What to Say About MLK (And The Seminaries That Love Him)

Hi, and welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I am John Harris. Today we're going to be talking about Martin Luther King Jr. because it is his holiday. And we've been talking about social justice for the past few weeks.

We're going to be talking about some more topics in social justice in the next few weeks. And I know I wanted to talk about gay Christianity this week, but I thought because of the holiday, we're going to do this instead.

The Baptist Press Article and Seminary Praise for MLK

There was a news item that caught my interest from last week in Baptist Press called MLK Taught as Christian Hero at SBC Seminaries. I think for conservative Christians, there's a sense in which they do not know what to do with Martin Luther King Jr.

And now some conservative Southern Baptist seminaries are deciding to grandstand him as this Baptist thinker, theologian, someone to emulate a hero. And there are some issues with doing this. And so I want to talk about the phenomenon.

What is going on within these seminaries? Why is this happening? I want to talk about who Martin Luther King Jr. was, the different interpretations of Martin Luther Martin Luther King Jr., especially as it concerns liberals and conservatives.

Because look, like Rush Limbaugh can have his Martin Luther King Jr. and he will quote, I have a dream speech and say, he's living up to that legacy. And then Al Sharpton will have his Martin Luther King Jr.

And they're, they're completely different. So I think it's important. We talk about who Martin Luther King Jr. was. And then what I'd like to do at the end is talk about where a Christian conservative places, Martin Luther King Jr.

So I am of that tribe. So if you're interested in how someone who is a Christian and a conservative views Martin Luther King Jr., then you will enjoy this. So let's start off with the Baptist press article here.

The original story was published on January 18th by David Roach. And it starts off talking about Bob Lawler, a mission catalyst in California and a Baptist association there. And after the Charleston shooting a few years ago, he got together 48 diverse churches, ethnically diverse, and they decided to talk about Martin Luther King Jr.

Lawler talks about the, I have a dream speech and uses Martin Luther King Jr.'s words. And he talks about King as though he is a gospel ambassador. He says that the efforts that were humanitarian, that King forwarded were based on the gospel.

Now where did he get this idea? Well, the article says it's from Gateway Seminary, Southern Baptist Seminary he went to, and then they interview a professor at Gateway Seminary, Leroy Ganey, professor of educational leadership.

And he said that every Christian minister needs to know about King. He says, at least during my lifetime, there is no greater Christian or Baptist leader than I can see than Martin Luther King. So that is quite the startling statement.

I mean, he lived, he's a Southern Baptist. He lived during Billy Graham's time, but no, Martin Luther King Jr., he is the man and he's someone that you need to know. It's essential that you know about him if you're going to be a Christian minister.

Now there are a lot of Christian leaders, Puritans, reformers, theologians from church history that, I mean, there's so many, you just can't know all of them or be intimately familiar with them. But he's saying King's at the, he's towards the top of this list.

You need to know about him. King was not necessarily a theologian though. He wrote about social things, about political things, and sure, theology drives up, but he wasn't a theologian per se, which makes what a Midwestern Baptist theological seminary does with King even more startling.

They say he is one of the seven chief theologians in the Baptist tradition, which, okay. And he celebrated there. And at New Orleans, he is taught in the Baptist heritage. Southeastern gets the prize because they have him in church history, ethics, pastoral ministry, and public theology.

And when I was at Southeastern about a year and a half ago, I remember before the MLK 50 event, which caused all sorts of controversy, there was a three credit class given to any Southeastern student who wanted to go to that event.

And I think they had to do like a paper and they had to meet once or twice. They could go do that. They could get the three credits. So they love him there. Southern Baptist Theological Seminary studies him in Christian ethics, Southwestern in a class on Bible and race and classes on the Bible as moral issues.

And then the last five paragraphs are quotes from Walter Strickland, who is Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminaries. Well, he was at least, I don't know if he still is, but he's their director for kingdom diversity.

