Tim Keller biblical or false teacher?

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Welcome to Apologetics Live. We're here to answer your questions and challenges about God and the

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Bible. Meet your hosts from Striving for Eternity Ministries, Andrew Rappaport, Dr. Anthony Silvestro, and Pastor Justin Pierce.

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We are live, Apologetics Live, here to answer your challenging questions, anything you have about God and the

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Bible, we can answer it right here. You doubt that? Well, take the challenge, go to ApologeticsLive .com

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right now, click on the StreamYard link, which is the duck icon, and you can join us and give us your most challenging questions.

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Just remember, I don't know is a perfectly good answer.

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This is the Ministry of Striving for Eternity. We are glad to be here. I will bring in my co -host here,

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Pastor Justin. How are you? Doing wonderful, brother. How you doing? Good, good. This is going to be like the last time we see you until next semester, right?

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It's going to be a while. Yeah. So you are in school, and we get to see pieces of you, or part of the time,

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I should say. Just a little bit of time. So before we get started,

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I know that we're going to have John Harris in a bit, but we have some hellos here.

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We got Melissa saying hello. Cynthia is saying hello from Ohio, gentlemen. And KT wants to say hi just to you,

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Justin. Yeah, just me, because I'm more important. Yeah. I should give a shout out to Sean.

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He has become a member on YouTube. It's one way of you can support the ministry.

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Better way, of course, is go to strivingforeturning .org and go to the support page, or just go to strivingforeturning .org.

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That's a great way to support us because, well, YouTube plays games, and sometimes they just take the money that they want.

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You were asking there on a Facebook poll about some of the headaches and the heartburns people have doing this stuff, and one of mine, as you know, is

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YouTube. I wish we had another source where we could just get everybody over and away from YouTube and Facebook.

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Yeah. Well, look at this. This is nice. Melissa says, I miss Justin when he's in school.

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Isn't that nice? Thank you very much. Jason is saying, hello,

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Saints, from Acworth, Georgia. Acworth, Georgia. All right.

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Absolutely. Rob is in Ohio. We've got a number of folks in Ohio. What's up with that? Oh, what's this?

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Someone is saying, hello from Ohio, and congratulations, Grandpa Justin Pierce.

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No. Nope. Okay. It's true.

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I'm a grandfather, but I've been a grandfather for nine months. It's just I got to finally see him. That's the difference.

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You're a grandpa at conception. Yeah. I was a grandfather at conception. I think I've said this here before, but yeah, my daughter found out she was pregnant just before Mother's Day, so I called her up and wished her a happy Mother's Day, and she went, but I'm not a mother yet.

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You are. Yes, I am. And I went, yep. That's right. That's great.

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All right. So Melissa is asking, is this your house? It's beautiful. I know it is beautiful.

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And no, it's not my house. It's a virtual image. I'm right now up in Massachusetts at my daughter -in -law and son -in -law's church.

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And so that's why the audio it's got a little bit of an echo here, and I apologize for that.

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I tried each of their rooms, and this was the one that was going to work the best.

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Unfortunately, it's a little echoey, but it's just bare walls and all, and I figured this -

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It looks warm and comfortable. Yeah. So with that,

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I'm going to bring, as in the news segment, what I want to do is

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I wanted to bring in somebody to talk something special and new. So I'm going to welcome someone new to the show, a good friend of mine,

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Clifford. Cliff, how are you doing today? Wonderful, man. Wonderful, Andrew.

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Hey, Cliff. How are you doing? I asked Cliff to come in because I wanted to talk to,

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I found it interesting that Joe Biden announced yesterday that he would like to institute rent control nationally.

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Now, I didn't grow up really having a good understanding of rent control and whether it's a good or bad thing, but I've learned it is a bad thing, and I learned it from my friend

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Clifford. You can also learn it from the movie or the book 1948. That'll help kind of give you an idea of what controlling people's lives is all about.

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Yeah. So one other thing about Clifford, you know

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I got to tell the story, Cliff. You know I got to tell the story. It's the best story ever. 1984.

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So just picture the scene. Cliff, show your shirt. I saw you had your shirt on.

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CCN, Christian Collegian Network. That's a ministry Clifford's with, and we've been working together for years, and they do one of my favorite outreaches called the

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Repentant Witness in New York City each year. We go and witness. We were in missionary housing.

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Now picture the scene. We're in the lobby of the missionary housing, and Clifford is explaining to me the way things work in black churches, and he's saying it really doesn't matter what is being preached.

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As long as you have the right cadence, people will amen. And I said, no, people got to be listening to what's being said.

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He said, I could be preaching a nursery rhyme and get an amen. And I said, how would you possibly preach a nursery rhyme?

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And this is no joke. This happened. I wish we had it on video because then

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I wouldn't always make Cliff have to do this, but I won't ask him to do it this time. But Cliff starts preaching

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Little Miss Muffet in a cadence, and he's like, Little Miss Muffet, she sat on her tuff, and he's going through.

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And a woman walks through the lobby and goes, amen, brother, preach it. Oh, wow. And Clifford just stopped and he looked at me, and I just put my head in my hands, and I was like,

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I don't believe she just amened Little Miss Muffet. Funniest thing ever.

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I said that again, Cliff? Is he breaking up for you?

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Yeah, it's breaking up pretty bad. Sorry, Cliff. By the way, while you guys are trying to set that up, so Cliff, you've been doing this for a while now, so you know

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Mary Hennett really well, I'm assuming. Yes. Yeah. Okay. I praise the

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Lord that I met her at the Ark Encounter when it first opened up.

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She and I and her daughter became really good friends and started saying a lot of communication, and I was able to get her in contact with Jen, and so she's been out there.

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And I'll tell you what, that lady is such a blessing. I just love her all to pieces. Yes, she is.

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She really heralds the gospel. I just love it when she, you know, the first couple of times she went up, she was nervous, but then she just became an old friend.

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She's great. She's great on Fox. She has no fear in going out there and approaching people, you know?

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And she has a technique of how she does things, so she's really a blessing, a real help. Now, Cliff, I don't know if you mentioned that you're going to be on here, but I see a big

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C from Mr. Andre Goff there, so we don't usually see comments from Andre. I don't know if he's just watching because he knows you're here, your partner in crime there.

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So, Cliff, help us to understand, because you really opened up my eyes when you explained rent control and why it's so bad and what it ends up doing to the inner city community.

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Well, the thing is, you know, like growing up in government -run homes, I mean, basically that's all

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I knew. You know, government housing was always a part of our life. It always kind of became ingrained and indoctrinated in our lives, you know?

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That's all we knew. It was so bad that we actually thought that people who owned a home were rich.

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You know, we would always go to one, go to one area and call it the rich section because people actually owned their own homes.

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But things started to change for me when I started looking around and just seeing, you know, because we grew up in a community of fatherless owners.

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You know, nobody had a father. And I remember a long time ago, you know, an elderly lady, you know, she said to me, son, don't get stuck.

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Just don't get stuck in here. And I never understood what she was talking about. And then

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I started to look at the struggles that my mother was going through and trying to get out of the community.

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And what I realized as I grew up and I look back and what I realized that the system was set up basically to suck you in.

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These cleverly devised traps known as compassion, quality and fairness.

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You know, what was happening was that as my mom was trying to get out, she would work a little bit, she would get a job.

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Your income put this way, your rent was always based on your income, your gross income.

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And they would set your rate, your rent based on that. Now, if you made a little bit extra money, they would raise your rate, raise your rent.

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They had this thing called income, it was called income evaluation, where they could come in and evaluate your income.

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So you could work six months overtime. And then, you know, get that advantage, get the extra money for that, and able to save and build up a little nest egg to try to get out.

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But as soon as they came in and did an income evaluation, they would look at the extra money that was made, and they would raise your rate, raise your rent.

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Now, the thing is, though, you may have lost that day that they came in, but you're still going to pay that monthly rent.

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So they would jack up your rent based on your gross income. So it was just a trap.

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You know, they suck you in with the, well, you're only going to pay $50 a month. You always only pay $50 a month for electric, and you'll only pay so much amount.

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But you can't have a father, working father in the home. You know, that's one of the things, you couldn't have a working father in the home.

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You know, if you had a working father in the home, that would really jack up your rate. And they'd also make provisions for somebody else, because now that father should be able to take you out of the hood.

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So that's why, you know, the place that I grew up with, it was just a fatherless community.

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And, you know, the thing about it, many people find themselves in difficult situations, you know, on going to pregnancies, planting clothes, a variety of things, you know, it can happen to everybody.

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And the government just, and that's what, you know, if you're doing that, you know, one may become desperate.

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And what happens is, you know, people a lot of times in a desperate situation, they'll find a weak path of resistance.

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And then we'll always go into the arms of the unwelcoming. When the government comes in, they say, hey man, look, we know it's unfair.

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We know, we understand your place. You just come on in, you know, we'll give you a set rent rate that you'll always have to pay.

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We'll feed you, we'll give you stamps, we'll give you housing, and we'll give you a basic income.

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So you'll never want, as long as you stay on this system, you know. And then what happens is, you know, through this process, this indoctrination process, you know, that, you know, that capitalism is really unfair, isn't it?

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Look what it did to me. So can you believe that? That's an unfair system. You get this sense of indoctrination.

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Once you get in, you're stuck and you're trapped because you can never work your way out.

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And I believe that's exactly what a certain class of a political party want.

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They want a permanent underclass that's always going to vote. They never want you to get out.

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What they'll do is they'll make you comfortable while you're in the hood, but they'll never get you out. You know, and that's whole thing.

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They'll make you comfortable there. They'll give you swing sets. And, you know, they'll give you some of the things that will appeal, that make your kids happy.

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Maybe a little government program here and there. So you become comfortable. And you become comfortable in the hood.

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They'll build houses all around you to make you feel like you have a house, but you never own one.

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You never own one. And you're constantly staying in that situation. Trying to get any kind of upward mobility is always crushed by the hand of the government because they'll come in and do an income evaluation, reevaluate your income, and then, you know, jack it up from there.

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Now you can never leave. Okay. So Cliff, is there, in situations where people get this type of housing, is there any incentive to them to work harder, to get, you know, work, you know, on weekends, get time and a half, work overtime, you know, work a second job?

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What does that end up doing to their rent if they go do that? Well, if they do that, you know, like I said, you could have income evaluation and they'll jack up your rate based on that extra, the extra income that's coming in.

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So the extra money that you get coming in, it's just sucked up by the government, by the extra rent.

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That's why a lot of people had to hide. I know my mother for a fact, she had to hide the extra income that she was getting because if they found out that she was making extra money, they would jack up her rent.

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Yeah. So you go and work harder and all that money ends up going to the landlord or to the government.

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Right. Right. So this is the thing that I didn't realize is, you know, because I was always of the impression like, okay, work harder, you can get out of it, but you actually can't because if you work harder, they just take the extra.

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So what's the incentive to work harder if you're not getting anything out of it? You work harder, so your rent goes up.

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And now, as you said, you lose your job and that rent stays at the higher level. Well, see, that's a mental thing too,

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Andrew, because what they do is they do that disincentive intervention, it beats you down mentally.

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And that's what it does so that you can never achieve. You know, I tell you, the system is not meant to encourage you, it's meant to discourage you, you know?

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And, you know, Dee is saying this, Dee's saying it seems that the system would encourage dishonesty.

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Is that what you would find to be true? And in order to get out, you would have to hide your income, you know, take jobs under the table.

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Start taking jobs under the table. Can you imagine if everybody put jobs under the table, how that affects the overall economy?

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No more revenue coming to the government because now you're paying people off to the side and there's no revenue.

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You mean like not recording the half a million dollars that Biden earned and didn't pay taxes on?

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You mean like that, like half a million dollars under the table? Oh, wait, I'm sorry. That's not what you're talking about.

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You're not talking about hiding half a million dollars. I'm sorry. It must be the 10 million dollars he got from China.

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How do you hide that, man, when you're sitting on top of documents? You got to read the documents first. Yeah, actually, we should, you know,

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I should ask you, you know, Cliff, you don't have any classified documents in your home?

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Okay, I'll plead the fifth. Okay, all right, plead the fifth. So, and we may end up, you know,

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I had told you, we have to get you to come on for a longer show because there's a lot of insight you have, but I wanted folks to hear what you had to say,

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Cliff. I'll just let me plug the ministry. It's changeyourcampus .com. If you want to get involved in working with college students going onto college campuses, what they do is they go onto college campuses.

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They do open air preaching. They do evangelism. They don't do a pizza and God night where they don't talk about God and just have pizza.

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They go in sharing the gospel and then discipling students to share the gospel.

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This is a ministry that what they encourage their students to do is when their students are on spring break, instead of going to Florida to party, they go to other campuses that are not on spring break and do open air preaching and evangelism on those campuses.

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That's what this ministry does. So, changeyourcampus .com is the website.

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It's Christian Collegian Network. Cliff, you and Andre are at what college?

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We're at Montgomery County Community College. Which college do you work at? I'll say it again.

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Montgomery County Community College. Yeah, I heard.

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All right. Montgomery County Community College. Real quick, you do the training as well. You guys reach out and train churches as well.

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Absolutely. About two weeks ago, we were just at a church. That's good.

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If you've got a university around your church, you need to have these guys come in and help preach.

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Well, sometimes there are established ministries that are on the college campus, kind of run into them, and they kind of rebuff us.

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You're not talking like Crew or anything like that. They wouldn't have any objection to you, would you? Yeah, no. Yeah, Crew.

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You mean the group that doesn't like the name Crusade, so that's the only part of the name they kept?

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They got rid of the... Well, they don't like the name Christ either, so they took that out. Yeah. Got to get rid of Christ.

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Got to get rid of campus. Anyway, don't get me started. So, thanks for coming in.

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Appreciate it. We got to get you on for a longer one, and maybe then we'll get you to preach a nursery rhyme.

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All right. Thank you. So, I know my

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Wi -Fi is acting up a bit. What I may have to do, because this will actually...

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I'm going to have to shut off this, so you see the boring background that I actually am at, but that may help with my internet.

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So, what I want to do, I know John is backstage. Real quick, John, if it's okay, you can give me a head nod because I'll be able to see if it's okay if we answer one question before you come in.

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Okay, we had Jacob here. He came in early. So, Jacob, welcome to Apologetics Live.

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I think this is your first time on, right? It is. Thanks for having me. All right. And so,

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I can't believe I just did that. I had my Logos up and I just closed it.

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And you have a question that I need my Logos up for. So, all right, if you could, ask the question that you had while I bring my

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Bible software up. Yeah. I guess I'll try to make it as quick as possible with my leading into the question, but it was about John 15, specifically

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John 15 -2 and the Word Takes Away. So, John 15, obviously, it's about Christ being the vine and the

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Father being the vine dresser. And in verse 2 says, every branch in me that does not bear fruit, he takes away.

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And every branch that does bear fruit, he prunes that it may bear more fruit. It goes on to talk about how the branch cannot bear fruit without him.

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And then he goes down in verse 6 and says, if anyone does not abide in me, he is thrown away like a branch and withers, and the branches are gathered and thrown into the fire and burned.

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A lot of my question is revolved around verse 2 when he says every branch in me.

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So, I am a Calvinist. So, reading through the book of John, when you get through John 6 and John 10, and you see the security all the time talked about, when you first read this verse 2, it kind of took me back.

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And I was like, how are the branches in him? And then how are they being taken away? And then you see verse 6, and you see it's, if they don't abide in him, they're thrown away.

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So, it seems to kind of, to me, was kind of seeming like two different groups of people. So, I started looking into my lexicon, and I noticed that there are different translations of that word takes away.

