Dan Darling Wants You To Just Let it Happen (Liberal Takeover of Evangelicalism)

All right, well, welcome to another week. God willing, this will be a very productive week for you. I pray that you have a lot of success in whatever work you engage yourself in, that God will bless you, that'll keep you healthy and safe and all of that kind of thing.

Now, I wanted to, there's a few things I wanted to consider doing today. I'm gonna definitely talk about this Dan Darling article that he put out. He's very important article. This is Dan Darling over here.

And this is the guy, if you remember previous AD Roblox video, he got fired because the company he worked for said, we're not gonna take a stance on vaccines one way or the other. And he took a stand and he got fired for that.

And instantly he became a pagan sensation. This is the kind of Christian that we can tolerate, the kind of Christian that will do the things that we want him to do. So, he went on the circuit, went on MSNBC, talked to Joe Scarborough and he wrote articles for the Washington Post and things like that.

And so he kind of did his rounds. And now here he is again, and he's got a very urgent message for his fellow evangelicals. And I read it, a lot of people read it and I wanna make some comments on it.

And the first video I did about Dan Darling, I kind of went in, there's just no question. I think that maybe I went in maybe a little too much. I'm gonna leave it up for posterity, but I wanna take a different approach this time around.

Big Eva’s Urgent Call to Hold the Center

Because this article is a perfect example of the kind of thing that Big Eva is expert at. And they put out these urgent articles and essentially what it boils down to, if you want me to translate these many, many words, is that Dan Darling senses kind of a shifting in the wind.

He senses his influence and his relevance and people's respect for him declining. And he wants to do everything in his power to maintain status quo. That's what he really wants. And because people look at this man and they don't respect him at all because he went to MSNBC and he does what they require you to do if you're gonna be on their platforms.

And that is to trash or at least allow the host to trash fellow Christians. And that's what he did. And so he writes this article because he kind of senses a changing in the guard, a shifting of the wind.

I think Jonathan Lehman did the same thing recently as well. I wrote him a message about some of that criticism. He actually responded back. And we won't talk about it, it's private communications. But that's really what's going on here.

There's a shifting in the wind. And so he's desperate. So he puts out this article. And the whole point of this article, it's called The Urgent Task of Holding the Center. And he posted on his Twitter and he says, to hold the center, I believe, is to resist both the temptation towards theological compromise and to resist the temptation toward theological McCarthyism.

And so what he wants to do is he wants to put on two sides of the coin. You've got the theological liberals who are, they're kind of playing with unorthodox beliefs and stuff like that. And they're trying to move the church leftward.

And then you've got those fundamentalists that want to call everyone and their mother a heretic. And we need to hold the center. Like we can't compromise, but we can't be the fundamentalist either. And actually it's not terrible advice.

I think this is an example of what Christ says when he says about the Pharisees, he says, do everything they say, but don't do what they do. Do everything they say, what they teach you, but don't do what they do.

Now, you have to read that in context. He didn't actually mean do everything they teach because they taught some crazy stuff too, right? They taught the Corbin Law, for example, which Jesus points to them and says, look, you're overturning the law of God.

So he didn't mean everything. Not everything Dan Darling teaches is something you should follow. But just like the Pharisees, he has these extra teachings. And I went into that in my most previous video about him.

But then he has some decent teachings. And I think this is actually pretty decent in general because I think that this is very, very important. You know, well, let me rephrase that. This could be a very important message for someone to hear if they have this temptation towards saying that everyone that doesn't believe just like me is going to hell and they're a heretic and stuff like that.

If there was a plethora of people believing that, this would be an important article to write. But very similar to Big Eva, he writes the article that does not need to be written. Holding the center right now is not our big problem in evangelicalism.

Theological Triage and the Problem of False Urgency

See, this is the thing. It reminds me of the John Piper article about vaccines. Do you remember he wrote the very serious, he's very concerned John Piper article. He's probably weeping as he wrote it, you know, and all that about all the people that are being pressured not to get the vaccine that really know it's the right thing to do.

