TGC Debates Wokeness, Jon Reacts

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Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris. It is a beautiful day in upstate New York. It could not ask for a better day as far as the weather.

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And I just came in actually from weed whacking. I've been researching some things this morning and I just,

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I couldn't do it. They have a window here and I kept looking outside and I spent like two hours trying to find a source

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I couldn't find. I said, that's it. I'm going outside, I'm doing something out there. And while I was out there, I put on my headphones and my earmuffs and I had previously this morning, someone reached out to me and say, did you see what

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TGC put out there, the Gospel Coalition? And I hadn't, and it was a debate on the woke church.

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In fact, the question being debated was, is woke church a stepping stone to theological compromise?

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And I had put out a video. I don't think I referenced it in the podcast. I had just talked about it.

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Maybe I did talk about it in the podcast. I teased this video from AD Robles where he makes some predictions about this debate series that Gospel Coalition is putting on.

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And he said that basically, he thinks that these debates in general aren't not gonna be framed properly.

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And I think he was right on with this one. I mean, that's not even a great question. The question is, is woke church a compromise?

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Not whether it's a stepping stone. So that kind of even cushions it a bit. It makes it, it's softer.

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So it's not as bad if it's just a stepping stone. Secondly, he said though that he thought that the debates weren't gonna be serious.

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And I think that's true. This one definitely came across to me as not a serious debate. I don't even think it qualifies as a debate.

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There wasn't a debate format. You had two people making a presentation and then you have someone who's just asking them questions.

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There's not an opportunity for a rebuttal and asking questions of one another in cross -examination.

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There wasn't a closing statement. It was just, it was short. It was some opening statements and then just some discussion between a moderator.

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And the purpose AD said for these, we're gonna be the defend the gospel coalition, to defend Big Eva, to show that really the problem's not in here, it's out there.

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We don't have compromise here. And that's really what this did, in my opinion. After you listen to it, you think, okay, well, the people in Big Eva that are accused of pushing this are falsely accused.

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And the real issue is out there. And if the church has any problems, if gospel coalition, the people who would read that have any problems, it's that they don't lament probably enough.

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They're not, especially the older ones, they're just not as repentant as they need to be when it comes to racism and treating the

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LGBT people wrong. And that, so I think it served the purpose AD said it would serve, which was sad to me.

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And the guy they had debating, and I don't wanna, cause I don't know whether or not this was, if he was complicit in this or if he was being used or if he just,

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I don't know, it's weird. And I'll show you the opening statement. And he says a few things that are similar to this opening statement throughout the debate that are just weird.

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But he seems to be aware of the fact that he is not in the same category as Rebecca McLaughlin.

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His name is Sean DeMars and he's a pastor. And let me just show you what he says to begin this whole thing.

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This is what Sean DeMars says. So allow me to begin by doing what

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I do best, embarrassing myself. I'm being completely serious when I say that I have no idea why

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I'm here. I've not written extensively on the subject of wokeness. I'm not part of any organization fighting on the front lines of the woke wars.

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I'm not in any Twitter spats or Facebook beefs over this stuff because I'm not on Twitter or Facebook.

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Moreover, I'm not a subject matter expert in the field of critical theory, which I'm just gonna be using synonymously with wokeness.

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I'm not a subject matter expert in any field related to any kind of critical studies. And to be honest with you,

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I'm not really any kind of expert at all. I don't have a PhD, unlike my interlocutor here who has a

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PhD from Cambridge, which is in England. I don't have a seminary degree.

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I don't have a Bible college degree. I don't have a high school diploma, but I am a pastor, which means that I've had to reckon with this.

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I've had to think through it. I've had to think about how the gospel applies to this stuff in my local church.

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Okay, that is, you just wanna just give the award for winning to Rebecca McLaughlin at that point.

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So you don't, I know you didn't say anything yet, but you just got the best reason to not listen to Pastor Sean here from his opening statement that he's just not qualified, but he's a pastor.

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That's what he's got. And the thing is, I think it's fun. If you're a pastor and you've thought through this, then that's great.

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And maybe you can be capable, but there are people who are pastors who have written on this.

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There are people who are in academia who have written on this and have books published. And why aren't they there?

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It's a weird thing to me to have the representative of the other side be someone who doesn't really have any claim.

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How did he get chosen? What was the process for thinking this is the guy that we need? And furthermore, the statement you heard him make, well, she's from England.

