Trinity Evangelical Divinity School Goes Woke

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All right, welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris. Today, we have a guest with us, a very brave guest,

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I might add, Ilgen. And Ilgen is a student at Trinity Evangelical Seminary, and that's in Chicago, right?

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Did D .A. Carson work there? He used to, he retired recently, yeah. So some big names, at the very least.

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And so tell me about yourself. What made you want to go to seminary? You know, tell me a little bit about your

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Christian testimony. So I grew up in a non -Christian home, and, but my parents were that classic liberal where they were open to new ideas.

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So we would visit different places of worship, like Buddhist temple, or I've even been to a

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Catholic mass. So we were open, but we didn't believe in a specific religion.

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When I was in eighth grade, I had an existential crisis, because I realized, what's the point of working hard or studying a lot if I'm going to just die anyway?

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I'll go to a good college, I'll go to, I'll get a good job, have a great family.

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But if I'm going to die anyway, there's no difference between being successful and being a failure.

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So I thought that life was meaningless. But there was a book that I found that my mom's

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Christian friend gave her called Dinner with a Perfect Stranger. And it's a fiction of an atheist guy having dinner with Jesus.

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So I picked it up, it was a short book, and I started reading it. And what really struck me was when

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Jesus said, there's nothing you can do to get to heaven. And that was such a shocking statement, because I've always thought that Christians believe that you go to heaven by doing good works.

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Then why do you go to church? Why give money to the poor? But Jesus continued to share that our standard of goodness just fails compared to God's standard of goodness, and no one meets

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God's standard of goodness except God. And because of our sin,

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God himself had to pay for that because he loves us, that he sent his son to die for our sin on the cross, and that on the third day he's risen.

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And if you believe in him, you can have relationship with God. And that's when

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I realized, oh, that must be the meaning of life. I'm created to have a relationship with God, and the only way

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I can do that is by believing in his son. So I became a

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Christian then. Then I went to a very secular liberal college and studied molecular biology.

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But I attended a really good evangelical church where they were very conservative in terms of they were complementarian,

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Calvinistic soteriology. So my doctrines were shaped there.

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And after college, I took two years teaching math at a

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Christian high school. I still wasn't sure of my call to pastoral ministry.

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But during that time, I had so many opportunities to preach. And every time

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I was writing a sermon, there was this temptation of injecting what

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I wanted to say in the text rather than just clearly exegeting what the text is saying.

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And I knew that was a problem because that's what most false teachers do, injecting their own ideas.

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And I knew that I can't just keep on sending my sermon drafts to pastors I know because they have their own sermons to worry about.

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And I decided if I am called to ministry, I should really go to seminary to learn how to correctly teach scripture.

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So some of the helpful influences were like Dr.

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Martin Lloyd -Jones because his passion for preaching is just really, really superb, right?

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I read his book on preaching and preachers, or preachers and preach. I think it's preaching and preachers. And when

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I read the part where it said, hey, if you can't see yourself doing anything else, do that.

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But if it's in your heart to really preach scripture, preach the gospel, and you don't see yourself doing anything else but that, then that might be a call.

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So I read that book because my then girlfriend, but my current wife bought me that book.

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So after that, I decided to apply to Trinity because a pastor that I knew back then, whom

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I really admired, went to Trinity, and he highly recommended it. Okay, so that's what brought you to Trinity to receive more education in seminary so you could preach.

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And I think that's why most people, or a lot of people wanna go to seminary so they can preach the gospel and preach the word of God in their churches.

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So that's a good story. So here's the thing. I wanna make sure people understand this. We're gonna get into kind of your experience so far at Trinity.

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And you're a brave man because you challenged the social justice narrative that you've seen at the school.

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But the impression I get is that you do this from a position of grace and care for the school.

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You do love the school. You want the school to just be on the right track and consistent with the message that it's supposed to be promoting and teaching about, and you don't want to see that corrupted.

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And so this isn't something where you wanna bash the school unnecessarily. This is just your heart for correcting the school.

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And I admire that in you. And so I just want people to understand that as we get into this.

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Now, one question before we jump into Trinity real quick. Iljin, I know we had briefly talked about this before I pushed the record button, but I wanted you to share.

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I mean, do you believe that racism exists? Racism in the sense of people having partial thoughts or hateful thoughts about people of other ethnicities?

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All right, we'll just narrow it down to that definition, which is the definition most people think of when they think of that term.

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Do you believe that exists? And have you ever experienced that? I do believe racism exists.

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And I believe it will continue to exist until Jesus comes back.

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And I would like to define racism as not something of systemic or type of sin that can only be committed by white people, because that's what

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I've been hearing these days. But racism can be committed by any type of people.

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And I believe it still exists because we're all still sinning. And I've personally experienced racism myself growing up.

