Church Discipline for Being Woke? & SBTS Does Reparations?

Conversations That Matter

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Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris. It is a beautiful day where I am.

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I almost don't want to be inside because it's a crisp, clear fall day. Colors are changing, the fall smells.

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And some of you in the Southwest don't even know what I'm talking about. That's a sad thing. But last weekend I was in New York and even more brilliant up there than it is here.

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The fall colors are just amazing, especially in the mountains. And I was up there doing a conference. Hopefully you gleaned from that.

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Three sessions on social justice. It's gonna hopefully be the basis for another book.

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I'm thinking about it. And one of the reasons, I just want to tell you guys this. One of the reasons that I do what

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I do, it really is the reason, when I talk about social justice and evangelicalism is because I want to equip you guys.

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I really do. It's not, I'm not trying to make a name for myself. I don't think that will really ever happen anyway, but I'm not trying to do that.

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Don't want to platform myself. I don't think I'll be doing this forever, although I do think social justice is going to be with us because we are letting it burrow down in American culture and in certain segments of evangelicalism, what was once called evangelicalism.

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We're letting it burrow down into the area of conviction. And once it gets there, it's hard to get rid of it.

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But I want to get written material out to you, things that you can read them all over, think about.

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I know the videos help, but I'm really trying at this point to get resources to you.

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And I just want you to know that's what I'm thinking. I want you to be the source, not me. I know you send videos sometimes to others and say, this is what

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John said, this is what AD Robles said, this is what cross politics said, et cetera. That's good. I'm not saying not to do that, but I really want to encourage you.

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You be the source. Take this book, take the word of God, and you and the word of God be that source to talk to your friend or your pastor or whoever about this issue.

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It doesn't rest on people like me. It doesn't rest on voices on the internet or voices on talk radio or even your favorite pastors.

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It really is with you to go and to talk to people about this. And the conversations naturally come up.

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And if it's someone who's not a Christian, it's a good opportunity to actually talk about the gospel and how there's forgiveness in Christ.

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There's no forgiveness in the woke religion and social justice. You're on the hamster wheel forever. You can never be forgiven.

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So just want to encourage you with that and let you know kind of what I'm thinking and where I'm headed.

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And so if you see people slander, I've seen a lot of slander over this weekend and even before that, a lot of slander.

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Not as much against me, a little bit against me. I have had some of that, but mostly against others, honestly, people in the

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SBC who are trying to bring about, I'm gonna show you some of that, conservative resurgence number two, and man, they're being pounded.

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We're gonna talk about actually Owen Strand a little bit. He put out a video about if you're basically social justice driven, woke person, you need to be church disciplined.

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I mean, look, that's not pulling. I mean, he's pulling punches, but here's the thing. I don't think he named any names, but it's like the people who knew who he was talking about took it personally.

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I'm gonna show you some of that, but we're gonna talk about that today. Hey, should we discipline for this? Is this a disciplinable offense?

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What if my pastor went woke and now is sort of backpedaling? I'm seeing a lot of that. I'm gonna hopefully answer that question a little bit.

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We're gonna talk a little bit about, let's see, what else? Just a, oh, Southern Seminary.

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Southern Seminary last week made an announcement and it was taken as kind of reparations. I don't think they meant it this way,

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I don't know, but $5 million for black students. And there is an aspect of this no one's talking about.

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There's an angle to this that I thought when I first saw it, I thought, well, the issue is it's a private institution.

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Does a private institution, I mean, what should we expect of private institutions? What do they owe others?

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No one's even thinking in those terms, which may be showing us how far we've fallen in a sense when it comes to private property and biblical principles of private property.

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So I'm gonna talk about that a little. We're gonna talk about just some political things.

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Next episode, probably, or episode after, later in this week, I'm gonna talk to you also about David Platt's new book.

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I read it over the weekend. It's called Before You Vote, and there's a few little things in there

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I appreciate, but there's a lot of honestly moral, just, how do

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I phrase this, moral ineptness. I don't know how else to say it, really.

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So we're gonna talk about that because I think a lot of pastors who don't want to, they don't like Trump, they're liberal, we'll put it that way, in a political sense, they don't think they can go full bore conservative, so, or rather full bore progressive,

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I should say. They don't think they can do that because they'll lose people, and they wanna keep the conservatives and the progressives in the same church.

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So what they're doing is they're going like three quarters of the way progressive. And I think David Platt kind of does that because after he's done with you, you read that book afterward, you're like, well,

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I can never criticize just about anyone who votes for Biden, unless they're so overt, they're saying, I like abortion,

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I voted for Biden. Otherwise you can't criticize it because there may be a pragmatic reason that someone had.

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It's morally just, it's not what a pastor should be doing. Pastors should be guiding their people into helping them make decisions.

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And this comes off as, I mean, he talks about fake unity, he doesn't want that, but it really creates a fake unity.

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And there's really, there's no moral guidance, real moral guidance from a pastor on the issues that people are actually asking.

