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 Moeller.

Would you mind opening us in prayer, brother?

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.

So 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 Baptist.

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.

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 in 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'd 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 and 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, because 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.

Yeah, 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 want 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 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 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.

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?

Did you, 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, I was just surrounded by, like, I remember the day I turned 14.

Okay, so just a boy turned 14.

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.

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 a 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 does 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, 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.

Such as what I do is who I am.

Yeah.

So you were, I'm sure, a precocious child.

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'll 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.

Yeah.

And, you know, it's the idea of the Bible is the sword.

Right. Yeah.

There's the swords in your hand.

You got to be a good swordsman.

This is how you do it.

That's so cool.

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.

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 soldier 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 Birmingham to Portland.

No, more Manhattan, 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.

You just need a guide along the way.

That was a mantra from the 60s, yeah.

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.

And so, again, but again, a very safe thing.

And I was like, you know, anti -drug activist, all 13 years old.

You know, just, I'm not attracted to it at all.

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, I got to do something to deal with you little people.

And, you know, and that was just a complete, you know,

world -shaking kind of event to me.

You put all that together.

It was this giant classroom, one -room school.

So, basically, you know, walls divide people.

So, we're 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 60s, just, 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 at the same time, they're huge apologetic.

I had atheist teachers, huge apologetic questions.

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

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

understand.

I needed answers.

And a part of my testimony is it took me some time to find someone who could help me

with those questions.

Who was it?

Who did you find?

Well, just to be honest, I scared my youth pastor to death.

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.

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 can I say this is God's Word?

How does it get from God to this?

And just basic questions of the existence and the nature and the character of God.

And I didn't know that Christians have been thinking about these things for 20 centuries.

I had a 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 Christians have been thinking about this for a long time.

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 given it their best thinking in order to try to help the church 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, 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 church was Coal Ridge Presbyterian.

D. James Kennedy was the pastor.

And so, he became a very large influence in my life.

And frankly, through him, I got to Francis Schaeffer, who's had just a massive

impact on my life.

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

Yeah.

Well, there's a reason for that.

Schaeffer's answering the questions that people like 16 -year -old Albert

Moeller were asking.

And even when I didn't understand everything he was telling me in the answers, I thought, well, you know, 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

ideas, and you separate religion from reality.

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 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, because 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 that it's distributed.

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.

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.

And these days, there'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?

It was the same thing with the printing press.

So, Martin Luther understood 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 print lies.

It can also print the truth.

Yeah.

Okay.

So, you make it through high school.

Where do you.

Go to college?

I spent a year as a faculty scholar, which is an advanced program at Florida Atlantic University.

And 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 double major.

It was spiritually a disastrous experience.

How come?

It was just an incredibly liberal 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 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, who doesn't want to live in Boca Raton?

Especially if you're from the Northeast.

Yeah.

And back then, the universities had 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.

So, I had like giant names in higher education and 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.

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, well, 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 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.

Right.

Well, some of them do.

Yeah.

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, I mean, I was 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.

Yeah.

And some of them were, at least I recognized at the time, oh, that's an

extreme position.

Okay.

Yeah.

Gotcha.

But I was exposed to it.

Yeah.

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.

Yeah.

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.

So powerful.

Yes.

Did you ever watch the documentary Frenemies about him and Gore Vidal?

The answer is yes. Yes.

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 say, 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 a 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.

Oh, of course not.

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 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.

You know, 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, you know, that's kind of true in my.

World as well.

What a terrible dip for you to go from the Harvard professor guide 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.

Yeah.

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.

Yeah.

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.

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, you know, 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.

So you left...

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, you know.

But at the time, just, you know, I'm very thankful that I had that kind of foundation given to me by

my pastors who preached the word and by people like Schaeffer and influences like Kennedy.

So you self -consciously said, I need to get out of this secular environment and go to a...

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.

Right.

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.

Yeah.

I mean, you actually do have it.

And these guys are still like, they just have fortunate son playing in the background in their.

Minds.

Yeah.

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.

Yeah.

And this was an unusual university.

It's growing so fast.

It was just kind of being established.

