Ligon Duncan - Meticulous and Calculating - Setting the Stage - Part 3

AD Robles

Subscribe

Download

Share

00

Ligon and Sean's Big Moment - Part 4

00:00

Alright everybody, back to the Ligon Duncan thing. I did see that CrossPolitik decided to respond to Ligon Duncan's, you know, stuff here, and I really want to watch that, but I don't want to watch it before I do mine, because I don't want it to flavor my thoughts.

00:19

But who knows, I might end up doing it anyway. But in any case, we're going to get back to it. They're going to move into a section about Tim Keller's legacy.

00:27

If you didn't watch yesterday's video about Andrew Klaven, I'm going to put it on the

00:34

Fight Last Feast podcast feed as well. I think it all ties into this stuff, in my opinion.

00:40

At least I tried to tie it in. So go ahead and give it a watch. That was very interesting.

00:46

Let's begin. Kathy Keller, our brother Tim Keller has gone to be with the

00:52

Lord. Man, what a loss. Praise God for all the fruit that his ministry has borne.

00:59

You don't have to agree with him about everything to appreciate his ministry. Colin Hansen's biography was superb.

01:04

Very useful in understanding why Tim did a lot of what he did. Let me just make my comments here on Tim Keller before we get into this.

01:13

Have I even talked about Tim Keller on the channel? I don't know. I don't know if I have or not.

01:20

Tim Keller is obviously a huge force in evangelicalism.

01:26

People rip off Tim Keller all the time. People want to be like Tim Keller. They want to preach like Tim Keller.

01:34

There's a lot of positive in Tim Keller's work. There's just no question about it. Towards the end of his life though, and really this was not necessarily just towards the end of his life, but it got more open and more crazy towards the end of his life.

01:47

A lot of negative fruit. A lot of negative stuff. Especially in the social and political sphere.

01:59

He just was no bueno in that stuff. This is not to say that everything he ever did was bad and all of that.

02:07

I really do wonder in the grand scheme of things if he was a net negative or net positive.

02:13

I'm not that hot on Tim Keller. I used to go to Tim Keller's church. That's the first church I went to as an adult.

02:20

His book, The Prodigal God, which if I went back and read it I'm sure I'd find lots of stuff I disagree with, but that book was instrumental in my salvation as well.

02:30

The way he unpacked, and I'm using biggie of a term because that way hopefully everyone can understand, the way he unpacked the prodigal son story is very helpful.

02:44

At least it was to me. It doesn't mean that you should go back and read that book, The Prodigal God. He's trying to be too cute.

02:50

I hate when people try to be too cute. Get out of here with that.

02:56

Anyway, that's one of his biggest net negatives.

03:02

He led the charge of trying to be too cute. I don't like that.

03:07

Anyway, I'm glad that God used that book despite its flaws to help awaken my soul.

03:19

That's the truth. That's the truth about Tim Keller. He had a huge impact on evangelicalism. Some of it was good and some of it was bad.

03:26

Some of it was really good and some of it was really bad. I don't think there's any question about that. It's a mixed bag.

03:33

He was horrible on the woke church stuff. There's just no question about it. Horrible on politics. He's a registered democrat.

03:39

He was one of these guys too. Ligon Duncan in this way is a disciple of Tim Keller's.

03:48

He's one of these guys too that he thinks he can get away with lying about people if he doesn't name them.

03:53

This is a core tenet of Big Eva. What I'm thinking about doing is coming up with a list, a guidebook for Big Eva's deception, how they deceive people because Big Eva deceives people.

04:05

Ligon Duncan deceives people, and I think that Tim Keller deceived people. One of the primary ways that they do this is they lie about people without naming them, and they'll never ever admit that they were talking about someone specific, and that way they think they can get away with that.

04:23

They think they're fooling people because you can never really call them on that lie because you never really said it was about X, Y, Z.

04:28

You just kind of put this general kind of truism out there that it's true, but it's not true and applied to the person you're talking about, but they don't name him, so that's how they deceive people.

04:38

That's one way they deceive people, and Tim Keller was the king of that, the king of that, and no matter who called him out on it, he would never admit it.

