Critical Theory, Liberation Theology, and SEBTS

Conversations That Matter

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Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris, and today I'm gonna be talking a little more about Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.

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Many of you know that back in January, I made a video called the downgrade of SCBTS and it went viral.

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That's where I went to school. I got my master of divinity from there last year, and I enjoyed some of the professors

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I had. I think God ordained it, I wouldn't trade it. But while I was there,

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I noticed a transition taking place. And a lot of the things fought for in the conservative resurgence,

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I saw being eroded. And I think in time they will be eroded if this trajectory of critical theory and liberation theology and the rest of it continue.

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Now, I have been given, since that video, overwhelming support, even from people within Southeastern.

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I've had professors, even from other institutions reach out to me and thank me for saying what I said, and I've appreciated that.

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But there've been a few people that have called into question everything I've said.

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Now, I've made three videos where I've talked about things going on, or included at least, things going on at Southeastern.

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And there's a certain segment of, probably more like the Twitterverse, I think that's more where I've seen this, that they say, oh, you don't have any information, you're just slandering, you're just making things up.

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Now, I think clearly someone who says that probably has not watched my videos, or they're just,

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I don't know, they're saying it to say it. But I felt the need to make a long, this is gonna be a long one,

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I think, a video that catalogs things, so chapter and verse. Now, I'm gonna give you this information.

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This is all distilled from the websites affiliated with Southeastern, or Southeastern's website itself.

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And it's gonna give you an idea as to what is going on. It'll, I think, hopefully be the best explanation for you in trying to figure out what is going on in evangelical institutions and seminaries.

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And the reason for that partially is because Southeastern's on the tip of the sword. They're pushing this stuff,

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I think, more or before some of these other seminaries. And the other seminaries are kind of following in the wake.

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So if you wanna know kind of where evangelicalism is going, where the Southern Baptist Convention is going, look to Southeastern, see what they're doing.

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They're the pioneers in this neo -Marxist critical theory stuff. So this will hopefully explain a lot of things for you, at least start connecting some dots that maybe previously were not connected or you didn't understand.

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And in addition to that, this is something that you can look at for yourself. I've prepared a PDF. I think it's about 38 pages long, and it's just got references, timestamps and podcasts, links, everything has a link.

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It tells you who said it. And I have not wanted to make this personal. In the video

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I put out in January, which was just basically my experience, and I'm not gonna bring up stuff from that. There's a lot of things

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I've brought up that the material is overwhelming that's out there. I can't even, this is tip of the iceberg stuff.

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I'll make that clear, but it's a lot. Anyway, that information, and the information that I'm about to present is not intended to hurt anyone in particular, or I don't have an ax to grind.

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In fact, I made a conscious choice in this slideshow that I'm gonna present to you, not even to show any pictures of anyone, because it's not about that.

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It's about the information. It's about what's being taught and the trajectory. And so that's what

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I'm gonna show to you. And there's gonna be a lot of pictures from the Southeastern website, and I'm gonna reveal some information as well that I don't think has previously been revealed about what's going on at Kingdom Diversity.

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But all that to say, I love Southeastern, and that's what I've been getting to here.

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I wanna see them change. I still do. Now, is it possible with the board being the way that they are, and the administration?

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I don't know. I think God can do anything, and I just really, I wanna see them take a good hard look at what not only

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I'm saying, but others. I know James White has spent some time on this, and I know there's others out there who have said things.

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And I hope a video like this, if you're a doubter or you just don't think what I'm saying is accurate, you can go through and just think through it slowly.

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I'm gonna be offering some interpretation of this, but most of what I'm gonna be showing you is just exposure.

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This is what's happening. You do with it what you want, but this is what's happening. And I'm gonna be giving my best explanation as to why

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I think that's happening. So without further ado, let's start at the beginning here.

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There was an article April 20th that came out in the New York Times. I've waited to put out this video until the dust settled, because I knew this was gonna be political for a few days.

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And it said, can black evangelicals save the whole movement? And Walter Strickland, who works at Kingdom Diversity at Southeastern, basically said, hey,

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I teach James Cone. And then of course, all the conservatives were like, you teach

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James Cone, hold on a minute. James Cone is at best a heretic. He did not believe in the sufficiency or the inerrancy of scripture.

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So how can you be teaching James Cone in your classes? And I'm summarizing this. I'm just setting this up. So then

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Danny Akin gets on Twitter. He says, hey, when I was a student in seminary, we learned these neo -Orthodox guys.

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And we think at Southeastern, you gotta know your enemy to defeat your enemy. And so this was a train wreck for Danny Akin, the president of the school, because it was interpreted as, okay, you're covering for Strickland, who's teaching

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James Cone and liberation theology. And the way you're doing it is you're trying to say, well, we just teach these things so you can dismantle them.

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When Strickland was saying he taught James Cone in a positive light. So, I mean, I wasn't involved deeply in this conversation really at all, but the little

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I saw was that people are going after Danny Akin saying, how can you defend it like this?

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That's not what Strickland was saying. Well, then Strickland puts out a blog at,

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I believe it was the Intersect Projects, which is affiliated with Southeastern. I've gone over this before in other videos, but funded by Oikonomia Network.

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And so anyways, the real ideas in play, foundational convictions of black theology and my journey with James Cone.

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And so he puts out this and essentially, here's a couple of quotes.

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What he says is he was helped by Cone's work specifically regarding systematic sin and championing unity and cultural diversity.

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So Cone helped him get through his mind that there's these categories. It's not just personal sin, there's systematic sin.

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It's a big thing. It says, as a teacher, I desire to offer my students the same opportunity to engage voices outside our theological tradition.

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Well, James Cone is certainly outside, right? And he says, I had disagreements with Cone, but this introduction of systematic sin was an important theological insight.

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And so he defends what he said in the New York Times article says, let me summarize this for you.

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What he's saying is scripture is a sufficient guide to answering

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Cone's concerns. So I use scripture, but what I do with Cone is I take the meat,

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I chew it up, I digest it, and I just spit out the bones. That's what I do with Cone. So when he says things about inerrancy,

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I just spit that out. So Cone is redeemable. Now pay attention, right? This is gonna be important later on.

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Cone, James Cone is redeemable. We can learn from him. Now, this is not a surprise to anyone who's remotely familiar with Southeastern or Strickland or Kingdom Diversity, because there have been other things put out.

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There are actually two podcasts, Remembering James Cone from the Lectern podcast, which is from Kingdom Diversity at Southeastern.

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And Strickland has already talked about his admiration for Cone. He said that Cone was an architect who built the theological scaffolding for black theology and was the precedent for everyone who does academic theology from African -American perspective or an

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African -American context. If you wanna do theology and you're African -American, you gotta know Cone. He says he was the precedent for many

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African -American scholars as a black face in a white space. You're gonna hear that word space a lot.

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Pay attention to that as well. So even for myself, who's at a predominantly white institution, which by the way,

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I'm gonna say this again, Southeastern is very white. He's looking to diversify the culture there.

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James Cone is someone that I can look to as a precedent. That's his quote, someone I can look to. He says, this is

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Strickland on Cone, there's still much to be learned from his legacy. If you agree with his constructive conclusions and where we should go or his ethical implications or not, you can still hear the cries of the people that are in need of being ministered to.

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There is much oppression that I think we can all agree about and then there's some need for liberation here.

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So this is the good part of Cone, that he's cries of the people. He's the first one to sort of break through the barrier to be able to go into this environment where he was a minority and then still not lose the uniqueness of his cultural background.

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He really allowed me to be a whole person, Strickland says. There is struggle that is unique to being black in America because we live in a racialized environment where blackness endures unique difficulty.

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And then he goes on and says that this precedent talking about the

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Negro spiritual to have some sort of prophetic lament, reality. What he's saying here is that there's

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Negro spirituals and there are laments. And by the way, they're not all laments, but that's what he said. There are laments and Cone gave them theological categories.

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That's what Cone did. Yes, he says that he allowed me to see, there are questions that arise from your experience that you then bring to the biblical text.

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Now that is important to pay attention to this. Your experience, you bring to the text.

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As you're interpreting, your experience has something to say there. I'm gonna bring this together in a moment, but let me keep giving you what

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Strickland says about Cone. Strickland also says, Dr. Cone opened my eyes to the idea that Christ is trying to restore brokenness.

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And he really had a focus on that brokenness manifesting as oppression, racially speaking.

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I sort of am looking at, you know, this big umbrella of God's redemption and seeing it both as individual and social because Christ said it himself to his disciples, that a summary of the gospel is not to bifurcate loving

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God and loving neighbor, but it is to love God and neighbor. So the great commandment, loving

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God, loving your neighbor, he's saying that this is what Christ wants us to do, which means you gotta look at the systematic injustice and it's not just individual, it's social, it's corporate.

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As a professor, Dr. Cone really saw, this is interesting to me, his role as a discipler.

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He was prophetic, he was prolific at his writings. Don't think about this, this is a heretic, rank heretic, but he was a discipler.

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Disciplers make people, they help people become more like Jesus. Cone could not have been, by definition, a discipler, but that's how

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Strickland sees him. This is all stuff that happened before the New York Times article came out. He says, for me,

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I can follow, listen to this, I can follow James Cone into this new theological space, but still, there's room enough in that space to do it with my own theological convictions, my own theological presuppositions, and then there's a lot of diversity in that mix.

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Last few quotes. Strickland says about Cone, I think the evangelical world would do well to hear the voice of Dr.

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Cone in drawing us toward the reality that the gospel, the resurrection of Christ, has implications for the here and now. He also says that the voice of Dr.

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Cone is beckoning to us, to the fact that a person is the one who is best suited to do the work of the social implications, the social outworkings of the gospel, and understands the brokenness of creation from Scripture, and go about fixing it under the kingdom that's to come.

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So this is the idea, Christ is gonna be redeeming everything, including institutions and so forth. Okay, so this is what

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Strickland says about Cone. Now, Strickland teaches classes on Cone as well, or uses Cone, I should say. He teaches two liberation theology courses at Southeastern that are available.

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You can sign up as a student right now if you wanted to, and take liberation theology. And the course, it says, well, it examines all these different sources, but the books that are used are outlined here, if you're watching, you can see.

