Danny Akin, Ed Stetzer, and Tim Keller, Oh My!

Hello and welcome to the Conversations That Matter live broadcast on YouTube. It is five minutes afternoon, fashionably late, as sometimes I am, trying to put some last-minute things together. You know, the news cycle never seems to slow down, and it gets faster and faster, and so I checked about 15 minutes ago to see is there anything new I need to comment on, and of course there was, but stuff that, frankly, I don't have time to dive into too deeply, so I'm sure as the day unfolds, this podcast will be obsolete by the end of the day with how fast things are moving, but I do have some new things.

Oh, before I forget my introduction here, I do want to say there are two opportunities in this live broadcast to win a scholarship, win a chance to take a class from Dr. Russell Fuller with his theology classroom.

He's starting up this fall semester. He is gonna be teaching Hebrew, which he wrote the book on Hebrew, on how to study it, how to understand it, so that alone is worth the $250, but he's also giving some other classes.

I think he's doing four or five, so you can choose which one you want. You'd have to contact him. I think his website is almost up. I haven't seen it yet, but I think he's in the final stages of getting ready to launch that.

If you win, though, here's the thing. You have to win it. You have to answer a question that I'm gonna give, and so if you win the scholarship by answering one of the questions that you need to answer, then you will get a chance to save $250 if you were planning on taking Dr. Russell Fuller's courses, and I don't know why you wouldn't.

I don't know why you wouldn't want to do that, and so that's just one of the perks to listening to the Conversations That Matter podcast. We are live right now in channel, and wow, there's a, I got advertisements, I guess.

I didn't realize live broadcasts had advertisements on them, but skipped through this, and it looks like a few of you are already watching, so it's good to see all 26 of you who are watching right now.

First question. First question. It's an easy one if you've been watching this broadcast. What seminary, this is a personal question about me, what seminary did I graduate from? I have a degree from a seminary.

I have an MDiv. What seminary did I get my degree from? First person to answer that will get one of the scholarships, and you'll get a chance later on in the broadcast to win another one, so let's see what those answers come in.

What happened? I don't know. Southeastern. Marissa Karen won the first scholarship for the Russell Fuller class, so Marissa, if you would put your email either, probably the best thing to do is if you can contact me through Facebook Messenger or Twitter private message, but if you want, you could even just put a comment on this YouTube channel with your email address, and I will send you one of those scholarships, so Marissa Karen won the prize, Southeastern.

She was quicker. Who said Southern? So I guess I could see someone thinking I went to Southern. It is a Southern Baptist school, but no, I did not. I did go to Southeastern, so some other preliminary things here.

Number one, I appreciate all of your prayers, those who know about this at least. I know I announced it on Twitter and support through, I know many of you are supporters on Patreon. That really means a great deal.

This last week, my father-in-law unexpectedly went to the emergency room with heart failure, and they still don't really know why this happened. He has an AFib, and I don't understand all the medical terms.

My mom is a nurse. My sister-in-law is a nurse. I'm surrounded by medical professionals that understand these things, but my understanding is his heart was only outputting about five to 10 of what it should have been, and so he was on death's door, and they were able to put him on a machine.

I think he's now on a lot of machines, on a breathing machine. He was on a machine that was pumping his heart. I don't remember what they call that. He was on for his kidneys. He was on dialysis, and so I think he's off the heart one now.

I know he, I'm not sure what percentage his heart's outputting now. He's starting to slowly get better, but it was very scary, and my wife and I happened to be visiting home that last week and this is when it all happened, so anyway, I appreciate your prayers.

I know that's a hard thing. He actually, he's a postal worker, but he runs the church, pretty much, that my wife grew up at, so it's a hard thing for the community, for the church, for the family, obviously, so thank you for that.

Oh, one other announcement. For those who listen on iTunes, you'll hear this in the audio broadcast, which I'll upload later. We may have figured out why some of the broadcasts, some of the podcasts skip, and you'll get like 17 minutes in, and then the podcast just kind of stops, and it skips to the next one, so I think we might have figured that one out, so just want to give you a little ray of hope.

