The Issue IS Homosexuality, then Brad Mason on “Color Blind Theology”

Greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line on a, let's see, we are on a

Tuesday, I believe, and so we've still got another program to go this week. Lord willing,

I want to point one thing out that I think is important. I'm not the first one to notice it, but I think it is important as we have the conversation about what's going on in regards to Roman Catholicism right now.

And it has been interesting to see the various Roman Catholic apologists on Twitter responding to a few comments

I've made. You know, I made a comment to Matt Walsh and immediately there were legions descending upon me with their little excuses that have been refuted literally for centuries, but they just keep repeating them over and over again in the hopes that some of them will stick.

It can't be easy being a Catholic apologist these days. I mean, wow, you've got Francis and then you've got this.

You know, if one state, Pennsylvania, just think about what that is multiplied across all 50 states, then into South America and Canada, oh wow.

The depth of the abuse situation within Roman Catholicism begs for explanation, and I really appreciated yesterday morning,

I think it was yesterday morning, yeah it was, that Dr. Moeller on the briefing very rightly pointed out that one of the issues here in regards to Roman Catholicism and their view of the priesthood is the idea that within Roman Catholicism, when you are ordained, when you are validly ordained, a mark is placed upon your soul that cannot be removed.

You will always be a priest. You can, I've talked about this, well, decades ago, probably what, about 12 years or so ago when we were getting ready for the debate up in the

Northwest with John Dominic Croson because Dom is a, well, from his perspective, a former

Roman Catholic monk, a priest. But he has been laicized, but within Roman Catholicism, that means he's still a priest.

He still has, even though he doesn't believe in a personal God any longer, he still, according to Roman Catholic sacramental theology, still has the ability to perform the necessary functions at the altar for transubstantiation to take place.

So there is, so this idea in Roman Catholic theology of the subjective change, the infusion of grace and this whole idea of being a priest after the order of Melchizedek, only

Christ is that. Not a single one of you guys is a priest after the order of Melchizedek, stop it.

Whether you're Mormon or Roman Catholic, it doesn't matter, you're not, period. But taken very seriously so that within Roman Catholic theology, you're having to look at these guys, you're having to look at these homosexual predators, and that's what they are.

You're hearing a lot about pederastians and stuff like that. We'll get to that in a moment.

But from the Roman Catholic's perspective, you have to look at these people as still specially, spiritually marked out as having this special power and capacity and all the rest of this type of stuff.

And honestly, this all goes back to the Donatist controversy.

It really does. If you've listened to the beginnings of the

Church History series, we're on Lesson 63. I'm figuring we're going to get about to 66, 67, somewhere,

I'm not sure how long Calvin's going to take. I don't think we'll get to 70. First time we did it was only 52, so we definitely expanded things out a good bit this time.

But you may recall in the earlier portions, we dealt with the

Donatist controversy, one of the two great controversies in Augustine's life, the Donatist controversy and the

Pelagian controversy. And we talked about the rise of sacramentalism and ex -opera operante versus ex -opera operato sacramentalism and all the things associated therewith.

And this is the natural result over 1 ,500 years, 1 ,600 years, of that particular controversy and the idea of ex -opera operato sacramentalism.

You really do have that in this. And so it is important, and it has to have an impact upon the thinking

Roman Catholic. I mean, Matt Walsh is talking about, we need to have hatred in the Church, you'd have anger in the

Church. And I'm like, your anger is misdirected. Your problem is that you've got the wrong gospel and you've got the wrong

Church. And it's corrupt from top to bottom, has been for centuries.

All you got to do is go back in history. It has been corrupt since the pornocracy, and it's still corrupt.

And yet there are people who just overlook it and just, well, you know, there's nothing else out there.

Yes, there is. Yes, there is. You know, I think about celebrity converts to Roman Catholicism, I think about one guy,

I listen to him all the time. He's a brilliant, bright guy, used to be Presbyterian, now he's Roman Catholic. And I just go, how do you miss this stuff?

How could you have once known the truth and then you miss this stuff? It's just... Anyway, one of the things

I wanted to point out is the fact that there is a chart out there,

Summary of Pennsylvania Predator Priest Activity, and it gives heterosexual predation, homosexual predation, and child porn.

Under heterosexual predation, and obviously since there's only male priests, 6 % female child victims, 16 % female teenage victims, 1 % female adult victims.

Under homosexual predation, 11 % male child victims, 2 % male adult victims, but male teenage victims, 60%.

So put the 2 % for adult victims with the 6, 62, that's almost exactly two -thirds.

I mean, okay, 67, but 6 .6. But about two -thirds, and this is just in Pennsylvania, is not pedophilia, not pederasty, it's straight -up standard homosexuality.

And I am not the first person. I've heard Roman Catholics talking about this for a long time, talking about the reality of the homosexual culture in the

Roman Catholic priesthood. And Roman Catholic apologists have, in general, not everyone, there have been some who've tried to say, hey, there's a real problem here.

But they would generally end up on the outside, because they did this. There is a huge homosexual culture within the seminaries that train

Roman Catholic priests, worldwide. It's not just the United States, but it's worldwide.

And when people try to pass this off as some type of pedophilia thing, it's not.

It is directly associated with homosexuality. And the reason you've seen it spun,

I mean, you've got to spin it, when 60 % male teenage victims.

This is clearly a homosexual issue. And there are people within the Roman Catholic Church that are starting to come out and say, yeah, yeah, this is what we're really dealing with, is this homosexual culture.

Good luck fixing that. You can't. You can't fix it.