04:46

And sometimes he would try to be too cute, and the example got too specific. He put a tweet out, and it was so specific that there's only one possible person he could be talking about, and that one possible person was just in the situation that he's describing in his general, vague description, and people would call him out, and sometimes he'd respond,

05:07

I didn't have anyone in particular in mind. It's just a lie. He's lying. He was the king of that kind of deception.

05:15

The way he did it, but you are one of the people who's had, I think, two debates with him on the floor of the

05:22

General Assembly. I've only listened to one, and it was several years ago, but can you speak at all to Tim's life and legacy, especially as someone who has had to kind of not really go to the ground with him, but debate him about things?

05:37

The reason Ligon Duncan debated him is because Tim Keller was like the figurehead, the leader of the more liberal, progressive side of the

05:46

PCA, and so that's the thing. And so Ligon Duncan, he was more of the representative and one of the leaders on the conservative side of the

05:55

PCA. So if you want to understand how far the PCA has fallen, Ligon Duncan was the conservative at that time.

06:03

And in some ways he still is, but woke church Ligon Duncan is a conservative, allegedly.

06:11

Very interesting when you look at it from that perspective. Ligon Duncan was the polar opposite on some of the more contentious issues when it came to the liberals versus conservatives in the

06:22

PCA. Let that sink in. Woke church Ligon Duncan. I don't care about that.

06:41

Yeah, that's right.

06:48

We're tiny compared to the Southern Baptist world or the larger evangelical world.

06:55

We had occupied the same territory, but Tim's about 10 years older than me.

07:01

And it was that first debate on women deacons and deaconesses that brought us together.

07:07

And I've always in life, I would rather have a debate over things that I deeply care about and disagree upon with a friend rather than someone that I don't like.

07:18

And so it was a real. That's always true. That's always true. And I think that, you know, we talked about this in the last episode about the cross politic interview with Clavin.

07:30

I think that's something that cross politic is really good at. You know, they're really good at making friends and building bridges, despite what you're about to hear in this video, where if you listen to what he says, they're like the most, you know, honoree and unfriendly people around.

07:47

That's just not the case. It's just false. And so so cross politic builds bridges.

07:53

They make friends and they make friends with people that they deeply disagree with, and they try to be very charitable about how they hear those disagreements.

08:00

And they try to find areas where they they kind of agree, but maybe they need to nuance things a little bit and stuff like that.

08:07

Who doesn't want to have an argument more with a friend than with someone that they don't like? In fact, there are people that I would not personally debate because I deeply dislike them so much that I wouldn't trust myself in a debate like that.

08:21

You know, man's got to know his limits, right? But but yeah, that's that's that's a very good, very good, very good thing to say,

08:30

Ligon. Good work. Blessing to be able to have that conversation with Tim and but he kind of didn't debate you, right?

08:38

He showed up and he was like, that's that's Tim's way, right? That's Tim's way.

08:43

I mean, Tim doesn't like to be polemical. You know, that was just never he did. Tim. Well, that's not really true.

08:52

That's not really true. Because I seem to remember many articles in national publications, non -Christian publications where Tim Keller absolutely ripped regular people in the pews, you know, because they voted for Trump and they're racist and they're backwards and stuff like that.

09:11

So Tim doesn't really mind being polemical so long as his his opponent is just a regular peon.

09:18

But if he's a stately, you know, leader of the evangelical movement, OK, maybe maybe maybe that's how he feels.

09:24

I don't really know because I don't really know Tim Keller that well, but he had no problem ripping the people in the pews.

09:30

And this is one of my biggest problems with Big Eva in general, because they they do the opposite of what

09:36

Jesus did the opposite. It's upside down. It's it's it's it's inversion.

09:42

You see, what Jesus did was he would rip apart, rip apart not evangelical leaders, the leader, the religious leaders of the

09:50

Jews. Right. He would rip them to shreds. And then if you see him interact with people who he disagrees with that are regular people, there's a lot more sympathy.

10:01

There's a lot more, you know, calm criticisms. There's a lot more measured words.

10:09

Right. With the regular peons. Right. That's that's Jesus's example. That's the example I try to follow as well.

10:15

Of course, I do it imperfectly. But if you look at evangelical leaders, they're actually inverted there.

10:21

They rip apart regular peons in the pews. Oh, yeah, they're just, you know, backwards hillbillies, you know, deplorable, all this kind of stuff.