The right thing to do is to get the vaccine, but they got all this peer pressure to not get it. So they're not getting it. And I remember at the time I said, okay, well, if people like that existed, I guess this is good advice, but this is the opposite of the article that needs to be written because there's not a plethora of people like that.

There's a plethora of people that don't want to get the vaccine, that don't think it's the right thing to do, that are being peer pressured into doing it. And so the article, the existence of the article pretty much tells you all you need to know about what the point of the article is.

Now, I posted this on Gab and I got a decent amount of comments about it. And Eric's comment here, I think is exact, hits the nail right on the head. He says, Big Eva equals signal holding the center, but in reality go for theological compromise.

So basically what he's saying is this article, even though it claimed we got to hold that center against theological compromise, but we don't want to be fundamentalist either, even though it says that it sounds really good, really all it's doing is making room for progressive theological liberalism and unorthodoxy.

That's the whole goal. And I agree with Eric. And in fact, I think I can prove that that's the goal of this article. It's just trying to make room for the libs. Now, let me kind of make my case here. The first thing I want to say is he kind of goes through a few reasons why you should hold the center.

And one of the things he brings up is something, I guess that Al Mohler coin called theological triage. And the whole point is that you've got these first order beliefs that if you don't believe these first order beliefs, then you really can't be a Christian.

Like if you don't believe that God is a father, son, and Holy Spirit, then you're not a Christian. If you're not a Trinitarian, you're not a Christian. It's just that simple. So there's things like that.

There's things like justification by faith, by grace through faith. If you don't believe that, then you're not a Christian. If you don't believe Christ is God in flesh, then you're not a Christian. There's this first order beliefs, this kind of bare bones kind of stuff.

And then of course you got the second tier, you got the third tier. And Dan Darling makes this big case on theological triage. We need to make sure that we're dividing over the right things, right? We're dividing over the right things.

And of course that's true, but this is no revelation here. I mean, evangelicals understand this. We already do this. And what's so interesting is that he kind of makes a point about how some secondary issues you can divide over.

And he makes the point about baptism. Because I guess in his church, he's got a Baptist church. If you're a Presbyterian, if you believe that babies should be baptized, you cannot be a member of his church.

And a buddy of mine, Austin, made the point. He said, so basically you're okay dividing up the church in a way that even heaven doesn't divide up. So you admit Presbyterians can still make it to heaven, but at the same time, you're gonna bar them from the table because they're Presbyterian.

That seems a little weird. And I agree that seems a little weird. In fact, I'm a member of a Baptist church as a Presbyterian. That's not something that my pastor believes you can ban me from communion over, but to each his own.

So Dan Darling says, in my church, we don't allow Presbyterians to fellowship with us because they're evil Presbyterians, but we still believe Presbyterians can be saved. Well, thanks a lot. I appreciate that.

But the point is we already kind of, most churches aren't as fundy as you on that issue, for example, Dan. And so we already do this theological triage. Yes, there are some small fundamentalist churches out there, but that's the fringe, right?

That don't allow you to be a member if you don't believe the same eschatology that they do and stuff like that. But the thing is, in general, evangelicals, this is not an issue amongst evangelicals. We understand how to do theological triage.

I've got people that watch my channel that every time I open my mouth about Calvinism, every time I open my mouth about post-millennialism, the law of God and stuff like that, they message me and they say, yeah, you're kind of wacky on this stuff, but I still like your content.

And it's like, we get this. We understand theological triage, but Dan Darling wants to make it seem like, well, no, no, no, no, no. We don't understand theological triage because we've got this big problem of everyone saying, if you don't believe exactly like me, you're not saved.

And it's just, quite frankly, it's not the case at all. That's one of the things he kind of, he wants to put forward and make this seem very dire. You know, another thing that he says in the article, this is in the fourth point where he says that holding the center means that we need healthy discernment, which I think is hilarious because the last thing that big evil wants, at least what they seem to want, is healthy discernment.