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Mainly because I came from Korea as a fourth grader and kids can be insensitive and racist.

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So I've heard people say like, hey, go back to your own country, things like that as a kid growing up.

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So I totally believe it exists. I've experienced it myself. Yeah, so I think it's important we lay that groundwork from the beginning just so there are people that might be listening to this who wanted to shut it off and say, these guys are just saying there's no racism.

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And there's a lot of conflation between what we would consider to be partiality or really just hatred in your heart for someone else.

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I mean, look, it could be, I've said this before, it could be you don't like the pants someone wears and you're just gonna give them a hard time for it because of some hatred in your heart because of some external quality that they're displaying.

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Like it doesn't have to even be racism for it to be hatred and for it to be wrong and for God to see that as not loving your neighbor the way you ought to and treating someone as made in the image of God.

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We get that, we understand that. It's wrong, it's evil. But today we see a different narrative.

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We see using word like racism then to hammer people in quote unquote majority culture and to ascribe to them this sin when it's not necessarily something that's even in their hearts or something they've committed or it's just by nature of their identity, of who they are, even if they're just their skin tone, they're somehow guilty of a sin that they're not actually guilty of.

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And that's what we wanna jump into. So I'm gonna let you take it away. I have some notes here and with your permission,

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I'd like to actually share these notes with those who may wanna look at them from who are watching this, but you kind of do this sequentially, the notes you sent me.

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So why don't you talk to me about your first semester and kind of that moment that you were exposed to,

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I would say the whole gospel as they call it, which isn't any gospel, it's the gospel plus social justice.

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What was that like? Yeah, so during my first semester, the classes were really solid.

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I was taking Greek and Hebrew and I was learning to exegete the text. That's what

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I signed up to do. But there was a chapel service that really questioned my understanding of the gospel.

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The good news of Jesus liberated us from all kinds of servitudes, from internal oppressions, our sin, which blind us, which make us selfish to the core in the words of Martin Luther in Corvatos in Se, but Jesus also wills us to liberate us from external enslavement.

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That is those that dehumanize humanity and the consolidation of human sin in the structures that we create.

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Those external enslavements are the myriad of social injustices and mysteries and abuses and violence and idolatries of money and power and sex and ethnocentrism and racism that we face.

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When this chapel speaker included social justice as part of the gospel, and as you know,

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I was saved by the gospel of Jesus Christ, where the word social justice was never mentioned, right?

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And I've been sharing the gospel of what Jesus has done to my friends, and I've never mentioned social justice.

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So to find out that, wait, if social justice is part of the gospel, then

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I've been doing an incomplete work, or they're really wrong.

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So did you really have that moment where you were like, wait a minute, did I get the gospel right?

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Have I erred in some way? Yeah, and I had to talk to some of the professors

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I trusted about it. And one of them made it really clear that the gospel is only about the vertical reconciliation with God through what

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Jesus has done. The horizontal reconciliation only occurs when people's hearts are changed, right?

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It can't be part of it. The vertical has to come first. Okay, so this is interesting, and this is what

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I want people to hear from you, is that there's a lot of people in your position. They go into seminary, they have a good heart as far as wanting to understand the text and preach it, and then they are exposed to this holistic gospel, as some have called it, and they don't know what to do.

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This is someone in authority telling them, in this case, it was a professor at your school.

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You also included, there's a tweet here from the professor who seems to indicate that he does believe social justice is part of the gospel.

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And this is an authority figure, and you gotta figure, a lot of these students who want to understand deeper what the

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Bible says and they respect their professors, this is tangling them up in knots, or they're just gonna follow their professors down that path.

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Did you see that with other students? Oh yeah, definitely. I think the student population is more into this than the faculty as a whole.

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There are still professors at Ted's who are really solid in this. My New Testament professor, when

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I talk to him about this, he's like, well, that makes no sense because the gospel is of Jesus Christ.

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It's what Jesus has done. It's not something you do. It can't be anything you do, right?

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That's the good news. Right? It works to the gospel. It's pretty basic stuff. Do they give those professors, like your

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New Testament professor, a platform to disagree, or is it just one narrative that you constantly hear?

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From my experience, it's been just this narrative, and it's only getting worse and worse as we'll see because the first semester was pretty good for me.

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So what happened second semester? The second semester, the whole chapel series became social justice.

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Last semester, the first semester, the whole chapel series was on the book of Judges, which was really good.

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And only one chapel was on like social justice. But the second semester, it was the whole chapel series on racial reconciliation.

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A number of Anglo members of the church approached this pastor, who's non -white, and asked if there might be a time in a next worship service where a number of Anglo brothers and sisters, in light of what they heard from the preaching, wanted to have a public time of prayer of repentance.

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So the pastor calls me up and says, how do we do this? I never learned this in a worship liturgy class.