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It's very, it's abstract, it's, anyway, I'm not doing that review in this video, so I gotta stop.

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I will be doing that though. Before we start with the stuff I just mentioned,

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I wanna read for you something. I'm gonna go to, and look, this is the word of God that we're gonna be reading.

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So it may be offensive. Some of you, if you're easily offended, you may wanna turn off the video now.

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I mean, this is the kind of stuff that, you know, gets you kicked off of social media. But I need to make it very clear what

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I'm not doing here. I am not, I am not giving you an application and I'm not telling you that you need to apply this biblical passage in your environment or anything like that.

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Here's what I'm saying. What I'm about to read to you is the word of God. And there's a lot of passages like this in the

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Bible, not just the Old Testament, but the New Testament as well. And how often do we hear pastors, material from even

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Christian publishers, focus on the law of God? I mean, but yet, that is what in Psalm 1, the man of God, who is like a tree firmly planted by streams of water.

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That's what he had available to him. This is what David meditated on day and night. It was the law of God. This is what did Jesus have? Law of prophets, wisdom literature.

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He didn't have the epistles. So this is the word of God. And it's very important. The people that we look up to, that we consider heroes in the

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Bible, this is what they had. And the moral law of God is demonstrated through the

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Tanakh, through the Torah, in the actual civil laws and moral laws and even the ceremonial laws of Israel.

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And we think about those things differently. We apply them differently. And certainly if you're covenantal or dispensational, you may think of some of those things differently a little bit because of your eschatology.

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But everyone, if you're an Orthodox Christian, agrees on this. The law of God is a reflection of his morality,

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God's morality. All right, so having said that, I want you to think about the passage

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I'm about to read. Think about the fact that this is coming from God and then ask yourself if you're offended by it.

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And if social justice advocates would be offended by it, I think we know the answer. And there was a movement in Nazi Germany, which

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I've studied called the German Christian Movement, which attempted to cut out certain passages that were too Jewish, et cetera, in the

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Bible. And I thought of this, when I was reading this passage, I thought, how would the social justice advocates not have to at least mentally cut these passages out?

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They're no longer binding. I mean, they have to do, they have to say that the

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Old Testament, the law doesn't apply in some way, or they have some kind of gymnastics to get around this, but this is the word of God.

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So here we go. Leviticus chapter 25. I'm gonna start with verse 39.

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If a countryman of yours becomes so poor with regard to you that he sells himself to you, you shall not subject him to a slave's service.

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He shall be with you as a hired man, as if he were a sojourner. He shall serve with you until the year of Jubilee.

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He shall then go out from you, he and his sons with him, it's a family, and you shall go back to his family that he may return to the property of his forefathers.

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For they are my servants whom I brought out from the land of Egypt. They are not to be sold in a slave sale.

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So let's stop there, I'm gonna continue. God's saying, if you have a countryman, someone who's of your own flesh and blood, right?

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Ethnically like you, Jewish, in the nation of Israel, you are not to treat them like you would a slave.

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When they sell themselves to you, that's a temporary arrangement until the year of Jubilee, in which case they go back to the land and the land of their forefathers, and they are free at that point.

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So realize that when you're buying someone who's Jewish. And God effectively says basically, hey, they're mine, they're mine, they're my slaves.

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Because look, I was the one that brought them out of the land of Egypt. They belong to Pharaoh, they belong to me now. You don't have them permanently.

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Check this out though, all right? That doesn't offend you, the next section will. You shall not rule over him with severity, but are to revere your

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God. As for your male and female slaves, whom you may have, whom you may have, you may acquire male and female slaves from the pagan nations that are around you.

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Then two, it is out of the sons of the sojourners who live as aliens among you, that you may gain acquisition and out of their families who are with you, whom they will have produced in your land.

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They also may become your possession. You may even bequeath them to your sons after you to receive as a possession.

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You can use them as permanent slaves, permanent slaves. But in respect to your countrymen, the sons of Israel, you shall not rule with severity over one another.

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Now, it goes on and there's a section on essentially if an

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Israeli, if a Jewish person gets poor, sells themselves into slavery to a foreigner, word here is stranger who is sojourning with you, then they have to be able to be redeemed.

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Basically, if you're a foreigner and you're gonna buy slaves in Israel, you gotta just know, hey, someone could come, an uncle, a relative, they could redeem these slaves.

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All right? They can't be permanent. I mean, they can be, I guess, if no one redeems them, but you gotta be open to that.

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But if you're a Jewish person and you purchase a slave from the foreign nations around you, someone who's a sojourner, et cetera, in your land, they can be permanent.

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You can leave their children as an inheritance to your children. This is the word of God.

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I'm not telling you anything more about it. I'm just explaining it to you and reading it to you. That's all I'm doing in this section.

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So anyone who wants to pin me with, John, you advocate that Jewish people can go to the nations around them and purchase slaves, or you're trying to apply that to America or anything.

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I'm not doing that. I'm reading it to you, and I'm trying to explain what it says. Now, why did I do that?