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And there are a couple that give you this idea of lifts up or bears up.

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And I was wondering why every translation translates it as takes away. I don't know if it's contextually.

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I don't know if it is something in the Greek that I don't understand. I'm not, you know, fluent in Greek or by any means, barely know any of it.

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So, that was really my question that maybe from a Calvinistic perspective, how do we deal with that verse if it really means takes away?

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How are they in him and being taken away? Or is it a problem with the translation of the

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Greek? Like, I believe in the inerrant word of God, but I do believe that it's as it was originally handed out, not our, you know,

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English translations of it. I think that there can be some differences in translation.

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So, that was really my question. Do you know of anything there that would make you lean towards takes away?

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Like, is it verse 6? Or do you see verse 6 and verse 2 as talking as the same group or a different group?

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Yeah. What's your thoughts on that? Yeah. So, first off with the word, I'll first deal with takes away.

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The word has a pretty good range of meanings. It means take away, take up, pick up, raise, lift up.

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That's the range that it has. There's a couple other usages of it.

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But the main idea of it is picking something up to take it away.

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The real issue is not so much the taking away of this passage, but more as we look at this, it is part of the thing, and let me back up a second and just say this.

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Part of the issue is people think that if Christ or someone is speaking in a way where he seems to be speaking to Christians, that he's speaking to genuine believers.

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This is what causes a lot of people to have trouble when it comes to Hebrews 6, Hebrews 10, a lot of passages like this, people want to say, oh, you can lose your salvation because what ends up happening is you end up having people who are saying you can lose that salvation.

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Well, if you look at most of what you see, people will say Jesus spoke about hell more than heaven, and that's actually true.

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People will say that Jesus spoke about money more than heaven and hell combined, and that's true. But Jesus spoke about hypocrisy more than heaven, hell, and money combined.

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So the thing is that he's very often talking to people, Pharisees who think they're righteous.

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He doesn't say they're not, but they're not, right? He'll say, oh, physician, heal yourself.

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He'll assume what they're saying, and then play off of that to point out their hypocrisy.

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That is what you end up having here. I think what you have here is, I believe that you have two different groups of people.

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You have Israel and the church. So I think that the way that my understanding of this is that he's speaking to those who are being plucked away being

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Israel and being grafted in is the church. And this is something that he has said multiple times, and yet disciples had a hard time understanding it because in their culture, that would have been the biggest anathema you could think of.

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And so he kept teaching that point. So I think what you end up seeing here is the fact that he's trying to say here that there are those who claim to be of the vine, they claim even to abide with the

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Father, but they're not. And that's the pruning process.

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He's going to chop them off. So those are those who profess to be believers, but they're not.

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And so I don't think that he's speaking here of of believers that he prunes.

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Okay, so he's not taking away believers. So let me throw one thing in.

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So if you follow the context of this, you have to actually go back to John 14, 22.

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Judas Iscariot, or Judas, not Iscariot, said to him, Lord, what then has happened and that you are going to disclose yourself to us and not to the world?

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So he's talking about those are his and those that are not. So exactly what Andrew was just saying.

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Jesus then goes on this long discourse to explain the difference between those who are truly his and those who are truly not.

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And the vine metaphor here, as he's talking about, as he's discussing, he says,

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I am the true vine and you are the branches. If, there's a qualifier.

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If you abide in me, right? So there's the living branches and the dead branches.

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So what would a dead branch look like? A dead branch looks like Judas Iscariot.

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A dead branch looks like a professor who is not a possessor of true salvation. A dead branch looks like one, we see it in churches all the time.

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They think they're alive in Christ and yet there's gonna be a time when they're gonna be cast out into the fire because they never were truly alive.

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Even though they said they were part of the branch, even though they, because they've never had the actual part of salvation.

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And so that's what he's juxtaposing here. And yeah, you could actually apply that to Israel as well.

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The unbelieving portion of Israel who they were not believers, you know? And you have to really think in John, he's specifically talking to the

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Hebrew people at the time. And so that's what this discussion's really directed to. So can

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I ask a little bit of a follow -up there? Just one. Oh, you just did. You wanna ask another?

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Yeah. So I see all that for sure.

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So would you say that when he says every branch in me, this isn't an in me kind of like when he gives the idea of in him.

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Because the way that I was working through that, I got the whole, you know, those who don't abide, those are the ones who were cast away.

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I was having more of a problem with, because of looking at the translation. Because they're in him.

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Because they're in him. And he says if, and I think verse, well, he ends up saying that all the branches in him do produce fruit.

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That was where I was having trouble. If he goes to say that if the branches are in him, they still produce.

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And then he, at the beginning says that. Yeah, so let's look at this. Yeah, so let's look at this.

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He says, I am the true vine. So he's speaking of a vine. My father is the vine dresser.

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So he's saying the father is the one that's gonna do the pruning. He's saying he's the vine.

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He's saying every branch in me. So he's speaking of a branch attached to a vine. He's using the imagery of it.

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Yeah, it's imagery. So every branch in me. Now notice later in verse four, he's gonna say abide with me.

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But these are ones that are just like, they're just in the vine. These are branches that are in the vine. So let me say when it comes to hermeneutics, when we see parables, what we got to do is say, what's the main thing it's trying to teach?

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Where many people get into trouble with parables. You want a perfect example, look at latent flowers. He loves parables because he takes them and starts reading into them things that they never said.

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And what we have to do is ask, what's the main point of the parable? And that's it. We don't go beyond that because that's the main point.

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So the main point he has here. And so we're not trying to figure out all the details of it because that's not the purpose of a parable.

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So he's saying he's using the illustration of a vine that has branches that are natural to it, but they're dead or dying.

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And so the father who's the vine dresser comes and prunes them, cuts them off. And Tom here had said, when you prune a fruit tree, yes, it removes branches that are of no use and you prune them to produce more fruit.

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And that's what is happening here. He's using the illustration of cutting off dead useless branches so that the vine will be more fruitful.

31:52

And just so that you can clarify that on this point of the branches, what's another name for the branches?

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A disciple, right? So in this context, a branch that's in Christ is a disciple, right?

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Okay. So Jesus had how many disciples following him around from time to time? At the max, maybe 10, 20 ,000, but they fell away.

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Were they true disciples? No, they were not true disciples.

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They were conditional disciples based on what Jesus was giving or what they approved of.

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They were not his disciples. And he even turned to his last few and he said, well, you believe me as well?

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And Peter said, Lord, where are we going to go? You're the only one that has the key to eternal life. They were true disciples.

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And the point being here is that true disciples don't fall away. False disciples or conditional disciples will.

32:54

And the branches are just the same way of saying that same analogy.

33:01

I hope that helps. Okay. So go ahead,

33:09

Andrew. Yes. So basically what I think he's trying to say is what is difficult for these early disciples is the idea that Jewish people would be cut away from, you know, from,

33:23

I mean, they think of themselves. I mean, even today, anyone who knows my testimony, when

33:29

I heard the gospel, I literally said to the guy, you know, he's telling me about Christ. I said, that's great for you, but I'm God's chosen people.

33:35

I'm in like Flynn. You're raised to believe that your Judaism saves you. And so the idea of Jewish people being cut off from God is like an unthinkable thing.

33:48

And so he's explaining this in the illustration of a vine that, you know, this is what's going to happen, guys.

33:56

You're going to see the Jewish people being cut off and a new group is going to, new branches are going to be grafted in.

34:04

Right. Because truthfully, when you prune, you don't graft in new ones. You just prune the bad ones and let new sprouts grow.

34:12

Yeah. I guess where I was coming from was if that word was not translated as takes away and it was translated as lifts up or bears up in one of those ways, the way that I thought that it potentially could be translated was that being in him is he's the one that's going to cause you to produce the fruit in the first place, right?

34:36

Being in him causes that fruit production and the ones that are already bearing fruit because of him, he prunes so they produce more fruit and then

34:45

I was reading six initially as a different group of people, those who completely don't abide in him versus what happens when you are in him.

34:54

There are people that he causes to bear fruit. Two and six, you probably want to read together.

35:00

I mean, well, That was my question initially. So think of it this way and then we're going to bring

35:06

John in. Actually, before you go, I'm going to bring John in and see if he has any insights that he wants to add to this because he might and he may have a very different view than me.

35:14

I don't know. So, but, you know, what you have is you have a vine that has branches on it.

35:22

That's the illustration. The vines there, it has branches. Some branches are growing and healthy and some are not and some are going to be pruned and then others grafted in.

35:36

And so what he's trying to communicate is that there's going to be groups of people that are going to be cut out and others that are going to be brought in.

35:45

And that's the work that the father is going to do to the vine. And so I think that this is

35:52

Israel and the church. Granted, I'm sure there's some who are going to go, oh, it's just because you're dispensational.

36:01

But, you know, I think that's what he's trying to say. So I'm going to bring in John Harris here.

36:08

And John, I want to give you a chance. So, hey, welcome.

36:14

Welcome to the program. First time we've had you on here in Apologetics Live. So we appreciate that. Thank you.

36:19

I apologize for my tardiness. I'm going to give you an introduction in a bit. Yeah, no, no, no, that's good.

36:25

My internet's not too good either here. But so I didn't know if you had anything you wanted to add to Jacob's question.

36:34

I'll be honest, perfectly honest. So I was in and out. I was posting the link for this on my socials.

36:42

And so I didn't hear the entire exchange. But I think whatever Andrew said is orthodox. That'll work.

36:50

Don't trust Andrew, always look to the Bible. So was that helpful,

36:58

Jacob? Yes, it was. I really appreciate it. And by the way, come back on anytime. And if you have more questions, feel free.

37:06

The door's always open, so feel free. I appreciate it, guys. Mold that around in your head for a little bit.

37:11

And if you say, hey, you know what? You guys are lunatics. Come back in and we'll look at some more of it and try to dig in deeper.

37:19

All right, sounds good. I appreciate it, guys. All right, thank you. All right, so let me introduce to our guest here,

37:32

John Harris. John, I got to know of John after I did two episodes on my rap report on Al Muller.

37:42

And everybody was thinking or assuming that John and I were discussing

37:49

Al Muller. Because I guess at the same time, he had released a couple of podcasts about Al Muller.

37:56

And we both picked up a lot of similarities. And we handled it differently, but said a lot of similar things.

38:04

And I had so many people that mentioned it. I got to go check out who this John Harris guy is and see what he said about Al Muller.

38:12

And sure enough, there was a lot of similarity. And I started listening to more of Conversations That Matter, which is

38:19

John's podcast, and realized, man, this guy is right on on so many issues. We got to meet the first time that I know of, at least at Shepard's conference, where I got to meet you,

38:31

John, and your dad, who I like him as much as well. I've got to listen to some of his sermons.

38:39

And so as we've gone, I've noticed you and I independently without communicating have hit some of the same topics over time on this show and your show.

38:53

And you've done a lot on the area of social justice. I think that's where you're probably most known for.

38:58

You have a book out on the subject. A few of them. Yeah, I've got that one.

39:03

When social justice comes to church. Oh, that's the first one. Yeah, this is the second. So yeah. Yeah.

39:09

Okay. I'm not sure which one's that one. This one's kind of a basic rundown of social justice and how it conflicts with orthodox

39:17

Christianity and social justice. Okay. Yeah. I'll have to pick that one up.

39:22

I actually wrote some multiple papers on the social justice and whatnot for seminary.

39:31

And I actually, the first time I'd ever saw you, you actually had a shirt on and it said something about social justice on it.

39:39

And I was like, oh no, not another warrior for social justice. I was like, no, please no.

39:45

And I started looking at your stuff. I was like, no, he's legit. So this is going to be, this is random.

39:51

And, and I don't know if this will spark any memories or not, but, um, actually Justin, we met, and I'm just remembering this as I signed onto the podcast and I think.

40:03

2011, uh, a deeper conference in Louisville or no, not Louisville.

40:08

Sorry. Uh, you're the creation museum somewhere. Helbington, Kentucky. Oh, and Andrew, you were there.

40:15

We did the, um, Octoberfest and all that. That's right. Yeah. So I, I tried to, yeah.

40:21

So I, so we actually met first there. So wow. Good memory, man.

40:28

That is awesome. Yeah. Well, it made it a big impression on me. I'd never opened or preached before. And the first time I'm doing it, is it an

40:34

Octoberfest and a drunk guy came and pushed me and I thought I was going to get into a fight and I was like, wow,

40:39

I guess this is, you know, that's what you're supposed to do. Oh, I was, I was up there and a guy came up and pinched me, you know, right.

40:45

In the midsection there, uh, upper midsection, he pinched me twice. And the second time a police officer come over and grabbed him and pulled him in and put him in jail.

40:55

Oh, yeah. Cause yeah, he pinched me twice. It hurt. And I wasn't going to fight the guy

41:00

I'm right there, open air preaching. So man, this is awesome. I think that may have been the event.

41:06

There was a, I think it might've been that event. I can't remember now. I had a guy who there was a police officer standing right behind the guy.

41:14

And this guy threatened to kill me. And the police officer went to step in.

41:20

Cause he didn't know if the guy was serious. The guy actually not realizing it was a police officer when the officer tried putting his hand on him, pushed him away.

41:28

And so then the officer was like, okay, that's it. Like, and so he searches the guy finds a whole bunch of drugs on him.

41:36

And his friend is, is like pleading with me, like, you know, to like talk to the officer to let him go.

41:42

And the officer goes, he's arrest for drug possession. I'm like, you know, it had nothing to do with me at that point.

41:51

Never bothered an evangelist again. So, so John, although you're, you're known for social justice,

41:59

I have gotten into more trouble that there's two people that when I mentioned in negative light,

42:06

I get into more trouble than any other names. Beth Moore and Tim Keller, Tim Keller.

42:14

And I have, I mean, there are people who love Tim Keller so much.

42:20

They, they can't handle any criticism on him. I mean, I've, I've run into people where I try to explain to him,

42:28

Tim Keller teaches socialism. No, he doesn't. I mean, I've heard him openly.

42:35

He teaches all the, we should be giving, you know, to everyone equally.

42:40

So everyone should have, I mean, it's like when, when I would say that he, he believes in evolution, you know, theistic evolution, people will deny that.

42:50

And I go, you've played clips of this. And so I was like, you know what?

42:56

You've done a bunch of research. You did, I think three shows or was it four on this, on conversations that matter.

43:03

And Tim Keller, I've done a lot more than that now, because he, there's this book. I don't know if you've seen this called engaging with Keller and it's out of print.

43:12

It was written in 2014, but it goes through, I think, eight issues. And one of them, so this is before social justice became widespread and known.

43:23

So there is a chapter that's similar. It's about the church's mission, but the other stuff is about the Trinity.

43:28

It's about his view of hell, his view of sin, his hermeneutics, all that kind of thing. And, uh, and I've gone through every chapter, but one now and given a summation of it on the podcast since it's out of print.

43:42

And, uh, so, um, the people who support me have access to my PowerPoint and I have all the quotes in the scripture and everything right there.

43:50

So that was, I think I did that though recently. Um, like I want to say

43:55

I started in October or something and, and I, uh, did it all throughout December and so, um,

44:01

I'll finish it up probably next week. But, um, but yeah, so if you were looking before that, you're probably right.

44:07

There were probably like three videos and now there's probably like 10. So, yeah.

44:14

So, you know, and, and, uh, let Justin know, Justin, I know my internet keeps coming in and out.

44:20

So if at any point I disappear, just take over the rapture, we'll have, we'll have a lot to talk about.