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So that very next Sunday, that's what happened. These Anglo brothers and sisters would come up and they would face the cross at the front of the altar.

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So their back would be toward us. Into the microphone, they would be offering this really heartfelt prayer of repentance.

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As a person who comes from dominant culture, white privilege, white power, some of the things that they were not even aware of before and how they have committed sin of omission as well as commission.

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Many prayed the prayer of a personal repentance. Some repented for the family that they grew up in.

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Some repented for the state of the city of Chicago and of our nation.

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And this is the Beloved Community Chapel Series? Yeah. Okay. And so you went through a bunch of these different chapel series and your response is interesting here to me.

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You aren't like most students. Like most students, and you know this, they just kind of accept what they're taught and move on.

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They don't challenge anything. And this is one of the reasons I like you is you say that you asked the student body president to start an online survey to find out what the student body thought of the chapel services.

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What happened with that? I was getting frustrated because I didn't want to attend chapel anymore because I would be hearing things that are just flat out wrong.

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And I've noticed that even the chapel series, people, students weren't attending chapel.

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It was getting fewer and fewer. And even more so, professors were not attending chapel.

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Really? Yeah. That's actually, that's interesting. So their own school that's paying them money to teach, they don't even want to go to chapel.

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Only a certain group of professors who agree to this, right, who are fans of racial reconciliation in this unbiblical sense were attending chapel.

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So the students, so it was less students, less professors attending chapel.

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And were there other responses when they started trying to figure out why this was the case that were kind of like yours, they were negative on the series?

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Yeah, so they didn't think about doing a student survey at all. And I don't know why.

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So I talked to the student body president about it. And he said, okay, yeah, let's have a chapel survey.

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And they did get the responses. And from what I hear, a lot of them were negative.

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And the chapel committee was like, surprised. They were like, why is this so negative?

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So this is an encouraging thing. If you are going to an evangelical seminary like Trinity, but it could be a different one, and this stuff is being pushed on your seminary, which no doubt it probably is, you're not alone.

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There are a lot of people out there who they don't know what to do necessarily. There might not be challenging it overtly, but they agree, they don't like it.

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I found that to be the case when I was at Southeastern as well. And so I'm glad you shared that.

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You also talk about in your second semester this Mosaic Talk by Mark Charles. Tell us about that a little.

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Mosaic is a student group that exists on campus. And it usually shares something that's,

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I don't wanna say controversial, but it is shocking. Every semester they choose a topic that will, that's very debatable.

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So this time I believe they chose a probably racial reconciliation or, but this specific video has a

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Native American speaker, one would say theologian, sharing the matters of systemic sin, corporate sin.

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Our Sunday school theology is pretty messed up. And so when

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I asked the question, whose blood covers corporate systemic sin, I want you to think about this.

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Is it really Jesus? I know that's the answer you've been told, but is this what the church believes?

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Is this what the church practices? And what's really surprising is that systemic and corporate sin are just assumed to be true.

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Doesn't argue for it. You're right. There's no debate. It's more of an echo chamber of, well, yes, it's true.

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So how do you, you have to deal with that. And for most students,

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I mean, I can't say most, I don't know how many, but for a student like me, like how do

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I repent of sin that I did not commit? I wanna tell you three stories. I was speaking at a conference and I was laying out like I did last night, the systemic racism, white supremacy, sexism over foundations.

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I was laying out our history of slavery and genocide of native peoples and slavery of African people.

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And through my talk, as I was laying out these documents and these numbers, there was a young white man sitting near the front row of the center.

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And I could tell he was distraught and what I was saying was really impacting him. And he was getting more and more bothered.

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He was really struggling kind of spiritually as he's hearing some of this history for the very first time. And during the Q &A, he was one of the first people that raised his hand and asked a question.

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And he was kind of talking and rambling. He was trying to get his thoughts together as he was talking to me. And he was jumping here and there, here and there.

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And I could tell after about 30 seconds that he wanted to apologize to me. And as he was talking and he was getting closer and closer to breaking down in tears and asking for my forgiveness,

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I finally said, sir, I have to stop you. Let me tell you what's going on for you right now.

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You are a white American and you have a highly individualistic worldview.

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And you are hearing for the very first time about the systemic corporate sin of your nation and your church, but you don't have a corporate theology.

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And so at the moment, 500 years of dehumanizing history is pressing down on your shoulders.

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And the only thing you can think about right now is how am I gonna go to sleep tonight? And so you want to break down in tears in front of me.

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You want to ask for my forgiveness. I, of course, in a public setting, as a Christian man, have to forgive you.

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So now you can go home to your house in the suburbs tonight and you can go to sleep knowing that you heard about this injustice, you repented of it, you've been forgiven of it, and now you can sleep tonight.