I've been in contact with Anchor quite a bit. They finally said this last time. This is the third time I contacted them. They said, I think it's on iTunes, so I was with iTunes support, and they said I need to upload an optimized file, so hopefully we'll get that worked out, but today, to the topics at hand, we're gonna be talking about a bunch of things.

We're gonna be talking about Al Mohler, and Danny Akin, and Ed Stetzer, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. I think we'll spend probably a lot of our time on Tim Keller and Tim Keller's latest blog, so let's jump into things here.

Al Mohler, Grace Community Church, and the Pressure to Stay Quiet

We're gonna start with Al Mohler. This is from the briefing on August 3rd, and I'm gonna read for you some quotes. I want you to understand, as we go through this, and not just this, but some of the other material, I want you to think about the times in which we're living.

Think about what's going on in the United States of America and around the world, but in our context in which we live, what the threats to the church are, the threats to Christianity. What threatens the church right now, in your opinion?

Obviously, the same adversary that the church has always had, right? Satan, the devil, sin the world, right? But specifically, what tools would the devil be using in our current context to destabilize, to fracture, to get the church off mission, to shut down churches?

I mean, this shouldn't be that hard for most of us, I wouldn't think, but it seems like it is hard for those who are in evangelical elite circles. I call them the evangelical industrial complex, you can call them Big Eva, but it's almost like they don't wanna acknowledge that real threats exist.

Instead, they'd like to almost side with those who are threatening the body of Christ. It is a very curious thing, and it really, it feels like what happened in Germany when, and I did a whole class on the Holocaust last year, had to read a number of primary sources on how churches reacted to the Nazi party, and they really wanted to show the Nazi party, even people in the confessing church, that they were anti-Semitic, that they couldn't go with all of it, but they would go halfway, and it was a survival mechanism.

We know that the acid of Nazism is gonna eat everything, they're gonna take over everything, they're totalitarian, and so if we can convince them we're on their side, they'll eat us last, or maybe they won't eat us at all.

And it almost seems like we're starting to adopt some of that same thinking. So we're gonna start with a very mild example, right? I'm not calling, just please don't take me out of context. I am in no way calling Al Mohler a Nazi or anyone else in this broadcast.

There's a very specific definition for what a Nazi is. I'm just saying that that self-preserving instinct seems to be very much at play. That was also the same kind of instinct at play during Nazi Germany.

And so I want to start with the briefing, August 3rd, 2020. So this is two days ago. For those who have been following the story, John MacArthur and the elders at Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California, basically decided we're just gonna meet.

And I did an episode last week, and I went through some of those reasons, so I'm not gonna belabor that point. This morning, a story came out, Pastor John MacArthur threatened with arrest and $1 ,000 fines.

City of Los Angeles, through a cease and desist letter, has threatened Grace Community Church and Pastor John MacArthur with a daily fine of $1 ,000 or arrest. This is just new this morning. But this isn't news to anyone.

We knew that there would be repercussions. What did Al Mohler do two days ago in his briefing? I'm gonna quote, "'The Grace Community Church leadership says "'pastors who cede their Christ-delegated authority "'in the church to a civil ruler "'have abdicated their responsibility before their Lord "'and violated the God-ordained spheres of authority "'as much as the secular official "'who illegitimately imposes his authority upon the church.'".

Mohler says, that statement is true on its face, of course, but the application of that principle in context will vary from congregation to congregation, place to place. So he's saying that the application of this may vary.

You don't have to do it the way MacArthur's doing it. In other words, you don't have to open up your church. He goes on, he says, "'The New Testament tells us about Christian worship "'under the Lordship of Jesus Christ, "'which is the congregation gathered together "'in order to observe and practice "'the ordinary means of grace.'".

So Mohler's saying an online church, that's not church. Mohler gets that. And that points to the centrality of preaching and in worship also the fact that we sing, right? Because in California, they're saying you can't sing if you go to church.

I don't even remember what all the regulations are. You have to have a certain number and you can't sing. There's all sorts of restrictions. And John MacArthur's like, we're commanded to do these things, we're gonna do it.

So Al Mohler is admitting online church is not church. The true church is the gathered body and singing is part of that. Good, right? Well, here's where the wheels start coming off. "'We encourage one another "'through Psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, "'but even as those things are made clear, "'as is the practice of the church in gathering "'in the main on the first day of the week "'in honor of the Lord Jesus Christ's "'resurrection from the dead.'".