He says this at the end of this section. It's so ridiculous. And by the way, guys, this is common. So don't, you know, I'm saying this ridiculous and I mean that in a technical sense, right? This is common though, this belief.

He says this. He says, rebuke like this should be accompanied with tears and sadness without gloating or self-righteousness. Now that sentence is half right. Of course, rebuke should never have self-righteousness or gloating, right?

Obviously, we get that. And, you know, look, this is an area that maybe arguably you'd say that I break, right? I shouldn't be self-righteous. People often will say when I criticize someone, so what, you don't sin?

And I don't know if I come across like as if I don't sin. I don't think I do because I regularly talk about my failures, but I don't want to ever come across self-righteous or gloating. But if you notice, how does he contrast self-righteous and gloating, right?

This is the sleight of hand of big evil, right? They say, you should have tears, you should be weeping, and you should be sad, not self-righteous and gloating. And I think the idea is, and this is a skilled writer, Dan Darling.

He's no slouch. What he's trying to do is say, if somebody gets on a video and he criticizes a public big evil servant, whatever, and he's not weeping and sad, like we pretend often to be, then he must be self-righteous and gloating.

And that's not a biblical standard. Look, I'm not happy when I see someone like John Piper put out a ridiculous statement about race or whatever like that. That makes me sad, but I'm not gonna be weeping on screen every time I turn my camera on.

Now, I have gotten emotional on camera before, but this standard, he see, if you're not weeping, then you must be gloating. If you're not sad on camera, then you must be self-righteous. He doesn't say that, but the way he uses rhetoric certainly seems to contrast those two things as if, well, one must be replaced with the other, and that's not the case.

You see, this article tries to make any kind of rebuke that's not sort of the kind of weeping, sort of super uber, hyper emotional rebuke. That's not relevant. That's not allowable and things like that.

There's a couple points from the article that I wanted to highlight. There's more I could say about this. I mean, honestly, a lot, excuse me, a lot of people were bringing up this idea. Well, at the end, he says, we need institutions that are committed to holding the center, and it's like the way he describes holding the center with the kind of limp-wristed rebukes and the kind of theological triage that kind of allows all this kind of stuff, and every institution's already doing this.

This is not the article we need right now, but here's where I wanted to kind of make my case that really the goal of this article is to make room for liberal sort of progressive ideas. So here's what he says.

He talks about, in the early parts of this article, he says there's biblical warrant for holding the center, and what he's trying to say is there's biblical warrant for not being a fundamentalist, you know, kind of heresy hunter, but also not compromising.

Listen to what he says is the biblical warrant. I found this so interesting, right? In the pastoral epistles, Paul warned his young protégé about, quote, anyone teaches false doctrine and does not agree with the sound teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ and with the teaching that promotes godliness over and over again.

In almost every letter, Paul is urging the people of God to, quote, stand firm and hold to the traditions you were taught, whether by what we said or what we wrote. Paul even uses words like fight. At the same time, Paul tells Titus, quote, slander no one, and, quote, reject a divisive person after the first and second warning, for you know that such a person has gone astray and is sinning.

He is self-condemned. In another place, he urged two feuding church people to reconcile, refusing to take a side or let them separate based on an issue that didn't rise to the level of orthodoxy. So listen to this for a moment.

So he says the biblical warrant for holding the center is the warnings that Paul says. You know, he says, you know, fight for the faith and reject a divisive person after the first and second warning.

This is what he says, right? And so that's his biblical warrant. And then he says that, you know, some people, you know, there's not a level of orthodoxy issue. He refuses to let certain people separate.

Christians are to give one another the benefit of the doubt and all that kind of stuff. Okay, so that's his warning, you know, biblical warrant for holding the center. In my opinion, this is very thin, in my opinion.

Now I agree with the premise that we shouldn't be heresy hunters in the sense of, you know, every single thing has to agree, otherwise they're a heretic, right? But this is very thin biblical warrant for holding the center.

But let's just take it at face value, right? Let's just take his warning here at face value. Think about what Dan Darling has been up to and people in his orbit have been up to. Like for one thing, one of the issues that's rampant, not only in the church, but also in the world is this issue of social justice and critical race theory, right?

