Desmond Tutu's False Gospel

Welcome to the

Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris. We're gonna talk today a little bit about Desmond Tutu, Archbishop from South Africa, Anglican, known for his contributions to theology as far as black theology and African theology, but also, and more importantly, perhaps, as far as from a global media standpoint, his activity, anti -apartheid activity, and his activity on the

Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, and so why are we gonna talk about him?

Well, the reason is because two things. Number one, Desmond Tutu is in the same breath as Gandhi and Mother Teresa.

Desmond Tutu is now kind of reaching that status, an MLK, and so I think it's important we know a little bit about his theology.

We see with MLK that his theology can be abysmal, but because of his political activity, that's kind of, it redeems him, and if you go after him, you're racist.

That's the thing. If you critique even his theology, you must have some problem with his political activity, and you must have a problem with racial justice or something like that, and I think the same thing goes for Desmond Tutu.

Now, I don't live in South Africa, so I don't know, his status he has reached there is probably much more enshrined than it is here as far as respect and all of that and saint -like status, but I think it's probably coming here.

It has come here to some extent. You do hear his name a little bit, but the second reason is because his name is brought up frequently on a certain website.

I shouldn't say frequently, regularly, often enough, and that's the Gospel Coalition website, and Desmond Tutu died not too long ago, and some brothers brought to my attention the fact that there were a number of evangelicals saying positive things apparently about him.

Now, I don't know the full extent of that. What I do know, though, is that the Gospel Coalition website for the last decade has been putting up articles that reference him in positive ways, and the thing that dawned on me, and this is why

I think this is worth talking about, the second reason I think it's worth talking about, is that Desmond Tutu's gospel and the gospel often promoted by the

Gospel Coalition are pretty much the same in substance, or they're very similar.

There's a lot of similarities. The difference seems to be one mainly of degrees.

Desmond Tutu goes much farther than the Gospel Coalition will about his deconstruction of gender and those kinds of things, but Gospel Coalition kind of walks with him up to a point, and I think they make, both many of the authors at Gospel Coalition and then

Desmond Tutu make some of the same basic errors, and so I wanna talk about those, and I think, so it's important,

I think, for us to understand Desmond Tutu. Now, we're not gonna talk about Desmond Tutu, the political activists. I wanna just put that on the shelf.

Not interested in that for the sake of this. Not that it's not interesting, just for the sake of this particular video, this podcast, we wanna talk about Desmond Tutu, the theologian.

What were his ideas about God? And so I've taken it upon myself to read some Desmond Tutu, and we're gonna talk about the book that he wrote, which is called,

God Has a Dream, A Vision of Hope for Our Time, and it's written by Desmond Tutu.

So we're gonna talk about that. Now, before we get to that, I want to mention a few things. One is very important to me, and it's of a personal nature, and I probably should have done this sooner, but it's kind of involved why

I haven't, and it's really out of desperation that I'm even putting this out there now, but I'm thinking of how to introduce this.

The Harris family has been going through a number of things, and two of them have been medical -related.

One, my grandfather died recently. I know I mentioned that on the podcast, and it was sad, but I think it was more...

There's mixed emotions, because there's a lot of anger there. And I'll give you an example of why.

He went into the hospital because of a broken knee and ended up dying, being overdosed on blood thinners.

There was an autopsy. The autopsy came back. There was no COVID, negative COVID test, yet the hospital declared it a

COVID death, and then the health county commissioner decided to override the autopsy results and still declare it a

COVID death, even though it wasn't. And he died alone. And it's a very sad thing.

It's just... The reason I guess I'm bringing it up is I know that I'm not the only one in that kind of a situation.

Many of you are. Dying alone is horrible. It's probably the greatest emotional turmoil coming out of this whole

COVID thing. Even beyond the lockdowns and losing businesses is relatives dying alone.

No one's allowed in because of COVID. And then you have to wonder sometimes where the incentives are in some of these medical facilities.

If they're getting money from COVID deaths, where's the incentive to keep someone elderly, especially alive?

I know that's a place our mind doesn't wanna go, and I know that's a dark place, but we've seen a drastic reduction in the quality of healthcare over the last few years, especially in Los Angeles, where much of my extended family lives, my immediate extended family.