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You hear a lot of remarks like that throughout this whole thing. He references movies,

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I think twice, which is fine. It's not wrong. It's just, he's a fish out of water though. You have, this is supposed to be an intellectual debate on woke church and then broadly speaking, critical theory, social justice.

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And it's like a youth pastor trying to debate a professor. That's what it feels like.

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And it just seems mismatched. It seems lopsided. It seems like, why did you pick that guy to be the representative of the people who are critical of social justice?

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So he goes on from there and he talks about the definition for social, well, it's not social justice, for wokeness.

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It's kind of convoluted. It's kind of confusing. He doesn't do a great job articulating it, in my opinion.

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He does okay, but he doesn't go for the jugular then on why this is a threat. He talks about syncretism a little bit, how these ideas from the world can syncretize with at least that possibility exists, but he doesn't tell you where or who is doing the syncretizing.

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And what that looks like in the church. He doesn't talk about the false gospel of merging categories of law with grace.

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He doesn't talk about justice being turned on its head and how that's a threat to the gospel as well, because then you put

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God in the position of not being a just God. He doesn't grant salvation to everyone, but yet things are supposed to be equitable and God's not equitable.

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He doesn't talk about, he mentioned standpoint theory. He kind of in passing mentions postmodernism, but he doesn't really talk about how that's a threat directly to objective truth upon which the idea of our doctrines of revelation and inspiration and inerrancy and sufficiency of scripture upon which all of these things rest.

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He doesn't go there. He just, so they don't get down to the root issues involved. And there's more that could be said, but he doesn't go into that stuff really.

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It's more surface level. It's more like it can cause people to partner with some bad things we all know are bad.

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Like we shouldn't be affirming the LGBTQ agenda and everything that they want, which

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I mean, Gospel Coalition is, I would say that they've been soft peddling like same sex attraction and stuff, but they would agree with that.

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Like we don't want to go beyond what clearly is designated in the Bible as like transgenderism.

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They would say like that's clearly there's male and female. Yeah, I know there's soft peddling of some weird things of gender dysphoria and stuff here and there.

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There's little weird sparks of that, but they're not gonna come out on the record and say that.

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So he doesn't, his critique is not a very hard hitting critique. It doesn't go to the heart of what the

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Gospel Coalition or Big Eva, meaning the evangelical industrial complex, meaning the people who have a platforming in evangelical circles.

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It doesn't get to the heart of what they've been doing and what's been happening in those institutions. And so, and then let's just skip ahead because it's so much of this can be summarized and it's just not, in my opinion, that interesting.

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But let me get to, I believe this is, this is the later part of his opening remarks.

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Listen to what Pastor Sean here says about conservatives. And so he's supposed to be arguing against wokeness.

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What does he say about those who have opposed wokeness? So you'd think the people he's representing. Also unity, there is an uptick in anger, shame, confusion, enmity, strife, jealousy, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, factions, and envy.

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Don't even get me started on the way that some of my conservative brothers and sisters have failed to appropriately,

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Christianly, respond to this threat and have only made it worse. So that's just, when

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I heard that, I was like, that's exactly what I would expect from the person representing the conservatives. They're going to scold their side for being too mean about this.

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And they're not gonna give specifics, but they're just gonna scold them. And so you have scolding from not just Rebecca McLaughlin, but you have it from Pastor Sean DeMars.

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And so that's the purpose, I think, that this whole thing serves.

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It really does, it rains on those people who,

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I mean, he's taking pot shots. He's talking about people who would create division within the church by introducing unbiblical things, but he doesn't get specific.

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And he kind of has this equal attention, this equal problem with... It's that old thing that I saw in the recent book that we went through on this podcast that T4G was giving out by Isaac Adams.

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It's the same thing that we've seen in other Gospel Coalition articles.

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The Thaddeus Williams book, I saw this to some extent. It is kind of like really overemphasizing the problem is the rhetoric.

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The problem is how mean we are when we communicate with one another and we just don't treat each other well.

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Well, yeah, I mean, that can happen, but is that the root issue? Is that what's causing the division? It's not.

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The division is being caused because people are in diametrical opposition to one another. The division is being caused because there's actual false teaching that's entered into the church.

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And those who are the dividers are the ones that are responsible. Those who are responsible for the division are the ones bringing the false teaching.

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It's never the people who are trying to hold onto orthodoxy. They're not the ones responsible. So this is the emphasis, and it continues.