Listen to this. There is no specific reference to the frequency. So he's saying, you don't have to do it all the time. There's no specific, there's no command in the Bible saying you must meet every single week, which he just said, "'But even as those things are made clear, "'as is the practice of the church.'".

And the practice of the church is to meet every day on the first day of the week. But you don't have to do it frequently. Frequency is not part of it. So what does this say to the guys who, in the area I grew up in, had a lot of Catholics, that most of the Catholics were cultural Catholics.

They go to church on Christmas and Easter. That's it. Is that okay? I mean, the Bible says nothing about the frequency. "'We need at this point to call out the malpractice "'of the United States Supreme Court "'and do our very utmost to avoid "'any malpractice of our own.'".

Who's he referring to here? What's he talking about? He isn't named John MacArthur by name. That's the context that he's talking about what happens and what is happening at Grace Community Church. "'We need to avoid the malpractice of our own.'".

What would malpractice be then? Meeting? Because the Bible doesn't say that we have to do it with frequency. Listen to how Al Mohler is very cunningly trying to give permission to churches not to meet and deviating from what John MacArthur is doing, giving that permission, and almost insinuating that it could be irresponsible, could be malpractice if your church does meet.

He's doing it all without saying directly, I disagree with John MacArthur and what he's doing. So very, very shrewd way to do this. Maybe a sneaky way to do it. I don't know. I mean, he's a wordsmith.

A lot of the guys that I'm gonna talk about today, Tim Keller's an expert at this. They're wordsmiths. What are you supposed to be left with after listening to the briefing or reading the briefing? What do you think?

Do you think, what questions are in your mind if you're a pastor? Man, I don't wanna do malpractice. He didn't say John MacArthur is in malpractice, but it almost seems like he's insinuating he could be, or maybe I could be if I follow in John MacArthur's example, because we're not all required to do what John MacArthur does.

Instead, think of the alternative that Al Mohler could have done. He could have done a story about Grace Community Church, and he could have made this a religious liberty issue, freedom to worship issue.

He could have really taken California to task for what they're doing. You would think this is an attack on the church. John MacArthur is being threatened with $1 ,000 daily fines on a church. Now, his church might be able to fight this more than other churches.

I'm sure, I mean, he's been in national news. I'm sure the president is very aware of what's going on there, and the White House will see what they do, if anything. I mean, they don't have, technically, the jurisdiction in California to do much, but he can call up Governor Newsom.

What about a little church, little church without the resources that Grace Community Church has? Is it malpractice for them to open? See, Al Mohler, you'd think when one of his friends, John MacArthur called him a friend, is attacked, he would go to bat, and that's not what we're seeing at all, not what we're seeing at all here, and it's very sad to me.

So Jacob Lee asks, the question is, what is Mohler seeking to gain with this position? What is the return on investment for his two cents? And I don't know the answer to that, and I don't want to go beyond what I do know.

All I know is this doesn't make sense when our church's very existence is threatened. Small church can't pay that. Grace Community Church probably can't pay that for long. So that's what's going on here.

Now again, think about the context in which we're living. What other threats do we see coming to the church right now? I'm gonna remind you of some tweets. Sean King on June 22nd talked about the statues of white European Jesus should come down.

They're a form of white supremacy. In the Bible, when the family of Jesus wanted to hide and blend in, guess where they went? Egypt, not Denmark, tear them down. Now of course, it's stupid. I don't know what other name to give that to you.

That's stupid, yeah, Denmark was not an option to flee to that far. Egypt was more of an option. And also these guys, they are the worst presentists I've ever seen. They always think that the conditions of today are the same as conditions were 2 ,000 years ago, that people look the same even genetically, and they did not necessarily.

Anyway, we don't know what shade of skin Jesus had. He was a Jewish man. There's a range. He probably did have darker, more olive skin. It's possible, but that's not a very significant, it's certainly not the emphasis of Christ's incarnation.

It's his skin color. Beth Moore wants to make it that. Lo and behold, Sean King also wants to make it that. But look, they have that in common, but Sean King also wants all these statues coming down. Here's another tweet from an influencer.

