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 in 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 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,

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.

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 hasn'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. And I mean, 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, we'll 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 were virtually, 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 mean, 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 oppression. I mean, where is this going to 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 were 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, 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 Bodhi Bhakham 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 DiAngelo 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 a month and a half, two months ago, saying we, meaning the three, 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.

They wanna do this with historical symbols. It's not what the authors of those symbols, the historical monuments do.

It's not what the creators of these monuments intended to communicate. It's what we think right now in the 21st century that matters.

That is reader response. If we apply this kind of thinking to the Bible, we make hash of the

Bible. Bible doesn't mean anything. Just means what we want it to mean here, 2000 years and more than that, in different parts of the

Old Testament when they were written, thousands of years after the fact. We're gonna just determine what the texts mean.

Ancient languages, this is acid. And this is what Danny Akin is advocating.

This is why they so badly, why is there this yearning? Why does Al Mohler have this yearning that we gotta caution, caution, caution on the church's meeting?

Why is he afraid? Why is Danny Akin, hey, hey, we can use the term Black Lives Matter. Let's just try our best way to somehow take part in this revolution.

We're part of it too. While rejecting some of the obvious non -Christian, anti -Christian assumptions.

Why that pressure? Why just do your own thing? Like, why do you have to have that hashtag?

It's very interesting to me, to say the least. So that's what's going on with Danny Akin this morning.

We're gonna talk now about Tim Keller's article. And I'm gonna preface this with, so I wasn't expecting this.

Sorry, I have a cold and I'm trying to make sure that I'm able to speak. So I have orange juice in this and it's helping so far.

So that's why I'm drinking a lot. Here's my preface. I was not expecting so many people to so quickly respond to Tim Keller's article.

And I don't think Tim Keller was either. Tim Keller is actually revising or adding to part of his article today.

And so I looked it up right before the broadcast and I don't think he's added anything yet. I'm not sure what he's even gonna put in it.

I don't think it'll probably change the substance of it. He's gonna make it more complex, which I, because it's too simple.

I was like, oh my goodness, no, please don't do this. It is so complex already.

And so the critiques that I listened to last night were A .D. Robles did a little critique of it and James White did a critique of it.

And James, I mean, you can't focus on this whole thing because it's so long. I'm gonna take a little bit of a different approach.

I'm gonna critique it as well, but I'm gonna be focusing on something a little different. But so A .D.

said something about Tim Keller that I thought was kind of funny. He said, you know, Tim Keller's kind of like Yoda. Like he says things you don't know what he means.

I actually don't, I disagree with that actually. Not like, not, I mean, it's funny because I can see his point.

I mean, Tim Keller kind of helped start the gospel coalition, right? But I think

Tim Keller is actually more like Obama in his communication at least. His communication is like, you remember those

Obama speeches that were so inspiring and that people were weeping, people were fainting at rallies, thrills were going up some people's legs.

Obama, he's just amazing, a great orator. But then at the end of the speech, you're like, what did he, what was he talking about?

Like what's he gonna do? So many people voted for Obama, not because they agreed with Obama's policies, but because they just didn't know, like they didn't know what he was gonna really do.

And what he said sounded so good, but it was so general. It was vague. It was nuanced and intricate, but not specific.

It was not, he was not clear in his communication at all. And so I look at Tim Keller and the way he speaks, and it's very much like Obama.

He connects with you emotionally, not with me really, but with a lot of people, he connects with them emotionally.

They hear certain words that make, bring about thoughts that are and feelings of happiness and you're agreeing with him, but you don't really always know why.

And Obama would, for some of his speeches that they write, they would have these focus groups and they'd look at different words and how different words hit people and impacted people.

And I don't, I'm not saying Tim Keller has focus groups. Maybe he does. But it's almost like he uses certain words that evoke emotions, but at the end of the day, you don't really know what he's talking about.

So that's my analysis of Tim Keller. If you wanna understand how Tim Keller communicates, go listen to some Obama speeches.

So let's go over some of this. I'm gonna try to give you the big picture and then we're gonna focus in on what

I think is probably the more important part of this article. The big picture is this. Tim Keller starts off with, there's a problem, all right?

And I would say the problems he's locating here, a lot of them are actually correct.

So he says, currently, there are competing visions of justice. That's right.

Often at sharp variance and that none of them have achieved anything like a cultural consensus, not even in a single country like the

US. And he's right about that. That's actually one of our problems. This whole diversity makes us stronger.

Yeah, not really. Diversity in the sense that different people have different skills and can complement one another.

A complementarian diversity, that can make people stronger, right? You have people that are good at certain things and people that are good at other things.

But that's specialization. The idea that just diversity for diversity's sake, especially people with different religions and worldviews, philosophies of life, that doesn't make something stronger.

That actually makes a country weaker and it destabilizes. And right now, that's what we're seeing, destabilization. So Tim Keller is right to point out that there's different competing visions of justice and they're antithetical.

He says, large swaths of the church still do not see doing justice as part of their calling. Now, I think

I might know what he means by this. I'll say, I probably don't agree.

If he were to define this, I'd probably say, what are you talking about? Because he's probably saying, getting culturally involved from a leftist point of view.

That's probably more doing justice, right? If he's talking about just charity, then I'd say, well, yeah, but Christians are the most generous people in this country.

Could we do better? I'm sure. But they're really one of the most generous demographics. I always found it interesting.

I don't know if this still holds, but Mississippi, right? Poorest state in the whole entire country.