10:29

That's the impression you get when they write for the Atlantic and then they soft pedal people they disagree with that are in their little guild, then their little club.

10:38

That's always how it works with Big Eva. It's just the inversion of the example of Jesus Christ.

10:44

So for all their talk about being Christlike and kind there, their action, their talk is

10:50

OK. So that's good. You can listen to their talk, just like the Pharisees. What they taught was OK for the most part.

10:57

But their example is inverted. Do what they say. Don't do what they do because they don't know what they don't they don't embody what they do.

11:06

His his. And by the way, I think this is part of why Moscow gets drug through the mud so much, because Moscow actually does what they say they want to do.

11:17

They want charity towards people. They want to be to be winsome in the good way.

11:22

They want to be make build bridges and make friends. And they do. And they do with people they disagree with.

11:29

And so Moscow's existence and the way that Moscow operates is an absolute it's it's it's it's it's it's such a contrast with what standard

11:42

Big Eva does. Standard Big Eva teaches the right way. They don't do the right things. Moscow teaches the right way and does the right things.

11:50

And I think that that really, really kind of chaps their behinds, grinds their gears because they see

11:57

Moscow and they're like, oh, look at them. They love bombs sometimes. Like, it's just like so ingracious.

12:02

And they see them actually being gracious. Right. They don't talk about, you know, winsomeness all the time like like like these guys do, but they actually are winsome.

12:12

That must really, really get their goat. He was always apologetic and evangelistic.

12:18

He was always trying to make a case for the gospel. He was trying to strip away objections to the gospel and to Christianity.

12:26

And he was trying to reach out and persuade. And he was an evangelist at his heart. And so he he was really uncomfortable in polemical settings.

12:36

Now, he had strong opinions and well -founded opinions. And I actually enjoyed arguing with him in private more than in public, because he didn't you know, when you're in public and you're a person of his stature, everybody is listening for every nuance of what you say and they'll have a read on whatever you say, however you say it.

12:57

When you're in private, you don't have to be careful that way. And so, you know, I've been in a room with Al Mohler, Mark Dever, Tim Keller and me and unbelievably candid interactions.

13:10

Yeah, right. And that was super enjoyable from a debate standpoint, more enjoyable than being in a public setting.

13:16

But what was, you know, just like the first time I met Vern Poythress at Westminster Seminary, unbelievably smart guy.

13:24

But you meet Vern and you immediately love him. He just he loves Jesus. He loves the Bible and you just love the man.

13:30

Well, same thing with Tim. You just you meet Tim and you just you talk to him for a little bit and you just I love this man.

13:37

I love I love the way he loves Christ. You know, when when you learn his story, and I do think

13:44

Colin really helped a lot of people come in. Oh, oh, that's that's where that comes from.

13:49

And Tim, that's where that comes from. And Tim, that's where that comes from. And Tim and I, I knew a little of that because my wife went to Gordon Conwell a little bit after Tim, but she had the same theological experience at Gordon Conwell that Tim and Kathy did.

14:03

And so I got I used to tell people, if you want to understand Tim, you have to understand Gordon Conwell, 1975.

14:09

It's just everything, whether it's loveless on dynamics of the spiritual life or whether, you know,

14:15

I go down the list of the people. And of course, especially Meredith Klein. Yeah, they had a huge impact on Tim.

14:21

But I you know, so it was really good to be put in that setting because I think people thought that we were going to come out, you know, with, you know, with guns blazing and fisticuffs and all of that.

14:32

And we had a really good, enjoyable engagement that I think was clarifying. And it ended up being unifying for the denomination.

14:40

And and then we had several other public engagements like that. But I tell you, one of the great blessings has been the last seven years

14:47

I've taught introduction to pastoral and theological studies in New York City. With Tim. So next week,

14:53

I will teach it without Tim for the first time in seven years. So it's a really poignant thing for me.

14:58

And I'm actually what this will surprise some people on this call, whereas Tim started when we were teaching.

15:05

A lot of people are noticing just Sean DeMars is interview style and I'm not the best interviewer myself.

15:12

So this this criticism is about myself as well. But it's just it's just like his interview style is like, oh, oh, oh, this is very annoying.

15:29

I do that too, though. I think I think I do that too. That's why I don't do interviews on my show.

15:35

I'm not very good at it. And he also did a lot of stuff on cult ministry that was helpful, too.

