lord to protect him. But Southern Seminary is like an old man whose body's racked with cancer. He's either going to die of the cancer, or that young man's going to try radical surgery, and he's going to die on the table.

But he's dead. And when the Lord... I say this, I mean this to be sweet, because it was so sweet.

The Lord used that. When I found out he had said that, it did not make me mad, sort of. It did make me mad a little.

But I mean, Adrian Rogers is a titanic figure. You can't be mad at dad. But it did.

The Lord really used that to center in my heart how deep the stakes were.

And the fact that it's only by His grace, you know, that this could happen. Now, when you got this job offer, phone call, fax,

I don't know, messenger pigeon? No, it was in person. In person. It was in person. Was it an immediate yes?

Or was it, I mean, prayerfully? Oh, at that point, yes. At that point, I mean, I just felt like I was made to do this.

Okay. Yeah. It took no convincing. Wow. Yep. So you guys move here in what year?

1993. 1993. What was the biggest challenge right out of the gate?

Oh, figuring out how to be president of anything. And I've been a student of leadership my whole life. I've just been watching.

So there were things I knew. But I mean, this is a giant institution.

So just even getting a hold of the machinery of it. I think if I hadn't been here as a student, as a doctoral student, and as an assistant to the president, working inside,

I couldn't have done it. And I did pretty much know. I knew who the people were, and I knew where the bodies were buried.

That helped a lot. What do you mean by that? I mean, in an institution like this, you know where the problems are.

Okay. You know the deals that have been made. You can pretty much figure out where the power is. And if you're going to affect change, how you're going to have to change.

Yeah. Those power centers. Yeah. Or die. Yeah. Faculty here was pretty certain that they would win and I would lose.

If you had to gauge a percentage of them being liberal, you know, wanting you to die and not be the president versus happy you're here.

Yeah. So I want to be careful. I really feel morally accountable to be careful. There are a lot of people who did not mean me personal ill.

Sure. But they did want me to fail. They didn't want you to be here. They did want my plan to fail. I would say 95 % of the faculty.

Okay. Look, I lost a vote of confidence at the hardest point of this 52 to 2.

Yikes. So you can do the math. Yeah. I said at one point, that's 2 % and my sweet wife said,

Ashley, that's slightly less than 2%. Okay. Thanks for that.

But she's right. She was right. Yeah. The math checks out. Right. So you're trying to wrap your arms around just what it means to be the president of an institution.

But yeah. Okay. What else after that? I mean, are - Oh, look, this is a civil war. You know, we ended up with helicopters flying over the campus.

You know, I had protesters in the hall for a matter of weeks. Look, the student body was as liberal as could be, maybe more liberal than the faculty.

And the faculty kept getting more liberal because they kept hiring younger scholars who were even further to the left. And I'm going to speak honestly.

I mean, we're talking about classic theological liberalism here because there were Southern Baptists who didn't believe that classical theological liberalism could show up on their faculties.

And this is where one of the classical liberals was a man named Ralph Elliott, who taught here briefly and then went to Midwestern Seminary, where he earned an entire controversy in Baptist history called the

Elliott Controversy. Years later, during the controversy, he wrote a book saying that the way

Southern's faculty worked at the time, in this age, the liberal age, is that he called it double speak.

Faculty learned how to talk to church people in church language, and then they brought you into the classroom and it's like Gnosticism.

Now we're going to tell you the truth. And so it was helpful for me to see all this because I think, well, that's exactly what's wrong.

We're never going to let that happen. And Southern Baptists are going to understand why we have to make these changes once they hear what these people really believe.

So I preached an opening convocation address my first time as president standing behind the pulpit in Alumni Chapel.

I preached a message entitled, Don't Just Do Something, Stand There, which, by the way, I got from Buckley.

And I said, look, we got to figure out what we believe before we can go forward at all.

So I went back to the confession of faith, the abstract principle. I went back to that language in accordance with and contrary to, went down the whole thing.

And I said, look, if you believe these words and you believe them as they're written, words, grammar, punctuation, if propositionally you believe these things, then you should stay and flourish.

If not, then you're in violation of the very, you know, founding principles of this institution.

So I knew bad things are going to happen. Okay. But I felt like I had to do that. And I'm so thankful I did.

I was young. I was not scared, but I was fearful of what

I knew was coming, but I did it knowing it was coming. So at four o 'clock that afternoon, the faculty committee showed up in my office.

This is the senior members of the faculty. The afternoon that you preached that. The afternoon that I preached that. And Mary, who's just been so stalwart with me the whole time, and she's home with babies, you know, she was there for the convocation.

And I told her, I said, yeah, the dam's going to break before this day's over. Because I just declared war, you know.

So the faculty committee came to see me. It was seven senior members of the faculty.

And they sat in my office, which is on the ground floor. And they said, this isn't going to stand. We're going to beat you.

And so. Were they polite about it? Thinly veiled rage?

I want to say they were not polite, but they were not.

Again, I want to be really careful. Sure. They didn't want me dead. They just wanted me gone. Yeah. There's a difference there.

They didn't want me hurt. They did want me out. So what's your immediate, as you're sitting there and they're telling you this, and they get, you know, period, what is your immediate response?

What I'm going to tell you, I was not Rambo, okay? But the

Lord told me the one thing I needed to say. This is not. And so I can tell you this calmly now.

And the Lord let me say it calmly, but inside I wasn't calm. I just looked at them and said, you're all fired.

Yeah. I did not see that coming. I didn't see it coming either. I didn't see it coming either.

But they presented it in such a way, it's do or die. I mean, they just said, we don't believe what's in the confession of faith.

Yeah. And you're not going to be able to do anything about it. So I said, you're all fired.

Oh, man. Okay. So I had not prepared Mary for this. I hadn't prepared my own self for this.

Right. I did know they were going to come. I didn't expect the confrontation to be this bottom line immediately.

And so... Smoke them if you got them, I guess. Just get right down to the business.

Bill Hendricks, who I'd known since I was a boy, he had taught at three

Southern Baptist seminaries as professor of theology, Southwestern, Golden Gate, as it was then and here. And I did love him, but he's in conflict with his own contract here.

And he's theologically not what you have to be to teach here. So anyway, he looked at me and he said,

Mr. President, very officious. I deserved it. Okay. That was not said was a term of respect.

I felt at the time what he meant when he said, Mr. President. Right. Yeah. Yeah. For now. This will not stand.

And I turned to him because at that point, it's just like the Lord just... I just saw this and I just simply said,

I know it won't stand. And it won't stand because you have a contract that says, I can't just fire you.

I have to go through a process. And I said, but you realize that you're saying about the confession of faith.

It means what I say it means, but when it comes to your contract, you'll take me to court over it. And I said,

Southern Baptists are going to see through this. And if we're going to have a head -to -head confrontation, let's do it.

So we did it. And it came to the crucial meeting in April, 1995. And the board of trustees, which still had some...

So you got here in 93? Here in 93. So two years later. This is two years later. And I had led the board to force the removal of a woman teaching theology.

And again, it wasn't personal. Charming person. But it wasn't just this woman teaching theology, it was also the theology she was teaching just in terms of our confessional context.

And so everything comes to a head. April of 1995, and the board unanimously, in all but one vote, in one vote, there was either one or two negative votes, 63 trustees.

But in the other votes, it was all unanimous. And they sustained the conservative redirection of the school.

And the dam broke. Because we made very clear...

I said to every one of these liberal faculty members, I said, you know, you have a contract that says there's a process to...

You're an elected member of the faculty. You can only be removed by this process or by your resignation. So you decide which it is.

Because I made very clear... And I really meant this too, because I believe the Lord will use it either way.

I said, if you want to go through a heresy trial, we will do that. And you will lose.

Okay, I think it tells you a lot that not one of those faculty members elected for a heresy trial. Not one.

Wow. They knew whose Southern Baptists were. I mean, it was just at that point, it just became very clarifying.

So we had about 90 % of the faculty left within two to three years.

Okay, over two to three years. Okay, that's a little bit more spread out than I thought it was going to be. Well, let's just say the cataclysm was

April of 1995, and the majority was right after that. Yeah, it takes a while for the gears to come to a halt when you're trying to do something.

And were you scrambling to find replacement professors who were sound? I was scrambling to find replacement professors.

Yeah. And it wasn't just me. I had to bring on a team that could help me.

And at that point, Dr. Danny Akin came to be provost with me and Dean of the School of Theology. We started looking everywhere.

And look, we got limited places we can go. So I know you've had a conversation with Tom Schreiner.

Okay, so he's like, and it's a fantastic story how we got Tom Schreiner. Share it if you can.

Yeah, I mean, we were looking, and I really didn't know who Tom Schreiner was. We're about the same age, you know, so we're both very young.

But Bob Stein was a very well -known evangelical scholar. He was a Bethel seminary. And we think, well, it would really help to get someone the stature of a

Bob Stein. So we're in conversation about how to get Bob.

And Bob gets cold feet about leaving. You know, he's very established there, and he'll be leaving.

And he said, you really need to hire Tom Schreiner. And I was like, Tom who? You know, he said,

Tom Schreiner. He'd written some and everything, but honestly, I really didn't know who he was. And so we started looking into who he was.

Well, I started looking into his writings, his teachings. I'm thinking, yeah, this is exactly who we want. Well, then Tom says,

I don't want to come without Bob. So it's just one of those things where the Lord just blessed us, so we ended up with Bob and Tom.

And we went to Trinity and hired some people, you know, Bruce Ware, later

Tom Nettles. We went elsewhere. I was just looking for the very best. And here's the thing, the

Lord had raised up so many wonderful scholars who were actually looking for a school that was this serious about theology and confessionalism.

And I mean... They're almost waiting in the wings. Well, God had prepared them. I'll put it this way. Whether they knew it or not,

God had prepared them for this. And we were able to build the faculty I would want to study with, which is what

I said, this is all we want to do. All we want to hire is the best faculty on planet Earth. And I have to say,

I'm very thankful Southern Baptist and many others joined in so that we had the money to do this.

I mean, because if we couldn't hire them, we would be dead. But the Lord made it possible we could hire these people. And I look at a

Tom Shriner, for instance, who was young. He could have taught anywhere he wanted. And you have to know the gratitude on my heart when, you know, he would come and invest his life here.