You don't have the gospel. You can't fix it. Your priesthood is corrupt.

It is unbiblical. It always has been. The only thing you can do is repent.

You know, may Pope Francis come out and say, you know what, I am not the infallible vicar of Christ.

And never have been, never will be, and none of my predecessors have been either. And let's go back and start this all over again, because there's no way you can fix this.

There's no way you can fix this. You don't have the power to fix it. That's just all there is to it.

So there you go. Switching gears, last night there was a get -together.

I didn't know much about it. I had started hearing about it from other people. But I guess it was down in Atlanta, down at the

Wretched Place there in Atlanta. And they had a social justice conference, get -together, presentation type of thing.

And Phil Johnson was there, and Todd Friel, and Tom Askell, and Daryl Bernard Harrison was there.

And my good friend Tom Buck was there. And so I've talked to a couple people who attended, and I have been told by those that were in attendance that especially the

Toms, the two Toms, hit everything right out of the park.

Josh Bice did. Josh Bice was there as well. He did very well. But both Tom Askell and Tom Buck, and especially

Tom Askell's presentation on, quote, white privilege. I'm really looking forward to hearing that. The scuttlebutt is toward the end of the week maybe.

That's a lot of editing to do really fast. I understand that. To get everything put together,

I get that. But I'm really looking forward, especially to hearing this, especially because the men were limited to a five -minute presentation.

That's not easy for most people to do. But evidently they pulled it off, and being concise can be helpful, but at other times it's...

I mean, how do you address white privilege in five minutes? I mean, I guess you've really got to boil things down and go, what are we talking about here and how...

The thing that would be difficult for me, how do you transfer the simple reality that God makes men to differ, that there are all sorts of Asian people that live here in the

United States? There are a thousand times the amount of money and influence that I do. So how do you...

And there are black people and Hispanic people. I mean, I sometimes wonder if I'm going to be able to drive my car in Scottsdale because they might eventually pick me up and say, could you leave, please, because it's a beautiful place and you're sort of messing things up.

How do you get around to dealing with that kind of reality in light of the sovereignty of God?

I mean, God blesses some people, and God blesses evil people with riches.

Psalm 73. So how do you even try to pull this whole idea that has gained so much traction for no particularly good reason amongst people and put it into a biblical...

I'm looking forward to it. I'm looking forward to hearing how that will be done.

Now, this morning I was sent a tweet and, well, someone tweeted and linked to me.

I don't know how it works, but anyway, someone responded to an old tweet,

December 22nd of last year, 2017, Dr.

Anthony Bradley of King's College, with whom I have been having almost daily little back and forths on Twitter, wrote the following.

Here's the problem, and this will be hard. From a black church perspective, evangelicals have never had the gospel, period, ever, period.

Read the book Doctrine Erase, A space race.

Here, then, is the actual cue for question. When will evangelicals embrace the gospel for the first time ever?

Hashtag black church. Okay. So I screenshotted that, and eventually someone sent me the link.

Thank you, whoever did it on Twitter. It's still there. And I asked

Dr. Bradley, do you stand by this statement? Do you modify this statement?

Do you retract the statement, stand by the statement, or was there a further context that would, in some way, ameliorate what seems to be the obvious meaning of this?

Now, let me say something here. I haven't had time to do this, but I've been taking the time to do it.

Dr. Bradley, for example, last week said, well,

I addressed this in this video. I don't have time to be doing this, but I watched the video.

Didn't really address it. It didn't gain me much, because when I wrote back, I didn't get a response, but I watched it.

And then, late last week, well, I addressed all this stuff in this chapter, in this book.

It's available on Kindle. Click, read on web -based reader.

Oh, there's a chapter. Okay, let's read. Read the whole chapter. It's a long chapter. Read the whole thing.

Wrote back. Okay. I read it. Didn't get me anywhere. But at the same time,

I'm seeing a lot of people who read this, and they read it from a perspective other than the one that Bradley brings.

And it does seem to prove the fact that a large majority of the conversation isn't a conversation.

Some of the underlying presuppositions and assumptions are so deeply held that it's almost like talking to the

Mormons. There is a vocabulary difference that goes both directions.

It goes both directions. And this sounds to people on my side like he's saying, you all aren't even

Christians. But I have a feeling, I could be wrong, he didn't respond to me.

Maybe he'll respond to me tomorrow. But I really have the distinct feeling that what he means by this is evangelicals, which in his mind is primarily fundamentalism.

A narrow fundamentalism. The worst kind of fundamentalism.

That since they've never embraced what he would consider to be the full gospel in the sense of seeking social justice, seeking to do good in the public sphere, from his perspective they've just eschewed all of their duties in those areas, because from his perspective there is a set of duties that you have to engage in to be really doing the gospel.

That that's what he means by, when will evangelicals embrace the gospel for the first time ever?

I think he would say that the salvation issue is secondary to what his actual concerns are. That's my guess.

I don't think he's read any of my stuff, but I at least have listened to some of his lectures and read some of his chapters.

We tend to do that more. There's lots of folks that dismiss what we have to say, and we spend a lot more time listening.

That would be my guess. But I don't know, he hasn't answered. All I know is there's a lot of evangelicals that support

King's College, where he teaches. You might find that kind of a rather broad statement somewhat troubling.

I saw a question just now, and I don't think there's any problem in my answering this question.

I don't believe there's any secrecy about this. I thought I mentioned it last program. Mark Fuentes is asking,

I hear Kwaku ML from Three Mormons will be on Apologia Radio to debate you and Jeff.