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One of them is James Cone, the God of the Oppressed. And of course, Anthony Bradley's in there, no surprise, and a few others.

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So this is Strickland. Now, I wanna interpret this for a moment.

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This wasn't a secret. When Strickland talked to the New York Times, he was sharing what he's always said. This should not have been a surprise to anyone, but it was a surprise to some people.

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And that's part of the problem here, is some of the stuff that Kingdom of Adversity is putting out, Intersect is putting out, people just don't know because no one reads it.

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And because no one reads it, they don't realize what's happening in classrooms that some of these guys are affiliated with.

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And so an influential, there's a group of pastors and church leaders that are being influenced by this stuff, and they're gonna go out and influence others.

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So this is important, even though it's a small group and not many of us know what's going on, it's an influencer group that's getting this information.

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Now, I'm gonna withhold my critiques on liberation theology and James Cone. I just want you to know that it's there.

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And I want you to know too, that this is the issue. The issue was never that Strickland had abandoned inerrancy or sufficiency of scripture.

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The issue was always these ideas from Cone come out of a rejection of inerrancy.

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You can't believe the Bible is sufficient and then come up with what Cone came up with. That's been the critique.

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Now, I'm not gonna flesh that out, but that's been the critique. That critique has not really been answered. All that's been, nothing's really been answered.

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All that's been said is, well, I still believe in inerrancy. Well, okay, that's great. But the categories that you're adopting come from a source that doesn't.

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And I'm gonna say this. Someone who says, well, you go to someone who's a free market guy.

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Think of, oh, I don't know, like an economist like Milton Friedman or anyone in the

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Chicago school. You're going to someone who's not a Christian. And so therefore, it's not the same.

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That's apples and oranges. And the reason is, is because we need to look at it in terms of category.

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What categories do scripture give us? Does scripture give us a category for private property? Well, yes, scripture does.

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What about stealing? Well, yes, scripture does. What about the way government shouldn't function? Yeah, scripture gives us these things. And the tradition that's come out of that has been a free market tradition.

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And I mean, we could talk all day, I guess, about what exactly that looks like. But there's a basic structure here that is borne out in the

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Bible. The categories that Cone brings out are foreign to the Bible. And that has been the critique.

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Whether you like it or not, whether you agree with it or not, that hasn't really been answered yet. So maybe

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I could do a program on that sometime, but I just wanted to put that out there because I've seen this.

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A lot of professors were circling the wagons around Strickland. Hey, he answered all the critics. No, he didn't come close to answering them.

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So here's, at least the critics I saw. Here's what James Cone says. I'm just gonna read these to you.

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We'll start with God of the Oppressed, 1975. This is one of the quotes in the book that Strickland assigns.

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Any analysis of the gospel, which did not begin and end with God's liberation of the oppressed, was it's de facto unchristian.

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So if you believe the gospel, but when you share it, it doesn't begin with God liberating the oppressed, that ain't

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Christian. Now, in Cone's idea, the oppressed, this isn't spiritual oppression.

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This isn't, you're gonna go to hell because you've sinned against God. This is the structural oppressions that exist in this world that hold minorities down.

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That's the gospel has to, that's gotta be the beginning and end of the gospel. Now, here's what he says. This is in Black Theology of Liberation, put out in 1970,

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James Cone. See if this is redeemable. See if we can,

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I mean, these are the bones that I think Strickland would wanna spit out, hopefully, but see if this is the kind of guy you want discipling you, which is what

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Strickland said. He's discipleship. This is what Cone does. As the oppressed now recognize their situation in light of God's revelation, they know that they should have killed their oppressors instead of trying to love them.

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The black experience is the feeling one has when attacking the enemy of black humanity by throwing a

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Molotov cocktail into a white owned building and watching it go up in flames. We know, of course, that getting rid of evil takes something more than burning down buildings, but one must start somewhere.

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The true prophet of the gospel of God must become both anti -Christian and unpatriotic. It is impossible to confront a racist society with the meaning of human existence grounded in commitment to the divine without at the same time challenging the very existence of the national structure and all its institutions, especially the established churches.

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All national institutions represent the interests of society as a whole. We live in a nation which is committed to the perpetuation of white supremacy, and it will try to exterminate all who fail to support this ideal.

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Just three more. For too long, Christ has been pictured as the blue -eyed honky. Black theologians are right.

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We need to de -honkify him and thus make him relevant to the black condition. Black theology must realize that the white

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Jesus has no place in black community, and it is our task to destroy him. We must replace him with the black

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Messiah, as Albert Clege would say, a Messiah who sees his existence as inseparable from black liberation under the destruction of white racism, or in the destruction of white racism.

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Certainly, if whites expect to be able to say anything relevant to the self -determination of the black community, it will be necessary for them to destroy their whiteness, to become members of the oppressed community.

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Now, does any of that sound like the kind of man you want to be discipled by? Sounds like a hateful man.

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Sounds like a man that doesn't, I mean, we're talking about the Great Commandment here. Strickland's saying, yeah, you know, Cone is teaching us how to love one another.

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I'm just gonna leave that right there. Now, when you're trying to understand

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Southeastern, I found this helpful. There's two movements, I think, roughly speaking, at work here. You have at Intersect, which is funded by Aquanimia Network, and there's some good things there.

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I'm not saying it's all bad, but this is where I think post -modernism, deconstructionism kind of seep in.

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It's in both, but this is kind of, if I had to tilt it, I'd say that's where that's coming in. And then in Kingdom Diversity, that's where the liberation theology is coming in.

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I'm gonna show you what I mean by that. Now, there were three articles put out in 2016, right after Intersect launched, not too long after, by Amber Bowen, who

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I believe is an adjunct there, and they're all about redeeming so -called deconstructionists, post -modernists, and I'm gonna read you the titles here.

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The first one is called Embracing Death, Redeeming Martin Heidegger. The second one is

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Love the Word, Redeeming Jacques Derrida. The third is Listening to Black Lives Matter, Redeeming Emmanuel Levinas.

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Now, this is a part of a series called the Philosophical Blacklist, and I'd like to suggest these three individuals are on the

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Philosophical Blacklist for a reason, but if you understand why there's an attempt here to redeem them, and what they believed, and what

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Bowen thinks that they are useful for, I think you can understand the rest of this video a little better, and what's happening in evangelicalism, and at Southeastern in particular.

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So, I'm gonna read for you three different quotes from three of these articles. The first one is on Heidegger.

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Now, Heidegger, by the way, apparently later in life, he regretted this.

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I've read secondary sources that say this, but Heidegger was a Nazi, just so you know.

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And I don't know, I haven't seen a primary source. There probably is one where he says that he regrets it, but he's redeemable somehow.

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Donald Trump, as we'll see, and the alt -right, not so redeemable necessarily, but Heidegger, he's redeemable.

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He says that Christians have roundly dismissed, she says, I should say, that Christians have dismissed

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Heidegger's voice, but maybe they have dismantled, dismissed him, there we go, too quickly.

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Perhaps he is not saying something all that different from the writer of Ecclesiastes. So, she's saying Heidegger's just like Solomon.

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Now, Heidegger, his philosophy was, it was interesting. He believed that we went from, he prioritized experience, and he thought that human beings went from this being, this interaction with the world, and sharing in this being to das

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Nicht, which, I pronounced that right in German, the nothing. So, you gotta live for yourself because of das

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Nicht, and that'll give you authenticity. And so, he dismantles these traditional approaches to Western metaphysics and more experiential, more driven by what you encounter.

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Now, his reasons for meditating on death and focusing on death are different than Solomon's.

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He thinks this is kind of all there is. And so, it's just interesting that there's an attempt to revive him somehow, but again, deconstructionist type against traditional approaches of Western metaphysics.

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Then you have Jacques Derrida. Now, she says that Derrida calls out our preference for speech over writing as unfounded.

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He questions our tendency to privilege the immaterial over the material in general. In so doing, he deconstructs an unnecessary hierarchy that even

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Christians have been carrying that has kept us from understanding the gift of the written word. Derrida's claim that there is nothing outside the text helps us affirm there is nothing more sure than the text.

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Now, in my opinion, Derrida destroys hermeneutics, and Derrida is responsible, if you believe this, as this is at the foundation of what's going on there,

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Derrida's responsible for a lot of what is happening, the critical theory that is on the campus of SEBTS.

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Now, Derrida is famous because he said, and this is a translation from French, roughly, no, there's no outside text.

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There's nothing outside the text. And what he means by that is we are constantly interpreting, even as we look at something and examine it, we can't get past our interpretive lens, shaped by our culture and outside circumstances.

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That's just the way it is. There's no objective outside text, deep meaning that we can all find, and that's what the text means.

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No, there is no outside text. All we have is really our experience interacting with the text.

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And that is, I think, what creates the push for multicultural churches, because, hey, we need their other experiences to find out what the text is saying.

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And that's, I think, what gives a lot of the credence to critical theory and taking the majority understanding and challenging it, because truth isn't really what's important in all of this.

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It's the person, the place in which the interpretation is coming from.

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And then last but not least, we have Levinist, Emanuel Levinist, and here's what she says about him.

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When there is a rupture or disturbance in our groups, institutions, or families, we automatically consider it a threat to be removed.

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Sometimes we react through flight, we change our friends, switch churches, disown family members, or even move to the other side of the railroad tracks.

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Other times we react through domination. We make the other, that foreign invader, look and think just like us before we accept him.

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According to Levinist, when we do this, we impose sameness. Don't wanna do that. And consequently, kill the other.

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Both of these reactions to the other are violent and oppressive, and they should be rejected.

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Now, Levinist, he prioritized ethics and thought that when you,

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I think this is where the word space comes from. You're gonna hear this a lot in this video, and at Southeastern you would hear this, white spaces, and so forth.

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When you get into a space with someone, when you interact with them, something transcendent happens, and there's this, it's the otherness, and that's how you can kind of find yourself is in relation to the otherness.

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Sameness doesn't help you. Again, Levinist, Derrida, Heidegger, these guys are considered in the tradition of deconstructionism, postmodernism, and they are on the blacklist for a reason.