Yeah, there it is. Vice president for diversity. And he talks about the fact that he thinks ministers should, students who are going to become ministers, should model King's reliance on scripture, which is interesting because if you read Martin Luther King Jr. and listen to his speeches, he used a lot of biblical imagery, but so did Thomas Paine, right?

There's atheists out there who can, in common sense, use a lot of Christian imagery. So King does this. And the way he uses scripture though, is interesting. It's not more often than not. It seems like it's isogetical.

It's a lot of images comparing obviously the Hebrew enslavement to what African Americans were going through in their struggle for civil rights. But there's one story that stood out to me. I was actually going to talk about it later, but it's pretty prominent in King's thinking.

I'll probably mention it later on, but it talks about the rich man and Lazarus. And the reason that the rich man is in hell, in King's words, not mine, in hell, is because he decided that in the fight against poverty, he was going to be a conscientious objector to that.

And that's the reason he's there. Now, why do people go to hell? Why do people get judged? It's not because they're a conscientious objector in the war on poverty. I mean, this is social justice language driving exegesis.

And King is notorious for this. So anyway, that's an aside. But Strickland also says that King returned to the authority of scripture and the belief in the Bible as the word of God when he got older. And this is a common critique made against Martin Luther King Jr. is that he was not an Orthodox Christian because he wasn't during his early years.

That is obviously true. And so there's this effort to kind of redeem him and salvage him and say, no, he came back to that towards the end, which of course, there's all sorts of questions that raises.

So what about all the things he did before this moment in which he realized he was not Orthodox? And where's the evidence for his realization that he was not Orthodox and that he came to this faith? I mean, the evidence usually given is this quote where he says, I have returned to the faith of my fathers, but there's no rejection of earlier heretical views.

There's no clear delineation embracing the fact that Jesus was God. So there's a lot of problems this creates, but that's what Strickland says. And he says that King is part of the best of the Christian tradition.

So we're grandstanding King and conservative seminaries now, just like the world has been grandstanding Martin Luther King Jr. for a long time. Now, for me personally, I'm going to talk about these two King legacies.

I like Martin Luther King Jr. At least I grew up liking him. And I still do to a certain extent, even though I found I researched him more, but I like him because of the, I have a dream speech because symbolically that's been what King has represented, judging a man not based on his skin color, but on the content of his character.

And what thing, I don't think King was necessarily thinking of the gospel, but what thing brings slave, the sons of slave masters and the sons of slaves together more than the gospel. So I got to love that.

Right. Now, even if, you know, King had some of his other issues with women, womanizing and, and of course it's even people that like Martin Luther King Jr. know, they admit that he was an adulterer and this has been verified, especially through the FBI surveillance of him, but, but also plagiarism.

I mean, even, you know, Wikipedia tends to lean left, right. But even the guys on Wikipedia, I'm not using that as my source of authority, by the way, that's not the source. I'm just saying, even Wikipedia admits and then tries to justify that King's doctoral dissertation at Boston university is large part plagiarized.

I mean, and we're in a day now where people are going, institutions are going after people that plagiarize PhDs like, you know, 10, 20 years after the fact, but King gets a pass, even though they know about this because he's Martin Luther King.

And of course the, I have a dream speech. The end of it was taken from Archibald Carey's 1952 GOP convention speech, which, and I say this because they're just so similar. It looks, it seems clear that it was, it was ripped off, but, but you know, it's still a good speech.

And, and I think as a symbol King, if that King has represented that, and if he continues to represent that, which I think is part of the reason the holiday was voted on and passed by a lot of conservatives as well, that that's a good thing, right?

We should not judge a man based on the color of his skin, but the content of his character. Now the question, there's multiple questions here, but one question, did King continue to believe that what he said in the, I have a dream speech?

Did he really believe that towards the end of his life? And then the other question, is King truly a Christian? Cause you know, there's no problem. If you want to make someone a hero, Paul said, follow me as I follow Christ, but the King follow Christ, is he of an appropriate hero to put into, to, to put as a model for pastors going into the ministry?