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Just to jolt you into thinking, wow, okay, the Bible has some stuff that doesn't comport with our 21st century

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American views. That's part of it. That is part of it. But more than that,

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I want you to think about the logic that is being given to you right now by social justice advocates and evangelicalism.

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They're saying things like nationalism or ethno -nationalism or nativism, or just even loving your country too much.

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This is idolatry, or this is sin, or those kinds of things. Wanting strict, a border wall.

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This is racism, essentially. If you really want that and you're not, you don't wanna care for refugees.

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You don't want, you want a vetting process. You wanna deport illegal migrants. I mean, this is all horrible. This is all racism.

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This is Trump. And we've been told this now for years, and it's coming to a head now. And the reality is the

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Bible itself, the way that God himself set up the law in ancient Israel was a situation where there were different rules in some areas, and one of them was slavery that applied to foreigners, applied to Israelis.

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That's just the truth. And I didn't make it up. God was the one that wrote that. Now, is that ethno -nationalism?

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Is that nativism? Is that this horrible thing that Israel had one set of standard for their own people, and they were to love their own people in a certain way, and a different set of standards for those nations around them.

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Is that wrong? Think about it, and read the passage. Read the law before you answer that question.

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The other question is, what about slavery itself? Now, slavery, in this passage, there really seems to be two ways suggested here that one could acquire slaves, at least in this passage, right?

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I know there's other, in the Old Testament, there's other ways. I mean, you acquire slaves in war.

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You bring captives back. So you have a war, and bringing the captives back was part of slavery.

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But in this section, it is acquiring them through purchasing them from a master of some kind.

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That's why God says, you're not to basically sell my children, Jewish people, in a slave sale.

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So that was something going on in Israel. They were having slave sales. The other thing is, a slave, someone wanting to become a slave, could sell themselves, because if they did not have a master, they may starve.

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And this was something that would have been done during famines, during just times when you're down on your luck, and you didn't have homeless working the block like they do today in many large cities in America, they had people selling themselves into slavery.

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It was a will work for food, but not only that, hey, I'll sell myself to you, so that I can come into your house, and be part of, in a sense, almost, some people call it the

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Abrahamic household, but your extended family. I'll be under your care, your provision. I mean, that's how

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I'm gonna get my healthcare, and my food, and all the things that Democrats wanna give you from the government. We'll get those things, and it's a personal kind of slavery, though.

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I know you, and I'm selling myself to you, and I'm gonna give you work in return for that. So, this was a practice that was done.

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Now, the Democrats and modern social justice warriors essentially want that kind of a deal for everyone, and they wanna force everyone into it.

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So, it's not a choice of you selling yourself into slavery if you become impoverished. The socialist government just provides everything for you in exchange for, well, really, your devotion and affection, because whether you work or whether you don't work, you're still going to be, in theory, gaining these kinds of benefits, and it's inescapable.

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As long as you live in the jurisdiction of the government, the centralized authority, then you are a slave.

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You're a civil slave of that centralized authority, and it's a very impersonal kind of slavery, and this is okay in the minds of the social justice warriors.

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This is actually what we're striving for to get equity. So, this is the hypocrisy here, but in this context, in that day and age,

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God instituted a type of slavery of some kind, and he regulated it. And I don't believe, because someone might jump on me for this,

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I don't believe slavery is fundamental to the created order. I don't believe God, it's an institution, like marriage is an institution or anything like that, and I'm not saying we should bring slavery back in any sense.

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All I'm doing is reading the word of God to you and explaining it to the best of my ability, what it meant for that time and what

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God was trying to do. Now, here's the question. Here's the real, here's the question. Does a book like that, that contains words like that, constitute hate speech?

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Should a book like that be burned? Should a book like that be canceled? I'm seeing other people now be canceled because of much less offensive things.

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Christians have no place for these kinds of people. We should just, we should run them out of town on a rail. John MacArthur is the king of that now.

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Even people like Doug Wilson, right? Horrible man to the social justice advocates.

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And now, I mean, I saw just this whole lashing out on Twitter recently against Tom Askell and Founders Ministries.

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These are just horrible people. And the whole anti -woke thing, I mean, is awful. These are just people that don't care about racism.

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They're called all kinds of names. And the reality is, there is much more politically incorrect, severe in the minds of the woke language in this book, much more.

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Oh, sure, they like to go to the stories of God liberating his people from slavery in Egypt.

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And they ignore that in the very passages they're quoting, God is telling the children of Israel how to implement the

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Passover when they have slaves. They ignore that this book has stories about the children of Israel being enslaved themselves and in captivity.

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And this was part of God's judgment to that people. And this was

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God's doing in some way. They ignore, and this is, look, we're just talking about slavery right now in the

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Old Testament. I mean, you could expand this. You could talk about slavery in Jesus' parable, slavery in Paul's teaching.

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You could also talk about other issues that are extremely offensive, the role of women. You could talk about what are the civil penalties for things like homosexuality in the

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Old Testament. The list goes on. And this book, I don't know how it doesn't get canceled.