Yes, blond, blue-eyed Jesus is a form of white supremacy. Now, Jesus likely did not have blue eyes. Is it possible that he did? I suppose it could be. There's some Jewish people that have blue eyes, but most likely he did not.

Does that mean we should just go ripping all the statues down? I mean, most cultures have taken a version of Jesus that matches their culture or their ethnicity, and that's who they conceive to be Jesus.

That's just, do we take down every statue that is not specifically Jewish? They're not calling for black Jesus statues or pictures to come down, and they do exist. So that's a threat to Christianity, in my opinion.

This is not, this is a direct attack on churches that would have statues of Jesus that don't fit, not a historically accurate picture. That's not what they're going for here. It's specifically, they don't fit the Black Lives Matter narrative.

Breitbart, there we go, breitbart .com reports on a plethora of attacks against churches, mostly Catholic, just in the last few days or so. This is an article that came out, I think, a few days ago, if I'm not mistaken.

It was sent to me by someone, and it looks like the Breitbart article, so this is an article within an article, right? They're quoting Breitbart from July 16th, so earlier last month, middle of last month, but the article I'm quoting from is from recently.

That makes sense. So here's Breitbart. Breitbart says, in Chattanooga, a statue of the Virgin Mary was beheaded. Mary's statues were also damaged in Queens and Boston. Florida, a young man tried to burn down a Catholic church before he was caught.

Three statues of the missionary who virtually founded California, Father, if I can pronounce this, Junipero Serra, have been toppled recently, and on it goes. Probably be Junipero, I would think, in Spanish.

And over the weekend, at a church in Miami area, a statue of Jesus was beheaded, so that was more recently. So this stuff is happening, and that was from an article called The War on Western Civilization.

I think it was on djkennedy .com. And then, of course, last week, we saw burning Bibles in Portland, Oregon. There's a little graphic of it, burning Bibles, and I had made a tweet at the time. I said, look, if you think that you are, as a woke Christian, you're gonna escape.

You got another thing coming. You think that all this oppression, all this stuff that's going on from America's past, is just, it has nothing to do with Christianity. You're trying to separate the two.

The secular world, the greater movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, they don't make that separation. They can easily blame Christianity and the Bible for that oppression, easily. And this is the struggle.

This is how people become woke, right? In the church, primarily. They learn this horrible narrative of what happened in America's past. They don't really know history that well, and there's a vacuum there in their understanding.

It gets filled with the woke stuff, right? They only look at race. It's disconnected. They leave out facts, and they come up with this horrible, horrible narrative. And when someone sees that, they say, oh my goodness.

Well, I have two options. Number one, option one is, these people were not Christians. They claimed to be Christians in the United States, but they could not have been. They could not have been Christians because look at the horrible things they did to black people.

Native Americans, women, et cetera. So that's option number one. They're not Christians. That's not the gospel. So they'll make their version of racism a gospel issue. Option number two, they were Christians, but they were very blind.

And so we need something other than the gospel to ensure that society works correctly. We don't have injustice. So it's the gospel plus something else. And you see these two camps, whether they know it or not, in woke Christianity.

Social justice Christianity. That's how people become woke. And so the effort is to somehow separate Christianity from the oppression that they believe took place and sometimes did take place in America and Europe and other places.

And I'll probably do an episode on this sometime because there's a lot of other options that they're missing to explain these things. But this is how people become woke. And this is the attempt they're making.

It won't work. It will not work. Black Lives Matter, the whole movement is bent on destroying Western civilization, which includes Christianity. Christianity is the religion of Western civilization. It is the white man's religion in their minds.

Don't think you're gonna be able to save it by jumping on the bandwagon. Just like pastors in Germany were not able to save Christianity just because they jumped on the Nazi bandwagon. You can't do it.

It is impossible. So let's talk about some things. Here, we're gonna get into the nitty gritty. I'm gonna actually expand this a little bit so you can see what I'm looking at here. First of all, Danny Akin posts this morning a defense of using the phrase Black Lives Matter.

We're gonna get into that. Ed Stetzer is doing a series, a panel, I guess, I don't even know what it is, panel discussion, but not really because I think it's just articles people are writing, but it's a series on white fragility.