44:28

Yeah. Um, so, so let's, let's first deal with the, the question, uh, who is

44:35

Tim Keller? Cause some folks may not be familiar with them. Um, you know,

44:41

I'll give the high level. Um, actually let's see if I, you know, I, let me see if I still have this up.

44:48

So I, I, I ended up doing this. I've been playing with this new thing. Uh, it's an

44:53

AI tool that has gotten, it goes through all the internet. It goes, this tool goes through all the internet.

45:01

It's called, um, oh, I gotta look it up. It's it's chat G P T.

45:09

And so this is something that's, that this is what they said about Tim Keller and so far, it seems like much of it's accurate, but Tim Keller is a

45:18

Christian pastor, theologian and author. He is the founder, founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian church in New York city, a position he has held since 1989 until his retirement in 2017.

45:33

He's also the chairman of redeeming, redeem your city to city, an organization that helps plant and develop gospel centered churches in cities around the world.

45:44

Give some more stuff, but that's, that's what he's, he's a Presbyterian pastor in New York city.

45:51

And I think what gets him noted known is when you, if you can get a big church in New York city that gets attention, you know, um, but he's in New York city with all the liberals.

46:04

And I think that, you know, I, it'd be an interesting study for someone to do a comparison between Tim Keller and John MacArthur, both of them, men with large churches in cities.

46:17

Right. Um, but you end up seeing how I think Keller has been influenced over the years by his culture, where MacArthur stood up to the culture.

46:29

And, you know, I would obviously say MacArthur is on the right side, but, um, so let's, what do you, what is your interest first?

46:40

What got your interest into looking into Tim Keller? I had a lot of friends recommend

46:46

Tim Keller resources to me as you probably have as well. He's so popular. And I was part of a church plant and, uh, it was a church plant slash college ministry in a college town near me.

47:00

And they were using Tim Keller, a video series that Redeemer, I guess, had put out. And I hadn't really read him.

47:08

I, I didn't know much about him. People had just recommended him. So I started watching this and I didn't immediately have red flags, but I knew something was just off about this guy.

47:20

And I couldn't maybe put my finger on it and fast forward going to seminary and, uh, seeing how many guys just, um, wanted to be like Tim Keller and thought he was the model.

47:31

Uh, and, and then of course, social justice, um, stuff started happening and I noticed it in,

47:37

I think 2018, uh, well, 2017, actually really hot at seminary and 2018, it was ramping up.

47:45

And, uh, Tim Keller was one of the major, um, players in that and people were referencing his book.

47:54

I think it was a 2014 book, generous justice and every good endeavor, uh, was another one that has some social justice type language in it.

48:03

So I decided to start reading them. And so I read every good endeavor. I read a generous justice and I just thought to myself, oh my goodness, this is terrible.

48:15

This is poor hermeneutics. It's, um, it's socialism light.

48:21

I didn't even know what to think after that of the people who had recommended Tim Keller to me. Cause I thought, well, surely they must not have seen this cause this is terrible.

48:30

And many of them had, that was actually one of the books that they liked. And then, um, so after that I was helping with a documentary, um, enemies within the church and they were going across the country trying to advertise this documentary.

48:43

And I traveled with them a little bit. And one of the guys who was doing some research for the documentary,

48:49

Trevor Loudon is his name, is an expert on communism and socialist operations.

48:54

And he has a website called key Wiki and it has all these guys from like,

49:00

I think thousands of guys that are communist operatives that he's just tracked. And well, Tim Keller was one of the guys that he knew a lot about.

49:08

And he said, well, you know, he was really enamored with the Frankfurt school. And I was like, wait, what, what?

49:14

And he, yeah, he says this in his book for God. And you go to the, so I started reading the introduction for reason for God.

49:20

And I'm like, sure enough, he wants, he, he's talking about how he was attracted to critical theory. And so, um,

49:26

I know I'm, I'm waxing along on this, but I landed the plane. I decided to, when

49:32

I was writing social justice goes to church, I was starting to seeing, uh, see a lot of connections with Keller, especially with Richard Mao.

49:40

And I just decided, you know what, I'm going to, I'm going to get to know Tim Keller. I'm just going to research him for, so for a straight week,

49:46

I did nothing really hardly at all, but read Tim Keller sermons. And, um,

49:52

I wish I had this AI tool that you're talking about and what it might've saved me some time, but, uh, I, I had to do the, uh, ground level work and reading his books.

50:02

And, um, that's where I wrote the last chapter or the appendix, I guess, for social justice goes to church, uh, about Tim Keller.

50:10

And so it's his bio. It's how he, uh, if you want to say got woke, you could say that, that the modern way, but they didn't use that word back in the late sixties.

50:19

You could just say how he became radicalized and, uh, how he's really been radical his whole way through in some ways.

50:27

And, uh, his whole conversion even is predicated on this teaching from Tom Skinner at Urbana.

50:36

Uh, it was inner varsity's ministry in 19, I think 70. And in that speech, cause

50:42

I've read it, it's a, it's a, one of these big speeches that influenced evangelicalism. Uh, he essentially says that there's two gospels, right?

50:52

You have, and then they're both incomplete. You have the fundamentalist gospel, and then you have the social gospel. And what we need is to wed them together.

50:59

And Tim Keller says, well, he, I'm already a campus radical and I was attracted to the new left stuff.

51:06

And then I'm finding out the inner varsity is promoting, uh, this teaching that will allow me to keep all those new left ideas and merge them with Christianity.

51:16

And so that was appealing to him. And that's where he was, um, supposedly converted.

51:23

And, uh, and so then he goes to, um, seminary while actually goes to, you know, this is in college at Bucknell university when he gets involved with inner varsity, but then he goes to seminary, then he goes to Westminster and in each place, there's someone else that he meets that impacts him.

51:41

So you have, uh, Elwood Ellis, uh, who convinces him he has basically what we call today, white privilege, that he was racist, even though he didn't know it.

51:50

And this blew him away and him and his wife. And then he gets, um, connected with Harvey Kahn at, um, uh,

51:57

Westminster. And he, uh, he is enamored with Harvey Kahn's view of the city.

52:03

Harvey Kahn thinks, you know, everything started in a garden, but it ends in a city, which means that for some reason we have to focus on cities and they're very special and Christians should have a unique mission to go and reach cities.

52:16

And he, uh, he also adopts this missy illogical, um, philosophy, uh, based upon really what would amount to a liberation theology view.

52:29

Um, they call it the hermeneutical spiral, but that you have to contextualize the gospel.

52:35

And what that means is in the context of an urban environment, you ask different questions about the text of scripture.

52:42

If you're living in this particular context and it's going to, uh, render a different, um, different kinds of sermons, different ministries.

52:52

And so Tim Keller has created a new model for how to reach postmodern urbanites in blue cities.

52:59

And it's supposed to be the path forward for everyone. And that's why I think they like him. That's why even Southern Baptists who don't share his theology, uh, like JD Greer is constantly quoting him, uh, because they, they think that this is the formula.

53:11

This is what's going to work because Christianity is dying. And, but Tim Keller seems to be making something work even in a blue city.

53:19

So that's, that's been my fascination and some of my study. So let's deal with some of the, some of the issues, because you brought up a lot on conversations that matter, which

53:33

I do recommend folks to, to download and subscribe or follow that podcasts.

53:39

Uh, I should say follow the podcast. Then, then you have, uh, you know, way for field to support you.

53:45

So, so subscribe there. Um, but, uh, let's start with, let's start in easy and then get to, to more complex.

53:55

I made the claim that Tim Keller is a socialist. Do you find there to be support for that?

54:03

And if so, what would it be? Yeah, that's a good question. I think Tim Keller, I said socialist light when

54:10

I was introducing him. I think if someone says that he's a socialist and they're defining it correctly and they're, they, they,

54:19

I don't think they're lying. I don't think they're wrong. I stay away from it. And one of the reasons I don't say it the way that as bluntly as you're saying it or directly is because, um, that that's one of the things it's like when you're, uh, talking to Jehovah's witnesses, right.

54:34

About, and they're like, let's go to John chapter one. You're like, well, yeah, of course they're all trained in John chapter one.

54:40

And all the Tim Keller fans, they're immune to this. Like it just bounces off them because they are trained to, or at least it's been told to them that people are going to come and accuse

54:52

Tim Keller of being a socialist. So what I say is Tim Keller, um, has a soft spot for socialism and his escape hatch, the reason that he'll, and his followers will say he's not a socialist is because he has two positions on like everything.

55:08

And in this circumstance, he'll say things like, well, uh, we are commanded to help the poor.

55:16

And there's two ways to do that. You can do that through government action and voting for a socialist kind of government, or you can do it through charitable giving and, uh, in either way is okay.

55:29

And so that gives him the escape hatch to say, well, I'm not trying to force everyone to be socialist, but I think that's a valid point.

55:37

So to come back, to answer it directly, I would say yes, but yes, he is, but he tries to soften it.

55:45

And, um, so I'll give you one quote that's, this is the go -to quote. There's a number of them, but, uh, in Christianity today in 2010, he says it's biblical, biblical that we owe the poor as much of our money as we can possibly give away as much of our money as we can possibly give away.

56:03

So this, and in the context, if you read this article, he's saying that because there's a need because poor people need resources, it's now incumbent on us to give away as much as we possibly can.

56:18

It's our, it's our duty. It's, it's, um, it's, and the thing is it's so subtle because I think we would all agree that we should be engaged in charity, but we owe the poor or that's now you're not, you're stepping outside of charity.

56:33

You're saying there's an obligation. Yeah. And once you do that, if we have obligations just based on needs,

56:40

I mean, extrapolate that out. God doesn't save everyone, but everyone does need salvation. So is

56:46

God not fulfilling an obligation is right. So, um, that's, that's one of the big issues with Keller is he makes these kinds of statements and I have a number of them listed, uh, in that, uh, chapter or that appendix in social or, uh,

57:01

Christianity and social justice where he says these socialist light things. And, um, and he even talks about redistribution and how that's a valid way to go about helping the thing that he preached a sermon that I heard where he talked about that the, the responsibility

57:18

Christians have to redistribute wealth, not just within the church, but within the, the government to take care of the poor.

57:30

And I was like, yeah, that's socialism. Yeah. He, he relies on a guy named

57:36

John Perkins because John Perkins teaches a redistribution and, uh, and he says that basically if we do at John Perks, so he asked to go to John Perkins because Perkins isn't a socialist because he's a great civil rights leader and evangelical, but Perkins is though Perkins does believe that on a certain level and Keller cites him and then says, well, this is the way that we're going to attract unbelievers to Christianity.

58:00

Um, and it's, it's a logical response of the gospel. So if you're a Christian, you have to redistribute your wealth.

58:07

And again, he does this binary thing though, where it's like charities could be part of this, but also forced redistribution could be part of this.

58:14

And he doesn't seem to see a difference between those two, as far as the morality or moral component.

58:22

I was just about to ask you if he's, if he's missing the difference between the biblical model of how we help and why we help at versus the, the socialist construct that we are obligated because, uh, well, not even a socialist construct, more of a socialist and a, uh, a new construct, depending on, um, uh, the, the racial component, uh, you know, we're obligated to, to, to help based on race and, uh, income equality or inequality.

58:53

Um, yeah, I'm, I'm wondering, uh, someone had posted in here a minute ago that, you know, he's, he's been, uh, heavily involved with Ligonier.

59:03

And I don't think that's the case anymore. Yeah, I think it was Alex, right. And he just was saying that, you know, just the point that he started off in a good place, that doesn't mean he ended in a good place.

59:14

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Let me, I'm going to put this up here now while we have it, since, um, because there's been, there's an explosion going on.

59:22

This is John, this is a carry over from, I think the last week or the week before, but, uh, you know, we, we have, uh, and how does, how do

59:30

I pronounce his name again? Hefe, Hefe was it? I forgot if I mispronounced it.

59:38

Hefe, um, says Calvinists can't defend their faith. God bless everyone. Good night.

59:44

Well, Hefe, we spent like what an hour and a half giving you scripture and you spent, uh, an hour and a half ignoring us and debating things that none of us believe.

59:57

We pointed out that none of us believe you. You are arguing a straw man, but if you'd like to come back in, uh, another time, we'd be happy to discuss with you again and show you that, uh, we're giving you scripture for what we believe and you are fighting a straw man.

01:00:14

If you'd like to actually engage with us, cause he was saying that, that, uh, folks in the channel here are not showing love, uh, misrepresenting people,

01:00:24

Hefe is not loving, just saying, um, but we, we don't shy away.

01:00:31

Um, Oh, Oh, Oh, here he goes. Yeah. You're just pulling that one up. Yeah. I'm trying to pull it up for you. Hold on.

01:00:36

Hold on. I'll get it. Yeah. Maybe you don't understand Calvinism. I love this. This is always the great comment when someone can't defend their attacks on Calvinism because they got

01:00:46

Calvinism wrong. So we, we don't know what we believe, but he knows better.

01:00:55

Okay. So Hefe, here's, here's a simple thing. I was telling you what I believe and you ignored it for what you believe

01:01:03

Calvinism is. You didn't engage with me or Justin or Anthony or drew.

01:01:09

Okay. So if you want to come on in and have a discussion on it, you're more than welcome.

01:01:16

Uh, we're not the ones that, this week, we're talking to John next week. Next week, we're going to probably be a full time next week.

01:01:23

There is an open letter that was written to Justin Peters. Oh yeah. Yes. I remember that.

01:01:29

We are going to address that next week. And I've already sent out a text.

01:01:35

And I mean, I've been engaging with the couple that put that message out. And so I hope that they'll, they, you know, they'll come in and see, you know, to defend with what was said, but, uh, but yeah, we're, that'll probably take up the entire two hours next week.

01:01:53

Well, let's talk about a pillow since we're into one hour, Mark, John, we have, we have a, um, uh, sponsor that takes good care of us.

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And so we, we, uh, threw out a, uh, shout out to them. Uh, so if you don't mind, it was just a second.

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Uh, they have very, very excellent pillows. They have, uh, sheets and whatnot. Um, they have all kinds of stuff.

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So if you go to mypillow .com or, um, if you will call, uh, 1 -800 -873 -0176, uh, we partner with them, uh, they, they sponsor, uh, take care of us.

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So, um, we, we have a promo code set up SFE. So if you'll just call them up and use

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SFE as a promo code, or if you go to mypillow .com and, uh, get all the stuff you want to get just, you know, hundreds and hundreds of dollars and then put the promo code

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Um, so the, I, I will admit I'm bummed. I'm going to Israel in a few weeks and. You know, limited, they limit the luggage.

01:03:10

I don't know if I could take my, my pillow, but I will try. Our other sponsor is Logos Bible software.

01:03:15

So if you want to upgrade your Logos or if you don't have it and want to get a new set, go to Logos .com

01:03:23

slash SFE, and you will get five free books to choose on us.

01:03:29

So those are some, yeah, I mean, you know, we, we could discuss who has a larger

01:03:36

Logos library, but we already know that I win. Yeah.

01:03:43

Who has a larger pillow? That's what I want. I don't know. I've got a different pillow.

01:03:48

I'm going to be honest with you. I've got, I've got several different pillows. You're you can't say that I have several pillows, but actually there's, they were, they were sponsors because of me.

01:04:00

Not him. Yeah. It's his fault. I travel with my, my pillow. I love my, my pillow. So, um,

01:04:07

I, I, I have, um, I have my pillow, pillow, slippers, uh, uh, robe towels.

01:04:16

I have the bunches, a bunch of their products. And my wife actually steals them from me because they're so comfortable that they're nightwear, you know, and it, it is good.