And my aunt almost died about a year ago just from mistreatment and dehydration.

I mean, these are the kinds of things, things that just wouldn't have happened even five years ago, and they're happening.

And we're seeing the quality of healthcare go down significantly in New York, where I live right now.

We're seeing the, specifically, the firings because of the mandates to get the jab are leaving hospitals short -staffed, and it's chaos in many places.

And this has affected, to some degree, my mom. And so I'm gonna read this for you.

This is, again, this is kind of out of desperation, but we just, we trust the Lord through this. And by the way, my grandfather did, he made a profession of faith.

We trust that he's with the Lord. My mom's a Christian. Thank God for that. But she has a catastrophic, very rare, autoimmune neurological disease called stiff person syndrome.

And it's very rare. She's very sick, and it's miserable.

You end up, you have spasms with your muscles, and you eventually die from it.

Your diaphragm doesn't work. And we need a second opinion from anywhere in the country.

And a local treatment neurologist near New York, within, hopefully, 60 to 70 miles of Poughkeepsie would be ideal, but there's willingness to travel to get a second opinion.

And the question I have for this audience, and I appreciate you bearing with me. I know many of you wanna get to the meat of this, is does anyone out there know of a neurologist that treats stiff person syndrome specifically?

So not just looking for a neurologist, but a neurologist that treats this. She was rejected from a program.

We think we might know why, and it's not related to her. It's related to some incompetence in New York, as far as them submitting the wrong paperwork and tests.

And there's just a waiting list on everything. And she's in bad shape now. So if anyone has a connection to a neurologist that treats stiff person syndrome,

I would be very grateful. And you can reach out to me. There's a variety of ways. If you're on Gab, you can private message me on Gab.

If you're on Facebook, you can private message me on Facebook. You can go to worldviewconversation .com, and I have all the social media there.

If you have someone, please don't just leave a comment. I might not see it. I'll try to look. But if you just private message me, that's probably the best way.

And I will give out my email. Please don't abuse this, everyone. I have a few emails.

This is one that I use for general intake, but it's just my name, Jonathan Harris, and then the date

I was born, 1989. JonathanHarris1989 at gmail .com. If you email me, that's the quickest way to get to me.

And I would appreciate it. So thank you for bearing with me with that. And we do trust God, like I said, through this.

So I just wanted to mention that. Also, don't forget worldviewconversation .com. You can go there and look at the speaking engagements, places

I'll be. And at the end of the month, I'm gonna be speaking in Kentucky and in Tennessee, in Nashville.

And so if you live near Bowling Green, if you live near Louisville, if you live near Nashville, would love to see you.

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All right, let's talk about Desmond Tutu a little bit. I just wanna introduce you to his theology.

So it's not quite as interesting, perhaps, as a biography, but it is important.

Many of you already know his story. You can find his story out pretty easily. But his theology, well, I don't think a lot of people are as familiar with his theology as they are with his political activity and his personal story.

So I read, God Has a Dream. And where do you start, right?

I tried to organize this information. There's false theology, false anthropology, and false bibliology in this work.

And the conclusions he reaches are wrong because his foundation is wrong. So let's start with this.

God took an incredible risk in creating us human beings. These are just quotes. I got tons of quotes.

And if you're a patron, you're gonna get this. I mean, this slideshow is available to you. God took an incredible risk in creating us human beings.

God has such a profound respect, nay, reverence for his freedom, for this freedom, he's talking about free will, that he bestowed on us that he had much rather see us go freely to hell than compel us to go to heaven.

And they say, hell is the greatest compliment God has paid us. Can you tell me what's wrong with that?

First of all, God took an incredible risk in creating us. God doesn't risk things.

God is, God's God. It actually shows that it's a role reversal.

God's the one that doesn't seem to know what's going on. And it's humans that are the all powerful ones because they have the free will.

They can choose what to do. God doesn't seem to have much of a choice. He's got to calculate the odds and kind of make a decision.

And it lowers God and elevates man. And that's what you're gonna see through all of Desmond Tutu's theology, lowering

God, elevating man. Hell is not the greatest compliment God has ever paid us.