Because obviously things he's done in his personal life, not necessarily so good. You wouldn't want your pastor being an adulterer and you wouldn't want your pastor plagiarizing things, hopefully. Um, and not that King, that was the only thing there was to King cause he's not, he's a man, he's complex.

So are there other things of King that he had that were redeemable? Yeah, I'm sure there are there. There absolutely are. Uh, but is that enough to grandstand him the way in which he is being, I mean, he's like a messianic figure at this point.

So let's get into these two different legacies that Martin Luther King jr has. And there's more than two, but let's, let's talk about the conservative one. The conservative one, as I said, starts off with the, I have a dream speech.

Martin Luther King jr is good because we believe, and also judging people based on the content of their character. And, uh, it's the left that wants to judge people based on the color of their skin. Well, there's some truth in this.

Uh, now King, we're going to get into this in the liberal interpretation of King or the, um, when we talk about the things that King did that clue us into the fact that, yeah, he was probably more of the left.

But, um, in regards to this speech, it is doubtful that he actually continued in that belief or, um, that, that was the center fuge for, you know, the, the, the center theme of his whole, uh, philosophy when it came to social action because the, I have a dream speeches from 1963 by 1965, he's doing the march on Chicago and by 1967, uh, there's 12 cities involved in his operation breadbasket, which I haven't talked to you about yet, but I will.

And the, the, the reason this is important is because King does seem to start, he does judge people. It seems like not just based on the content of their character, but on other external things, especially the fact that they are rich.

And, uh, and, and you even see that it seems like in his journey to India, um, which I'm going to get into a little bit as well. So, you know, I think it's a little doubtful as to whether he stayed with this.

I have a dream speech mentality, what we've taken away from it, but the, I have a dream speech is spectacular. And, um, and he fought discrimination in the bus boycott in Montgomery, right? I mean, there's actual rules on the books that he was fighting against.

And that's so much different than today where there's a systematic racism, but we don't know where it is because there's no law that we can use to change it because all the laws are anti-discrimination and there's no, there's no law that says white people must be treated this way.

It's just, it's systematic. Well, King actually had an actual rule that he was trying to overturn. Uh, he liked the NAACP in the beginning because they fought for equal opportunity and conservatives tend to like that equal outcome, bad equal opportunity, good modern conservatives.

That's what they say. Civil Rights March, um, was American to Dr. Martin Luther King. He thought this is part of who we are as a people. He liked the declaration of independence, the constitution, the bill of rights.

This is just continuing in that theme. He would not have supported kneeling at football games. No way he would have supported that, uh, given his love for the country and, uh, what he, he was trying to get the country to live up to their ideals in his mind.

There's also a distinction that he makes between a just and unjust law. He uses Augustine to make this distinction during the Montgomery bus boycott. And for conservatives, I mean, that goes a long way.

Unjust laws, Augustine. Yeah, that's right down our alley. We're, we're into Augustine. We like just war theory. We like looking at things the way that he did. And so King seems to make these distinctions and says a lot of things that conservatives today certainly can look at and say, we agree with that.

But, uh, but there's a lot of people, even liberals that will have their areas where conservatives can agree with those things. Right? So, so this doesn't mean that King is a conservative, which I have, I've almost heard some outlets try to make the case.

He's a, he is more, he would have been a Republican today if he were still alive and maybe he would have, I don't know. But, but you know, we, we, we don't know those things. And all outward indications I'm as I'm about to show you seem to point towards King being a creature of the left.

Liberal Theology, Social Gospel, and Ecumenical Activism

So liberal theology, first of all, uh, he liked Walter Rauschenbush and the social gospel and he liked Gandhi and he was introduced to both of them when he was in Pennsylvania going to school. He thought Gandhi exemplified the love of Jesus.