Absolutely poor. And yet, the most generous state in the entire country.

Giving more. And I believe it used to be one of the highest, if not the highest evangelical population. I don't think that's a coincidence.

Evangelicals are just, and Christians in general, are very generous people. But he's saying that large swaths of the church, they just don't see doing justice as part of their calling.

So this is really more older people. The reason I know is because this next sentence. Many younger Christians recognizing this failure of the church and wanting to rectify things are taking up one or another of the secular approaches to justice.

And this is why I don't think I would agree with his assessment that large swaths of the church aren't doing justice.

Because he's saying that the same critique of the church that younger Christians are giving is what he's giving, essentially.

And we know that these younger Christians he's talking about that are adopting these secular theories, their critique is definitely the new left critique.

And so these are the problems according to him. Oh, one other. There's a need for an objective standard.

He spends a lot of time in the beginning of this article talking about how basically secular theories have a problem.

They don't have an objective standard. And he's right about this. So I'm gonna just give him a pass and say, let's just agree with all this. These are real problems.

So before we even get into the article anymore, what would your solution be to this? What would your solution be to these problems?

As a biblical Christian, what do you do? Now, I can think of a few solutions that people probably wouldn't like.

In fact, the New York Times ran an article a few days ago where they paint this nightmare scenario of a contested election between Trump and Biden.

And in the scenario, California, Oregon, and Washington all secede from the country. And it's basically, this is this horrible thing.

And I think Trump sends in troops and it's just, we don't wanna go down that road. You know, that's a horrible road to go down.

And so the interesting thing is I was thinking about it and I was like, well, why would that be such a bad idea?

And granted, I know there's a lot of factors to consider, but what does someone in, we'll use

Mississippi again, what does someone in Meridian, Mississippi have in common with someone in San Francisco, California? The average person in both places, what do they have in common?

Not much, completely different cultures. And yet they're bound by this thing called the union to stay together.

Now, I'm not saying that this is the ultimate solution. I know China is waiting for destabilization.

And I mean, there's, we got people from other countries that don't want America to succeed and be prosperous, et cetera.

But just letting those go who don't like this country, why would that be such a bad thing?

That could be one of the solutions, all these competing versions of justice. Well, those who have a antithetical view, they can just go their way.

They can have their reparations and whatever they want in their utopia, right? That could be a solution.

Now, probably most of you listening don't even like that solution, but I'm saying it is something to consider. It's a divorce in the case of a husband who's running around on his wife or whatever, that person can divorce.

That person can, most people don't have a problem with that. Even biblical Christians understand there's a covenant and when the covenant's broken.

Now, I don't know that the, has the covenant actually been broken? I don't know in this case, but there's leaving is a way to find peace or separation.

Even if it's not a divorce and you have an abusive husband, separation, right? There can be peace in that scenario, more so than forcing people together who are gonna try to kill each other.

And I would suggest that in America, people are at each other's throats right now because of different political persuasions.

The other thing is you could just really advocate winning. I mean, Keller could come out there swinging and say, there is only one true justice and it's the biblical justice, right?

But really swinging. I mean, like really taking these other theories to task, saying there is no true unity, we're gonna have chaos without Jesus Christ as Lord.

And specifically spelling out what that means, which Keller does not do. And saying, we're gonna win.

We're in a cultural battle and we're gonna win. We're gonna win through every lane we have available.

We're going to support our version of justice. Now Keller does not do that either. So what's

Keller's solution to this? Few things about Tim Keller and you're gonna get a chance to win another scholarship for Russell Fuller's classes.

So this is your second chance coming up in a minute. I'm just giving you a warning. Few things about Keller. Number one, and I wrote these down so I wouldn't forget them these are just some things off the top of my head.

Keller, the first thing that put Keller on my radar for me to be skeptical of Keller, that is to think what's going on with Keller was years ago,

I wanna say now, at least maybe 10 years ago, something like that, maybe seven, 10, he was asked a question about homosexuality, is it a sin?

And he waffled for like 15 minutes he just, he couldn't answer a straight question. I'm like, what in the world, all this wordsmithing and it was just weird.

I think the interviewer was confused. I thought, why can't he just say, yeah, it's a sin. This is what the

Bible says, just use biblical language about it. He wouldn't do that. In 2007, he wrote,

The Reason for God. And he says in the intro to that book that he was attracted to neo -Marxist Frankfurt School critical theory stuff when he was a young man, which is interesting to me.

So he has, there's a new left background there of some kind. Now, I just recently talked to someone who was a member of Tim Keller's church, friends with Tim Keller.

And he was saying basically like, I didn't see any of this stuff in Tim Keller until like the late 90s started to show up, early 2000s, late 90s.

And that may be true, but just because someone didn't see it doesn't mean it wasn't there. And I wonder if the seeds were planted early in Tim Keller's life for more of a neo -Marxist approach.

So he, but he says this in Reason for God. In Generous Justice, 2010, another book, he says, we owe the poor as much of our money as we can possibly give away.

He quotes Liberation Theologian, Gutierrez. He quotes, I think this is the one where he quotes

John Perkins, the three R's, redistribution being the third R. And then you have another person.

This is your chance to get the scholarship. You have another person that he quotes in this book and in frequently in many of his books.

I would say this man probably influenced Tim Keller maybe more than any other with his public theology.

What is the name of that man? He's quoted in Generous Justice. Tim Keller quotes him in a number of the books.