16:06

But there are a lot of people out there that I think would surprise that would surprise them. You know, he set aside contextualization, sets aside contextualization to go after Calvinism to make sure you understand grace.

16:17

Exactly. Yeah, that's exactly right. And so that was fun to be able to see him do that. It doesn't surprise me at all, to be honest.

16:24

But it's so interesting how they kind of they kind of know that that contextualization stuff was was no bueno.

16:33

And it would have been nice to hear more about why they have that opinion, because I agree.

16:40

I remember, in fact, that's the very first lecture I heard because I went to his church, of course. And then he also had this like, you know, city for city or something.

16:50

I don't know, some kind of lecture series that that was offered in New York. And I went to it. The very first one I heard was about contextualization, gospel contextualization.

16:58

And even as a young Christian, like I didn't know any better, really. And so I was just like, you know, like listening and I had no opinions, really.

17:06

But but I remember thinking like, yeah, that doesn't sound right.

17:12

That doesn't sound right. But at the time, I was just kind of like, well, I mean, I must be wrong because I'm not I'm just I'm new at this.

17:17

I don't know what I'm talking about. But it never, ever sat sat right with me. It certainly seemed like adjusting the message to to to reach your audience.

17:27

And and there's some truth there in the sense of maybe you adjust your tactics or maybe you adjust your, you know, the kinds of wording that you use or the tone of the words that you use, maybe.

17:43

But it still has to have the same content. Right. So sin can't become, you know, an offense against God or start as an offense against God to, you know, not

17:54

God's best for you. That's not contextualization. That's changing the content anyway. So. So, yeah, like, you know, as a young Christian, I knew that that didn't sound right.

18:03

But, you know, I didn't really have the categories to talk about it. And to watch how he did that and how he handled objections.

18:11

And that was one of the great privileges because I would sit in on his classes and he was a master teacher.

18:20

He remembered everything that he had ever read. I've had a few professors like that in my life. Tim's got that same thing.

18:26

I had a professor in Edinburgh who remembered things that he had read 50 years ago. He could tell you exactly where they were on the page.

18:32

He would get a paragraph quote almost exactly right. That's how Tim is. And so though Tim had never done a

18:39

Ph .D., he had that kind of mojo for an academic, you know, just because of, yeah, because of his memory and because of his intelligence.

18:50

And he was interested in everything. He was always saying, hey, have you read? Have you read? Have you read? And he was reading so widely.

18:56

He was reading stuff that I hadn't read. So he'd say, oh, you need to read this. You need to read this. And so that was fun.

19:02

And we interacted a lot, text, email, phone calls over the last four or five years of his life.

19:11

And that was a special privilege. And he, you know, he had admonitions for me along the way.

19:16

Like when he when he knew things were going downhill with the cancer, he said to me over a year ago, he said, look, how old are you?

19:25

And I think at the time I was 61 or 62. And he said, wait, it's leg. I thought it was like, look, how old are you?

19:35

Like, how old are you? I must have been saying that wrong this whole time. Don't think that you have time.

19:43

And that was a really good. And I'm not a person who takes for granted the time that the

19:49

Lord has given me. But that was a really good admonition to have from Tim. So I got to be a little bit of a part of his life in that way.

19:57

That was that was a wonderful friendship. And though I'm, you know, in the

20:02

PCA, if people would associate me with the more confess wing of the

20:07

PCA, Tim and I had the most delightful working relationship and were totally on the same page with what we were trying to do with our students in New York City.

20:16

Wow. Praise God. Switching gears a little. Classical theism.

20:22

That's the argument we're having these days. Where do you land on that? Yeah, I'm thankful for that.

20:29

You know, in the 1970s and 80s, because the big thing was just the battle for the

20:37

Bible. So the doctrine of special revelation was a front burner issue. It was not uncommon for evangelicals to question all kinds of historic commitments to the

20:49

Christian doctrine of God that Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants would have all agreed upon.

20:54

There's a reason we're going through this, and I'm not commenting too much, because, you know,

20:59

I think Ligon has a lot to a lot of good things to say. You know what I mean? And it's

21:05

I think that I think that it's strategic to talk about all these things, which are not really softballs, but but things that he could knock out of the park.

21:17

You know what I mean? You know, because no one's going to challenge him on his friendship with with Tim Keller.