That true? And the answer is yes. Next week, we are going to get together late next week, and he's driving down from Brigham Young University.

I've already given him some suggestions on the proper route to take and what to watch for because I've driven it enough times.

I was driving that route long before he was born.

I'm not sure about that. It's been a while. Anyway, I've been doing that for a long time, and so we're going to be getting together.

It does seem unfair, doesn't it? Him talking with Jeff and I, but we will try to be as fair as possible and as focused as possible.

One of the things we're talking about is, what do we really want to focus on? Obviously, we have to focus upon who

God is. It's foundational to everything else, doesn't it? We can't talk about the gospel or priesthoods or anything else when we haven't yet dealt with the foundational issue, the first principle of the gospel, according to Joseph Smith, the

King Follett funeral discourse. And so, yeah, that's going to be next week. I'm not sure when that's going to be available.

But we're looking at about two hours, maybe, of conversation, and we will obviously make him feel very, very welcome.

And hopefully, the resultant materials will be helpful to everybody.

So yeah, that's coming up. That's coming up next week. And he explained to me his name, and it's really complicated.

I, you can actually tell what day of the week he was born by the form of the name, given his people and stuff.

It's pretty cool. It's a lot more interesting than my name, but not, you know,

I think my daughter's name is pretty interesting because we took it from my mom and my wife's mom.

And so, you know, there was sort of a historical connection there. But, you know, my middle name comes from my dad's middle name.

So I guess there was something there, there. But anyway, don't know how I got into that. There you go with that.

So I thought I would answer that particular question. Now, what I want to do primarily, teaching -wise, on the program today is

I want to get into the word and I want to address an article that I put into my

Evernote file a little while back. I have the feeling it was posted

June 7th of this year. I have a feeling it was aimed directly at me because the author, a man by the name of Brad Mason, has proven to be quite an enemy.

He is a real opponent. He's put together a list of reasons that he has a problem with me that is grossly biased.

I mean, it's MSNBC level leftist drivel, okay?

It's just that bad. I mean, there is not the slightest hint of fairness on Brad Mason's part.

Nowhere. I've never seen it. If you can twist it, if you can turn it, if you can inject it with poison to attack the other side, that's what we're talking about here.

Okay, that's this fella. So not a friend by any stretch of the imagination.

Enemy of what we're doing. Entoto. But I wasn't mentioned in this particular article, but I think

I am. And so, given that it pretends to be a biblical, exegetical refutation of, quote -unquote, colorblind theology, and yet fails utterly.

And I think it's just because you can't really come up with a meaningful argument exegetically, but it fails to interact with the heart of what

I have emphasized in what

I've said on this particular subject. So it's almost like, oh yeah, I refuted him on that.

No, didn't even try. Didn't even try. So I want to take it apart and examine it.

And that takes a little work, takes a little time to do it. I'm going to be actually reading what he has to say.

And hopefully shed some light on this particular subject. Seemed appropriate in light of last evening's wretched event in Atlanta that I'm sure will be garnering more discussion, as will,

I'm sure, tomorrow's, I believe it's tomorrow's, article at gty .org

on the Grace To You blog. It's interesting that Dr.

MacArthur's first introductory, very much personal, first article evidently got a whole lot more response and commentary than Monday's article did, even though Monday's article, since it didn't mention

King or anything like that, maybe that was part of it, but went more into Dr.

MacArthur's recognition that apologetics and polemics very frequently has to be practiced within professing

Christianity, not just toward those who are about outside and are atheists and things like that.

Everyone recognizes that as a huge threat, but so often our efforts have to be directed inside.

And so anyway, if I recall correctly, the article on Monday said that there would be another article dropping tomorrow on Wednesday at gty .org.

And I would imagine by now, this next article will be the first that's going to actually start making specific exegetical and biblical arguments regarding the nature of Christian unity and the church and ethnicity and issues along those lines.

So I guess it would be fitting that the first one might get a whole lot more attention than anything else, even though it was just introduction.

And the second was pretty much also introductory. My assumption is the next one will finally start getting into some of the argumentation.

It has not been my experience thus far, sadly, that people promoting a — everybody has objections to the terminology — but a social justice movement concept that would include anything from reparations to racial reconciliation slash penance ceremonies or whatever else.

I just haven't found that side to be as yet overly willing to engage the topic fairly.

And of course, they respond to the exact same charge. Yeah, someone on the channel just said, on Wednesday, I'll continue and conclude this retrospective.

So maybe it won't be. Well, no, that's just the retrospective.

After retrospective comes the actual argumentation. So I know there are going to be some sermons that are going to be preached on the subject as well.

So just patience. We'll need to be patient with all of that.

Now, on to Brad Mason's June 7th.

This is part of a series. I looked at Part 3 and Part 6, which were linked here, looking for more in -depth exegetical argumentation, especially on the fact that the main point that I had made — and when did

I do the Colossians 3 program?

I'd be interested in knowing. I did two programs. Once, I just sort of I did something and then

I expanded upon it about a week later, as I recall, here on the program.

It would be interesting to know when that was. Which one?

That's the second one? Don't need the whole thing.

I just need to know. Nobody can hear you anyways. So that was the first one.

Then I expanded because I did it more than once. Oh, yeah,

Colossians 1, Reconciliation, that's the Reconciliation issue. Yeah, that's a different one. Anyway, what is and isn't being said?

Number five, Colorblind Theology. Now, number six was titled

Colorblind Racism, which is interesting, how you could do that.

But it starts off by offering a clarification.