And here he is. We've had 30 plus years, or soon 30 years together of teaching in one institution and leading together.

And, you know, I just can't say enough thanks to a Tom Shriner and to the Lord for providing.

Well, you know, Tom was telling us about his time at Azusa Pacific and about his time at Bethel and how he's at these places that they're like partially egalitarian and partially soft on inerrancy, or a lot of soft on inerrancy.

And how when he got here, he just was like, man, I'm home. You know, I'm home.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's interesting how the Lord does this at the cognitive, theological, confessional level.

And the Lord also brings about a melding of hearts. And the

Lord, you know, made this happen at a time when we could, like, raise our kids together. And, you know, I mean, so it's just really thick.

The distinction between thin and thick is just really important to me.

Michael Walzer, you know, who makes that distinction between thin and thick in terms of just war theory, ethical theory, man, that is a concept that stuck with me from the first time as a doctoral student

I read it. I want thick doctrine. Thick complementarianism. I want thick everything.

I also want thick fraternity. I want thick communion. I want thick unity.

And so for thick, it's kind of like, you know, the biggest change I think in the is from thin to thick ecclesiology.

It has been incredible. And you've seen more of it than I have. Well, let me just say, there wasn't a single

Capitol Hill Baptist Church in the SBC. I'm not saying there was no ecclesiology.

I'm saying there was no intentionality like that. And now, you know, the young men on this campus, and they're more here than anywhere else, you know, headed for the pastorate like this.

Let me tell you, they think in terms of thick ecclesiology and thick doctrine, thick ethics, thick morals, thick doctrine, and kind of assume it's always been this way.

And you know, when the church has been most blessed, it has been that way. But it's an achievement that came by God's grace.

We should be very thankful. I remember in small town Decatur, Alabama, trying to find a family friend of ours, a healthy church home, and just really struggling to find a healthy church in one of the most churched cities in America.

These days, I'm a pastor there. These days, a new pastor will come to town. I'll take him out to lunch. I go to give him my nine

Marks books as a gift, you know. He's read them all. I'm giving this one to my deacons. It's incredible. And it feels not to be bombastic.

It feels very Reformation -esque when you have this guy here doing this thing, this guy here.

So you're here at Southern. You've led like an institutional, educational Reformation thing.

Mark is doing like ecclesiological Reformation stuff in a very generational way.

You got Piper doing his stuff, you know. Mark and I are just about exactly the same age.

We were doctoral students together. That's where our friendship emerged. And I thought Mark would teach church history here.

Yeah, until he said Carl Henry. I can now see

God's providential hand in all this, and I'm very thankful. Were you disappointed in the moment, though?

Sure, I was. Sure, I was. But on the other hand, Carl Henry was a mentor to both of us. Right. And Tom Schreiner included him in his testimony, by the way.

Really? He was like, yeah, when I was wrestling through inerrancy, I read volume six. Mark...

I mean, Carl Henry was a mentor to both of us, and Carl Henry was personally the link that brought Mark to CHPC, then called

Capitol Hill Metropolitan Baptist Church, by the way. Interestingly enough, it had been the merger of two churches.

Metropolitan came rather complicated in the LGBTQ age. That's why they dropped the name. Oh, I did not know that.

Oh, yeah. Some people showed up thinking it was a very different church. Metropolitan Community Church.

So anyway, I was a part of Mark's installation 30 plus years ago.

I've seen that picture on the wall of the study. Yeah, you and Don Carson's there. Oh, absolutely. Mark's looking about 30 pounds heavier.

Look, it's... I want to tell you is, I knew God at that moment had put

Mark there, and I thought I knew he'd spend the rest of his life there, the same way

I would spend the rest of my life here. So that's a very sweet thing in God's graciousness.

Hey, speaking about ecclesiology on the campus here, do you guys have an ecclesiology class, or is it only wrapped up in systematics?

Well, first of all, everything's wrapped up in systematics without apology. So in other words, what you need, and what we did was, rather than call class ecclesiology, we extended systematic theology into three semesters.

And so you basically have ecclesiology and eschatology as that third class.

We offer classes on ecclesiology beyond that, but I don't think you should have...

You shouldn't cut up the body of Christian theology into separate doctrines and teach them as separate classes.

Sure, don't have just an eschatology class. I mean, you can have an elective in it, but we need to learn

Christian theology as a whole, and how it hangs together.

And by the way, sequentially. What do you mean by that? Well, you kind of start with the doctrine of God before you get to Christology.

A la Calvin and the Institutes. Exactly. There is a logical outline of Christian theology.

You can't understand yourself unless you understand God. Right. So how long have you been the president of Southern Baptist Theological Society?

This is my 32nd year. Wow. Yeah. That's a lot of grace, brother. Was there ever a moment where you thought you'd fail?

The April meeting of 1995, board meeting. The Sunday before the meeting starts on Monday is

Easter. Good Friday was two days before.

Wednesday before Easter, when everything's falling apart here, when the liberal faculty and all their allies in the churches and everything else were signed on for the big battle to be the next week, and they intended to win it.

My pastor's wife shows up at our house with proof positive of adultery on the part of the pastor.

Okay. It had to be handled biblically, and it was. But there were some betrayals, just in terms of, this is the way it works.

And we shouldn't be surprised. Same thing happens in the local church. You think you can depend upon this person's judgment, and it turns out the other way.

So we felt very badly about that. And at one point on the Friday, so this is a good Friday, and I mean, it's just, you know, very memorable as to how it happened.

We received a word about one thing, and it was devastating. And I went home and told

Mary, and we had like a four -year -old and one -year -old, you know.

I guess by that time it was a six -year -old and a three -year -old. And I mean, we're just mommy and daddy, you know.

And Mary and I have to talk about this, and it's just the four of us. It's just us and the two kids.

And so Katie's always been very responsible. She was six at the time. We just said, you just watch

Christopher for a minute, okay? And mommy and daddy are going to step in here and talk for a minute. So we walked in.

We were devastated by what I had to talk about, and we just gave it to the Lord. We just, frankly, both cried.

I'm sorry, brother. Are you talking about the pastor situation still here? It's all together. It's all together.

This is all... What I'm saying is the cataclysmic showdown over the seminary was going to be the next

Monday and Tuesday. And then the pastor thing happens the previous Wednesday. Right. And then Friday.

And then Friday, another very... Betrayal kind of thing. I will call it a betrayal. Yes, yes, yes.

So you're telling Mary about that. I'm telling Mary about it because I don't want to be surprised. And we just feel like, okay, we've got nothing to give.

We've given everything we've got. We're leaving nothing undone. But this is outside of our hands.

I mean, obviously, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, I'm going to have to be at the top of my game in order to help the trustees to understand how this, what's happening.

But we gave it to the Lord. We just both, we both figured that this could very well just be the end, you know, two -year presidency, you know.

But I did feel like it would have been worth it. Sure. To have at least tried. No, well, and to force the issue.

Okay. To force the issue. And... Real quick, brother, I can't help but think about 2 Corinthians, Apostle Paul talking about Christ being strongest when

He's weakest, you know, I mean... Yeah. At that moment when you're there... It wasn't my plan, but it was God's plan. Yeah.

You were at your pinnacle of strength in that moment of weakness. Yeah, I could see that. And it was liberating to give it to the

Lord. Yeah. And you talk about the means of grace. I don't want to get too emotional here, but a little piece of paper comes under the door.

I already see where this is going. Yeah, it's just a little daughter and three -year -old son out there.

And she just writes, Mommy, Daddy, I love you. And you know what? The Lord just used that to say, look good. Let all the rest of this go if it has to.

Look at the Lord's mercy. So we went out and had to be Mommy and Daddy, you know, so we have to just drop all that the best we can.

And the Lord got us to the weekend, an Easter Sunday, and then the trustees start coming in on Sunday night.

They fly in for the meeting on Monday. So we try to avoid Easter, but that's what happened. And so the officers flew in kind of late on Sunday night.

And at that time, we did not have a lot of the facilities we have now. So they couldn't have the trustee meeting on campus for them to stay.

They had to stay in a hotel downtown. And so I went down and met with the officers. And I'm very worried going into that meeting, because the officers have been officially told by the faculty and others, this is going to be the absolute showdown.

And so I walk into that meeting. I haven't talked about this much in public, but I feel like I've just been given truth serum, so I guess

I got to talk. And look, honestly, I'm at a point in life where I think I have the stewardship of saying some of this.

And so I walked into this meeting with the trustee officers. And by the way, I am legally an employee of the trustees.

I'm the sole agent of the board of trustees. I work for them. I walked in, and they said, we're going to win this thing.

This is the Lord's timing. We didn't decide to have the great battle this week, but the enemy is the one...

Please, I shouldn't have said that. The other side has chosen the timing, but we're going to get this thing done.

And boy, did they get it done. I mean, I had to present all the evidence. I had to lay it all out.

And quite frankly, I had to lay my job on the line. And they, like I say, every significant vote, save one, was unanimous.

Were you surprised that it was that much in your favor? I was astounded, because there were still some moderates on the board.

I'd say the conservatives had 70 % of the board. So I mean, they could win, but it wasn't going to be unanimous.

But the situation was so clear that every vote but one, and that was on complementarianism.

Every vote but one was 100%. It was unanimous. On complementarianism,

I think we lost two. Well, it may have been one vote, maybe one. It may have been two votes, but we didn't lose more than two.

Yeah. And that was 63. So it was like 61 to two. So it wasn't close.

Was that just like jet fuel for you? Well, it was eventually. It was not at the moment.

At the moment, it was like you're just looking at the battlefield and seeing all the smoke. And even when you win a battle, the devastation is huge.

And so one of the last conversations I had that night, the Wednesday night, because we had to have like,

I had to have a session to report to the faculty and all this. Can you imagine the tension? Yeah.

Do you do like a Q &A there? Or do you just make your announcement and walk out the door? No, I had to offer the

Q &A. And look, it was horrifying. I feel unsettled even thinking about it.

And there were a series of those. There was a situation in which the faculty had a meeting

I got called to, and it was near Cincinnati. Okay. So in other words, they were meeting at a retreat, and they were plotting against me.