21:24

But they but they they talk about that first, because what they are attempting to set up here and it's really it's really genius.

21:31

It's ingenious that they do it this way, but they're trying to set up a contrast. And so they're taking the first 30, 40 minutes to try to set up a contrast with what the real topic is.

21:44

And the real topic is to to lie about Moscow, to lie about Doug Wilson and his friends.

21:51

And that's the that's the point of this episode, even if you look at how it's titled Thoughts on Theonomy and Christian Engagement with Culture.

21:59

That's the topic. And so all this stuff about Tim Keller and their charitable disagreements, you know, and how

22:06

Tim Keller was just this amazing man. And he was just so winsome and he was an evangelist at heart and and all of this stuff.

22:14

And by the way, he was totally orthodox. Notice how they threw that in there. He put aside his cultural engagement to focus just on reform theology.

22:23

All of this stuff has been planned out. You need to understand this is all preplanned.

22:30

Big Eva doesn't do off the cuff remarks. That's just not how it works. Right. And even if you notice, you know, later in this in this episode, he's going to say that, you know, there's no such thing as Big Eva.

22:43

That's crazy. You know, and then he's going to say, oh, by the way, you know, you know, Kevin, you know, sent me the rough draft of his attack against Moscow and I, you know, gave him my thoughts and approved it.

22:54

And it's like, it's just so crazy. They don't do anything off the cuff. Right. They don't do what I'm doing.

22:59

What I do is I load this up. I have no notes and I just off the cuff give you my opinion, which there's some downsides to that because there's some things that I don't thoroughly research and there's some things that I don't know.

23:10

So I'll just be like, I don't know, you know, I'll give you my opinion, you know, stuff like that. They don't do this kind of thing.

23:16

It's all planned out. So this might be boring to you, but this is all part of the setup.

23:23

They're setting up a contrast. How great is Tim Keller and Ligon Duncan? And let me show you what how terrible

23:29

Doug Wilson is. And it's all based on lies and it's all based on a false standard.

23:36

Because as great as you think Tim Keller was, he is not the standard.

23:44

I don't know what else to say, but that's the whole reason they're doing this. This is all setting up the stage for them to go in on Doug Wilson and lie many times in the process.

23:54

It's all about deception. They're trying to deceive. And so that's what's going on here.

24:00

The topic is Doug Wilson and Christian nationalists and theonomists. That's the topic.

24:06

And this is all preliminary setup so that they can create this fake contrast to show you how evil all those people are.

24:15

After all, these guys are just all about, they don't even talk about reformed theology. They intend to drive people away from the gospel to talk about their cultural engagement.

24:24

That's what he's trying to set up here. Because I'm sure, I don't think they're lying about Keller.

24:30

He cared about reformed theology. But he cared deeply about his phony baloney and awful upside down cultural engagement.

24:38

He cared deeply about it. And that's his legacy. That's how his life ended up. That's where he was focused.

24:45

But they're trying to pretend like, eh, it wasn't that big. That contextualization, it wasn't a big deal. Yeah, I mean,

24:52

I guess. Sure. But the 20th century, you had people jettisoning the doctrine of divine simplicity, divine impassibility, immutability.

25:04

I can go down the list of things that relatively solid evangelicals had thrown out the window.

25:09

And so the recovery of a robust, historic, and biblical

25:16

Christian doctrine of God, call it classical theism, is a wonderful, wonderful thing.

25:24

And I've told Scott, my president at RTS Orlando has been a big part of that.

25:32

He's a Trinitarian theologian, has written in that Zondervan series. Scott Swain, short introduction on the

25:40

Trinity. I told Scott, you know, Scott, you have made me go back and think about how

25:45

I've said things in my doctrine of God course. You know, things that I've said for 30 years that I've wanted to try, because of the insights that you have given to me,

25:55

I've wanted to tighten up what I was doing. Because I was confessional, I was protected against some of the newfangled trends that were out there.

26:06

The people that were jettisoning impassibility, I never bought that, because I knew

26:12

I couldn't buy that. That's not confessional, it's not a historic

26:17

Christian approach to God. But the work of these younger guys, and they're everywhere, they're in the

26:23

Baptist world, they're in the Presbyterian world, they're in the Anglican world, conservative Bible -believing guys, recovering historic

26:30

Christian doctrine, especially in the doctrine of God. They've really helped me, and I think set us on a good course.