They'll mention below — I want to make it abundantly clear — I do not think that the Jew -Gentile relation is one -to -one comparable to modern

Western racial relations. That's a good thing. It's amazing how many people try to make it that because there is so little else that you can grab hold of to try to come up with a positive basis for the insertion of racial reconciliation concepts within the

Fellowship of the New Testament Church. I pointed out, I have pointed out a number of times, that the church in Rome, or Colossae, or Philippi, or any of the

Asia Minor churches, Italian churches, off into what would be called back then

Gaul, because of the policies of Roman Empire, there would be a tremendous mixture of wide -ranging ethnicities within the

Christian church and any of the churches that were founded in those cities. And while Paul was exceptionally concerned about one particular issue, and that is the possibility of the division of the church into a

Jewish and Gentile church, into two different churches, one for Jews and one for Gentiles.

This is an absolutely overriding concern in Romans and Galatians.

It's what prompts Acts 15. It's what prompts Galatians 2. This was primarily a religious issue, not an ethnic issue.

Now, of course, religion and ethnicity were greatly combined in those days.

I'm getting a crick in my neck. But it was a real danger in light of Acts 15.

It was a real danger in light of the Antioch situation. It was a real danger in light of the constant attempt on the

Jews to silence Paul, chasing him all the way to Rome, basically. This was a very, very, very important issue, and it grows right out of the natural reality that you have the

Old Covenant focused upon the people of Israel, and the New Covenants could go out to all the world. And so when that happens, there's going to be lots of questions to be answered.

But none of that had anything to do with the

Jews. Not only of different ethnicities amongst the Jewish converts, because of Jewish proselytism or whatever else it might be, but certainly amongst the

Gentiles, there would have been all sorts of potential dividers because of how

Rome had conquered, you know, building upon how Greece had first conquered under Alexander, and then

Rome comes along and solidifies these things and expands these things. It would have been a rainbow of people from all over the

Mediterranean, North Africa, the Middle East, all sorts of people who would have had very, very tight, very, very tightly defined definitions of ethnicities.

And many of them would have had deep and sharp disagreements with and detestations of other ethnicities.

Where the differences would be so small, you and I would be going, wait a minute, why do you want to kill his cattle and his family again?

Because of a war a hundred years ago around a certain hill someplace?

And yeah, that's exactly right. And so it's fascinating to me that the very issue that would provide a foundation for talking about how the church needs to be regularly involved in going back in history and nursing a fence based upon your skin color from what happened 20, 30, 50, 100, 200, 500 years ago.

We're not the first nation to have to deal with these types of issues.

You would think that if it was going to be the apostolic example that this needs to be one of the central activities is, on this

Sunday, we're going to learn about this brother's ethnicity and his background and how we all need to repent to him because of how our ancestors treated his ancestors.

And then the next week, it's the next guy. And then the next week, it's the next guy. Or this family group over there, that family group over there. You don't have any of that.

Don't have any of that. So there must be a reason. There must be a basis because those tensions would have been there.

So what removed the tensions? What addressed the tensions? Well, my argument is it was a positive emphasis upon what the gospel actually is and the fact that there is only one, to use

Colossians 3, renewal, one work of the Holy Spirit of God, one way of justification. And since everybody and what was missing in Mason's material is not recognizing that the reality of ethnicity was specifically laid out.

The Scythians were an ethnic group. The Barbarians made up a number of ethnic groups.

Doulos and Eleutheros, those were political categories, slave and free.

And there are all sorts of different of gradations, especially within the Doulos category there.

There were some very powerful slaves, but they were always just slaves. There were the bottom levels and all sorts of gradations.

It got quite complex under the Romans, more complex than it had been under the Greeks. Paul specifically addresses that.

He uses that as an example. And my argument is the oneness of the work of God in bringing about salvation, justification, sanctification, adoption into the family of God, all based upon the same action of Jesus Christ, brought into the reality in life by the same

Holy Spirit of God. This destroys ethnic distinction within the body as it relates to our relationship to God and our relationship within the body to one another in regards to our unity in Christ.

What is plainly obvious to me is that there are many who will say, oh, of course.

Oh, sure. Yeah. But then we still need in the church, you know, if one ethnic group is nursing grudges that even they never actually experienced, that goes back to their parents or their grandparents, their great -great -grandparents or their great -great -great -grandparents or great -great -great -great - accepted and dealt with within the body.

Well, that's the problem is that there's no room left for that.

What is not being said is that you just somehow get yourself hypnotized by repeating this mantra enough times that you no longer recognize a

Black brother or a Chinese brother or a Korean brother or a Japanese brother or a Hispanic brother or a

Brazilian brother or whatever, that you no longer recognize those categories and ignore them or that you say, well, look, y 'all just simply have to adopt whatever the predominant culture where the church is and cast off any of the distinctions and distinctives that might identify your particular culture.

If there is anything in your cultural or ethnic past that is derived from sin, whether it was sin against you or sin on your part and in almost all human situations, it goes both directions.

Does anyone really believe there are just absolutely innocent people? You sort of need to read

Romans 3 again and Romans 1 and Romans 3 about that innocent thing. If there is anything that comes from our fallen nature, that's not to be brought into the fellowship of the saints.

That which is good and, well, true, honest, just, holy, pure, of good repute, good report, all the things you're supposed to be dwelling upon that therefore come from grace, then they can be enjoyed by all and you can have the, you know,

I've preached in a lot of churches over in the UK where certain elements of the congregation carried the tune better than others during the singing of hymns, and certain elements of the congregation really helped to keep the tempo up, whereas other elements of the congregation...