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So trying to hitch our wagon to these philosophers is probably not a good idea.

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None of them were Christians, by the way, and their philosophies come from a deconstructionist philosophy.

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Now, you may think, why would I care about any of this? Well, we're almost half an hour into this video, and I'm just kind of laying a foundation here.

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I'm showing you kind of what's going on, but I'm gonna get going here, and I'm gonna show you how this stuff makes its way in to what's being taught at Southeastern.

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I had mentioned to you before that terms like dominate, spaces, survival, that's kind of Foucault, power is knowledge, but the postmodern hermeneutic, terms like voices, contextualize, fear, listening, conversation, these are applied kind of in the sense that Derrida would think.

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There's no outside text. We need all these voices. We need to be listening. We need to contextualize. We shouldn't have fear of others, and maybe the fear could be

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Levinist as well. So fear, listening, spaces, you hear the word spaces a lot.

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That's Levinist speaking. You know, there's these spaces that we're supposed to be, that's how we find transcendence, is looking into each other, having experience with one another, and the space is important for that.

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So if you want to understand more about that, you're gonna have to read these philosophers.

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I think once you understand them, you're gonna better be able to understand what's going on, but there's a lot of these terms,

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I think, go over our heads, especially those in the old guard. I mean, they haven't studied postmodernists.

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Why would they? So when these terms are now being used, it just, it sounds vague.

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You know, they don't get it. Otherness is another word. Oh, you know, we don't wanna treat, we don't otherize someone, and otherizing someone, well, it sounds like a bad thing, but what is it?

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So, you know, it's funny that, you know, liberals sometimes will accuse conservatives, it's a dog whistle.

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They come up with that term. I don't think conservatives came up with that. It's a dog whistle. You're trying to signal to all the racists that, you know, you want them to vote for you,

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Trump, or whatever, and it's like conservatives, they tend to just mean what they say, say what they mean. I find the dog whistle much more in these conversations where only those who are familiar with this philosophy are gonna understand what's being said, but it'll just be said.

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I can think, I'm not gonna say names, but I can think of prominent Southern Baptists who are steeped in this, who will even in sermons to just, you know, regular congregation, they'll start using these terms and not really defining them, and it just either sounds good or bad, but people don't really know, and so I'm giving you a little bit of a beginning or telling you where to look if you wanna know what this stuff means.

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Now, moving forward here, the postmodern ethic shows up in what's being said at Southeastern, and the idea is that experience is what influences or determines truth.

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There's this relationship between the two, and I'm gonna read you some quotes that prove this, and I'm not gonna bother to tell you who all these people are.

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They're all associated with Southeastern. I don't wanna make this video too long, and I'm not gonna bother to tell you where they came from.

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All the links are in the PDF in the info section. You can find everything I'm referencing pretty much, so experience determines truth.

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Elders can speak with their black congregants and other people groups to get their perspectives. So that's important to get these other perspectives.

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Why would that be important? Well, I mean, I could think of reasons maybe sometimes, but in the, well, again, I'm going to the context here.

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They have something profitable to say about biblical interpretation, theology, so forth. For some of us, listening to minority voices can be more difficult than others.

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Some live in all -white communities. So we have to do it. It's necessary. We have to listen if we wanna understand theology or walk with God.

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Again, this is a seminary. Remember, this is a seminary, so that's their purpose. The black church, being sociologically shaped by segregation, needs to take the same doctrine and tilt to different concerns than, let's say, a white person.

29:46

Either that's very sloppy or that's borderline. We're getting into heresy. I don't know, but we need to take this doctrine, and we just need to tilt it.

29:55

What is that, change it? What does that mean? Apply it differently? Hopefully that's what it means, but because there's different concerns than, let's say, a white person, because remember, sociology is coming in here because of the experience of this community.

30:09

There was a lecture on global theology which really bore this out. Dr. Walter Strickland was interviewing

30:17

Fabini Anderson, and here's some of the quotes from that. Every theology is a contextual theology, insofar as it arises from a specific community and also is designed to address the needs of that community.

30:30

Scripture speaks more directly to non -Western contexts for several factors, which is why non -Western contexts are actually more literal.

30:37

This is key. They're more literal biblical interpreters because suffice it to say, non -Western countries identify more closely with the social and economic realities portrayed in the pages of Scripture.

30:48

In addition, the political environments, including poverty, debt, and famine, and urban crisis, racial struggle, persecution, brutality, or distrust of the social order are all ways in which those in non -Western world can read the

31:00

Bible and identify with the people in the pages more literally than Western readers. Now, catch this. Catch what

31:06

I just read. Think about that, please. If you have to pause the video, this is crucial. People in non -Western contexts are more literal biblical interpreters because of their experience.

31:18

Political, racial struggle, supposedly, right? That's outside of, I guess, the

31:23

West. So they're better biblical interpreters. They're more literal biblical interpreters.

31:29

Well, what does it mean to be a literal biblical interpreter? Commonly, we would think of that.

31:35

I mean, every layman hearing this would probably think, well, yeah, you mean it's authorial intent. You mean what it says?

31:40

It said something to the original audience. We're gonna be literal about that. It's not just all figurative. And this is taking the word literal, and it's redefining it.

31:48

They read the Bible and identify with the people in the pages more literally. So because they have a shared experience, supposedly, they're able to find a deeper meaning within the text, a meaning that cannot be found if you are someone who is in a

32:05

Western context. So if we want to know the deeper meaning of Scripture, what it really means literally, we have to have an experience.

32:13

And non -Western people, they have that experience. Look at how dangerous this is. I mean, this destroys the idea that Scripture is clear and that you can come to it from, it's made for all people from any context.

32:24

This just destroys it, unravels it. This is in the same podcast here.

32:30

Christians who are well -intended in their desire of protecting the text from misrepresentation, misinterpretation rather, read the

32:37

Bible so objectively that they, because they cannot escape their own cultural trappings, assume their own cultural realities into this reality of inerrancy.

32:45

And then we come up with very simplistic readings of the text. And this is academic, or they're simplistic. Don't really understand the deep meanings.

32:53

Again, it's that deep meaning of Scripture we gotta get to. And we're chained by our experiences.

33:00

Our cultural trappings chain us so that we cannot get at that meaning. That's what's being said. This simplistic reading, or this sort of Scottish common sense realism, and it's the result of Francis Bacon, it's scientific.

33:13

Charles Hodge, he's the problem. That's not good. This is the idea of, this common sense thing.

33:20

Gotta get rid of that. This is kicking Western tradition to the side, and it's also destroying with it the idea of, this is why this will unravel the conservative resurgence.

33:29

And it's on the campus of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. I can't share the personal experiences because there's no chapter and verse, but I've been told that in classes, certain classes, yes.

33:41

There's some professors that are fighting back, by the way. I don't wanna give the impression that everyone's like this, but the administration, those who are in control, they are pushing this stuff, and it's very caustic.

33:54

I think many Western readers of the Bible are a little hesitant to consider the voice of our global brothers and sisters because we have this fear of relativism.

34:01

Yeah, yeah, we should. A fear of placing the authority away from the text and into the communities in which the theology is being done.

34:10

This idea that theology, you gotta do theology. When they say that, they don't mean the same thing you think. When you think we gotta do theology, you think we gotta sit down, we gotta figure out what did the author mean.

34:20

We're gonna put in some long hours to do so, right? Is that what you think, Pastor? When they talk about doing theology, that's not exactly what they're saying.

34:28

They're saying, and you hear that term a lot, doing theology is putting it, is contextualizing it.

34:36

So there's this kind of application, interpretation, kind of blurred lines here.

34:43

And corporate, this is within culture context. I think what we have done is we have elevated our own interpretations to protect the text itself.

34:52

So that's the accusation against people who would try to interpret according to what she would call a common sense, which

34:59

I would just call a grammatical historical hermeneutic. It is, this destroys grammatical historical hermeneutics, plain and simple.

35:07

Now, some of you may remember, I'm bringing this up again. Danny Akin had tweeted out, this was about a month ago.

35:14

Hey, I love this article. Everyone, read this article that came out.

35:19

You will be glad you did. It's called Black and Evangelical. And one of the quotes in it said, personal and cultural experiences create lenses that are essential to the discovery of objective truths.

35:32

I'll read it again. Personal and cultural experiences create lenses that are essential to discovery of objective truths.

35:42

This is the idea that I've been talking about. There is no outside text. Derrida, that's his ghost haunting us right now.

35:52

It destroys objectivity. And I had put this out there and I said, look, you gotta choose whether you're gonna believe in errancy or you're gonna believe this.

36:02

You know, choose one, pick something. And people were angry at me that I had said this and going after Danny Akin.

36:09

I'm just quoting him. And hopefully if you understand the philosophical underpinnings of this, you understand how much of an acid this really is.

36:19

It was a big deal when he put that out there, but it was no different than what's being said at the seminary. So this was nothing new.

36:26

But if you don't understand the philosophical categories, it goes over your head or under your head or side your head somewhere.

36:34

It's not caught. Now, if this is true, if we really do need to understand other cultures because they have the deeper meaning, then well, we need multiculturalism, right?

36:44

So here's what is happening on campus in regard to multiculturalism. Cultural differences exist between peoples and that one culture is not necessarily better or worse than another.

36:53

So hey, Western culture is not better, just equal. As my university presented opportunities, this is someone's personal testimony here.

37:01

And this is in the 10 books you should read for Black History Month by Brittany Salmon.

37:07

God slowly opened my eyes to a layer in our social framework that I had never seen before. Since then, I have attended conferences on multiculturalism and diversity.

37:15

I've been a part of a church that is pursuing, diversifying its staff and congregations in order to better reflect the community.

37:22

Now, some of you have probably wondered out there, well, why are they, what's this whole, like we have to have revelation, every tribe, tongue, and nation.

37:29

I mean, they take that out of context because separate tribe, tongue, and nations, right? And the point of the text isn't even trying to diversify your church, but they'll use that and they'll say, we gotta diversify the church.

37:43

If it's necessary to get at the deeper meaning of a text, to understand it, well, you need these perspectives. They're essential, right?