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I don't know how it can comport with the woke religion. It can't, it really can't.

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You're gonna have to choose one because the tension is so much right now. It's about to snap, and I'm telling you guys, it's snapping.

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We're at the beginning of it, but it is snapping. There is a great falling away that is happening right now.

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And yes, it has to do with the gospel. It has to do with adding to the gospel all these social justice -driven

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Marxist ideas. Yes, that's a corruption of the gospel. There's an ethical issue here as well.

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There are Christian, quote -unquote, leaders whose law is not the 10

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Commandments. It is equity, diversity, and inclusion. That's their law.

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And however that's defined in the progressive parlance that seems to be current because it changes.

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That's where we're at, and that's why I'm concerned. And that's why I would just encourage anyone, if you're going down this path and you're a

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Christian, grapple with passages like this. Try to make sense of them.

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And if you are struggling with the idea that, wait, is God misogynist? Is God, is he for slavery in some way?

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Or he's okay with some certain context in which it could be utilized or regulated?

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Is he someone who is against homosexuality? Does he really think there's only two genders?

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The list goes on. If you're struggling with that, you're gonna have to make a choice. That's my encouragement to you is make that choice.

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If you're not a Christian and you come to the conclusion, I don't agree with God on these things, then just be honest about it.

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Don't carry the label Christian with you. You're something else. You could say you're a theist if you want, but you're not a biblical

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Christian. If you can't integrate, if you can't understand, if you can't honor the book that Christians get their authority from, the book that defines what

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Christianity is. All right, so I've had my piece on that. Just wanted to read that to you.

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It was in my devotional reading this morning and I just thought that's, I just wanna share that. And yeah, I could get canceled from things, but again,

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I'm not the one advocating any of this. I'm just reading and explaining to you what the word of God says. Well, let's talk about some things.

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Let's talk about Owen Strand, who is a Southern Baptist professor at I believe it's

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Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. And this is what he said recently. We are speaking the truth in love.

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We are demolishing strongholds, according to Paul in 2 Corinthians 10, four. A lot of us today, we don't think in those terms that language sounds kind of hostile and arrogant and imperial and very

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Western. That is an apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ, martyred in the Christian faith who tells us that he demolishes strongholds.

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The Corinthian church is to demolish strongholds. And by extension, 2000 years later, roughly, you demolish strongholds that would seek to take you captive.

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We want unity in the truth of Jesus Christ, but where people have embraced wokeness, we must follow the steps of discipline, per Matthew 18, 15 to 20.

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We need to treat them as if they are being taken captive by ungodly ideology, because they are.

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I'm talking in particular about this fourth group. Even as we also publicly confront those teaching unbiblical ideas in a broader sense.

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Though it will pain us greatly, excommunication must be enacted for those who, after going through the

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Matthew 18 steps, we pray we don't have to go all the way to the end. But if we do, excommunication must happen for those who do not repent of teaching

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CRT, wokeness and intersectionality. At the institutional level, the same principle applies.

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Trustees, voting members, organizational heads, educational boards, and so on, must not tolerate the spread of wokeness any longer.

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Not one day more, not one hour more.

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It is time. It is time for a line in the sand.

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Now that sounds really good. I mean, it's stronger, almost,

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I think, sounding stronger than anything I've said, if I'm not mistaken. But I agree with it.

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I would say, if someone's truly bought into what I call the social justice religion, because it is a religion.

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It has all the elements of religion. It answers the questions religions answer. And if they're truly pushing ideas that undermine the objectivity of truth, the purity of the gospel, and biblical ethics, then there's only one thing you can do.

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There's only one thing we are assigned to do within the church, which is to confront that person. And once you confront someone, then you are on a trajectory that's going to lead you if they do not receive the confrontation well to church discipline.

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Ultimately, kicking someone out of the church, telling someone they cannot fellowship with you if they will not repent and change their views, treating them like a

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Gentile and a tax gatherer. So that's what Owen Strand, that's the argument he's making.

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Now, we have been watching this now happen, this movement take place for two years about, more than that, actually.

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And Owen has written some encouraging things. This is where I would, those of you, if you know

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Owen, if you're encouraged by this, if you have any interaction with him, this is what I would encourage at this point.

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There's a few professors that are saying sort of similar things, not quite as strong as Owen, but in the

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SBC at Southern Seminary in particular, I've noticed there's a few people that are starting to try to say things, but it's all very abstract.

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They're not naming names in their denomination, which that's their decision, okay. But that time must come and will come.

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And there will be opportunities for it. There have been many opportunities that have been passed by already to name names.

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That won't stop. There will be opportunities, I guarantee it. There will be opportunities even this year,

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I'm sure of it, in the SBC to say, all right, I'm gonna name the name now and I'm gonna call them out specifically.

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So it's a lot easier to have really strong language when you're not, when there isn't someone that you're specifically talking about.