Hell is a place of torment, reserved for, it wasn't even created for man. It was for the devil and his angels, but it's men who follow in the devil's work of sinning against God go there.

And it's, that's not a compliment to be in that category with demons. Nowhere in scripture does it teach this.

But so anyway, I don't wanna get hung up on every single quote. Most of you are gonna recognize the errors as I read them.

Perhaps only when we care about each other's dead, can we truly learn to live in the same world together without our irrational prejudices and hatreds.

Perhaps this will be possible when we eventually realize that God has no enemies, only family. So first, hell is a compliment.

Now God has no enemies. So who's he sending to hell? It's like, if he has no enemies, why would he?

So hell is, what is to hell then? Just a compliment? Is he paying people compliments? All right. When someone is wonderfully generous or compassionate, we do sometimes stand in awe of that person.

And that gives us a glimpse of the glory that is God. Not the way to phrase this.

If what you were trying to mean is that you can, you know, Christians are capable of doing good works, glorifying their father in heaven and see that, you wouldn't phrase it this way.

It doesn't give us a glimpse of the glory that is God. That's the important, that is God. It gives us a glimpse of God's design, but there's, and in fact, the context even makes this more clear as you read the book.

There's this sense that it's almost pantheistic. We're all connected to one another.

God's in us. We see God in things. You get that from this book as well. He says, we have not always learned just to be receptive, to be in the presence of God, quiet, available, and letting

God be God. Who wants us to be God? Right, there you go. He wants us to be God. We are shocked actually when we hear that what

God wants is for us to be God -like, for us to become more and more like God, not by doing anything.

That's convenient. You can become like God, not by doing anything, but by letting God be God in and through us.

Sounds pretty mystical. And it's super man -centered. It reminds me, I mean, of so many calls. It reminds me of the excesses and the prosperity gospel stuff.

This is Desmond Tutu though. People need to be very careful, he says. Many tend to be literalists, people who believe in the verbal inerrancy of the

Bible. He doesn't believe in that. He goes through that. All right, so let's just get into more of the specifics.

This is just the bad theology. This is the foundation he builds the rest of his theology on. Elevates man and denigrates

God. Now, there is definitely a strand of liberation theology in Desmond Tutu.

And for those who have read any liberation theology that you start to recognize it, you recognize the terms.

He says, can you think of anything more subversive of a situation of injustice and oppression?

What should you need Marxist ideology or whatever? The Bible is dynamite in such a situation.

What he's saying is that you don't need Marxism. The Bible is sufficient. The Bible will do, does what

Marxism does better. And this is, you hear Gutierrez say this. You hear James Cone say this.

This is the same stuff all liberation theologians say. You know, we're not Marxists. Why aren't you

Marxist? Well, because you don't need Marxism. The Bible, basically the Bible teaches Marxism. The Bible is the original, you know,

Marxist playbook. So that's, you get a sense of liberation theology from him as well.

For those who don't know, whenever you have liberation theology, it corrupts the gospel, okay? And for in a number of ways, but the main way is it misdirects what the atonement's about what

Jesus's coming is all about. The good news is a political reformer that identifies with the poor and the weak and the downcast and the victims and then elevates them.

And through the cross, there's an identification going on and then rising again, you know, conquering, conquering the

Roman oppressors, showing that they don't have the last word. These are the kinds of things you hear liberation theologians wax long and eloquent about.

And you see a sense of that. You see a hint of that in Desmond Tutu for sure.

So what's the goal of Desmond Tutu's theology? At least in this book, the goal seems to be autonomous freedom. He says this, our freedom does not come from any human being.

Our freedom comes from God. This is what we mean when we say it is an alienable right. This freedom is so much a part of the human makeup that it is not too farfetched to say that an unfree inalienable right.

This freedom is so much part of the human makeup that it is not, okay, I'm repeating myself here. I guess I must've,

I must've erred when I copied and pasted this, but he says, okay, I'm continuing here. The unfree human person is in a sense, a contradiction in terms.

The ideal society is one in which its members enjoy their freedom to be human freely. He uses the word free a lot.

Provided they do not thereby infringe on the freedom of others unduly. We are made to have freedom of association, of expression, of movement, the freedom to choose who will rule over us and how.

