Jon Harris Interview

Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ based on the theme in Galatians 2 verse 5 where the

Apostle Paul said, but we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.

In short, if you like smooth, watered -down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn't for you.

By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we're called by the divine trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her

King. Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth. Welcome to No Compromise Radio, ministry.

My name is Mike Abendroth. And if you're new to the show, there's been kind of a metamorphosis in my thinking over the years.

In the old days when I was younger, I thought, you know, let's call it No Compromise Radio because I don't want to compromise. And that's still true today.

But I've tried to switch it to make it a little more Christ -centered. And so we call ourselves No Compromise Radio because we try to talk about the one who never compromised.

Can you imagine the Lord Jesus? He said in the Gospel of John, I always do what's pleasing to the

Father. And then secondly, we like to talk about His work, His representative and substitutionary work in His life and death, and of course, confirmed by the resurrection.

And can you imagine, dear listener, that Jesus, when He died on the cross, all the attributes of God simultaneously on display, and not one of them was compromised?

Not His holiness, nor His justice, nor anything else, His grace or love. So that's why we're

No Compromise Radio. As you know, every day is a different format. And the Wednesday format is interviewing theologians, authors, other pastors, friends, and people that I want you to know about so you can understand their ministry as their ministry is focused.

We're focused on truth, and that is Christ -centered truth. And so today, being Wednesday, I have John Harris on the phone.

And I first started listening to John, and I thought, you know what? That's my kind of man who wants to stand up for the truth at any cost, without compromise.

And so, John Harris, welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry. Hey, thank you, Pastor Mike. Very kind of you to have me on, and it was nice meeting you at the

Shepherds Conference a month ago. It feels like another world with all the changes since then.

But yeah, you're just a great guy. I was just listening to your podcast on Psalm 23, and I appreciate what you do.

Well, John, when I saw you at the Shepherds Conference, it did seem like another world, right? The Shepherds Conference just made it before the restrictions and the shutdown, so I'm glad all the men got to go there.

Yeah, absolutely. So I regularly ride a bicycle or work out, and when I do, I listen to podcasts.

And a lot of times, the podcasts I listen to maybe are more of the, I don't know, kind of,

I don't know, cerebral stuff, and who knows what's going on in the world, and maybe

I'll listen to a book on tape or something. And for some reason, I started listening to a podcast called

Conversations That Matter, and it said John Harris, but I didn't put two and two together.

I didn't know who your father was, and I know your father, who ministers up here in New England, New York area.

And I thought, you know what? I want to hear what John says, because I have a son, Luke, and I appreciate what Luke has to say, and he teaches me many things now, even though he's only 23.

And I thought, you know what? I bet you John has been influenced by his father and could teach his father things, and if he could teach his father things, he could teach me things, and I started listening, and I was hooked.

So John, you've got me hooked, Conversations That Matter. How did that podcast start? Yeah. You know, it started with just me realizing that people were more likely to listen or watch someone talk about things than actually read articles, and I had a blog for years before that that wasn't getting a lot of traffic.

Some articles would get traffic, and others, maybe two people would read, and so I decided to try to put together a podcast where I could just kind of share my thoughts on all sorts of things, the full spectrum of everything

I was interested in, and that would include theology, politics, and history, and all sorts of things.

What ended up happening, though, was I think it was my second podcast or so. I did a podcast on hiking.

I love to hike. I love being out in the outdoors. You're talking about going for bike rides. I love mountain biking, all of that, and I was going to incorporate that into some of what

I talked about, but my second podcast, I decided to do kind of an expose on my experience at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, and the rest is kind of history.

That video that I put out went viral, and immediately I had an audience that I didn't have before, and they were interested in the social justice debate that was going on at the

Southern Baptist Convention, so I decided to spend just a few more weeks on that. Weeks turned into months, we're over a year later, and I have to say that's probably the majority of what

I talk about or have been talking about. I don't know if it'll continue to be that, but it is a topic that has just exploded, and there's a need,

I think, right now for Christians who understand the issue, who can articulate it, and prepare the sheep, and even in some cases, pastors like yourself who listen for,

I think, what's coming and what has come, and so I'm enjoying navigating that and meeting people like yourself, and that's kind of the nutshell version right there.