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But once you talk about them, then you risk a personal offense and you saw what happened to Russell Fuller when he did that.

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Russell Fuller actually applied this. I mean, within Southern Seminary for years, he's confronting these men, not getting anywhere, trying his best in the institution.

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At the end, now that he's gone, he just, he says, hey, those who are funding this institution, this is what's happening.

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There's an opportunity right there. Russell Fuller stood when it counted. And I think we're gonna see some other incidences like that,

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I'm just saying. So the opportunity for Owen to name the names is coming and for other professors who are saying similar things is coming.

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But look, I'm glad about this. This is a step in the right direction. I don't know Owen personally. I've never met him, but seems like a guy who cares about truth and the purity of the gospel.

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And we're gonna have to see. We're gonna have to wait and we're gonna have to see how this plays out. But here's something that should interest you.

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Here's how the woke reacted, a few people. Greg Johnson at Memorial PCA. So someone that's not even in the

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SPC. Excommunication for being woke. So I guess he's saying excommunication, church discipline,

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I get it, okay. Excommunication for being woke. Teaching critical race theory for intersectionality.

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Let's start instead with porn, adultery, slander, sloth, racism, and gossip. Oh, and gluttony.

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Lots more of those in the churches. Bible calls those sins. Well, I mean, look, slander is part of,

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I mean, people that are pushing the critical race theory. Critical race theory is basically group slander. It's also racist because you're assuming a moral inferiority of certain social groups.

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I mean, look, it's within that. I mean, gossip, that really, critical race theorists engage in that.

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And we have a few of those sins already. A sloth, I mean, look, hey, I can encourage some sloth because you have people that think there's something owed to them.

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I mean, look, if you really wanna go after the sins he's labeling here, then maybe you should be going after critical race theory.

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So I don't know who Greg Johnson is, but he doesn't seem to understand what critical race theory is or intersectionality.

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How about Thibidi and Abouille? Yes, one of those, properly understood, is not a sin. No church should be excommunicating saints who are not in sin.

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That's what makes the statement so egregious. So apparently it's not a sin. Well, let me ask you this.

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Is Mormonism a sin? Is the New Age movement a sin? Is any false religion a sin?

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Because that's what the social justice movement, it's a religion. And people who have really bought into it, they get deeper into the religion and they become committed.

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They're woke, that's their born again experience and they're in. If you understand it in that sense, if you understand that this has its own saints, its own way of testing truth, its own holy books, its own understanding of sovereignty and providence, it's about power relationships and privilege.

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God's not the one that's actually creating and calibrating the circumstances into which we are born and live.

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I mean, the list just goes on. It's a religion. It answers all the questions. It has all the facets of a religion, essentially.

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And so is it a sin for someone to be in Mormonism? Well, no and yes.

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No, in the sense that the word Mormonism is just a word about people who follow Joseph Smith and the

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Book of Mormon. And you could have that label and I guess have no clue what it means.

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I remember there was a story from years ago about some guys who were Mormons out in the backwoods and they had the

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Bible and the Book of Mormon but they basically didn't really treat the Book of Mormon as authoritative in any sense and they just had the

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Bible and they basically were so separated from the LDS Church when they went and they found the LDS Church, they realized, hey, wait a minute, we don't believe any of this stuff.

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We just have the Bible and that's what we've been teaching. Well, they thought of themselves as Mormons. Okay, were they really Mormons?

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Well, not really, but they thought of themselves that way. So were they in sin for being Mormons? I mean, you could think of technicalities like that,

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I guess, but in general, yes. When we talk about Mormonism, we say it's a sin to be a Mormon. We know what we're talking about.

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Everyone knows what that means. It's accepting the teachings of the Mormon Church. If you accept the teachings of wokeness, of the social justice movement, of critical race theory, intersectionality, if you're accepting that, then you're in sin.

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Yes, it is not compatible with the Bible. Go watch the three -part series I did last week, the three sessions on this.

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It is an egalitarian religion that is influenced by Marxism and post -modernism. None of that comports with scripture, none of it.

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So anyway, that's the BDN Abouillez, otherwise known as Ron Burns, his objection.

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And then we have Anthony Bradley. Such profound nonsense, it's hard to know how to respond. It's better if you read it in a

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British accent, but I won't. Such profound nonsense, it's hard to know how to respond. Southern Baptists are calling to excommunicate

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Christians who teach about intersectionality, et cetera. The PCA attaching themselves to evangelicalism instead of 18th, 19th century

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Scottish Presbyterianism was a massive mistake. Don't even know.

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I'm gonna sidestep the whole Presbyterian thing and whether the

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PCA has attached themselves to evangelicalism. It's nonsense, it's ridiculous.

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It is just the kind of the looking down at someone because Owen would say this, looking down at him.

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And how could anyone do something so nonsensical as to excommunicate people for intersectionality?

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Well, if you understand what it is and that it's a religion, and this is trying to rip down all the hierarchies that God has even given instructions about, some of them are woven into the fabric of creation and that's what intersectionality accomplishes.