We are made for this. It is inelectable. It cannot ultimately be eradicated, this yearning for freedom to be human.

This is what tyrants and unjust rulers have to contend with. They cannot in the end stop their victims from being human.

So he very much promotes this idea of freedom and you're gonna see it tied in with equality later in the book.

Freedom, equality, humans living out their full potential. I talk about this in Christianity and social justice, religions and conflict.

I talk about how the liberal concept of freedom is to set the parameters of society in such a way that humans get to carry out the inner urges and longings and be the authentic self that's somehow in there and trapped by society, it's set free and they're able to carry out all these desires.

And sometimes at the expense of others, that's the highest goal. And you see that in Desmond Tutu. It is a libertarian kind of freedom.

It's not a kind of freedom that comes with necessarily the attachments, they're

Marxist attachments, but it's not like attachments to your family, attachments to your country, it's broader than that.

It's attachments to humans as humans. That's the only attachment you really have.

Your only responsibility is not to infringe on other humans. So you want a society of maximum freedom where no one's infringing on other people's freedom and that's basically the goal.

And there's things that stand in the way of that. This is egalitarian stuff, okay? It's that kind of freedom.

So this vision gets sucked into his view of the gospel. The word he uses though, is not gospel, it's transfiguration.

And this is interesting to me. Gospel Coalition doesn't do this, but I was trying to pick up on like, okay, where's the false gospel in this book?

And he doesn't really use the word gospel. The false gospel is in this term transfiguration. It's used 41 times in the book.

And he talks about the election when apartheid was overturned. And he says that that was a transfiguration moment.

And our problems are not over though. We have poverty, unemployment and AIDS epidemic because transfiguration is also ongoing.

It sounds like justification, sanctification almost. Like you have a moment of transfiguration, but then you have so far to go, right?

People entered the booth, he says, one person and emerged on the other side a totally different person. So it's a born again experience.

Voting becomes a born again experience. And, but he uses the term transfiguration. I'm free, someone says, and she emerged, it changed, it transformed a transfigured person after voting.

Now I'm gonna bring all this together. I know this is kind of murky for some of you. This is where the gospel comes in.

Let me read you some quotes. We are the agents of transformation that God uses to transfigure his world.

So God has a dream, right? God's trying to transfigure the world. How is God trying to do that? God respects humankind so much.

God wants them to have maximum freedom to carry out their desires and their authentic selves.

And so we need societies that don't have barriers to that. And so take down all the barriers, make things inclusive, equity, tolerance, all these things to try to get that perfect society going.

That's God's plan. And we are the ones, right? I mean, it's so prideful, right? We are the ones that are gonna do this. It talks about Mary.

Mary was just one example of this. She's a poor girl from Galilee. And then look what she does, has the son of God. And Jesus, of course, waited to be anointed with God's spirit, made him, he preached the good news to the poor in the setting free of the captives.

He went in a retreat in the wilderness. He had an experience of transfiguration. So Jesus is like an avatar.

He's one example of many examples of transfiguration. It lessens the uniqueness of Jesus.

It's not that Jesus, the gospel is only, we only have it because of what

Jesus has done. It's not centered on Jesus. It's just Jesus becomes an example, which is liberation theology. The transfiguration was happening so that the disciples could descend into the valley to help others and share what they had seen of God.

In this life, we could never remain on the mountaintop. The authenticity of the transfiguration experience would be attested by how it fitted us to be

God's presence, healing, restoring, forgiving, reconciling, admonishing, comforting the world. Where do you see this in the scripture?

This is what he's saying. That whole experience of the transfiguration, that was for the apostles who sought to go into the world and be inspired by that and to change the world, the dream of what it could be.

And so for us, the spiritual life is utterly crucial as we work to bring God's transfiguration into our political life.

This is the connection. And this is what Gospel Coalition does too, to an extent.

It's the immunization of the eschaton, the realities that exist in heaven, right?

As in heaven, a Gospel Coalition podcast. We're supposed to be trying to bring that world, that eternal world into the temporal world.

And this is Desmond Tutu's point. This is all the spiritual social justice warriors are trying to create a utopia, heaven on earth.