Well, let's just say there are some people who could really use a metronome.

That's a problem in my congregation because I've never actually used a stopwatch on it.

I've threatened to do some more than once, but I'm going to tell you something. Amongst Reformed Baptists generally worldwide, the fifth stanza will be a minimally 15 % slower than the first stanza.

It's almost like the battery starts dying or the rubber band starts to...

I don't know. But anyway, and I've told a story about, you know,

Brother Metwire in our congregation years ago, Black Brother, that during one of the hymn sings sort of rebuked us all saying, brethren, the amen at the end is how you say it is true.

It's not supposed to be how the hymn dies in a painful fashion. Hey, at least we still sing the amen.

We're about the only congregation left on the planet that does, I think. But anyway, so what was

I talking about? Oh, okay, this was back to Brad Mason here. So colorblind theology and the

Jews and the Gentiles. Okay, let's get into the article itself. Among the greatest barriers to acknowledging or even recognizing the extent of racialization in American society, and the extent of white privilege in particular, is the post -civil rights ethic of colorblindness.

Not only does the colorblind ethic obscure the history and currency of the centuries -forged color line in America.

Now, obviously, there's a particular vocabulary being utilized here that is not necessarily shared by everybody.

It also allows for only historically unhinged explanations of current disparities leading to the continued maintenance of the status quo cemented through 450 years of both overt racism and racialized institution building.

Now, that's quite a sentence. Two sentences, actually, with a lot of stuff packed into it from somewhere other than Colossians, but just reading it for now.

In fact, it renders racial and ethnic disparities nearly unstatable, collapsing all problems into individual events among individual bad actors with perfectly reasonable individual explanations, usually some deficiency among minorities themselves.

And so I guess this is a general complaint or assertion of systemic racism and things along those lines and somewhat of a complaint against the idea of personal responsibility.

While I intend to explore the interpretive patterns and social ramifications of colorblind racism in the next post,

I would like here to first address the so -called colorblind theology, which is thought to furnish a biblical justification for a colorblind ethic within the church itself.

Just as the majority of Americans today believe colorblindness to be the highest expression of anti -racism, so also many theologians seem to believe it is the

God -ordained basis for unity within the church as well as the gospel cure for any prejudice or disparity within the body.

Well, I'm not yet sure what Brad Mason thinks colorblindness is.

I have been very clear, and it has been misrepresented to me over and over and over again,

I have been very, very clear to emphasize the reality that when

I speak of being colorblind, I'm talking about as to a person's relationship to me as a

Christian. A black person, a

Chinese person, a Filipino person, a Hispanic person is no more or less saved, justified, sanctified, gifted, called, united to the body, is no more or less

Christian because of their ethnicity than anyone else.

It is not a matter of saying, and this is really what the representation is, this is really what where the objection is, what you're actually saying is that you have to abandon a black ethnic cultural expression and adopt a white one.

That's basically what I keep hearing people saying. Interestingly enough, it's generally not my

Asian friends, Filipino friends that make this kind of argument. Is there a

Christian ethos? Is there a Christian moral and ethical system? Can there be things in a

Filipino culture that would be, within the

Christian context, something you would say that needs to be left outside because of its inherent definitional connection to a violation of God's will,

God's law, God's truth? Yes. In Hispanic culture? Yes.

In black culture? Yes. Now, it takes a tremendous amount of discernment and discipline and care.

It's very, very easy, and it has happened over and over again.

There is no question of this. It is very, very easy. There is a stream of fundamentalist evangelicalism that has a very narrow world experience, let's put it that way.

And hence, is it true that there have been many churches down through history, in the

United States, down through the past century, past hundred years, where a predominantly

Anglicized European, broadly

European, broadly Northern European cultural norm has been considered to be the biblical way that a church is to be?

And has that included unnecessarily narrow definitions of cultural expression?

Yes. Have there been times when people have unjustifiably identified things that are just different from their own experience as being wrong?

And since they're in the majority, that seems to be something that gets lost a lot of time. Up until recent times, that Anglicized Northern European, they were the majority by a long shot, numerically, in the

United States. And so that particular cultural expression of what worship was to be in the church became confused with a biblical standard.

So in other words, if you came and there was a cultural...

I don't know what that was. My phone's silenced, so it must be on the...

Oh, it's Facebook Messenger. Yeah. So if there was a particular way of doing things, the majority saw that as being the biblical way of doing things.

Even if, rather obviously, no one in the biblical would have had any idea of that. Has that happened?

Yep, you bet. Does that continue to happen today? Yep, you bet. No question about it.

Has that been used against Black Christians? Yep.

As well as Asian Christians and Hispanic Christians and Christians from South America and Russian Christians and all sorts of like that.

When I go to other places, I am made sensitive to these things because sometimes my hosts have to say to me, you may be accustomed to doing it this way, but here in Ukraine, we do it this way.

We realize that it's not actually a biblical issue, but it's really deeply social.

It's when you become all things to all people and you recognize that kind of thing.

If there's no reason, if it's not some huge violation of Christian liberty or something, you put it aside and you don't create problems.

And by the way, and I'm not sure where to fit this in, but I'm not going to get through this because I've got a meeting this evening, so I may have to make this parts one and parts two.

I saw a statement made by someone, I forget who it was, and when

I sat back and thought about it, a lot of the conversation isn't taking place because you line up and you start shooting and you just assume that everybody on the other side is just wrong and bad and everything they say, and it goes both directions and nothing ever gets accomplished.

Someone on the other side had said that later forms of fundamentalism had provided a safe place for a great deal of racist thought to go unchallenged.