Well, John, years ago, when I went to get my doctorate of ministry at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, I watched the

Lipscomb movie, the PBS movie, called Battle for the Minds, and I thought it was very fascinating. It was almost screw tape letter -esque, where the enemy was really the good guy, and the good guy was the enemy, and it documented the conservative takeover of Southern Seminary, and I never thought

I would live to see the day that that movie almost could be reversed. Do you think I'm overreacting to my...

Maybe it's a feeling, or a sentiment, or an emotion, where I think, you know what? I'm now almost 60 years old, and I've lived to see the day where Southern went from grossly liberal pornography classes in ethics rooms and gay marriages in the quad to very conservative, and now it's going the opposite way, or is the opposite way.

What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, well, I have the same feeling that you're talking about.

I actually thought Al Mohler, thought very highly of him. He was a hero.

I thought highly of Danny Akin. One of the reasons I even went to a Southern Baptist Seminary was because I wanted to be part of the denomination that they were in, and I thought it's the biggest

Protestant denomination in the United States. It can draw a lot of influence that could be exerted there.

The cooperative program attracted me, and so those are part of the reasons that I ended up going where I went, and there was no sign of this when

I visited the campus that I could remember, and it was like overnight, someone flipped a switch, and all of a sudden, the campus where I was, at least

Southeastern, became obsessed with social justice, and before really anyone had talked about it, this was before MLK50, I remember thinking, this is the same kind of thing that I was taught in my secular college experience, and it was taught by Marxists.

Same language, same arguments, same ethics, and I started to get concerned, and like yourself,

I did not want to cause a stir right away. I waited. I talked to professors.

I tried to go through the proper channels as best I knew how and hit roadblocks, and eventually came out and talked about what was actually going on on campus, but I think you're 100 % right.

The ideas that we are swallowing right now are destroying the fabric of the theology we believe, and not a lot of people want to talk about it, unfortunately.

I think there's a lot of risk in doing that, so yeah, they've gone liberal, and it's sort of a different path to liberalism, a little different than the modernist controversy and what was going on in the 70s, but still, same destination, ultimately.

Talking to John Harris today, Conversations That Matter, I'd encourage you listeners to listen to John, and you can go to YouTube as well and watch him as he does his show as well.

I listen to every one of his shows, and most of the time I am glad, but a few times I get mad, not at John, but what he's talking about.

If you ever hear, if it's an 11pm Twitter scud on social justice, it's usually inflamed by John's podcast.

I was thinking as you were talking, John, about Machen's book, dear listener, if you have not read

J. Gresham Machen's book, Christianity and Liberalism, I believe 1923, Erdman's Press, you ought to read that book, because the truths that he talks about regarding God's Word, salvation, the person of Christ, will arm you on the positive side to see some of these social justice issues that are springing up everywhere.

John, let's fast forward just for a second, because I don't want to forget this. Now there's no Southern Baptist Convention for 2020.

To what degree should I think nefarious things are going on to keep the current woke leadership in place?

Is that, am I thinking wrongly? Oh, wow. You know, I don't want to speak beyond what

I can point to conclusively through primary sources online. So, I mean, I don't have a document that I can say, go look at this document and it proves that the motivation is they want to keep woke people in leadership.

But it does seem very curious to me that at the same time when all the same leaders are telling us that we need to just do online streaming right now and you can do online church and that's a great thing, they don't want to have something equivalent for the convention, like maybe online voting for the next president or resolutions that could be voted on online.

They don't want to postpone it either. I know, you know, I go to Liberty University, I'm just graduating right now with a second degree in history, and they've postponed their convocation until September.

So they didn't cancel it, but the Southern Baptist Convention could have done something similar.

So there are a lot of questions that I have about this. It just seems contradictory. It seems weird.