Now what evangelical would say that? I mean, I hope no, they wouldn't. I mean, Gandhi is not a Christian, right? So it's not the love of Jesus. I mean, maybe it's love, but it's not that love. Uh, he thought that, um, that the, uh, well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna jump to that later.

We'll talk more about, uh, India. But, um, when he went to Boston college, he wrote a paper and I'm actually going to link this. So if you go to the info section, you can check it out. The humanity and divinity of Jesus.

One of many papers that he wrote is very clear. When you read this paper, he did not believe in the divinity of Christ, not in an Orthodox sense at all. So Martin Luther King jr, not at this point, uh, in his, you know, before he has graduated, uh, he is a heretic at this point.

He's denying Christ divinity with knowledge that he is doing so. His pastoral call, he believes what's to set the captives free like Jesus did, but he doesn't talk about souls going to hell. It's to alleviate social conditions.

Then in 1959, he goes to India. He sees the spiritual strength of the Indian people. Now, what evangelical is going to say that about a group of Hindus that they have spiritual strength. I mean, these are, it's in weird words.

If the, if Martin Luther King jr was an Orthodox Christian, he says the bourgeoisie is the same all over using the language of social justice or so. I mean, that's, I mean, people who use the word bourgeoisie aren't necessarily communist.

I'm not sniffing out communist here, but I'm saying he's using terminology that, um, definitely smacks of a socialistic character by saying what happens in India with the caste system, with the, you know, this is the same all over the world so that there's this class struggle going on between oppressor and oppressed.

Then, um, we find out that, listen to this, think to yourself, would an evangelical Christian who believes Jesus is the only way to heaven say this? He, he goes on this march, uh, in Selma and Selma, Selma march with Catholics and Jews.

And he says, this is a big ecumenical event. It's, this is like the second great awakening, the second great awakening. The gospel is not part of it. It's not why they're marching. The people that he's marching with don't all believe the gospel, but it's the second great awakening.

Okay. Let's get into some of his more, um, shall we say politically liberal stances? So, uh, he has a march on Chicago and he called, uh, the ghetto of Chicago, a colonial area, uh, area where the population was used for cheap labor.

And he said, this was an injustice. There were forced housing agreements where basically the stipulation was if you're on welfare, you, you don't buy property, you can't own property, which there's some people that make sense, right?

But King said, this is absolutely wrong. This is, this is racism. And so we launched this operation breadbasket and operation bread basket assumes that businesses are selling in the ghetto, but they're not hiring people from the ghetto.

So he starts implementing quotas, this operation breadbasket, uh, that you have to hire a certain percentage of blacks if you want to stay open or else we're going to boycott you. And furthermore, you need to sell products made by black business owners.

And furthermore, you need to deposit your money in banks owned by black business owners or else we boy boycott you. So he's exerting pressure and we're still dealing with this. This is the Al Sharpton thing.

This is the Jesse Jackson thing. These are the race hustlers. King was involved with this at the beginning. You know, that's, it seems to be, that's where they learned some of this stuff. 1967 this is in 12 cities, not just Chicago.

And he has a specific problem with the Jewish landlords of the lower East side. And he says that they're implementing a color tax. So again, private property now is not as important to Martin Luther King.

He's not defending that. This is not necessarily a free market or conservative idea to, um, exert pressure on these companies or, um, I mean in this case it's the whole class of people, it's the Jewish people who own these, um, slums in his mind.

So apartment buildings and so forth that are charging these higher rents. Uh, and, and he's saying, you know, that, that needs to stop. Um, and he's willing to use pressure to do it. Political pressure.

He's against Vietnam. Military industrial complex is profiting from it. He says it's one of the greatest injustices ever. Vietnam and he encouraged draft dodging to follow Jesus. So if you're going to go to Canada, then you're following Jesus.

I'll leave that one there. I'm not going to comment. Uh, so you see towards the end of his life, cause you know, this stuff, the March on Chicago's 1965, uh, by 1967 is when you have 12 cities doing this, basically this hustling, uh, this, um, or a shaking down rather businesses.