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There's more statements like this that are made. And then you have Rebecca McLaughlin giving her statement, and basically she shames the other side.

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In fact, she spends less time describing what wokeness is than Pastor Sean. Pastor Sean gives kind of a description and he gets into more critical theory and what this accomplishes.

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And Rebecca McLaughlin basically just says that, well, it's not the same as critical theory because it just means being aware of our history, being aware of the way that minorities have been mistreated.

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And that's all that wokeness is. That's never all that wokeness was. That's a mischaracterization.

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Wokeness was always looking at the world through these new set of glasses, with these new set of assumptions that see systemic racism or oppression of other kinds.

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It started with racism. In every institution, it's the ideology thing.

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It's adopting that ideology where you just flatten everything into connecting it to oppression. And then when you become aware of that, then when you're woke, you do something.

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You become an activist to try to totally revolutionize society. That's what wokeness has always been.

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That's what you get when you read woke church. It's not like there haven't been things published on this. It's not like there wasn't a book written by Eric Mason applying this to evangelicalism.

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They don't even mention Eric Mason though in this entire thing. And there's a lot to talk about with Eric Mason. He says in his book, he says that the church should be looking to these secular organizations for how to apply the gospel even.

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It's total false teaching, and yet it's not even mentioned. It's just weird to me.

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Let me just go to a few little clips here. So Rebecca McLaughlin, here's I think the heart of what

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Rebecca McLaughlin's saying. I disagree that we are, but I believe that if we look at the history of our forebears in the church, we will find a history of profound theological compromise when it comes to questions of race.

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We will find a history of slavery, a history of segregation, a history of explicit racial prejudice and discrimination built into our legal systems.

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And most tragically, we will find a history of white

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Christians who look and sound like me being deeply complicit in this.

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Let me skip ahead just a little bit here. I'm gonna just give you a few, she goes along these lines for a while. All white elementary school, while hundreds of white parents shouted racial slurs at her, issued death threats against her.

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And while she, God bless her heart, prayed for their forgiveness because that's what she'd been raised by her Christian parents to do.

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You might say, I wasn't there, but you know what? Our parents were, our grandparents were, our great -grandparents were.

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If you like me are a white evangelical, this is our tribe. And then she uses that to say that white evangelicals gotta repent of this, need to repent of this.

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Bring us into a place where we can actually learn from what the scriptures are telling us and where we can in the right ways repent.

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It should be second nature to us as Christians to repent and to believe.

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That is how we come to Jesus in the first place. And yet we find it so hard to do when it comes to the history of our tribe.

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So that is the crux of the argument. Your grandparents did some bad things. Your dad and your mom did some bad things.

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You're guilty for those things and you need to repent. And so what she does is she gives, she sets up, here's the analysis.

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Here's the expectation. You must believe that this is who you are as a result of your parents' and grandparents' supposed complicity in these things.

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And because of that, you today are to sit in that guilt, to lament.

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Now, she doesn't go as far as to say and do reparations and defund the police and take down a monument.

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And she doesn't do that, right? But we know that this kind of analysis just leads to that. Because if Christ isn't enough to assuage that guilt, then, and you gotta sit there and lament, you're gonna look for ways to get rid of the guilt.

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And you're gonna go towards doing some penance of some kind. And it's gonna be redistribution, whether it's money or resources, or it's just privilege.

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We gotta diversify our elder board. It's gonna be those kinds of things. And so that's what she's doing.

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This is a core of the social justice arguments in the church. I think she expresses it well, but it's a flawed argument. And it needs to be hit out of the park and say, look, what you're saying is absolutely wrong.

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It is out of step with biblical teaching. Even if what you're saying is all true, which I would disagree with that.

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But even if what you're saying is all true, then it doesn't mean that just because you're white today, you just bear the brunt of all this.

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Think about it this way. All right, let me just give you a few examples to apply her logic to other people groups.

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If you're black, are you then guilty of what your ancestors have done?

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What have my ancestors done? Well, someone had to sell your ancestors into slavery somewhere along the line.

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That would have been other people in Africa. That had to have taken place somewhere along the line. So does that mean that, and those people were black, so you're black, therefore you must bear the brunt of that.

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How about some of the pagan religions? I just saw yesterday an article.

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They found a mass grave in Mexico. I think it was probably a Aztec ritualistic cleansing ritual of some kind where they decapitated 1 ,000 women.

