Thoughts on the Chauvin Verdict and Dallas Theological Seminary's Corporate Apology

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Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris. We're gonna talk a little bit today about the verdict that was reached yesterday in the

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Derek Chauvin case. I'm trying to line up someone who has followed this more closely than I have, who will be able to give probably some better analysis than myself, who also has a law enforcement background.

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So stay tuned. Hopefully I'll be able to book that guest later in the week.

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But I did wanna give you some preliminary thoughts because I know everyone is talking about it today. And to me, this is actually pretty simple, but we're gonna go over that.

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And then we're gonna talk a little bit about the statement that was put out by Dallas Theological Seminary.

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Now I think it's back in January. It's been a while. And I heard about it at the time and it was on my list of things to look at.

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And I finally looked at it yesterday and I thought, I've never really said anything about Dallas Theological Seminary.

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I keep hearing things over the years really about how they're going towards the progressive left, but I've never done a deep dive or anything like that.

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So I don't even know that I need to. This statement alone to me is enough to say, yeah, they're woke, they're going that direction.

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So we're gonna talk about that a little bit as well. And just, I wanna remind some of you, maybe it'll be review for some of you, but we're gonna talk about corporate apologies or what

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I think would be a more appropriate term, weaponized apologies. So let's get started.

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Let's talk about the Chauvin trial and the verdict which was reached yesterday in that.

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Some of my reservations in this have to do with the fact that the jury was not sequestered, meaning they weren't, they could still see what was happening on the media.

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They could look at their phone, they could see, they get news updates, that kind of thing before Maxine Waters, who is

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I believe a Senator, Congressman, Senator, I think she's a Senator from California, made some very outrageous statements about basically a threat.

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If we don't get the verdict we want and if all three of the charges are not approved by the jury, then basically there's gonna be more rioting.

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And the judge weighed in in the case and basically said that this could actually be grounds for a new trial because that is such a level of manipulation trying to influence the jury before they're sequestered that it could have actually influenced the verdict.

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And of course, all you need is one jury member to say I'm not comfortable with the verdict and that changes everything.

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Of course, the president, Joe Biden, the president with an asterisk by his name as well weighed in and not quite as irate and ridiculous as Maxine Waters was being, but still signaled his approval for charging

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Chauvin. So I think that might've been after they were sequestered, but I'm not even clear on whether or not they had their phones when they were sequestered.

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If they had any, not that they even needed them, they probably knew what public opinion or at least the media's opinion was, but if you have a phone and you have it set that news updates can come on your phone and the president says something, that could just come up on your phone.

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And so that doesn't make for the most objective jury. So that's one thing

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I'll just say I wasn't quite comfortable with and the judge certainly wasn't comfortable with that. I thought of the fact also that the

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O .J. Simpson trial, I believe, if I remember, it's one of my earlier memories, was moved to another city.

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And that does happen sometimes if you don't think you're going to get a fair verdict in the city in which the crime took place or whether it was a crime or not, the incident took place.

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And in the O .J. Simpson trial, as I recall, they moved the trial and this trial, of course, was not moved.

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And so those who are on the jury, and you can't tell me the word doesn't get around that so -and -so is on the jury in a local community, they're gonna be known in that community and they're gonna be released back into the community which has all kinds of people gathering to get ready to protest if they don't get the verdict they want.

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That is a level of intimidation many of us probably aren't even, we can't even relate to, to think, if I don't do, if I don't make the decision, especially if you're the holdout, if you're the one guy that's like,

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I'm not comfortable with charging him with these three charges, then you're gonna be released back into the same community that wants to burn everything down and cause all kinds of mayhem if they don't get their verdict that they want.

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So that also would, in my opinion, be a cause for concern as to whether or not you can even get a fair trial.

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I know one of the witnesses I had heard, and I haven't confirmed, but I had heard this morning when I turned on the radio that one of the witnesses who actually testified in favor of Derek Chauvin had a severed pig's head,

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I think it was on his lawn, put on his lawn or in his driveway or something like that, as a threat. So you can't,

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I mean, you can imagine how the level of intimidation and public pressure is just through the roof.

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Now, everything comes down to this, and it should for everyone who's concerned about this trial.

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Everything should come down to this. Was the burden of proof met? Because the question is not whether or not it was wrong for Derek Chauvin to put his knee on the neck of George Floyd.

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The question is not whether that's something that the society finds approving, that they approve of.

