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#NoDespair2020
Shelter-in-place order, April 10th, self-quarantine, human no contact, social distance. Running out of coffee, so I guess all is lost. I don't even know what to say anymore in the beginning of these things.
Just a heads up, my chickens are all still alive. They seem to be thriving. They're so cute. They, there's like a, at night, they form like a little semi-circle where they sleep. And it's funny because that must be like the perfect temperature.
So like, you know, the heating lamp is like a circle and then like the temperature kind of decreases it. It's so funny. They're, they're adorable. They're absolutely adorable.
You know, maybe I'll grab one. Maybe I'll grab one so you can check them out. Hold on one second. It's adorable. The Rhode Island Reds, baby. That's what I'm talking about.
He looks terrified, so I'm gonna put him back. Anyway, came across this video from Danny Akin. I actually saw it on James Lindsay. He is an atheist who is very much against social justice. Very smart guy.
Seems like a guy that you could have a beer with and it would be a lot of fun. And hey, who knows? I'm in this conversation too. Maybe one day we'll have a beer with him. Anyway, let's, let's do this.
He, he, I, I, he has a whole thread about it. And I saw that a few people that I like were kind of interacting with this thread, but I have not read the thread. So I am just interested in the video itself.
Let's hear your boy, Danny Akin. Oh, there's one tweet that I did read from this thread and it was from Michael O 'Fallon, who basically said that quotation where it says, if you want to see who rules over you, see who you're not allowed to critique.
And Danny Akin is one of these untouchables. And you know, I don't care because I'm not in the SBC. And even if I was, I'm just not that kind of guy who has these sacred cows where you don't touch and you defend them no matter what, no matter how stupid what they're saying is, you defend them as having the best possible motives.
I'm not that kind of guy. I don't expect anyone to do the same for me. I don't want anyone to do the same for me. If I'm wrong, if I'm stupid, then it's okay to either A, not defend me, or two, A or two, A, not defend me, or two, tell me that I'm being stupid.
That's fine. That's the kind of friends that I like. My brother tells me that I'm stupid all the time and I appreciate it, especially when I'm being stupid. Let's watch this video and respond to it. I have not seen it.
I have not read the thread.
Let's do this. It seemed like pretty clearly that this resolution is a denunciation of the ways that those things subvert the gospel.
Let me give you an example again that I think shows how people can misunderstand what's going on here. I've been teaching in either a Bible college or seminary now for over 30 years. I've taught theology, I've taught preaching, I've taught hermeneutics.
When I teach hermeneutics in particular, one of the things I will point out is that none of us is a blank slate when it comes to interpreting the Bible. We all come to the Bible with a particular perspective, presuppositions, a particular worldview.
That's very true.
You know, when we read the Bible, we read things in a certain way and we have a picture, we have like a mental image in our mind of what the scene looks like, what's happening in the scene and stuff like that.
I'll give you a perfect example. I learned this in a hermeneutics class. This is an example that was used in a hermeneutics class. When we read about Jonah and the whale, many of us kind of envision Jonah sitting at the bottom of like this cavernous belly of this whale and there's like a little water on the bottom.
So he's like in the water, but he's breathing. Like he's got oxygen. It's like a cave that has like a, you know, maybe like a couple of feet of water flood. And he's just sitting there and he's very sad and he's contemplating what has happened.
And maybe he's praying to God in from the inside, the belly of this cavernous belly of this whale. And it's like, where does that image come from? You know where that image comes from? I'll tell you where that image comes from.
The movie Pinocchio. That's where that image comes from. If you were to go inside of a belly of a whale right now, that's not what it would look like. It would not be a big cave with a little bit of water on the bottom where you could just sit in there pouting.
That's not what it would be like. Jonah probably died inside the whale. That's the point. Like when you read it, you bring these things that you've experienced in your life, things that you've seen, all that kind of stuff to the text and you interpret it in a certain way.
Many people think Jonah died inside that whale. And I agree with them. Because if you were actually in the belly of a whale for a couple of days, you would be dead. And it'd be like, and the belly would be all in you and up on you and like there'd be disgusting stomach acids on you and all that kind of stuff.
That's gross, man. But none of us picture it that way when we read it. Instead, we picture the scene from Pinocchio. Anyway, so that's a good point. That's a good point.
Let's see where he's going with this. I will say something like this. Danny Akin cannot help the fact that he comes to the Bible as a white male married who comes from the Deep South, who has rock solid convictions and commitments about the supernatural worldview, about the inerrancy and infallibility of the Bible, and who is committed to Orthodox Christianity and finds his own worldview in terms of theology well-reflected in the Baptist Faith and Message 2000, the Abstract of Principles, the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, the Danvers Statement on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, and the Nashville Statement on Gender and Gender Identity.