What is the name of the man who Tim Keller got a lot of his information from? And I'll give you a hint, specifically information regarding Abraham Kuyper.

Abraham Kuyper. So who did Tim Keller go to? I'm gonna wait for you guys to lock in that answer, whoever can get to it first.

But we're gonna keep going here. He did a living out audit a couple years ago.

This was maybe two years ago. He was part of this living out, how to make your church a safe space for homosexuals, essentially, sexual minorities.

And then, of course, I just found this out recently. He is on the elder board for the AND campaign. Now, the

AND campaign, Justin Guboni, Michael Ware, Democratic strategists, Democratic Party operatives, unabashedly so.

This is who they are. They're Democrats. And they run the AND campaign.

It's social justice and biblical values, right? Keller is on the board. And it's funny, it's an elder board, and I guess

Keller's not a Westminster Confession guy. I don't know, because it's actually, it's chaired by a female, this elder board.

So he does sit on an elder board that's chaired by a female. So it's just interesting to me that he's,

I think he still claims the Westminster Confession, but these are just some things about Tim Keller that I'm thinking, like, what is going on with him?

And more so as time goes on. James White even talked about this yesterday, that there's something wrong with Tim Keller.

I don't think anyone's gotten it yet, by the way. I'm looking at the, all right, so I'm gonna give another hint.

It's someone who helped Tim Keller understand Abraham Kuyper's theology and make that theology applicable to political, social situations.

They also, this is the second hint, were a president of a very prominent neo -evangelical college out in California.

So who am I thinking of? This is your chance to get the scholarship, the

Russell Fuller Class Scholarship. No, it's not Bart. No, it's not Karl Bart.

Who else could it be? All right, no one's getting it. So I'm gonna give it a few more minutes and I'll drop another hint if no one gets it.

This is a key to understanding Tim Keller. If you really wanna understand Tim Keller, you need to,

I think, first understand this guy. So all right, so those are just some things about Tim Keller.

And so now let's get into actually critiquing this because I guarantee you,

Tim Keller, Tim Keller is not coming at this with a moderate, balanced, or conservative approach to it.

Knowing what we know about Tim Keller, he's got, there's a liberal bone in his body, meaning there's a new left bone.

There's a neo -Marxist bone in his body. There's a critical theory bone in his body. And by the way, critical theory, if you really think about the word critical theory, the critical part is the

Marxist parts, the neo -Marxist critique. The theory part is the postmodernism. And Keller has both of them going on.

Keller started Gospel Coalition, and Gospel Coalition, I mean, they're in that postmodern camp.

I mean, they have a class you can take. It's probably still there on Foucault and Derrida. Keller talks about speech act theory and this kind of stuff.

All right, no one's gotten it yet. All right, I'm gonna give you all another hint. So in order to understand

Tim Keller, you gotta understand the guy who helped him understand Kuiper was president of a very famous neo -evangelical seminary.

The name of the seminary is Fuller Theological Seminary. All right, president of Fuller Theological Seminary and influenced

Tim Keller tremendously. Tim Keller quotes him all the time. And this man also quotes Keller quite a bit.

What is this man's name? The man in question. We'll see if someone can get it. All right, let's get into the actual stuff here.

So the article is called A Biblical Critique of Secular Justice and Critical Theory.

We're gonna start off with the problem. And the problem is that there's no justice.

We need an objective standard, right? We went over all that. So what's the solution from Keller? What's he gonna do about it?

Well, biblical justice is the alternative. So he gives you all these secular theories, secular ideas that you have to reject.

And then he promotes his biblical understanding of what justice is.

And what he does is he awards points to these secular theories. He says, some of them are really, they have some really good points, but the wheels fall off here.

And so Christianity ends up being the theory that essentially fills in all the spaces.

It's strong because it takes all the strength of the secular theories. All right,

William Ha got it. William Ha got it. William Ha, Richard Mao is the correct answer.

So please email me. I'm just gonna give it away. My email address that you can email to, jonathanharris1989 at gmail .com.

jonathanharris1989 at gmail .com. It's probably the easiest way to do this. Send me your email.

Just say, I'm William Ha, and I guessed Richard Mao. Richard Mao is the one that influenced Keller quite a bit. All right. Both of the scholarships for Russell Fuller have now been awarded.

So what Keller's doing in this article though is he's taking the strengths, what he considers strengths in all these secular theories and saying, well, the

Bible, the biblical theory has those, and it doesn't have the weaknesses that they have. So this is the appeal to secularists that just come on over onto our side.

We've got it right. Well, what is the biblical justice that he's advocating? Because that sounds good.

We should advocate for biblical justice. That's a good thing. Number one, community.

Others have a claim on my wealth, so I must give voluntarily. Now I'm gonna say that there's a truth to this.

There is a truth to this. Do others have a claim on your wealth? The wealth that God has given you to steward for him.

That's Christian ownership. It's not that we own it. Absolutely, God owns everything, but what we're stewarding.

Do others have a claim on that? All right, let me give you this example. Do your kids have a claim on your wealth?

Yes, to some extent. Your responsibility is to take care of them. Responsibilities are the claims.

It's not that your kids so much have a claim on your wealth. It's more so that you have a responsibility to take care of them.

If you wanna phrase it that way, then I'm okay with that, but you could easily get into dangerous territory the farther you get away from the language of responsibility.

The Founding Fathers believed rights were tethered to responsibilities, and I'm gonna do an episode on that sometime. Keller is,

I'm gonna give him the benefit of that and say, well, on the front end, that's what it looks like he's saying, so let's give that to him.