01:04:26

I, they're a great product. So yeah, I got the pajamas. That's right. Yeah. That too.

01:04:32

But, uh, yeah, so, so I I'm trying, I'm trying, John, maybe you could, you can help me.

01:04:38

Uh, I'm trying to get someone that you have as a sponsor and that's how I heard about them. Gold, Gold River tea.

01:04:44

Oh yeah. Yeah. You turn them on to me and man, that tea is good. I'm not like it is.

01:04:50

No, it really is. I don't. I like the Asian teas. And, and when I, when I first got,

01:04:55

I'm like, man, this tea is expensive, but I discovered this tea is, is it's good because like you could reuse the teabag like five times and it still has flavor.

01:05:04

Yes. So it's like, you're really getting good tea. I was like, yeah.

01:05:10

Yeah. And I don't typically like Earl gray, but there's, I do. Okay.

01:05:15

I love Earl gray. I, I stopped drinking coffee. Hold on. I stopped drinking coffee too.

01:05:21

Let me let John give a plug for his. No, I don't. You know,

01:05:26

I mean, I, I mean, I like it. Um, but you know, it's, I don't even know what to say now.

01:05:32

I mean, they're, they're not paying me to say this, but, um, yeah. Gold river to me,

01:05:38

I have to stand behind and they do well, they're great because they're, it's a company that's independent pro

01:05:44

America. They're, you know, patriotic. They love the Lord, um, bunch of, uh,

01:05:49

Christians. And so I want to help other Christians of like -mind and faith. And, um, and I actually suggested to them to, to do it.

01:05:58

I was like, have you guys ever tried that? And it worked out great for him. And so the, um, you know, they, uh, will give me sometimes, you know, one to five ads.

01:06:07

Sometimes it's a month. It's like, you know, could you mention it like four or five times? And, um, they come out with new teas all the time.

01:06:14

So I was going to say, I'm not before this, I wasn't a huge tea guy and I would drink it now and then, but after I got ahold of theirs,

01:06:23

I actually became more of a tea guy. I really like it. And I was not thinking

01:06:28

I would like their pumpkin spice tea. Cause that's like for white girls in the fall. And why would

01:06:34

I have anything to do with pumpkin spice anything? Well, I tried it because they asked me to, they sent it to me and they're like, could you market this?

01:06:40

It's October. I kept drinking it. It's all gone now. It's so good.

01:06:45

I was just like, you know, give us the name again, gold river, gold river, co .com

01:06:52

gold river tea. And what's the, what do they have to mention to, so that gold river tea knows that from you?

01:06:59

I don't even know. I think conversations, I think it was conversations. Yeah. Yeah. If you go to gold river, gold river tea, search for gold river tea.

01:07:06

And when you call them up, just mention that you heard them on camera, even though this isn't conversations that matter.

01:07:14

Just mention you heard them from the host. You could do that. Yeah. You could do that. They'll throw into my pillow.

01:07:20

If you order over a hundred dollars worth. Wow, man. So, all right.

01:07:27

So let's, let's get back to, to Tim Keller. So I have, I have a quote that I forgot about that.

01:07:34

I was going to read you guys that might put your jaws on the floor. It's, so this is something

01:07:40

Keller said about Karl Marx. He said, I'm serious.

01:07:45

He said, Karl Marx was the only major thinker other than God who held up the common worker with a high view of labor.

01:07:55

I was on one of his sermons. Say that again. Karl Marx, Karl Marx was one, was the only major thinker other than God who held up the common worker with a high view of labor.

01:08:07

So he just doesn't ever, he doesn't understand that Joseph Stalin said that Karl Marx was the, uh, one of, one of the most evil, evil thinkers of his time.

01:08:17

And no, nobody should ever listen to or read or understand one word that the man has ever said.

01:08:23

That was from Stalin. Yeah. Hold on. Let's, let's take a look at actual history.

01:08:29

Let's look at John Calvin. I mean, here's a guy that goes into Geneva.

01:08:35

He was invited into Geneva because Geneva was such a cesspool. Poverty was at, you know, was huge there.

01:08:43

And what did he do? He preached the gospel. People got saved because they got saved.

01:08:50

They wanted to learn to read so they could read the Bible. Yeah. No, I will teaches them that they have to take care of their fellow brothers and sisters.

01:09:03

They start taking care of the poor. They, they, those that are poor start getting jobs and working, you know, you, like other than Jesus.

01:09:12

Well, I would say John Calvin comes long before Karl Marx. I would think so too.

01:09:20

Um, he pokes a whole, like he, he'll say that, you know, like Marx is wrong though, because of the atheism.

01:09:26

Right. Uh, and, uh, the materialism and stuff. And, you know, but, but he had a good idea.

01:09:31

And here's one more quote. He says this, um, if I can find it,

01:09:36

I just had it up. Okay. The people, this is a direct quote. The people I read who were disciples of Marx were not villains.

01:09:43

They were not fools. They cared about people. There are vast populations, millions of people who have been an absolute serfdom and peasantry and poverty for years and years.

01:09:53

And there's no way they're going to get out. There's no upward mobility. See the people who read

01:09:58

Marx said, we have to do something about this. They weren't fools. Tim Keller. Oh, okay.

01:10:07

I was going to sermon too. Oh, wow. But think about it. How many thousands of people listen to us at MN, you know, or maybe more than that, but I mean, that's, it's, it's shocking because if you think about it, what country alive today besides America has given itself over to socialist or communist ideology that is not self -destructing or has not destroyed everybody around them and, and, and has, has used its people as a forced labor, a, uh, to, to ingratiate the higher elites with, with vast amounts of wealth that there's not one country that you can name that fits the criteria of what he just said.

01:10:55

Well, my question is who are the disciples of Marx too? I mean, are we whole pot? I mean, these are the people that executed it.

01:11:01

I mean, is it, uh, you know, dictators? Is it Fidel Castro? Like who, yeah.

01:11:08

They really just cared about people. They loved everybody. That's why it happened in Venezuela. They loves people so much.

01:11:14

Hugo Chavez was just, yeah. Yeah. They love so much that they hung them and, and, and, and took all of their food and, and how can you praise

01:11:23

Marx for, for that and say, but, but we're going to ignore his atheism.

01:11:28

Like that was the underpinnings of everything he did. Well, that's the same play that we see now with the

01:11:35

CRT, right? It's an analytical tool. So, um, as long as you reject the atheist foundation of it,

01:11:42

Christians can use this. And they did the same thing, uh, in the 1970s, Richard Mao, who helped train or influence

01:11:50

Keller was doing the same thing. It was the same formula over and over and over. We can, that's liberation theology.

01:11:55

We can take this and use it for ourselves and build it on another foundation. Like Jesus was the real

01:12:01

Marxist. And obviously that's not true. Well, and that's, and, and, you know, you and I both covered this, but this, uh, this, uh, campaign, he gets us a hundred million dollars devoted that, and, you know, just read through what they're trying to do.

01:12:19

They're trying to rebrand Jesus as a social justice warrior.

01:12:24

And that's, that's what drives me nuts with that whole campaign is when you look at, and we've,

01:12:30

I tried digging. We cannot find out who is behind that campaign, who put up the a hundred million dollars.

01:12:37

My guess, my theory, George Soros, but. Oh, I think I, oh, you're no, no,

01:12:43

I think you're right. You're right. It was, no, it's, it's a, it's a bunch of foundations that are owned by other foundations that have, it's, you can't, you can't find out who put the money up and who it is.

01:12:55

And so my theory is it's George Soros, but, um, you know, it's the whole idea of it.

01:13:01

Would it be fitting? Right. Yeah. So I, I just,

01:13:06

I look at this whole thing and say, this is what they want to do. They want to try to rebrand Jesus because they don't like the

01:13:12

Jesus that actually existed because they, they prefer the Jesus that is going to endorse what they want him to endorse.

01:13:21

Well, if, if Jesus is a social justice warrior, you have to, you have to ask the question, why were there so many people around him that he walked away from or would not go to, or would not give, you know, the concessions to that they wanted?

01:13:37

I mean, they wanted him to be their King and to give them, you know, all the food, all the wealth, all the power that the people wanted that.

01:13:47

Why didn't he give it to them? Yeah. You know, why did he shun them? One, one little candle is one of the podcasts on the

01:13:53

Christian podcast community. One little candle podcast is saying the late, the latest he gets us campaign is all about Jesus having been a refugee.

01:14:03

Yeah. Well, but, but when you're trying to, and I, you, you know,

01:14:08

Andrew knows my opinion on this. Uh, when you're trying to overthrow America as a nation, um, you have to do every bit of media and even

01:14:17

Christian media to outsource the idea that we, we need to get rid of borders.

01:14:23

We need to get rid of security. We need to get rid of the middle -class. We've needed to get rid of, you know, we even started the show off with even housing.

01:14:31

You have to get rid of idea of ownership of property. Everything's communal. We owe it to, you know, the, the person beside you that has less, you know, if, if he has a one less, whatever you owe it to him to give it to him, you know, and so, and that just goes down the line to where everybody's becomes poorer and poorer and, um, and the only people that, that actually come out, um,

01:14:59

I believe it was marks that said that, uh, religion is the opiate for the masses. And, uh, and I'm trying to figure out how

01:15:07

Keller and others can, can use that, that denigration of Christianity.

01:15:13

How can they use that and say that it's a, it's a good, John, you said it an analytical tool.

01:15:20

How can they say that that is a good tool to analyze the scripture based on the idea that they wanted to destroy

01:15:27

Christianity and replace it with atheism? I don't understand. I mean, they're not self -aware of the implications of some of this.

01:15:36

So I mentioned before that when Keller came to the Lord in the context of inner varsity, in the early seventies at Bucknell university, he was already radicalized.

01:15:47

He was already a new left guy, um, participating in protests and things.

01:15:52

And when he listened to this, uh, speech by Tom Skinner that said, there's these two incomplete gospels.

01:16:03

The fundamentalists have one, the social gospels, the other one. And if we wed them together, we'd get this holistic, complete gospel.

01:16:10

He, he took that tape and he listened to it over and over and over and over. And, and, and just, it impressed him so much that it attracted him to going towards ministry,

01:16:20

I suppose, but at least getting involved with inner varsity. And the, if you look at that speech, and this is an early one, um, you know, we're not thinking about Christianity going liberal in 1970, but it was already happening before that too.

01:16:35

Yeah. Well, and I, and I mean liberal in this, right. Cause I have to define the terms here, but I mean like a Marxist new left kind of social justice direction.

01:16:44

Um, you know, Tom Skinner is basically saying that he, the sneaky thing is he's taking the law, right?

01:16:52

So the law is that we ought to obey God's commandments and, um, and part of obeying his commandments, part of loving your neighbor is helping your neighbor at times.

01:17:04

So that's what they'll do. They'll, they'll take these very vague notions of love and sometimes they'll take commands that are directed towards Christians and they'll misapply them because Christians are supposed to take care of their own.

01:17:16

Families are supposed to take care of their own, but they'll take those commands and universalize them. Or they'll take, you know, things from the old

01:17:23

Testament in the context of a covenant community and universalize them. And then they say, well, you know, that's what

01:17:29

Jesus wants us to do. And the, the conflation is that's the law that condemns us because we fail to do that, but they turned it into it's incumbent on Christians because it's part of the gospel.

01:17:41

Now it's connected some way. It's a gospel issue. It's a, you have an incomplete gospel if you don't do this.

01:17:48

And so any Orthodox believer who's well -meaning and maybe a little ignorant is going to hear that and think like, well, this is,

01:17:58

I wouldn't normally get involved in political activism, but if it's part of the gospel, I guess I will. And, and they go down this path thinking so.

01:18:07

So that's, I think the play most often is pervert or overemphasize certain aspects of the law of God to, and to the detriment of other aspects of the law of God, and then infuse that into the gospel and then make that the centerfuge of the entire faith and the mission of the church and everything else.

01:18:28

So would you, would you think that that's why we could do the, um, you know, Valdi Baucom, Justin Peters talk about the train and the caboose, you know, all the, all the different bus cars along with it.

01:18:39

Um, you know, uh, intersectionality you have, you know, you have your, your ideas of your LGBTQ, you have the, you know, all of the woke ideologies because it doesn't come in one, it comes in all.

01:18:50

And I've heard him, uh, speak directly to the, the, the social, uh, the, the just the injustice that's done when we do not accept the, you know, the trans, or we don't accept the, the people for who they say they are and bring them in as they are.

01:19:05

Um, you know, Well, Keller's been influenced. Keller's been up to his, his ankles, at least in this, because he was the one, him and his wife that introduced the living out church audit that said, here are whatever it was, 10 things that you need to do in your church to make sure that it's a safe space for homosexuals and they don't feel judged when they come.

01:19:25

So that's Keller. Yeah. That's crazy. You know, and I want to end up changing into some other topics.

01:19:32

I want to bring Melissa in because she, she may be want to talk on this topic. Melissa, Melissa Lex, she's from Thoroughly Equipped Podcast, another of the

01:19:41

Christian Podcast Community podcasters, and I can announce publicly, she is the newest administrator for the

01:19:49

Christian Podcast Community. So, Melissa. Can you hear me? You can hear me?

01:19:54

Hi, John. Hi. Um, yes, I do have a question. But before that, I did want to, um, ask you specifically, have you heard about the

01:20:04

If Gathering? If I have. Jenny Allen for Women's Ministry.

01:20:10

So part of my pod, part of my podcast is, um, kind of, um, discernment into women's ministry and stuff like that.

01:20:19

And so I mentioned this because Jenny Allen's, one of her big influences is, uh,

01:20:25

Tip Keller. So, and not only that you have Be the Bridge. Oh, I know about them.

01:20:30

Yeah. Yeah. So I really wanted to have you on my podcast. There you go,

01:20:36

John. Well, actually, yeah, this, this is the, this is John. I think I texted you about, uh,

01:20:42

Melissa reaching out to you. So. Oh, yes, yes, yes. So this is the reach out. Awesome.

01:20:49

This is a public. You can't say no now. You just have to say. Yeah, no, it's okay if you say no, it's fine.

01:20:56

I did email you, um, but I know you're busy. But, um, yeah, in regards to the

01:21:01

Be the Bridge and the CRT. But one of the, my questions was right in line with that is about the kingdom of God.

01:21:09

Doctrine. And I wanted to hear you speak about Tim Keller. And if he talks about the kingdom of God in socialism terms, obviously.

01:21:20

But that's what I see a big, uh, entryway into women's ministry is, um, talking about being, uh, doing the kingdom of God, bringing the kingdom of God to earth.

01:21:34

And I'm wondering if that's kind of how he, um, kind of slides in the social.

01:21:41

Gospel and slides in the critical race theory. Oh, sure. Uh, I, I definitely know he talks about the kingdom.

01:21:48

Um, I don't know if he does it in the same way. That like Jim Wallace does where they'll say the gospel of the kingdom is, and then it's all these social justice things you have to do.

01:21:57

But I know that Keller, he often uses the term kingdom in conjunction with, um,

01:22:06

Christ's, uh, humbling of himself in Philippians, uh, chapter two. And how that's an example to us of what we have to do.

01:22:14

And we would all say, amen, except for the fact that that means give up all your money. Social work.

01:22:20

Yeah. And, and it's, so he misunderstands, I think what the incarnation was really about.

01:22:25

I mean, he misapplies verses like, um, that, that talk about spiritual renewal and he'll make it about, uh, that it, you know, helping physical needs, like, uh, helping give sight to the blind is like John Calvin would say in his commentary that, uh, that's a reference in Isaiah to, um, what the

01:22:49

Messiah is going to do to take away spiritual blindness. But Keller will make that about, it's all a directive to the church today to go and get involved in poverty ministries and so forth.