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I'm afraid that's how it's been portrayed in the major media, it seems. But that's not, that really has nothing to do with the burden of proof that they had to meet and the standard that they were supposed to use to be able to figure out whether or not one or more of the charges were in fact legitimate charges.

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What they needed to figure out was whether or not, and everything hangs on this, Derek Chauvin was the one responsible for George Floyd's death.

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In other words, he killed him, and the evidence suggests that beyond a reasonable doubt.

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That is what this whole entire trial hinges on. And when you look at the autopsy, when you look at the fatal level of fentanyl

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George Floyd had in his system, can you say beyond a reasonable doubt that that was what caused his death, was

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Derek Chauvin? That's really the question. If you watch the full body cam,

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I know there's a lot of talk about the amount of time that Floyd was under the knee of Chauvin.

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But before that, there was a longer period of time if you watch the police, which I have the body cam footage.

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And it seems to suggest that there was a lot more going on there.

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And that, well, I'm not gonna comment on that anymore because I wanna have someone else who actually is in law enforcement weigh in on this.

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So I'm going to just say that if you haven't looked at the autopsy and you haven't watched that body cam footage, probably not a good idea to weigh in on this.

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Because it's gonna be hard to answer that question. That central question was beyond a reasonable doubt, was

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Derek Chauvin the one who killed George Floyd? So as a result of this, of course, there's an incident now in Columbus, Ohio, in which the police were very quick to release body cam footage of a 16 -year -old girl who got shot by the police.

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And you see the body cam footage, she's about to go after her friend with a knife. And in order to save the life and prevent the injury of this friend, the police officer shot the assailant.

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And this, of course, there was, I think there already was some rioting and it looked like it was gonna get a lot worse.

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And so the police released the body cam footage and they don't usually do that. And I watched part of the press conference and Columbus police were just begging people to let the process work.

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And I think when you peel back the onion layers or you step back a little bit, you look at this whole situation in general, both the

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Chauvin trial and the situation in Columbus, what we're seeing is just the breakdown of trust in institutions.

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The social justice crowd already has completely undermined any trust that anyone has in the criminal justice system, just completely erased it.

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Now, I think what we're starting to see is the other side, the more conservative political side is also now starting to not trust the institutions because of what

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I just outlined, because of the media pressure and the way that politicians get involved with really things they shouldn't be commenting on and how that influences outcomes.

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And so there's, we're living in a time when our criminal justice system and other systems, other traditions that have been in place for a long time are now being questioned.

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And I think that's really the bigger conversation that probably needs to be had is where do we go from here?

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What happens when public opinion on both sides does not trust the system?

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What does that do? Real quick, the charges that were brought, second degree murder, second degree unintentional murder that carries with it the maximum charge of 40 years in prison, third degree murder, maximum charge of 25 years in prison and second degree manslaughter, maximum charge of 10 years in prison for Chauvin.

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The jury charged him with all three of these. And again, behind all those is the understanding, even though it could be unintentional, it is the understanding that a murder has taken place, that Derek Chauvin was the one responsible beyond a reasonable doubt for the death of George Floyd.

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And frankly, knowing just enough about the case to know that that might not be a possibility, that is what is concerning a lot of people today that don't care for it.

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It's not the fact, and I need to say this very clearly, it's not the fact that they don't approve of what happened to George Floyd or how the officer conducted himself or officers.

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It's not, that has nothing to do with it. It's literally, it comes down to whether or not the rules that have been in place for a long time, the standard, the burden of proof that has to be met beyond reasonable doubt, whether or not that still is in place and people respect that standard.

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That's the question. So I wanted to just give my, a little bit of an analysis on that, and hopefully

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I'll be able to say more later. Now let's switch gears. Let's talk about corporate apologies a little bit. I've written some things out here that I wanted to share with you.

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I wanna review this because we're still seeing these corporate apologies. We saw a lot of them after what happened, initially the confrontation between Chauvin and Floyd, and we're still seeing them though.

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And I have a feeling that this is going to continue. This isn't gonna go away. This is going to probably now extend to other things.

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This is gonna be to other groups. I'm not sure what, maybe the

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LGBTQ lobby, et cetera. There's just gonna be these corporate apologies. And I'm gonna give you some examples of that.

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But first I wanna back up a step, and I just wanna talk about what is, I think, motivating this.

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The Apostle Paul condemned mechanisms by which humans attempted to contribute to their salvation, right?

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If you read the book of Galatians, by the works of the law, he said no flesh will be justified. And he went on to say that if righteousness comes through the law, then

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Christ died needlessly. And I do believe that this is what social justice advocates, many of them, do teach, even in evangelical circles and denominations.