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They just found all these dead decapitated skeletons. When Western peoples were coming to these areas that they had never been to before, and they're watching some of the things that are happening, they would use terms like they're savages, because that's what they would have thought in their minds.

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Are your ancestors, if you're Hispanic or you have blood from the Aztecs in you, I mean, are you just now, do you need to do penance for that?

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Is that something now that that guilt is upon you? Every people group has something like this. So what is the determining factor as to whether or not you need to lament and spend time lamenting and have places on the calendar where you just spend the day or the week or the month lamenting about what you've done or your ancestors have done?

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That's the crux of this. The other thing, though, I thought about too is just that historically, this bothers me, that every time this is brought up,

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I've never seen, in evangelicalism, a discussion as to why there was segregation, why there was slavery, why it couldn't be ended in an immediate way.

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The assumption seems to always be that it's just hatred for minorities, and there was an unwillingness to end it because they just hated minorities somehow and wanted to use them.

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And segregation's the same thing, it was in place because they just hated minorities. And there's a kernel of truth to some of this.

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There was hatred, there was ethnic partiality and stuff like that. But there's also something else that's going on that's bigger, there's a number of factors that are bigger.

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For instance, we have a modern state today that you can pass a law and you can change everything. You have court cases now that can change everything overnight.

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That's why we're dealing with this Roe v. Wade thing. You didn't have that in a decentralized form of government that existed during the time of American slavery.

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In fact, the people that wanted to end it had to think about progressive ways to end it. They knew if you ended it immediately, you'd crash the economy.

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It wouldn't be good for the slaves. They lacked the responsibility necessary for self -government. They knew that it was the society that existed at that time would not have accepted them.

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And so the Western territories were a better place to put them. But the Republican Party, one of the Western territories for free white labor, they didn't want black people there.

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So that created a problem. And there was no plan to emancipate while integrating into society and compensating the masters who owned the labor of these slaves.

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So you have these complexities that never get discussed. It's just assumed, well, we're just evil. It's just sinful.

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That's all it was. That's why they lacked the moral fortitude to end this institution. When in reality, there was a whole lot of people that wanted to end it, and they didn't know exactly how to go about doing it because it formed organically, not through the coercion of a modern state.

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When it comes to segregation, you don't hear about, all you hear is it was just hate. It was hate.

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But I was reading just the other day a poll from I think in 1967 or maybe it was 1969.

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Black people were just as against interracial marriage as white people were.

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I thought that was interesting. So what this means is it was more than we just wanna create a system to benefit white people and threaten everyone else, oppress them somehow.

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There was something else going on in this. There was assumptions that existed that don't exist now. Assumptions related to your responsibility and the identity conferred by your racial group.

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And I'm sure, and it goes beyond that, I'm sure. I mean, we had dueling even 150 years ago.

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There were still some places where dueling would happen, where you would defend the honor of your family.

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There was a sense of responsibility that existed then that doesn't exist today, and a sense in which your identity was shaped by your people, including the racial ethnic makeup that just doesn't exist today.

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And it's not for the purpose of this podcast to get into all that. But the assumption, all I'm pointing out is the assumption is always,

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I can't think of an exception. It's always that the past is a horrible place that was in which it was a regular, not just common, not just even regular, but it was fundamental is what it was.

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It was fundamental and definitive that everything was based upon the oppression of minorities, that that was the whole intent, the whole purpose, and your grandparents are just totally guilty.

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I don't care if they were farming out in the middle of nowhere, they're guilty. I mean, one of the things she brings up is a lynching.

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And she says, your grandparents and your parents, they would have gone to that lynching. They would have gone for the Sunday lynching and had their picnic.

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And well, it's like, did your grandparents do that? I mean, mine didn't, not that I'm aware of. They were too far out in the country to even do anything like that.

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The places that probably did happen, it would have been seen, I mean, this seems barbaric today, but it would have been seen as a public spectacle to teach lessons to everyone, including children, that you shouldn't do what this person did or this will happen to you.

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It was a deterrent. And so it was seen as a way to train children and as a reminder to people of don't steal, don't do whatever this person did or else you're gonna get this kind of punishment.

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Don't murder, whatever. So, and in the cases where there was unjustified, illegal lynchings of minorities for horrible reasons, which did happen, if your grandparents were involved in that kind of thing, which maybe some of you in this audience do have grandparents that were involved, it doesn't mean that you're guilty for what your grandparents did.