And so I acknowledge that that's who I am. I suspect that I read the Bible differently than say a lesbian woman of a different ethnicity who lives up in the Northwest and is committed to a pantheistic worldview way of thinking.
I think we probably read the Bible differently. Right, that's true.
Yes. Yes, a pantheist would read the Bible differently than a Trinitarian. A Unitarian would read the Bible differently than a Trinitarian. A homosexual would read the Bible differently than a heterosexual.
That's true, that's very true. But there's a big but here because we have to determine, there has to be a way to determine who is closer to what the Bible presents. Like this is what I always talk about worldviews like this.
There's only one worldview that is correct, and that's God's worldview, because God is the only one that has the information that's necessary to have a perfectly correct worldview. He has all the information.
He knows what everything is. He knows why it exists. He knows what it is for. You know why he knows that? Because he created it to be what it is. Only God has a perfect worldview. And in the Bible, we get revelation about God's world.
We get a window into that worldview from God. God's worldview is perfect. And in the scripture, he has chosen to reveal certain things about the world that he created, certain things that we can hold on to, certain things that we can understand.
You see, the Bible is written in such a way that you can understand it. God has revealed certain things, not everything, but certain things in a way that can be understood. And so if you were a pantheist, and you start saying stupid things about certain passages in scripture, and, well, see, it's a pan, everything's God.
Everything's God. Or you ever talk to those mother God cult people where they read in Revelation, where it says, the Lord and the bride say, come. You see, see, see, there it is. There's mother God right there.
And it's like, yeah, that's not it, Sparky. It's not it. There's a way to determine who's interpreting the Bible in a more accurate way. We're not talking about perfect accuracy. Nobody's reading the Bible in a perfectly accurate way, but there are some things we can know.
There are some things we can determine. And we can find out whose worldview, who's interpreting the Bible more correct, the pantheist lesbian who hates the Lord or Danny Akin. We can determine that based on the text itself, right?
Now, having said that, does that mean that we cannot communicate across our differences? No, it does not. Does it mean that I cannot share with her the gospel and the Holy Spirit take that gospel message and convert her so that her worldview is turned upside down on its head, acknowledging that I could never change her mind or her way of thinking, but the Holy Spirit certainly can.
Now, I've been teaching that for over 30 years. We weren't talking about critical race theory or intersectionality 30 years ago. What I was trying to help my students understand is even though I come to the Bible with all of those presuppositions, because I am aware of them, I can be more self-critical.
And I can ask questions about, is my bias causing me to read the Bible in a way that is not actually true to the divinely, authority, intended meaning that is deposited there by the Holy Spirit? Now, none of that has anything to do with critical theory or intersectionality.
So why are we talking about this? Simply has to do with a recognition that when it comes to the interpretive process, yes, there's an author, yes, there's a text, and there's also a reader, and readers do come to the text with certain ways of already thinking that hopefully they can be self-critical.
And that's one of the reasons why, Griffin, the Bible, though I do believe strongly in the doctrine of the priesthood of the believer, God did not intend for the Bible to be read in isolation. God intended for the Bible to be read within a believing community that can function as a check and balance among the community of faith so that we do together read the Bible more rightly and more correctly, which is why, again, I think we do better when we sit down to read the Bible and we have brothers and sisters coming from all different ethnicities, all different socioeconomic standings, because they're gonna have insights into this infallible, inerrant text that I, for example, will miss simply because of who I am, where I've lived, where I was born, what I've studied, and who I'm influenced by.
Right, right, and those same biases when we come to a text can come to how people who are very close together generally read a resolution.
Absolutely, yeah, I think in a sense,.
Oh boy, oh boy, so he's telling a nice story. This is a nice story, right? You know, we all get together, and you know, I might miss something, and you know, someone from another ethnicity or someone from maybe a different socioeconomic status, they might not miss it, and so it's important that we get all together and we all kind of, you know, get in our little circle, and we talk about what the text means to me, and we all take our turn, and someone will speak, and you'll say, hmm, interesting, and then, you know, that's the best way to do it.
It sounds so nice, and let me tell you one reason why it sounds nice is because that's the way we've learned since kindergarten. I'll never forget, I'll never forget when I was in elementary school, we were reading this stupid book.
It was some kind of Amelia Bedelia book, I don't know. I wasn't, I don't know if it was that, but it's something along those lines, and we all did that. We all got in a circle. What do you think this means?
What do you think this means? What do you think this means? And I remember thinking to myself, even as a child, I was like, yeah, but what does it mean? You know what I mean? We did this a lot with poetry, too.
Maybe it was poetry. Maybe I'm getting my facts wrong here, but it's poetry. What do you think it means? And we just, we did that endlessly, and then the period was over, and we all left, and I remember thinking to myself, but it doesn't matter what I think it means.
What does it mean? That's the point, right? What does it mean? And so it's a nice story, and it sounds so loving and warm and fuzzy, and you just, oh, we all get together. It's all great. But the problem that we have here, Danny Akin, is we're not just talking about some minor things here, because here's what's going on.