Absolutely, you have a responsibility to your community in some way. You do need to treat people the way that you wanna be treated.

There's, you're born into a world that has obligations upon you. This is just true, guys.

I'm sorry if that offends some of the more maybe libertarians out there, I don't know, but you're not a blank slate.

You're not born into a vacuum. You do have some obligations upon you. You are a son or a daughter.

You are a member of a community. That community has given you certain benefits from a young age, protection and so forth.

There is a civic responsibility, and this has always been understood. This isn't a new thing. This isn't a socialist thing, but socialism can creep in under these assumptions.

When you get away from the response, when the responsibility becomes unhinged from biblical responsibilities, then we can get socialism very easily, and we're gonna talk about that a little more.

So what are the examples he uses? He says, well, the gleaning laws of the Old Testament are a case in point.

Deuteronomy 24, 17 through 22. Okay, yeah, there were gleaning laws in the Old Testament. By the way, by the way,

I don't know of any examples of these gleaning laws being enforced.

In other words, you didn't have the police going out, arresting someone, because like, hey, you've harvested the edges of your field.

This was more of a charity thing. Yes, it was in the law. You're supposed to do it, but was this something that was actually enforced?

I don't know of any evidence for that, but this is something that voluntarily is done by the owner, in an agrarian society, by the owners of the land.

And so he says, you are to acknowledge the claim and voluntarily be radically generous. This view of property does not fit well with either a capitalist or a socialist economy.

So here it comes, here it comes. You're supposed to voluntarily give, right?

We agree with that. All Christians should agree. Yes, that's part of being a Christian. We voluntarily give, we give charity to people.

We help the poor, right? We've been given too much, so we give to others. Now, does that mean that this doesn't fit in with capitalism somehow?

That the idea that a society that would protect private property is in violation of this principle?

No, it doesn't, because it's still your private property that you're supposed to be giving away because you have a responsibility to give it.

The issue at hand here is force. Where does force come in? Socialism says, the socialist government has force attached to it.

We're going to force you, because if you don't pay, we are going to come with the police and we're gonna do something.

We're going to force you to pay for our social programs, et cetera. So even capitalists recognize there are certain things that like national defense, right?

That which goes back to government bearing the sword because civil law, in other words, the criminality, these kinds of things, violent crime and so forth, these must be punished.

Now, it's better probably doing this on a community level, but you still need militaries. You still need a means somehow of defending yourself.

So there are taxes for certain things, necessary things, right? That we can ground in biblical truth.

Once you start getting into the welfare business of like the common good and human flourishing, et cetera, and it's the responsibility of people to give to those things and it must be compelled through force, now you're in socialism land.

And there isn't an in -between. This is where Tim Keller is playing fast and loose.

He's saying that, well, it's not capitalism, it's not socialism, it's biblical Christianity. As if biblical Christianity did not give rise to the capitalism that we have before us.

And I should say the free market, because even capitalism, you know, sometimes people could be talking about state capitalism or cronyism, and that is not,

I would say, biblical either. That's actually closer to socialism. But it's actually a Marxist slur, the word capitalism.

But most people, when they say capitalism, they're meaning the free market. I'm at laissez -faire type stuff. So Keller is trying to promote a third way here.

And he's saying it's the biblical third way, but it's not, it's not. The Bible protects private property rights from the beginning.

I mean, they're very protected. They belong to families, passed down from generation to generation, land.

Even in Acts, where, is it Peter says to Ananias, was it not yours?

Was the property not yours before you sold it? It belonged to you. You usually try to go back to the

Church of Acts to say how great it was, communitarian, et cetera. All right, so this is getting off on the wrong foot.

Then he says equity. Equity, that's another principle of biblical justice. Everyone must be treated equally and with dignity.

Now, we agree, if he's talking about equality before the law. He quotes Leviticus 24, 22.

You are to have the same law for the foreigner as for the native born. Okay, so if you're gonna punish murderers and a foreigner murders someone, you should punish them.

Got it. Here's what he says. Any system of government or government in which decisions or outcomes are determined by how much money parties have is a stench before God.

Okay, what happened? What happened with this quote? So he's thinking like a central planner here.

He's thinking like an elitist, looking at this economy, looking at this government. And he's saying, well, if you have a system of government in which decisions or outcomes are determined by how much money parties have, well, that's a stench.

Well, what do you do with inheritance laws? So if you have a rich dad and he passes down the money to his son and it keeps going for generations, and normally that kind of thing, it can happen.

But normally you get, it's very common to get a son who squanders things. How many boards are, you know, you think of like all the big corporations and how many of them did the family say, yeah,

I'm not giving it to my sons. I'm like, this corporate board can take care of it. I mean, normally that's what happens in the

United States. But yes, there's generational wealth that gets passed down. And that's not a bad thing.

In fact, Proverbs talks about this. The wise man passes down his wealth to his children's children.

That's what a wise man does. We're supposed to do that. It's living biblically and frugally.

And the blessing of that, it's God's providence. And so to say that a system of government which allows for that is unjust, well, that's just flat out wrong.

Because that would be a system of government in which some decisions or outcomes are determined by how much money parties have. If you start out and your dad's a rich dad, if you start out with that and you have, you wanna call it privilege, that's fine.

There's nothing wrong with that. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, all right? Tim Keller, I think, would make us think differently.

We should all start out, I guess, what? At the same starting point? Are we gonna just have everyone, $100 ,000 when you're born?