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I, meanwhile, will get on the plane, go back to the reservation, and have to deal with all the dregs of this injustice and nothing will have changed.

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I said, I'm not mad at you, but I don't want you to ask for my forgiveness.

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You need to sit in this brokenness for a while. You don't even understand the extent of what's happened.

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And you need to just sit there for a while. And I gave him the tool of lament.

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If I haven't committed these actual racist sins or pick whatever category you want, then what am

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I supposed to do about this other than stand against it where I see it? But I want to get into this third semester because this is where I think it gets really interesting, in my opinion.

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This is where it's so obvious and you start really challenging things.

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And I think the reaction of the school is very telling. So tell us what happened in your third semester.

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Yeah, so there's a course that every MDiv student has to take at Trinity. And it's called

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Understanding Social and Cultural Context for Ministry. So it sounds pretty logical.

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I think pastors should understand the social and cultural context for ministry, right?

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How to teach and preach in a postmodern context or in the liberal context.

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Or how do you preach or teach through the gender issue?

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Homosexuality. So sort of an apologetics bent is what you were thinking. That's what I thought.

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But none of that, none of those things were actually focused. Or I don't even think we ever talked about homosexuality or gender, transgenderism.

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That's shocking to me. Yes. So that was not mentioned, but it was mostly on race.

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Like one speaker, so they had some guest speakers. One speaker actually defined racism as sin that can be only committed by the oppressor group.

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So that's critical race theory. Oh yeah. That's all that is. That is just the assumption that you must have power in order to exert racism somehow.

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And if you don't have power, you can't do it. So they're teaching critical race theory at Trinity in some quarters at least.

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Yeah. And we would learn about immigration, like in the 1800s, right?

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And then the speaker would share, well, like the

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Italian immigrants were treated worse than the other Anglo immigrants because their skin's darker.

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And that baffled me because, well, I know that the Irish immigrants were treated worse too.

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And their skin's really white. I was gonna say that's news to the Irish because yeah, I grew up actually in upstate

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New York in about an hour and a half north of the city. And a lot of my friends growing up were Italian and Irish people.

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And so it's in the local history, of course, kind of what happened during immigration.

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But yeah, I've never heard that. In fact, I mean, every group that came here had barriers they had to overcome, but the

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Irish are well known to have had a barrier when they first came to the United States.

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And that's interesting. It sounds like it's an assumption this person is just, I mean, did he have evidence to back this up or was it just his own?

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No, it's just really about feelings, you know? Yeah.

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And when I would challenge something, even some of the students would get mad.

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I would say - God bless you. And it wasn't like I was yelling. I just questioned like, hey, we can't just assume that this house in an

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African American community, the price went down because of the community.

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Because the timeframe you're showing includes the housing bubble that popped in the 2008, 2011 area.

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You can't say that this was because of the skin color. Yeah, if you look through history and the only thing that you wanna look at is ethnicity or race, then you're not gonna make the proper correlations.

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You're gonna have tunnel vision. You're not gonna see the other events that are taking place that could affect different regions.

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And so that's a very good point. And I have to ask you, what kind of textbooks did they use or reading material in the class?

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So one of the main textbooks that we used was Michael O. Emerson's Divided by Faith.

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Of course, of course you did. That is the go -to, probably the first book that people read if they're gonna go down the social justice road in evangelicalism.

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It's part of the woke canon at this point. So was that one of the main books then in the course?

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Yeah, that was one of the main books we had to write our main paper on. How'd that go for you?

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Did you get marked off? Oh man, yeah. So when I finished reading the book, or even when

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I started reading the book, I was concerned like, how do I write a paper?

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So the prompt is given where it's like, you interact closely with these three works,

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Divided by Faith, More Than Just Race and A Spacious Heart. And we analyze the nature and extent of racism that permeated in our culture and society.

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And then identify ways through which attitudes and practices of racism have influenced individual

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Christians as well as Christian communities. And then you offer one or two specific steps that church can take to be prophetic in this divided world.

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So, and being prophetic, is that basically bringing a racial reconciliation program to your church?

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Right, right. So it's not going into the world and preaching against the sins of the world. It's more coming into your church and telling them about historic systemic injustice and what they can do to correct these things.

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Right. And the shocking part was we weren't really given the option to disagree.

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You see the prompt is very forward, like it's assumed to be true. All the things that you learn from Divided by Faith, how or analyze it and show so that racism is permeated in society.

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And then one or two steps to show that you can use it in the church. Like there's no room for disagreement here.

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Iljin, I wanted to share with you now, and I hear a few had the same experience as I did, but in secular undergraduate college, we were required to take a course.

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It was called, I think at the time, Social Problems in Today's World. It was kind of a sociology course, but every single major had to take it, which is interesting.