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If you've read what Kimberly Williams Crenshaw was trying to do and how this was a political thing, this is influenced by standpoint epistemology from postmodernism.

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This was an extension of identity politics. If you understand that, then you don't scratch your head about this stuff.

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You understand what's going on. But if you just say, if you try to redefine these things, then yeah, of course you wouldn't understand.

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And I don't know really exactly what's always going on. Sometimes it seems like the social justice crowd is trying to just redefine it to make these things palatable to Christians.

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So they're taking them out of their secular context. And other times it just seems like they're saying, yeah, so what? If we're creating a revolution and we're completely eroding the idea of objective truth and adding works to the

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God, so what if we're doing that? Either way, these responses are not helpful and they're at best ignorant.

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And I suspect the BDN of Wheelay knows. Anthony Bradley knows. They're not so ignorant about this.

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At worst, this is malicious. This is evil. And good for Owen Strand for not backing down on it.

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Now, again, we'll see what happens when opportunities are made to actually apply this.

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Because the words mean nothing unless this is applied. This must be applied. Another development

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I wanted to talk about in this video is from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

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This was interesting. And I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on it, but we had this situation in which, see if I can pull it up for you.

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Southern Seminary decided to make an announcement. And I have the article actually up here from Southern News.

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SBTS trustees retain building names, address history, establish 5 million scholarship for African -American students.

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The building names, the people who founded Southern Seminary owned slaves. I mean, that's really what this amounts to.

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I mean, how horrific that they would have owned slaves. That's horrible.

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They were in sin. It was, I mean, that's the assumption behind this. And it just haunts the history of this institution.

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And you read through this, and it's all about that. It's all, here's a summary of the 2018 report on slavery, which, again, hey, did you know that the people who started

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Southern Seminary owned slaves? It's pretty much the, that's the argument, or the message that they're trying to convey.

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No, we didn't know that. I think most people did know that Southern Baptists, a lot of them, especially the more affluent ones, would have owned slaves.

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And then, anyways, founders made great sacrifices when it appeared the

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Civil War might force the school's closure. Here's what the founders did. So what he's trying to do is saying, look, hey,

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David was a man after God's own heart, and Moses killed an Egyptian, and everyone's got flaws, but we're not gonna take down their names.

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So Moeller's giving, if you read this whole thing, it seems like kind of a half -hearted attempt. At least there's an attempt to try to not completely erase the names of the people who founded the institution.

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But how does this comport with biblical teaching on slavery? I don't know. I mean, you can have slaves and not be in sin for that, just like you can be involved with a sinful welfare system.

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Bible says a man doesn't work, he shouldn't eat, yet we have a welfare system in this country, and I wouldn't dissuade a

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Christian from being a welfare worker, and say, oh, you're part of an evil system. No, you're trying to bring light to that system, and hopefully we can progressively end that system, because it's keeping people in generational bondage.

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That's the effect of it. It's not even giving them the dignity of work. Shopping at places that have sweatshop labor.

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It's really no better than slave labor, in some of the places that we buy clothes from, et cetera. I'm not saying,

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I would never say, oh, those people are in sin for doing that. Look, here's the deal. You can be in a system in which there's wickedness attached to it, in certain elements, and keep yourself away from that wickedness, unstained by that wickedness.

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How else would Paul give the instructions he did concerning slavery in a system, in a Roman Empire, in which,

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I mean, look, they didn't have gladiatorial arenas in Alabama. They had them in the Roman Empire. They had sex slavery that was normalized.

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It wasn't hidden away somewhere. This was, yeah, that's my sex slave. Horrible situation, and Paul gives instructions to masters and slaves in that environment.

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Here's how you live as Christians in this. And so someone like Southern Seminary, like the people who set that particular seminary up, it is very possible you can be involved in slavery, but keeping the biblical commands, and that's never the issue.

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It's like it's never even talked about. Did they? That's the question. Did they keep the commands that are given to slaves or slave masters?

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Did they treat their slaves in a way that is becoming of a Christian? In the time in which it was legal, in the time in which it was a reality in this country, and there were many efforts.

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This is the thing that you also don't hear. There were many efforts from the foundation of the country and during the constitutional debates up through, even most people will be surprised to hear this, the

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Confederate Constitution outlawed the slave trade. There were efforts to reduce, to minimize, to cut back, to figure out ways to gradually emancipate.

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There were a lot of slave abolitionists societies trying to come up with these things.

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It's almost never talked about, but even those who would have owned slaves often wanted to, saw the institution as a whole as a bad thing, but did they treat the slaves they had in a way that honored the word of God and the law of God?

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That's always the issue. We have to compare it to this, and this is what I, I mean, I get called all kinds of names for this, but this is, look, show me in this word, show me in this word, rightly divided, taking into account all the passages on the subject, not just cherry picking here or there and inserting your own opinion.

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Study this book and then show me, okay, what does it teach about this subject? And then apply it to the founders of Southern Seminary.

