Jonathan Merritt Uses Slavery as a Cover for Slander, then Bart Ehrman’s Ideal God

Welcome to The Dividing Line. It is Thursday, and we are, wow, we're working on wrapping up January already. 2020 is not going to last very long, is it? Already been a rather eventful year to be sure, but always eventful when you get the attention of some of the elites out there, the progressive elites.

I'm not sure when the progressive title came along, but I have often said that to be a progressive just simply means that you're progressing right off the edge of a cliff into disaster, and that most of what is called progressivism is actually regressivism, going back to old ways of paganism and things like that, especially when you're talking about people within the Christian context.

And yesterday, I noticed there was an initial tweet that I should have pulled up here because it didn't have my particular name in it, and so I should have grabbed that. I didn't. But I noticed a tweet from Jonathan Merritt that was one of these, you know, I'm just going to throw this out there and I'm going to say that all these people are bad, bad people.

And, you know, there's a lot of that. There's what was the passive aggressive mechanism of approaching people. And so I responded to it by asking, I might have. Well, this is this is how I responded to that initial that initial tweet.

Let me see if because I just brought this up there. Maybe I can. Yeah. OK, no. Anyways, here's how I responded because I don't have the screenshot of. OK, here I think this is here. Can someone tell me why Christians equivocate on the New Testament slavery passages?

Say it with me. Quote, it is never OK for one person to own another human. That's not a quote, it's an asterisk. Kinder slavery is still morally wrong. Period. Full stop. Why does this even need to be said?

So I responded to that with. So you are saying one, death is superior to slavery as slavery was often the only place to go to avoid it. And two, Paul was in error in exhorting slaves and masters to both come to the table in fellowship and brotherhood, question mark, not asking for a friend.

So what I the reason I even responded is Jonathan Merritt, as most people know, is a writer. He is the son of a former Southern Baptist convention president. He's got another book coming out. There's a lot of speculation as to what that book coming out might include.

And very much on the same road as Rachel Held Evans was on, and so there's a whole group of people out there who, as they move away from what they call the faith of their childhood or their upbringing, part of the defense mechanism that kicks in when you are abandoning that which you once professed is to obviously start agreeing with those who attack the very things you once professed.

Now, my experience is that the large portion of these folks were never passionate about these things, never fully understood the concept of a Christian worldview. They were blessed to be given these things, but it was not something that they had ever made their own.

And so very often they will engage in extremely surface-level attacks upon what ostensibly they once believed. Now, that may mean that they just had a very, very surface-shallow, very shallow surface-level belief in the first place.

And so they're not misrepresenting necessarily what they once believed. They once believed very surface-shallow types of things. But the point is it's very, very rare that these individuals will maintain a kind of honesty about the positions that they are intent upon encouraging others to abandon.

Because when you start down that road, you want to encourage other people to go with you. The more, the merrier. And if there are other people going with you down that road, then, hey, that makes you look less conspicuous if it's a whole group of people leaving.

And that makes you say, hey, we're obviously doing something right here. And so the whole point on this subject is that we have a Bible. And we are either going to believe all of it, or we are going to adopt positions where we begin to abandon portions of it.

And if I recall correctly, there had also been a statement on his, yeah, can we all get real honest and admit there is no Christian who follows all the Bible. No one is stoning their disrespectful children or sending escaped sex-trafficking victims back to their masters.

The Bible says to send escaped sex-trafficking victims back to their masters? Really? I missed that part. This is a way of framing debates and conservatives used to shame and silence. Well, of course, the thing that caught me there, of course, is the hypocrisy of Jonathan Merritt, who frames things in a very negative way toward evangelical Christianity all the time.

I mean, that's just, he's talented at it, he does it all the time, and he knows it. He knows he's doing it. So to turn this around and talk about getting real honest, and then to use such absurd language, let alone, you know, let's focus in upon the central course of the moral law to make this point that no one's doing this.

Again, it echoes the old West Wing stuff and things that we've dealt with over and over and over again over the past number of years. And so I raised this particular issue because the man still, at least to my knowledge, claims to be some kind of a Christian, but more of the progressive kind now.