37:50

So that's why there's this push and why it's so important to have these. Now, this is what

37:56

I'm revealing. This is not on the website. Well, it's on the website if you are a certain minority status.

38:02

This was sent to me by someone at the school who, well, obviously they are a minority or they wouldn't have seen this.

38:09

And what they told me was, if you are a student there and you're applying and you want financial aid and you put in that you are a minority, it'll take you to this page.

38:18

I want you to look long and hard at this. This is a big deal. I've thought for the longest time that the

38:24

Kingdom Diversity Initiative at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary was just affirmative action.

38:32

That's not what it is. It's not just what it is. It may be part of it. It is not just giving scholarships to students who are female or of a different minority status, ethnically speaking.

38:47

They are after particular students within those groups.

38:55

And you know this because here's the questions. If you want to get this money, you have to fill out this questionnaire.

39:00

Here's some of the questions. How have you recently, this is question two.

39:08

How have you recently promoted multiculturalism in your church or educational context? It's not enough to be black or Chinese or anything else.

39:17

It's not enough to be a minority. That's not what this is about. You have to have promoted multiculturalism in your church or educational context to get this.

39:29

You have to, let's see. In what ways could you contribute to fostering a multiracial and cultural community at Southeastern?

39:37

Well, I thought if you're a minority, aren't you already doing that? Nope, you gotta go the extra step.

39:42

You gotta explain how you're, you gotta do something. So they're looking for people to, that fit this bill, that are pushing their agenda.

39:54

It's not just being a minority. You gotta push this multiculturalism agenda. And the scholarship here that you can get is called the

40:01

Aiken, Aiken, named after Danny Aiken, I assume, Ethnic Kingdom Diversity Aid Fund, along with the

40:07

Kingdom Diversity African American and Hispanic Aid Fund. So this is what's going on in Aiken's name at Southeastern.

40:15

This is not just tucked away in the Kingdom Diversity. Aiken's name is on this, the president. And you have to prove your multiculturalism street cred if you want to get money here.

40:26

So this is somewhat merit -based. This isn't just because of, again, I don't wanna beat a dead horse, but I think this is fairly significant because it shows this isn't just affirmative action going on.

40:40

So that is new information. Now, I'm gonna move on here. Another thing, if you're gonna push multiculturalism is you need a diversified library.

40:49

It's not enough to just have all these old white guys, theologians from the Western tradition. You gotta have more than that, right? So here's a quote.

40:57

I think the needs to have a missiological disposition to go in and find these voices that are drastically underrepresented ideologically.

41:06

Representation matters. The voices and insight of black women are vital. Faith leaders of color need to be rediscovered.

41:13

And here's the books that are recommended. It's one of the 10 most read Intersect articles in 2018. And you can look through this list.

41:21

If you're listening, I'll mention a few. The New Jim Crow sociological book. Also, Why Are All the

41:26

Black Kids Sitting Together sociological book. You need to put those in your library. The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, which apparently has strong language, but that's on there.

41:38

And there's a bunch more. In another blog post by Lanny Anderson called

41:43

The Seven Steps to Take Toward Racial Reconciliation, it says, think about the authors of the books you read.

41:50

Evaluate what podcasts, music, and media you consume. This is especially necessary for the Christian's spiritual formation.

41:55

Can't be spiritually formed unless you have these authors that are minority voices in the context of the article.

42:03

And she also says, you gotta read Divided by Faith by Michael O. Emerson and Christian Smith. So sociology coming in.

42:10

Gotta diversify your library. Now here's part of the Kingdom Diversity Initiative missions, this is their philosophy of education.

42:18

And they put this out there a couple months before they did a series on critical race theory. I'm gonna quote, this is from their philosophy of education.

42:27

They are giving voices, here we go, to underrepresented, misinterpreted, and ignored minorities.

42:35

The KDI sponsors a range of informal and formal events to expose students to a wide range of voices whose influence, whether through absence or presence, has shaped how

42:44

Christians in general, and Southern Baptists in particular, understand the gospel and its implications. This approach means we engage voices with whom we do not and should not agree entirely.

42:53

So again, this is a point that I'm making throughout this, and I want you to keep hearing this. Redeemable, there's voices that are redeemable out there.

43:01

We don't agree with their theology, but we gotta use them, we gotta use them. Christians need a nuanced grasp of how their faith has been used to paradoxically, to justify and abolish slavery, to withhold and champion civil rights, to perpetuate battle racism, et cetera, et cetera.

43:17

Empower women is part of that, subjugate and empower women. So this is what Kingdom Diversity is doing.

43:22

They're taking these voices that have been, they've been given minority status, they haven't been heard enough, and we're gonna make them heard.

43:30

And we're gonna show you what these other voices, even if they're not theologically sound, you need to hear them, why?

43:38

For the sole reason that they've been underrepresented. That's the sole reason.

43:45

That's the new ethic. If it's underrepresented, it must be good. And that's another dangerous thing,

43:52

I think. Using that as your criteria, that's gonna be an acid that starts eating things because the bigger that gets, that criteria, just, well, it's an underrepresented voice.

44:05

You know, it needs to be heard. The other criteria, theological criteria for evaluating a source, those kinds of things are going to wane.

44:13

And I think we're starting to see that. That's what we see with the cone stuff. Now, I'm going to really bring this point home that I've been making.

44:25

Jay -Z is redeemable. He's a type of King David, by the way. I don't know if you knew that. Jay -Z's just like King David.

44:30

Whole article written about that. And here we go, Malcolm X, obviously.

44:37

And we know Martin Luther King Jr., totally redeemable. And there's good things about some of these guys.

44:44

I'm not saying there's not, but like Martin Luther King, the thing he's most famously known for, I think, would contradict a lot of what's being said at Kingdom Diversity because judging someone by the content of their character isn't what they're doing as much, it doesn't seem.

44:56

But, you know, but again, Martin Luther King Jr., his plagiarizing and his cheating on his wife and the heresy that he believed.

45:07

I mean, they'll take him. He's redeemable. We'll platform him.

45:13

Malcolm X, another guy, he's redeemable. All those postmodernists that I talked about, redeemable. Guess who's not redeemable?

45:19

Here's the point that I wanna make. The alt -right is not redeemable, not one bit.

45:26

There's a article here by Bruce Ashford on the alt -right. Yep, nope, no gospel there, can't redeem the alt -right.

45:33

And I'm not gonna necessarily argue with that, but I'm showing the hypocrisy here, which I think is what

45:38

Jesus did a little bit, right? He liked to show, okay, this is what Pharisees said they did and they heaped all these burdens on people and what they needed to do that were extra biblical, gotta diversify your library, being, you know, one example that I've already brought up.

45:53

But then, you know, there's contradictions here. We gotta diversify by reading all these guys, some of them heretics, but no, alt -right, not good.

46:02

Confederate soldiers, nope, not, that's not good. Can't have that, can't have monuments. And here's a resolution.

46:09

Keith Whitfield was part of it. I thought Ashford was part of that too, but a statement made to condemn the alt -right.

46:16

We've gotta have him make a statement, get everyone to sign it, not good. And Donald Trump, of course. Donald Trump, he is not a good guy.

46:23

And here's some quotes on that. Michael Emerson says, this is from a podcast, that the election itself was the single most harmful, the single most harmful event, the election, 2016, to the whole movement of reconciliation in at least the past 30 years.

46:43

So racial reconciliation, nope, the election changed all that. Here's the

46:48

BDN Wibley. This was, you know, he didn't just preach in chapel. This was on the Intersect website. They took the transcript and they made an article.

46:56

He says, as evangelical preachers and Christians have all but lost any categories for actual moral uprightness, integrity, equity, righteousness, and justice, we don't have to look any farther than the evangelical attachment to our current president.

47:08

So that's Donald Trump. The willingness of evangelicals to defend him without qualification.

47:14

Now, I kind of agree with some of what he's saying, but again, they're saying these guys are irredeemable, or at least what they're saying is we condemn this, but we're going to uphold this other heretical stuff.

47:26

But this stuff, no good. Here's another, now, this is an interesting one. Danny Akin had tweeted out.

47:32

If you're watching, you see that tweet. He said, you know, the lingering effects of lynching, which is a library talk at Southeastern.

47:38

He said, it's good. He said, it was a fine panel discussion. What did they say in that panel discussion?

47:44

One of the things they said was, here's a quote. This is from Dr. Donald Matthews. We got a president who cannot rule this country without vilifying brown people at the border with these caravans, these hordes.

47:54

All these are code words related to lynching. So Donald Trump is using code words related to lynching.

48:01

Here's another one. I'm getting tired of meeting white people who say, by the way, I didn't vote for Trump. I'm one of the nice white people.

48:08

Yeah, it's no good. You're white, so it doesn't matter if you didn't vote for Trump. This shows the hypocrisy that's out there.

48:18

We'll grandstand and celebrate and hold events and write books and articles about men who were heretics and who were not morally upright.

48:29

Heidegger was a Nazi at one point. I don't know how that makes the cut. But if they have ideas that we like, we'll take those ideas.

48:38

They're redeemable. Even though the ideas that they had did not originate from scripture, which is the issue from the beginning.

48:44

It's not that non -Christian can't have good ideas. They use the plundering of the Egyptians line a lot, and Francis Schaeffer used that.

48:51

Hey, we can take some good things. That's true. We can take some good things. But it's the source of those good things.

48:57

What's the originating philosophy that they come out of? A non -Christian can have some good ideas that are in contradiction with their basic worldview, and we can take those ideas.

49:08

But when it's inconsistent with their worldview, and it's a non -Christian worldview, then how does that work?

49:14

That's what's going on here. But yet, here's the list of those things that are not redeemable.

49:22

It's kind of arbitrary, isn't it? There's really no way to distinguish why these guys, this set of people, they're redeemable, this group, and then this group is not.

49:38

Now, one of the things that you have to believe in in order for the Neo -Marxist stuff, and the critical theory, and the liberation theology to work is you have to believe there's an ethnic division.

49:47

Southeastern has plenty of articles about this. Here's, I'm gonna read a few, just a few quotes. There's some sort of chasm seemed to open between me and my white brothers and sisters in Christ.

