Al Mohler and Christianity Today

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Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.
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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
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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.
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In short, if you like smooth, watered -down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn't for you.
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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
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King. Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth. Welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry.
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Today is Tuesday, and that, of course, means and always signifies, and therefore, logically, pertaining to, thereabouts, according to, forthwith.
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Pastor Steve is here again today. We're taping, and it's raining, raining in New England.
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Who would have thought? Can you imagine what would Jonathan Edwards do on a rainy day like today? WWJD. I think he'd just pull these sheets over his head and go back to sleep.
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I think he probably would. Today we want to talk about Albert Moeller, our
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Al Moeller, and he is the president of Southern Seminary, and why do we want to talk about a man?
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Well, it's not that we necessarily want to admire, worship, or honor a man, but we are very happy here at No Compromise Radio that Al Moeller has been given theological gumption by the
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Lord, conviction, and he has stood up. He has not compromised when it is pertaining to Southern Seminary regarding that as a
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Christian institution. So that's what we want to talk about today is Al Moeller and how the Lord has used him. And we're talking about that because he was the subject of a recent profile in Christianity Today, also known as Christianity Astray, where they print all the compromise that's fit to print there.
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Well, Christianity Today, I think several months ago I actually said this was a good article or that was a good article, and once in a while they have a good advertisement in the back, the
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Master Seminary of Southern Seminary. Good ads. That's a reason to subscribe. It's on nice green paper with Helvetica font for those of you that don't want to use up much ink.
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Nice. Yeah, that's actually, I heard in that Hipster Christianity book, Helvetica is the font of the future.
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Yeah, because we're going to save the planet by using less ink. What Christianity Today did is they put
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Al Moeller on the cover, I was happy for that, called the reformer by the author, and they went on to basically, kind of covertly, secretly try to damage the reputation of Al Moeller.
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At least that's the way I read it in capitulation today. Excuse me. Absolutely.
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I mean, if you look at the cover, how Al Moeller transformed a seminary, helped change a denomination and challenges a culture, you'd think, oh, this is going to be a very nice, positive piece.
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It really didn't go that way, though. Well, Molly Worthen was the author of this article, and she is finishing her
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PhD, according to Christianity Today, in American Religious History, and then you figure out where she's studying and that gives you a clue or an inkling to her theological persuasion.
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She's a Yalie. She's a Yalie. Now, I wish it would have been Yale in the 1700s when Jonathan Edwards went there and when
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David Brainerd, Brainerd actually got kicked out of Yale, and then he learned from that youthful indiscretion.
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But she is going to give a biased perspective. Now, we all know that. I'm biased, are you?
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Yes, I am. Of course, we all have our, what is it, biases? Biases, yes. Biases. Remember Len Bias?
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What a tragedy that was. Yes, but biases sounds like you should go see the doctor. Yes, I have to get a fine needle biopsies.
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And so here in this book, now, this is why we're talking about the issue, because you need to be careful on how you read the news, how you read theological magazines, how you listen to me preach, how you listen to Steve sing
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Kiki D songs. You need to understand this properly. I don't even know any Kiki D songs. Don't go breaking my heart with Elton John.
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I think she was Australian or something. But you need to be discerning. The Bereans— Man, I'll just point out, you know more about her than I do.
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Yes. The Bereans, I think I had a crush on her when I was 14 or whatever. The Bereans were considered noble because they examined things.
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That's all you have to do. The world's life verse is, judge not lest you be judged. But we know that the
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Bereans were commended, and now we are commanded in 1 Thessalonians 5 to examine things.
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And that's what we want you to do at No Compromise Radio. If you just turn on the radio and you think, I don't have to examine anything that comes across these airwaves, and Chuck Swindoll and Charles Stanley and David Jeremiah and John MacArthur and Alistair Begg and R .C.
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Sproul all have the same views, and I don't need to be discerning as I listen to them, then
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I think you're, at best, naïve, and at worst— Worse than naïve.