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I'm sorry. We're called to honor our parents. We can look at what they did and we can honor the things that we can honor, but it doesn't mean that we take all the bad things that they participated in and then we just sit in the guilt of it and we use that as the defining thing that defines even who we are today and we bear the guilt of it and we have to do something to amend it.

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No, I'm sorry. The Bible clearly teaches the sins of the parents. So even best case scenario here for Rebecca McLaughlin, if all these things are all true, which

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I think it's more complex than that, as I've said, but even if the whole picture she's painting is all true, all that means is at the end of the day that, okay, let's not do that again.

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Are the Egyptians, the Coptic churches supposed to be just having their time of lament for what they did to the

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Jews? And every group would have a reason to do this. I mean, are the Anglicans gonna apologize to my

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Puritan forefathers? I mean, I have a conflict, I guess, in myself since I have people on both sides of the

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Civil War. Is the Northern side of my family supposed to apologize to the

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Southern side of my family for burning their homes and invading them and stuff like that?

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Or vice versa? How do you wanna cut this? How long do you want to, because you're gonna be doing this for the rest of your life, and you're gonna cut the pie so many different directions, you're gonna slice it so many different ways that you're gonna be just apologizing to all kinds of people groups for all kinds of things.

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That's the whole problem with this. And rather than hit it out of the park and say this isn't biblical, that Jesus has taken on the sin that I am complicit in, that I do repent for, but the sin that I haven't done

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I don't need to repent for, this is what we get. Listen to this. I just wanna start,

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Rebecca, by saying I'm so thankful for you. I'm so thankful for your ministry, for your writing. I agree so much with what you said up there.

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And I know that that's the heart of this whole dialogue is to show that we're really on the same team and there's just a variation of difference, but I felt it as I was listening to you.

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So I just love you and I'm so thankful for you. That's the heart of this whole dialogue. That's the heart of it.

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And I think that's exactly what AD said when he was predicting what would happen with these quote unquote debates. This isn't a debate.

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This is a session to just, well, you heard it right there, to show that we're really on the same page, but we're not, that's the whole problem.

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We're not on the same page. There's false teaching that's coming in. In fact, you just heard some false teaching. How about you correct it?

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But it's instead this like great appreciation. This is why we're having, this is not going to satisfy anyone.

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It's just gonna create more problems because they're not getting to the heart of these issues. And they're pretending like they're so secondary.

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It's not really that big of a deal. When you hear something like that, that's, I mean, he's not just talking about her personally. He's talking about what she just said.

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All right, so let's just skip ahead here. Here's another thing that clued me in.

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So I was like, wow, this guy is not a fair representation of the anti -social justice side.

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Something better here now. So what is, she mentioned lamenting.

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You agreed with that. What does lamenting as opposed to repenting look like today for church leaders?

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Yeah, so I appreciate her point because I'm not saying that I found the perfect middle, right, but the position that I often find myself in, a pastor in Alabama, a student of history, a victim of racism in various ways, like on,

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I feel like I'm having conversations with some Christians to the left of me where I'm like, that's not helpful.

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Don't say that. You don't know where that comes from. And then I'm having conversations with people who are conservative to the right of me, who they're just entirely ignorant of so many different things.

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And they're kind of cold and calloused. And they just kind of repeat the Fox News bylines.

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And I'm like, well, hey, you should actually read this book. And like, you should be really sad about these bad things that happened in our backyard.

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And yeah, I want our people to lament more. We pray prayers of lament in our church. I highly recommend

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Mark Vergaap's book on lament, particularly as it's related to racial injustices.

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He's recommending Mark Vergaap, who when I was on Twitter, he blocked me when I used to be on Twitter, because Mark Vergaap is woke.

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And so he's recommending woke resources. He's saying that we do, we do the thing

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Rebecca is saying, we do all the, you know, the lament thing. So it makes me scratch my head. It's like, well, you're buying into the analysis, then why not just go the extra step?

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And if you're doing the lament thing, and this is so horrible, all the horrible racial things that have happened, then, you know, what is there today to lament?

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Is it, it's gotta be some kind of a disparity. I mean, it's not, this isn't just contained in what happened in the past.

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This is having an ongoing effect on the people in the church who are doing the lamenting. So is it a disparity that exists today?

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Is it, what state of affairs is it that's wrong? And once you start doing that, if you go down the path of there's a state of affairs today that's wrong because of, then you're going to want to figure out a way to change it.