And you had to kind of walk into the den. I had to walk into the room. But you know, the Lord uses that. The Lord uses that to make you who you are.

And I just had to look at them and say, look, this is the situation. And it was good for me to be able to say, look, this is

Albert Moeller telling you this is what's going to happen. But it's not because I'm Albert Moeller. It's because behind me is a board of trustees, behind them is 40 ,000

Southern Baptist churches. And behind them is the Word of God. Yes. I look at this and I go back and I say, you know,

I really learned how to say to a faculty at that time,

I really do trust the churches of the Southern Baptist Convention. Here's the thing.

If you get to make your case and I get to make my case before the churches of the SBC, wow,

I'm going to win that. If I have to do that in the annual meeting of the SBC, wow, we're going to win this.

And if you do this before the trustees, wow, we're going to win this. And what the trustees said was in unanimous votes, don't even try it.

And so we gave them the option if you want to go through like a heresy trial, if you want to have the hearings, if you want to go through that, we'll do it.

And not one person elected to do it. In the 32 years I've been here, not one faculty member has ever elected to do that.

That's wise of them. Of the seven that were in your office that day when you said, yeah, you're all fired.

Yes. Were they all just gone? Like, when did they leave? One of them was someone who was very much a part of the old faculty, but he was far more conservative.

And he came to me and he said, I'd like to talk to you and the trustees.

He said, I did not support that ultimatum given to you, and I will publicly offer full support to the confessional direction of the seminary and all the rest.

It was a senior, an older member of the faculty, and he retired with full honor as he deserved.

And he also put himself on the line for the inerrancy of Scripture. So God uses that too.

But other than that, the rest of them... And look, a lot of this is very bitter. So you lose a lot of relationships, and a lot of this is so bad.

Mary and I have to go to all the funerals, and I've been preached at and worse at funerals.

I had to go to one funeral where the speaker said that what had happened to the seminary was like,

I think it's Philene's song in Les Mis.

You know, we have this beautiful thing, and then the tigers come at night. And so I was the tiger sitting there.

Yeah, it's just... I was thankful Mary wasn't able to be at that funeral because she didn't have to be there as the tigeress.

Brother, you've brought up Mary a lot. How close would you say your partnership has been with her throughout these many years in ministry?

I could not be alive without her. God used her to keep me alive, not to mention to give me moral support.

She's taking care of me. She loves me. I think she's a beautiful picture of a godly wife. How has it been for you to watch her sometimes count the cost of ministry with you?

Look, I have to take seriously what she thinks, because she's been invested in this for the whole time.

She knows, and you know, she's been so helpful, because she's so much better at so many things than I am.

Like just knowing people. She cares so much about people. She knows whose child is having a birthday.

She knows whose grandchild is, you know, whatever age. It's because she loves people, and she works so hard at it.

And so I've just desperately needed her. I'm not sure I'm answering your question. Yeah, the question was, you know, when you're that tightly bound up with your spouse in ministry, they catch strays, stray bullets, right?

Bullets that are aimed at you, they catch the strays. I think some of it's a lot harder for her than for me. Right. And how has it been for you to watch that?

Lord sometimes has, in this kind of conflict, He makes me mad, and I mean that in the right way,

I hope. Sure. Righteous anger. I know what's the right thing to do, and I'm going to go in and do it.

And I think Mary would tell you, not that I'm impervious to bullets, but I think she will tell you the

Lord's made me such that if it's the right thing to do, I don't worry about it.

I just don't want to give it to the Lord. We'll do the right thing. I think wives bear insults and injuries harder than their husbands.

And so I think she deserves a statue, you know, just because of her. And she's always so stalwart, and she'll always tell me what she thinks.

And she's very intelligent, and she thinks. And so she's, first of all, just a wife and a mom.

And I say just a wife and a mom in the most honorific way I possibly can. You know, this is the right ordering of the universe.

It's the right ordering of the Christian home. But you know, we live right across the street, and she's so active in terms of this campus, but she's never been intrusive.

She's never been in a trustee meeting. That's not where she would want to be, and that's not helpful. But you know,

I leave chapel this morning, and I just happened to notice her car is over here, and I see she's carrying stuff in to a student group.

You know, and I get, how sweet is that? You know, and they love her. She's really been very instrumental in a ministry here known as the exchange, which is just, you know, items for students.

Passed a student walking over here to do this podcast, and she was wearing a t -shirt, and it had the name of a lake on it. And I said, where's that lake?

She says, I don't know. You know, she got it at the exchange. Yeah, but it's just sweet.

And you know, so I hope that's a sweet memory for the seminary at some time.

Outside of those initial few years, is there anything else that stands out to you as a significant challenge during your tenure here at Southern?

Well, the answer is yes. It has to be if I phrase it that way, right? I guess what would the example be?

The example would be when the issue of Calvinism became such a apparently explosive and potentially divisive issue in the

SPC. And can you locate me timeline? Oh, it was pretty soon. I would say from the late 90s until 2010, somewhere in there.

It was hot. Hot. Hot. And how did that affect you? Well, it was the archenemy.

Okay. Southern's becoming Calvinist because they got this Calvinist president, Calvinist faculty.

And Calvinism kills evangelism, and Calvinism kills church growth, and Calvinism is going to kill the SPC.

And this is where I just, you know, remember, you know, the church history reveals exactly the opposite, of course, you know.

But, you know, people are deeply... Revivalism, and I don't say that condescendingly, but revivalism had such a transformative effect on the

SPC. The SPC was kind of Arminianized, partly, but not all the way. It was never fully

Arminian in any sense. As a matter of fact, even before I was elected president, Southern removed one of its longest faculty members for denying the perseverance of the saints.

Wow. Yeah. So at least they had one point, right? So were you seeing, like, a decline in enrollments?

I mean... Well, no, we were actually being blessed with enrollment. But here's the thing, and this is why you end up with the book

Young, Restless, Reformed, and other stuff like that, Colin Hansen. It's because the Lord's raising up a generation of young men who, like me, and like Mark Dever, and others we talked about, we came to evangelical identity,

Baptist identity, by two routes. And one of them is by, as I said,

Mark and I photocopying all these documents, correspondence, associational minutes, all these confessions of faith.

This is where the SPC came from, undoubtedly, undeniably. You're reading Baptist history, and you're reading the

Bible. Yeah, reading the Bible. And the other is, you know, the influences in my life. So, you know, I mentioned, for example, my boyhood pastor,

Tall Steeple Baptist Church. I became a Christian. What was I given as new member in a training?

Broadus' Catechism. It's completely reformed, but they didn't say it, but that's what

I was taught. So, you can't tell me it's not Southern Baptist. This is the most Tall Steeple Southern Baptist you can imagine.

PhD from Southern Seminary. All the entity heads of the SPC, you know, are here. Being located in Florida made that a little easier.

And then Jim Kennedy, who has such an influence on my life, D. James Kennedy, he's the author of Evangelism Explosion.

He's training more lay people in evangelism than any other pastor in America. And look, there was great help that came to me, and one of them was through my personal friendship with Dr.

Billy Graham. And so, that's absolutely a huge part of this story.

And I probably wouldn't be sitting here but for Dr. Billy Graham. Can you elaborate on that? Yeah. So, Dr.

Graham had been associated with Southern in one way or another to some degree through its presidents and relationships.

He knew what was going on here. He had had two young men of his associates come here and get theologically really hurt.

And so, he wanted a conservative president here who was going to turn the place around. He believed this institution was central not only to the

SPC but to the evangelical world. And so, he was of concrete help to me. Before, I guess it was the first week

I was in office, he sent two of his senior staff as emissaries to me.

And they walked in. One was a young man by the name of Tom Phillips, and he and I both grown older since then.

But he was young then, I was young then. He was like director of the Billy Graham Crusades and worked closely with Dr.

Graham personally. He walked in and he said, look, Dr. Graham is concerned for you and wants to make sure you are protected and you're thinking things through.

So, you know, in reference to a recent catastrophic ministry failure, one of the things

I said to students is, I've never been alone with a woman, not my wife. Right. And you got that from Billy Graham.

I got that from Billy Graham in him sending two people saying it was more than that, but that's at the heart of it.

We're going to help you put together a security plan. And by that, they meant moral security, because they're going to come after you.

And it was that in which I... These are my words, okay? These are my words. But it was the logic of what

Billy Graham had impressed on me through these two. And then later, personally, it was, when you are accused of something like that, you can't say it didn't happen.

You've got to say it couldn't have happened. You know, you're not going to be able to place me in a room.

You're not going to be able to... You can't connect those dots. And, you know, Billy Graham was so smart about that.

He said, you know, the national press is not going to write a long narrative about this in the moment of urgency.

They're going to say this is either true or false. You've got to be able to say it is false. I mean, so it didn't happen.

Yes, but you also need to be able to say it couldn't have happened. I'm not alone inside. And I I'm virtually never alone.

And so that was just really helpful. And thanks be to God, it's been used as a protection in my life.

Dr. Graham said, I want to do anything I can to help. And so I said, well, here's what you can do.

You can come speak at my inauguration. Imagine how big a statement that was. And then we want to establish, because here's the mechanics of the faculty here.

The mechanics then, this is not true now. This was all changed in 95 as part of those unanimous votes. The faculty had veto power at that time over anyone

I wanted to bring to the faculty. OK, so they weren't going to let me bring conservative faculty, you know.

And so I had to create a new school immediately. So we're going to get that fixed.

But you can't change the Constitution bylaws and all that. You can't you can't do that with a snap of fingers. Right. And so we're going to get that done.

But we're going to start a school. And that school is going to have an independent faculty.

I get to hire every single one of them. It's going to be the Billy Graham School. And Billy Graham is going to give his imprimatur and energy to it.

And we were able to start that school in God's grace. I was able to secure a four million dollar gift in 1993 to start that school.

So we're going to be able to start. I mean, we don't have to wait. We can we got money. We can actually start to spend it. I can hire new faculty.

And you know what? Every single one of them. There's no old faculty that takes a vote. This is a new school. So like the first first faculty meeting,

I had like one person. You're in favor. All in favor. Hey, you're elected. Then I took it to the board of trustees.

And when the Calvinism thing got really hot, Billy Graham was also very helpful to me in that he was asking one setting.