But the reality is we have a revelation. We have a corpus of revelation that we do not have the right to edit. But many evangelicals today are grabbing hold of the idea that there are ways of trying to transform this into something that will be cool in 2020 Western culture.

Because that's really what they feel they need to be doing, is it's not for them appropriate to go, man, this culture is in desperate rebellion against God, and it's self-destructive, and it will not be able to last.

No culture can possibly last when you can't even tell who boys and girls are anymore. When a culture is administering hormone blockers, which we've only known about for literally a number of decades, but we're using our advanced medical knowledge, which no generations before us possessed.

But now we're using that, and we're using that to neuter eight-year-old boys, or to arrest the development of breasts for a female at age 11. All because we have such a corrupted understanding of our place in this universe, and our purpose in this universe, and all the rest.

No society that embraces this kind of thinking will long last. So what do you think is going to happen when we try to create a Christianity and edit a Bible that will be pleasing to that kind of corrupt society?

That kind of society that no longer values morality and law. We use, again, that same medical technology to murder unborn children so that we can have unfettered sexual license. I didn't hear almost any discussion over the weekend with all the abortion stuff, being it's the end of January, Roe v Wade, and everything else.

I heard almost nothing about the reality that the central aspect of abortion is unfettered, outside of marriage, sexual intercourse between men and women. Still know enough about how that works. A society like that, how much of this is going to be left once you start cutting out the parts that this society doesn't like?

There's almost nothing in here that this society does like, because this begins with God and ends with God. Mankind is always seen as the creature of God, indebted to God for everything that God has. This is God's story, and we want something that will talk about our story, because we're all that matters.

We get to determine whether a male, female, twin, spirit-seeking, questioning, we get to redefine marriage and profane it. There ain't gonna be much left, and one thing we certainly should have learned by now is that even once you compromise, even once you hand the current immoral mob anything, they will not be satisfied with it.

That will not be enough. The only thing that you are allowed to do is to capitulate, apostatize, and join the mob in chasing anybody else who hasn't yet gotten to that point. That's all you can do. There are no middle grounds.

There's no compromises. These people are totalitarians from beginning to end. So, those people who are trying to find some means of slowing down the process and making Christianity cool, there are certain aspects of biblical revelation that they simply can't abide.

Now, interestingly enough, if you were to seriously think through biblical law and think about the moral foundations, and this is an area of difficulty for many Christians, there are certain eschatological perspectives that, as a part of their eschatology, include the denigration of and dismissal of God's law as having continuing relevance today.

And so, there are many who just go, I'm not under law, I'm under grace. So, I'm not going to think about the moral exhortations of the New Testament. I'm not going to think about how the Corinthians should have known that incest was wrong, even though it's obvious to the pagans, it's right there in God's law.

And I'm not going to, you know, I know Paul in 1 Timothy, when he walks through all the sins, I know he's following the Ten Commandments, and I know that means it's continuing to be relevant and applicable, and even outside of the boundaries of ethnic Israel.

But I'm just, there's just too much to that. Let's just go with this really super simplified version. And as long as you stay in your own little boxes, then you can get away with stuff like that, because you don't get challenged.

But for people who want to go out into the world and seriously engage the world, that's not going to work. You have to have a view of Scripture that will allow you to meaningfully engage with very smart people who, guess what?

Folks, this is a big seller, and you can buy it anywhere. And people who don't believe it actually read it. And sometimes they know this far better than the people who claim that it's God's Word. I mean, this is one of my first really super Bibles I've talked about before.

I had God's Word put on the front of it. That was a pious thing to do, right? And I certainly continue to believe that all these years later. I probably bought this just probably about 39 years ago. Was that 39 years ago?

Did I put a date in it? My mom used to do that. So, yep. Okay. Nevermind that. 41 years ago. Okay. Under the presented by put the Lord. He gave me the job to do it. So, yeah, 1979. So, I continue to believe that it's God's Word, and I put that on the front cover, not in between the Testaments, and I meant it for the whole thing.