49:57

There's a chasm there, and she's talking about the Trayvon Martin and Colin Kaepernick stuff, and when that happened, well, she was different.

50:02

She realized, she was concerned, they weren't. Here's another one. This is crazy to me.

50:09

There's a professor at Southeastern. You probably should not adopt a non -white kid.

50:14

I think white folks struggle with guilt. It might be much worse for a young black child if you were to bring them in the middle of a context in which they're never going to have any interaction with any other black folks, because that means something in the

50:27

United States. Because that means something in the United States, and you have to be very hesitant and circumspect about adopting across those racial lines.

50:38

So there's racial lines, and you should not, as a white person, adopt a minority. Because you know what?

50:44

You're doing it just because you're guilty. That's what he's saying. You feel guilty because you're looking at that box and you wanna check off that you're willing to adopt someone who's non -white, but you're just doing that, not out of the goodness of your heart, because you're guilty.

50:55

And you probably shouldn't do it, because it's making them suffer if they don't get to be with people, more people of their own skin color.

51:02

I mean, this is ridiculous. I hope people just see this for what it is. I shouldn't even have to explain why this is ridiculous.

51:09

Here's another one. Colorblind theology and not making racial categories reinforces whiteness and white supremacy.

51:15

So if you have colorblind theology with, by the way, I don't know how Martin Luther King Jr. did not, in his most famous statement, at least, judging people by the content of their character.

51:24

If that's what you do, colorblind, you don't see race. You just judge someone based on their character.

51:30

Well, that is just the way that white supremacy moves forward. You're just giving them cover.

51:36

The other thing you have to believe is that race is a social construct. So you have to learn about the creation of race as a social contract, direct quote.

51:45

To understand race is not to understand anything about the biological realities of skin color.

51:50

This is where people get confused, by the way. But to understand how specific values, characteristics, and narratives have become associated with different colors in different contexts over time.

51:58

Race is nurture, not nature. Listen to that. Race is nurture, not nature. So I wonder, what about the white guy adopting the black kid?

52:06

I mean, are they a white person now that, you know, if he raises them in white culture, do they be this black kid?

52:12

Are they, I mean, I don't, this stuff just contradicts itself left and right, though. Whiteness is not primarily about the color of one's skin.

52:19

Whiteness is a system of values, characteristics, and narratives that have been assigned to a lighter skin. So let me try to at least explain this.

52:27

I'm not gonna either, I'm not gonna show why it's wrong. I'm just gonna explain it. What's being said there is that if you're a certain ethnicity it's, they're talking about culture, really.

52:39

They're saying that the cultures associated with that ethnicity are, that's what the label is.

52:45

So if you're white, whiteness, that's the culture. It's not a skin color.

52:50

But yet then they'll turn around and they'll treat it like a skin color. Like in the previous example about adoption. So I don't know how they sustain that, but that's one of the things, the core tenets of this woke movement.

53:04

Now, it says if you're going to have any value to the institution, so we're talking about white spaces and churches, in the first place you've got to be conversing with your own culture.

53:17

You cannot be totally cut off from your own culture and just be like an Oreo. And this is from Dr. Carl Ellis in a conversation with Walter Strickland.

53:24

He's telling black preachers, hey, or people that would go to the academy, you can't be an

53:30

Oreo. You can't cut yourself off. You can't just be within the white space. That's bad, really bad. Another thing that a fundamental belief here is

53:39

America is characterized by bigotry. Bunch of blogs that talk about this. Here's a few quotes.

53:45

This is all from Southeastern. Since white American culture is rooted in racism, liberation theology helps eradicate that which is culturally sinful and creates division in the body of Christ.

53:57

We are not the most incarcerated country by accident or because we're so bad, we're just worse than anyone else. Okay. I also know that the very real struggle of black people in America, I felt the awkward feeling when something is stolen from a coworker and I'm the first person everyone looks at.

54:15

Determining a person's worth based on the choices he or she has made in life is a huge pitfall for American Christians operating under a strong allegiance to the

54:24

American dream than the gospel. By the way, the trashing of the American dream, I think led to a lot of this stuff. That was going on when

54:30

I was there. American dream is bad and this is still going on. And I think that kind of helped usher the woke stuff in, but I continue.

54:38

We look with pharisaical disdain at the homeless people on the side of the road. They brought their condition on themselves.

54:48

We're certain about that and are therefore beneath our care and our respect. We do the same for the high school girl who gets pregnant and out of wedlock, or the middle -aged man suffering from AIDS.

54:56

We position ourselves to aid in the reaping of what we presume they have sown. Man, the finger is pointing at us

55:03

American Christians, isn't it? This is what we are, apparently. You have likely received a whitewashed view of history from grade school and college.

55:11

By whitewashed, I mean that you mainly learned about the history of white Americans as told through the perspective of white Americans.

55:18

So you gotta have the history told from the perspective of the minority. That's the solution.

55:24

When we fail to, again, I'm gonna just comment real briefly here, because I'm a history guy. This is what destroys truth and this deconstructionism when it comes to history, because it's not about finding out what happened.

55:36

It's not about that. It's about the perspective, because remember, knowledge is power. So if you have a narrative that you want to teach or a story you want people to know, it's what perspective is it coming from rather than, well, is it true?

55:53

So the first question that these guys are asking is, well, who's telling the story? Is it the oppressor? Because then we gotta reject it.

56:00

We can only accept it if it's from the minority, the oppressed. That's postmodernism for you.

56:09

When we fail to do justice, the good life becomes little more than a baptized version of the American dream. Many Americans believe that the solution to the persistence of racism moving forward was to adopt a colorblind theology of race.

56:21

There's that evil colorblind theology. When one does not fix a 400 -year -old problem by closing one's eyes and pretending it is no longer relevant.

56:28

So that's what colorblind people are doing. They just pretend, yeah, slavery never happened. That's what they're saying.

56:35

Now, here's another core tenant of the woke theology. You need to believe in systematic injustice.

56:41

It is time we consider the embedded system of systematic racism in our society. That's unfair sentencing within courts, biased hiring practices, racial zoning, and land use all point to larger structural issues.

56:52

Systems of oppression that are still plaguing black communities still currently. If the concept of systematic injustice or institutional racism is new to you, do not dismiss it.

57:02

So these are all quotes from different articles and podcasts. Moving on to more quotes. There's things that presently are set up that continue to marginalize and disenfranchise people and the systems that are currently in place and the prejudiced ideologies that people have within our sphere of influence, continue to be advocates of change within our churches and friend groups, but also being advocates of change from a structural, so word structure, systems, and maybe political.

57:28

Let's see here, I'm skimming. We can't miss opportunities to continue to put a stake in it and not allow for white supremacy or any type of racial superiority to reign, especially in the church where Jesus reigns.

57:40

So systematic injustice, structural, deck is stacked against someone because the system's against them, the structure's against them, that's white supremacy.

57:50

And we gotta drive a stake through it. And this is happening currently, by the way. New and more insidious forms of racism, so mass incarceration, broken window policing, tearing down social safety nets, where the legislative and judicial action carried out under the banner of colorblindness.

58:08

There's that boogeyman. So colorblindness is where we started having mass incarceration. I don't even know where these people come up with some of this stuff.

58:16

I mean, I understand the philosophical underpinnings to a degree, but some of it, the idea that colorblindness is to blame for all this stuff,

58:24

I think what they're saying, and this is just, this is my interpretation to try to make this understandable, is that colorblindness is a scapegoat.

58:32

So we're gonna do all these horrible things where there's systematic injustice, but then if we just bury our heads in the sand and we're colorblind, and we just say, well,

58:40

I'm not gonna look at these demographics, I'm not gonna look at the poverty gap or whatever, then, and then who's being incarcerated, then

58:47

I'm just aiding and abetting because I'm not confronting the problem. I think that's what they're saying. A weak theology of repentance remains focused on individual's transgressions, not systematic or societal transgressions.

59:00

Now listen to this, this is really important. This is really key. Applying the word repentance to American society at large shifts this act from individual to societal and jumpstarts expanding the

59:09

Christian's view on the scope that actions can demonstrate repentance. A correct application will also actively, here it goes, tear down the structures of ethnocentricity in Christianity as the church seeks to repair the damage done from the sinful construct of race.

59:25

Now, why did I say that was key? The reason that is key is because they're saying, this is where you start to get this language in there that, well, you're just not repentant.

59:36

You just, you're saying, I didn't do anything. Well, you know, my parents didn't own slaves.

59:41

I'm not guilty. Why are you, well, you're just not repentant. And that's, and you've heard this probably before if you've ever said that.

59:49

You'll be met with the idea that, well, you just need to repent and there's no argument for it. It's just, that's just the way it is.

59:56

You're a benefactor of these systems of oppression. It doesn't matter if your parents owned slaves. So there's gonna be some more quotes

01:00:04

I think I have on that. Anti -white, that's another part of this. You gotta be against white.

01:00:10

I'm not calling this the race issue. I'm calling this the anti -white issue because these are the things being said.

01:00:15

My interests is that the white Christian response, my interest is the, here we go. This is from the lynching seminar.

01:00:21

My interest is the white Christian response. Lynching is a crime done by Christians against other Christians in America.

01:00:26

It is, I think, America's original sin. America needed lynching. Lynching is terrorism.

01:00:33

And listen to this. There is an uncanny exact correlation between the rate of capital punishment in North Carolina and the rate of lynching in North Carolina.

01:00:41

So they're saying capital punishment is the modern form of lynching. Okay. So to me, lynching is not only a psychological trauma, it's theological.

01:00:49

You gotta read James Cone's The Cross and the Lynching Tree. Jesus Christ was a victim of torture, death by the government.

01:00:55

So he's, you know, that's how the gospel fits into this, I guess. And so this is interesting.

01:01:01

He says, as a white aging preacher, the thing that interests me, where do preachers get the divine authorization to speak up, to confess our complicity in our sin, and then to push our people to the point of saying, let's see if Jesus Christ is the son of God, the savior of the world.

01:01:16

Can he save people who live in a land so deeply embedded in lynching? And this is a question.

01:01:23

It's a question. And that's the saddest part of this whole thing. That's not a statement that Jesus Christ can save his people from sin.