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Well, let me just start by, you know, I'm going to skip basically the first page, and she has this little subtitle called
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Battle for the Baptist's Soul, and she's going to give like a little take on the history of recent
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Southern Baptist development starting in 1979. She says, in 1979, when the
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Southern Baptist's annual meeting elected Memphis pastor Adrian Rogers as president, and listen, and the conservatives launched their push to take over the denomination's leadership.
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Moeller was a senior at Sanford University. So the conservatives—keep that in mind as we move through this—the conservatives would be those people—by the way, that's code for what?
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They actually believe in the Bible. Yes, that's exactly right, and do you notice, too, and I'm probably jumping your gun here, but we move quickly in her excursus from conservative to fundamentalist, because fundamentalist has this connotation today in our society in 2010, not like fundamentalist had in 1930, where you believe the fundamentals of Scripture, inerrancy of Scripture, fundamentals of the faith, inerrancy, substitutionary atonement, literal resurrection, et cetera, virgin birth.
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So now fundamentalists are, you know, whacked out. You know, Muslim fundamentalists, they bomb the
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Twin Towers. Christian fundamentalists, they probably keep their wives barefoot pregnant in the kitchen.
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And when they have spare time, they attack abortion clinics. That's what, you know, Christian fundamentalists do.
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Yeah, that's how they—the bloggers. Right, that's the biased perspective of it. So she goes on and she says here, she's talking about the former president before Al Moeller took over the
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Southern Baptist Seminary, a man named Honeycutt, and she says
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Honeycutt weathered—I mean, just listen to the wording—Honeycutt weathered years of negotiation. This is after the conservatives started trying to take things over.
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He weathered years of negotiation and compromise between liberal faculty and fire -breathing trustees.
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Oh, liberal and fire -breathing trustees. Well, here's the situation, and this is why we find it fascinating, and we at No Compromise Radio want you to listen, even if you're not interested in such a topic.
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Maybe you're driving around in Worcester, or who knows, you're in Saudi Arabia, for that matter. I have a listener there. Here's the point.
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When the Lord raises up men like Al Moeller and his right -hand man at the time,
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Danny Aiken, to take over what used to be a Bible -believing seminary, and all the seminaries in the
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Southern Baptist Convention, and he takes a man like Al Moeller, and Al Moeller is used by the
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Lord to turn back around from a liberal, theologically liberal school to a conservative school where the
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Bible is preached and Jesus is proclaimed, we, you, ought to rejoice in that, that the
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Lord is doing something that he rarely does, and that is take a school that has gone
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South—they all go South, if they're around for long enough—and then turn it back around. It should just pop out into your conscience and say, that is an amazing thing.
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God is doing something in the heart of one of the largest theological schools in all the world. Yeah, I mean, so many schools started as conservative seminaries, and then they just kind of go away.
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I mean, Yale didn't start out liberal, Princeton didn't start out liberal, lots of—well, Fuller didn't start out liberal.
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I had a seminary prof—we both had a seminary prof who used to say that liberals never build a seminary.
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They just wait until the conservatives give them to them. Well, S. Lewis Johnson talks about that as well.
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Liberals never start churches either, because you can't start churches with saved people with liberal theology, because the
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Spirit of God uses preaching from the Bible, so the conservatives start the—you know, they recognize the people that God has saved, they build the building, and then it's the liberals that take over.
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Southern Seminary, I will give the disclaimer, I went and got a degree at Southern Seminary, and one of the reasons
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I did that is because God was working through a man like Al Mohler to turn that place around.
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And here's basically what Al Mohler said to the staff, to the tenured faculty. A. Do you believe our statement of faith?
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And B. Will you teach it? And if you won't believe it and you won't teach it, to use Danny Akin's terms, you're fired.
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You're fired. Yeah, and it really is—it's amazing reading this, because again, walking through these steps here, she kind of discusses the transformation of Al Mohler from a reasonable guy who wrote his graduating thesis on Karl Barth and an analysis of that, and he gets transformed into what a moderate publisher calls an unquestioned fundamentalist.
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And then she goes on to describe how Mohler was left alone with Karl Henry, who was basically disregarded by so many of the liberals down there at Southern Seminary, but he was invited to speak one time.