What I'm saying is our enemies know what it says, so we have to be honest about what it says. And so the new narrative is, and what I ran into because of Jonathan Merritt, is this buzzsaw of people that just basically say, look, you just simply have to say this.

No nuance, no history, no context. You need to speak from 21st century America and judge the Word of God on the basis of the wisdom, the pinnacle of wisdom of 21st century America. That's what you got to do.

And I wasn't willing to do so. So, things get ugly. Now, Jonathan Merritt would not answer my questions. He's a smart guy. He knows he can't get into this debate because the inconsistencies, the fact, see, and it doesn't help his side.

All they want to do is push a narrative. They don't push the narrative by demonstrating the consistency of the narrative. This is not a narrative that appeals to history, logic, reason. It appeals to emotion.

And emotion is best ramped up not through logical interaction and argumentation, but through the use of insults and through the use of categories, not proper categories, but you just need to use the key words to flip the switches in certain people's minds.

And therefore, I will not listen to that side. And so, I asked the questions that I asked for an obvious reason. We know that there are multiple kinds that slavery has existed from the earliest annals of human history.

Slavery has existed amongst every people group, every skin color, every background. There is slavery in China. There is slavery all over Asia. There was slavery in Africa. There was slavery in Europe.

The American Indians not only enslaved other American Indians, they ate other American Indians. Okay. The Aztecs, oh my goodness. The Mayans, the Olmecs, the Toltecs. It is universal amongst mankind that slavery has existed and it has very, very, very rarely been regulated in any fashion whatsoever.

As long as there was war, there was going to be slavery. As long as there was famine, there was going to be slavery. What's the relationship? Real simple. Up until the past couple of hundred years, mankind normally lived in an economic situation where they were three meals away from starvation.

As soon as things would go bottom up, lack of rain, invading army, whatever, all of a sudden, if you're fleeing someplace, all you've got is what you can carry. That's not a lot in the way of food. And so, if you don't have the economic basis for food storage and people helping other people and communication and stuff like that, very often all you could do would be to enter into slavery.

You call it indentured servitude. There's all sorts of different levels and you're going to find differences in how slavery was practiced in this place over against that place. And even during Greek slavery under Alexander or during Roman slavery, you're going to find differences as to how slaves were treated in Rome versus Ephesus versus Carthage, subtle differences, but there will be differences.

Very often it was simply property. There were incredibly powerful slaves in the Roman Empire who had good lives, but they didn't have their freedom. They had great power, but they could not make themselves free.

There were others who had relative freedom, but had very little power. And then normally slavery meant no power, no freedom at all, lowest level of the society. But if you were, if you belonged to someone who had resources, still had food sources, then you had value to them and hence you could eat.

So there were situations, the Bible recognizes situations where a person had the choice of entering into slavery or dying. That was their choice. And you can do the Patrick Henry thing all you want, give me liberty or give me death, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

But I have discovered that there are many people on Twitter who have never thought about these things. They never think, ever, ever, ever think historically. They don't think about how things were in the past.

They sit around and they assume our worldview and then use that to read through things in the past and assume that people thought the way we think and had economic opportunities the way, and communication, and they didn't.

And the result is a mess, absolute mess. Historically laughable. But if you keep these things in mind, then you realize that God's word allowed people in Israel to enter into slavery. Now there was Jubilee year, there was supposed to be a freedom of these slaves, but there are other kinds of slaves that weren't set free in the Jubilee year, when foreign wars took place and things like that.

So there were differences. And there's even some argument as to exactly how some of these things worked out, because there's not a whole lot of discussion about them. And does this law take priority over that law and stuff like that.

But the point is, a lot of people don't, haven't thought through, was it a mercy for God's law to regulate slavery? It was a universal reality. The people of Israel were slaves in Egypt. So it's not like you're going to come out and get to ignore the reality of slavery.

They were slaves. Now, how then are they going to function in a world where slavery is going to exist in every nation around them? The Philistines had slaves. It was considered absolutely normative. In fact, it was considered absolutely necessary for economic realities.