01:01:33

It's a question. Can he save people who live in a land so deeply embedded in lynching? You see how this tampers with the gospel.

01:01:42

This is from an event that Danny Akin said was a fine event. All right, there you go.

01:01:49

Whites have always felt threatened by blacks. The whites have created the threat. So it's anti -white.

01:01:55

Some more anti -white stuff. Dr. Carl Ellis says the only way I could survive in a situation in evangelical culture is by being totally assimilational to white culture.

01:02:05

And I can't say I'm thriving if I do that because someone's gonna call me the N -word eventually. White brothers and sisters, we must repent of our silence and lack of participation in racial reconciliation and restoration within the body of Christ.

01:02:17

I'm gonna explain what racial reconciliation means in a minute. These fugitives of slave laws, they were set up to keep

01:02:24

African -Americans enslaved and they're what become our prison system.

01:02:32

And this is such a telling quote. In this kind of life of fear, waiting on the moment when they make a quote unquote misstep in the eyes of the white man and then being hurt because of it and being beaten at times, being killed for petty crimes.

01:02:46

And I say crimes with air quotes with it. So they're saying, you know what, nothing's changed. The prison system is just where slavery is happening right now.

01:02:54

And it's the eyes of the white man, just wow, wow.

01:03:00

A lot of white men, especially seminarians need to die to the idea of pastoring a multi -ethnic church. Oh guys, this one drives me crazy.

01:03:11

This is from a theological language in ethnocentrism. I'm sorry, this one was from Cortland Perkins interviewing

01:03:19

Jason Cook in multi -ethnic churches, challenges and joys. There we go. And I think it's

01:03:25

Jason Cook that says it, but it's one of them. They say a lot of white men, especially seminarians need to die to this idea.

01:03:31

So if you're white, forget about pastoring a multi -ethnic church, not gonna happen, can't do it. I don't know how this is not racism.

01:03:38

I don't know how they escape this. If you just say, use the word black or any other color and you're gonna be a

01:03:46

Klansman. But somehow they get away with saying this. Here's some more.

01:03:52

The multi -ethnic church in America can expose the white ethnocentric terms that have supported white supremacy over the decades.

01:03:58

So that's what we need to do. That's the goal of the multi -ethnic church, exposing white supremacy. Here's Cortland Perkins interviewing

01:04:07

Professor William Branch. He says, so I went to an evangelical institution and it happened to be predominantly white.

01:04:12

So I went, but I was so hungry for the core. I didn't mind enduring the white. And this is, I think he's a rap artist and is hungry for the core.

01:04:22

What he's saying there is that he's enduring the white. Endure it, something to be endured.

01:04:28

You see how unredeemable this is. We can redeem critical theory. We can redeem postmodernism and James Cone and Malcolm X, but you cannot redeem whiteness apparently because it's something to be endured.

01:04:44

And he was hungry for the core. The core is his culture. He was hungry and he needed that. So he had to grit his teeth and get through.

01:04:52

There's a lot of Christian guilt. Here's two quotes for you. There's a long history of the church's complicity in racial injustice issues.

01:05:01

And then you have people who have enjoyed power and privilege in the modern church setting. Anything that threatens that power is seen outside the bounds of orthodoxy when whiteness is decentered.

01:05:12

So the church, people in the church are so guilty because this is how this stuff progresses.

01:05:18

You understand these core things like there's systematic injustice and America's this horrible place and look what

01:05:25

Trump's doing. And you get the philosophy, the critical theory, and then you heap on the guilt.

01:05:31

If you're part of the church, if you're part of America, if you voted for Trump, if you're white, you have an insane amount of guilt.

01:05:37

The intersectionality works both ways. The intersectionality for someone who is a minority and has been oppressed and maybe they're a single black woman with a left hand, they're left -handed and let's say they are introverted.

01:05:51

Okay, wow, they're really oppressed. That's kind of like, they have a unique form of oppression against them.

01:05:56

That's intersectionality. But if you're a Christian white male who voted, let's say, as a

01:06:01

Republican, and maybe you love your history, you're going to have a difficult time because the intersections now are working against you in every single way.

01:06:14

So intersectionality goes both directions. So heaping on the guilt, that helps motivate people to take action.

01:06:21

Now here's the action. Here's how it works. Now we're getting down to the application. You understand everything that I just brought up, right?

01:06:27

This Southeastern students, yep, we got it. We've heard this. So what are you going to do about it? Well, first thing is, we're going to redefine the pro -life movement.

01:06:35

And what better way to get this ball rolling than to hijack the pro -life movement? This is

01:06:41

Tavedian Wibley. He says, it's not Southeastern. God is pro -life from womb to tomb. Christian advocacy is not about what the

01:06:47

Christian wants, but about the destitute and what they need. So pro -life movement is not just about saving the babies being murdered right now.

01:06:55

It's about poverty. It's about other things. Here's from Amber Bowen on the

01:07:00

Human Value and Pro -Life Ethic. She says, and this is a book, by the way, that The Intersect, which is paid for by the

01:07:07

Aquinumia Network. This is a book that they give out for free. It's a free ebook. You can go on the website. Again, all the links in the info section in that PDF.

01:07:17

And it's Christian Voices of the Cultural Moment. And it's an essay by Southeastern women on various things. And Amber Bowen, she says that being a voice for the unborn is not a significant part.

01:07:28

That issue alone does not encompass the whole of being pro -life. We must address a child with special needs, a wayward teenager bent on ruining her life, orphans, the homeless, refugees, immigrants, minorities, the elderly.

01:07:39

So that's what being pro -life is. And so that's where you get away with this kind of stuff. This is an exchange

01:07:45

I had with Danny Akin about a month ago. Danny Akin liked a tweet. The tweet said, for those on the anti -social justice train,

01:07:51

I have one plea. Please be consistent in your stance. Don't preach a single sermon on pro -life. You can't say you're against social justice and then a la carte your social justice issues.

01:08:00

So I said, Danny Akin, why did you? I said, so if you're not in agreement with social justice, you shouldn't preach against abortion.

01:08:08

Danny Akin, I'd love for this to be clarified. And Danny Akin gets back to me.

01:08:13

He says, thank you, John. I believe we should be guided by the great commandments and the great commission and the biblical categories of justice.

01:08:19

Article 15 of the Baptist Faith in the Message provides a good summary of social concerns that Christians should address.

01:08:24

For me, abortion is at the top of the list. And so this is where Danny Akin in this got into the same kind of,

01:08:35

I think it's a trap basically, but expanding this definition of pro -life to mean something that it did not mean originally and using it as a hammer by which to bash anyone who, maybe someone thinks that there's a better way to deal with the crime in the inner city.

01:08:55

Or maybe they think that welfare maybe is not such a good thing. We need to get rid of that or quotas aren't good or for whatever reason, or redistribution is not good.

01:09:05

Whatever the case may be, it's a way to hammer those people and say, well, you're not pro -life because pro -life is being absolutely redefined.

01:09:15

Now here's what racial reconciliation means. This is the telos, right?

01:09:21

This is where this is all going. The goal, the achievement, what we're supposed to do is accomplish racial reconciliation.

01:09:29

And by the way, there's other stuff at play here too. But this is, I've been talking most about the race issue because that's what Southeastern talks about mostly.

01:09:35

They talk about other stuff. I'm gonna show that. But if you're concerned about this, this is what you need to do. Now, what is racial reconciliation?

01:09:41

Well, here's a few quotes for you. When you're a black person dominated by the majority culture, you have to learn the majority culture for your own survival.

01:09:48

They don't have to learn the minority culture because it's not a matter of survival. Well, without you learning the minority culture, you won't have reconciliation either.

01:09:57

So one of the things you have to do if you want racial reconciliation is you have to learn the minority culture. I feel like some people are like, whoa, whoa, whoa, what does that history have to do with me right now?

01:10:06

I was not there in that history. I did not commit those atrocities. My family was not involved in that. What do I have to repent for something that they did over there back then?

01:10:15

I think fundamentally the question is incorrect. I think that question has an incorrect interpretation of repentance.

01:10:21

I think when you ask the question, why do I need to repent for something they did means that you are looking at repentance in a way that centers you and your individual current story rather than centering

01:10:34

Christ and his work. So again, the hammer, just repent. You just gotta repent. There's no, you didn't do anything.

01:10:42

You had no, the interesting thing to me about this, and I've never heard a good response is

01:10:48

Ezekiel 18, 20, the soul that sins that shall die, son shall not bear what the father did and the grandfather.

01:10:55

I don't understand how in the world they get around that. I've never heard a good explanation at least for it.

01:11:02

And that should clue you into something here. These guys who came up, the way they justify these categories,

01:11:10

James Cone, hey, systematic injustice, these categories arise in non -Christian context.

01:11:16

It's not a Christian idea. Ezekiel 18 is against that idea. Sons don't pay for the sins of their fathers, but in this woke theology,

01:11:25

James Cone has subverted the scripture and reinterpreted and redefined things.

01:11:31

And that's why we're in the middle of a postmodern controversy, because it's like the modernist controversy, same words like inerrancy now redefined.

01:11:38

We're doing the same thing again. We're redefining terms. So racial reconciliation requires us to, if we're white, we have to learn the minority culture.

01:11:51

We have to just repent. That's all, we just repent. And then if we don't, we have a man -centered view of repentance.

01:11:58

And it's one that's obsessed, direct quote, with not being responsible with the wrong be committed against a neighbor.

01:12:08

So even if we're not responsible, if we say we're not, we're obsessed with not being responsible. Courtland Perkins interviewing

01:12:14

Fabini Anderson there. Some people tell him, this is from the lynching event.

01:12:20

Some people tell him that their ancestors were not involved in lynching or slavery. My people never owned slaves. My people didn't lynch, chuckles.

01:12:26

Why can't we begin our understanding with the prayer of confession, not the accusation of others who challenge us?

01:12:34

So in order to accomplish any of this, you just have to start with repentance. And that's all it is.

01:12:39

That's where this, the reconciliation thing is going. That's, I looked at this issue for years now.