And I'm paraphrasing it here. He's asking one setting, you know, don't you think Calvinism kills evangelism? And he said, well, something like I've been you know,

I've been sharing a bedroom with a Calvinist for 50 years. And I don't think it kills evangelism. His wife. Yeah.

So Ruth Bell Graham, Mrs. Billy Graham, her father was Nelson Bell, who was a very, very famous Presbyterian missionary to China.

She was born in China, I believe, on the mission field. And he was like one of the great leaders of the southern

Presbyterian conservatives. And so, you know, the fact is, you know, it's just an absolute lie.

And so I can still remember a major SBC pastor, and God bless him. He was a dear friend, and I love him.

I mourn the fact he's dead. I don't get to talk to him anymore. But he told me one time, he said, Charles Spurgeon was the exception to the rule.

And I said, okay, let me just tell you something. I want you to go to Britain and find out if Charles Spurgeon was the exception to the rule.

I want you to find anybody you want to hang around with, because they're going to be a Calvinist. You know, if they love the gospel, they're going to be a

Calvinist. It's like I tell people, look, if I go to some countries, I don't know who to trust until I see who's carrying a

MacArthur Study Bible. I mean that, that specifically. No, I get it, yeah.

Because I say, okay, some things I can't figure out shorthand. If you're carrying a MacArthur Study Bible, I got a pretty good idea.

I know who you are. Yeah, I'm going to trust you. I'm going to take you and all these people in the room, and I'm going to find out from you how to read the score.

Wow. Brother, I have to get to these actual questions. I have not asked you one single question, and I want to respect your time.

No, I want you to ask what you want to ask. Is it true that you don't do any prep work or take a manuscript into the studio for your briefing episodes?

Those are two different things. I consider like my life prep work. Okay. I'm dealing with these issues, so no,

I got to know what I'm talking about. Sure. But no, there's no manuscript. There's no time. When I walk in the studio,

I have a general idea of where I'm going, but it's only a general idea of even what issues I'm going to talk about, because issues happen fast.

So just to be clear for our viewers, you do not have a piece of paper with a script in front of you.

Absolutely not. Absolutely not. There would be no briefing because there's no time to do that. I think

I've heard people say that before, and I've wanted to believe it, but it has seemed like a myth.

Come over. I'm going to be doing it shortly here. Okay. So you record in the afternoon? Well, I record.

It has to be finished by 3 a .m. Okay. And so we were past that Wednesday morning.

Okay. So it all depends on where I am in the world and what time, but when

I'm here, I try to record the evening, not the afternoon, but the evening before the morning, because it has to be finished basically 3 o 'clock a .m.

So I can't really wake up at 1 o 'clock a .m. and do it. And the way the news cycle works,

I can generally get away with it. But hey, I recorded at 2 o 'clock in the morning,

Wednesday morning. Which means that your guys were... They were. They were with you. And then

I had to re -record at like, I don't know, 4 .30, because they called the election between the two, and it's a big enough deal.

So look, I have to have it done by the morning, but it's better just in terms of,

I mean, I've got people working with me, engineer, producer. I would like for them not to have to be up at 1 in the morning doing it, and I'd prefer, but at least one night a week, like on Sunday, because of the way the news cycle works, it's often very, very late

Sunday night. Do you ever re -record an episode because you're not happy with it? Yes. Yes. But I normally don't re -record the whole episode.

I re -record... I mean, it usually happens right when I say something. Okay. Yeah. And I say, let's cut that.

Let me do that again. And one of the problems is that I'm a fast processor, but I'm also a self -monitoring speaker.

So when I preach, I'm generally listening to myself, but when I'm doing the briefing... You've done that several times in the interview.

When I'm doing the briefing, sometimes I can fall into a verbal fault, and I really need somebody to hear that.

And will one of these guys be like, hey... Yeah. And I need them to let me know as soon as possible, because it's a flow

I'd rather... And I know they're trying not to interrupt my flow, but it's actually harder for me to go back.

And so, for instance, this week at one point, I said 1924 instead of 2024.

Yeah. That's big enough. We got to fix that. We got to fix it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So when do you sleep?

Much better now than when I was younger. I really didn't get enough sleep for like 40 years.

That's a long time. It is a long time. 40 years. And I'm a night person, and my dad and mom figured that out when

I was a child. Okay. So they stopped trying to put you to bed at seven? Yeah.

But they were really firm, wonderful disciplinarians, a Christian family. They knew there had to be structure.

And so I got in trouble sometimes. And my dad, when I was like 13, maybe a little younger than 12, what

I wanted to do in bed was read. And... Just like my daughter. Well, that's a sweet thing.

It's a sweet thing. And so my dad said, okay, here's the deal. And I'd gotten in trouble and been disciplined for it.

And my dad simply said, look, I understand. I think I'm a night person, too.

He said, I'm going to let you read for another hour. You can't get out of bed, but you can read. And it's a sweet story.

He used to tell people, he'd walk in and like at eight o 'clock, I'd be in bed like I was supposed to be, school in the morning, and I'd be ready for bed, but I'm just not sleepy.

And he'd let me read. And he'd come in at 830, there I am reading. He said, you know, I'd open the door at nine o 'clock and he'd be asleep with a book on his chest.

He'd come in and I'd get emotional. He'd come in, you know, close the book, put it beside me. And that's just good fathering.

Yeah, that's right. Earlier, you were talking about your distaste for politics, being in the room, seeing a deal made and just, you know, just going...

Distaste of a vision of life and politics. That's right. Excuse me. Yeah. Good correction. There is something necessarily political about your position at this school.

So, how do you navigate that? How do you not become a political animal?

Well, I think what drives us here, you know, why am I at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary is to raise up a generation,

I pray, they'll be faithful, ministry, Bible, Word, doctrine. Yeah. Through the college, comprehensively in the

Christian worldview. So, there are things I have to do to make that happen, but I'm not here to do the things you have to do to make that happen.

I'm here to make that happen. Okay. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. Yeah. Now, you can buy into politics that way, and the end justifies the means.

Right. That's not what I'm saying. I've never had to do anything unethical as president of Southern Seminary. Right. I have had to take care of a lot of things and hold a lot of hands and go to an awful lot of meetings.

And by the way, in the Baptist world, relationship is the most important thing. I want to say to younger Baptist preachers, younger pastors, period, not just Baptist, but SBC is where I live.

They underestimate the value of being in a room. Amen, brother, 100%.

And I got to tell you, as a young pastor, I used to go to associational meetings. And you know what? I discovered that older pastors would love younger pastors.

Now, as an older guy, I want to say, younger guys have no idea what power you have when you walk in a room. And they say, well, you know, you walk in a room with those old guys, they're just gonna be judgmental.

No, after a short amount of time, they're going to want to adopt you. And I mean,

I had an old pastor who made the motion for me to preach the associational message at the annual meeting.

I was absolutely astounded. And he said, well, it's sink or swim, buddy. And he said that with a glint in his eye.

You know what I mean? Yeah, he said that. And I still look back at that. That was the annual message of the Sulphur Creek Baptist Association in 1984, 1985.

And that was one of the first big public things I'd done with a bunch of preachers in the room.

And you got to show up at these meetings. If that's politics, then that's politics. I've had to cut deals.

I've had to cut deals. Not ethical deals, but I've had to go into budget meetings and say to the SBC, you know, okay, we're gonna have to make some changes.

You know, this isn't exactly what I would want. Yeah. But you know what?

It's been done the right way. And I'm a member of the team. So I'm going to support it, you know, 100%. And I think

I got a track record in the SBC of living up to that. And that's one of the reasons why I think after 30 years here, you know, there are a lot of people who said,

I don't like Calvinism, whatever. But I'm thankful that that pastor knows he can call me when he's got an issue he's dealing with.

You know, I'll tell you one of the sweetest things that happened to me is that I had a young man come to me, and he told me, he said, because he came to me with a big theodicy question, big apologetic question.

For our listeners who may not know. It's the presence of answering how you reconcile a good

God with evil in the world. And he had a big question. And this guy said, well, my pastor sent me to talk to you.

Well, his pastor was someone who in the SBC political world was kind of against me. Okay, so that's kind of sweet.

All right. And then, and that was anti -Calvinism. I want to tell you something else.

And this is the kind of thing, I hope the Lord allows me to write a memoir. So one day I'm in my office, and there's a pastor who calls me.

And this is like the old days when you had a pink message slip. And the secretary back in the old days, this is the way things work, no cell phones or anything like that.

This is the height of the controversy here. And this guy had protested me.

He had spoken against me. He was just really clear from the moderate side in the SBC. And so I had a message to call him.

And I thought, you know, honestly, I was expecting some kind of argument.

And I returned the phone call and he said, Dr. Moeller, I was very respectful. He's much older. He called me Dr. Moeller. And he said,

Dr. Moeller, he said, I need your help with something. And I thought, okay. And I still was smelling a rat.

And he said, I'm facing a pastoral situation. And he laid it out.

And honestly, it's about the most challenging thing I'd ever heard in my life. And he said, what do

I do with this? And I said, well, why don't we meet for a cup of coffee?

And I just tried to use biblical, ethical analysis to strip back layer by layer until we could get down to this thing.

And it was a complicated adultery paternity question. And I mean, it's the worst

I've ever encountered in my years of dealing with these things. And then

I said, let's just, let's just pray about it. We talked about how the church should deal with it. He wasn't, he didn't know anything about church discipline.

He didn't have a category for it. And so we started talking about this. I said, well, thankfully you don't have to invent this. Here's the

Bible. You know, let's just, let's just look to this. And we prayed together and you know what? It's one of those times where you realize, okay, that God's grace and mercy is in this.

I'm so thankful that he called me and I felt like he could. And I think it meant something that I dropped everything and just said, let's, let's meet and talk about this.

And you know, sometimes that's what it's like. And I'll say to younger pastors, you got to be in situations where that can happen.

You got to show up in meetings. You just got to be the person who's there. And yeah, I went through enormous battles, but you know what?

If they're friends of the gospel, they're friends of the inerrancy of scripture, they're friends of the faith once we're all delivered to the saints, I want them to know

I am for them. And, and as I tell them, you're going to be a Calvinist eventually.