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Now, here's the thing. Here's the thing that, the issue that I don't hear anyone talking about, because this is, the issue's not slavery.

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The issue's not slavery. The issue is, do private institutions, right, their own money, their own, they're accomplishing their own purposes with private property, do they owe it to certain social groups?

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Do they owe reparations or some kind of payment, compensation to them for not extending a service to them or offering a service to them?

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Do private institutions owe people money for not extending a service to them or people like them at some point in time?

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Southern Seminary wasn't allowing women to be, I mean, look, Southern Baptist Convention doesn't allow women to be pastors.

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Does Southern Seminary and the Southern Baptist Convention owe all women compensation now?

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Because, well, we didn't allow them to come and study because we didn't think women could be pastors. Is that now grounds for compensation as well?

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I think a lot of the woke crowd, I'd be curious to hear Dwight McKissick because he's more egalitarian. I think he'd probably say, yeah.

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That's a good start, five million for African -American students. How about another 10 million for women?

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Where does this end? What about all the language and rhetoric over the years against LGBTQ plus community, et cetera?

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Are there reparations for them? So same -sex attracted Christians felt like maybe they could never be pastors.

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I mean, look, once you start going down this road, you can find all kinds of disenfranchised groups, but the question still remains, does a private institution owe it to any group that they did not offer a service to?

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And the answer is no. That's the answer. That's the moral principle here. Private institutions are not taxpayer funded.

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They're not, that's not how Southern Seminary was conceived. Southern Seminary was a specific group of people that wanted to accomplish a certain goal.

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And we can look back at some of the things, maybe the decisions they made, the things they did, and say, well, we don't agree with that.

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We can change the policy. We can say, we're not doing that anymore. But in the times in which those things happened, it wasn't like there was some kind of entitlement that, well, every single person, no matter who they are, where they are, deserves an education from Southern Seminary.

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I think that's the logic we live in now, though. We don't think in those terms. In other words, you're allowed to do what you want with your own stuff.

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This applies to individuals as well. I mean, look, if you reverse the logic, here's another way of showing how this doesn't make any sense.

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Is there a requirement that if you own a business, or a seminary, we'll say in this case, that everyone must frequent your seminary?

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If they don't go to school there, they at least gotta go to the gift shop and buy things. They must take advantage of the service you're offering.

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No, that makes no sense. That's up to the buyer, just like it's up to the seller, the provider, who they want to sell to.

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It's up to the buyer who they wanna buy from. It's up to the seller who they wanna sell to. That's not just how the free market works.

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That's how private property works. That's how it works. Even Ananias and Sapphira were told, hey, was it not yours when you had it?

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Did it not belong to you at a time when the church was holding all things in common, people selling their property?

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They didn't require to do that. They didn't owe it. It was a good, it was exemplary, but they didn't owe it.

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It was theirs when they had it. All right, that's the issue. Remember, it's not slavery.

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That's the issue. And when you start going down this path, and here's the announcement from Al Mohler, breaking news,

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SBTS Trustees retains building names, address history, established $5 million scholarship for African -American students.

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When you couple all these things together and say they're related, it really does sound like reparations, doesn't it? Now, if they didn't want it to sound that way, then he shouldn't have coupled it.

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They shouldn't have coupled all these things together. But the way they coupled them together leads to the conclusion, well, this has to do with the trustees.

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This has to do, or the building names of the founders. This has to do with the history of the fact that there were slave owners who helped start it.

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And here's the thing that really just, it makes me scratch my head.

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All these Christian leaders who advocate Christian morality on things, gratitude is a big part of being a

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Christian, being thankful to God, being thankful to others. Why can't we look at this situation and we say, yep, there were some people who owned slaves.

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And surely, I'm sure they wouldn't want to, wanted to, they surely wouldn't have liked it if that's how people reduced them or characterized them solely.

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You know, reducing them down to, well, you're just people that own slaves because there's a lot more to them than that. But that's how they're remembered now in the modern history of slavery.

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Social justice driven narrative. All right, so we have some people that owned slaves that started

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Southern Seminary. Can we not be thankful that what these men started, a great sacrifice to themselves.

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They didn't have to give their money to the propagation of the gospel and gospel ministry, and yet they did.

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That's a good thing. That's a commendable thing. And that the Lord used those people who owned slaves to do that. Well, look what the

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Lord did. He took people that owned slaves to do this. And look what the Lord did. Now, look at how the

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Southern Baptist Convention and Southern Seminary allows people of all kinds of ethnicities to come.

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And there are no slave owners. It's obviously illegal in the United States, in at least that kind of slavery.

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You know, look where we've come from. And look what we've come to. And look how the

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Lord used people that were engaged in practices that many of us would have disagreed with now.

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But that's the story of the Lord. I mean, Joseph was able to do this with his own brothers. What you intended for evil,

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God intended for good. And these slave owners didn't even intend building Southern Seminary necessarily for evil, or at least

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I don't see any evidence of that. They weren't doing it because like, we just want to be racist. They were doing it because they wanted to expand gospel ministry.