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If you're a math major, you had to take this course. Nothing to do with math, obviously, but it was meant to, it sounds very similar to this class where I remember one of the assignments was to go out and look for examples of racism.

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And I mean, this is 10 years ago. When I went to Southeastern, another Southern Baptist seminary, and I started seeing similar things to what

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I had learned in that class, I thought, oh no, my teacher was a Marxist. She was pretty open about it too.

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She said, yeah, Marx knew what was going on. His analysis was correct. And anyway, in that class, it was the same thing.

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America, from the beginning, it was awful. It was built for the white, straight male.

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Of course, homosexuality did play a part in this class. Heterosexual normality was a problem. And then how do we change it was the only question.

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There was never a point in the class where you could challenge the narrative.

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And you say, are we really understanding in all the complexities of this huge country that we live in, what's really the case?

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Or are we giving a cartoon, kind of a flat picture of what this country is like?

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You couldn't even bring up nuance. It just wouldn't happen. And so the conclusion at the end, of course, was it's revolutionary.

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And I remember a friend of mine had a different professor teaching same class. And at the end, this was during, he took it,

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I think, a few years after I did. But his professor said, all right, class, this week I want you to, as if it's an assignment from the instructor, vote for Obama.

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I was like, it was a class assignment. And so anyway, not to get off of my story, because I want to hear yours, but when you were hearing these things, did it bring you back to undergrad at all?

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Were you thinking, wait a minute, this is the liberal stuff I heard when I was an undergraduate. Oh, yeah, yeah.

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Man, I would even say my undergraduate would actually allow me to disagree.

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Yeah, I went to a school that's very liberal in the

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Bay Area, right? Oh, goodness. And they were all about free speech. You were in the

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Bay Area? Uh -huh. Okay, yeah, that, oof. So it was very antagonistic to your

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Christian belief, I'm sure. Right, but at least I could speak my mind there.

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Yeah, and write a paper disagreeing without having to ask. Yeah, so the professor for this class told us in class, you know, for this class,

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I don't want you to dissent. I want you to just write it because this is not like a research paper.

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You don't have enough time for it. You don't have enough space for it because it only has to be five pages.

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I don't want you to dissent. But then when I read that book, I just could not, in good conscience, actually not dissent.

33:20

I respect you for that, for challenging this and getting marked down, it sounds like, or at least giving a little bit of a hard time for it.

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Yeah, so I did email him, like, in my good conscience, I can't write this paper unless I dissent.

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And then he graciously let me dissent. But, yeah, he did not like the research that I did to write that paper.

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Did you get marked down or notes in the margins disagreeing with your analysis?

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Oh, yeah, definitely. I've done some research reading works by Walter E.

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Williams, a famous economist, Thomas Sowell, another famous economist who works for the

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Hoover Institution of Stanford, Charles Murray. And these economists, they look at the data from the government departments, like labor department, right?

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And then they analyze how the social programs that the

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US government instituted actually had a worse impact on the black population because it incentivized various ungodly behavior, like having kids out of wedlock.

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And the government would pay for that, right? Pay more money if you have more kids.

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Or not holding onto a job because they would give unemployment benefit.

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Yeah, it's interesting. I did this analysis of Phil Bisher's video a few weeks ago where he takes, what, 20 minutes and goes through, this is the history of America.

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It's all just systemic injustice and racism, and I took almost two hours and I just went kind of carefully through his whole video.

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And one of the things I tried to point out, and some of the economists you mentioned I was looking at as well, where they're looking at numbers and they're analyzing data, which is,

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I like that. Right. And one of the things that was left out of his narrative, and I'm curious if it was left out of your class, is labor unions, of course, very racist in the early part of the 20th century.

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Of course, you had the eugenics movement, scientific racism, Otobango was in the

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Bronx Zoo. You had Planned Parenthood, obviously, very racist,

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Margaret Sanger, at least was. That was one of her purposes for the organization. You have the minimum wage laws and how they adversely affected, and not necessarily a racist intention behind them, but they just ended up adversely affecting

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Oh, yeah. Black people, young people. And then you have, they always blame

36:20

Nixon, but it really was LBJ who started the war on crime. And I just find it fascinating, they try to get to the

36:27

Republican to blame the Republican. And so anyway, they skip over the

36:33

Great Society programs and how those adversely affected the black community. And the thing is, if you're gonna tell the story of quote unquote racism in this country, or if you're just even gonna redefine it and say, we're just gonna tell the story of disparities, you would think that you'd wanna focus on those things.

36:51

You mentioned the labor unions, Planned Parenthood, minimum wage laws, and the Great Society programs.