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They can articulate mankind's need for the grace of God and the exclusivity of faith in Christ for salvation, and yet simultaneously apply his atoning work to individuals, the church, and impersonal systems through the ability of humans to keep a new left -derived law.

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And though Paul taught that the gospel of grace left no place for boasting in human accomplishment, this configuration allows for just that.

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And that's the crux of this. I think that's why there's corporate apologies. That's why there's virtue signaling. And I'll do another episode on virtue signaling soon.

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Jesus warned about the kind of boasting, though, that I think Paul is talking about in Galatians in the

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Sermon on the Mount. And he said, beware of practicing your righteousness before men to be noticed by them.

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And he then cited the way the Pharisees sounded trumpets when giving to the poor and called attention to themselves when praying in public places as actions to avoid.

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In the midst of a scathing rebuke against the scribes and Pharisees, Jesus also accused them of being unwilling to live up to their own standards and doing all their deeds to be noticed by men.

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Their motive was not loving God, but instead receiving social honor, authority, respect, and position.

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Today, I believe many social justice advocates display the same kind of attitude. And one way is through weaponized corporate apologies.

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Now, another very astute observer of this was C .S. Lewis. And he talked about this in an essay in 1940 on national repentance.

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And what he observed was a tendency in young English Christians to apologize for foreign policy decisions that they were not old enough to participate in at the time they were made, but which they presumed contributed to World War II.

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So Lewis quipped that men fail so often to repent their real sins that the occasional repentance of an imaginary sin might appear almost desirable.

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Essentially, what he's saying is the young man who was called upon to repent of England's foreign policy is really being called upon to repent the acts of his neighbor, pretending to take responsibility for other's failures can actually serve as a clever and prideful way to criticize and single out those who do not engage in the same kind of apology while simultaneously projecting the appearance of personal humility.

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Lewis wrote that the charm of national repentance was how it enabled someone to denounce the conduct of others yet feel at the same time that they were practicing contrition.

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And the parallels between what Lewis described and what commonly takes place within the ranks of social justice advocacy is striking.

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It truly is. I think this is spot on, really good analysis. And there's a test he actually outlines in this where he essentially, he talks about if someone enjoys apologizing for, well, he doesn't say condemning really, if they enjoy correcting or condemning someone they love, then that should raise a red flag in our minds.

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Because that should be something that you don't wanna do. It's something you do because of duty or because you care about something greater, but it's not something that you have glee about.

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It's not something you get the cameras out and say, look at this. Here's a couple of examples of this.

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At the 2019 Crew Staff Conference, Latasha Morrison led thousands of employees in one of the largest evangelical organizations, which

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Crew is, in a liturgy in which they lamented actions like mocking the poor, allowing institutional racism, participating in racial segregation, ignoring the plight of brown and black men and idolizing the nation.

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So all these young people working for Campus Crusade formerly now called Crew are essentially guilty of all these things.

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They've mocked the poor apparently, they've allowed institutional racism, they've participated in segregation and they've ignored the plight of black and brown men and idolize the nation.

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They're saying that they're guilty, they're complicit in all of this. And this fits exactly what Lewis is talking about.

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People who aren't, are they really guilty of all these things? Is this really what they're doing? Or, I mean,

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Latasha Morrison, is this really what she believes? I mean, she's using the pronoun we. But what they're actually doing is they're lashing out against something that they see that they don't like, they're critiquing it, but they're hiding their critique within an apology because you can't really criticize an apology, that's supposed to be humble.

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So it's such a brilliant way to castigate someone else or another group of people without just directly castigating them.

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It's a very indirect way to do it. It's sneaky, it's slimy, but we see it all the time. In June of 2020, the

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Gospel Coalition did the same thing. Essentially, they hosted a night of lament for racial justice in which evangelical leaders, such as Mark, and I don't know how to pronounce his last name,

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Vrogop, Vrogo, I'm not sure. Shy Lynn and David Platt asked for God's conviction and indicted the church's callousness and confessed things like partiality.

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So this is something that is widespread enough, it's characterizes the church, there should be conviction, we're guilty of partiality.

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These are the kind of things they're lamenting. Again, maybe not saying the word apology, but it's the same kind of thing.

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It's this critique, but it's taking it on themselves and we're guilty of this too. And that hides the fact that it's a critique.

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In honor of Martin Luther King Day, and this is what we're gonna talk about today, Mark Yarbrough, the president of Dallas Theological Seminary, offered, and this was recently, an institutional apology for our past racial sins in chapel, which included slavery, segregation, and continued prejudice.