I sat back and I thought about some of the really bad fundamentalist churches that I have run into.

I thought of Peter Ruckman. Peter Ruckman was a glowing racist.

I mean, I don't have it in here, but he even sent me his book,

Black is Beautiful, where he was a cartoonist, a fairly talented artist. Oh, so yeah, no question about that.

And that needs to be recognized. And then people say, well, see, there you go. We just need to bring that up every year and have a special service about that.

And I go, no, no, no, no, no. That needs to be condemned for what it is.

And if it rears its ugly head, that needs to be chopped off. But if it's a sin that white people can perform, it's a sin that black people can perform.

And the thought that crossed my mind was how many of these folks who will rightly point to something like that and say, yeah, that did happen within fundamentalism.

And there were those places where it became the quiet bias, the quiet prejudice, where you were allowed to have that kind of bias and prejudice.

How many people who will recognize that and admit that that's the case? How many people on the other side will recognize that the same attitude exists within the black church?

In reverse. Exact same attitude. It's there. You know it's there.

There's no question that it's there. And yet you can't say that.

In fact, there are some people going, hey, I'm really glad that he's talking about, you know, saying what something that was said was correct.

And yeah, that's great. But now you know, I just undid all that because I dared to say, and it goes both directions.

Because I am really frightened when I hear people starting to say that there are certain sins that only one side can commit.

That only one that your melanin count somehow determines what kind of sins you can end up committing.

I don't buy it. I don't buy it. Now, there is neither

Jew nor Gentile that the most common passages used to demonstrate the alleged colorblindness prescribed in scripture are the following.

Colossians 3 .11. Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, scythian, slave, free, but Christ is all and in all.

And Galatians 3 .28. There is neither Jew nor Greek. There is neither slave nor free. There is neither male and female.

For you are all one in Christ Jesus. Galatians 3 .28. Now, it would have been nice if there had been, you know, an expansion upon these things.

Because, for example, starting where it starts in verse 11 skips over the fact that it starts with a relative pointing back to the concept of renewal.

This is a renewal where there is neither Jew nor Greek. It's a work of the Holy Spirit of God.

This is what connects this to the gospel, just as in Galatians chapter 3. For in Christ Jesus, there is neither

Jew nor Greek. And that's a part of the argument on justification. So in both instances, the connecting factor is the sovereign work of God in the salvation of a singular one united people that are the body of Christ.

And that's why this, you know, today it is a phrase used so often that it no longer has meaning for almost anybody.

But the phrase is a gospel issue. It's a gospel issue.

Well, it's been so abused and misused that some people will make everything a gospel issue.

And other people couldn't identify a gospel issue if it walked up and hit them in the face. And then there's everything in between.

Part of it is because of so much confusion on the gospel. There's no reason for it, but that tradition is tradition and tradition is strong.

Upon citing these passage, believers presume themselves justified in declaring that they don't even see color.

Now, here's where I write the start.

Mason makes his argument by definition rather than by argumentation. Listen to his definition.

They don't even see color, that categories of race and ethnicity, including the histories of peoples and their encultured relations have no place within the church.

What's that supposed to mean? What do you mean, have no place in the church? If you mean have no place within providing the foundation of unity, have no place in being the purview of the church, to be the constant referee in all of the possible permutations of ethnic strife and division, yeah.

If what you mean by this is that you somehow have to magically pretend that God never did anything good amongst your culture, or all that positive stuff, just leave all the positive stuff out, no, there's no reason to leave the positive stuff out.

If it comes from grace, true, honest, just, good report, comes from grace, then that's all

God's work and that's a wonderful thing. But if it comes from sin, if it was divisive, if it was one people enslaving another or warring with another, slavery and war almost always went hand in hand back then, you didn't have modern warfare.

When you think of the bombing of Europe, that level of impersonal element, that's modern warfare.

It's really hard to connect in the mind's eye of one of the gunners in the

B -17, a specific ethnic hatred for the people being bombed down there.

He might certainly not like the Germans because they're shooting back at him, but there might be non -Germans down there, he didn't know that.

Once you have modern warfare and you have drone strikes and artillery that travels miles and miles, that personal element of warfare, which normally led either to your killing your opponent or capturing your opponent and enslaving your opponent, that passed away.

That element was still there once you get hand -to -hand combat going on, but look, that's just not generally the primary way that wars are done these days.

Anyway, that kind of ethnic strife division, how is it dealt with in the church?

On the level of ethnic relationships having anything to do either with my relationship to God in the sense of forgiveness of sins, imputed righteousness of Christ, is the righteousness of Christ imputed to a black person differently than a

Chinese person? Of course not, can't be, can't be.

You have to be colorblind there, must be, absolutely must be, or you deny the gospel, end of discussion.

If you say the Jewish person has a different kind of righteousness than the

Gentile, if you say the black person has a different kind of righteousness than the Chinese person, that is a denial of the gospel, period, end of discussion, must be, absolutely must be.

There can be on that issue, there can be no compromise at all.

There's only one righteousness to be imputed, and it was not a righteousness based upon an ethnicity.

That's why there is one righteousness to be imputed, there is one forgiveness of sins, there is one sanctifying work of the

Holy Spirit, there is one renewal, Colossians 3 .10 -11, the work of the Holy Spirit of God that knows no ethnic boundaries.

And if the positive imputation of righteousness, adoption as sons and daughters of God is all absolutely the same, then it is colorblind.

If you insert color in it, you are destroying the gospel of Jesus Christ, period.