And I think because there have been so many things in the past year or two that have disappointed conservatives in the convention and a lot of shady things have gone on and have been brought to light,

I think the grace that would have been given even a year ago is not given as much anymore. And the questions that we are asking are not being answered or addressed.

So you know, I have the same concern you have about that. How about when

I think about the conservatives wanting to nominate or find someone to run against Al Mohler?

I mean, this is like, it's a different world. If I would have thought before, conservatives are trying to figure out somebody to run against Al Mohler because they don't think he's conservative or conservative enough.

Isn't that strange? It is. It's very strange. It's also strange to see

Armenians and Calvinists coming together in ways that I think even a year ago

I would never have conceived of. There's kind of an Armenian wing that is now starting to cooperate with the

Founders wing. And they're saying, you know what, this issue is bigger than the battle that we have.

And you know how important that battle is to them. But they actually think that this could be more of a threat to the gospel, which is amazing.

John, I'm not really a psychologist or anything like that. I mean, I see people and watch them and, you know, been around for quite a while.

I'm trying to think if I, and I know Danny Akin, and I don't know if he would think I'm friendly toward him anymore, but I've had him speak here at the church several times and have been indebted to him for him getting me some preaching class opportunities where I've taught preaching class at Southern for several years up here in the

Boston adjunct campus. But could it be, I mean, I'm trying to figure out why people do what they do.

And so sometimes it's like, okay, with the evangelicals and Catholics together, why did J .I.

Packer do these things? And I think it was MacArthur who said something like, well, it's their friends and their friends influence them.

And so don't forget the power of a friend influencing. Well, I've never met Danny Akin's children, but I know a couple of them

I think are in ministry to some way, shape, or form. Here's what I'm going to posit. Could it be that people who are younger growing up in our world of social justice everywhere they look, including churches, have his sons influenced him to kind of go down this direction?

Or is it the other way around? I mean, I don't know, but that's just something I'm thinking about. Yeah, that's a,

I mean, again, I'm not in his living room hearing his sons and him discuss things.

Here's what I do know, though. His sons have a reputation from, and I don't know them personally, because I went to Southeastern, I do have mutual friends who are conservative, and they told me that, yes, his sons do have that reputation.

I know online, I think it was John Akin, if I'm not mistaken, now, and this is another weird rabbit hole that we probably don't want to dive down unless you want to, but he's pastoring now at First Baptist Naples, John Akin.

But John Akin had put out a tweet thread, I think it was a couple months ago, defending social justice and saying it was a

Christian concept. And so, from what I know, from what I've been told, from what I've seen, yes, his sons kind of are more geared towards that mindset.

And I think Danny Akin, from my personal conversations with him and just observing him when

I was a student, is very pragmatic, and he's an institutionalist.

So he looks at the school, I think, and he makes calculations. You know, I remember one time, this is a good example of it, there was someone who was coming to speak in chapel who

Danny Akin did not actually agree with his theology, and he was actually speaking on a topic that Akin disagreed with.

And I remember Akin told me, this was a personal conversation, but he said that there was a couple of students,

I was one of them, near him, and he goes, you know what, guys, I don't want this man to come on campus and speak on this topic, but he's got a million -dollar grant he's going to give to the school, so I kind of have to just let it happen.

And I remember that so clearly and vividly, because it was within the first few weeks of being a student at Southeastern.

It wasn't related to social justice, it was eschatology. But I just remember thinking, man, like, what kind of principle says, you know,

I don't agree with what this man's going to say, but, you know, I want the money. And so ever since then,

I've noticed Danny Akin making a lot of decisions that seem to me, if I frame it in a pragmatic way, they start to make sense.

You're going to get money from outside organizations, like the Oikonomia Network, if you start a social justice program and implement these work economic classes.

You know, seminaries need money. We're going to get in—this was said at a donor meeting two years ago now—but we're going to get in all the minorities and all the young people if we just implement kingdom diversity, because, you know what, that's the language they speak, and the

Southern Baptist white old men are all dying. So we need to revitalize, and Southeastern's going to lead the charge.

So step by step, if you start making decisions for what's best for your institution and your denomination instead of what's best for the kingdom of God, then you could wind up in some weird places.