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And so Mohler's walking around with Dr. Henry, and Dr. Henry asks him to defend the egalitarian—in other words, the view that women and men can both serve equally in ministry.
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And Karl Henry asks Mohler to defend that biblically, and ultimately he was unable to do so.
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In fact, Mohler is quoted as saying, In 24 hours, I came to the chilling conclusion that the hermeneutic—in other words, the way you have to understand the
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Bible—required for an egalitarian position was incompatible with the inerrancy of Scripture.
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Translation, you cannot hold to women being able to teach contra 1
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Timothy 2. You cannot hold that position without doing some kind of tap dance around the idea that women,
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Paul says, are not allowed to teach men. You have to skirt around that.
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You have to say— Oh, is that a pun? Yeah. You have to work your way around it. Al Mohler was not changing his views because he was an opportunist.
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That was the slam. Right. All of a sudden, Al sees a good opportunity. He sees the time. He reads the bones and the fortune of the winds.
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And then he says, You know what? The conservatives are going to take over. I better quickly become a conservative. If you're listening today on No Compromise Radio, you need to find a copy of the
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PBS special entitled Battle for the Minds, 1997, by Stephen Lipscomb.
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And Stephen Lipscomb—you and I talk about it all the time, Steve—it's very interesting because it's a show that talks about the takeover of Southern seminary.
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And these people producing the movie don't like the takeover. So the enemy is
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Al Mohler. It's like watching the Screwtape Letters, where in the Screwtape Letters, C .S. Lewis has God the enemy because you've got the demons in Wormwood, etc.
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But here the enemy is Al Mohler taking over the seminary—you know, that seminary that was so liberal where they'd have gay marriages out in the common, show pornography in ethics classes, say that Jesus wasn't
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God. And so you need to watch that show from the other perspective, the Battle for the Minds, 1997.
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But I praise the Lord that God raised up a man like Al Mohler to kick those people out.
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And I think that he did a—I mean, I'm just impressed. And so when God raises up a courageous man, don't we sit back and say, oh,
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Winston Churchill, you know, World War II, Al Mohler, Southern Seminary. Al Mohler, you know, to use some biblical imagery, was kind of the brimstone that destroyed
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Sodom and Gomorrah that was the Southern Seminary, and just a remarkable work of God.
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I'm certain that Dr. Mohler wouldn't want to take the personal credit, but God, through him, did a great work at Southern Seminary.
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The Bible in 2 Corinthians 4 talks about people that adulterate the Word of God. Now just think about how gross that is when we think of adultery, and it's breaking the promises to God, to the spouse, to the community, what it shows, you know,
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Christ doesn't really love the church, and he cheats on the church, etc., etc. But now adulterating the
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Word of God. And I think if there's a seminary that adulterates the Word of God, the sooner it gets closed, or the sooner another
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Al Mohler steps in, the better. Yeah, and there's just so many issues.
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I mean, it just goes on and on. She caricatures, that means she just kind of—she reduces to the most absurd level many evangelical notions, including this one.
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She says that presuppositionalism, that is the idea that we don't have to prove the existence of God. We don't have to prove the veracity and inerrancy of Scripture.
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It just is inerrant. She says it is a system of thought that boils down to the slogans advocated by that other prominent presuppositionalist,
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Francis Schaeffer. And she just slams—the whole piece is, you know, it's a mixture of nice things said about him and then brickbats tossed after him.
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This is one thing she describes that he did at Southern Seminary. He replaced moderates with an errantist, meaning they didn't believe there's anything wrong with the
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Bible, faculty who agreed with him on abortion, homosexuality, women's ordination, and his brand of Reformed theology, as if those things are up for debate.
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How do you debate abortion, homosexuality, and women's ordination? What happens is, if you toss the
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Bible out, it's no longer inerrant, then everything goes. That's why there is the battle for the
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Bible, as Linzell wrote the book many, many years ago. And so we have to hold people to the
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Bible, or else call it something else, don't call it Christianity. But Yale Theological Divinity School and her students won't agree with that in general.