They don't often say it that way, but if you read closely, you're gonna catch the hints. That's what they're doing.

God is transfiguring the world right this very moment through us because God believes in us and because God loves us.

God relies on us to help make this world all that God has dreamed of it being. And remember,

God can't do this on his own. He needs us. He's limited. He took risks in making us. So we're such a central part to this whole plan.

It really builds us up here. So redemption. The face of Jesus shone brightly and his clothes became glistening white.

His body, his clothes, gross material things that, this almost sounds Gnostic, that up to then might have been thought to be impervious to the spiritual.

The transcendent became translucent with an unearthly illumination. The term transfiguration originates in this mountaintop experience as a description of how the physical can be shown to be truly spiritual, can be transformed from the profane into the sacred.

This is gospel kind of language. This is, there's redemption going on. There's, this is the metamorphosis.

This is the changing of people, the curse of sin being overturned.

And it reminds me of John Lennon. That's why I put imagine here. Members of a family, Tutu says, have a gentle, caring compassion for one another.

How I pray that we will open our eyes and see the real true identity of each one of us. Right? This is how you have to see the world.

This is what you got to understand about egalitarians. Take down all the fences, take down all the barriers and see everyone as just a person.

Now this creates, you know, an impersonal government kind of system every time. But this is what he says, that this one is not white or black,

Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, or Jew, but a brother, a sister, a treat, and treat each other as such.

If we could but recognize our common humanity, that we do belong together, that our destinies are bound up in one another's, that we can be free only together, that we can survive only together, that we can be human only together, then a glorious world would come into being where all of us lived harmoniously together as members of one family, the human family,

God's family. In truth, a transfiguration would take place. God's dream would become a reality.

And a couple of things about this, because this is where it's all leading to. This is the world, the utopia that he wants to create.

I want you to notice though about this a few things. God is bad. God's dream needs us to become reality, right?

So this is why social justice is so important. By all means necessary, we must have social justice or else

God's dream won't become reality. Very weak God, okay? Other thing

I want you to notice here is Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, Jew, right? Our common destinies are wrapped up in one another.

What are our common destinies? What's the common destiny of a Muslim and a Christian? They don't have a common destiny.

Even according to Muslims, they would say of Christians that Christians aren't gonna go to the same place they're gonna go. So there's an assumption here.

There's a universal assumption. The other thing is I want you to notice is this emphasis on humanity.

Being human as if we're not human, right? We're not human, apparently. We gotta struggle to be human somehow.

We gotta, we're not really human together unless we're all in this together. Then we're truly human.

We have to be in this corporate, kind of really globalist pot of soup without any definition with others and tie ourselves, our destinies to one another in some kind of a centralized, really,

I mean, this is right for a government to come in and who's gonna do this? Who's gonna do the tying everyone up together in their common destiny?

And that's where you get your, that's where you find your identity. It's actually erasing your identity.

It's erasing all the things that make you you and saying those aren't important. The only thing that's important is that you're human.

But until you realize that, you can't really be human. So it's this whole awakening.

It's a Gnostic thing in a way. It's this whole, you have to go through this process and shed these other identities in order to finally, or at least minimize other identities to finally have this human identity.

And until you really concentrate and get to that point, you're not really truly 100 % human.

Scripture doesn't teach that. Scripture just says you're human. You're made in God's image. I don't care if you're a serial killer, you're human. Humans have a sin nature, by the way.

Christ came to forgive humans. That's why he came. Came to do the

Father's will, but he came to seek and save the lost. And if we trust in him, we can, that's, you wanna know where identity's found.

It is wrapped up in the creator, his design, but in who we are as, when you become a Christian, as a redeemed child of God.

You're in his family, that's your identity. And Desmond Tutu takes that all away.

I guess it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if you're a Buddhist, Christian, whatever. The only thing that matters is that you're all humans, but you're not really until you realize that.

Let's move on here. What has to happen in order to get to this point?

We have to realize the universal brotherhood of humanity. If God's family, in God's family, there are no outsiders.

All are insiders, black and white, rich and poor, gay and straight, a Jew and Arab, Palestinian and Israeli, Roman Catholic and Protestant, Serb and Albanian, Hutu and Tutsi, Muslim and Christian, Buddhist and Hindu, Pakistani and Indian, all belong.