Well, even before the social justice stuff started emerging at Southeastern, I would watch who would go to chapel, and, you know, it was the

Driscolls of the world who would go, and I thought, why do those men who already had been to some degree exposed, why do they have now an audience at Southeastern Seminary?

And so that made me think about a lot of those things. You know what, John, maybe we could do this on the show. Let's just say somebody's tuning in, they don't really know what social justice is, they don't know why it's a big deal, would you just give our listeners kind of a

Christian view of what social justice is, and why people should avoid it and be concerned that it doesn't take hold in their churches?

Yeah, that's a really good question, and you know, there's short answers and long answers. I'm going to give you the one -word answer, envy, would be.

That was Thomas Sowell's answer when he was asked that question, it's just envy.

But to become a little more specific with the origins and the thinking, you know, people

I think started waking up to what social justice was when Resolution 9 was passed last year, and they had never heard of critical race theory or intersectionality, found out that these were tools used by social justice warriors, and then all of a sudden their understanding got their connecting.

Social justice in its modern form is a combination of Marxism, or you can call it cultural

Marxism, and postmodernism. And it's essentially the idea that there are different identity groups that have levels of oppression, and this is where the postmodernism comes in, they also have different understandings of the way the world is.

And so the more oppressed you are, the actually greater your understanding, the more truth value it holds.

And so someone who is very oppressed needs to be listened to, because their perspective is more important, and we should read the

Bible through that perspective, we should understand everything we do through that perspective. And we should, and this is where the

Marxism comes in, we should elevate those perspectives, we should redistribute the privilege, so platforming people just because of their oppressed status on this hierarchy, reallocating resources, that's where the reparations comes in and all of that.

And so you have kind of a combination of these two Marxism and postmodernism ideas, and it's a deadly combination because both of them contradict biblical ethics, biblical epistemology, and the gospel, frankly.

Talking to John Harris today, Conversations That Matter. John, as I would listen to you, sometimes

I would think to myself, okay, that was really insightful, I have to try to figure this out a little bit more.

For instance, Al Mohler retweeting Owen, I don't know how to say his last name, Strachan, is that his name?

Strand. Strand, yes. Retweeting Owen's tweets about, you know, let's be careful about social justice and the other, but yet Al simultaneously having people at his seminary,

Southern Seminary, teach the very opposite thing. What's your take when people do that?

Is this a political, is the Southern Baptist Convention and Southern Baptist leadership so political that I can't even think that way when it comes to ministry, so I don't know what they're trying to do politically, pragmatically?

Could that be the case? Yeah, it could be what I was talking about before with the institutionalism.

If it's going to benefit their institution or protect their institution, they'll adopt it and straddle the fence.

And I've been watching Al Mohler, I did a whole episode on Mohler a few weeks ago, and I decided to just watch him over the course of a year.

I had insiders at Southern telling me, he's no good, this is what's happening right in front of our eyes.

This is what's happening in meetings, faculty meetings, and, you know, the trustee meetings, et cetera.

And I thought, you know what, I'm not going to, I can't name these sources, I'm not going to come out and just, you know, say this is what

I hear is happening. I want to be able to verify it. I want people to see for themselves, based on publicly available information, what's happening and let them come to their own conclusion.

And so I started just keeping kind of tabs on the controversies that would arise over social justice and then the position

Alber Mohler would take. And consistently, over the course of a year, every time it seemed like the issue was, you know, going after a social justice person like a

Beth Moore or, you know, Danny Akin at Southeastern or what happened with Robert Oscar Lopez at Southwestern or Matt Hall, you know, et cetera, et cetera,

Mohler would, without almost, you could almost time it, Mohler would come out with a tweet defending them.

And then on the flip side, if a conservative was being attacked, like Tom Askell or James White, his friend, right, or John MacArthur, Mohler was silent.

And I noticed this tendency and so I started asking myself questions, you know, what would motivate this?

Why would he, why would he only be defending social justice warriors and attacking conservatives or being silent on that?