You probably need more than that, quite a bit more. I don't know, we're gonna go through age 18, half a million dollars, there you go.

That's it, that's all the help you get. Everyone gets the same amount. And when you die, then the money all goes to the state to redistribute.

I mean, that's what you'd have to think. That's not biblical. Tim Keller is, though, vague about this.

He doesn't give you applications. Again, he just lays out these principles which, when I take them to their logical conclusions, they're not good.

Corporate responsibility. He says, I am sometimes responsible for and involved in other people's sins. Now, this one's interesting to me.

This is very interesting. So he says, Daniel repents for sins committed by his ancestors, even though there is no evidence he personally participated in them.

Right, because there's a covenant with God. There's a covenant that God had with the ancestors and with the children, and both parties broke it.

The ancestors did, the children did. The habits of the fathers were passed down to the sons and the daughters. In 2

Samuel 21, God holds Israel accountable for injustice done to the Gibeonites by King Saul, even though he was, by that time, dead.

Right, and it says, if you go to 2 Samuel 21, it talks about in his house.

It wasn't just Saul. It was Saul and his house. So what did they do? They killed, was it seven of his sons

I think they killed? So this was not just injustice from a dead guy. This was injustice from people who are presumably still living that this is talking about.

Again, in both examples, God's the one, ultimately, that's determining the justice here.

There was a famine in the land, I believe, in 2 Samuel. So God's determining, he's sending a famine to punish.

But again, both of these examples are God, God's judgment in a country with a national covenant.

In Joshua 7 and number 16, God holds whole families responsible for the sin of one member.

The first one is the example of Achan. Now he buries this loot in his tent.

You think his family didn't know about the loot in his tent? Yeah, I think they probably did.

So when his family's killed, I think it's not safe to assume that they weren't somehow complicit in this.

Number 16 is Korah's rebellion. And if you remember correctly, God's gonna wipe out

Israel. And Moses is like, wait a minute, for the sin of one man and God doesn't do it. I mean, how many times does that happen in the story of Israel and in the law?

And basically, this is what they set up. If you don't agree with Korah and his rebellion, then leave his tent, get out of there.

The reason God was so angry was because they were all participating with Korah. They weren't stopping Korah. They were living with Korah.

And so the separation then must be made. If you're not with him, then you separate and who has swallowed

Korah and the people in the rebellion, the people who were actually guilty. Again, who's the one giving the judgment here?

It's God. It's God giving. This isn't about forming a civil society. This isn't about reparations.

This isn't about what humans do vertically. This is about what God is doing horizontally, exacting justice on people.

So those are some of his other examples. He, let's see, what else does he say? He holds members of the current generation of a pagan nation responsible for the sins committed by their ancestors many generations before.

And he gives examples of the Amalekites. Interestingly though, way before this in Exodus 17, it says the

Lord has sworn to war against the Amalekites from generation to generation.

So this is something that the Lord swore. Now this is the Lord doing it. The Lord knows their hearts. I don't know their hearts.

Joshua didn't know their hearts. This isn't something that it's a recommendation.

Well, you need to just war against them because of what their ancestors did. This is God's vendetta against these people.

And God knows what the generations that are downstream from the initial sinful generation are also thinking.

He knows what kind of crimes they're committing, and it's up to him if he wants to judge them. To me, this whole thing,

Deuteronomy 23 is another one. And of course, in that passage, God even says he loves the Amalekites and tells the children of Israel not to be against the

Edomites because they're your brothers, et cetera. So this whole thing, guys, let me just break this down for you.

Keller is bringing up all these examples of corporate responsibility. Why is he doing this? Why is he bringing up these examples?

What's the purpose? It's because he's appealing to people who want to believe in punishing or holding responsible an entire class of people.

Who's that class of people right now? White people, Christians, straight white male, heterosexual males.

I mean, there's entire classes of people that are being held responsible. And Tim Keller's tipping a hat to that.

He's saying, yeah, yeah, we can hold some people, hold these groups responsible. And these groups, the

Black Lives Matter bandwagon, what do they wanna do? They want reparations. They want punishing. They want revenge.

They wanna redistribute something, privilege, money, et cetera. Take down their history.

And Tim Keller's tipping a hat. He's being vague enough that he's not saying go rip down something or do reparations, but he's giving them the logic they need.

But what's he ignoring? He's ignoring the fact that in every single example that he gave, it is God's punishing, vertical punishing,

God who sees the hearts of human beings punishing people. He also, this is something that I point out quite often, but he's almost assuming that the

United States is like Israel, which is the one thing you're not supposed to assume. If you are a progressive evangelical, you hate those people.

I mean, it's near hatred. You really hate like the Jerry Falwell Jrs of the world. And those who came before him, the

Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell tapes, you don't like that at all. Because well, they assume that the

Bible, the biblical relationship that God had with Israel is the same as the relationship

God has with the United States, that we're a covenant people. And we know we're not, we're not special like that. American exceptionalism is racist.

Well, what's Tim Keller advocating here when he uses this? He's paralleling Israel, a nation with covenant before God, which also affected nations around them who were not in the covenant, but were interacting with Israel.

He's paralleling that with the United States. I don't know how you get more Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson than that.

So just don't catch that. Catch that when they pull that one, because then you can ask them, so are you saying there's a covenant, that America's special, we have a covenant with God?

And if they say no, they say, well, why bring out all those verses that assume a covenant? All right, corporate responsibility.