Just the way it was. I mean, the Egyptians, how do you think the Egyptians built pyramids? They did not advertise for skilled workers. This is not how it was done. So would it not be a mercy to regulate these things and to have the opportunity to save yourself, your wife and your child when famine strikes?

And I asked the question, that's why I asked the first question, is he saying death is superior to slavery? And I haven't gotten anybody answer that question yet with any level of clarity. There've been people who say, well, but it's always still wrong.

What they mean is it's something that existed in a fallen world. Well, then everything is always wrong. Taxation's always wrong. Having to have laws to regulate human behavior is always wrong. Everything's always wrong because we live in a fallen world.

We're not talking about the end of time here or not. We're not talking about when justice will roll down like mountains and roll down the mountain, so on and so forth. We're talking about the real world where this was intended to function in the real world.

And by the way, by the way, we sit around today and we pretend that there could never, ever be a time again where anything that the Bible said about these things in the past would be relevant to us because we have grocery stores.

We have food, electricity, water, houses. None of that stuff will ever, ever, ever happen again. I don't want to be the big downer dude, but you do know that the really crazy guy in North Korea has nuclear weapons, right?

And you know the Iranians are enriching uranium. The Iranians are enriching uranium. That's really very hard to say. And you do know that it is well within the realm of possibility. It's not just the stuff of movies that major American cities or European cities or Russian cities or Chinese cities could disappear under a mushroom cloud without any of the major nations having launched some type of nuclear strike.

You do realize that, right? Do you remember what happened? Well, some of you don't. If you don't remember, when 9 -11 took place, there was a major economic turndown. Remember? There was a major economic turndown.

Ministries were impacted. Everybody was. The economy took a hit. That was two buildings. That was three buildings. What happens if Washington disappears? What happens if New York disappears? What happens if 10 cities around the world were to disappear under a mushroom cloud?

What do you think is going to happen to the economy then? And when the economy goes, that grocery store goes too. And that thin veneer of civilization that we are all so proud of and never really give thanks to God for because we take it as an assumed reality, you don't think that that could happen and we could be back in situations that much more mirror what happened long ago than what we've got right now.

We've had an extended period of blessing from God, but we've also taken it very much for granted. And so, the point is, what if you find yourself in a situation? You are a young man. You have a young wife.

You have an infant son. And the choice is, we're going to die together slowly and horrifically, or we are going to sell ourselves to become servants to someone who can provide our needs and we will live.

What is the Christian perspective on that? And there isn't any argument here because as soon as you go, well, we should just die together, you are now saying that the majority of the members of the early Christian church should not be respected for how they lived their lives because there were a bunch of slaves in the early Christian church.

The New Testament is plain on that. So you're saying they should have just offed themselves because they had it worse? No, they lived lives without political freedom that were free in Christ and honoring to him.

You can only do that if you're alive. Now, there are, I was going to bring them up, didn't do it, apologize. There are numerous books. You don't even have to get religious books. You can get secular books that will lay out for you all the different permutations and stuff like that of slavery in the past.

And most of the time you're just sitting there going, wow, I'm glad I did not live back then. That's wonderful. But when you do that, you begin to recognize that there were people who made real contributions to this world.

We may not know all of their names, but they made real contributions to this world because they lived their lives. Life is vitally important. Isn't there something in Christianity about life, the sacredness of life?

And are our Chinese brothers and sisters who are in slavery right now to the Chinese government, are they less worthy? Should Chinese Christians, knowing that they're about to be in prison, should they kill themselves or they go into prison, suffer by the grace of God and act as a testimony glorifying God?

It seems that a bunch of people on Twitter think that they should kill themselves. If you don't got it, if I can't have my iPhone, I don't want to have life. Seems to be what most people are saying because there's this narrative and they've bought it hook, line, and sinker.

And so I ask a question, which is death superior to slavery? It's meant to make you think. It requires you to maybe do some reading to understand something about history. And then I asked, Paul was an error in exhorting slaves and masters to both come to the table in fellowship and brotherhood.