Jamar Tisby, he put this out. Given the depth of theological miseducation when it comes to race and white churches, a brief sermon series on race before you get back to your regularly scheduled programming isn't going to cut it.

We need to consistently address racial justice for months and years at a time. That's Jamar Tisby. So if you're following me on Twitter, I made some tweets about all the oppressions against my family.

My lineage, right? How the English against the Scottish and the Romans against the English and Reformed people against the Anabaptists and the Anglicans against the Puritans and the Northerners against the Southerners and all this horrible baggage that I have that's brought me to, I mean, I wouldn't even be in the United States, right?

I wouldn't even be here because my family had to flee. Some of them as indentured servants, some of them were persecuted for religious reasons. I would not exist if it wasn't for all this persecution and I wouldn't live in the United States.

So I think we should have a whole sermon series for years just so people can understand my impression. I mean, where is this gonna end? This is insane, but this is what Jamar Tisby wants. I don't recognize this kind of Christianity.

This isn't even Christianity. What is this? What is this? Anthony Bradley, I really wish more Asian and he's late late tinks, late late ticks. I think he was trying to say late ticks. I don't even know, it's Latino, but now they're trying to make Latino, I guess, gender neutral.

Latinx friends would listen to Eric Mason. He wishes they would listen. So many blacks have recently decided not to waste their lives in white spaces, trying to convince white folks to care about black thriving.

Why do other minorities crave white acceptance? Why do other minorities crave white acceptance? That's, what in the world is this? And of course, I tweeted out a response to this. I said, look, I grew up in a very diverse church.

I've submitted to people that were not of my ancestry, including Italians, don't have any Italian blood in me. People don't, people just put that in the white category, but I mean, look, there is a difference.

Europeans have a lot of differences between them. Language differences, cultural differences, food differences, even the way they look. I've submitted to leadership who have been Italian, Irish, black, Latino, I'll say it that way, or Hispanic.

I've, and people that were of more of an Anglo ancestry, I've submitted to people of all those categories, ethnic categories. I never thought of them as, I'm gonna submit to them differently because they're a deacon or they're an elder, but they're a different skin color or something.

That's absolutely ridiculous. I went to church with people that didn't look like me and we were one in Christ. Anthony Bradley doesn't even understand, it seems like, or he doesn't, or if he does understand it, he probably does understand it.

He does not value the communion that is in Christ. He automatically assumes if you're in a quote unquote, white space, that I guess you're somehow, what he defines as a white space, that you don't have power, you're marginalized in some way, it's terrible.

You should just leave that. So this is not the Christianity I recognize. Now, speaking of white spaces, speaking of white spaces, I don't know if you noticed this Ed Stetzer series on white fragility.

I'm just gonna say this because it's interesting to me. I found out that he had asked or Tom Askell had told him before he even ran this story, the first part of this, to have Samuel Say. Samuel Say is a blogger, slow to write, it's his blog in Canada, and he wrote a critique of white fragility.

And Samuel Say was recommended to Ed Stetzer in this Christianity Today, I should say this Christianity Today series, to be one of the people who wrote, because he's against it. If you wanna really get all sides of the issue, you should probably have Samuel Say.

He didn't have Samuel Say. And I looked at the list and it looked like people who are pretty much all woke to some level or not, except here's the exception, Neil Shenvey was on the list. So instead of Samuel Say, it was Neil Shenvey that he picked to be on this list.

And it's just, it is interesting to me. Speaking of elite spaces, in this case, elite evangelical spaces, Neil Shenvey seems to be like the accepted one of, he's the one that, I happen to know of two Southern Baptist seminaries, who one of them would not have, for lack of a, without going into the whole story, one of them didn't really wanna have, it seems like Tom Askell speak, canceled an event.

The other one basically didn't, disinvited Bode Backham, by having a scheduling conflict, not rescheduling. I've got that from three different sources, two Southern Baptist seminaries. Both of them had Neil Shenvey speak on critical theory.

That's interesting to me. Why is he the one that it seems like he's the acceptable voice for Big Eva? They don't like Tom Askell. They don't like anyone else. Like, they're not gonna have Tom Buck. They're not gonna have James White.