Let's, we're winding down here. Socially institutionalized ways of life become weighted in favor of the powerful and oppressive over those with less power.

Listen to the wordsmithing here. Become weighted. Become weighted. Very smooth way to put that.

Basically, he's talking about discrimination when he says become weighted. And socially institutionalized, he's talking about systemic racism, systemic oppression, et cetera.

So he's saying socially institutionalized instead. He's good at swapping out words for, because if he were to say systemic racism discriminates in favor of white people, if he said that sentence, then we would jump all over it.

We'd probably say, what are you talking? But because he says socially institutionalized ways of life become weighted in favor of the powerful and oppressive, then we don't see it as much.

Examples include criminal justice systems, Leviticus 1915. Go to Leviticus 1915. See if you can find criminal justice systems in Leviticus 1915.

Commercial practices, and he goes through a whole list, low wages, delayed wages. Sure, there are things that are unjust.

But to pretend that this is somehow parallel with institutional racism, the kind that's advocated today, he specifically does criminal justice.

That's wrong. And I'm not gonna belabor this point because I've gone over this many times. You can go back and watch a number of videos.

Just type in on YouTube in the search for in conversations that matter, just type in systemic racism or police.

I did a number of shows and I showed you the stats and I said, look, we don't have evidence that there's systemic racism on a broad scale in the

United States today. We just don't. And Tim Keller though, he's writing in the context he's writing in.

He's writing when there's a war on the police and he's saying these kinds of things to kind of tip the hat.

Say, oh, the Bible kind of talks about this too. Not in the verses he's quoting, no, it doesn't.

Yeah, there's injustice. Injustice can happen, but you can identify it when it happens. You can find that injustice and you can correct that injustice.

The kind of systemic oppression, et cetera, that's being advocated now by groups like Black Lives Matter, it's invisible.

It's not systemic oppression, it's invisible oppression. It's there, it's assumed, and you must comply.

You can't whip out statistics, you can't show them that really there's no evidence for it because I've done that. It's just, you're a bigot if you don't go along with them on this assumption.

And so Keller, instead of correcting that, I would say he tips a hat to that. He says, four, individual responsibility is another facet of biblical justice.

I am finally responsible for all my sins, but not for all my outcomes. He says, there is an asymmetrical balance between individual and corporate responsibility.

Deuteronomy 24, 16 says that in ordinary human law, we must be held responsible and punished for our own sins, not those of our parents.

So it's interesting. Does this, is the Tim Keller in point four, is he similar to the

Tim Keller in point three? And I think it's interesting he's trying to straddle this.

If he were to say that God judges peoples, and he does so however he wills to do it, based on covenants, based on his own will, he can send a hurricane and sure innocent people can be hurt in that.

And he could be judging, it's very possible. But then when we set up governments, we're not to be looking to God's example, the way that he judges to do it.

He's actually given us principles by which we can without the position or the knowledge of God to set up systems of justice.

He doesn't make that distinction between an earthly justice and God's justice, God's heavenly justice, and how those things are implemented, the difference between the creation, the creator in that sense.

So it's all muddied, it's all muddied. So he's now saying that, yeah, we are responsible for our sins, but not all our outcomes.

Because look, some disasters can happen, all sorts of things can happen that affect our outcomes, which is true.

I don't really have a lot to say about that point. And then number five is the last point, advocacy. We must have special concern for the poor and the marginalized.

All right, this is where I think, this is the telos, this is the purpose, this is where he's going with all this.

While we are not to show partiality to any, we are to have special concern for the powerless.

This is not a contradiction. Proverbs 31 says, speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, defend the rights of the poor and needy.

The Bible doesn't say speak up for the rich and powerful, not because they are less important as persons before God, but because they don't need you to do this.

The playing field is not level. And if we don't advocate for the poor, there will not be equality.

In this aspect of justice, we are seeking to give more social, financial, and cultural capital to those with less.

Okay, he plays fast and loose with equality here, because look what he says. We are seeking to give basically money, capital, to people.

We're speaking to distribute from those who have money to those who don't have money, all right? That's our purpose.

That's what we're supposed to be doing. That's the purpose, that's the telos. But he uses, what does he use to justify that?

Proverbs 31, speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, defend the rights of the poor and needy. The rights of the poor and needy.

Equality before the law. Equality in the sense of, go read Exodus chapter,

I think it's 33. Equality before the law. You're not supposed to favor a poor man either.

You're not supposed to favor a relative, or someone who's, you're not supposed to discriminate against someone who's a foreigner, because they don't have the connections you have.

They are at a disadvantage. They probably don't speak the language as well. They weren't born into the society you were born into, so they don't have all the advantages you have of understanding how it works.

You are supposed to defend the rights of those who are unable or just not as capable of defending themselves.

But justice, we're gonna get into this. Justice is the faithful application of the law. Equality before the law.

That's the kind of equality Tim Keller talks about at the beginning of the paragraph. By the end of the paragraph, he's talking about a different kind of equality, somewhat egalitarian equality.

He's talking about redistributing income, so that outcomes are the same,

I guess, or more similar. That is different. That is a fast and loose trick that he is playing on you and the evangelical world when they read this.

The verses that he's using don't substantiate the point that he's making. I don't want you to miss that.

Here's two interesting quotes, and I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on this. I would recommend

James White's podcast yesterday, because he talks about this first quote quite a bit. The central story of the Old Testament is liberation of slaves from captivity.