And I started examining his beliefs when it came to critical race theory and the soft peddling of homosexuality in particular.

And Mohler's views over the last, I would say even 10 years, have actually been kind of accommodating to the liberal wing of the

SBC. But I think because he's so masterful at the way he communicates things and he can say things that will please both audiences,

I think it's been undetected. But when I started just closely examining his words,

I found out, you know what, he's repented and he's done this consistently. He's said it a few times or, you know, he repents for believing that homosexuality is not in a hate orientation.

He's consistently said there's this stain of racism in the Southern Baptist Convention which will never go away until Christ comes back.

It's always going to be there, no matter how many resolutions, no matter, you know, you can't fight it. Christ hasn't,

I guess, taken that, and so this is consistent with critical race theory. And so I think that Mohler's been influenced, and he may not realize it, but, you know, if you look at all the data available, it's pretty clear that, at the very least, he may be conservative on some things, but on some things he's definitely trending a lot.

I noticed that Phil Johnson took a lot of heat just over a year ago at the Shepherds Conference by putting his pinky finger out on the microphone and asking

Al Mohler a direct question. I liked it that Phil did it, and I know he took a lot of heat for it.

Is that all—do you think that's the reason why Al's not back, is because the men at the

Shepherds Conference and Grace Church and John MacArthur, we don't want to deal with this anymore when it comes to Ligon Duncan and Mark Dever and Al Mohler, etc.?

Do you know anything about that? I don't think I know. I know that's the reason they're not there, yeah.

You know, and I'm not going to say anyone's name who might have said that or given anything away, but yes,

I mean, I've had multiple conversations with people close to the seminary, not Phil Johnson in particular—you know,

Phil Johnson, here's the thing, when you're—and you know this—when you get to that level, I think there's a modicum of decorum you need to have.

You need to be aware of, you know, there's going to be people that come to your conference who still like Mohler, and look,

I had to be led down the garden path on this. I did not want to believe it at first, and so like I said,

I had to watch the guy over a year and really think through what he was saying to come to the conclusions I did.

So I think there's an awareness that we're still in transition, in a way, and that people still need to sort of wake up, and there's a process to that.

That's probably, you know, that's why you're having me on right now, is to raise awareness to this issue. But yeah, as far as the

Shepherds Conference and the split going on, there's definitely a split. Look at the G3 speakers.

Look at—you know, compare 2018 to 2019. Look at the names that were missing and the names that were present that hadn't spoken there before, like John MacArthur.

I mean, there's clearly, in evangelicalism, a split happening right now. And you can look at all the major conferences, and it's there.

So... Well, John, thanks for being on today. I think we're going to go a little bit longer, if you don't mind, just because I'm fascinated by the input and what's happening.

Has anybody called you, any big shots called you to say, quit this or else? I'm trying to think.

I called—you know, I've had my own calls with big shots, but... See, that's why I like you.

You call them instead of the other way around. Yeah, yeah. I called Danny Akin about a year ago now, or less than a year, maybe, you know.

It was right after the, I think, the SBC convention, and I had a 45 -minute phone call with him and confronted him on everything.

But yeah, you know, I was—when I was at Southeastern, that's kind of where the confrontation, I think, started and kind of ended with me.

They—the vice president of the school—I'll just sort of briefly give you the situation.

I had written a blog, and it was—there was a professor at Southeastern who had—this was when the monument debate was raging in North Carolina, and there was a professor there who had given an interview to a local secular newspaper, and he said, all these monuments need to go to the ash heap of history, essentially,

I'm paraphrasing. And I think that was the headline, and so—but you walked through his logic, and his logic was—here's the argument he gave.

Because people in the present world consider these monuments to be offensive, basically, that's their meaning.

That's what they actually mean to the people today. So you can already see there's a present perspective, a pressed perspective that gets to define the meaning of a historical artifact.

He didn't discuss the interpretive markers that are on them or anything like that.

And I'm a history guy, so I was angry. I was like, hold on, you know, that's not how you do history.

And I wrote an article, and I pointed out that if we apply this logic to Scripture, then we destroy the text.