They're not gonna have myself, A .D. Robles, Samuel Say. The list goes on and on. They're not gonna have those people. There's a whole long list where they'll condemn us. They'll condemn us as racists or liars or whatever.

Neil Shenvey gets in those spaces. Now, why is that? I'm not gonna answer that question, but I just want you to notice that he's part of this series. And what's the problem with this series? What's the problem with even doing this?

This should be condemned. White Fragility, that book, should be absolutely condemned. I'm getting some messages before I keep going that, lost video and audio. Is anyone else having trouble? I'm still broadcasting, so people are saying that they can't hear me.

So, please comment if you cannot or can. Just let me know you can still hear the broadcast. You're good. Okay, all right. So, I must be on whoever commented on their end. What's the problem with doing White Fragility, then?

The problem with doing a series on White Fragility is that you're saying this is a debatable topic. Reasonable Christians can accept White Fragility or aspects of it, and the vast majority are woke people that are reviewing this.

Reasonable people can agree with White Fragility, and the church has something to learn from White Fragility. This is what the Methodists did. The Methodists actually got Robin D 'Angelo to come do a video series for them on White Fragility.

In the video I did with Bill Roach, we talked about that. I showed some clips of that on Standpoint Epistemology. So, the Methodists have gone that direction. Now, the Southern Baptists are going that direction.

Ed Stetzer himself, who is Ed Stetzer? Ed Stetzer has written for Jim Wallace's Sojourners. Go look it up, go to Sojourners, sojo .net, I think, or .com, I think it's .net. You can find Ed Stetzer's articles there.

Ed Stetzer, he's the guy who runs the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College, and significantly, he's the one J .D. Greer appointed to the Resolutions Committee for the Southern Baptist Convention. Remember, Resolution 9 was such an issue.

Curtis Woods was the chairman of that. So, we're gonna do better, I guess. We're gonna have Ed Stetzer, the guy who thinks White Fragility has something to teach us, something good in there. We're not just gonna condemn it.

We're not gonna do Christian apologetics against it. This idea that you're just white, you're just racist because you're white, you're part of majority culture, you benefit, you have hidden racism. I mean, this is disgusting.

This is not compatible with biblical Christianity. It's just not. It's postmodern, it's critical theory. He's gonna say that, no, this is debatable. This is something that Christians can talk about. And he's chairing the Resolutions Committee for the Southern Baptist Convention.

This tells you where Southern Baptists are at. And I don't know if I was even asked. I don't know if, the only way I could participate in this, it would not be a friendly discussion in the sense of, well, I have all these brothers here, and they all, we all just have our disagreements, and I have mine, and they have theirs.

No, we're not doing the brother talk on this. You wanna bring like Joseph Smith in, or bring, like, what kind of heresy do we, what kind of false ideas that undermine Christianity do we say, this is a bridge too far?

Or do we just let it all in? Can we learn from Mormonism? Can we learn from Buddhism? I mean, I guess if you're a good learner, you can learn from anything, but why would you? This is not compatible with Christianity.

It undermines Christianity. False teaching. You don't just nuance and debate and sit there and think about what positive elements there could be in it, and that's what Ed Stetzer is trying to do. It's subversive, what he's trying to do.

Tim Keller is, of course, we're gonna save that one, but that's the last article we're gonna go through is his article that he put out just recently. So, let's start with Danny Akin real quick. Danny Akin, president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, puts out this article, defending Black Lives Matter as a slogan, and here's a quote from the article.

There are many who embrace the proclamation, Black Lives Matter, yet are not aligned with the message of the organization. In their hearts, they are convicted that black lives do matter, and they're advocates for change, but believe the organization's message.

Methods and values are antithetical to redemption and reconciliation. There are also many who embrace the organization not realizing its message, methods, and values are divergent from those of the proclamation.

So, they're saying you can have Black Lives Matter, the organization over here, reject that, but also adopt Black Lives Matter, the slogan. This is the article we've heard. Here's the response. First of all, the origin of Black Lives Matter, that slogan, you need to understand this.