26:38

The Reformers were pretty harsh on scholasticism. Some of the guys in this classical theism conversation are more friendly towards scholasticism.

26:49

Do you think that's just because of how kind of scarred, wounded the

26:56

Reformers were because of the way scholasticism had run amok in the Roman Catholic Church? You will find a mixed report in the

27:05

Reformers on the scholastics, and it depends on which scholastic you're talking about. So Luther, for sure, was completely fried with late medieval nominalism.

27:17

And look, I would have been too. I'd have been over in the corner cheering, go Luther, go. So, you know, the late medieval nominalists come in for a lot of pounding from both the

27:29

Lutheran and the Reformed. That's still going on today. But there are also scholastic theologians who the

27:39

Reformers, the first -generation Reformers quoted with approbation. And so Calvin was not trained in a classical theological curriculum.

27:52

He was a humanist trained. His dissertation was on Seneca's thesis on clemency.

28:01

He had been prepared for law and then went in a different direction. He does not in the way that a

28:09

Petrus van Maastricht or a Francis Turretin or someone like that cite the scholastics and such.

28:19

But you can find Calvin citing scholastic opinion in an approving way and then slapping around the schoolmen in other areas.

28:28

And you can find a little bit of that in just about all of the Reformers. So it was not necessarily a wholesale rejection of everything.

28:37

I remember R .C. Sproul, I was doing this conference on the Westminster Confession before PCA General Assemblies back in the 1990s, early 2000s, and I invited

28:49

R .C. to give a lecture on the Westminster doctrine of God. And he got up and his first sentence was something like this, there is nothing unique about the doctrine of God in magisterial

29:08

Reformed Protestantism in the 16th century in relation to Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.

29:15

But the most unique thing about magisterial Protestantism in the 16th century was its doctrine of God.

29:23

And that was such an R .C. way to start a lecture. And then he went on to argue that what the Reformers had done is that they had worked out the doctrine of God in relation to all the other loci of theology.

29:35

So that the sovereignty of God permeated the totality of your theology, not just this little area of the doctrine of God in the

29:43

Trinity. And of course, that especially applies to soteriology. But it also applied to things like ecclesiology.

29:51

And so, in an interesting way, R .C. kind of anticipated what has happened in the last five, ten years amongst all these young guys.

30:02

Fascinating. One of the things that I did not know that I learned from Colin Hansen... Fascinating.

30:11

Oh man, I'm making fun of you, Sean, but you know, again, this criticism goes to me as well.

30:17

That's how I interview. The biography of Keller was the connection of Keller and R .C.

30:22

Yes. What was the name of the place where they were? The Ligonier Study Center. The Ligonier, the original

30:28

Ligonier Study Center. Yeah, before it was in Florida. Brother, this is not meant to be like that.

30:34

Alright, so this is where they jump into the Moscow stuff. And we're going to stop here because I did cover this already.

30:40

I'm going to cover it again. That's how weaselly and deceptive this part is.

30:45

We're going to cover it twice. But I did want you to see that. I hope this wasn't like the most boring episode ever.

30:52

I mean, it probably was for some of you. But I really need you to see how they set up the discussion of the

30:59

Moscow mood. This was all intentional. And it's all for the purposes of deception. It's all to prop up the typical

31:05

Big Eva, you know, names that you all well know. See, they weren't quite as bad as people say.

31:12

They were focused on the right stuff, the important stuff. And they all interacted so graciously and this and that.

31:17

And it's all just to set up this false witness that they bear against Moscow and Doug Wilson.

31:25

And it's all very self -serving. It's all intended to prop up the failure of Big Eva, the failure of guys like Tim Keller, the failure that Ligon Duncan is still participating in to this very day.

31:39

It's all intended to set that up. And so, again, I don't want you to ever think that anything

31:45

Big Eva does is off the cuff. It's all intentional.

31:51

It's all plotted. It's all planned. It's all circulated. It's all reviewed and edited to have the most possible effect that they could possibly have.

32:01

They are very conniving. Ligon Duncan is a very conniving man.

32:07

Sean DeMars looks like he's participating in this, but who knows? He's a low -level goon. Who knows how much he's in the planning, but he's a willing participant.