So look, I can live with that. And you know, I say it tongue in cheek and we have a good time, but you know what?

You asked the question, you know, that was other than the inerrancy of scripture, it was Calvinism that was the huge issue.

And with the inerrancy of scripture at the same time as complementarianism. So those two happened at the same time.

The Calvinism thing detonated a little later and frankly lasted a little longer because it took longer for the

SBC to figure that out. But you know what? If you want to find young men committed to the gospel and the inerrancy of scripture and expository preaching and the faith once we're all delivered to the saints, you know, whether they call themselves reformed or not, that's where they're coming from.

And so I've got all these older Southern Baptists who say, I'm against Calvinism. Boy, I love my preacher. And I'm going, thanks be to God.

I'm just going to praise God. That's an inconsistency. Well, it's not, but that's where we're all inconsistent, right?

In the sense that our affections and our theology don't always align.

And sometimes that's wrong. Sometimes it's right. Sometimes it's right. What do you mean by that?

By that, I mean, it's not wrong for you to love someone who disagrees with you.

Oh, sure. No, it's a fact. Even when they're wrong, even when they deny the inerrancy of scripture, don't stop loving them.

But like Luther, you know, fight them nose to nose and toe to toe where doctrine's on the line.

But you be the one who they know they can call when they're in trouble. Yeah, that's good, brother.

Thinking in public. Yeah. Which one gets more downloads? I'm sure the briefing gets more on a daily basis.

I personally have benefited more from thinking in public. I mean, you were kind of doing long form subject matter expert talks before it kind of became fashionable.

Here's my question in relation to... Like well over 200 of them now, I'm glad to say. Yeah. So when we first started

Room for Nuance, you were one of the guys that we thought like, if the Lord blesses us, hopefully we'll be able to interview

Al Mohler. And here we are today, grace be to God, or glory be to God, grace be to us. Is there anyone that you've wanted to interview that either you've gotten to or you haven't, where you kind of looked up to them intellectually, morally?

Oh, sure. Sure. Now thinking in public is a little bit different. So like, it's not ministers. No, no, no.

Yeah, right. And so they're giants of the pulpit. I just would love to be able to spend time with. But no, in the intellectual world, one of my near misses was

Thomas Sowell. Yeah, you didn't get him? No, he just really hasn't been doing anything like that for years.

And I mean, he's... I don't want to say so old, but I mean, he's remarkably active, but they're protective.

I would love to have had an opportunity. Every time I read Thomas Sowell, every time

I go back to him, I'm a little bit like, yeah, I kind of get it. I've done the whole Thomas Sowell thing. Then I'll get 20 pages in, and I'll be like, oh, it's so good.

Well, his book, The Conflict of Visions, is I think one of the 10 most important books I could recommend to people. Completely agree.

Yes. Mark Dever used to have that be his main kind of common grace giveaway book.

But Thomas Sowell has become so politicized recently. His name evokes such strong reactions.

It's become a little bit trickier. Okay, spell that out for me. Yeah. These days when everything is politicized to the hilt, right?

It could just be like, hey, here's this great resource from a black conservative guy who has some views that might be useful for you.

10 years ago, you could do that and be like, who's Thomas Sowell? We don't know. Now, Thomas Sowell has been enlisted. Yeah, but the reason

I'm pushing back a little is if Thomas Sowell were here, I think Thomas Sowell would tell you, look, buddy, I came to my adult life publishing these things in the 60s.

I was politicized from moment one. I've been on the campus of Stanford University.

I mean, tell you what, it's been politicized from day one. So I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm just saying that I don't think Sowell has moved.

Oh, I don't think so either. I think the environment has moved around. I think cancel culture is what's new. Yeah, that's right.

But such that, you used to be able to recommend this resource or that resource, but it's become so politicized that their name creates friction.

Right. But I just think anyone who has serious ideas and seriously like Sowell is pressing back on the monoculture, the progressivist leftist monoculture, then they're going to be dismissed in the same way.

Yeah. Have you read Black Rednecks and White Liberals? I have read it. Yes. I thought,

I think that's my favorite soul book. Conflict Divisions is, I think, probably more useful. I think it's the most important book. And if there's a critique of Sowell that really should stick, it's that he repeats himself, which is what he does book by book.

But every author kind of does that. They rewrite the same books. Yeah. Well... Like Piper's rewritten the same book a hundred times and I'm still here for it, you know?

Yeah. But there's more to it than that. And I think that's a good analogy. So I'm going to give you that. That's a good analogy.

So I'm not saying Sowell's just rewritten the same book over and over again, but you know, a lot of his illustrations just show up again and again, a lot of his arguments.

So if there's any one book, I think it's the Conflict Divisions. And you know, that's so consistent with...

So connect this dot. Abraham Kuyper, Francis Schaeffer, Thomas Sowell.

They define the Great Conflict in exactly the same way. Only Sowell doesn't see the supernatural element.

Sowell, I think, just comes up short explaining why there is a constrained, as he says, in an unconstrained vision.

And when he says constrained vision, I just want to say, it isn't a constrained... Dr. Sowell, it's not a constrained by a what, it's constrained by a who.

Yeah. I never got to have that conversation. And there are a couple of others of people who died, you know, before I could have the conversation.

I was reading Hartman Rosa recently. Do you know? He's a German critical theorist, interestingly enough, but he writes about resonance and the uncontrollability of the world.

Right. And he's doing all this really great just common grace sociological analysis. And I'm reading it,

I'm just going, brother, I got this from Genesis 1 through 3, you know? And so when I read Sowell, I'm kind of doing the same thing.

Have you ever heard him speak of any metaphysical stuff at all?

Because, you know, he's an economist. Right. But... He really brackets it all. Okay. Who else would you...

Who else is on your like, oh man, I wish I could interview... Well, I don't... I think for all kinds of reasons,

I don't want to talk about people we're still trying to get. Okay. Okay. Then who have you gotten that you were like, this was great?

Oh, Peter Brown at Princeton. Who does? He's the great biographer of Augustine.

Great. He's so important in history that he named an entire epic of history that they're now departments of in major universities.

And that's Late Antiquity. He's the guy that really is the great scholar of Late Antiquity. Wrote the best book written yet on Augustine.

Which is? Well, it's Augustine, basically. By... Right on the nose.

By Peter Brown. Okay. He's written some remarkable things. I did a Thinking in Public with him on his book,

Through the Eye of the Needle, which is on basically Augustine again, and how Augustine transformed the late

Roman Empire, even right down to economic theory. Wow. I started reading

Alan C. Gelso. Yeah. After one of your interviews with him, where he explains the

American experiment as a mix between the Enlightenment and Puritanism. Yeah.

Yeah. He's brilliant. And I look forward to having him again. One of the things

I did was I went on our Room for Nuance Facebook page, and I said, hey, going to interview Al Mohler. What's the one thing

I have to be sure to ask him about? And one of the things that came up pretty frequently was the

Trump endorsement in 2020? Or was it 2016? It's 2020.

2020, because that was... Definitely not 2016. That's right. And I think for a lot of people, it felt like the shift from character matters to I'm endorsing someone whose character

I do not approve of. Yeah. I would step back and say, I don't formally endorse.

Okay. I did say who I was going to vote for in a public statement. Is that a distinction without a difference?

Morally, maybe not. Legally, yes. Okay. So I've been around long enough to be careful.

So I don't regret either one of these. I regret actions taken by Donald Trump.

Sure. But I don't regret this in that I've been at this a long time.

I think honesty is paramount. I think I've been about as clear as I could be.

I'm an editor also at World Opinions, I've been saying consistently ever since 2020, we need a nominee other than Donald Trump for the

Republican Party. Okay. I did not get that. And so if I'm looking at the race, and as I say,

I've tried to help people to understand, it's not just electing a president, you're electing a government. We're increasingly like a parliamentary system.

And you're electing policies. And it's not a situation in which

I have felt like we have had a situation in which you've had a stellar character and a horrible character.

I think we've had like two horrible characters. And I don't want to minimize in any way Donald Trump's inadequacies, his moral faults, his sin.

I'll just tell you, I'm close enough to the situation where I'm not going to say that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are less complicated morally.

I would say they're less complicated in terms of how they play the political game.

Yeah. But yeah, I mean, I would like to think and look,

I've had very few unarticulated thoughts. That's not an original quote. That's that goes back to a statement made by an early psychiatrist in the 20th century.

I just haven't had that many unarticulated thoughts. So you can track me. I've been doing the briefing or daily radio program for like 30 years or something like that.

I've been writing for 40 plus years. I think it's a pretty straight line. And I think my priorities have stayed pretty much the same.

If there's an incongruity, it's what I would do with Bill Clinton in the 1990s when

I went on Larry King Live so many times and CNN and all these things and called for Bill Clinton to resign.

I don't think that was the wrong thing to do. I do think the political landscape has changed. I want to be honest.

I think I would have to say that if you had a situation in which you had genuinely distinct characters, and character is just, say, sexual morality, that I think as a

Christian, that's going to be an excruciating position to be in. I just don't think that's what we're dealing with here. I didn't think in 2016 that Donald Trump would do what he said he would do in terms of Supreme Court appointments and other things.

Well, he did it. I felt like I was pretty honor -bound to say. I think that's determinative when you look against a

Joe Biden who had just over the course of the 2019 -2020 campaign really showed his true colors on abortion and was calling for the end of the

Hyde Amendment and all these things. Well, you know, that really wasn't a hard decision for me, and it wasn't a hard decision in 2024 either.

I understand that I'm going to be horrified,

I think, by many things Donald Trump does and says. Already have been. And says. But I mean, even since the election, you know, just, you know, days before we're having this conversation,

I have to look at what I hope is right for the greater good of the society over time.

Yeah. Are you ever going to write a systematic theology?

I don't know, but I'm kind of doubtful that I will write a true systematic theology.

I think that is produced by a lifetime of teaching systematic theology in the classroom. I obviously taught it in the classroom and enjoy it.

I do want to write a one -volume theology, Christian theology. I think there's a real need for that in the

Christian church. I don't know how many giant systematics we need, and we've got some really good ones that are being done.

Steve Willem on our faculty is writing this multi -volume, and we have several members of our faculty who are doing this, and there are others out there as well.