They're building buildings everywhere.

Florida's just exploding in population.

And it's a major university now, you know, football team and the whole thing.

It was not then.

But it was just clear to me, this is not where I'm happy.

Sure.

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

God.

Yeah.

I think God can have you in some very unhappy places to show you through your unhappiness.

Yeah.

Both what is the truth and what is his will.

Yeah.

So then how do you hear about Southern?

Is it through Sanford?

No, the answer is yes.

Okay.

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

A hinge figure.

Are you saying that now or are you saying you saw yourself?

I'm saying this now.

I'm saying this now.

Which may seem, sorry, brother, I don't mean.

To interrupt you, but that 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 without...

I don't mean history is.

Turning on me as the hinge.

I mean, I'm sitting at the hinge.

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. Robinson, who had studied with the founders

and was the son -in -law of John Broadus.

Do you realize how humbling that is to me?

My spiritual formation came...

The robe I wear at commencements and at convocations is Rupert Coleman's robe.

He was hooded by A .T. Robertson, who was the son -in -law of John Broadus.

So just understand, it was like.

God meant this to happen.

It reminds me of Spurgeon pastoring the same church where John Gill...

You know, 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 being preaching in my home church and it being a very big deal when he was president of Southern Seminary.

He became president in 1952, 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.

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.

Okay, so just understand.

So 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.

Okay, let's come back to that.

Was the seminary liberal when you were here?

Exceedingly.

Exceedingly.

And you knew that going in or no?

No, no.

Once again, you're just...

So just 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.

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

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's what became the MDiv.

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 as kind of their...

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, they're roots, but Adrian Rogers is elected in June of 1979.

I arrived here in the fall of 1980.

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.

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.

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 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 no...

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'd go to be a professor or a pastor?

I was open to any number of different permutations there.

And I mean, 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'd 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 had 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, that's 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, a liberal institution.

And having worked as assistant to Roy Honeycutt.

A liberal guy.

Yeah, more or less.

And the SBC would have been called a moderate, but yes, 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 Lord 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, you know, the board has mixed conservatives and liberals.

But the conservatives have 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, I'm 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'd been signing this.

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 Moeller, Southern Seminary, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

And like in the SBC, that's like...

Or in 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 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 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.

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.

Right.

Well, and that's why when I became president here, 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 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.

It's 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.

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?

Oh, 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 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 before that Sunday school award.

And so that will work in several ways, and 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.

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 turn 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 put up with this.

And they actually had this wild -eyed idea that maybe we can elect presidents who could elect

trustees who would eventually affect change.

And as I 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.

But I think the vast majority of people thought, you know, 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 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, et cetera, or were you struggling?

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 moved here in what year?

1993.

1993.

Yep.

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 this is a giant institution.

So just even getting ahold 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.

But 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 figure out where the power is.

And if you're going to affect change, how you're going to have to change

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 were a lot of people who did not mean me personal ill.

Sure.

But they didn't 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, 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 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.

Okay.

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 know 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 not contrary to, went down the whole thing.

And I said, look, if you believe these words and you believe them, you know, 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.

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?

Okay.

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.

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 and you're not going

to be able to do anything about it.

So I said, you're all fired.

Okay.

So I had not prepared Mary for this.

I hadn't prepared my own self for this.

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.

Dr. 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 with a term of respect.

I felt at the time what he meant when he said, Mr. President, 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 old...

So you got here in 93?

Here in 93.

So two years later.

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 a woman teaching theology, it was also 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 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 who 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, probably that 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, I 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, well, this is, 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, you know, and we went to Trinity and hired some people, you know,

Bruce Ware and 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 Schreiner, for instance, who was young.

He could have taught anywhere he wanted.

And you have to know the gratitude of my heart when 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 I just can't say enough thanks to a Tom Schreiner and to the Lord for providing.

Well, 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 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.

I'm home.

Yeah.

And essentially how the Lord does this at the cognitive, theological, confessional

level.

And the Lord also brings about a melding of hearts.

And the Lord made this happen at a time when we could raise our kids together.

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 evangelical world

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 they 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 church 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 with my deep grace.