And, hey, you know what, you may want those monuments to come down, that's fine, but that's not the issue.

The issue is, do we let a present people group or an understanding that exists today, coming from especially a group that's considered to be a victim, to define something historical?

Because if we do that, if we start going down that path, you've destroyed the principles of hermeneutics. The authorial intent is gone, the historical context is gone, the original audience and what they thought.

So I pointed this out in a blog, and the vice president of the school reached out to me within two days.

It was just my personal blog, didn't usually get a lot of traffic, but I guess they were keeping an eye on me, I didn't realize it.

And very angry that I did that, told me that the rules that the professor that I had written against was a history professor, and basically the rules of theology didn't apply to him, which shocked me.

And I was then threatened that I would have to speak to academic affairs, because they wanted to meet with me if I continued my writings, my critiques.

And I said, I'm done. I'm not... There was one article, that was it, just for my blog, and I was absolutely shocked.

I would walk on campus, professors would be in huddles, and see me come around the corner, and they'd just stop talking.

That was the kind of atmosphere I had to deal with. My wife thought I wasn't going to graduate, and so I learned a lesson.

I was not a Southern Baptist, I became a Southern Baptist, briefly, while I was at Southeastern, and I did not know that there was this 11th

Commandment. And so I think what happened, I know I'm taking a long time answering some of your questions here, but I assume this is interesting to you.

What happened was, I think through the grapevine, Danny Akin and probably the bigwigs in the

SBC, I think they found out who I was. And because I tried to articulate as best

I can in a gentle way, because, look, I care about these guys, I don't want them going down that path, some of them are ignorantly doing so,

I mean, that's my heart in all this, I care about Scripture. I think they realized, confronting this guy doesn't necessarily go well for us, because I wouldn't back down.

And so, no, I haven't been treated the way some others who are fighting this have been treated. Mostly, they ignore me, but my audience keeps getting bigger, and, you know, if they do say anything, it's kind of a passive -aggressive, you know, there have been lies said about our institution.

I see a lot of professors at Southeastern saying things like that to the online critics who lie about us.

Well, I know they're talking about me, but no, no, they're not confronting me directly.

John, I was thinking about the whole statue deal, and maybe we're going to have to go up to Salem, Massachusetts, and tear down that Adoniram Judson statue, because, you know, what about all the people now in Burma, actually, you know,

Judson thought none of them were going to go to heaven without believing in Jesus, so, I mean, when does it stop?

Right. Right. I always ask people, you know, when you think of Salem, Massachusetts, what do you think of? And of course, they say witch museum and witches, and I think, you know, you are so ungodly, you should be thinking about Salem, Massachusetts, where the first missionary left this land to go overseas.

John, how about a kind of, you know, the lightning rounds always get people in trouble, but it makes good radio.

Todd, for you. Okay, let's do it. Yeah, yeah. I'll mention somebody, and then you just tell me whatever you want to tell me.

Mark Dever. Oh man, you had to start with him. How many words do

I get for this lightning round? Whatever you want. What word do you want? Whatever you want. I mean, I... Okay. Go ahead.

Good church polity resources, bad social theology, bad public theology, that's what

I'd say about Mark Dever. All right. Well, is Isaac, I don't know his last name, is he still the chairman of the elders there?

I don't know. I'm not infinitely familiar with the inner workings of their church, I just know that some of the guys in Nine Marks, you know,

Thabiti and Wile, Jonathan Lehman, definitely trend that direction. Mark Dever said some things that trend in that direction.

You can look at... And I had a friend that went there a few weeks ago in their Sunday school class, they were talking about identity politics and, you know, it's funny, the handout, he had a handout he gave me.

It was the only handout in their Sunday school class series that wasn't available online. They specifically decided not to make that one available, so you can find it on Reformation Charlotte.

There you go. It's there now. All right, how about... Yeah, they... You'll go ahead. No, I was just going to say, next name,

Paige Patterson. Paige is, you know,

I think, hurt, wounded, tired, I think he's, you know, he did not accept the grant money that pretty much every other

Southern Baptist institution accepted that hasn't really been talked about, but he made that decision a few months before getting canned, and so I think there's a lot more at play there than what's on the surface.