And like systematic theology as a field, as an academic discipline, it's become virtually impossible to write a one -volume, simply because you've got to be conversant with everybody, you've got to footnote everything.

And so, I'll be honest, I don't really aspire to spend a 10 -year period of my life devoted to that, and I think there's some really good ones out there.

And so, I just don't see that. I think the greater need from me, I think, is some of the other stuff

I'm writing and a one -volume theology.

That's a good answer. I want to help lay people as well as pastors. And you know what? At the end of the day, an awful lot of people are going to read one -volume of theology.

You said a lot of awful people are going to? No, I said an awful lot of people. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Not a lot of awful people.

That word order really matters. What do you think is the most important book you've written thus far?

I think it may be the first one, in that you learn how to write, and it's culture shift, but it's not the great contribution

I hope to make. But it did kind of get a lot of the arguments out there first. And I would say, in terms of cultural analysis, it would be

We Cannot Be Silent and The Gathering Storm. And those things have to be put together, because look,

I don't live book by book. I live idea by idea, doctrine by doctrine, issue by issue.

And so there's one sense in which I could wait until the end and put it all into one giant volume, but instead it's like, this is a major chapter in my thought.

We Cannot Be Silent is just a major part of my thinking, dated now, you know, because it's like...

The culture is changing so fast around us. It is. There are things we're doing in terms of sexual and gender ethics right now we didn't know we'd ever have to deal with.

And by the way, other issues as well, AI and other things that just weren't on the screen even then. What do you hope to write?

Forgive me if this sounds morose. Before it's all said and done, what's the one thing you're like... Well, you can't count on that, but there are three things especially that I hope to write.

And I've got other things coming out, you know, the Christmas book just came out, The Incarnation. I've got a book on the three offices of Christ coming out.

I've got an awful lot of biblical exposition that I hope to be in usable form for pastors and particular preachers that I'm trying to work on.

But I've got a big book on cultural analysis that I want to land in the next couple of years.

And is that going to be like a how -to manual? No, it's going to be a what -in -the -world -happened book.

How Christians should connect the dots and figure out what it's going to take to have

Christian grandchildren. I look forward to that. What are you thinking here?

2030, Lord willing? No, no, no, no. It needs to be before that. No, I'm thinking 27, something like that.

Okay. Yeah. And then I want to write a memoir. Yes. I really do. A memoir. Yes.

I want to write that because I think there are stories that need to be told.

I think I'm the only person alive who can tell some of them. And the Lord will decide whether it's worth blessing or not.

But there's just a lot of things I need to write about.

Well, brother, just having you on the show and hearing all your stories, I'm already excited. And I just got a thimble full.

If God allows that, that project's a big one. And I said three things. The other one's the theology.

Yeah, that's right. Have you started even putting notes on the memoir stuff? I've got notes on all of these.

Okay. You got documents that you're working on. What would be the one thing you would tell young Al Mohler, who is just getting ready to start the work of reforming

Southern? What would be the one thing you would tell him? Oh, that's very easy for me. You can't do this alone.

Lots of people are going to be absolutely vital to this, and you need to be incredibly grateful.

I don't think I was good enough at expressing gratitude. I wish I could go back and say thank you to an awful lot of people.

Yeah, that's really good, brother. And look, there are a lot of things that only later do you find out what someone did for you. And then you're kind of horrified.

I can't go back and say thank you. He's dead. And it's really kind of heartbreaking. It just makes me wish

I had said a lot more thank you at the time. You are certainly one of the...

You are a generational figure. You're one of the greatest... There's another way of saying you're old. Yes, but I get it.

Yeah. And the generation spans from here back to the BC period. What was it like to preach with Paul?

Right. That's right. What has the Lord used to humble you over the years?

What has been your sort of thorn in the flesh? I want to answer this in a

God -honoring and wife -honoring way, but I would say I think marriage is one of the best checks on arrogance and pride when it comes to a husband, because she knows the truth.

And it's still a preacher joke, and the pastor preaches his heart out, thinks it's just been a home run, gets in the car and says to his wife, you know...

What do you think? Yeah. Yeah. No, who do you think are the greatest preachers in the planet? She says, you know,

I think one less than you're thinking at the moment. And we do laugh at it because we understand how we set ourselves up for that.

But no... My favorite is when my wife goes, so how do you think the sermon went today? Yeah. Well, that's never good. That's never good. You're asking me.

Yeah. And look, I have two children, and they, from the beginning, have just been really helpful.

They love me. But they're just... They're your kids, you know.

Yeah. But they're also just some other friends. There's some people who can speak into my life and do.

I've got a couple of friends who have veto power over my life. Can you say who they are?

You don't have to. Well, I think you're gonna... You can figure out who they are. But I'm not... I think at this point,

I should just honor the friendship by saying... Yeah, that's right. Yeah. I mean, they can call me and say, stop that.

Don't do that. Hey, Dodo. That was wrong. And in 40 years of friendship, we've almost never had to do that.

Yeah. But we really do speak into each other's lives in really, I think, very helpful, constructive ways.

Yeah. Your book on leadership is amazing. And I don't use that word lightly.

For a couple of years, I tried to... People were like, you gotta read books on leadership. And I'd read like Simon Sinek.

And I thought, this is drivel. Most of the stuff out there is drivel. I read Conviction of Leadership, and I was like, whoa.

Who has been the most significant influence on your leadership? I think personally, it would be leaders

I've observed. And I would say, start out with my dad. In other words, the Lord's given me rich examples in leadership.

My dad was a grocery store manager. He wasn't a state governor. He wasn't a pastor. But I learned so much from him.

And I've just attached myself trying to learn from other leaders, pastors, intellectuals, leaders of history.

You hear my study, you look around, you go, oh, well, it's pretty obvious who influences him. Churchill. Yeah. People like that.

Luther. I just lived up... For a while going through the fight here, I just lived off of Luther. You need to during that time.

You do. And in every way. Luther's a real man.

He's got a real marriage. He's got real kids. He has a real centeredness in his life. There's a real courage to Luther.

There's also some real joy to him. There's a sense of humor to Luther. And so he's a man in full, as the

British would say. So I've been encouraged in all those ways. About leadership, I would say someone like Peter Drucker has had a real crystallizing effect in my thinking.

Help me place the name. Peter Drucker is a management leadership expert from the middle of the 20th century.

He helped to distill, like for modernity, what leadership looks like.

And his book, The Effective Executive, is really dated. It's really dated. Okay. You can go back and read it today and be like, oh.

Well, I mean, it's just really, really dated. But he's got some things in there that are very practical, which are important for leadership.

So if you're getting yourself ready for leadership, you better know who you are. And he says, for instance, before a man is 30, he needs to know the answer to two questions about himself.

And so you're expecting like the meaning of life. And he says, no, these two questions are, are you a morning person or a night person? And are you an eye person or an ear person?

He says, eye people are those who assimilate things best by reading. Ear people are those who, you know, analyze and receive material better by hearing.

Okay. So I'm a night eye person. And he says, you just need to figure out really early in life when you're most productive and save that time for productivity.

Prioritize that time for productivity. And you need to know how you get information. And if you're an eye person,

I'm a very much an eye person, means you got to work harder at hearing people talk. If you're an ear person, you got to work harder at reading.

I hope that makes sense. Those are just two little concrete things. And the fact that he says that's pre -leadership, that's just where you got to know before you get in a situation of leadership.

Because leadership is going to accentuate the problem and it's going to compress your time to figure these things out.

Yeah. You are at the stage of life where people are probably asking you if you're thinking about succession.

Yeah. How are you thinking about succession? Are you thinking, I mean, you seem as virile as any young man could be.

How are you thinking about succession? Well, that's very kind. I'll just say I wasn't born with white hair.

Every one of these white hairs was earned. Right. That's right. Obama in his second term. Yeah. This was one conversation.

I have to be thinking about it. And I'm thinking about it as strategically as I know.

And I should not say too much here. I can just say it is a formal plan. It is not an interesting idea or an intention.

I have to operate on the basis of a formal plan. There is a formal plan in place along with the officers of the board.

And that's not an imminent announcement. I'd be honest if it were. Oh, sure. Yeah. But things need to be in place so that,

I mean, I didn't spend my entire adult lifetime helping to build this institution in order to dissipate it at the end.

Yeah. So that's not what I want to do. And besides that, I want to be a cranky old man running around the campus. No, I mean, seriously, the

Lord convinced me. I believe it's from the Lord. It's just in a time of prayer, not too long ago.

Okay. Okay. By observing some other things, the Lord kind of impressed on my heart.

And it really came on a walk that I need to be happy thinking about a time when

I'm not in this job. Does that make sense? Yeah. I think the

Lord's given me that. In other words, I don't think my identity is so wrapped up. This is what I got to do.

And there are other things I want to do that frankly aren't going to happen so long as I'm in this job. So some of the writing.

What an incredible gift to have that freedom. Yeah. I don't know the exact timing. Yeah. But, and I want to continue to contribute here in a big way.

Sure. Are you going to still live near the campus when you retire? Well, I've got to be careful not because I'll just say

I want to be very careful that the next president is president.

Yeah. Let him feel like he's free. Yeah. But I also. You don't want to put an office next to his office.

I remember how this works. Yeah. And, but I also want to be nearby and available.

I mean, you spent four years of your life here, you know? Right. Yeah. Right. But living across the street is not the plan.

Okay. Here's another question from a Room for Nuance fan. I thought you might find this one to be intriguing to answer.

Do you think that Jimmy Carter is a born again Christian? You don't have to hope and pray so. I've had some personal engagements with the former president.

He has mentioned me in like four books negatively. Negatively? Yes. Yes.

He is not a fan of the conservative resurgence in the SPC. And remember I got into the thickest controversy early in my life in Georgia, where I was editor of the paper, which guess what?

Jimmy Carter's in Georgia and, and cares a lot about Georgia. Okay. So I did a thinking in public with Jimmy Carter.

I think it's a very gracious conversation. That's good. So can I say something very sweet?

Okay. Okay. So Jimmy Carter and I are on opposite sides of many, many issues. Yeah. But Jimmy Carter had a text greeting sent to me with a picture of himself saying hello, because of a common friend.