Uh, and then it's 1967, uh, that, uh, end of 67 is, uh, when he talks about the rich man and Lazarus and that sermon and he says, rich man, you know, it goes to hell because he's a conscientious objector to the war on poverty or against poverty, which it's just, that's an isogetical, right?

And it shows that there's a shift though, that he's, this is a, it's a poor man thing. Now he's, he's not just talking about African Americans, but it's, it's all the disenfranchised people who are, they don't have economic means and he wants to end all poverty.

So the poor people's campaign spring of 1968 is launched and this is of course right before his death that this happened. So where King's trajectory, if he had not died, where would it be now? It seems like he'd be definitely on the left.

Reading King in His Own Words

Now I'm going to read for you a couple of speeches. This is probably the most important thing that I can do is read King in his own words and let you be the judge. And this is, this is 1968 these speeches that I'm about to read these excerpts.

Here's the first one. This is from to make the wounded whole from 1968. We have the power to make the church that institution that even young people who feel temporarily separated from it can respect.

We can even get them to have a new loyalty because they'll know we are on the battle line for them. All right, stop right there. Young people are going to, they're going to come in because we have a new loyalty.

This is the, is it the gospel that's drawing them in? This is the conversion. He had it, but no, why, why are they going to come in? Why are we going to get these converts? Well, we're getting converts from our social action, right?

I'm going to continue. This is King. And they'll come to see that Jesus Christ was not a white man. Christianity is not just a Western religion. We can, which are both true, right? We can make the church recapture its authentic ring.

We have power to change America and give a kind of new vitality to the religion of Jesus Christ. And he goes on and he says that Jesus started operation bread basket and the first sit-in movement. It was Jesus who did that.

And this is, this is the, he says, Jesus had, he has the glow of the divine. That this is from the end of his life that Jesus has the glow of the divine. That's the same language he was using. Read the article when, that I put in the info box there, that at the beginning of his career, that Jesus, the divinity of Christ was this kind of, well, God more or less gave him this power, this energy to do these amazing things in favor of justice.

I mean, that's not divinity. So anyway, that's from the end of King's life. And of course you can, I mean, there's, I'm not going to comment on all the issues with that, but there are some. He also says in, I believe it was in 1968, if it's not, it's 1967, this speech.

I read it though, in the autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr. is the title of the book. He says, Christianity failed to see it had, it had a revolutionary edge. And in the same speech, he portrays Jesus as a revolutionary.

And he says that he's not inspired by Karl Marx, but he never contradicts Karl Marx. He proves that he understands Marx in this speech. And I'd encourage you to, you know, go pick up that book, the autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr.

Cause you can read it there, but he does not contradict Marx. He just says, Jesus is basically, he's the better hero to put as our champion for social justice. It's not Marx. I wasn't inspired by Marx, but he doesn't contradict Marx's ideas, which is very interesting.

That would have been the opportunity for him to do it. Instead, he makes Jesus out to be this revolutionary. Jesus was the original Marx. That's what it seems like he's saying. So he says the rich man went to hell.

Like I said, because he was a conscientious objector in the war against poverty. And this is how he reads scripture. So if you look at, at what he says about who Jesus is and the purpose of Jesus and his calling to the ministry to alleviate these injustices, and then look at how he treats scripture as this treasure trove of images to, and analogies to use in his struggle, then you have to wonder whether he's an Orthodox Christian.

He doesn't seem to be wanting to be true to the actual text of scripture. It seems like he's using it instead of further a different kind of end. So I'm going to ask this question. What's motivating all this?

Why are these seminaries going in this direction? Well, I think this is my own take on it. I think there's a couple of reasons. I think Southern guilt has something to do with it. The reason I say Southern guilt is because the article I just read, these are all Southern Baptist entities, right?

A lot of them, obviously, I think it was Golden Gate. That's in, I think, San Francisco. It's in California. But most of the other ones, I think all the other ones, they're all in the South somewhere.