And social justice and critical race theory, the whole point of these things is to be divisive. In other words, it divides people according to race, skin color, whatever you want to call it. And you analyze the power dynamics between the two groups and stuff like that.

It's divisive at its core, right? It's divisive at its core. And Dan Darling and his little buddies in his orbit want to make room for that in the church. And they say, well, that's a theological triage.

That's, you know, secondary, tertiary issue. But here Paul is saying, reject a divisive person after the first and second warning. And so you can see like, okay, Dan, so let's put your social justice and critical race theory presuppositions through this test here.

Are you being divisive by dividing the body of Christ according to skin color? The second thing is, what has Dan Darling himself been up to? He got on MSNBC, allowed the host to slander Christians as a bunch of idiots and buffoons and conspiracy theorists.

He didn't say jack about that. And then he himself said that getting the vaccine is a way to love your neighbor as yourself. In other words, he added to the law of God, a command, that's not there, to get the vaccine.

All while knowing there are many churches that are currently dividing communion according to vaccination status, mask status, and other things like that. They've got different services, whether you're vaxxed or not vaxxed, whether you're masked or not masked, maybe you're not even allowed at church.

These are the issues of the day, social justice and vaccination discrimination, right? And in both of those things, what is Dan Darling doing? He's dividing, at least he's supporting dividing the body of Christ according to skin color or vaccination status.

And here he is saying, well, that's obvious. I mean, obviously I don't think he's trying to be a hypocrite here. He's saying that's not something you should divide over. That's a secondary tertiary issue, even as he himself is dividing over it.

He would not want to take criticism or he wouldn't want to take angry rhetoric or he wouldn't want someone to be a McCarthyist against that stuff. And yet he himself is one that is dividing the church like a pizza according to different statuses.

And Paul here would say, even by his own standard, Paul here would say, warn him once, warn him twice, and have nothing more to do with him. You can't tell, so here's the point, right? Obviously Dan Darling doesn't think he's breaking his own principles here of holding the center by being okay with telling Christians that they're in sin if they do not get the vaccine.

And by being okay, by dividing up the body of Christ according to skin color to see if the power dynamics are acceptable to Abram Kinney X, right? So he obviously doesn't think there's any issue with that.

And so therefore, I think that proves that this, the whole point of this article is to get you to stop criticizing him, even as he's making room for unorthodox liberal and progressive beliefs inside the church.

That's the point of this article. So I think that Eric here, when he says, Big Eva equals signal center, but go for theological compromise, I think in the person of Dan Darling, you can see that because here he is urgently telling you to hold the center as he is constantly marching leftward again and again and again.

You see, this is the point. It never actually goes the opposite way, right? Like it doesn't actually, like he would never write this article if people were bringing unorthodox sort of more faithful, unorthodox more faithful, it makes no sense, unorthodox opinions on the right.

So in other words, here's what I mean. If our big problem in the church right now that was dividing up the church was that we were getting a lot of anti, I don't know, Latino or anti, whatever it could be, beliefs in the church, right?

Black, Jew, beliefs in the church. And that was a big problem. And it was dividing up the church and the liberals over here were like, oh, we need more orthodoxy over here because you don't allow Jews into the assembly.

That would be wrong if you didn't allow Jews who converted to Christ into the assembly. Let's say someone was doing that, right? An issue that they put more on the right wing. I'm not saying it is a right wing issue.

I'm just saying that's what they would say. Would he write the article? We urgently need to hold the center. No, he would never do that. He only writes the article when he's trying to make room for more liberal interpretations, when he wants to make room for the sexual ethics of the liberals.

Well, you know, maybe it's okay if I desire, you know, another man, as long as I don't go through with it. I mean, you know, and then it'll make room for, oh, maybe we got a third way for abortion. You know, the mother's a victim by after all.