Over and over in the Bible, God's deliverers are usually racial and social outsiders, people seen to be weak and rejected in the eyes of the power elites of the world.

No, it's not. No, it's not. That's not true. Even, look, if you go back to read the story of Exodus, read the story.

While they're being freed from Egypt, God is giving them instructions on how to keep

Passover, and he's giving them instructions on what to do with their slaves. And basically, for mercy's sake, he's saying slaves, your slaves, are included in that.

He's telling the children of Israel when they get to the promised land, they're gonna have slaves, include the slaves in the Passover. There's slavery in the

Old Testament, and he's telling this to people who are in slavery currently. And this is before.

This is, well, anyway. This is not the main theme of the

Old Testament. That's the Exodus story. God did deliver his people from a very harsh slavery, and he implemented in his law and regulated a different kind, a more just kind, in the context in which they lived back then.

There's a whole lot of the Old Testament which is not about deliverance from slavery.

In fact, the children of Israel go into captivity how many times? They're constantly being subjected to wars because it's about the covenant of God.

And it's about how they failed to keep it. You know who kept it? You know who kept the law of God? Jesus Christ.

It's about the one who was foretold who would keep the covenant of God. And the

New Testament, what does he say here about the New Testament? Over and over in the

Bible, God's deliverers are usually racial and social outsiders. Is Jesus a racial and social outsider?

Yeah, he was part of the majority culture in the area in which he lived. He didn't come out a different ethnicity, he was

Jewish. And he was in a carpenter's family, middle -class, not a bad living to be a carpenter.

He wasn't at the bottom of the totem pole in every sense of the word. He was a carpenter for 30 years, middle -class.

I don't know what Tim Keller is trying to talk about here. What about all the kings of the Old Testament?

What about David? What about Solomon? Were they at the bottom of, they were, were they deliverers?

Were they at the bottom of the social strata in some way? Yeah, God does take people from the bottom, but he takes all kinds of people.

That's the point. God can use you. If you're a rich man, if you're a poor man, if you're, no matter who you are,

God can use you. If you submit to him, if you, look, you repent, you receive the gospel,

God can use you. And maybe the place he wants to use you if you're a rich man is to have a ministry to those who are like you.

I happen to know some rich people that I've met have friends with, they're friends with other rich people.

That's who they go golfing with. Just the way it is. The neighborhood they live in, business relationships, et cetera, witness to them.

That could be part of your ministry. There's nothing wrong with that. That could be what God's calling you to. Why is

Tim Keller wanting to force a narrative that doesn't exist in the Bible? Bible's about the glorification of God through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.

Jesus, the one who could fulfill the law, who kept all of them when we could not. The grace of God poured out on our behalf that though we being sinners are able to be in a right relationship with him because of Jesus.

And it all goes back to the glorifying God. It's not the, why does he force this narrative? The story of oppression and identifying with the marginalized.

He sounds like a liberation theologian when he talks like this. Says the restoration of a poor community will require a rich multidimensional understanding of human flourishing.

There's that word, human flourishing. There certainly is a need for social reform and dismantling of systemic injustice.

But people also need meaning in life and strong families and ways to grow in character and healthy functional communities and moral disciplines as well.

He's trying to pivot or straddle a line. He's trying to say conservatives, liberals, hey, we all got something.

Conservatives, you guys got the family values. We need strong families. Liberals, yeah, we need to dismantle this systemic injustice too.

We need both of those things. That's what he's trying to say. And this is the purpose of I think the whole article that he thinks biblical

Christianity is this third way. It's the best option. It's different than any other option that's out there.

He ignores kind of even how this country was set up and how

Christianity affected this country. He doesn't really go into detail on that. And so we're actually dismantling a system that has been very much impacted by Christianity right now.

And he wants in the dismantling, I guess, we should just implement biblical Christianity, the true kind, not the kind that the founding fathers and those guys, no, the true kind of biblical

Christianity, which is the restoration of a poor community. And it's not gonna happen.

It's not gonna happen. You're not gonna, you know what the system, economic system that does the best for the poor?

Free market capitalism. Look at the people who come here from other places. People are dying to get here because they know they have an opportunity in the

United States of America. Votie Bauckham said it just recently, his seminary in Africa. And he's saying, look, if people just watch the news, they think that the

United States is the most horrible place for black people to live. He says, it's the best place. There's the more opportunity there than anywhere else.

And if we take Tim Keller's principles that he's advocating to their logical conclusions, we'll dismantle that.

And we'll do it in the name of biblical justice and call it a third way. Yeah, well,

I don't wanna see that happen. And hopefully you don't either. So to finish up here,

I wanna show you a chart. This gives away the farm. Tim Keller included this in the article, but he also tweeted it.

It's a chart and it's got individualism on one end and collectivism on the other one. So Marx, Marxism is collectivism.

And in between, there's all these theories. The four theories of justice. Libertarian, justice is basically about freedom.

Liberal, justice is basically about fairness. Utilitarian, justice is basically about happiness.

Postmodern, justice is basically about power. What's the problem with this?

Let's read some Bible verses and we're gonna go back to it and I'll tell you what the problem is, what I think at least. The nature of justice.

Isaiah 28, 17, I will make justice the measuring line and righteousness the level.

Justice in this verse, justice is a standard that is set, all right? So what is justice? Well, justice is a measuring line, it's a standard.

Isaiah 42, he will not be disheartened or crushed until he has established justice in the earth.

Messianic, talking about establishing justice, something you do, something that you can implement.