You have to deal with the reality that there are entire texts in Ephesians and Colossians and elsewhere in the New Testament that specifically address masters and slaves. You have to deal with it. It seems these people want to ignore them.

They want to, in some way, say, well, all of them are actually commands to do away with slavery. Amazing reading. They can't apply the same rules of exegesis to those texts. They apply to anything else.

They have to come up with some new way of reading all that, but you've got to deal with it. You've got to deal with the fact that the New Testament does not turn the Christian faith into a revolution in its first generation.

Does it lay the foundation? Of course it does. The very fact that you would bring masters and slaves together at the same table is obviously detrimental to the long-term survival of slavery in what? In a society where Christian values and morals become the standard.

A lot of these people don't even have a theology that would ever believe that that could even happen. So you've got to deal with these texts, and so you have to answer the question. Paul knew slavery existed.

He knew slaves, so why wasn't his first thing to say, rebel, take up the sword, fight? He didn't do that. He did not do that. He could have done that. His master didn't do that, so he didn't do that, because he knew that life in Christ is eternal, and so you proclaim the gospel.

These individuals are freed in Christ, even if they remain in chains, in abject servitude. I mean, you know there were slaves on those ships that Paul was on going to Rome. In the shipwreck, there were slaves.

Paul didn't say, run, run, run, but he set them free spiritually. Well, that's spiritually. Yeah, and that is more important. Oh no, he said it. Yes, I said it. It is more important to be spiritually free than physically free.

Yes, that's true, and if you don't believe that, you must have never done any type of prison ministry or anything like that at all, right? Because, I mean, what's being in prison if it's not slavery? I mean, most slaves in Antebellum South had more freedom than people in a penitentiary do.

They got more chains going on there than they did in the South. So, I'm just stunned at how inconsistent people are, and it's all because of a narrative. So, let's see how the narrative worked. So, Jonathan Merritt won't answer these questions because to answer these questions requires you to think through the relationship of the nation of Israel to the nations around immediately, to major powers like Assyria and Babylon and Egypt especially, then to think through Greek slavery and then the modifications that Rome made in their form of slavery, which would be the primary form that would be experienced by the first Christians once the gospel goes out into the Mediterranean Basin.

It requires you to think through what you believe about law, whether you believe that there's any relevance whatsoever to the Mosaic Law or whether that's just simply been done away with. It just doesn't matter anymore.

It requires you to do a lot of thinking. Thinking is not emoting, and leftist progressivism as it's experienced in Christianity is an emotionally driven thing. It's not a thinking thing. So, he doesn't answer the questions, but does respond with this.

Not to me. He tags me, but he doesn't respond to the questions. He quotes a response I wrote to somebody else. Someone named Tyler Lee Conway wrote to me, perhaps you could just simply answer, this is part of a thread, so you can go back and see where it was.

Perhaps you could just simply answer, do you believe it's ever okay for one human to own another human? Now, Tyler was trying to, again, get past dealing with the complexities of this topic. Again, this is 2020.

This is 2020 Christianity. I don't want to deal with the text in Exodus where someone who has become a servant to someone else could actually love their master so much they want to stay with them for life.

I don't want to deal with that. Because you see, that requires me understanding a, a context of a culture that I don't, that's not a part of me. I, I, I don't get that. I'm an American, kings, hierarchical societies, stuff like that.

I, I don't get it. And, and in fact, all I've known is the employee-employer relationship, which again, in human history is rare, is fairly new. Very, very new. I, I mean, you just, you just need to understand that the, the European experiment with things like liberty, a middle-class, universities, education, this has not been the historical human condition.

And so people who are, that's all they know because we, well, because most of them are public school educated. Let's just be honest about that. They don't read classics. They, they don't, they don't read, you know, I was, I was on a, I was on a webcast.

Finally, well, you saw the bar guys, Dwayne. I was on with him and we had been trying for a year to make that happen. And it finally just, I said, well, let's do it. You got your, got your stuff, let's do it.