He was with that common friend. And he said, I want to say hello to Dr. Roller. And he did. And you know, it's just one of God's gifts.

Yeah. Because we still differ on all these things. And you know, on his 100th anniversary,

I wrote a major piece for world. Okay. You know, about him. And I, that's my honest take on him.

I think it helps that I've been around the SPC so long. He's like your typical SPC deacon in a more liberal church.

Oh, yeah. Do you have any good Mark Dever stories? Oh, just sweet ones.

Okay. I mean, like my daughter is now married to someone who's his associate pastor, directs missions program there.

Yeah. Godly man, I'm so thankful for my son -in -law, Riley Barnes. And my daughter who

Mark held as a little baby, when she's like six weeks old, is now raising her children like two doors down from Mark.

How sweet is that? Incredible. How sweet is that? I mean, Mark and I, we've had so many experiences together.

Yeah. But the best nights were still back there in the room with the photocopier. You know,

I think who you grow up with as a friend at a stage in life, you just need to pray that person's a friend for life.

Yeah. And I will tell you, I've known Mark for nearly 40 years now. And if there's any one man,

I'd say, you know, I trust his heart. It'd be Mark. Yeah. Same, brother. And there are others,

I'd say that of two. Sure. But I don't know them the way I know Mark. What are your thoughts on the classical theism, theological retrieval stuff that's happening in the broader reform world?

Well, I think they're onto something very important. And as an historical theologian, I want to say, and as someone who grew up in an evangelicalism impoverished of historical theology,

I'm very happy about that aspect. What concerns me is that it can become a refuge for people who don't want to deal with being particularly tied to the doctrines of the

Reformation, and don't want to be particularly concerned with the doctrine of biblical inerrancy.

Mm -hmm. And, you know, you can write about monastic interpretations of the Psalms. Sure.

Or scholastic interpretation of the Song of Solomon. And I'm not saying we don't need any of that.

I'm simply saying it could be a way of avoiding these issues. I also think we have to be very careful in that evangelical retrieval has to be incredibly eccentric.

What do you mean? What does that mean? I'm Augustinian. I would say if there's any one thing that describes my theology after the

New Testament, it would be Augustinian. I think it's more basic than Reformed. It's more basic than Protestant.

Because the Reformers are going back to Augustine. Right. But it's got to be an eccentric recovery of Augustine.

I think I'm covering his great vision, but I'm not with him on infant baptism.

I'm not in with him on the episcopacy. I'm not in with him in his understanding of sex. I don't mean biblical morality, but his basic opposition.

If you think celibacy is a higher state than marriage, I think we've got a big problem. Yeah, that's right. And I don't mean that to argue with the

New Testament. I mean in terms of a Solomon priesthood. You've just got a big problem here. I'm with Luther on that question.

I hope that makes sense. I've got all these paintings of Luther. I've got a

Luther Bible sitting on the desk. Luther is everywhere, and I love so many things about Luther, but I'm not with Luther on the sacramental question.

I'm not with Luther on ecclesiology. I'm not with Luther on, you know, many things. The Jews. Oh, yes.

I mean, yeah. Well, and let's just say even in the

Reformed tradition, you know, I love so many things about Calvin. I don't want to be Calvin. Right.

Yeah. I hope that makes sense. So I think the retrieval movement, though, is particularly subtle, and I'm quite concerned about it, to be honest.

Again, I've tried to say the good part, but it worries me that I've just been through like three defalcations from evangelicalism into Catholicism, and I don't want this to be the next, or into Orthodoxy.

Yeah. And I think there's a danger there. What an odd phenomenon that Eastern Orthodoxy is gaining ground amongst evangelicals in the

West. I just don't think it's odd. I want to tell you why it makes sense. Okay. It's because you don't have to go to Catholicism and buy all that Catholicism means, and you don't have to buy into Trent.

And so Eastern churches have never anathematized the Reformation. That can't be true.

No. It is true. I feel like I just read Gavin Ortlin on Why We're Protestant, and he specifically highlights times when they do, but...

No, they disagree. Yeah. But you cannot be a priest in the Roman Catholic Church without assenting to the

Trent tradition, the Tridentine tradition, which anathematizes anyone who believes in justification by faith.

And you're saying the East has not anathematized that position? Not in that sense, no, because the East's conception of Orthodoxy is primarily invested in theology,

Christology, and Trinity. That's one of the differences, and there's so much apathetic aspect to their theology in terms of mystery.

It's not the same head -on collision. No. Wow. And look, as evangelicals, what we have is a thick theology and a thin social life.

Yeah. Okay. Thin ethics too, oftentimes. Well, but I mean, we're not stuck with that, but we are stuck with a thin social life.

Now, I don't mean a thin ecclesiology, but I just mean we don't get the material aspect.

I'm not saying we don't have stuff, but we don't have icons. We don't have smoke.

We don't have incense. We don't have altars. We don't have priestly garbs and all this.

We don't have the oral and visual and tactile and even the smells that you can get.

I mean, all of it. You get all of that with Orthodoxy. You get all of that. And of course, what

I believe you have to give up is the simplicity of the gospel. And so I just think that I'll be thrilled if this movement proves me wrong.

I just don't want to see it fall over into that. I also think, look, there's a lot we need to learn from like post -Nicene

Orthodoxy, and I affirm it baptistically, but I just don't find refuge.

And I think there is a danger of people just saying, I want to go back to the Reformation. I want to live there. Well, I want to go back to the

Reformation the same way I'm going back to Nicaea with Mark and Lig and others. We're going to be doing this conference on the 1700th anniversary of Nicaea.

But I'm thankful there's a lot after Nicaea. For one thing, when we talk about the Nicene tradition, we're really talking about the

Nicene Constantinopolitan tradition. We're obviously talking about more than Nicaea.

We're talking about Chalcedon. So in other words, even the formula we use is not merely

Nicaea. So I don't want to... I am going back to Nicaea. I mean, physically,

Lord willing, but I don't want to just go back to Nicaea because I don't want to be with a bunch of priests in a room.

Yeah. Yeah. I hope that makes sense. No, it does. Hey, here's another question from a fan of the show, and I chose to include this on purpose.

All right. Why do you allow critical race theory to be taught at Southern Seminary? I don't.

Well, there you go. Yeah. I will tell you that these kinds of things can sneak up on you because you often don't understand exactly how these things are fitting together until it's brought to your attention.

And, you know, I will say that I think evangelicals had a particular vulnerability to some of this simply because...

But again, one of my earliest apologetic issues was over Frankfurt School, critical theory.

I am shocked at how... And I have a theory about this. I don't think critical theory could ever have gotten hold in the

United States the way it did without the emergence of identity politics. Well, yeah. Well, you say, well, yeah.

Well, that didn't happen for a long time. Identity politics is a new thing. Yeah. In relation to critical theory proper.

Yeah. No, I mean, it's a new thing in American culture. Okay. The identity politics. The idea that...

I mean, there have always been different identities, but the idea that that coalesces into what is seen as a hierarchy of conflicts of identities, that takes an intellectual jump even from the 60s.

Okay. I mean, there were some people maybe in the academy who were thinking that way. Yeah. But you don't really have identity politics as we have it today until you get to recent decades.

And then critical theory also makes sense because then you can take critical theory, you can drop anything in the middle. Critical race theory, critical gender theory, critical sexual theory, critical moral theory.

It's perfectly made. Critical pedagogy. Right. As a disaster. Yeah. Yeah. And again, I met that at age 13.

That's a part of that big school room. At age 30, I was reading these books and I was like, I have no... I'm trying to wrap my mind around it.

I can't imagine being 13. Oh, I think I was talking to you when

I talked about the, you know, no more sage on the stage, just a guide on the side. Well, that's critical pedagogy.

That's right. Put on your statesman hat for this question. Why should local churches not give up on the

SPC? Well, I have to turn there and say, why would you give up on the SPC? If the

SPC is everybody looking like you, then just don't do it. Okay. Okay. But the

SPC is a union, a convention of Baptist churches for some specific purposes.

And I would say, come to this campus, you'll see why you stay in the SPC. Yeah. How do you not want to buy into this?

How do you not want to be a part? Where else are you going to find all these young men training to be pastors who want to be expositors of God's Word?

Now, you know, are you going to find things in the SPC that upset you? Of course you will, because we're a big denomination.

But you know what? I really believe that the Lord uses the SPC. I believe the SPC, this is like Moeller's first law of the

SPC. Southern Baptists will always do the right thing, given enough time. Okay.

And on some issues, it's taken a very long time. Yeah. But you know what? I've never seen a group of people who are more wanting to do the right thing.

And the SPC hates to do hard things. All big organizations hate to do hard things. What happened to the SPC this year?

Removed a church by an overwhelming vote because it had installed a woman as pastor. Okay. You know what?

What other denominations are going to do that? And not just any church. The biggest, perhaps most influential, most money -giving church.

Right. That was two years ago, and I was the one called to make that argument. I mean, this year, though, it happened with First Baptist Alexandria, Virginia, which is one of the oldest churches in the

SPC. First Baptist Church, Alexandria, the legacy church. The SPC did it, and then went on, and then considered the next issue.

And I look at that, I say, what other denomination has the courage to do that in 2024? Is the

SPC perfect? No, it's never going to be perfect. For one thing, we are not a church. That's what

I want to say to Baptists. The Southern Baptist Convention is not a church. We are an association. That's all we are.

So you go home and be faithful. You also network with other churches. Baptist associationalism is even more important than the convention.

And I don't mean that just local Baptist associations. I mean, associationalism. Yeah. So, I mean, you got the

Nine Marks Tribe, and you got the Pillar Network, and you got all these things. And I see all that as good in that it allows people in the

SPC to say, okay, I kind of really feel like I know where I belong, and we can do these things together. And look, no one's ever going to recreate this campus.

It's not financially going to be possible in the Protestant world. No one's going to be able to do this again.

I'm not saying there won't be more theology schools, and they won't do a good job, but no one can do this again. No one's going to be able to build all this.

No one's going to be able to create an SPC. No one's going to be able to create the International Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention.

No one's going to have, you know, 175 years of experience of how to get somebody from here to there, and keep them on the field, and support them financially.

And no one else has been able to do that. So let's not mess it up. Let's always make it better.