36:57

And it's left out of the narrative. Like, and the thing that I realized, I said, I thought to myself, the thing that connects all these things is these are all

37:07

Democrat, either Democrats were behind these things or they are current groups that the

37:16

Democratic Party caters to, especially Planned Parenthood and labor unions. And so all that to say, you know, was that, were those holes in your class as well?

37:27

Did they talk about those things? Yeah, only in terms of good things. Like I did the minimum wage in my paper, and then the professor commented, well, like the minimum wage in Australia is like much higher and they seem to be doing fine, which

37:44

I don't know how that can be a good argument for minimum wage working.

37:51

Like we need to actually look at how Australia is doing. You know, we can't just anecdotally throw it out there.

37:58

It's working in Australia, so it must be fine here. What about the Great Society and welfare programs, et cetera?

38:04

Yeah, I mentioned that, and he called it too reductionistic. And he recommended some other sociologists to look at.

38:13

And what's surprising was he called data analysis by Thomas Sowell, Walter E.

38:20

Williams, and even Charles Murray, as they're not quote unquote empirical.

38:26

I don't know how sociology can be more empirical than economists.

38:33

See, this is interesting to me because this shows you that the concerns that are being, that are platformed at a place like Trinity and other secular and also non -secular seminaries across the

38:51

United States, they are only bringing a new left critique to bear on the situation they're claiming to remedy or they want to remedy.

39:01

They're leaving things out. There's holes in their narrative. And these are the holes that you'd think a

39:07

Christian, of all people, a Christian who believes man's depraved, who understands that you can't just throw money at a problem and get rid of a problem necessarily.

39:19

There's hearts, there's evil hearts involved. You can't incentivize sin and then expect good results.

39:26

You'd think a Christian wouldn't miss these things, especially in parenthood, right? Abortion, you'd think a Christian would look at that and say, well, that's happening today.

39:34

I'm gonna talk about that. But these are Christians who aren't talking about those things. And they'd rather talk about the things the

39:40

Democratic Party is so concerned with today. That's fascinating to me. You have any thoughts on that?

39:46

Yeah, I think, I don't know whether it's, I'm sure there are unintentional people who do not know the impact of the social policies, social programs, welfare programs.

40:01

They think they're actually helping out the poor, right? But then there are intentional people who are just flat out ignoring the facts.

40:12

And I don't know why they're pushing their agenda. I don't wanna assume motivation, but I partly, it might be the fear of men.

40:21

You don't wanna be canceled by the liberal outwing, right? The moment you say that, you go against them, you can be called all sorts of names.

40:33

Yeah, yeah, I understand that. But this is something the church should be concerned about because future pastors, they are drinking this stuff in and they're going to a church and they're gonna teach the whole congregation.

40:46

This is how it gets into the pews, the working class people. They're teaching them that they're racist because they have majority privilege, that this country is racist.

40:56

And that solutions to these things aren't necessarily Christian solutions.

41:02

Welfare programs are good, minimum wage is good. So this is something that I think it's good that you're shining a light on it, showing that this is being taught at Trinity.

41:13

Now, when we get into your fourth semester, this, I mean, I think it started getting interesting in the third semester, but this to me, like I have so much respect for you.

41:23

You wrote to me that your pastor and yourself, you both tried to start a dialogue on campus about these issues.

41:30

I have so much respect for that and I wanna hear all about that. How did you go about this?

41:36

What were the results? How did the campus react? So my pastor and I, well,

41:42

I shared with my pastor all that's going on at Ted's. And he's a Ted's graduate from the 90s.

41:49

And he was shocked, right? And he told me, Iljin, this can't be just staying in your class and you just writing a dissent paper.

42:00

I think the truth has to get out. Like we have to have a platform for the truth because Mosaic gets a platform.

42:09

How come the conservative voice, the biblical voice cannot have a platform, right? We need to have a voice against this idea of structural racism.

42:22

But our first platform was gonna be against this idea of white guilt.

42:28

The idea that people are guilty of sin of racism because of the color of their skin, right?

42:39

And it's just so unbiblical because how can you repent of your skin color?

42:46

And I think in the end, it's an insult to God because who chooses someone is born white or not, right?

42:56

God. And if you like consider what else do we need to repent of if we're thinking like, well, we have to consider the historic sin, but every ethnic group has done something wrong to another.

43:14

So like, how far do we go? We can't just go back to the 1800s, 1700s.

43:22

And I don't know your story at all, but I know everyone in this country, right?

43:27

Came from somewhere else. I know my family going back, we came live different lines that came here, but I have relatives on the

43:34

Mayflower. They were escaping persecution in Great Britain. And perhaps,

43:39

I don't know if you have the same kind of story for your family escaping some kind of oppression from somewhere else.

43:46

But that's the story of this country. And so it's every ethnic group.

43:52

Every ethnic group is involved in this because we're all human and we all have sin. And that's part of it.