01:23:02

And he will say that that's, he does use the word kingdom and I'm looking for a specific quote. I do. So he says this, this is actually interesting.

01:23:09

He says no revolution, um, can escape the reality of the, of, and I'm summarizing here a little bit, uh, the reality of the power, except quote, the kingdom of God ruled by a king without a quarter power or recognition and requiring his followers to give up their power as well.

01:23:27

So that I think it's, it's probably dovetailing with what you're talking about. If I'm not mistaken, that Jesus comes and in institutes, this new revolution to Keller calls it a revolution.

01:23:39

And it's this kingdom that, but it's, it's different than every other kingdom because every other kingdom is exerting power.

01:23:45

And this one is giving up power. And that's what we have to do is to go give up all our power powers, bad, the religious rights, bad, trying to stop abortion through political means.

01:23:54

We, we've just soured people's tastes and power's bad. And, and he'll say that it's not income.

01:24:01

It's not, um, you can't reconcile that with being part of the kingdom of God we're supposed to bring.

01:24:07

So Christ is an example of that, right? Uh, the ultimate giving of power.

01:24:12

The cross is an example of that. That's at least what I see. Right. It's liberation theology.

01:24:18

Yeah. Liberation theology. Exactly. Yes. It makes me wonder, you know, and I don't know if you,

01:24:24

I doubt you have the answer to this, but I wonder how much Keller is worth. You know, like, cause the reason

01:24:31

I'm asking is because so many of these guys that preach that we should, you know, everyone else has a responsibility to give to the poor, but they usually don't give their own money to the poor.

01:24:39

Like you don't want to take a picture of David Platt's house and yeah. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

01:24:46

I love that. I love it, man. That's funny that you mentioned David Platt and he's another one that comes into the

01:24:52

IfGathering who talks about the whole gospel. Then you have Eugene Cho. I don't know if you've heard of him.

01:24:59

Oh, he's way out to the left. Keller's conservative compared to him. Yeah. So yeah.

01:25:05

Yeah. So I would definitely, um, it's a understanding that women's ministry and, um, a whole cause it's very sneaky.

01:25:14

The way IfGathering is set up, it's online. And so it can get into any church.

01:25:19

And I do think a lot of the critical race area, at least in the communities that I'm in,

01:25:26

I've seen a lot of, uh, women leave church good, solid teachings because they're influenced by women's ministry like that.

01:25:36

And so they leave good, solid church to go to more inclusive church is it's really sad.

01:25:42

Yeah. Yeah. And I should say, you know, a couple of the ladies have been, you know, in here mentioning about the fact of the

01:25:48

IfGathering, um, someone who said they, they went before they knew better. Uh, just so you know, after I get back from Israel, I'm going to be trying to put together, uh,

01:26:00

I'm trying to get Melissa Lex come on with a couple other ladies to talk specifically about the

01:26:06

IfGathering so that we could bring some more awareness to that. So that's a future episode of Apologetics Live.

01:26:12

That's so necessary. What you're doing, Melissa, because my experience, uh, so many of these

01:26:19

Christian ministries are targeted to women specifically, especially like suburban housewives.

01:26:25

And that's what it shouldn't be this way, but that's what ends up pulling the whole family towards, you know, a certain theology.

01:26:32

Yeah. I mean, think about it. Bethel church is notorious for, you know, uh, appealing to the emotions of ladies and, and those that are, that just don't have a theological background.

01:26:45

And they love to pull that in. I'm, we're talking different subject, but, but you think about it, it's, it's all interconnected in some way, you know what

01:26:52

I mean? Satan has his hands in, in, in the, uh, the idea of trying to destroy, you know,

01:26:59

Christians in any way you can. So, you know, you could go back to what we did a few, uh, well,

01:27:04

I want to say weeks, but now maybe months ago when Melissa Lex and, uh, you know, was on last time and we talked about feminism.

01:27:12

Um, and you know, we, we, we talked about how the feminism it's like so much what we see in the social justice movement, you know, like you see it starting, you know, a lot with the feminism and feminism has now been redefined where it undoes the very thing that the feminists originally were trying to do.

01:27:29

Right. You know, like if, if the feminists of old would hear what the feminists of today are saying, they'd be like, stop.

01:27:37

Oh, I mean, now the feminists are, are, are the quote unquote families are defending men saying they're women.

01:27:46

I watched a video just today of a gentleman. I watched a video today of a guy that walks up to an airport and, uh, the security.

01:27:54

He walks right up to the airport. I don't know when it happened, but I saw it. And, and he says, um, you guys just spent $22 million for all this new security to, to try to help everybody.

01:28:05

That's, you know, those transgenders and, and the, you know, the, these feminists are running around saying, you've got a, you know, a, a, a, a woman's ride and a woman can have a, and, and if he identifies as a woman, he can now all the silliness, this guy walks at me, he says, um,

01:28:21

I identify as a woman. And, uh, the, the airport security, the police, the owners, the whole, everybody had to come out.

01:28:29

It was this big fiasco. And he's like, he, and he said on, on the video, I'm not a woman, but I'm going to identify this way.

01:28:36

See what happens. They got, he got patted down, like patted down by a lady. This is insane.

01:28:43

But, but, but it's, I mean, lifeway, uh, is, is got this, got this, uh, material coming in to the churches today.

01:28:51

That that's a woke that's, uh, that's, that's trying to shift everybody's thinking towards accepting these types of things.

01:28:57

You know, it's, it's all interconnected. I mean, and it's all demonic, but it's all

01:29:03

Satan. Yes. Let's get, you know, so we talked about Keller with social justice, those things.

01:29:10

I mentioned the fact that his views on, on theistic evolution, um, you actually played clips on your podcast, actually a clip that I use in some of my talks, um, where he talks about Genesis one and two.

01:29:26

And, you know, he, he's, he does, well,

01:29:31

I would like to say gymnastics, but you know, that's belittling gymnastics with what he did.

01:29:39

I haven't heard that one then. Yeah. Well, you played, you played a similar clip to where he is, where he was just, you know, he's like, he's got

01:29:48

Genesis one, Genesis two. And it's like, well, this is literal, this is completely figurative.

01:29:53

Like this is all made up. Right. You know? So this is like chapter one actually happened.

01:29:59

Chapter two is, is a literary style, you know? So it's not really that there was an

01:30:05

Adam and an Eve because chapter one is teaching evolution, right? And it surprises people to know that he teaches evolution.

01:30:13

He doesn't believe in a worldwide flood either. No. Okay. So what's his view on sin and the fall?

01:30:21

Well, sin. Yeah. I mean, he's got two views. I think I said that before, like on almost everything, except creation of a

01:30:28

Christian. So one to the unsaved, right? Yeah. You know, it's pretty much the case.

01:30:33

I mean, he's, he, he'll, depending on what audience you're listening to, like if he's at a

01:30:38

PCA General Assembly, he sounds a whole lot more conservative than he does at a university or in a leadership training seminar or something.

01:30:47

But his biblical doctrine of sin, I think a lot of what we hear today about sin being equivalent to brokenness is from Keller.

01:30:57

Or at least he's, if it's not from him, he's certainly made it popular. And so Keller's main thing is trying to communicate to this postmodern blue city community that breaking

01:31:11

God's law, which is what they all have in their minds. That's probably, that's sin. It's doing things that God doesn't like.

01:31:18

Right. At least he tries to overturn that to get them to, it's always like this fortune cookie, like impressive

01:31:24

Ted talk nuance thing where like, oh, you thought it was this, but guess what? Christianity is, is something so much more mysterious or better or curious and compelling is the word he usually uses.

01:31:39

And so, so he, he, he tries to step away from this idea that it's breaking God's law and focus on instead the, what sin does to us, the effect of sin.

01:31:49

So if you, if you sin, you're going to reap the consequences of sin in yourself. And he even says, that's a type of hell.

01:31:55

Yeah. That you're, you're starting hell when you, when you sin and go down this road and it leaves you unfulfilled.

01:32:01

That's the bottom line. All of this stuff, isn't really going to fill you up and make you happy, even though you think it is.

01:32:08

And so it's, it's just bad for you and you're broken. And now you need a complete identity because you, you've had this unfulfilled identity and come to Jesus.

01:32:17

Right. So that's how he distorts what sin is, because if he was going to be to be biblical, biblically accurate, he would say, it's breaking the law of God.

01:32:26

Sin is lawlessness. You've broken the law of God. You justly stand condemned. But he, that's too judgmental.

01:32:32

People in New York City don't want to hear that. Okay. So a question has come in for you, John. The Bishop of Railway, love the names, but he says, can you expand on what you mean by sin is brokenness?

01:32:47

So yeah, people, I mean, I'm going to see if I can find an example of it, because I know there's many of them, but...

01:32:53

Is that, while you're doing that, is that kind of like when he did the video and they asked him directly about sin?

01:33:00

I'm sorry, about homosexuality. And he nuanced it to the point where you're just broken.

01:33:06

You're, well, you're, you're incomplete in that lifestyle. It is sin, but you're incomplete in that lifestyle.

01:33:11

And it kind of pushed me towards... It's not God's best for you. Yeah. It's not God's best for you.

01:33:17

Yeah. Yeah. I can't find an exact quote right in front. I know I've, I've read a number of them, but it's, yeah, it's, it's like I said before, the consequences of sin being reaped in your own life, that it leaves you broken.

01:33:30

It's, it's so the, it, instead of the effect it has on, on God, what you've done to God, essentially by thumbing your nose at him, it's the focus has shifted from what the sin does to you.

01:33:42

And there's some truth to the fact that sin does break you. You are broken. That's not wrong to say that.

01:33:48

It's not the full story though. And if you leave out the part and you make it definitional, that brokenness and the effect of sin, the consequences of sin are really what sin is, then you're doing your audience a big disservice.

01:34:05

The Orthodox people here, and they, they, they will fill in the blanks, the gaps. They'll say, oh yeah, like we know what he's talking about.

01:34:11

And that's why I think so many people have heard Keller over the years and think they didn't suspect. Yeah. But if you're not

01:34:17

Orthodox and you're hearing what he says, it's not comprehensive. It's a very limited, narrow understanding.

01:34:23

It's, it's almost what you have with Mormons where they have the same words as Christian. They just have totally different meanings.

01:34:31

Right. So that's the liberal side though. Some questions that came in, uh, brother John is saying question,

01:34:37

Tim Keller, post -millennium post -millennial. Do you know the answer to that? I don't think so.

01:34:42

I think he's on millennial, but I would think, I would think he's on millennial. Presbyterian, um,

01:34:48

Facebook user says, Hey John, could you shoot me the quotes from Keller on Mark? Yeah. Just send that, send that over to him.

01:34:54

We can't Facebook user because you got to go to apologeticslive .com. Follow the instructions to see how

01:34:59

Facebook could, could share your name, but I'll tell you how, how you can get them here. He actually said that go to conversations that matter.

01:35:07

Uh, and you can, you can support him there. And if you support

01:35:12

John, you get access to that. So it is in my book. I know, I think

01:35:18

I, the blue, the blue one, social justice goes to church. You can find those quotes. Um, can

01:35:23

I say something to the sin on brokenness thing? Um, just cause of, of my study into the, if gathering, it's led me to psych psychotherapists that are presented at if, and then

01:35:35

I called this the psychology, the psychologizing of sin.

01:35:41

It's, it is basically, um, you're only offending yourself. God wants your best, right?

01:35:47

Like you said. Um, and then there's just all this talk. The gospel is more like God is making something beautiful out of you, your brokenness.

01:35:55

And that's the good news that he's going to use you for some, uh, really good purpose and, and something like that.

01:36:03

So the, the idea of sin as offending you and not God really, it does mess with the gospel entirely, which then kind of leads to Jesus being the example on the cross.

01:36:18

His life is the example, and that's how we live. And we are to be like Christ and sacrifice ourself just like he did.

01:36:28

So Melissa, I guess you'd better start listening to voice of reason radio because Chris Hunt holds this thing. Psychologically, I can't even say that.

01:36:38

Psychologizing of sin. Writes that down for later use. You're probably going to hear that soon on voice of reason radio.

01:36:44

So what does, what does all that do, these concepts? What does it do for the doctrine of sin, doctrine of hell, and the doctrine of wrath of God?

01:36:51

I mean, God's justice seems to be on the back burner, if at all. So I'll read you a definition to start this one off.

01:37:00

This is from reason for God. He says, sin is the despairing refusal to find your deepest identity in your relationship and service to God.

01:37:07

Sin is seeking to become oneself to get an identity apart from him. Now, there's some truth in some of this perhaps, but it's not comprehensive or complete, and it's certainly not biblical.

01:37:17

When you look up all the passages like transgression, yeah, sin is transgression. So, so, and there's a number of quotes

01:37:25

I have mostly from reason from God and also from prodigal God where Keller does this thing and he tries to tell them, hey, sin's not breaking the law.

01:37:32

It's these other things. What he does is he reduces sin down to idolatry. All sin is idolatry, and this is how he can make things that are even not technically sins, but the, let's say the left finds them offensive.

01:37:46

They become idolatry. Loving your family too much, I guess, could be idolatry. I mean, anything could. So he reduces it down to it's idolatry and this broken self that you have, this unfulfilled self, this black, this identity you lack.

01:38:01

And God's goal is to give that back to you, to bring you into a place where you have your identity fulfilled and you're a whole person again.

01:38:10

And so it's, it's purely man centered. And the attributes of God, like his wrath and justice are downplayed because Keller's whole idea of hell is that it's, he gets us from Lewis, but it's locked from the inside.

01:38:24

God's, it's, it's the lacking of the presence with God. God's not there. And it's something we choose to, to go to ourselves.

01:38:32

God has no choice in the matter. He's, he's feels rejected. He's crying as we go there, but we lock it from the inside and we don't want to leave.

01:38:40

He misunderstands the whole rich man and Lazarus parable and tries to make it out like this is a, that, that hell is a place that you go to that if you choose to go there, you're not interested in going to heaven.

01:38:54

So it's, I guess it makes you not feel as bad for the people maybe being tortured. I don't know, but, but what it does is it takes the attributes of God and it tries to that wrath and that justice.

01:39:06

He guts it. Cause that's not a God that people in New York city want to worship, right? They want a God who's all love, love, love.

01:39:14

And with his doctrine of the Trinity, he totally changes what the Trinity is. And he makes the essence of the

01:39:21

Trinity love. He takes that one attribute of God and elevates it to a point where it's the only thing that God is.

01:39:28

And, um, yeah, I mean, you know, the, the, one of the things I've seen with him, and this is what we said, talked about earlier in the show with the question that we had from Jacob, he has a habit as well of taking parables and reading into the parables far more than should be.

01:39:47

And so when we look at hermeneutics, that's the, the, the science of interpretation, how we interpret with parables, when it comes to parables,

01:39:57

I'll say this again, because it's really important. You see a lot of people do this. When you come to a parable, you look at the parable for what the main point is of the parable.

01:40:06

You don't try to see if you could analyze every aspect of the parable. It's not what a parable is for.

01:40:12

It's an illustration of one point. And so the goal of the parable is figure out what it's illustrating and that's it.

01:40:19

Anything beyond that is just twisting the scriptures because you're not following the rules of interpretation.

01:40:26

And he does this a lot. And so this should be a warning to anybody. If you see a teacher who is nitpicking at parables and starting to find, well, this could mean this, and this means this, and they're going beyond what the purpose of the parable is, that the main idea, you know, someone who's no longer dealing with God's word, but trying to insert their own thinking.