As Martin Luther King and Gandhi remind us, God's dream envisions more than mere equality, an equal you can acknowledge once and then, forever thereafter ignore.

God's dream wants us to be brothers and sisters, wants us to be family. The endless divisions that we create between us and that we live and die for, whether they are our religions, our ethnic groups or nationalities are so totally irrelevant to God.

Imagine there's no heaven, no nations, no religion, just a soup of undefined humanity.

Doesn't that sound great? That sounds like such a great world, right? If we just shed these things, we'll find true freedom.

When you start understanding this, you start seeing it everywhere. You start realizing this is what the social justice stuff's all about.

This is why they're ripping down the family. This is why they rip down the nation. This is why they denigrate labor relationships.

This is why they do everything they do. They deconstruct sexuality. They have to do that because if they have fences up and borders and boundaries, we can't actually be human together.

We can't have the Tower of Babel 2 .0. So what else do you have to do? Deconstruct gender.

Fortunately, in our Bantu language in South Africa, Tutu says, we do not have gendered pronouns, and so we do not face this problem.

So I'm reading it kind of out of context here, but he says, to avoid cumbersome usage in English, I have chosen to follow convention here, but I apologize to the reader for this grammatical necessity but spiritual inaccuracy.

What he's saying is that gendered pronouns are spiritually inaccurate. Doesn't like them.

We gotta deconstruct nations. He says, yes, our first election turned out to be a deeply spiritual event, a religious experience, a transfiguration experience, a mountaintop experience.

Now here we were becoming from all the different tribes and languages, diverse cultures and faiths, so utterly improbably, we were becoming one nation.

Now I gotta stop here because some of you are thinking, wait a minute, that's the United States, right? We say the same thing.

Doesn't matter what creed, religion, color, whatever. Doesn't matter. You're an

American. It turns out now for the left, you don't even have to be here like physically on the

American landmass. You can be somewhere else and you should still qualify to be American. You should have open borders.

Now, the thing about this I just wanna mention is that this isn't biblical, number one.

You don't find that kind of thinking in the Bible. The most you can find is there is no Jew, there is no Greek, no slave, no free, all are one in Christ, but that's not about deconstructing nations.

That's about a spiritual reality and that's why I say they keep taking those spiritual realities and just imposing them on everything else.

We have multiple identities, okay? And in a temporal world, that doesn't apply to the temporal world as such.

That's about the extent of the gospel, the extent of salvation. Jews and Greeks, you're still a

Jew, you're still a Greek, you're still a slave, you're still free, you're still a man and a woman. You don't change those. Those things don't change necessarily, but you all are eligible to receive

Christ. That's what that's about. But they take that, they make it mean in their minds that those boundaries don't matter and then they impose it on nations and other things.

And so in America, I think we have an identity crisis partially because of this.

We are dedicated to the proposition now and this wasn't the founder's intent at all, but this is really post -Lincoln.

It kind of gradually became this way, this proposition nation idea, but we're dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

That's what it means to be an American. What kind of equality? We don't really know, but that's just what an American is. So it's not about a land.

You don't have to speak English. It's not about a religion. I mean, this flies in the face of what many of the founders said.

I quote George Washington in Christianity and Social Justice where he says, what an American is, is a common set of habits, traditions, religion.

He talks about kind of the Anglo heritage and stuff.

There's English, they speak English. I don't think he mentions English, but that would have been part and parcel to it. Christianity was very much part of that.

So it doesn't mean that everyone has to be Christian necessarily. This is more of an organic thing.

It's not something you can just put on paper and then here's the five things it takes to be an American. Yeah, you qualify.

It's a little bit, it's hard with organic things because you recognize it when you see it. It's like listening to music.

You're like, how do you know what kind of music that is? Well, I can describe, it's got drums, bass, and guitar.

It's rock. But how many other genres have those instruments, right? Usually there's a quality to it that I can say, okay, it's this kind of music.

And that's what makes this kind of thing difficult. And nations are very organic things. Think of it as families.

What makes your family different than a family down the street? Now, they're very different. They have probably different rules and all kinds of different things, but you're not gonna be able to quantify all of them and put them on a piece of paper.