Jeremiah 22, 13, woe to him who builds his house without righteousness and his upper rooms without justice.

Justice is an element in the foundation, in the structure of a society.

Justice is part of that. So David reigned over all Israel and David administered justice and righteousness for all the people, 2

Samuel 8, 15. It's something you administer. All right, let's go back to this chart. What's the problem with this?

Justice is basically about freedom, what's freedom? Now, let me tell you what justice is about. Justice is about justice.

He's using the word justice in the same way that he and others use the word gospel. The gospel is about bringing about this community of equity and inclusion and tolerance.

Justice, it's about freedom. It's about fairness, happiness, power.

No, justice is about justice. Justice is a standard. Justice is an element that exists within a society.

Justice is something that the rulers administer, hopefully faithfully. To give an example, the law, right?

Justice is what enforces the law. So the law says you shouldn't murder.

You cannot take someone's life unjustly. And so my murder happens.

What's justice? No matter who that person is, doesn't matter who they're related to, they will be in trouble.

They will have the full force of the law against them. There will be no partiality. That is justice. Justice is the faithful application of the law.

Society must have it to exist and function. There must be a standard of justice and it should be implemented.

It's not about another outcome. It's not about, well, justice is just ingredient we pour in so that we can bring about freedom or fairness or happiness or power.

It's not what justice is. Justice isn't a means to an end, meaning the ends

I just mentioned. Justice is an end in and of itself. Biblically, that's what justice is.

It is an attribute of God. God is a just God.

Is he a just God because he wants freedom? No, justice is good in and of itself.

I'll tell you what Tim Keller's doing here. Tim Keller, this is what I think, is an elitist.

Tim Keller is looking from a bird's eye view at a society, at a culture, and he's saying in a central planning kind of way, well, these are all the different theories of justice and we need the one that works the best.

That's biblical justice. That's the one that works the best. It doesn't have the problems the other ones have and we can implement it.

And it values a lot of the things. It takes the good things while spitting out the bad things in these other secular theories.

And we can just implement this. This is the Neo -Kuyperian stuff too, by the way. This is the we can create culture.

This is, it's the Richard Mao stuff coming back. It's the political evangelism stuff. This is the artificial manufacturing of culture, including justice.

Cultures don't, cultures form organically. You don't, this is a very top -down approach that Tim Keller wants to take on this.

And so he's looking at it like an elitist and he's saying, if we just all got on board this biblical justice, then

I think things would be a lot better. And it's his version of biblical justice because why would they be better?

Because, well, we're gonna have all those things, all the things you saw there. We're gonna have freedom. We're gonna have fairness, happiness, and power.

All those things. It will, it's the answer to all of it. Instead of starting out with the

Bible is true. Justice is an attribute of God and justice in and of itself is an end.

And we have deviated from it. We are in sin. I call you to repent in the areas where you have not been just, according to a biblical standard.

That would be truly prophetic. Tim Keller's not gonna do that. He's trying to get favor from someone, it seems like.

He's trying to tiptoe around, I guess, what the world thinks. And I know he lives in New York City. So he's surrounded by that stuff all the time.

I get that. I grew up just north of there. I know how it is, very liberal. And I get the fear that people have as well to speak out.

But that would be the way to prophetically speak out. The Lord, your God is the source of justice. And he calls you to reflect him in obeying his law and being just yourself.

And we have a book, a book that tells us, we have a book that tells us how to be just.

And I'd like to introduce you to the one who followed those laws, who followed

God's law perfectly in your place. Name is Jesus Christ. That's not what we're getting from Tim Keller.

It's not what we're getting from Gospel Coalition types, unfortunately. And this is not, it'd be nice if Tim Keller, he could pick

Exodus 33, just walk through the passage. What is justice? Let's apply this to today.

But he doesn't do that. It's a very kind of esoteric, philosophical, and we're gonna pepper spray verses through it that don't really support the points that he's making.

So that's my critique, a little longer, a little longer than some of the ones that have been out there.

But I appreciate y 'all who are listening. And very encouraging comments, guys. Please continue to pray, if you would, for my father -in -law, his name is

Frank. And he's improving, like I said, steadily, but it's just, there's a lot of decisions my wife and I need to make here in the next few months as far as where we're gonna live and what we're gonna do.

And we just really like him to recover. We'd like to see where God would have us.

There's some good opportunities out there. But I appreciate all of you who are supporters and patrons and those who faithfully pray.

You guys are such a blessing. And there is a remnant, guys. And maybe it's even more than a remnant.

There are a lot of people who feel exactly the way you do about this stuff. You're tired of being talked down to.

You're tired of the unclear, vague messages that you're getting from Big Eva.

And you're tired when your pastor starts repeating these things. You just want clear, biblical teaching in the place where you live.

And I'm excited to tell you that there are some things, there's some irons in the fire right now that I think are gonna really help.

I'm not gonna go into details right now about all of it, but I've been encouraged in the last few weeks of some things that I've seen.

So just wanna encourage you guys with that. Stay faithful, pray for your pastor.

Send him, you can even send him these videos. Send him things that will challenge him.

If he's plugged into that gospel coalition or I don't know, whatever, Nine Marks, if he's plugged into these organizations, send him this video.

Send him, it doesn't have to be this one. Send him pushback. Send him articles that challenge his thinking and encourage him.

And so that's my encouragement to you. Thank you. God bless you all. And hopefully we'll have another video dropping later this week, maybe