This was from Alicia Garza. Now, Alicia Garza was the first one to come up with this phrase, Black Lives Matter. She's one of the founders of the Black Lives Matter organization. So, they are intrinsically linked at the beginning, the phrase, the slogan, and the organization.

And she said, this is in 2013, on July 13th, I continue to be surprised at how little Black Lives Matter, and I will continue that, stop giving up on black life, black people, I will never give up on us.

And she's talking, I think it was Trayvon Martin, if I'm not mistaken, right after that. And another one of the founders, I think it's Patrice Murray, said the same day, she used a hashtag. She's the one that put the hashtag in front of Black Lives Matter.

Declaration, black bodies will no longer be sacrificed for the rest of the world's enlightenment. I am done. Trayvon, you are loved infinitely. So, it was Trayvon. So, she puts out the hashtag, Black Lives Matter, 2013.

Two days later, she says this, Alicia Garza, myself, and hopefully more black people that we can imagine are embarking on a project. We are calling it hashtag Black Lives Matter. It is the hashtag. It's the same hashtag that Mark Dever and J .D. Greer and Jonathan Lehman, et cetera, et cetera, all use.

Black Lives Matter is a movement attempting to visibilize what it means to be black in this country, provide hope and inspiration for collective action to build collective power, to achieve collective transformation rooted in grief and rage, but pointed towards vision and dreams.

Tonight, I will be talking about this project as well. And so, she goes on, this is where the movement started. This is where the slogan started. This is where the hashtag started. The phrase, Black Lives Matter.

This is where it started. Patrice Marie was the one that you saw on video month and a half, two months ago saying, we, meaning those three who started Black Lives Matter, which would include Alicia Garza, we are trained Marxists.

Trained Marxists, right? Same group of people coming up with the hashtag, Black Lives Matter. Here's the response. This is an article that came out June 19th, almost two months ago. It's a great article though.

You should probably copy and save this. Slogans matter and sometimes slogans divide. An academic argument for why Christians should not use the Black Lives Matter catchphrase. For whatever it's worth, the vast majority of Big Eva finds itself in neither of these categories, meaning, well, I'll keep reading and explain, but in a third way approach.

So, what he's saying is that Big Eva is not in the Black Lives Matter movement completely. They're not embracing the organization. Big Eva is also not in the all lives matter category. They reject all lives matter.

So, they're in this awkward third way. We're not either one. We're something in between. Explicitly, they claim evangelicals can still affirm in a generic sense Black Lives Matter without embracing the Black Lives Matter movement.

For the sake of this article, we are going to investigate the consistency of third way approaches to Black Lives Matter. First, Black Lives Matter is a clear and defined movement. It is inappropriate for evangelicals to fundamentally change the meaning of the slogan for our purposes.

The framers of the Black Lives Matter movement gave the phrase a definite meaning and use, and to reduce the phrase to just mean we value black lives and people is to abuse the author's original intention.

So, this is an original intent argument. Christians would be outraged if a pro-choice organization used the saying, this is my body for a pro-choice movement because it is fundamentally at odds with scripture's understanding of the sanctity of human life in the New Testament, author's original meaning and use of the phrase.

Classic evangelicals are adamant that they do not want readers to determine the meaning of texts, whether it be biblical texts or the constitution. Therefore, consistency demands we follow the framers of the movement, Black Lives Matter, to determine the meaning of their texts.

Not later, evangelical readers who misappropriate and redefine the meaning of the term Black Lives Matter for their own purposes. Secondly, the reactions by committed advocates of Black Lives Matter to new and contrary slogans demonstrate the Black Lives Matter desires to set the determined meaning and use of the phrase, opposes all contrary uses of the term, and finds third way uses of the term confusing and unhelpful to their movement.

So, here's the argument. When Danny Akin does this, says, well, you can use Black Lives Matter, it's fine. It's just a true statement. He's muddying the waters. He's ignoring where the phrase came from.

He's ignoring who invented the phrase, why they invented the phrase, the organization, which is very defined if you go to their website, what the organization stands for. And it's a reader response. It's, well, it means this to me.

We would not do this with scripture. We would not do this with scripture. The Southern Baptists, and it's not just Southern Baptists, evangelicals in general seem to wanna do this with so many things.