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.

Anyways, what an incredible.

Time to be a part of.

Mark and I are just about exactly the same age.

We were doctoral students together.

That's where our friendship emerged.

Okay.

And I thought Mark would teach church history here.

Yeah, until he said Carl Henry.

Yeah.

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 you know...

And Tom Schreiner included him in his testimony, by the way.

Really?

He was like, when I was wrestling through inerrancy, I read volume six.

Oh, yeah.

Mark...

Well, I mean, Carl Henry was a mentor to both of us.

And Carl Henry was personally the link that brought Mark to CHPC.

Right.

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.

The 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...

All I want to tell you is, I knew God at that moment had put Mark there.

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.

Yeah.

So that's a very sweet thing in God's graciousness.

Hey, speaking about.

Ecclesiology on the campus here, do you guys have like 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.

Yeah.

There is a logical outline of Christian theology.

You can't understand yourself unless you understand God.

Right.

Okay.

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.

It just in terms of, this is the way it works, and we shouldn't be surprised.

Same thing happens at a 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 very memorable as

to how it happened.

We received 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.

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, you're just gonna 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.

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 what's happening.

But we gave it to the Lord.

We both figured that this could very well just be the end.

Two -year presidency.

But I did feel like it would have been worth it.

Sure. To have at least tried.

Well, and to force the issue.

To force the issue.

Real quick, brother, I can't help but think about 2 Corinthians, Apostle Paul talking about Christ being strongest when

He's weakest.

I mean, at that moment when you're there and you...

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.

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.

Oh, I already see where this is going.

Yeah, it's just your 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 we had to be Mommy and Daddy, you know?

So we have to just drop all that the best we can.

And the word 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 like truth serum, so I just 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 this is that 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, 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 Mohler telling you this is what's going to happen.

But it's not because I'm Albert Mohler.

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.

Nice.

And he also put himself on the line for the inerrancy of Scripture.

There you go.

So, you know, 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.

Like, 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 tiger asked.

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.

And 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?

Because the Lord sometimes has, in this kind of conflict, he makes me mad.

And I mean that in the right way, I hope.

Sure.

I mean, in other words...

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 in what 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?

I mean,.

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.

Yeah.

So at least they had one point, right?

So were you seeing, right,.

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's Catechism.

It's completely reformed, but they didn't say it, but that's what I was taught.

So then, and 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.

I mean, I mean, it's just, 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, 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 his, 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, 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, and 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.

It was part of those unanimous votes.

The faculty had veto power at that time over anyone I wanted to bring to the faculty, okay, 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 do that with a snap of fingers, and so we're going to get that done, but we're going to start a

school, and that school's 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's 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 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 faculty meeting, I had like one person.

You're in favor?

All in favor.

Hey, you're elected, and 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, but he's asking one setting.

You know, don't you think Calvinism kills evangelism, and he said, well, something like 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 of 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 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, that's right.

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 haven't 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 my life prep work.

I'm dealing with these issues, so no, I got to know what I'm talking about.

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 that you're reading.

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.

We were past that Wednesday morning.

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 there.

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 you know,

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.

Okay.

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, you know, I'm a fast processor,

but I'm also a self -monitoring speaker.

So when I preach, I'm generally listening to myself.

Yeah.

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 do you, like, will one of these guys be like, hey, you know...

Yeah.

And I need them to let me know as soon as possible, because I'd rather, because it's a flow I'd rather, and I know they're

trying not to interrupt my flow, but it's actually hard for me to go, it's harder for me to go back.

Right.

And so, for instance, like this week at one point, I said,

like 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.

And...

So they stopped trying to put you to bed at seven?

Yeah.

But they were really firm, wonderful, you know, disciplinarians, a Christian family.

They had to be structured.

And so I got in trouble sometimes.

And my dad, when I was like 13, maybe a little younger than 12, he, what I wanted to do

in bed was read.

And...

Just like my daughter, sitting right over there.

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 the book on his chest.

He'd come in and I'd get emotional here.

He'd come in, you know, close the book, put it beside me.

And that's just good fathering.

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah.

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.