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Yarbrough also asked forgiveness for those suffering and wronged by the institution, though he did not provide any concrete examples.

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And we're gonna get into it, but this is a perfect example, in my opinion, of what Lewis was talking about. Now, while there are instances, we should say of national repentance in scripture, they involved present participation in sin by perpetrators directed to the

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Lord and resulting in forgiveness. And I guarantee, any of the examples, and I've had a number of people send me, even last night, someone was sending me an example.

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Hey, what about this example, when Saul's sons were punished for his sin, right?

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And I pointed out in the text, it says Saul and his house. I have yet to see an example where these four principles don't hold up.

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Sometimes there is a generational sin, but it's not generational in the sense that they're paying for the sins of their fathers.

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It's generational in the sense that they have continued to participate in the same sins of their fathers out of habit or tradition or whatever.

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So they're guilty, and they apologize for the guilt that they've done and for their fathers who taught them that guilt.

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That's included in the apology for present guilt. But you're not, I have yet to see anything that falls outside of this rubric.

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Now today, here's what's happening though. It's so far outside of this rubric. Weaponized apologies are often for past unrelated or uncharacteristic wrongs by those not responsible, frequently to other social groups and perpetually without lasting forgiveness.

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It is literally, it contradicts those four facets at every single point of a biblical corporate apology.

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C .S. Lewis pointed out that the moment there is reason to suspect that someone enjoys rebuking someone they love, there is reason to doubt the authenticity of their rebuke.

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Sinful humans generally do not welcome the opportunity to publicly admit actual sin or the sins of a beloved institution.

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Yet at the very moment evangelicals are announcing their complicity and racism, so are most secular institutions.

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And that is because weaponized apologies aren't actual apologies. Their purpose is to advance accusations which portray others who fail to apologize as morally inferior.

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And in a sense, they are the subspecies of the virtue signal. And that's what we have.

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We have, if you fail to apologize, if you fail to make a statement against racial injustice, et cetera, you stick out like a sore thumb and you are to be condemned.

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And that's what the purpose of this is. It is not an apology. It is a mechanism by which you identify and then castigate those who fail to apologize.

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Now here's what happened with Dallas Theological Seminary. I'm gonna read for you some clips from this.

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This is from the president. Friends, hatred is a poison that will derail any system, including political parties, companies, ministries, and a local church.

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Sadly, it happens at Dallas Theological Seminary. Really? And he hasn't cited anything.

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It's there apparently. How do I know this to be true because no person is without sin? So that's the proof.

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And this is, Al Mohler does this kind of thing all the time. I have several quotes from him where he does this. Well, racism is in every institution.

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Every country has racism. It's just, we are all racist somehow. There's like, it's just everywhere because we all have sin.

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It's just the doctrine of original sin. That's all it is. We would never do this with, I mean, there's a lot of sins you'd never do this with.

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Yes, we're all pedophiles, right? We're all just that because everyone has sin. No, of course not.

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Not everyone has the same sins that they're committing. Not everyone has the same propensity for those sins.

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Not everyone's making the same choices which lead to these sins. There are some people who that is not the vice or the sin that they are participating in.

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But it's just the assumption of guilt without proof. And this is the flipping around of innocent till proven guilty.

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It's just frankly, I mean, obviously there's sin in a general sense, but you can't say that it's characterized by racism or bigotry or anything like that if you don't have something to point to to say this is where I see it.

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And that's what we're seeing. Here's the apology. At Dallas Theological Seminary, we acknowledge our past and present sins, our

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American forefather sins and those of the American church. We acknowledge that the trade and treatment of, and he goes through slavery is part of this, segregation is part of this.

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And then he says racism and prejudice still exist within American culture. And there's the blemish is on our history as a nation and the church.

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And he says that Dallas Theological Seminary is reaffirming their personal and institutional apology for past racial sins.

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Look at them taking on the full burden of slavery and segregation, America's forefathers, their founding fathers, all of it is now, it's gonna be apologized.

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I mean, this is classic what Celis Lewis said, it's apologizing for the sins of your neighbor. While beginning with a bold and noble vision for theological education,

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Dallas Theological Seminary does not advocate for African -Americans as much as it should have.

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This is so vague guys. It doesn't outline, okay, well what is it that was specifically sinful in a biblical sense?

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Doesn't really say. It's just they're guilty of racism.