01:12:45

I've been at Southeastern. I've sat in the chapel messages. I've tried to figure out what in the world is this?

01:12:50

All these events of racial reconciliation. What is the end goal? When is it accomplished? Is there a bell ring and hey, we're reconciled now?

01:12:58

Or is there someone who comes out? Does Al Sharpton have to pronounce that? So like, where's the meat, right?

01:13:05

This is all I've been able ever to find. You just need to repent. And it's a continual process.

01:13:11

It's a hamster wheel. You never get off of it. This is not biblical. Repentance, biblically repentance is for something you've done, like a sin, an actual sin that you've done.

01:13:22

And biblically, a sin. And then when you, I mean, I shouldn't have to go over all of this.

01:13:29

It's basic theology one -on -one. But God forgives you and you're justified. This is, sanctification and justification in this are just kind of like merged.

01:13:39

And you're apologizing for like systematic abuse that's currently happening. That's the result of supposedly what your ancestors may have done.

01:13:47

You're not finding that in scripture. You can't. But that's what it takes to get this ball rolling.

01:13:54

Black Lives Matter is endorsed. This is getting down to the nitty gritty. This is the application more.

01:14:01

So how does this all work out? What are the specifics? Well, here's a listening to Black Lives Matter, redeeming

01:14:07

Emmanuel Levinas. I had showed you this before. Levinas was, that particular blog was actually about Black Lives Matter.

01:14:19

So they're even admitting that the deconstructionism, that is what's underlying the support for Black Lives Matter.

01:14:26

I mean, it's so obvious. Here's a quote. And to say Black Lives Matter doesn't negate anything.

01:14:33

It simply calls attention to what should be true within our larger society, but isn't. Many black Americans would like for others to acknowledge that they cannot be slain in the streets by those who sworn to protect them.

01:14:44

So Black Lives Matter is a good thing. Critical race theory is also a good thing.

01:14:50

This is from a six part series by Matt Mullins on his critical race theory on Christian.

01:14:56

And I'm pretty sure this was, it was right after I think James White had done something on critical race theory, the Alpha and Omega James White.

01:15:02

And this was put out. And here's some quotes from it. This is so telling, this first quote. Unlike Marxism, which sees disparities in terms of class, critical race theory views the wealth gap as a structural legacy and present reality of racism.

01:15:17

So how does Marxism and critical race theory differ? It's the exact way we've always said, those of us who have been critical of this, we're cautious about it, concerned about it.

01:15:28

We have said, this is neo -Marxism. It's not along class lines, it's along racial lines.

01:15:33

And that's exactly what this says from the critical race theory blog here. So if someone tells you, which

01:15:39

I've been told this, that, oh, there's no neo -Marxism, that's not neo -Marxism. Well, show them this.

01:15:45

This is where he says he disagrees with Marx. It's not class, it's ethnicity. In addition to that, my own view is that critical race theory provides

01:15:54

Christians with helpful lenses. There's the lens language again, through which to view the problem of racism.

01:16:01

Again, plundering the Egyptians, he uses that. The difference between critical race theory and these other epithets is that most

01:16:08

Christians, like most people in general, have probably never heard of it all, much less known anything about it. Critical race theory is a complex system of beliefs.

01:16:15

And there's the, again, that's the, I can't help but feel that's the looking down your nose kind of like, it's complex, hard to understand.

01:16:22

Guys, it's not that hard. There's oppressed, there's oppressors. It's along ethnic lines as well as gender and other lines.

01:16:30

But essentially, there's systems of abuse that have kept the oppressed down.

01:16:36

There you go. Critical race theory helps us get back at the oppressors and even things out.

01:16:43

So critical race theory holds that race and racism are woven into the very fabric of our society.

01:16:49

It's not about just how a person feels, it's the laws, it's customs, it's arts, entertainment, it's culture.

01:16:56

Proponents of critical race theory, who study intersectionality, typically believe that people living at the intersection of multiple oppressed identity categories face unique forms of discrimination that require equally unique forms of defense.

01:17:12

And then make the legal system fairer. Advocate for voting rights, change speech norms, ranging from hate speech to microaggressions.

01:17:18

Here's the application, the nitty gritty, this is what you gotta go do. If you wanna forward critical race theory, you gotta change this legal, it's about overturning what's currently in place.

01:17:30

Now feminism is also on campus to a lesser extent. A little photo here from college at Southeastern and I think they have a degree,

01:17:38

I think they have some kind of, I don't know if it's women's leadership or what it is, and that may not even necessarily be bad, but it's leaking its way in, feminism.

01:17:47

I think, and I could be, this is one thing, I'm giving you chapter and verse on everything, I could be wrong about this.

01:17:53

I do believe though, I think the board for Southeastern is the first board in the Southern Baptist colleges and seminaries to have a woman sitting on it making decisions.

01:18:02

So you have a woman sitting there and she's helping make decisions about curriculum for men being trained for the ministry. That is already happening at Southeastern.

01:18:09

Now, oh, she's not ordained, she's not a pastor. Yeah, that, it's not gonna be long before they are ordained and pastors,

01:18:16

I guarantee it, but that's already starting to happen. And so you have feminism starting to make its way in.

01:18:24

Here's a quote, if anyone is supposed to put on display a vision for inequality, not only between ethnicities, but between genders, the church has the best chance to put that on display for the whole world to see.

01:18:35

Males and females are just doing the same thing. And, oh, this is, by the way, this quote I'm reading for you is about Black Panther.

01:18:42

And there's a scene where there's women fighting and there's men fighting, and they're both holding their own. And he says, hey, this is great.

01:18:48

Neither one has to demean the other in order to show that they are capable and strong. I know in American, in America, the history,

01:18:55

I mean, historically in the world, since Adam and Eve, men and women's relationships have been broken.

01:19:00

And in America, it has been seen as a patriarchal setup. It's just good to see what it could look like when men and women are equally powerful and equally skilled.

01:19:10

Think about that for a minute. There's this, Black Panther has this fighting scene. You got these women who are, they're good, they're beating up men, they're skilled.

01:19:17

I don't really have a huge problem with a woman being able to fight, right? I hope if I have daughters, they learn self -defense and they'll carry a gun too.

01:19:25

I hope I didn't trigger everyone, but yeah, when they come of age, they'll get a pistol permit. If I have daughters, yeah,

01:19:30

I'm gonna protect them. I want them to know how to protect themselves. But I think this would have appalled most

01:19:36

Christians in the last 2000 years, to have a scene like that where a woman is, it's brutalized.

01:19:43

That's what it is. They would see it as barbaric and brutalizing that a woman has the, woman should go out and aggressively take part in war.

01:19:51

It happens sometimes, but to champion it as a good thing, that's the difference.

01:19:57

Is that a good thing? I think it's necessary, but is it good? And this is equality.

01:20:03

Well, if that's equality, then congratulations, I guess. I mean, if that's what a woman wants is to be in the same horrible conditions that men have been in, in most of human history, going to war, then okay, there you go.

01:20:19

I don't, I have a higher view in my opinion of what a woman ought to be. And I know it's necessary sometimes, like I just said.

01:20:26

I don't, I'm not against necessarily even women having roles in the military, but I don't view it as a, sometimes necessary, but I don't view it as a good, positive thing.

01:20:37

And neither have Christians for gender. And it was the social norm, because men were supposed to be doing the brutal work.

01:20:48

I mean, the horrible thing that war is. That was supposed to be something that men would endure because we cared about women and wanted to protect them.

01:20:54

That's out the window now, and it's championed. And that's what I think that quote reveals. Also, the same -sex attraction stuff is making inroads.

01:21:03

There's a blog, My Hope for Spiritual Friendship and Revoice by Jean Burrus. It says, to many on the evangelical scene,

01:21:10

I'm sure I should stop this quote and just say, if you're not familiar with Revoice, Revoice was a, it's happening again this year, but it's a conference for same -sex attracted

01:21:20

Christians and sexual minorities is what they call it, that churches need to basically advocate for them and make them feel comfortable.

01:21:28

And so this gentleman is saying, hey, Revoice represents a progressive shift.

01:21:34

However, it's a shift towards conservatism, because it's better than other conferences that are out there.

01:21:40

And that's like, but it happened in the PCA. That's different. I don't understand. It's not a conservative shift.

01:21:46

It is a liberal shift, because of where it happened. It happened in the conservative denomination. Overall, I hope

01:21:53

Revoice will help the same -sex attracted flourish in their churches, not just in a sexual ethic. So getting rid of like Colossians 3, 5, getting rid of these desires, that's not the goal.

01:22:02

It's helping them flourish with these desires. That's what Revoice was about. And this is being affirmed at Southeastern's Intersect website.

01:22:09

The marginalization these Christians feel and experience should cause us all to think about how we can make our churches safer for confessions of sin and weakness.

01:22:17

So they've been marginalized. The church is guilty. It's important for conservative evangelicals support and encourage and empower the same -sex attracted to follow

01:22:25

Christ. Okay. Step one, reject Revoice and believe that there's power in Christ to root out these desires and fight them.

01:22:36

That's not what Revoice was about. That's not what this is about. To this day, no SPC denomination office exists solely to equip churches in their ministry to the same -sex attracted or gender dysphoric.

01:22:47

Well, thank goodness. Why? I don't understand why there should be, but I mean, do we have an office for,

01:22:54

I mean, I don't know, helping people with racism, helping, what other desires should we make an office for?

01:23:00

But apparently this is an issue. We need a denominational office to help people and equip churches.

01:23:08

There's, let's see here. There's no compelling reason to keep offering this conference, the

01:23:14

Revoice conference, if churches will be so full of love and truth that these same -sex attracted

01:23:20

Christians feel accepted. So he's saying that the whole motivation for Revoice was, it's to make them feel accepted, same -sex attracted

01:23:30

Christians. And they weren't accepted. And this is a horrible thing, which I don't know.

01:23:37

It seems like there's another motivation going on here to change the way the church looks at sexuality and sexual desires, but that's what they're saying.

01:23:49

This is the soft peddling of the LGBTQ stuff, and it is starting to make its way in. One of the main things, and I'm gonna,

01:23:56

I think, end with this, yeah, is scripture twisting. And I've noticed this. I mean, I said this before, and these aren't, this is not an exhaustive list, but David is compared to Jay -Z.