43:59

So tell me about your first topic, what was no white guilt and social justice. I mean, you guys just,

44:06

I mean, I love you guys for doing this. So you just decide, we're not even gonna tiptoe around it.

44:12

We're just gonna say no white guilt and social justice. How did that go for you, trying to reserve a room and get a crowd to come and see you talk about this?

44:20

Yeah, we didn't want to be, we didn't wanna trick people into it, right? If we were to just say like, oh, it's a platform on white guilt and social justice.

44:32

And then we present our view of like, no, we don't believe in that. Then that's just lying.

44:39

So we wanted to be forward and say, no white guilt and social justice dialogue, right?

44:45

I was able to reserve the room, which was surprising. And even the person who's working, the administrator who was handling room reservation, like she personally emailed me saying, oh, this sounds like a great idea.

45:05

Like to have a discussion on campus. So we got the room reserved for a specific date, but then for some reason, the poster can't pass.

45:19

So it's like the room's there, but the poster can't pass. And that's because the

45:25

Dean of Students found out about it. So, yeah.

45:31

Was this a problem for other groups? Not really, because I found out after,

45:37

I'll share with you all these problems that the Dean of Students had with my poster.

45:43

Those problems weren't considered when it was of an event, when it was an event for another thing, a thing that's not related to no white guilt and social justice.

45:57

Okay, so there's different, the Lord hates different weights and measures.

46:03

So there's different standards being used here to judge your poster for advertising versus the poster of other groups.

46:12

I had to write all these down because there were so many criteria that we had to meet.

46:18

And those criteria, they would change. So my pastor and I, we had an in -person meeting with the

46:25

Dean and this was before COVID. And so first thing she tells us is, see, the problem with your poster is it has to be sponsored by a student group or a church, right?

46:40

So my poster didn't have a student group or a church's name on there, right? So I was like, oh, okay.

46:47

And then the pastor, my pastor who was sitting right next to me says, oh, yeah, yeah, our church can do it.

46:54

Our church is approved by Trinity for internship. So we probably don't even have to go through so many hoops.

47:00

Like we're approved by Trinity for internship. Yeah, yeah, that's a high level of trust, sure.

47:06

Yeah, and so, but the moment my pastor shared that, she changes her mind.

47:14

She's like, oh, wait, wait, wait, that's not a thing. Church can't sponsor events. We don't have a thing, right?

47:20

Like it was during that meeting in terms of minutes, like in minutes, she changed her mind.

47:28

And then she said, if you don't have a student group, you have to have a faculty sponsor that event.

47:36

So right after I go out, I found two professors who were willing to sponsor it because they are concerned about social justice and critical race theory, right?

47:48

Right. Because white guilt is totally related to critical race theory. And when

47:55

I told them, yeah, your name has to be on the poster, and they were fine. And the professor even wanted to meet with the dean to talk about why is this so hard, right?

48:08

But then the dean said, oh, I can't meet with the professor until this date, which was after the meeting, after the date in which we were supposed to meet, like the date when we had the room reserved.

48:29

So it's like... So did you ever get off the ground with this? Yeah, it had to be just by word of mouth and online invitation.

48:40

I would just copy and paste all the emails from different classes and classmates so that hopefully they come.

48:47

How did it work out when you had it? We had about like 10 students, that wasn't a lot, but we had some people from my church come in support of it, like 10 people from my church come.

49:02

So it was like 20 people discussing this. Yeah, and I'm sure that that puts a damper on it when you don't have the whole might of the school.

49:10

I mean, the school can send out emails to the whole student body at once. They can put posters up on campus.

49:15

They have those screens that they'll put announcements up on these screens. And not having that,

49:21

I'm sure very much affected you. And that's disappointing to me because the seminary, of course, the academy in general is supposed to be a place of debating ideas, but the seminary, especially for people like yourselves who are concerned about what the

49:37

Bible says, and you share the Orthodox, I'm assuming you both subscribe very strongly to the statement of faith, you would be brothers in Christ.

49:48

There should be no problem with brothers in Christ who are involved, you're paying to go there, pastors accepting interns from there from using the facility when other groups can.

49:58

It's shocking to me that a seminary would give such a hard time to people like yourselves.

50:06

And so we get into, so I first commend you for doing that.

50:12

Most people won't go that far. And then of course, COVID strikes, right? So you can't do anything anyway.

50:19

I'm sure the classes probably went online. And then we're up to the summer now. Tell me what's happened since then.

50:25

What's happened since holding this event at the school? Since holding this event,

50:32

I've seen multiple posters and pictures shown that did not meet the requirement that I was given, right?

50:41

Like there's no professors named there. There's no professor sponsoring the event. One of the first posters on the

50:50

Idiot Book Club, right? Has a church email. So that's church sponsorship.