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Brothers and sisters, I encourage us to search our hearts, to repent of any form of racism, to those wrong,

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I ask forgiveness for the suffering we have caused. I mean, he's saying we've caused suffering, he's heaping guilt on the institution.

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But there's nothing specifically going on here. And then he says their mission is to glorify

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God, et cetera. Embedded in that statement is a heartbeat, not only for all people and nations, but a faculty staff and student body who celebrate and reflect.

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Here's the working, not the word that you should focus on, that reflect the diversity of God's people around the world.

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And so what are they gonna do? One of the things they're gonna do, pursue qualified administrators, faculty, staff, and students from across the nation around the world.

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Seminary's commitment to formal and non -formal education offering requires that we recruit competent employees with multicultural experience and establish specialized financial scholarships for students with limited access to theological education.

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It is a form of affirmative action. It's a form of quotas, it's, and I don't know that they have actual numbers here.

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I'm sure they do somewhere, but it's, we're gonna make sure that we have more diversity in our body by recruiting and hiring people that are different.

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So instead of looking at, are they able to do the job? And that being the sole factor, they're gonna be looking at, well, what background did they come from?

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And so this is Dallas Theological Seminary going completely woke, using a weaponized apology to virtue signal.

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I don't have any other way to figure out what the motive behind this is. I mean, if you have one, put it in the comment section and say, hey, this is what

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I think they're doing, but it fits perfectly what C .S. Lewis talked about. If it's perfectly the motivation, Jesus said the

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Pharisees has, it's a public statement, a look at us. I mean, if there was really things going on at DTS that were racist or bigoted or whatever, those are things that you would expect them to focus on and take care of in -house.

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You know, hey, there was this incident that happened where this white professor said this horrible thing to a minority student.

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Or, I mean, racism can be done by other cultures too. I know that's hard to believe. Other, I should say, other ethnicities.

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Someone who was a minority said this to a white person or to another minority or whatever the case may be, you would deal with that sin between the people that sinned against each other.

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But DTS isn't doing that. They're publicly virtue signaling to the world, broadcasting really how great they are because look at us, look what we're doing.

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We're diversifying ourselves. And we acknowledge how horrible we've been.

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At the same time that, I mean, they're a little late to the game, but every corporation last year was doing the same thing.

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We acknowledge systemic racism. Here are the measures we're taking. And that's really what it's all about. It's about getting up to, here's the reason that we are going to be taking these new measures.

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And we're gonna be judging everything off of an intersectional framework and not a competent framework that is based on merit.

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And it's really, it's turning everything around. It's going to turn around the quality of manufacturing goods.

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I mean, I've already talked to a friend of mine who's in manufacturing, who said basically that. He said, we're not even doing business with people that are good at making products.

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We're looking at gay owned businesses, black owned businesses. I mean, that's the primary factor we're looking at in my corporation with who to do business with.

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And this is just gonna, quality control is just going down. And this is all by design. I believe it is all by design.

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And so DTS is part of that. And so I wanted to give you a fuller explanation because I know you're dealing with this.

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Some of you in churches and institutions, and you don't know quite how to confront it. How do you confront someone who's apologizing and sounding like they're humble?

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Well, they're not. This is, it's a weaponized apology. I mean, it's like I saw a clip or a picture of Kyle J.

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Howard, who's fashioned himself to be a racial trauma counselor. And he was taking pictures of himself crying, like four pictures when he heard the outcome of the verdict in the

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Chauvin trial. I mean, he wants people to know. It's not like he's silently doing this.

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He's not. He wants the world to see the tears on his cheek because it is part of a virtue signal.

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It is part of, look how soft my heart is, how emotional

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I am, how just wonderful I am, that I'm this compassionate,

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I'm this empathetic, that kind of thing. And it really is what the Pharisees did.

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If that is a good work, which I don't buy that it is, but it's the motive is to doing it to be seen by men, doing it to be seen by men.

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And how often do all of us to some extent, though hopefully we're not characterized by that, but how often do many of us just kind of, that's the natural human tendency.

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We wanna do those things. We do something good, we wanna tell someone about it. We want someone to know. In this case, it's actually cheap virtue though.

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It's not, they haven't actually done anything good. They haven't done anything right, but it gives them the feeling that they have.

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That's what a virtue signal does. And we're gonna talk more about virtue signals probably later this week. And I'm gonna explain that on a deeper level.

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But I really do hope that this helped you understand weaponized corporate apologies and maybe you can engage them better.

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So that's all for today. And I will have a podcast out tomorrow. Be sure to look for it.