Well, we talked about it a little bit when we met at the Shepherd's Conference. I'm thinking about what...

Of course, I'm not going to defend anything that Paige Patterson said or did that was wrong or sinful. That's not my point.

Neither am I. But I do think that if it wasn't for the Lord using Paige Patterson, there would have been no conservative revival in any of the schools, and I just think the way they treated him, even if there is a

Christian brother who's sinning or caught in a sin, there's a certain way to treat them. And I don't know if it's true or not, but I had heard that he was overseas and even had his credit card cut off and couldn't figure out a way to get back.

Is that true? They dug up his dog's bones that were buried on campus. It literally went that far.

So yeah, it's a bad situation all around, and I think, to the point you just said, history is complicated, and there, you know, fallen people make fallen decisions oftentimes, and we're in the process of doing those things right now, but I think there's a lack of grace right now.

For anyone in the past who would have said anything that might have been accepted at that time, that's not now, and Paige is kind of a victim of that in a way.

No gratitude towards what he did, and that's, I think, one of the things that bothers me about it. John, you know the guy's name, and I've forgotten his name.

Who was the professor at Southwestern who would, I think he had homosexual desires and actions when he was younger, and got sick.

Robert Oscar Lopez. Yeah, tell us about him. Yeah, you know, he's kind of a friend at this point.

He's a guy who called me. I get a lot of these calls from people that would frankly shock you at times and probably wouldn't want their names out there, but Robert's one of these guys who, you know, said,

I see you're talking about the SBC. I don't know who to talk to. I'm alone, and I'm a professor at Southwestern, and I said, oh my goodness, well, that's interesting.

Tell me about your story. And long story short, he was told by the administration, you know, Robert, you've been given your testimony for a long time about how

God saved you from homosexuality, and you're heterosexual now, and you believe that God can change those desires.

There is no innate orientation that's fixed, and Russell Moore and the

ERLC don't agree with you on that. We don't agree with you, and we want to make sure that every article that you write, every interview you have goes through us first.

We have to approve it. And Robert said, hold on, that's not professional. That's not...that's basically limiting.

That's not even the role in secular universities professors have to abide by. And so he called me, and we talked about, you know, what can you do?

We prayed about it. I tried to connect him with others, but he decided in the end he was just going to take a stand, and he was going to continue giving his story.

And they ended up firing him for it. And here's the interesting part. Here's why

I think there's a lot of suspicion in the SBC. The statement that was put out by Southwestern denied everything

I just told you. And Robert Oscar Lopez had the foresight to record some of those conversations.

And in the conversation recordings, you can hear everything I just told you. That's exactly why they fired him.

So they got caught in a lie. Al Mohler came out and defended them right away, as he usually does.

And so that's kind of, I think, it was one of the lightning rods. It's one of the things that has really, I think, shed a light on what's happening.

And Robert Oscar Lopez is a brave guy, in my opinion. Yeah, I listened to your interview with him and was disheartened, but also encouraged that people have fortitude and theological backbones and will not step down.

Okay, last person we'll name for kind of this lightning round. You mentioned him earlier. I think he's probably the biggest liberal in all of the

United States or the one that's the most influential is Russell Moore. Go home.

Yeah. Did you, John, put out the map that showed

Mohler's influence in terms of, okay, Russell Moore used to be at Southern. Danny Akin used to be at Southern.

I can't remember who's at Southern. No, I didn't. I've seen it. I did not put that out. I think either

Jeff Maples at Reformation Charlotte or Alan Atkinson at Capstone did. But yes,

I've seen it. It's very insightful. Yeah, it's a map showing the different people that Al Mohler has trained and then sent out to be in key institutions and key spots for the

Southern Baptist Convention. I thought that was fascinating. What about the split?

Do you think there's going to be a split in the Southern Baptist Convention? I know that one pastor down in the South was very eloquent, and as he said, we're going to leave.