On that level, there can be no compromise, none. And if the positive work of God in that sense functions in that way, then the duties toward God and toward one another cannot be based upon ethnicities.

I must love God and my neighbor. Now, those duties remain the same, but how that is going to flesh out may well involve that, and it did in the early church.

What do I mean? Acts 15. Gentiles, we want to have one church.

We need to have one church. We can only have one church. But you have Jewish Christians in your fellowship, and we need to have peace in the church, and you need to understand that there are certain things that you may feel very comfortable doing in your own home, but in the church, you're going to end up causing unnecessary division.

So you have to be sensitive to these things. So the outworking of the duties which flows from that theological truth of one way of salvation, one righteousness, one sanctification, is going to have different applications.

You know, you eat meat sacrificed to idols. There aren't any idols in the world.

Those are false gods, and it shouldn't cause anybody problem, but for the sake of the weaker brother, and sometimes that weakness comes from a cultural issue, a cultural issue.

That's why I would suggest that in general, the worship of the church is going to be, how do

I phrase this without getting myself into a tremendous amount of problems, is going to be that balance produced under the leadership of the

Holy Spirit of God and the wisdom of the elders given to that particular congregation that will allow for the widest participation of the people in the body to allow them to worship and to hear the

Word of God and be conformed to the image of Christ without introducing specifically unusual cultural elements that could lead to division and a diminishment of the effectiveness of the

Word of God amongst the people. That was a long sentence. I'm not even sure

I could repeat it. The point is this. We may have all sorts of colors in the congregation.

It may be a rainbow, we like to say, but the worship needs to be a little bit more on the beige side.

What I mean by that is instead of demanding that my color predominate over everybody else's color, we need to find a temperature of color that is going to allow the ministry of the

Word of God to be the most effective and efficient, given our situation, that's going to be different in different cultures.

That's what's so beautiful about the gospel. You have the rigid structure of the core teachings, then when it comes to the church, you have the form of the church with the elders and the deacons and the preaching of the

Word of God and the prayers and the seeing of hymns. You have all of that, but how that all goes together is going to be different from fellowship to fellowship properly, because God made us as different people.

He puts us all in there, and if we have that unity of spirit and intention like we're supposed to have, then

I'm not going to insist on always having my kind of music.

I mean, I go to a church where some of the most special, spiritually uplifting music to me, we never sing.

In fact, given how we sing, we should never sing, because Keith Green shouldn't have an amen at the end of almost anything.

But I've never gotten to sing a Keith Green song.

And there are certain people in my congregation that a couple of Keith Green songs would leave me going, what are you doing?

I have to put that aside for the one heart that we have for the main purpose of that church, which is the consistent ministering of the

Word of God. And so what I'm saying is, is that in a cultural context where a particular church is culturally homogenous, and that's going to happen in places.

And people, it should never have happened in history. No, think about it, folks. Think about it for just a second.

Up until what? 60, 70 years ago?

How far did anyone travel to be able to get to church? And so if you lived in an area where pretty much everybody looks like you, the church can look like you, and there's going to be a homogenous cultural expression.

And so, hey, no problem. No one really had to struggle too much with that. It's in the modern situation that you've got differences, or in the early church.

And in the early church, the reason was not travel. It was

Roman occupation and having conquered basically the whole world and displacing people and putting them in other places.

And especially in the major cities, that's where you'd have all the slaves that come from someplace else and all the rest of that kind of stuff.

Different contexts. The gospel gets to flourish in all those contexts. In all those contexts.

So in some situations, in some instances, you are going to get a homogenous form of worship that's going to reflect that particular cultural group.

When that begins to change, then the elders need to recognize that.

And what you don't get to do is to come in and start demanding that everything change for me.

But the key issue here is not what we've been hearing recently.

And that is that we need to be doing these ethnicity studies and find out about this and that.

No. The key is, is the word of God being clearly and effectively communicated to everyone and applied to everyone?

And is the worship that we offer to God meant to be that which will allow for the sanctification of all the believers that are there, the conforming of them to the image of Jesus Christ?

That's the issue. I'm not going to tell the church they can't do this, but I find it just very troubling that some people think, well, that means that on the third

Sunday of each month, we need to have this ethnicity leading. And then we do that ethnicity and we can all just learn about.

Do you really think that that helps create a consistent atmosphere for the preaching and teaching of the word of God?

Or does that lead to just a whole lot of degradation of that?

That really becomes a question. So, anyway, sorry, started preaching there for a second on a different topic.

So, this definition that Mason gives here, upon citing these passages, believers presume themselves justified in declaring that they don't even see color, that categories of race and ethnicity, including the histories of peoples and their encultured relations, have no place within the church.

In reference to everything that I've said, they have no place in the church in regards to unity, grounds of our unity, our oneness in Christ, the duties we have to one another, our relationship to God, our relationship to the gospel, the righteousness that is imputed to us, all of that flat out.

I will not compromise on that. You can do your best to destroy me for not compromising on that.

I won't because that's a gospel issue. That's Galatians. That's Antioch.

That's fundamental. None of that in any way means that I do not recognize the good,

God -created, ethnically -relevant realities of the peoples that God draws – this is a

Reformed discussion – draws to the fellowship. And so I see different giftings,

I see different strengths, and sometimes they're related to ethnicity and sometimes they're not.

But you're looking for the positive, you get rid of the negative. We have some

Filipino folks in the congregation, and what's fascinating is one fellow –

I'm a fairly decent chess player, this guy can destroy me. He's just so good.