And one of the questions that they ask is what books are you reading right now? Well, the funny thing was I had just downloaded 80 hours or 90 hours, I forget what it was, of, I burned all my Audible credits.

And what I did is I downloaded a ton of books about the backgrounds of the Bible. Not, it's not, this is a background of the Bible book, but a book on Babylonian and Assyrian religion. Oh, that'll be fascinating.

But then books on Hannibal. So the car, the, the Carthaginian wars with Rome. And then a couple of books on, on the rise of the Caesars and the Roman empire. And the book I was, I am still reading, I haven't made much progress on past couple of days, is a book on Alexander the Great.

And it's starting off with his father and then moving to Alexander and the various campaigns and the expansion of Macedonian power through all of Greece and, and the Persians and all the rest of that kind of stuff, which most of you think, you know, about because you saw 300.

That's not really giving you a whole lot of good, solid history, or you saw Troy. So that gives you something a little bit earlier than that. Anyway, those aren't the kinds of books that the vast majority of people in the 21st century are reading.

And so exposure to the economic systems, exposure to the wars, exposure to the cultural situation with a, with a king and with the structured society don't have it. And so we take our standards and we read them back onto the past.

And as a result, you lose, you, you, you can't engage with history in a meaningful fashion. So Jonathan Merritt, can someone tell me why evangelical leaders like Dr. Oakley, 1689, that's, that's the moniker I hide behind as some atheists think, refuse to say, quote, it is wrong for humans to own each other, question mark, exclamation mark.

So you ask him to think historically, morally, ethically, contextually, not anachronistically, outside of just the USA-atively, and all of a sudden you're refusing to say, I mean, this is just, the dishonesty of this is stunning, but it's what is done every day in politics.

Every day in politics, this is what is done by both sides, by both sides to the other, but it's part of the religion of the left. This is what is done. That is a grossly unfair statement. It is not accurately representing what I said.

And what it's doing is saying, I don't want to reason. I don't want to deal. I don't want to actually build a biblical ethic that applies the same standards of exegesis and interpretation to this issue that I apply to the Trinity or the resurrection or justification of my faith.

I don't want to do it. You just simply have to buy the narrative. And the narrative is, you just simply say, it's all wrong. Let's, and see these people never ever leave their little bubble and they don't go to other countries.

They don't, they don't take on other people in debate who are from another religion, but read this the same way we, they don't, but I read their scriptures. So they don't have to deal with the fact that I will engage in a discussion with a Muslim about what the Quran says about these issues.

And that means the Muslim is going to be reading what this says about that. I can't ignore this stuff. You people live in your little progressivist bubble. And so you can ignore all of it. Fine. The rest of us who live in the real world, that are actually doing real encounters with other people, we can't do this.

We can't ignore this. I have to have a meaningful, consistent, apologetic, not just a defense as in, I'm going to play with the facts, but a true defense that understands how God's word address these issues and still says God's word continues to be relevant today.

So it was not wrong. And in fact, my response, did I include that? I don't see this here. Oh, great. I didn't. I'm doing all these screenshot things. And unfortunately, the ones I saved at home, I forgot to put in Dropbox.

They were saving someplace else. I thought that was a default thing. I had set it up for that. Must've changed it. Anyway, my response included quoting Philemon 1 -1, where Philemon, who was a slave owner, is called our dear brother and fellow worker.

And I said, this is not a lie. Because that is what this, if you simply say it is wrong at any point in any time, in any context, then Paul should not have called Philemon his brother and fellow worker and commended him.

Then Paul was wrong. I am fundamentally abandoning any belief that this is a consistent revelation. That's what they want. They don't necessarily see that, but they haven't thought this stuff through.

So he says, it gets better. The influence of white supremacy on white evangelicalism runs deeper than most people realize. Lord, save us from your followers. I realized what I had skipped here. I was telling you what Tyler Lee Conway, so the tweet that he's responding to.

Tyler Lee Conway had said, perhaps you could just simply answer, do you believe it's ever okay for one human to own another human? My response had been simply answer equals, please stop reminding us of human history and all the complexities that involves, ignore all that, limit yourself to the current, shallow, ahistorical, emotion-driven culture and submit.