That'll be my last question. Do you think there's going to be a split? There's not going to be a split. Yeah, that's right. And if there's going to be a split, how many do you think are going to leave?

Well, there already is a split in a sense, right? We already have division. But you're talking about actually leaving the denomination itself, and I think it's going to be more of a leak.

It just seems like pastors are leaving. I talk to a lot of smaller pastors, smaller churches that have already left, and this obviously disheartens the conservatives who want there to be a resurgence.

But I think what they're looking at right now is the convention that is stacked. The deck,

I mean, you'd have to fire, you know what, 15 professors in most of the administration at Southeastern.

Some of these places, you'd have to clean house if you wanted to try to resurrect them back to conservatism.

And I think as far as the convention goes, it's hard to get these small pastors to financially support making a trip, sending messengers.

Meanwhile, the entities and the big churches, some of these guys get paid to go. They control the convention.

And I think there's going to be just people leaving. One of these news stories breaks, like one of the ones

I just shared with you, and another pastor leaves, another church leaves. So it's not going to be,

I think, a hard and fast necessarily. This is the moment. There may come a time, and maybe it won't be this year, maybe it'll be next year, but there may come a time where there is such a divisive event that you do see a large portion of churches leaving at the same time.

But I would wager that most of the churches in the convention are conservative.

Eighty percent of them, I am convinced, do not agree with any of this stuff, but they just don't have the power.

So, you know, on a closing note, if you really want to do social justice and empower the weak and the victims, maybe we should empower these conservative churches, because they're certainly not in control of things right now.

Well, I was going to ask you one last question about any kind of hope for anything, but I realized I already said

I have one last question, so I'm glad you turned it to the uptick there for hopeful.

John, thank you for being on the radio show today. I really wanted to let our people know who you are.

Probably a lot of them already do. But I think they'll be encouraged if they listen to your podcast about this issue and a lot of other issues as we have to try to navigate now, things that I never thought

I would have to navigate when I first went to seminary. But this issue is big enough.

And to me, I was going to go the whole show without mentioning the word virus, so I guess I'll say it now. It's like a virus that's affecting and infecting people.

And people need to stop it. Somebody has to stop it and expose it, because once this idea becomes a process idea, that is a hermeneutical mandate and or application,

I think everything is gone in the next generation, and we're starting to see it unravel now. And I don't want that.

I go between wanting to send my degree back to Southern Seminary because I can't stand what she stands for now to being appreciative and being exposed.

I mean, I lived in a master seminary bubble and then went to Southern, and then you've got Tom Nettles there and all these other people, and Herschel York helped me so much.

I realize the benefit, and I want what's best for these men. And so I think that's what I like also about your ministry.

You're not trying to just hurt and ad hominemly slam people.

You want what's best for them, and so do I. So I appreciate your ministry, John. Absolutely. One just really final word of hope here that people like yourself,

Pastor Mike, with your show. I see seminaries like the Expositor Seminary, and they put a hole on churches joining them because they've got so many churches that want to join.

I'm seeing voices that were not platformed before through the traditional means of platforming now becoming leaders in the

American church, and that is encouraging. I just want to say that just because the seminaries are bad and the denominations are bad,

I don't think that means that Christianity is done in this country necessarily. God's finding other routes to reach people, and this show is one of them, so thank you for what you do.

John Harris, thanks for being on No Compromise Radio. They can go to your podcast, Conversations That Matter, and catch up.

Is it okay, John, that I listen to your show at 1 .5 speeds? Is that fine? Yeah, I mean, I listen to most shows at 2 speeds, so you're more gracious than that.

Well, sometimes on my radio show I say to myself, I'm going to talk fast enough that if anybody goes at 2 .0 speed, they'll never be able to do it.

You know, I do it like James White, on a bike, going up a mountain, 2 speed, you know?

That's right. Thanks for being on the show. God bless you. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible -teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life -transforming power of God's Word through verse -by -verse exposition of the sacred text.

Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 10 .15 and in the evening at 6. We're right on Route 110 in West Boylston.

You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.