Here's what's going on. The black POC brown perspective is telling me right now, as I'm sitting here with my Bible open, that what we have to do to right the wrongs of the past is that we need to have reparations, right?
And I know the slaveholders from yesterday, they're all dead and gone, but what you see is that whites today, certain whites today have benefited from their sin, and so those people have to pay back what they were owed.
They need to make restitution. Restitution and reparations, this is the same word. This is what we're being told, right? And so that's what we're being told. We're being told something like that. And I can open up my Bible to Leviticus or Deuteronomy or wherever it is.
I don't have it prepared here. And in the scripture, it says, the sons shall not die for the sins of the fathers. In other words, the sons aren't going to pay for their father's sins. And I can read that sentence, and it's a very easy sentence to understand, right?
It's very easy to understand. We can apply the principles of hermeneutics. We can apply all the stuff we learned from apparently from Danny Akins, been teaching it for 30 years. And then my black and brown brothers and sisters in Christ say, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, but in this case, it's different because the sons do need to pay for the sins of the father.
And you're like, well, according to God's worldview, I don't think they should. And so now we're in a bit of a quandary, aren't we? Because our black and brown brothers and sisters in Christ whose perspective is so important seems to contradict what the scripture says.
So what do we do? Who's right? Because their perspective is pretty valid, right? I mean, I might be missing it. I might be misinterpreting these words. And so we have to go back to reason, rationality, the ability to read and understand what words mean and basic stuff that has nothing to do with skin color or socioeconomic status.
It's just that simple. Has nothing to do with it. Danny, the problem with this is that we can read, right? We can read. We have brains. We can think about things in a logical, rational way, right? And so when somebody contradicts what the Bible clearly says, then we can say like, nah, I'm not going along with that one.
You can go along with that and if you'd like, I'm not doing it. I mean, that's how we used to, that's old fashioned maybe, I don't know.
You know, if I could put it in two dichotomies and I know there's always a danger in that. Some have come to the resolution with a hermeneutic of sympathy, giving it kind of the benefit of the doubt. Others have come more with a hermeneutic of suspicion and therefore they see things and spot things that those who come with a hermeneutic of sympathy don't necessarily see.
Now what I would say is, put both sides together and I think we can together read the resolution more clearly, more fairly, and more honestly. Right, right, right.
Dude, oh man, there's respiratory illness going around. You cannot make me laugh like that, man. Woo, all right. So what we have to do, apparently, is read resolution nine. We got some people that are reading it with sympathy, some people reading it with suspicion.
What we gotta do is come together and read it with sympathy. Nice try there, Danny. Nice try there, Danny. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's not how it's gonna work. That's not how it's gonna work.
It's like, okay, we can work together and then eventually come to my conclusion. No, that's not how this works. We're not stupid, Danny. I know you think we're stupid. Oh, Danny. You think we're stupid, but we're not stupid.
I know you think we're stupid, but we're not. That trick is not gonna work. It reminds me of when Matthew Bynes was trying to debate James White, but the only way he would do it is if he agreed with him from the beginning.
It's like, no, we're not gonna do that. What kind of a tactic is this? I think the stress is getting to him. The stress is getting to him. Anyway, that's pretty much it. There's really nothing that exciting there.
I mean, it's just typical Kumbaya standpoint epistemology. It's just like, well, you know, black and brown people have things to offer too. Yeah, of course they do, but not if they're gonna go against the normal rules of reading and understanding and rationality and all that kind of stuff.
What we have that happens here is it's like, well, if you don't agree with my interpretation, then you must just hate blacks. And it's like, that's what we're dealing with here. So it's like, if that's what you're saying, we need to go with that.
Otherwise we're racist, white supremacists, all this kind of stupid stuff. No, Danny, no, we're not doing it. We're not doing it. This is a weird tactic to try to get us to do it. Well, we gotta have the suspicion and the sympathy come together and have sympathy.
No, not gonna happen. Weird tactic. What's that meme? Weird flex, but okay. Anyway, I hope you found this video helpful. God bless. So I was sitting here editing this and I was thinking that the example that Danny Akin used in the beginning about the lesbian pantheist and then how he's a white guy, orthodox, whatever, that just shows how worthless this whole idea is.
He goes, okay, what we gotta do is we all gotta get together. The heterosexual, married, white guy and the lesbian pantheist, we get together and they agree with me. It's just so worthless. He tries, it's just so stupid.
It's like, I'm the white orthodox guy. We need the perspective of the lesbian pantheist. Since we're gonna get together, it's gonna be kumbaya and everyone's gonna agree with me. Does anyone else notice this?
This is preposterous. What do you think about it, baby?
I thought, muah, muah, muah. Muah, muah, muah, muah, muah.