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So this is actually morally kind of, if you really start peeling back the onion layers, this is morally kind of inept to do this, to act like we, you know,

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Southern Seminary owes it to these people for not extending a service. That isn't it, hey, we were able to save the names this time, you know, next time, who knows.

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And we're just gonna, we're gonna address our history. Addressing the history would just mean we're thankful to God from where we've come from and from where, and where we are.

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That's what we would, that's who you think you'd look at. I mean, look, you know, you want to go back in time. Let's go to the reformers and look at some of their views on the civil magistrate and the penalties for those who disagreed with the religion.

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Or what about the divine right of kings? Or what about arranged marriages? Or what about all the things that in our modern day, we look back and we think, oh, those are so horrible that anyone would have been involved in that.

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I guess now, you know, any institutions or organizations started by those men must, they have to put a grant aside for those who are disenfranchised.

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John Knox needs to, you know, the Knox publishing, right? They need to make sure that they're gonna publish a new quota of women's books because of all the things

46:41

John Knox said about Catholic women. I mean, guys, this would get ridiculous if we really accepted this logic.

46:48

Well, I'm afraid that's where we're going. Here are the reactions. Dwight McKissick, $5 million scholarship in honor of Garland O 'Foote.

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Thanks, dot, dot, dot, thanks. This is sarcastic. Dr. Moeller and SBTS trustees.

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That's what I call fruit worthy of repentance. I sincerely believe the next generation will finish the job and remove the names of men stealers and child abusers.

47:10

Speaking of slander, right? We're supposed to slander, what do we see in the last slide? Oh yeah,

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Greg Johnson. How about slander? That's what we excommunicate for. Well, Greg Johnson should be calling Dwight McKissick up and saying, you need to be excommunicated then because Dwight McKissick is calling them men stealers and child abusers.

47:29

Because some of them own slaves? Does that mean they're men stealers and child abusers? As celebrated figures.

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Well, Dwight McKissick obviously thinks this isn't enough. Moeller didn't go far enough here. Southern Seminary, just the trustees didn't go far enough.

47:46

The Bedian Abouille, also known as Ron Burns. Finally, this press release fails to call things what they are.

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The scholarship ought to be called an effort at reparation. So he gets it. Even critics see this as for what it is.

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Racial supremacy ought to be called white supremacy for that's the legacy dealt with here. So he's still nitpicking at the announcement.

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This announcement doesn't satisfy the woke crowd. $5 million scholarship for black students doesn't satisfy the woke crowd.

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And I said this as soon as this was announced and I saw it, I made a tweet. I said, this ain't gonna satisfy the woke crowd and it's not.

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A, this is a, the woke idol will never be satisfied with your sacrifices.

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It will always require more. The only way to win is not to play the game. It's the only way to win.

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And that's why I was saying when we started ripping down all the history everywhere and knee -jerk reactions to everything, I said, even if you can make a good argument that let's say something should be removed somewhere, not right now.

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Because right now it's gonna be taken as you're sacrificing to their gods. And they're gonna be encouraged by it and they're gonna, you give a moose a muffin, they're gonna take more.

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And that's what we're seeing. It's never enough. It's never enough. And this was a incredibly inept decision because now you have conservatives upset about it because we realize the principles it's undermining.

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We realize it's undermining gratitude. It's undermining a principle of private property. And we, so we're not happy.

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And then you have the woke crowd thinking this doesn't go far enough. So that's,

49:20

I wanted to end on that. There's a few other things that I wanna talk about this week, but I'm gonna just, because this episode is getting long, we're gonna stop it there.

49:30

Quick announcement. The book, Social Justice Goes to Church, is out. If you did receive a copy of it, if you've ordered it from Amazon, if you ordered it from me, from the autographed copy, which

49:42

I have a good deal on that. You go to socialjusticegoestochurch .com. I just got a shipment in. So I'm gonna be starting to,

49:49

I think I got 50. So I'm gonna ship those out and then I'll get some more and I'll just keep shipping them. But yeah, if you ordered it a week and a half ago, that's why you haven't gotten it.

49:58

I didn't have my shipment yet. So that's going out there. But please, this is the big thing. Please go to amazon .com,

50:04

this is what the publisher wants me to say, and give it a rating. Give it a review. I know many of us don't do that.

50:10

I don't usually do that with most books, but it would help, according to the publisher, if you review it on Amazon.

50:16

I don't know how all that works. This isn't my area. But they said it'd be nice to have 50 reviews by the end of the month.

50:21

So I think we have 20 or so now. Go review it, let us know what you thought. Hey, if you didn't like it, don't review it.

50:28

But if you liked it, let us know. It's a history of the social justice movement, kind of how this came to be, how we got where we are, and hopefully it'll help you explain, in your minds, what happened.

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But that's all I have for you today. God bless and enjoy. Hopefully you're having a beautiful fall day, like I am here in Virginia.