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Maybe there's an exception here or there. So therefore, you get Molly, and she comes across quite condescendingly, as one man said, you know, she's kind of snarky.
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I don't know if that's a real word or not, but it is a real word. It's bandied about quite a bit, and she doesn't like that.
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You know, when she calls someone a moderate, they're really a liberal. But moderate sounds so good, doesn't it,
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Steve? Balanced, in the middle, we can't go too far here or too far there.
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I've got a bigger problem, and here's my problem. If you want to give money to a seminary and some kind of endowment, if you're listening today and you've got a lot of money, you better be very careful with that money.
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Because if you give that money to Gordon College, when it was actually a Christian school before they let rabbis and priests and works righteousness filter through, you're going to give it to Christian education?
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I think that's a worthy thing. Unless you're going to give it to a school that won't hold its professors to teach the
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Bible, so now you're going to give your endowment to Gordon College, which is an apostate school, basically.
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A place that'll teach there's no hell. Yeah, Messiah College, no hell. No, you can't do that.
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And so let's get rid of tenure. Let's get rid of these people that get a job and then go south.
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Let's have men like Al Mohler and Paige Patterson and Danny Akin, three presidents of three
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Southern Baptist schools, saying to the faculty, do you affirm the Bible through their confession of faith, the abstract principles, and will you teach it?
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And if you don't, see ya. Goodbye. It's no compromise style.
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Yeah, what's a moderate position on abortion? Well, you know, in some cases, what's a moderate position of homosexuality?
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Well, it could be genetic. It could be. What is a moderate position on women in ministry?
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You know, it's either, I don't care if you're liberal, moderate, whatever you want to call it, there's the biblical view and then there's the worldly view.
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Well, you know, in the article, Steve, where she even mocks things like this, that somehow he's got a big library.
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He's not really that smart, but he shows off his library to somehow show the students and show other faculty how great he is.
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Let me set the story straight because I've met Al Mohler and you know Al Mohler. When I went there, you know who wants to go to the library?
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Al doesn't say, oh, by the way, you all come to my library and look. The students want to go.
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We beg people to go. We want to go to the president's house to see the library. And you walk in and it's typical
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Southern style and you styled home and decor and it's very, you know, palatial kind of, you know, the president lives there.
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It's not his house. He doesn't own it. And you walk downstairs and there are books everywhere.
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And it is fun to look through. And Danny Aiken, who was a professor there at the time before he moved to Southeastern, said, ask
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Dr. Mohler, pull out a book and say, do you like this book, Dr. Mohler? And since he has almost a photographic mind, he'll say to you, yes,
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I thought it was pretty good, but I disagreed with such and such on page 246. It's amazing. He's not,
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I wouldn't want people walking through my library. Yeah. Yeah. Did you like this book? I mean, when people ask me that,
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I'm going, you know, I know I read that. I just, we use tools and tools that we use now are books.
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And so it's a good thing to go into a pastor's library and see lots of books. And so for her to do the kind of cheap shot,
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I just didn't appreciate that at all in the article, and it just shows me that Christianity today is ecumenical, which includes, you know,
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Greek Orthodox, which includes Episcopalian, Roman Catholic, and anybody else. If you call yourself
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Christian, they'll write about it. But if you call yourself a Bible believing school that says we're going to stand for truth, preach the word, men and women have different roles.
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They compliment one another. You are going to get blasted by the folks at Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Fuller, et al.
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And Christianity today. I mean, listen to this. He is so palatable talking about Al Mohler. So polite, yet never afraid to take extreme positions.
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Extreme, yeah. Like kind of like Jesus. Yeah. Or Paul. You know, standing up for the gospel, I guess, is a pretty extreme position.
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If you have Christianity Today as a magazine, maybe you should write to them and say, thank you for highlighting
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Al Mohler, and we're sorry to say that you try to use pejorative terms like fundamentalist and mocking him through...
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I mean, she writes well because she knows what to do. She just can't get up and say, Al Mohler's a dope.
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And by the way, I'm wondering why Al even said he'd do the article, because he's smart enough to know what the media does in interviews.