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What's the way that's gonna change? This just, I see the seeds of what ends up when it blooms becoming wokeness planted here.

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And the resources he's even recommending would totally go in that direction. So I just thought, man, this guy is not a good, he's not articulate on this issue, at least from our side.

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And he's admitting here the reason for this whole discussion and kind of where he sits in it. Let's go, here's another thing he says.

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Argument, you talk about your conservative brothers and sisters who are making things worse. And it's important because here we are members of the body of Christ, we are.

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By the way, I gotta say Rebecca McLaughlin at no point in this debate starts talking about how she's just so, she talks about like the churches that are like LGBT affirming, having issues, but she can only do it while condemning the more conservative church.

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It's always paired with, well, we're not gonna find our solutions in the world. We're not gonna find them from these mainline denominations.

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But the real reason that people are looking for solutions there is because we failed. It's all us.

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She just takes, it's all the guilt of the church. It's all the true church's guilt. You see that throughout this whole thing.

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And so she never, she doesn't do what the pastor here is doing, where he's just taking time, emphasizing how much, how unhelpful it is that these conservatives are, they don't know what they're talking about.

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They're just repeating Fox News talking points. Basically, they're dumb. Their rhetoric is making everything worse.

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And it's like, yeah, but there's an actual theological compromise. There's false teaching. If you believe that, then you'll be taken a whack at it.

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And you'll think that, wow, we, the real problem, if you wanna assess this accurately, is that people with position platform, with power to do something, aren't doing it because they are, whether they're scared or they agree with social justice, but they're not taking a whack at this stuff.

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So you have frustrated laymen who end up taking it out on social media or trying to combat it in the only way, only avenues they have available to them because of people like this, who won't take a stand.

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I won't take a really hard stand on this stuff. So it's just so skewed in my mind, the way that they view the landscape.

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So anyway, so here's like the third time it's gonna be, you know, those conservatives, they're just as guilty, if not more so, for the state of affairs and the conflict that's around us.

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On the same page about the large things, we are a part of the same kind of coalition. I would like you to speak to the people to your right that you referenced, or more conservative was the word that you used, because what we hear, here's some common statements we've seen in the media, things like Southern Seminary has gone liberal and woke,

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Reform Theological Seminary has CRT syllabi, Tim Keller and the Gospel Coalition are the greatest threat to the gospel in our lifetime.

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Those are the things that are said by those people that you referenced. How do you interact with that?

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Well, that is exactly what AD said. That's an interesting pause in the screenshot here.

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That is exactly what AD said was gonna happen. It's gonna be a shield. These debates are gonna be used as a shield because of the

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Gospel Coalition. What AD said was, he goes, we forced, meaning him and the people that listen to his podcast, he goes, we forced

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Gospel Coalition to do this because we kept pointing out all their issues, how they were so compromised on these things.

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And now they're forced to respond to us, but the way that they're gonna do it is they're gonna take kind of like their own friendly to them conservative and use that person in a way to be that shield.

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To make the conservative who's, actually this is kind of a move you see on like MSNBC and CNN all the time, where they have their panel and then they have the conservative they bring up, but you know it's not really a conservative.

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It's someone who's like an MSNBC contributor. Meghan McCain on the view is not a conservative.

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We know this, but she is the conservative on the view. She's the representative for the view. So it serves to kind of soft pedal and make it look like, well, here's a true conservative.

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And even this true conservative knows that anyone who would be that crazy to say

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Tim Keller's compromise and a threat to the gospel is even that conservative sees that silly.

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And that's exactly what you're gonna find here. That primarily as a pastor, I've had these conversations with people who were upset at me for going woke, believe it or not in my church, leaving the church, you're going woke.

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You're part of big Eva with my church with less than a hundred people. And I just,

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I don't know. I just, I'm always trying to walk the tightrope. I'm trying to have a careful thought nuance.

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I'm most often I'm saying, Hey, some of these guys that you're saying are woke. I know them. They're my friends.

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That guy discipled me. I had lunch with him last week. I heard him say this about that person. Trust me, he's not going woke at all.

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We did an episode on this in my podcast. Maybe it'll end up as a gospel coalition article, but.

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All right, let's just stop here. So trust me, I know these people. I'm part of the guild.

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So they're not woke. So there's two options. One is you have no discernment and two is, well, they believe something totally different in private and they're not gonna come out publicly and say it.