There's just things you're not even thinking of that would play into that. And so what's my point?

My point is that nations are a thing. You see them in scripture, they're a thing. I'm sorry, it's not like they stopped being a thing when we enter modernity.

In Revelation, people don't shed their national characteristics. They still have them even in heaven. The very verse that they use from Revelation to try to prove getting rid of nations and boundaries is actually the one you can use to say there are nations and boundaries.

Tribes, tongue, nation. Egalitarians don't like that. They gotta deconstruct nations.

And I think we're having a crisis of identity in America because of immigration over a long period of time, in part, and many other things.

But what does it mean to be an American? It's very hard to even answer that question now. And South Africa has a similar issue with the different, they have different nations there.

The best way to probably categorize this is they're a country with different nations represented.

And things get messy. Families get messy, by the way. With out -of -wedlock births and adoptions and all kinds of things.

Families can get messy, too. Any pastor doing pastoral counseling knows this. So, it doesn't mean that there aren't families.

You wouldn't say, oh, that family's messy. It's not a family. Families don't exist or something.

Everyone on the block is part of a family. You wouldn't do that. You would say, no, families are a real thing, and here's a few things that define what a family is.

And so, the whole attempt here is to try to take down identity, to take down anything that would stand in the way of just viewing yourself as a human attached to other humans.

Deconstructing marriage. Tutu says, many, however, say that some kinds of love are better than others condemning the love of gays and lesbians.

But whether a man loves a woman or another man, or a woman loves a man or another woman, to God it is all love, and God smiles whenever we recognize our need for one another.

Okay, that's great. So, this is just poison. God smiles on homosexuality.

That's what he's saying there. Don't need marriage, or at least marriage, it's legitimate even if it's same sex, two of the same gender.

Deconstruct masculinity. Ending sexism, including women, fully in every aspect of society not only ends its own great evil, the oppression of women, but also is part of the solution to the rest of the world's problems.

If gender cannot be a bar to baptism, which makes all Christian representatives of Christ and partakers of his royal priesthood, then gender cannot be a bar to ordination.

And he also says, we have hardly spoken about the motherhood of God, and consequently we have been the poor for this.

So, this is all about deconstructing masculinity. God is not viewed as male, even though the male pronoun is used throughout the

Old Testament. Yes, I realize there's places, especially in the Psalms, where there's some maternal language used, but God presents himself as a male.

That's, don't argue with me. That's the Bible. That's how God is presented, even in the

New Testament. It's I and the father are one, not I and the mother. And so he, because of his view of God, which is

I think where the root of this is, he thinks that, yeah, you know, should be able to ordain women and gender.

You just shouldn't have any barriers between genders, pretty much. That's where this is going, at least.

That's where the logic leads. So, that's my critical review of Desmond Tutu's God Has a

Dream, a vision of hope for our time. And in the next episode, I will talk, well, maybe not the next one.

I think the one after the next one, I'm gonna talk about why everything I just went over is significant for the evangelical situation right now.

Why an archbishop in South Africa who died recently, why would that be relevant for today's evangelical movement in the

United States? I'm gonna explain that. Because it really opened my eyes when

I realized what was going on. So to review, Desmond Tutu, humanist gospel, really.

His message of hope, there's no gospel in there. He eliminates sin, all those things. It's humanist. It's man is

God, basically. Or man can approach deity in some way. And in order to do that, we gotta struggle.

And part of the struggle is getting rid of all the barriers and fences that divide us and keep us apart and produce conflict.

And if we just got rid of those, we'd have utopia. And we'd have this bland humanity. Our identities would just be human.

And that's what we have to do. So gender stands in the way of that. Our national identities stand in the way of that.

Marriage, traditional marriage stands in the way of that. We need to just, we need to take those fences down and become truly egalitarian.

How does this factor into the way the gospel coalition approaches things? We'll get to that episode after next.

Don't forget, go to the website to see where I'm gonna be next, worldviewconversation .com.

And I should mention, if you've read Christianity and Social Justice, Religions and Conflict, please, please, please, please, please feel free to go to Amazon and Goodreads and leave a positive review.