And, you know, maybe, you know, look, maybe there's a better way to accomplish the end of abortion instead of banning it. Maybe we should just, you know, more welfare. Yeah, like stuff like that. That's the only way Big Eva writes an article like this.

It's never going to be written to make room for people like Kinnis, for example, right? Kinnis, for example, they often will say, you know, well, the Kinnis, there's a lot of Kinnis out there. And it's like, well, there's really not a lot of Kinnis out there, but let's say that was a big problem in the church.

A lot of Kinnis thought was coming into the church and churches were banning, you know, interracial marriages, whatever it was, right? Let's just say that. Would Dan Darling ever tell you urgently need to hold the center with these brothers and sisters in Christ?

He wouldn't even dream about writing such an article. And so the point is that this article is not terrible. It's not. It didn't need to be written right now because we already do all this stuff, but it's not terrible.

And I think this is an example of doing what Dan Darling says. You don't want to be that heresy hunter that requires everyone to believe all the same things that you do in order to be saved, because obviously that's not correct.

You also don't want to be the theologically compromised individual, but the problem is that there's no balance here. He kind of tries to make it like these are two equal mistakes that people are making right now.

That is simply not the case. There are very few people that believe that you have to believe everything the same is made to be saved. There are some, but there are very few. And probably the people that Dan Darling has in mind don't fall into that category.

Like he probably thinks Protestia falls into that category, right? Oh, those evil, J .D. Hall is just an evil person. Look, I've spoken to J .D. Hall before, and he's against what I believe about theonomy.

He's against certain things. And guess what? We can still be friends. He might think I'm acting like an idiot sometimes, but we can still be friends and we're still saved and all this kind of stuff, and that's wonderful.

So there's very few people that fall into this category, but there is a mountain of people, a mountain of people that fall into the category of trying to compromise with the teachings of Satan into the church.

There's tons of those people. So as urgent as you might think the task is, Dan Darling, let's not pretend like this is an equal kind of thing, because you need to clean your own liberal house before you start talking about, oh, you criticized me wrong.

I didn't see any tears. You're not gonna see any tears in this video, Dan, because I'm serious right now. It does make me sad that this is a problem that is just rampant amongst so many people that I've gotten so much value from their books.

Before, I've never read one of your books, but I'm sure that at the time when I was reading Matt Chandler and Tim Keller, I probably would have loved your books, right? So it makes me sad that these people are compromising in the ways that they are.

But the fact is they are, makes me sad. It also makes me very angry because you're lying about the Lord of glory regularly, and you're teaching wrongly about the Lord of glory, regularly, and not just in ways that I just disagree with, but it does, you know, we can still be friends.

Like for example, you're a Baptist, I'm a Presby. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about ways that divide the assembly of Jesus Christ that he cares so much about that he gave his life for. You're dividing that up like a pizza and trying to make it seem like it's holy.

It's not. And then worst of all, Dan, you go to the pagans and allow that scumbag Joe Scarborough to just drag Christians through the mud, making the, oh, they're just idiots. What is it, Dan, about Christians that makes them so stupid?

And stuff like that. And you don't say anything about it. Here's what you say. You say, oh, well, there's some good news. Finally, they're getting the vax according to the law of God. Dan, that makes me sad, but it also pisses me off.

And so, you know, I, you know, I'm not gonna cry right now, Dan. You should still heed my words because this kind of garbage that you do, where you pretend to put this very wise article out, but you don't do any of it yourself.

It's just like the Pharisees. It's just like the Pharisees. Oh, you know, hold the center and then go on MSNBC and just tell every Christian that's not getting the vaccine that they hate Jesus and they hate grandma.

Oh, I didn't say that, Adam. Yes, you did. When you said it was love your neighbor as yourself, what does Jesus say? If you abide in my love, you will do what I say. And when you say it's love your neighbor as yourself, you're saying that Jesus would have taught to get the vaccine.

Therefore, if you don't get the vaccine, I guess you just hate Christ. That's the message that MSNBC wanted you to put out there and you did it like a dutiful little servant and that pisses me off. So anyway, I hope you found this video helpful.

God bless.