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So either way, it's just a, it's bad for them. You know, he goes on and he talks about, you know, he even says,

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I think at one point, like you're crazy if you think Tim Keller is a threat to the gospel. No, he's not and stuff. We've pointed out though,

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Tim Keller is, in fact, I have the book sitting somewhere. Hold on.

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Yeah, I got it right here. I've been slowly going through this book called

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Engaging Keller. Let me blow up the screen so people can see what I'm looking at here. Engaging Keller.

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And this goes through a number of things. This isn't even related all of it to social justice. And they try to make it clear.

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It's like, well, we're not saying Tim Keller's a heretic, but when you read these essays, you're like, well, how, like what other options are there?

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Rebranding the doctrine of sin. Soft peddling hell. Bad analogies on the

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Trinity. Conflating the church's mission with doing justice in the world.

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Bad hermeneutic. Theistic evolution. Looking for ecumenicism.

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And this was like in what, 2014 or so when I think that came out. I did a whole section in my book

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Christianity, or Social Justice Goes to Church on Tim Keller. And you see that not only was he a leftist, but he buys into this version of Christianity from Tom Skinner at the very beginning, which is a false gospel.

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It's saying that the gospel includes these works, these social justice works.

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And you see Tom Skinner, you see Harvey Kahn, the hermeneutical spiral. You see there was another individual.

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See, now I've written, I wrote it a while ago, so now I'm blanking on my own writing here. But the people who impacted him were not

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Orthodox, many of them. And he takes these ideas and he makes them his own. And I mean, his own idea of generous justice puts

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God in a very, it actually attacks God. Because what you're saying is that if we just owe the poor as much money as we can give away, and it's people who are poor have a claim on us because of their need, and because every person in the world is in need of salvation, and God doesn't grant that, then

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God must not be into justice. I mean, it's super bad theology. And I would say, yeah,

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Tim Keller's a threat to the gospel, but he thinks people like me who would say something like that are crazy.

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All right, let's just finish this up. Yeah, we're just gonna go to one more clip, and then we're gonna end it.

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And here it is. I thought that can't be true.

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I thought that has to be, would 100 % affirm. And it's,

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I mean, just to go personal for a second, I moved to America 14 years ago. And when

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I first heard that white evangelicals in America were associated with racism, I thought that can't be true.

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I thought that has to be slander against the people of God because it just, I couldn't believe it.

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And in the past sort of decade or so, as I've learned more, both from reading and from talking with black brothers and sisters in particular, the more

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I've realized how much truth there has been in that. This is such an admission. I don't think she realizes it, but I wanted to just play this for you.

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All right, so if she hadn't done the, she hasn't talked to these brothers and sisters, these particular brothers and sisters, and I guarantee it wasn't

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Bodie Bauckham she was talking to. I guarantee it wasn't someone who's blessed with more melanin, who's a conservative.

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If she hadn't had these conversations with presumably woke pastors and individuals, and she hadn't read these books, these woke books, she would have never thought that there was a racism problem in evangelicalism.

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That is so telling, that is so telling. She can only know about the problem through having these conversations and reading these books.

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It's not something that would be obvious to her just living in the United States. I think that that's extremely interesting because it shows that you have to,

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I think you have to deny kind of what's right in front of you and buy into this narrative that you know, you don't believe what your eyes are seeing.

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Step out on faith and believe these other stories and these other analyses from other places.

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But don't trust your senses for what you're seeing. And is it possible someone with very little experience could not notice something very bad?

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Yeah, sure it's possible. I mean, you could be going to a church, right? And you could be going there like a few months and you could realize, wow, there's, after a few months, this is a really bad place.

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There's really bad stuff going on, but you didn't notice it for the first few months. That's possible, but it doesn't take long.

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And with any degree of familiarity, you're gonna figure that stuff out pretty quick. It doesn't take long.

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And so her admission though, is that without these resources and with just her experience, she wouldn't have seen it.

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And I think that's very telling and very interesting and really actually is an argument against her point.

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The things she's complaining about, are they really problems? You know, are you gonna believe your eyes and what you see or are you gonna believe all these stories and this narrative?

39:40

All right, that's all I have for today. I hope that was helpful for you in analyzing this particular debate.

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I think Aidy Robles was pretty spot on with his analysis, his predictions for what this was gonna be.

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And I'm sure he'll probably do a video on it too. I'm trying to beat him to the punch though. So maybe I did,

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I don't know. Anyway, God bless. More likely coming this week, I'm not sure yet.