Let's always make it more faithful, but don't give up. And if you find someone in the SPC with whom you pain, the right steps towards theological fidelity.

When the SPC is doing the hard things to do the right thing, that's exactly the wrong time to leave. Yeah. Amen, brother.

When we pray for the SPC in our pastoral prayers on a Sunday morning, we always say, we're about to pray for the largest mission -sending organization in the world today.

Right. In the history of the Christian church, if you want Baptist braggadocio. But I mean, there are a lot of Southern Baptists, the way it should be.

But again, there's something very invaluable there. And you know what?

Here's the key of the SPC. You can be a Southern Baptist as you want to be. That's right. Yeah. The church can decide how much it wants to be active and involved.

And again, I want to say, look at this. Don't you want to be a part of this? Yeah. And by the way, I need you to be a part of this. I need you to give generously for this to happen.

I got to pay all these bills. And don't you want to give sacrificially so that people can get to the mission field?

Theological education. Yeah. And you know, the SPC is one of the glories about it. We don't do many things. We're not the

Catholic church. The National Convention does basically three things. International missions, domestic missions in the

United States, North America, and theological education. It just doesn't... I mean, there's an Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, stuff like that.

But there's really not much else. We're a lean, mean machine. Sometimes mean in the wrong way.

Best T4G memory. Oh, the very first T4G with MacArthur and Sproul, Piper, and the four of us together.

It's just really sweet. The sense of fraternity. Well, it's just one of those things you think, how wonderful is it to be in this room?

And you know, the Lord allowed some of us to be in the room again and again and again. You never take it for granted.

But then, you know, some of the people aren't in the room anymore. And you know, it's sometimes health.

It's sometimes other things. R .C.'s gone to be with the Lord. So yeah, having

R .C. on the platform. But you know what? Having R .C. and John Piper and John MacArthur on the front row, listening to each other preach.

How great is that? Wish I could have been there, brother. Well, there was a downside to it. Which is?

We had way too many men in way too small a space. Yeah. Oh, I like it like that.

Well, we packed in beyond what we could have imagined. I can just say, everybody needed to go home and take a shower.

And we needed a little bit of a bigger room. And the Lord blessed beyond anything we imagined.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Favorite Churchill biography? I would say just the favorite lyrical style,

William Manchester's two volumes, especially the first volume. Best biography is Sir Andrew Roberts.

Okay. Favorite Puritan? You can do book or author or both. I'd have to say the one that I probably live with the most is

John Owen. Okay. Yeah. There's kind of a constant conversation companion in a way that many others aren't.

Favorite John Owen work? Oh, The Death of Death and The Death of Christ.

You know, a lot of people are taking Owen and modernizing him, trying to make his prose more accessible, which is a little tricky.

You want to be careful. Right. But I found it to be so helpful because so many people just can't read

Owen. And so I'm thankful that they're doing it with Edwards too. You know, they're taking stuff and making it. Right.

I just think you always have to know you're looking at a reduction here. Sure. Yeah. Because I really think you kind of need

Owen and all of his Owen -ness. Yeah. Especially in a seminary context, absolutely. But I'm thinking about the guy who lays tile in my church.

Yeah. You know, I'm not going to get him to be able to read religious affections or the purpose for which God created the world. But this guy...

I think a better way maybe to do that, and I'm not... I tell you, that should never be done. I think maybe a better way to do that is for someone like you to write about Owen and even paraphrase him where you have to.

Mike McKinley, Communion with God. He took Communion with God, turned it into Friendship with God. Yeah. Very good.

Yeah. All right, brother, we are almost done. You have been fantastic. This has been amazing.

Here are the rapid fire questions. Okay. No qualifying. Okay. No both and.

Tea or coffee? Coffee. This is what the people really want to know. Coffee. Favorite...

Do you watch TV? I really don't. Movies? Not anything in a long time.

If I asked you your favorite movie, could you name even one? Free Willy? No. I would say,

I think Oh, good grief. Theologically, I think

The Godfather 1 and 2 are just incredible epic sagas that raise almost all the most important questions of life.

Wow. If you could be trapped on an island and you can only listen to the preaching of one of these men, who would you choose?

Dever, Piper, Keller, Sproul, or John MacArthur? Well, you can't do that to me with living people.

I sure can. Say it again. Dever, Piper, Keller, Sproul, or John MacArthur?

And this is... Rest of your life on an island, you can only listen to one of them preach. You have all of their preaching.

All of it's available to you. You know, anything I say here is wrong. Right. I mean, thankfully,

I'm not forced into that kind of thing. But I would simply say, I'm going to go back to when I was 16 and desperate to know how to understand the

Bible and who's teaching the Bible. And I started listening to John MacArthur. There you go. What about if you could only be trapped on an island with their books, who would you choose?

From those same people? Yeah. Sproul. Sproul.

Lewis or Tolkien? And I want to tell you, it's because I think Sproul's The Holiness of God just transformed the way

I look at the world. Yeah. Yeah. Lewis or Tolkien? Definitely Tolkien. There you go.

Look, it's for reasons that you might not expect, but you said rapid fire, so... No, no, no. You guys tell me now.

I think Lewis is indispensable in works like The Abolition of Man. But my mind is far more interested in the sophistication of the way of the theological realism in Tolkien.

And I just think it's... If I'm looking at Narnia or Lord of the

Rings, they're not at all comparable works. Yeah. I go with the Lord of the Rings every time. But I'm really deeply in a project right now on Tolkien's letters and...

Reading them or? Reading. I've read every single one of them extant. Wow. And I'm working on a project that's important too.

Like a book you're writing? I haven't decided how to handle it yet. But it's working its way into a lot of things.

Well, there you go, Luke. That's your Jim for the episode. He's biggest Tolkien favorite novel?

It's hard to say, but I would say The Remains of the Day. By? Ishigaru. I've never even heard of it.

Shocker. Let me make an assignment. You need to read The Remains of the Day. Okay. By Ishigaru?

Is it Japanese? Yes. Okay. It's translated. Okay, right.

I'm still a little bothered by Pearl Harbor, but I'll give it a crack. Mountains or Beach?

Oh, gosh. I grew up with Beach. I'd say now mountains. Favorite candy, least favorite candy?

I don't know what least favorite means. Like black licorice. Pretty gross, right? Look, I like just about everything else.

I mean, I should have it. Okay. Okay. That's your two favorites. I will tell you, I love black licorice. Well, no accounting for taste.

Yeah. Favorite candy? Anything with cherry in it. Okay. Android or iPhone?

iPhone. Macaroni salad or potato salad? Potato salad. Mayonnaise or mustard?

Mustard. If you have to eat one of these, caviar or escargot?

Caviar. Night out or night in? In. Concert or football game?

Concert. Morning person or night out? Night out. Burger King or McDonald's? McDonald's.

Yeah. Mexican or Italian? Italian. Burgers or barbecue?

Barbecue. Chinese takeout or sushi? Chinese takeout. If you have to be cold or hot for the rest of your life?

Well, I used to say, here's the deal. If you're cold, you can put something on to be warm. Correct.

So that's all I know. There you go. If you're hot, there are a limited number of options you got.

Okay. This is going to be an interesting question for you. Rock or rap? Yeah.

That doesn't really much apply here. I at least grew up at a time when rock music was a very important part of the culture.

Yeah, sure. Classical or jazz? Classical, although I don't hate jazz.

Yeah, I do. I can't stand it. It depends on what you're listening for. That's true. If you could only have,

I can't believe I'm asking Elmo this question. If you could only have a unibrow for the rest of your life or no eyebrows, which one would you choose?

I'm going to leave that to the Lord. All right. Trapped on an island with one. We got three questions left.

Trapped on an island with one systematic theology for the rest of your life. I'm going to say the

Institutes of the Christian Religion. Yeah, that's what Shiner said too. What hymn would you like to be sung at your funeral?

I would like at my funeral the seminary hymn to be sung, Soldiers of Christ in Truth Arrayed.

Is this seminary? This seminary. What other seminary hymn would I want? Hey, Princeton, I don't know.

It is a magnificent hymn. But it belongs to this, I'm sorry, I've never heard of it. It's in the Baptist hymnal.

This seminary is written for the first commencement here in 1860. Just because it encapsulates your life so well?

It encapsulates my life, the gospel, and my hope. Wow. I'm going to have to look that up. It's also an incredible piece of hymnic music.

The last line is, we meet to part, because remember, this is a commencement, a gathering.

We meet to part, and part to meet, when earthly labors are complete, to join in yet more blessed employ in an eternal world of joy.

We meet to part, and part to meet. Isn't that sweet? That's so good. Only true because of the gospel.

Yeah. May it not be, but if you were to pass tomorrow, who would you want to preach your funeral?

Mark Dever. Last question. How many holes does a straw have? It has none.

None? I don't think I've ever heard that one before. Come on. It's a cylinder. Okay. There's no hole in it, unless it's a defective straw.

You just blew my mind. I've asked this question 100 times.

There are no holes in a straw, or it won't work. I don't know if I could... All right.

We've been beaten. We've been beaten. I've been outmaneuvered here. All right. Let's end on that note, brother.

Thank you so much for your time. Let's just pray. Thank you so much for the gift that Albert Mohler is to the church.

You have given him to this station in life. You have called him.

You have equipped him by your grace and mercy. You've empowered him with the gifts of your Holy Spirit. You've sustained him through many trials and toil in this life of sin.

You have provided for him in miraculous ways. You have given him a vision of the glory to come that has sustained him.

Lord, when he has failed, you have forgiven him. We pray that you will continue to bless his efforts as he rises in the morning, as he walks by the way, as he lays down at night.

We pray that he will in every way communicate Christ and Christ crucified. We pray that the gospel will be advanced by the rest of his ministry, however long that may be.

We pray that it'll be many more decades to come. We pray that his legacy will point people to Jesus.

We pray for the Southern Baptist Seminary. We pray that you'll protect it, that it will remain true and faithful for many generations to come, should you tarry.

Lord, we pray that you'll use this episode, this meager conversation to strengthen the body of Christ, to encourage, to equip, to exhort, to challenge.

We pray all of this in the mighty, glorious, beautiful name of Jesus. Amen. Amen. Amen.