And that's where I put Philemon, our beloved brother and fellow worker was not a lie. That's what he was responding to. Did he refute anything about Philemon? Jonathan Merritt ain't going to touch it.

He ain't going to touch it. That's not going to help the narrative. Did he refute anything about the fact that there is human history involved here? That is complex. Nope, didn't touch it. Instead, what do you do?

Throw out the white supremacy slander. It's easy. His name is white. That makes it real simple, right? Let's just throw that slander out there and see what sticks. And there are lots of likes on it. Warren Throckmorton, he's always a friendly fellow.

One of his responses was, is Dr. Oakley 1689 an evangelical leader? That's depressing, if that is true. To which someone responded, it's a big circus and he's a clown. That was Dan Marvin. And Warren Throckmorton responds, ah, so there are court evangelicals and then there are evangelical jesters.

Well, it is a kingdom with many roles, I suppose. Oh, the elites, the progressive elites and their robes of social justice, righteousness, they're just, oh, you're so good. Oh, so you're this month, you know, oh, that's just, just going crazy.

All because Jonathan Merritt is willing to ignore direct, meaningful, historical questions and just simply go straight for the white supremacy slander. It's a lie. Everybody knows it's a lie. There is not one rational person who believes that that's a true statement.

Jonathan Merritt knows it's not a true statement. So this is what it means to be woke. Here it is, folks. This is, this is what it means to be woke, is to be challenged to think about what the word of God actually says, what its history says, how to understand all of it together.

And look, I realize he may have been raised in a context where there was no emphasis at all upon a holistic view of scripture. I get it. I get it. It doesn't mean that I don't have that view. It doesn't mean that I don't have that view.

So to ignore being rebuked and challenged to answer meaningful questions and to just respond with, ah, there's white supremacy for you, only meant to excite the fellow woke people, because there's, there's, there's no substance to it.

I mean, if you were to submit this to some type of logical examination that everything you're saying here is just disjointed. You didn't make any connections, didn't make any arguments. You're just, you're making assertions that aren't even logically connected to one another.

Yeah. That's, that's what we face today. Is there any reason why I'm getting a crick in my neck, always looking to the left all day today? Just, I mean, normally you've been over here within five minutes.

So you keep reading over there. And so I just need to, I just need to get, I just need to, we're going to need to run a little thing in here and I can just go beep, beep. And then I can, I can, I can do that.

Anyway, so there, there's lots of stuff that I, something tells me that within five years, Jonathan Merritt will be outside the orbit of Rachel Held Evans. About five years. And I might be being conservative at that point.

Um, but that seems to be the direction things are going, but this is how it works. If you dare challenge the progressivist to reason with you from scripture and challenge them to think these things through, oh my goodness.

But there is a narrative and the narrative is, we have to do something with this. And if they're really honest, what they would say is, this is outdated. It's outmoded. There is no way to come up with a 2 .0, let alone a 10 .0 or a 19 .0 or whatever else there's there.

You know, we all sit here. Have you noticed how often now I've had a smartphone for a long time now? I'm a geek. Have you noticed how much more you have to update the thing now? I mean, every day that little red badge shows up on the app store and it's six and then 10 and the next day is 20 and you don't update it for a while.

It's 95. And, and, and we're so used to that. That's, that's how things function. Um, you can't do that with this. You can't do that with this. Now, my belief is the reason you don't need to do that is because it has a divine author that by revealing it the way that he did means that in whatever situation mankind finds himself in, the proper handling of this will provide what we need.

But these folks don't believe that. These folks don't believe that. Progressivists can't believe that. Uh, yes, sir. Well, I, uh, had mentioned in that same conversation, sometimes you don't see my posts and I don't see your posts on Twitter.

I don't know why that is. It drives me crazy. I think it drives you crazy too. But I had pointed out that in Genesis 47, 13 through 22, we have the account of the famine coming. And then in verse, uh, verse 19, I believe it is, we have the Egyptians coming to Joseph.