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Yeah. They just kind of slant things. I mean, it just goes on. She says, Mohler is not so much an intellectual or a theologian.
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And I'm just like, if you talk to the guy... He's both. Yeah, he's both. As he is an articulate controversialist, et cetera, et cetera.
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And she goes on to say that he rehearses familiar arguments about the importance of maintaining a biblical worldview as if he's a parrot.
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She didn't say that part. That's my editorial. And offers little in the way of original analysis, though Mohler is capable of nuanced scholarship, such as the dissection of Barth in his dissertation years ago when he was a more liberal theologian.
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Yeah, when he was one of us. Yeah, those were back in the good old days when we liked Al Mohler, according to her. Well, Al Mohler is now going to affect an entire generation of Southern Baptist churches, because currently a lot of Southern Baptist churches in the
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South don't want Southern seminary graduates—reformed, Calvinistic, Complementarian, et cetera.
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But they're going to have no one else to hire soon enough. And so change the seminaries and you change the tide of the
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Southern Baptist churches. And that's what I'm looking forward to. People that'll stand up and say, this is what the
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Bible teaches. Jesus is Lord. Come what may. And so the takeover of the seminaries by the conservatives,
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I couldn't think of a better thing in my life that seminaries that used to say, Jesus isn't
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God, now say Christ is Lord, then I commend Christ Jesus and his wonderful work through a fallible man like Al Mohler.
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Amen. I mean, this article is just amazing because she says, in this regard, talking about theology, he's just as elitist as the moderates of the old
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Southern. He is certain he has the truth. And those Baptists who simply protest or who protest simply are not initiated into the systematic splendor of reformed thoughts.
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And she then goes on to use somebody else to kind of bring him down, someone who pastors a liberal church in Louisville.
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And this whole illusion of balance is fascinating to me because what she's really doing is undermining him at every possible turn and trying to make him out to be some kind of sophisticated
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Rube, if I may use that little contradiction there. You know, he looks like he's sophisticated, but he's just a simpleton.
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If you're listening today in No Compromise Radio, I think you should be praying for seminaries.
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Why don't we start praying for Harvard and Yale? Harvard used to be a seminary training men for the gospel ministry, according to the doctrines of grace.
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Wouldn't it be great if God took some of those seminaries and turned them around? And that probably would be a good thing to do.
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You also need to be saying to yourself, Jesus Christ is building his church and nobody can stop him.
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Liberals can't stop it. And so they're afraid of us because I think deep down they know this is what the
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Bible actually teaches, so let's get rid of these people. And I'm very encouraged in a time like this that some things, you know, are very bad in our society, but some things are excellent.
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And this is a place where we should say in history, we're watching history unfold. The Lord is blessing the ministry of the
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Bible preached at Southern Seminary, Southwestern Seminary, Southeastern Seminary. Yeah. And I would encourage everybody to vote or to vote.
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Let's get the vote out. Rock the vote, baby. To, you know, just pray for Dr.
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Molera. He's had some health issues. I just pray to the Lord, keep him around for another 50 years and use him just as strongly as he has for the last 20.
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And, you know, I would also pray that the Lord would raise many, many more
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Al Molers. I mean, we need a nation of Al Molers, you know, leaders in our seminaries and our denominations, because to just stop the slide into neo -orthodoxy and liberalism and just away from the truth and the inherent fundamentals of Christianity.
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Well, in that movie, The Battle of the Mines, you'll see this helicopter view of Southern Seminary with REM having the song,
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Losing My Religion, like they're going to lose Southern Seminary, the flagship to conservative theology.
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And it's just an amazing book. And you can see the candlelight vigils and the chanting and all that stuff.
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And we say, praise the Lord, more candlelight vigils for the neo -orthodox, unbelieving, compassionate left.
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May God reclaim many more seminaries for his glory and for the truth. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.
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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.
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Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at 6. We're right on route 110 in West Boylston.
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The thoughts and opinions expressed on No Compromise Radio do not necessarily reflect those of WVNE, its staff or management.