01:24:10

Solomon is compared to, I think that one was maybe Derrida, and so there's this, or Heidegger, I can't remember, but he's like a

01:24:19

Solomon. And we have these biblical comparisons and biblical imagery being used, but it's outside the context of scripture.

01:24:30

Here's a few examples. Here's Carl Ellis. He says, people who live in the dominant group, the systems function better for them than they do in the subdominant group.

01:24:38

Well, they had a distribution system in the early church. The system broke down when it came to the subdominant group, the

01:24:43

Greek widows. The apostles knew they didn't have the know -how because they were part of the dominant group.

01:24:49

So they appointed seven Greek deacons. You don't hear the Jewish widows complaining about reverse discrimination.

01:24:55

Now, of course, that's not what happened in Acts. You don't find gender, or I'm sorry, there's this ethnic aspect coming out.

01:25:06

I mean, this is all interpretation that Ellis is putting on top of the text to try to explain it within his paradigm.

01:25:15

But the apostles, where does it say that, oh, they just didn't have the know -how? No, they didn't have the time. They needed someone to do the work, so they appointed deacons.

01:25:23

And yeah, of course, if it's Greek deacons, it would make sense to, in their community, have the people that know them distributing the food.

01:25:30

I don't understand why this has to go into this multiculturalistic liberation theology paradigm.

01:25:40

But that's how Scripture's being used. And we're putting ideas in the apostles' heads that weren't there, or at least they were not given to us in Scripture, unless Carl Ellis knows something.

01:25:51

I don't know. Considering Peter, Cornelius, and the emerging multi -ethnic church in Acts 10, believers should consider how theological language can support ethnocentric ideologies.

01:26:00

So there's a multi -ethnic church in Acts 10, apparently. And believers need to consider this, because look at Cornelius.

01:26:07

Look at what Peter did with Cornelius. Oh, that's multi -ethnic. Is it multi -ethnic, or was it more so about the culture, of the

01:26:15

Jewish culture, and the laws that were ceremonial that were associated with that culture, and that barrier coming down, and the gospel going to the

01:26:22

Gentiles as a judgment? I don't understand this. Let's take this category of ethnicity, and it's really driven by critical theory, and then we're gonna shove that into Acts 10.

01:26:36

Here's another one. The social justice movement is a reclaiming of the gospel justice, and has always been part of the very nature of God and his people.

01:26:42

It is gospel justice that we are after, and it is in the very acts of doing justice, that we find opportunities to preach the gospel to some of the most broken and vulnerable.

01:26:51

This is exactly what Jesus did for us. Jesus entered in the world, the time, and the skin of a people that were completely different, unlike him, so that he could love us well, and share the good news of justice.

01:27:04

Wow, that puts, ooh, tingles down my spine. Jesus was in the world to preach the good news of justice.

01:27:12

That was the good news. Where are you finding this? Is this the good news of justice? No, it's the good news that justice has been overcome.

01:27:20

At the cross, justice was satisfied, and Jesus entering with a different skin, there's nothing to do with it.

01:27:28

Find a verse in scripture that says, yeah, you know, it's significant that Jesus entered with this different skin color. There's nothing there about that, and this is why

01:27:37

Jesus died. This is where you start tampering with the gospel. Here's another one. The person with privilege, the person who is the most, often can be like Christ, and laying that down, and not just laying it down for a moment, but laying it down to enter in.

01:27:51

So if we're gonna be like Christ, we need to lay down our white privilege. Like Christ gave up his privilege, we gotta lay down our white privilege, in order to enter in.

01:28:02

Completely foreign to the text, just not there. And, you know,

01:28:08

I'm reading all these to you, but as I'm reading them, I'm just thinking about how destructive this is to the basic fabric of church unity.

01:28:21

I'm gonna share with you a little story here. I had someone reach, well, yeah, they reached out to me.

01:28:27

And I have a bunch of stories like this, but this one was fairly recent. Someone who was in a church, pastored by a

01:28:34

Southeastern grad, and he shared a last name with another family in the church, and the pastor there said, well, you need to go apologize to them, because they were owned by your family, because you share a last name.

01:28:49

Now, first of all, that's not true. My last name is Harris. I've met other minorities who are named Harris, and in my genealogy, and my uncle has done extensive work on it, there are no slaveholders.

01:28:59

There are other Harris's, but not in my line. So, that breaks down. But this was the assumption.

01:29:07

They were told something that wasn't true. And so, this individual fought it, and said,

01:29:15

I don't have to apologize to them. What do you, I wasn't, I didn't own any slaves. I don't, well, why would

01:29:22

I have anything to do with this? And an elder, who happened to also be a professor at Southeastern, got involved, and apparently backed up the pastor.

01:29:34

And there's a reason I usually, I don't bring these things up, because, you know, how can you verify it, right? If the person's not gonna, if I don't have someone on camera, most people don't wanna go on camera.

01:29:43

They don't wanna be interviewed. It's just, it's too much pain. They've already been through enough, right? But this particular experience,

01:29:50

I'm just, even if it's not true, even if you say, I don't know if that happened, just think with me for a moment. Could it happen, given what

01:29:56

I just shared with you? Is that kind of thing possible, that you'd have someone indoctrinated in this, who then goes into a church, and says,

01:30:03

I'm gonna forward racial reconciliation. You need to apologize. And creates division as a result.

01:30:12

That person is no longer at that church. I don't even think that church exists. And this was recently. This is why this matters.

01:30:22

This is why I care so much about it. And this is why it needs to stop, quite frankly. That was a lot.

01:30:29

I realized that. Been going here for about an hour and a half. So it's almost as long as my first video, the downgrade of SEBTS.

01:30:38

But I hope that helped you. And I wanna end it this way. I don't want this to be a complete depressing thing.

01:30:49

Because it's easy to get depressed. I've been steeped in this stuff for the last two days. Oh, listening to podcasts, and reading articles.

01:30:56

And man, it's just, it depresses you. Because there's nothing life -giving.

01:31:01

There's nothing of Christ, and what Christ has done. And how he's broken down that barrier. And how you can go to any country in the world, in any culture, and if it's a brother in Christ, there's unity.

01:31:10

Doesn't matter whose ancestors did what. That stuff, it's real.

01:31:16

It will survive, because it's timeless. And the Lord will not let that be washed away by critical theory, and liberation theology.

01:31:27

It will remain. But we do have to contend earnestly for the faith. And we do need to reveal the deeds of darkness that are concealed.

01:31:36

And that's why I put this together. So, I hope there is some encouragement.

01:31:43

I think that people are waking up to this. The more they understand it. Because a lot of this stuff, they use words that we're just not familiar with.

01:31:52

And so, a lot of this stuff, we think, okay, I don't see how that's that bad. No, it's not that you just wanna love people. Racism's bad,

01:31:59

I'm not a racist. And I mean, that's how they forward the movement, is with common, you know, the layman, common people, layman.

01:32:06

I consider myself a layman. It's this sort of emotional subversion.

01:32:12

It's saying, hey, slavery was bad, right? And you're like, yeah, it was bad. Racism's bad, right? Yeah, racism's bad.

01:32:18

Lynching was horrible. Yes, of course it was horrible. And so, you kind of get the emotions going, the melodrama, sometimes even.

01:32:25

That's what the lynching event did. They just showed pictures and said, just look at these pictures. Just meditate on these pictures of these horrible things that happened.

01:32:34

And so, you start there. And then, you introduce, well, what are we gonna do about it?

01:32:40

Something's gotta be done about it. And especially a young, idealistic person, yeah, I wanna do something about that.

01:32:46

Well, here's what you can do. And then, the tools of critical theory, liberation theology are put in your hand, put in my hand.

01:32:55

That's how this stuff works. But I think that people are realizing now, and I've heard a lot about what's going on in Southeastern now.

01:33:03

And there's some professors starting to, in their classrooms, say things against liberation theology.

01:33:09

There's some students that are starting to ask good questions and wondering, is this really right?

01:33:17

There's some good videos that were put out by the Conference on Social Justice and the Gospel in January, before G3.

01:33:23

Bodie Bauckham did a whole thing, I think, on this topic, on critical theory.

01:33:31

And James White and some other guys. And as those videos have made their way into institutions like Southeastern, and there's young guys who are watching them,

01:33:39

I think that you're gonna see a change. I think there's probably gonna be a split, but there is a change.

01:33:47

And people are starting to see, okay, hold on. I can be against some of the things that have happened in the past.

01:33:52

I can be against some of the abuses that have taken place, even though I think they're way overplayed sometimes.

01:33:58

But I can be against that and not accept the solutions, because these aren't biblical solutions. This is not the gospel. You're lying to me when you say that this is part of the gospel.

01:34:06

So that's an encouragement. And I can't share with you all these messages, but I'm getting lots of encouraging messages.

01:34:14

So keep contending for the faith. Share this video around. Keep it bookmarked.

01:34:20

If someone says, where is this going on in the Southern Baptist Convention? Or what seminary is capitulating?

01:34:25

Well, show them this video. I know that I'd have to update it every day, because there's new stuff coming out.

01:34:30

But there's a list, and I think people will keep adding to it. And if you go to the info section,

01:34:36

I have all these quotes and links and everything, those that have not been deleted, that are still there.

01:34:45

It's all laid out for you. So you can go check it out. So there you go. Next podcast,

01:34:51

I'm hoping to get out of this, I think. Because I'm just so tired of it. I want to do something fun. I've actually had some history presentations that I've wanted to give.

01:35:00

One of them, actually, this is fun. Maybe I'll do this next time. I have a presentation on masonry.

01:35:07

And the conspiracy theorists who like to say, oh, the masons are running the world, and the founding fathers and the presidents were masons.

01:35:13

Well, I've done some study on the masons in America, and I want to share that. I think that would be fun.

01:35:18

And you can send it to all your conspiracy theorists and show them why they're a little bit out to lunch on some of that stuff.

01:35:25

But it's fascinating. It's history, and that's what I enjoy. So we'll get out of this stuff and start talking about some more fun stuff.