And there is this sense, and I'm just getting this from my own experience being at a Southern Baptist university. There is this sense in which Southerners especially feel very guilty for what happened during the civil rights movement.

And I remember even just recently someone talked about segregation in churches, how there's black churches, white churches, and yeah, well, I'm, we're in the South. So, and that, I mean, that's, I can't count the amount of times I've heard that.

And it's been curious to me as someone who grew up in the Northeast and I've lived down South, but I grew up there. When I start telling people about all the experiences of, from racism, from white people that I saw in the Northeast, I try to say, look, what you're sharing with me, that's not news to me.

In fact, I see, I've seen something worse. And I give them an example, and I'm not going to go through those now in another video I might. But anyway, it's always, it's almost like they're shocked because the narrative is that this is just unique to the South.

I'm going to give you King's own words on this though. And I'll tell you why this is important in a second, but King's own words on this are that the people of Chicago could teach the people of Mississippi how to hate.

People of Chicago can teach the people of Mississippi how to hate. The Watts riots, the police brutality in his mind that happened there, that woke him up to things outside the South, issues. They threw eggs at him in New York.

He saw bricks flying at him in Chicago. That was the worst one he said he ever saw. Nazi flags. He said himself, the urban North was more resistant to change than the rural South. And that there was a less loss of life in 10 years of Southern protests than 10 days in Northern riots.

One of the reasons the perception exists, this is not the only reason. Okay. And I don't have time to get into all the other reasons, but one of the main reasons that there's this perception that the South is, has to bear the full weight for the civil rights movement.

And it was their problem is because the, so many African-Americans lived in the South and lived among white people. As a Cooter Jones said recently, I heard him say this, that the culture at the time of the civil rights movement was not segregated, but the society was in the South.

So in other words, you go to, you would go to the grocery store and you'd be nice. And I know this from my own experience with, you know, I have a huge family from the deep South and just hearing their stories and, and, and seeing the way they even live now, you know, you are friends with the person down the road who's a different color than you.

You help each other out. I've seen this firsthand. You're the best of friends, but then, and I'm not saying it's like this today, but then there's these unspoken rules kind of like, you know, you may not go into each other's houses sometimes, or you may not, there's just these things that you're not supposed to do.

And there's, and that's where the separate drinking fountains and all that comes from. But but, but this being said, this tangent that I'm on which I'm going to wrap up here, it, the, the North by and large did not, unless you were in an urban area, have ethnic minorities around.

It was, I mean, you had maybe Irish and, you know, other kind of Scandinavian and other white people groups, but you did not have African-Americans in anywhere but Northern urban areas. So it wasn't an issue.

Civil rights wasn't an issue. You just, there weren't enough people to have a civil rights movement or enough, why would you create a separate drinking fountain for the one black person within a 200 mile radius in some of these areas?

Right? I mean, Pennsylvania is still like that, right? So not Philadelphia, but anyway, rural Pennsylvania. But so, so there's, there's a Southern guilt component to this. And I, the reason I went through all that and I could have said more, I don't want to belabor the point is because I don't think there, there needs to be that.

I think this is a, there's a strain that everyone can bear. And a lot of the ideas behind this, they did not come from Christianity. They came from scientific racism. And in fact, I will go on this tangent for like 10 seconds.

There's a book I just read recently by Eugene Genovese. I believe it's called Sacred Fire, but it's about slavery. But he talks about reconstruction and how in antebellum Southern literature, you find a lot of pro-Orthodox Christian, pro-Bible where, you know, Bible's the final authority.

And then after, because of the way in which slavery ended and the problems that ending created, which North and South both have their own complicity, I would suppose in this, they could not justify segregation based on biblical texts.

And there was a more of a sociological basis, a scientific basis. So, so these things didn't come from scripture. There's, there's no reason to, for Christians to have a Christian guilt about this. There's no reason for Southerners to have a specifically Southern guilt about this, even though horrible things happen in the South, but also horrible things happen in the North.