01:40:49

And they, they use the parables because the rest of God's word doesn't say it.

01:40:54

And that's why these, these people always go to parables because they can twist the parables to make it say what they want it to say.

01:41:00

They look, they start with the conclusion and they're looking for, how can I fit this in the Bible? I mean, this is, this is what he does with evolution.

01:41:08

Let me look at the Bible and see how I could fit this in because the scientists say this is true. Millions of years.

01:41:13

Okay. It's got to be right. You know, evolution, it's got to be right. You know, and you look at, look at that.

01:41:19

If you add in that, the philosophical nuance, you know, everything's got to be nuanced.

01:41:25

You can't, you can't speak to anything on a concrete level. You have to be so flowery with the language and you have to,

01:41:34

I mean, the only people that can understand it is a 180 IQ with a, you know, six degrees under your belt and, and, and always sounds so great.

01:41:43

I, I, I can't stand that. If you can't speak to the, to the child in the room, then you're not speaking to anybody. Yeah. You know, you have to be able to speak to everybody on this.

01:41:51

So let me ask this. Cause I, you know, we, we got about now we can, we can go over if, if John wants to go longer, let's give him the time if he wants it.

01:42:00

But I want to, I want to cover some of the other things. What you covered a lot of things on, on your different episodes.

01:42:07

Are there more concerning doctrines that you have concern with, with Tim Keller?

01:42:14

Other than the ones I've mentioned? Yeah. Well, I mean, we, we, we talked about his social justice.

01:42:20

We've talked about his, his, you know, his view on, on, you know, evolution, you, you touched on his, on the view of sin, but you just, you just started kind of touching on the attributes of God.

01:42:36

And, you know, Well, this is my conclusion. So the, the book engaging with Keller, they don't, they don't draw this connection.

01:42:45

They, in fact, it's weird because in the forward, or I guess the preface to the book, they're saying, we don't think

01:42:52

Keller's a heretic and the whole book is he's a heretic. So it's like, it's a, it's a strange,

01:42:58

I think they're just afraid maybe to say that. I don't know. Well, yeah, a lot of people are John. I mean, you think, think when you do what, what we're all doing here, you try to be as gracious and kind as you can be, but there comes a point in time when you have to, you have to stand fast and say, look, we're wanting to warn you.

01:43:15

The church, we want to warn the body of Christ that this person is, as the Bible says, you need to know to mark a void.

01:43:22

Here's, here's the proof. Here's the receipts. They don't want to get that. I know my

01:43:27

Twitter's probably blowing up right now. Okay. Oh, trust me. And, you know, and, and I'll deal with it for the next week because like, oh, you touched the

01:43:36

Lord's anointed, you know? Yeah. You touched his anointed. Sorry, John. I mean. No, you're no, you're totally good.

01:43:43

I just started noticing in the chapters a trend because the chapter on sin and I get through all these quotes and I'm like, okay, well,

01:43:52

Keller doesn't really like the fact that God is just has a standard. We violate it and we're guilty.

01:44:00

And so God as a judge is kind of, that's, that's not something we should talk about too much. And then the, you know, chapter on hell, it's

01:44:06

God's not really responsible to send people there. He's not involved in the torturous aspects. It's we, we just choose to do this to ourselves.

01:44:13

Like, okay, well, he doesn't like the fact that God has wrath in that case. Right. So these are attributes he's downplaying.

01:44:19

But then when it comes to like the Trinity, he accepts this social Trinitarian idea that it's this love dance between the father, son, and the

01:44:28

Holy spirit. I kid you not. That's his, the way he frames it. And, um, what happened when we were dancing along and then the fall happened and that's when we lost the dance.

01:44:40

And part of Christianity is to return to the dance, to start dancing along with God again. It's really weird.

01:44:46

And I, I, I was just shocked as I was reading and I was listening to sermons of him.

01:44:52

I'm like, yeah, he did say that. Okay. Um, in that Celtic dance. Yeah.

01:44:58

Well, he doesn't say what kind of dance that's the thing too. It was like river dance. Let's all do the river dance thing.

01:45:04

I'd wonder, I mean, what would, what would he deal with and how would he deal with Romans nine specifically?

01:45:10

Let me just read from 13 and following. He says, just as it is written, Jacob, I have loved Esau. I have hated.

01:45:17

What shall we say then? Is there any unrighteousness with God? May it never be for.

01:45:22

He said to Moses, I have mercy on whom I'll have mercy. And I have compassion on whom I have compassion.

01:45:28

So then what does, uh, so then it does not depend on the one who wills or the one who runs, but on God who has mercy for the scripture says.

01:45:41

To Pharaoh for this very purpose. I raised you up in order to demonstrate my power in you, in order that my name might be proclaimed throughout the whole earth so that he may have mercy on whom he desires.

01:45:56

And he hardens who he desires. You will say then why does he still find fault for who resists his will on the contrary?

01:46:07

Who are you? Oh man, who answers back to God? Will the thing molded say to the molder?

01:46:14

Why did you make me like this? Or, you know, does the potter have the authority with the, with over the clay to make one lump with a vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable.

01:46:27

And what if God wanting to demonstrate his wrath, they read that again.

01:46:34

And what if God wanting to demonstrate his wrath and make his power known endured with much patience, vessels of wrath, having been prepared for destruction.

01:46:50

I mean, you know, it almost Tim Keller's Presbyterian, you would think he's going to come from a

01:46:57

Calvinistic perspective. And yet he would have trouble with, with that clear teaching because he doesn't like the fact that God is

01:47:06

God. He's wrathful. Yeah.

01:47:13

I don't know what else to say. You're, you're spot on. Absolutely. Right. Would, would he, I guess

01:47:20

I don't know the answer to this one. Would Tim Keller be juxtaposed to the, the, the concept of the wrath of God poured out on Christ on the cross?

01:47:32

Uh, go ahead. I think he would, the thing is, like I said, he has two positions and all these things.

01:47:37

So I think he could articulate it in an Orthodox fashion, and then he's going to try to articulate it to the postmoderns and he gets into this heretical stuff.

01:47:46

And so, um, I, I, you know, I don't think he has a problem with that. Like if you were to come and ask him,

01:47:53

Justin, he would probably give you the right answer. That's the part about Tim Keller that I think so many people find confusing and why, um,

01:48:02

I've just scratched my head about how he continues to operate in the PCA, but that's, I think how he does it.

01:48:08

Um, so that just reminds me of John 10. Yeah. Jesus says, yeah,

01:48:14

I'm the good shepherd. And you know, here, here comes all these guys that they know the wolves are there, but they're going to open the door up because they want the money.

01:48:25

You know, I'm not saying I disagree with Tim Keller. I don't support him.

01:48:31

I think he's probably more likely a heretic. Um, I think he's a false teacher at best, but I also think that he has opened the door up like so many other have because of the power and the position, the money, you know, things like that.

01:48:46

I, I don't know when you bring in, when you bring in, you know, atheistic socialism, uh, to destroy the church,

01:48:55

I don't know what else you can say. You know, that's, it's terrible. I mean, it's, it's, um, it, it pains me because I know so many people like, like Andrew said, you know, and I know

01:49:06

John, I know you've dealt with this. That will turn their back on you because you dare say something about their golden calf.

01:49:13

Well, what they'll do is they'll start trying to pull a bunch of Orthodox quotes, right? And they'll say, well, look,

01:49:18

Tim Keller said, you're saying he said this, but he said this over here. And it's like, well, I'm not saying he didn't,

01:49:24

I'm just saying, how do you reconcile it? And that's what they can't do. And they don't want to do. How do you reconcile what he said here with what he said there?

01:49:30

You just nailed it. They don't want to, right. They, they want, they, they hear something they like from Tim Keller and they want to believe it's true rather than say, you know, let

01:49:43

God be true in every man, a liar. I mean, we should be comparing to what God's word says.

01:49:49

And I think you're right. He's, he, he seems to, you know, you really nailed it. I think with he's duplicitous in the doublespeak, he changes the meanings based on who his audience is and, or he'll, he'll speak so vaguely that for those in his audience, they think he's saying what they believe.

01:50:12

And so they think he's Orthodox and the unbelievers think he's teaching social justice and no one really knows what he believes.

01:50:21

Cause he's just constantly talking out of both sides of his mouth. And this is what I think makes it so hard and why so many people, you know, get upset when we would speak negatively about Tim Keller because they think, no, he's

01:50:36

Orthodox. He's, he's spoken the truth. We've got two people in the side chat that are just, that are just going, going to town or, you know,

01:50:44

John, you have to give direct quotes for exactly what he said. Yeah. But the thing is, is if you, if you give a general discussion.

01:50:56

That's coming from Alexander, right? So it doesn't count. Alexander is saying, John, please give a direct quote for the dance.

01:51:02

I mean, I have a long paragraph here. I mean, I've given it on my podcast and I don't know. I mean, Alex, Alex, I was going to say go to his channel and subscribe and download all the quotes he wants.

01:51:14

Just go to Conversations That Matter. And then if you hit the, if you hit the subscribe button and then you, you know, you donate to help him out.

01:51:23

I mean, you guys are too kind. And Alex, don't, don't give us any excuse that you're a missionary and can't afford it.

01:51:32

You know, I, you know, there is one quote that I would like to read for you.

01:51:38

This isn't about the Trinity thing, but this I think is the key or the formula. He said this in Center Church.

01:51:45

He says, when he went to Manhattan, he says, I encountered a cultural allergy to the Christian concept of sin.

01:51:50

I found that I got the most traction with people. However, when I turned to the Bible's extensive teaching on idolatry, sin,

01:51:56

I explained is building your life's meaning on anything, even a good thing more than on God. Whatever else we build our life on will drive our passions and choices that end up enslaving us.

01:52:06

There's another quote. I have a reporter in USA Today asking him about his church, and he talks about the idea of branding and, you know, setting his church apart from these other churches that are in town.

01:52:20

And he says, let's see, self -centeredness is destroying peace and justice in the world, tearing the net of interwovenness, the fabric of humanity.

01:52:29

And he says, this is a rebrand of sin. He uses the word rebrand, self -centeredness that's destroying the peace and justice of the world.

01:52:36

So when the USA Today reporter comes, what sin? It's self -centeredness. It's destroying all the peace and justice.

01:52:43

You don't want that, right? We got to rebrand. And he says that when he's talking to,

01:52:49

I think someone might even, I'm not watching all the quotes, but someone put in the chat a quote of him that was sounding orthodox on this.

01:52:56

You have to, again, look at his audience and he's giving you his formula. He's telling you in center church, he's saying,

01:53:02

I'm communicating this to people in a way that's palatable, that's compelling, that they seem to get it more when

01:53:10

I say it this way, instead of the way the Bible says it. So right off the bat, it sounded like, okay, pragmatics.

01:53:17

I'm going to speak to whatever gets to people, not what God wants. So that right there tells you what his priority is.

01:53:26

Okay. The second thing is, ask yourself the question for those listening and watching, how could

01:53:33

Catholics and evangelicals get together and sign a document, Catholics and evangelicals together?

01:53:39

How could they get together and say, we believe the same things when in the core issues, it's mutually exclusive?

01:53:49

Oh, very simple. Because they didn't define their terms. They used vague things to just, so that they said, what can we say where we could get everybody to say, yes, we agree.

01:54:02

We just mean different things by it. Well, that's Tim Keller. Yeah. And Al Mohler.

01:54:10

Al Mohler. Yeah. Tim Keller's better at it than Al Mohler, I think, but. Yeah. I mean, yeah, go back and listen to on my

01:54:20

Rap Report podcast, it's R -E -P -P report. It's a play on my last name,

01:54:26

Rap Report, but go and listen to the two episodes I did on Al Mohler. I play him on his own words, complaining about, it was just so funny.

01:54:34

He did an episode complaining that there is a Roman Catholic politician in Canada.

01:54:42

Oh, I've heard this. Yeah. Yeah. And so I played this clip exposing how he's sitting there saying that a politician who's

01:54:50

Catholic, not even Christian, has to answer the question on homosexuality. He refused to answer.

01:54:56

And Mohler was saying, you can't have your cake and eat it too. And I pointed out at the same time

01:55:02

Mohler's doing this, there's an open letter to Beth Moore about her taking a stand on homosexuality or not, what's her stance.

01:55:12

And she's not Canadian. She's American. She's not a politician.

01:55:22

She's a Christian speaker. And she's not Catholic. She's Southern Baptist, or was at the time, like he is.

01:55:30

So if a Catholic politician who's Canadian has to answer, why does

01:55:36

Beth Moore get a pass? Oh, because she's SBC. This is like a pandemic, though, in evangelicalism, where they can get the credit for taking a bold stand where it doesn't risk them anything.

01:55:47

But when in their own backyard, they have the power to do something about it, they fail to do it because that'll actually make them risk their neck.

01:55:54

Oh, absolutely. And that's why the very next episode I did, I used his same quotes against him on his comments when he was doing the

01:56:05

Q &A at Shepard's conference, where he's like, oh, I stood up for social justice. Yeah, but not within the

01:56:11

SBC. That's the issue. Well, when you stand up and you say this on the liberal side, and we're talking about Tim Keller, but Albert Mueller has done the exact same thing so many times that you cannot get away from the fact that he's trying to cater to both audiences.

01:56:31

And Tim Keller is doing the same exact thing. Look, guys, I'll say this. John Piper has done the same thing for so many years.

01:56:37

It's not funny. Yes, he has. You know, I mean, anybody that would say, hey, we need to have a passion conference with every single bad teacher that you could get ahold of and bring them in and then put a little bit of a balance in there.

01:56:49

I'm sorry, you know, but that's geared towards our youth for the SBC. No, I wouldn't exactly mind doing that if we were condemning their teachings and preaching the gospel to them.

01:57:02

Not have a big sign that says, Jesus, speak to us in the back as Beth Moore is taking us through the

01:57:08

Matilda Vina. Look, I've said I'll speak anywhere.

01:57:14

I was invited to speak at the Flat Earth Convention. I don't know what that says about you.

01:57:20

I don't know why they thought so. Hey, they had people from all over the globe. I got an email asking me to speak at the

01:57:30

International Flat Earth Society. And why? You asked me to talk. And so I said, sure,

01:57:36

I would like to. I will. I'd be happy to come in and discuss why the earth is a sphere.

01:57:42

And I never heard back from them. I don't know why. Why did they even invite you? I don't know. I should have first asked, how do you hear about me?

01:57:50

You're right. Yeah, that's someone's misrepresenting you or maybe, I don't know.

01:57:55

That's weird. I don't know. But hey, I would have gone. I would have been, you know, I mean, look,

01:58:01

Matt Slick goes to, you know, debate, you know, Sinless Perfectionists. And I mean, he's at a conference.

01:58:07

They're all Sinless Perfectionists. I give credit to him. It's like, you know, he went right into the belly of the beast there.

01:58:14

It was like I watched that debate online and he literally turns to this woman like, are you telling me you think you've never sinned?

01:58:24

And she's like, no, because he said he sins every day. And they're like, there's like this gasp that you even,

01:58:31

I mean, it's so loud. You heard it through the online. And he just looked like, wait, you guys are telling me you think you never sinned?

01:58:40

So he goes, hang out with me for 10 minutes and I'll make you sin. I'm getting so angry.

01:58:48

So I got a couple of things that we've started here. Is this right?

01:58:53

Gerard Perry said that Keller was interviewed by Focus on the Family recently, and they made him out to be a

01:58:58

Christian guru on life. Well, Gerard, he comes on my channel sometimes.