This is not fair. And then I got to introduce some of the young guys – well,

I wasn't the only one, but I was instrumental in introducing – we have a mixed – we had – they've gone to another church now, they just live too far away – but we had a mixed race, mixed ethnicity –

I hate that term race – mixed ethnicity couple in our church, and I helped get their boys started in chess.

And wow, state champs? Yep, uh -huh. And their age groups just – that's not something to say, oh, we can't recognize that there are certain strengths or even proclivities to have a greater interest in certain areas, things like that.

I'm not saying that any of that is banished from the church. So colorblind theology is a theology that recognizes that the righteousness of Jesus Christ avails no matter what your skin color is.

That's what it is. So when you rail against it, you better start defining it right, better start defining it correctly.

And just citing these passages isn't the only foundation of that, though both of them are directly relevant to that.

So let me just read one more paragraph, and then we'll wrap things up. Mason says, while there are many things wrong with employing these passages to get to colorblindness, including the lack of a one -to -one correspondence between Jew, Gentile, and modern racialization –

I stopped for a moment and say, though he skips over and never addresses in this article or in the one that followed after that I could find, maybe

I missed it – he never addresses that it's not just Jew, Gentile. Scythian and Barbarian are ethnic groups.

They're ethnic groups that existed within the church at that time. So there is direct ethnicity, direct, right there in the text.

The unbiblical implication that racism was allowed before Christ, what?

Okay. And the exegetical hoops that must be leapt through to then avoid gender blindness.

I'll get back to that one. The most deflating aspect is that there is simply nothing colorblind at all about these passages.

I think we all agree that union with Christ is the basis for Christian unity and identity among believers of every race and ethnicity.

Do you really? Do you then apply that? Do you then make that the overarching issue?

Because we do. But there is simply no warrant for assuming all embodied distinctions are therefore to be eschewed among the members of the body.

There's the definitional argument. You're redefining what it is to a ridiculous, oh,

I can't even see. I just see everyone's just a light tan now to me.

No. If it's true, honest, just, lovely, good report, if it comes from grace, fine, wonderful.

But it does not define the relationship that you have with God and therefore cannot define the relationship you have with your fellow spirit -indwelt believer.

That's the issue. No, what these passages capture is quite different. So we'll see that is the issue.

And I have addressed this before. The second time that I dealt with Colossians 3, someone had actually raised this issue.

Maybe it was him. That if you take what Colossians 3 says in its context, then you can't have a recognition of maleness and femaleness.

You realize that that makes ethnicity as definitionally differentiating as maleness and femaleness?

That is so absurd. I don't even know where to go with it. I was stunned that anyone would call themselves a

Christian, would use such horrific argumentations. I mean, they can't have any capacity to function on a basic categorical level and not realize, huh, skin tone, male, female, same thing.

No, it's not. No, it's not. I thought we were doing Christian theology.

Is this not the same apostle Paul that makes those very distinctions based upon creation ordinances?

Yeah. Well, unless you're one of those, you know, egalitarians out there, they're trying to overthrow all that stuff, too.

So one is a created distinction, male and female, necessary, beautiful, proper.

Can I throw in a free plug here? Yesterday, I was working at home on P45.

I actually found out that it was an easy mistake to make, but one of the major scholarly groups that deals with papyri had gotten some of the descriptions of the

Acts P45 fragments mixed up. And you'd only know it if you were translating the fragments.

And so I was trying to unmix that and figure out what was what. And I listened to the last

Sheologians broadcast on why it's beautiful to be a woman. And it was really, really good.

So you might find it worthwhile to catch the Sheologians podcast.

Yes, Dad is promoing for the daughter. It's okay. It was really, really good. And I learned stuff from it, and so maybe you can, too.

But that is a God -ordained, beautiful distinction based upon creation that continues the species.

If you can't see a difference between male and female and skin color, or even ethnicity, or your historical background of your parents, whatever else,

I don't even know how to talk to you. I don't know how to communicate with you. This is called being able to think in proper categories.

I don't know what went wrong, but something went wrong somewhere in your thinking, and you need to unthink it.

No, I have not been watching Twitter or anything while going through this material.

I just haven't had the desire to multitask in that way.

But I need to wrap up, because I have a meeting this evening. So I'm going to continue with that in the future, depending on what happens between now and Thursday, maybe even on Thursday.

Wrap it up, then we will see. But don't forget, again...

Oh, and there was one thing before you hit the button there. And I didn't mention this to Rich, but there may be...

I'm going to be doing some traveling in October, and I wanted to try to arrange on my way to my ultimate goal, either on my way or on my way back.

It's going to be on the way. I've got a project that would flow naturally from the work

I'm doing on P45, and the papyri of the early church, that I think would really, really be helpful to a broad, broad spectrum of the church.

And I need to make a stop and a visit on the way on this next trip, and there may be some costs associated with that.

Is the link still up? It's on the giving thing. Donate at the bottom of the page.

Somewhere. Right, there's a travel link on the donate page.

Oh, it's at the top. Okay, whatever. There may be some costs involved in routing me in such a fashion that I can do all of this, but all

I can say is, I really hope this happens. And it would really,

I think, be extremely useful. It would be just the natural outflow of the coursework that I'm doing right now, the research

I'm doing right now, in the early form of the New Testament text. And so, if you'd like to help, maybe, you know, it's not a big deal, but if you might want to be able to help, there's the travel fund there on the donate thing.

So, and of course, we could always use your continued support, especially because,

I'll be honest with you, addressing subjects like this, as important as they are, not overly popular.

So, remember us along those lines as well. Lord willing, we will see you on Thursday. God bless.