50:57

How come we couldn't have that? Interesting. And it's approved. So like the second picture has the stamp of approval there that we couldn't get.

51:05

All that happened, but COVID hit, so. But then we had the Black Lives Matter stuff. So I'm assuming if they're on the social justice train,

51:12

Trinity had to have, did they have some kind of a live stream or response to Black Lives Matter? Oh yeah, that we had a public lament.

51:22

Oh Lord, you search us and know us. And your word tests our hearts.

51:28

We confess the fears and prejudices that run so deep.

51:35

And I was taking a summer class called Worship and Pastoral Practices.

51:41

And we were required to go because it was during class time.

51:50

We confess our complacency, our despair, and our unwillingness to hear those crying for justice and true peace.

52:00

In this way, we deny the power of your gospel to restore and to unite us.

52:06

So we went and their leaders of the campus, like the president, deans, and the chapel director, and they're all leading this public lament.

52:23

Lord, we confess our failure to love brothers and sisters from all races and cultures.

52:31

We repent of failing to confront racial injustice and failing to learn to do right, seek justice, and defend the oppressed.

52:47

Have mercy on us. In Jesus' name we ask it, amen.

52:53

And so this lament takes place and it very much sounds like some of the other things the other laments we've heard from the evangelical world.

53:03

And beyond that, I mean, this is the secular Black Lives Matter stuff, Christianitized, that's what it seems like.

53:09

We've seen this kind of stuff at Black Lives Matter rallies. Now, you're gonna be going back to school this fall at Trinity.

53:18

You have, what do you say, one or two more semesters? Two more semesters. Two more semesters. You're very brave because I could see someone maybe possibly being brave enough to, after they're graduated, when they don't have to go back and face these people, saying something, but you're saying it now.

53:35

And I know you're saying it in love, you care about the school. I'd like to hear a couple things from you.

53:42

Number one, your advice to students that are in a similar position to you. They just wanna understand the

53:48

Bible and they're getting fed this stuff. Because I think that you have some good ideas here on holding an event with your pastor, challenging this stuff in class.

53:59

So that's the first thing. What can students do? The second thing is how can people contact you and support or pray for you?

54:09

And so if you would just, wouldn't mind telling us some of your thoughts, because Christians are funding this stuff.

54:16

We need to know what we're funding. We need to understand that this is, when we give our money to the propagation of the gospel, the seminary education, some of it's going to this stuff.

54:24

And so tell us, what can a student do? Yeah, I think students should first and foremost, know what is correct.

54:34

Don't just buy into what they're hearing. Like our standard is the

54:40

Bible. The only reason why I started disagreeing with these things was it just repenting of historical sin did not match with the

54:53

Ezekiel passage of father's sin or guilt passing down to the son. Like, why are we doing something that the

55:01

Bible is speaking out against? So we, I think as students, we have to know the

55:06

Bible, you know, in fact, better than some of the past professors. When I push with scripture against my professors, they can't really argue back.

55:19

I've had a professor say, I'm glad you're paying attention in your Old Testament classes. That's all they can say.

55:25

They can't push back on like, you know? And I can share with you some of the writings

55:33

I've done in arguing, like arguing against white guilt or things like that.

55:38

Like blog posts or just? Well, I don't have a blog, but I can share the

55:44

Microsoft Word. Yeah, why don't you do this? Send those to me and those who are watching this video, you can go to the info section on this video and you're gonna find some resources.

55:54

Scroll down to the bottom, you'll see more resources. You'll see some of Iljin's, his work on this.

56:00

You'll see the notes that he sent me for the timeline of kind of his experience so far.

56:09

Where, if people wanna reach out to you, maybe you don't want anyone reaching out to you, which is fine, but if people want to and you're okay with that, where can they find you?

56:17

So I don't have any social media, but I can give you my email. Okay, so we'll put that in the notes as well then.

56:24

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. And I think the students, they have to speak up. I think we're too late even sometimes for many seminaries.

56:34

We have to speak out against this. Sure, like graciously, don't do the same thing the writers do, bring truth.

56:43

And there have been many students who tell me after class, like, hey, thank you for sharing that, or thank you for speaking up.

56:52

I really like what you had to say, but be more than that.

56:59

Speak up because I think there's still a lot of people with sober minds in class at church, but I think the institution has to know that this is not right.

57:16

And the only reason they know is when people speak up. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, Agen, I appreciate so much your bravery, your time, your heart in all of this.

57:28

And I'm looking forward to seeing what God does in your life. Well, Gensho, you are an

57:34

MDiv student at the Trinity Evangelical Seminary. If people want to pray for you or contact you, you can obviously pray for, they can pray for you no matter what.

57:45

But if they want to contact you, the email is in the info section, and so are some of your blogs. So thank you so much for sharing that with us.