01:59:04

And if he says that, it's generally true from everything I've seen. You know, here, hold on. Let me let me go back to the

01:59:10

AI, because here's the here's the other part that I didn't read from my AI when I when I looked up who

01:59:15

Tim Keller is. It says he is considered one of the most influential Christian pastors and theologians of the 21st century and has been featured on various media outlets such as The New York Times, CNN, The Wall Street Journal.

01:59:30

He continues to teach and speak at conferences, teaching at churches and seminars around the world.

01:59:37

So, yeah, you want to hear something funny? I forgot to mention I don't know if I forgot.

01:59:43

I didn't think it was significant. But back when I had a Twitter, I don't have a Twitter anymore. But when I did,

01:59:48

I actually interacted with Tim Keller. Him and I went back and forth for a while. Relevant Magazine did a whole piece on it.

01:59:54

And, you know, and this was in like twenty twenty, I think. And how do you get yourself into this stuff,

02:00:00

John? I was posting his Marxist quotes, the ones that people wanted to see. Where did he say that?

02:00:05

Well, I was posting quotes of it and I tagged him or something and he was responding and he tried to this is

02:00:12

I remember his whole angle was he tried to get he tried to say John Calvin was also supportive of the same, like he was a

02:00:19

Marxist or something. And James White, I remember, did a whole dividing line on it.

02:00:25

It blew up this whole thing. And it was just because I posted those two quotes I read for you on Karl Marx and he just had to explain them somehow.

02:00:34

So, yeah. Tim Keller is really big, surprisingly, even in the homeschool community.

02:00:41

I'm just saying because of his writings on parents, parenting. So he's really popular with us women.

02:00:47

You want something scary? He appeals. He's the most popular author in Brazil.

02:00:53

Christian author. Really? Because they translate his stuff. No, well,

02:00:59

I think Brazil is only one. It's probably a number of countries, but I happen to have some connections to Brazil.

02:01:05

And that's what I was told, was that, you know, because there's a Brazilian guy looking to translate my book because he said all this stuff's coming down.

02:01:13

And Tim Keller is the number one resource that even Brazilian Christians have access to.

02:01:20

And it's sad what's happening internationally because of people like Keller.

02:01:25

So. So, OK, John, John here is saying, I love conversations that matter.

02:01:33

So that's that's the clock commander, by the way, for our regulars. So let's go through some of the comments.

02:01:41

Gentlemen, I'm going to head out, let you guys continue on to Anthony time. All right. Yeah, well, we're going to we're going to close up here and just close up.

02:01:48

I just want to try and get some of these things quickly. I'm trying to look to see if any of these things are directly for John.

02:01:56

Yes, I look for. By the way, maybe you want to talk about this one.

02:02:02

Jay Gresham Machen book on Christianity and liberalism should be the required reading for every

02:02:07

Christian. I agree. What say you, John? I love the great Jay Gresham Machen stuff.

02:02:12

Yeah. Now, of course, he's canceled pretty much. I mean, he's he's getting there, but he's great. Yeah. All right.

02:02:19

So let's. OK, so this from earlier in the show, Ethan was said, how's the hate mail,

02:02:26

Andrew? Well, we don't have time to get through all the hate mail. So I may do that on a different show. I do that as a show just on that show.

02:02:34

And after this show, I might get more. All right. KT said the Bible doesn't teach either socialism or communism for us.

02:02:42

And that's something that I think is important for people to understand that when what you see is you'll see

02:02:49

Christians or at least professing Christians that try to argue that the

02:02:55

Bible teaches socialism, communism, definitely not communism, because communism, the core tenant is atheistic.

02:03:04

So but when you think of socialism, the key passage they always go to is

02:03:10

Acts chapter two, right? They sold all that they had to give to those that are need. There's a key thing when you see people that try to argue that the

02:03:18

Bible's teaching their socialism, the difference between what the Bible's saying and what socialism is, is this.

02:03:27

First off, you're having a historical narrative when you come to historical narratives. One thing you have to realize is historical narratives are not teaching what you should do, but explaining what did happen.

02:03:43

And so what actually happened was some people sold their own properties to give to those in need.

02:03:50

It's the same thing we saw with John Calvin in Geneva. As people got saved, they had a care to help people that needed help.

02:03:59

But notice the difference. What you had happen is Christians making the choice to do this.

02:04:07

That's different than the government coming in and forcing you to do this. And that's the difference.

02:04:12

Because what you see with socialism is this desire to make sure everybody gets equally.

02:04:18

But what really happens is it pushes, and this goes right back to what we were talking about in the very beginning of the program with Clifford, what they do with the controlled rent is to force everybody, force everyone down to an equal standard, meaning everybody gets nothing except the elites.

02:04:36

That is what socialism is. When they talk everyone getting equal,

02:04:42

Vice President Harris was just out saying that the American dream is that everybody's supposed to end at the same point.

02:04:53

Well, really? Then we're all president of the United States. There you go. Because if we're not all president of the

02:05:00

United States, we're not all ending in the same place. It's an impossible standard.

02:05:05

It's a stupid standard because it doesn't make any sense. Because everybody can't be ending at the same place because we'd all be

02:05:15

Elon Musk then. And then guess what? Now there's no money. Well, he's going to lose all his money anyway.

02:05:23

Yeah. All right. Anything else? Chris Honnold said, like Andy Stanley rebranding

02:05:31

Christianity, that is entirely disconnected from Scripture.

02:05:37

So with that, what I do want to do, and I wanted to do this earlier in the show, but I want to play something that I found on YouTube.

02:05:48

This is a YouTube short, and I'll have to admit that I might not be able to play this where you'll hear it too well, but it's

02:06:00

Andy. Hold on. This is the most recent clip. Yeah, so I'm going to play it because we won't be able to hear it.

02:06:08

But basically, he's got a clip of Andy Stanley basically justifying homosexuality.

02:06:15

I'm saying how, you know, we got to kind of be considerate to how homosexuals would feel.

02:06:21

But the issue there is he's ignoring their actual sin. Well, he's got a homosexual family and family, quote unquote, clarify that in his church as in leadership.

02:06:36

Yeah. So Facebook user here says, Tim Keller should run for political office.

02:06:41

Sounds like he'd do great with double speak and spin. He is a registered Democrat, by the way.

02:06:47

I don't know if you guys knew that. Yeah, I did. I'm not surprised with his, you know.

02:06:54

That's the party he'd run in, I guess. Yeah, would here. Helping the poor doesn't always mean giving them money.

02:07:01

Actually, that's a point so many people don't understand. You know, you want to really help someone who's poor or homeless.

02:07:10

You get them a job because if you give them money, guess what? Now you got to keep giving them money. It's exactly what

02:07:15

Clifford was saying in the beginning of the show. What the Democrats do is go, OK, well, we're just going to keep giving you money.

02:07:20

We're going to give you this subsidy and this subsidy, keep you down, keep you poor. Just keep voting for us.

02:07:25

It's it's a form of slavery that they're doing and they do it for votes.

02:07:31

And by the way, it was the Democrat Party that was for slavery. Now they're still for slavery, just a different kind.

02:07:40

But let's see, Julian said another another situation where the church is speaking of Tim Keller, another situation where the church tried to influence the culture and compromised.

02:07:52

You know, and, you know, where I think Tim Keller thinks he really he's really made of an impact.

02:08:00

You know, I'm going to go back to what you said, John, earlier, though, that if he's already radicalized before he ever comes to Christ or, quote, unquote, comes to Christ, he's already got that in his mindset.

02:08:13

Nothing's changed that. In fact, it's more radicalized now because he has a bigger platform and he's able to start a church and teach this stuff intermingled.

02:08:25

I think that that's that is that is his goal. And I think that is what his what he's doing is bringing that into the into the body of Christ.

02:08:35

And I think it's in every book and I think it's in everything he's doing to nuance it. So when he's teaching at, you know, the youth conferences or the family integrated church conferences or whatever else at the conference, he's going to bring that dogma or that mindset in.

02:08:52

I mean, see what you think about that. I know Trevor Loudon thought he was a left wing operative, that that was his purpose, and it was very self -conscious.

02:09:01

I don't know how self -conscious it is. I definitely believe that he's got an agenda.

02:09:07

He would think it's this sort of Kuyperian, we're going to transform the church into this organization of Christians that engage the culture well and contextualize the gospel and promote social justice.

02:09:28

And he thinks he may actually legitimately think this is all biblical and that he's doing a service.

02:09:35

But, you know, he's been corrected so many times on this.

02:09:40

I mean, even the fact that this book exists is a rebuke. And I haven't read all the book again.

02:09:48

Engaging with Keller, and it's out of print. So you've probably, if you find a copy, it's probably gonna be like 200 bucks.

02:09:54

But yeah, you have like, I think, seven different Presbyterian scholars or pastors that took different issues and then wrote about them.

02:10:04

And I haven't, in my studies of Keller, I haven't seen him seriously engage with any of the critiques.

02:10:12

I mean, he tries on Twitter sometimes, but it's all shields. It's smoke and mirrors.

02:10:18

It's hard to take a lot of his engagement seriously, like as if he's really after the truth and you're having a good faith discussion.

02:10:27

It's more he's after it. And this is me. I just so everyone knows this.

02:10:33

I don't have a source for this. This is just me putting a read on it. So this is my bias. But it seems to me like he's just protecting his legacy.

02:10:40

Like he just wants to protect all the things that he's poured his life into and built.

02:10:46

And he doesn't want someone coming in and pointing out, hey, that's actually what you built isn't as good as you think it is.

02:10:53

That's you posted a link here in the back. Do you want that shared on this?

02:11:00

Oh, yeah. Well, it was just there were some quotes from it. It's basically the chapter in if people want it for free, because I gave it to enemies within the church.

02:11:08

But on social justice goes to church that book in the back, there's an appendix on Tim Keller.

02:11:14

And it's I think, well, I don't know what it's called. I think it's just called Tim Keller and progressive evangelicalism.

02:11:23

So if you want, I'll post that on here so everybody can see it. So this is just a free version of that. If they just don't they don't want to buy the whole book.

02:11:29

They just want I want to see what Tim Keller was up to. Go buy the book, guys. He's done us a good service of putting us out here.

02:11:36

So Chris Honhold said this. And Chris is the one of the co -hosts of Voice of Reason Radio, another

02:11:43

Christian podcast community podcaster. But he says, when you deny the sufficiency of scripture, you run to whatever, quote, resource unquote, you will help you will help you appease the unregenerate crowd.

02:11:58

And that was a reference to to Tim Keller. Now, that's all the comments we had that were toward Keller.

02:12:07

We have some other comments here, um, because, you know, we've we've had an unusually large amount of angst,

02:12:16

I guess, in the chat tonight. Yeah, it's John Paul. We're talking.

02:12:21

I'm looking at some of it. Yeah. No, we're talking Tim Keller. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

02:12:27

What brought out all the Armenians tonight? Oh, yeah. And the anti -dispensationalists, because, man, they were going crazy.

02:12:35

OK, so we have one day. And so one day I'm going to say I want him to come in sometime when when when

02:12:41

I'm back on the show so we can have a discussion. He says, why did John Calvin want to behead a person in Geneva?

02:12:48

Because he was evil. He didn't want to behead anyone, actually. If you did any kind of study into the history, it was the law of the land.

02:12:57

And he did everything he could to save his friend. But his friend was teaching false teaching and there was a death penalty for it.

02:13:07

He tried to convince him to change his views. He refused. And so, you know,

02:13:14

Calvin being in the position he was followed the law. And, you know, whether he liked it or not, whether he thought that it was fair or not, he followed what the law said, which was his responsibility.

02:13:30

So when people have to say Calvin wanted to behead him or wanted him killed.

02:13:37

Yeah, I don't think Servetus was even beheaded, though, wasn't he burned? I don't think he was beheaded, but he was burned.

02:13:44

Yeah. And and so but but but Calvin didn't want that. It's clear if you if you end up reading the writings like the letters that that were written.

02:13:55

Um, so, um, he didn't have any authority to do anything. He was just an advisor,

02:14:01

I believe, if I'm not mistaken, as a pastor, he had no authority. Yeah, he had no but he but he had to, you know, he basically was on the on the,

02:14:10

I guess, an advisory board and had to had to sign what you know, like the question was, is he teaching false doctrine?

02:14:18

The answer was, yes, sure, sure. Yeah, right. So they're saying, see, he signed the death warrant.

02:14:24

And they're making as if it was only him signing the death warrant. Well, it's the law that's that said, you know, all that he did was say, this is what he's teaching.

02:14:33

That's false doctrine. The law took over. And you got to think about how many times that the John Calvin was actually.

02:14:42

I won't say an enemy of the state, but more more unwanted person in the state of Geneva.

02:14:48

He was more unwanted as far as his teaching is thinking. I mean, even when he was wanted at first, then he was unwanted and kicked out, then they wanted him back.

02:14:57

And then there were multiple times he was very unpopular when it came to the leadership, because he didn't follow their rules as much as they wanted.

02:15:07

And that's what people I don't understand when people throw that stuff out. It's like, just could you read church history is really a good thing to know.

02:15:17

Yeah, so the same guy says this, Jesus died for all men, however, many choose to reject him or simply suppress the truth to continue in their sin without him.

02:15:31

Well, boy, oh boy, people must be really strong because they're just stronger than God.

02:15:39

You know, when you're saying that, you know, God had to argue that is to say that God did everything.

02:15:47

And this is what, you know, Billy Graham used to preach. God did all he can.

02:15:54

Now it's up to you. Well, that makes you the sovereign. You know what's so bad about that idea, though?

02:16:00

You have 4000 plus years right at 4000 years before Christ. And Jesus died for every single one of those people that are in hell before Christ.

02:16:12

I mean, based on that theology, every single person that was ever born from Adam to Christ who died before Christ died on the cross, they are all in the hell, and he still died for him anyway.

02:16:28

Yeah, well, yeah. And then we had some people that don't like, Brad doesn't like dispensationalism,

02:16:35

I guess. He says, why did John Darby make so many fine distinctions and divide scripture where it shouldn't be divided?

02:16:42

And then he said, with all love, how many dispensationalist folks actually know the history of their system?

02:16:50

Well, I would ask the same question, Brad. How many covenant theologian folks realize that their covenant theology is coming from the

02:17:00

Catholic Church? This is a book from Michael Vlock called Dispensational Hermeneutics.

02:17:05

He's my professor, by the way, and he's been teaching quite a bit about all this stuff.

02:17:10

And he deals with every hermeneutical system. Go ahead.

02:17:16

Michael Vlock? Yeah. So this is the latest voice magazine. It's the publication of the

02:17:21

IFCA. Michael Vlock is one of the main ones who wrote in this. It's funny that that got brought up. I love it.

02:17:27

Sitting on my desk, and then I'm looking at it, and as you said, Michael Vlock, I'm looking at his picture, and I was like, oh. You both picked it up at the same time.

02:17:34

Yeah, I'm going to tell you what, brother. He blows my mind. I mean, I love him. He's such a tender—I want to point out something, just real quick.

02:17:45

I don't—John, I don't know, you know, as far as you, Dispensation, or wherever you're at, and I don't care. I love you.

02:17:52

I think the world of you. I think, you know, you're just such a great man of God that wants to care about the word and help people to defend the scripture.

02:18:00

And when I see people that come online and all they want to do is attack, they don't want to hear your position.

02:18:07

They don't want to hear your discussion. They don't want to hear what you have to say. All they want to do is attack. They don't do the work of getting into the depth of what we believe.