And furthermore, let's talk about white guilt, right? There's a white guilt, I think, component that allows this in. If we honor Martin Luther King Jr., then look, we're not racist anymore. We can, we can celebrate with the world and, and our ancestors, we can just say, okay, they were wrong, but, but we're going to really beef it up to show, it's a virtue signal, essentially, to show how, how great we are, because there's no other reason you'd celebrate the guy in a, in the context of Christian ministry, because he doesn't, his lifestyle doesn't exemplify Christianity and his theology didn't.

But that's the only other reason I can think of, you know, they're trying to show people that, hey, we're not racist. We're, so that's not a great motivation. Yeah, there's, there's certainly guilt out there, but guilt is born by sinners, by those who did bad things.

It's not, guilt doesn't know a color. And I talked about this in my other videos, but there, there, I don't believe there is such a thing as white guilt. You can say that I lived in a culture that, that did some bad things, just like every culture has.

And you can certainly admit that, but to everlastingly celebrate a guy whose lifestyle and theology were not in keeping with the, let's say the doctrinal statement and the code of conduct for students on these campuses is a problem.

And I made a prediction to, in the video I did on Southeastern, I said, they will be liberal eventually if they continue down this path. Well, this is an example of that because Martin Luther King's junior theology, his theology is not in Orthodox theology.

And so if people copy this, there is a consequence to it. They're not going to be in Orthodox land before long because Martin Luther King wasn't. So, so I think those things factor in Southern guilt, white guilt, Christian guilt, for being in the oppressor class, quote unquote.

And then, you know, there obviously there's a willingness and a desire to be on the social justice train. It's popular right now in the world. So Martin Luther King's popular in the world. Let's bring him in.

So that's part of it. And last but not least, how should we think of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.? I'm going to tell you how I think of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I'm very thankful for the, I have a dream speech.

And I think there's a reason to celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. just for giving that speech. There's a symbolism in that. And I, and I wish in a sense that that was where King stayed. If we're going to look at him positively, that that's the pinnacle.

So I can't ignore though, his socialistic and heretical views or his lifestyle. That was not a very Christian lifestyle in every way. So I could not treat the man as a hero. He's not following Christ, as Paul said.

So he's a fallible man and he did some helpful things. And, and those things should be commended, but he's not a theologian. And to treat him now as a theologian, who's important to her pastors to know, that's, I think where the biggest danger comes in because you can adopt his theology.

So that's another area where social justice is creating a problem. I might add to that. If, if Martin Luther King Jr. is a theologian, then that says a lot about what these people think theology is, because I talked about the watering down of academic standards and Martin Luther King Jr. does not compare to Jonathan Edwards, John Calvin, even Robert Louis Dabney.

I can go down the list, Tozer, all the theologians that were, these are theologians. MLK, he's not. So I think also contributes to the dumbing down academically to treat him that way and to put so much emphasis on him because he's not helping people get a new perspective or not.

I'm sure it's a new person, a deeper perspective on scripture. He is, he's doing the social justice thing, especially as he progressed later in life, he was a social justice advocate. And, and that's why a lot of these guys might also like them birds of a feather, right?

So we liked, we liked the social justice, Dr. Martin Luther King liked it. So we're going to advocate it. So hopefully you can see where these, the problem comes in with this. And next week, Lord willing, we will finally get to boxcar number three.

That's right. So I said, boxcar number one is issues of race and then boxcar number two issues of gender and sex, boxcar number three issues of sexuality. And this was, I didn't, I'm stealing that, I'm plagiarizing from the social justice and the gospel conference.

I think it was Tom Buck, maybe said that. And, and I thought it was very helpful. So we're going to get to boxcar number three, I think next week and hopefully talk about gay Christianity. If, if I have time to get that together, if not, we'll do something else, but thank you for listening.

I hope that was informative.