02:18:15

They take a shallow straw man and want to fight. It's like, I mean,

02:18:20

I'm reading through, you know, the five views of hermitics and, you know, for papers that I'm writing.

02:18:29

And I've got, you know, five different opposing views, and all of these men love each other.

02:18:35

They all respect one another. They're all concerned with, okay, you have your view.

02:18:40

I have my view. Praise God. Go ahead. Let's, we'll debate it. We don't hate each other, you know, and they're also gracious.

02:18:47

Guys, we got to stop this. You know, there are heretics and there are wolves and we got to realize that.

02:18:53

Okay. But to be shallow, to be a straw man type person, it doesn't work.

02:19:00

It's not, it's not godly. Yeah. So first off, let me, uh, we got, uh, uh,

02:19:07

Mary says grateful for John Harris, exclamation point, exclamation point. Would love to have him come speak in Houston, Texas.

02:19:16

Well, you know, there's a way you could do that. Um, if you could put, if you could put the banner back up because, uh, for his site, but cause you created it on the other one.

02:19:30

So just go to conversations that matter .org and that'd be a great place to contact

02:19:35

John so that you can get him to speak in Houston, Texas. So that would be my suggestion,

02:19:41

Mary, for what, what you could do. Um, so, uh, oh wait, sorry.

02:19:47

Uh, one day is saying a death penalty for false teaching question mark. He was burned in Calvin's Geneva.

02:19:53

Okay. Let's examine this first off. Um, now he, first he said he, he was hung.

02:19:59

Now he's burned. Um, but Calvin's I didn't. So Calvin owned it.

02:20:06

Calvin had final say when, when this is the thing that happens when people have to resort to, to, to things like that, to, to be like, oh, it's, oh, it's all him.

02:20:15

You're trying to blame someone for something he didn't actually do. If you actually look at the historical account, he didn't have the authority to stop it.

02:20:26

Okay. And yes, there is the look that when, when you had a Roman Catholic empire, they killed

02:20:32

Christians because they called it false teaching. And so, yes, false teaching.

02:20:37

When you have a church state as one, they can say that. So, uh, let me get back to this before, you know,

02:20:45

I was, I was starting with this and I didn't get to finish it. And so people are now questioning because, you know, someone wanted to praise his, his teacher there, his professor.

02:20:54

But so I made the comment, covenant, the Catholic church, and Doug is saying, asking with a question mark.

02:21:00

So here's the thing. So understand the history. You had a Roman Catholic church that, that taught a hermeneutical system that was based on spiritualizing the text of scripture, reading into the text of scripture, church tradition.

02:21:15

And what ended up happening. So, so when we talk about covenant theology, that's, that's really historically

02:21:21

Roman Catholic. What, what most people call covenant theology today is what we would refer to historically as reformed theology.

02:21:29

They took the Catholic church's teaching. They kept much of the hermeneutic, except for the reading into it, the church traditions, and they had a more reformed view, but they still had the similar hermeneutic of interpreting the scripture in a figurative spiritualized way.

02:21:51

So when I, that's what I meant by that, the more, the proper term. So it's not a slight on it.

02:21:56

It's, it's the, the reason I brought it up is to say someone's criticizing dispensationalism because of Darby or not knowing it's, it's history.

02:22:07

And yet the person saying that may not know the history of their own system.

02:22:14

So I say that to say, we don't judge the system based upon its founder or its history.

02:22:22

We, we judge it based upon its teaching. And so if I'm going to judge what we call reformed theology or what some refer to as covenantal theology and compared to dispensational theology,

02:22:34

I'm not going to compare it to what the Roman Catholic church teaches. I'm not going to compare it to, you know, what wackos that believe in covenantal theology.

02:22:45

I'm going to take it from the main core teachings. And so I would just say, if you're going to try to criticize, and I find it interesting, everyone that criticizes dispensationalism likes to pick on Darby because they never want to deal with what mainstream dispensationalism actually teaches today.

02:23:02

Yeah. Darby's not around and very few people believe what he, today, what he's teaching that teach dispensationalism.

02:23:09

So. Didn't Darby kill a guy though? No, I'm just kidding. Yeah, he burned him at the stake and then hung him.

02:23:16

That would justify everything. No, but you know, the point, look folks, Apologetics Live, what do we do?

02:23:22

Yeah, we take, we answer questions, we deal with apologetic things, but we also want to teach you how to do apologetics, teach you how to think a little better.

02:23:30

I'm not saying we're perfect, but the point is, is when you criticize a system of thinking that's outside of your own, don't do the straw man arguments.

02:23:42

Don't, you know, don't try to look for the quick win. Try to understand what their position is.

02:23:49

You know, when I wrote my book, What Do They Believe? Right? So I covered Judaism. That's my background.

02:23:54

So I understood it a bit, but not to the level of studying the Talmud that I did. Catholicism, Islam, Mormonism, Jehovah Witnesses.

02:24:04

But when I studied those, when I wrote those chapters, I went to authorities in each of those religions and I gave them those chapters to say, am

02:24:14

I teaching what is orthodox in your belief system? And not one of them said

02:24:20

I was wrong. That's what you need to be able to do. What you need to be able to do is say that I could debate the other side of an argument and do it accurately.

02:24:33

So I can walk in as I did once when I was preaching at a Presbyterian church and someone comes in, he sees me at the pulpit.

02:24:41

So after I get done preaching, he comes up to me. He's new. It's his first time there. And he says, I'm new here.

02:24:46

You know, I grew up in a Baptist church, but what would this church teach different than what I grew up with on baptism?

02:24:53

So I said, well, I'm a Baptist. So right away I'm explaining I don't believe what that church teaches. But then

02:24:58

I went on to explain Presbyterian baptism. And the pastor, when we went to lunch, he's like, you, a

02:25:03

Baptist, understand Presbyterian baptism better than anyone in my church. You have to be able to do that when you criticize the other side.

02:25:12

You have to be able to argue their argument. Because if you're just going to throw up straw man arguments, the person is going to just throw out what you're saying and just reject it.

02:25:24

And that's not what you want to do when you're doing apologetics. You want to be able to understand the other position.

02:25:33

And that's the thing we really got to work at when we do apologetics, which it takes something,

02:25:39

I'll be honest, it takes something many of us are not good at doing. You got to listen, right?

02:25:46

You got to listen to what the person is saying. Well, and that's one thing. We just want to say how we think they're wrong.

02:25:54

Yeah. And just to add to that, John, you came on here and you didn't go for an attack against Keller.

02:26:02

You used his words and not somebody else's words. You used his, you know, what is it that Keller has taught?

02:26:12

And instead of just saying, you know, and just going off on a tangent,

02:26:18

I think you tried to be very level -headed and very, very respectful. And I appreciate that.

02:26:23

But, you know, and I think that was to me, that's what we have to do, guys. You know, I don't care what you believe when it comes to if you're, you know, your hermeneutical system.

02:26:35

But like Andrew just said, you have to learn to read the best material of a covenant theologian, read the best material and best thinkers.

02:26:45

Go find out what is the absolute pinnacle of, you know, post -millennial teaching and then read it and say, okay, what can we affirm?

02:26:58

Because what I've figured out is every single one of the systems start out with a grammatical, historical, hermeneutic, and whether they stay with that or not, you know, that's their debate.

02:27:09

But everyone I've talked to, studied, and listened to, they say, well, this is where we got to start.

02:27:15

If they're biblical, they start from that point of view. They want to be consistent and they want to be honest with the text.

02:27:22

Now they take it from different points, but that doesn't make them our enemies. You know, what is the foundation?

02:27:28

It's the gospel. You know, and now that's where, you know, John comes in. We say, okay, well, does

02:27:35

Tim Keller or whoever else, do they hold to the gospel? Well, there's a problem here. Then there's a problem.

02:27:46

I've shared this before because, you know, when I was in seminary,

02:27:51

I had to take a class on dispensationalism, you know, and Justin, you know this because you now have one of my professors, right?

02:28:02

But we had to read both sides of an issue. And so, you know,

02:28:07

I remember reading, and I've told this story here before, but it's good for repetition. I'm reading a dispensationalist and he's saying, you know, the problem with covenantalists is that they believe in two ways of salvation, works in the old and a covenant works and grace in the new.

02:28:25

But we dispensationalists believe that ever since the fall, it's been by grace alone.

02:28:31

And I said, well, I must be dispensational because that's what I believe. So, but then I read a covenant theologian and he says the problem with dispensationalists is they believe in two ways of salvation, works in the old, and they quote the first copy of Schofield's reference notes and grace in the new.

02:28:49

But we covenantal theologians believe that ever since the fall, it's been by grace alone. And I went, wait a minute, they're both saying the same thing.

02:28:57

They don't take time to listen to one another. And so that becomes the issue.

02:29:04

So Doug is saying many church fathers also had a similar hermeneutic of spiritualizing the text.

02:29:10

I agree. I also agree that many of them had a literal interpretation for, in fact, the one that everyone credits for amillennialism, and that'd be

02:29:21

Augustine, Augustus, believed in a literal thousand years. He believed he was in it.

02:29:29

And that's why so many people can turn to Augustine, both dispensationalists or amillennialists, because he did believe in a literal thousand years.

02:29:37

He believed he was in it. And that was the church's position until about a thousand some

02:29:42

A .D. I think it was Pope Innocent II that changed that because they said, oops, it passed.

02:29:49

Melissa said, I was a dispy long time before I ever heard about Darby. I just read my

02:29:55

Bible, came to that view entirely on the scriptures. And so Doug says this.

02:30:02

He said, I agree with understanding the other side and debate from that side.

02:30:07

I tried to do it with Presbyterian friends on baptism in the spirit, in that spirit.

02:30:14

Would you all think that Keller is already a false teacher? So I'll start with you,

02:30:20

John. Your thoughts. Is Keller already a false teacher? I mean, I've spent a lot of time with Keller, so I don't expect everyone to jump to this conclusion, but I've come to that conclusion that there's a number of teachings that he that he advocates that are false.

02:30:38

And there's a method to it. It's not that there is a certain, I guess, there is an innovative new thing that he's trying to produce based on multiple false teachings.

02:30:56

So it's he's constructing something and that something, I think, is a different version of Christianity, ultimately.

02:31:04

That's my conclusion, because you end up tinkering with the attributes of God, and it's in multiple areas.

02:31:14

And I think that's probably the biggest thing for me, but it affects your soteriology, your ecclesiology, everything.

02:31:21

Yeah. And, you know, I think that I agree with you. I have said for a long time he's a false teacher, and people just torched me for it.

02:31:34

You know, you got to listen to him for a while with, you know, you know, Alex, I want to end with Alex's comment, but this comes in well with it.

02:31:43

Alex Wright, who actually is a dear brother, even if I give him a hard time, but he said also in regards to apologetics, you need to put yourself in the uncomfortable position where you could make mistakes.

02:32:00

Remember, if they are already unbelievers, they hate Christ. Well, in this case, what it is, is, you know, if you think

02:32:07

Keller's right, listen to what he's saying. Go back and listen to everything in light of what you've heard tonight.

02:32:14

Go and listen to Conversation of Matter and listen to all those episodes that John did and then re -listen in light of saying, could

02:32:22

I be wrong about Keller? All right, just do the homework. Don't just say

02:32:28

Keller's right. That's it. Like, because what if he's wrong? What if Keller is a false teacher?

02:32:34

And then you're promoting someone that would be against God and his word. That's not a position any of us want to be in, and we don't want to be in there accidentally just because we want to defend someone because we like something they said.

02:32:48

And that's usually what it is. These teachers say something that we liked, whatever it is, it helped us.

02:32:55

And because of that, we don't want to think they could ever do bad. I mean, look, in our camp, let's call it, if someone pointed out that they disagreed with MacArthur, John MacArthur, how many in our camp would be like, no, they just defend

02:33:10

MacArthur without even listening to what could be. Are there areas where I disagree with MacArthur?

02:33:16

Yes. I actually got in trouble with a church when I pointed out in, I came to a passage where I disagree with MacArthur's interpretation.

02:33:24

And I said it, you know, and so like, look, we have to be people of the book.

02:33:34

Right. Not people of the celebrity pastor. Right.

02:33:40

What matters more? Whose approval do we really want to have in the end?

02:33:46

Tim Keller's, John MacArthur's, or Jesus Christ? Amen. Amen.

02:33:52

That's the thing we need to think through. So, well, John, thanks for coming on again.

02:33:59

My pleasure. Go check out Conversations That Matter. Check out all the stuff John's doing.

02:34:04

Get his books. You're not going to go wrong by listening and reading what he's putting out.

02:34:12

I see Melissa said she was going to go like half an hour ago, but she just couldn't bring herself to leave, John. She couldn't do it.

02:34:17

She couldn't do it. I thought you would kick me out as I was just waiting to be booted out.

02:34:22

Oh, no, I'm not going to kick anyone out. It was good to hear all that.

02:34:28

So, yeah. Yeah. Thanks for coming on, Melissa. So, you know, next week,

02:34:35

I want to just give a plug. Next week, we're going to have Justin Peters will be on.

02:34:40

We're going to be dealing with this open letter to Justin Peters. Basically, what someone's criticizing is

02:34:46

Justin made a comment that it is not cessationists that have a low view of the

02:34:52

Holy Spirit, but the charismatics that do. And this person is saying that that is divisive and dividing the body of Christ and just really wrong of Justin to say it.

02:35:06

He thinks that it was wrong for Justin to say at the cessationist conference that we have men like John MacArthur and Vody Bokom, John Calvin, you know,

02:35:18

Jonathan Edwards, and they have guys like Benny Hinn and John Farm, Parker, you know, like all these other knuckleheads.

02:35:26

And he's like, that wasn't fair. Well, we're going to address that and take a look at why

02:35:33

Justin said those things and see if that was in context. So, you're not going to want to miss that because the guy who wrote it,

02:35:42

I have invited him on, so we'll see if he'll come on and, you know, and be able to talk directly with us.

02:35:49

And so I will say that there's probably a good chance I'm going to reveal something that we haven't made public before, neither

02:35:57

Justin nor I, but I think I will make it public. So I will have that for the next for next week.

02:36:04

And then after that, Anthony Silvestro will be,

02:36:10

I'm going to be out for several weeks, unfortunately. Well, not unfortunately for me, but for the listening audience.

02:36:19

But Anthony will be talking with a creationist, I think it's Andy McIntyre, if I'm not mistaken, or McIntosh.

02:36:26

I may have the name wrong. Sorry. McIntosh. McIntosh. Okay. And so he'll be on the 9th, and then

02:36:35

I will be in Tennessee at the Open Air Theology Conference on the 16th. So I won't be able to be here then.

02:36:42

And then I'm in Israel for two weeks. And then the week after that, I will be in Shepherd's Conference.

02:36:50

And then the following week, I will be flying to Indiana for a family conference out in Indiana.

02:36:55

So I won't be back until the 23rd, but what we got together,

02:37:01

Anthony and Justin and I, and what we've decided is the days, we know Justin's not going to be able to fill in.

02:37:08

And so in the weeks that we're not here, because we know that you guys don't like when we take off, what we're going to do is

02:37:15

I'm going to find some old shows and we're going to replay them. So we're going to do some reruns.

02:37:21

We think we could have the technology to make that work so that you guys could still tune in and we'll find something that you haven't seen for so long that you go, oh, this seems new.

02:37:30

Or maybe you're new to the show and you're going to go, oh, this seems new. And so that's what we plan to do.

02:37:38

So until next time, remember to strive to make today an eternal day for the glory of God. And we'll see you next week.