News Roundup: SBC, Greear, Muslims Worship Same God? Master's University, Cross Con

We are live now on the Conversations That Matter podcast. I hope everyone can hear me. Let me know if you cannot in the chat section.

I had a number of things I wanted to talk about. I had to reduce the list because time constraints. We are actually starting the

American Churchman podcast in about, oh now, 57 minutes. So the podcast can't go, this podcast can't go beyond that.

And also I just think some of the topics I wanted to talk about, namely My Daily Bread or Daily Bread, the devotional ministry that I wanted to do a follow -up on.

I think I need more time to flesh out some of the critiques I have of some of the content they've put out.

So we're not gonna talk about our daily bread. Sorry, did I say my daily bread? Our daily bread. And we're gonna instead focus on some other things that I've been saving, mostly.

Some things regarding the SBC and we're gonna talk a little bit about CrossCon.

I actually watched or listened to four and a half of the sessions at CrossCon.

I didn't listen to all the ones I wanted to, but I listened to enough to get a flavor for it. For those who don't know,

CrossCon is a youth conference as I understand it. Similar to, well, the feeling of it, the flavor of it is very similar to the

Gospel Coalition, T4G. I can't quite even put my finger on it. It's one of those things you know it when you see it.

Someone who's probably more observant of particular things, like my wife is very observant of details.

I don't always get the details, but I can see the big picture. Someone who knows details well can probably pick out exactly what

I'm feeling when I look at the room and the way people are dressed. It's a very sort of millennial cool style.

That's how people dress. They're millennial cool. You can tell they're like 10 years behind the trends, but they think they're cool.

That's my perception, okay? That's what I... And I'm not probably the best judge of cool, which makes it even worse for them.

But anyway, there were about 10 ,000 students at CrossCon last weekend, and that's nothing to sneeze at.

I think that it's important for us as conservative Christians, Christian conservatives, however you wanna frame that,

Orthodox, theologically rigid, when it comes to solid root level

Christian doctrines, those of us who are like that, whether the woke wars, we are in more fracturing now over, frankly,

I think liberalism more than anything else. And we're looking around us and we're talking about these very small categories of people, you know?

The Ogden guys versus the Moscow guys, the G3 verse, it's not even really that much of a verse, they don't have a feud, but they're different, right?

G3, American reformer. I put out a post about this earlier today and asked people what they thought about these separations or differences.

Right response ministries and apologia.

We're talking about those things a lot in certain segments, certain sections of X.

And I think 99 % of the evangelical world in America just isn't on the same wavelength.

And this brought it home to me a little more. I thought, you know, none of these ministries are having a 10 ,000 person gathering that's just students, 18 to 24, none of them are.

Crew maybe, I don't even think crew, I don't know. So I do think that these legacy ministries that went woke have taken a big hit.

I think they are on their way out in some ways, I think. But they do have resources, they do have, there is momentum there, they do have connections.

And those things mean something. And so it would be foolish, I think, for me to stop talking about those things altogether, which some people do want me to do.

John, it's a dead horse. Sometimes I feel that way, it's a dead horse, stop beating it. Don't talk about these legacy ministries that have compromised or figures that go to conferences on the conference circuit.

You've already covered those guys, don't talk about them. Well, sometimes I need to, because guess what? There's still just a very large percentage of people out there.

And it's a larger percentage, I think, or at least a more well -connected percentage, more influential percentage of people out there who are still frequenting some of these events.

And there's people in those events, by the way, who they're not all compromised, right? And that's what

I wanted to talk about a little bit. So I'm probably jumping ahead of myself because there were some other things I have. I don't usually do a show notes list, but I wanted to keep things straight.

So I put a few notes together and I'm already like on 0 .4. I've skipped past the things

I was gonna talk about, but that's okay. I'll say this.

I think that the guys, a lot of the guys who compromised in 2020 and before that, leading up to 2020, right?

With all the BLM inspired protests over shootings and these kinds of things and the

Me Too movement and even some LGBTQ normalization, same sex attraction isn't sin, all of that.

We talked about all this, right? I think a lot of those guys have tried to go back to their bread and butter.

That's what I'm seeing out there. You don't see the hard woke stuff. And that's what I noticed when I started listening. It was a little bit like crew.

When I listened to one of their conferences in 2022, I thought, okay, I've listened to some of their other conferences in the past.

It's like a woke fest. And I started listening and I thought, that's really not. And it's about very basic things like, hey, you should pray.

You should be more devotional. A lot of it, honestly, not as inspirational as it is guilt trippy.

That's what I noticed too. I noticed that specifically David Platt's speech at CrossCon, very guilt trippy, but that's just David Platt.

I commented on X. I think he's got one sermon and he just preaches different versions of it everywhere. Every time

I listen to David Platt, it sounds like I'm listening to the same thing. It's just different analogies, different passages, but the same basic points.

And a lot of it does come back to a very, I hesitate to say manipulative because I do think that's what he's doing, but it doesn't have to be.

Some of the things he says don't have to be manipulative, but they are very persuasive to someone who wants to, hungers to know

God more, thirst for righteousness. They will hear what David Platt says about how often do you look at your phone?

Now, how often do you do your devotions? And it's a valid point to make that someone should be reading the word of God.

Someone should be praying to God and exercising spiritual disciplines. There's no question about that, but it is the constant hammering of that that Platt does over and over and over in every sermon that you're just falling short.

You just get that message all the time. You're falling short, you're falling short. You're not a serious Christian. You don't sacrifice enough.

That's usually the root of it. You don't sacrifice enough. You need to do more. You need to give more time. You need to give more money. If you would give more money in time, the world would have been reached, but the world is not reached.

Guess what? That's because of you. That's the Platt message. And I noticed that these guys are all falling back to their prime messages.

Some of it is very simple. Like I thought even listening to one of the panel discussions where actually this is another thing.

It was hosted by a female who was very domineering. On the panel, which

I thought was interesting too, but without getting into the whole patriarchy complementarian stuff, that was an interesting thing to notice.

But it was all about missions, but it was like super basic stuff. And so had me wondering like, where are we at?

Are we, do we progress in the pop evangelical world ever?

Is there ever like, like Rosaria Butterfield gave, and I actually asked her about this.

And she said that, you know, her session was, people had to, it was a breakout,

I guess. So people had to volunteer to go into the session. It wasn't like they were main session where everyone's expected in a mixed audience to be in there.

This was something, it was aimed at women about modesty. And she actually gave you information like to build off of, like beyond just your very, very basic stuff.

But she was, I think an outlier. Like what I listened to was just so basic. I just thought, wow, this, by the time

I entered youth group, most of these things were just taught and we need to be reminded of the basics.

But the flavor is so overwhelmingly basic. It just has me wondering, why are we always getting milk?

And then when it's not milk, it's social justice. Like we have to be nuanced and it needs to be complicated.

We need to understand intersectionality, these big words. But then when it comes to actual Christianity, like deep theology seems to be thrown out the window.

Like we don't need to know complicated terms or they're not really that complicated, but we don't need to know fancy terms for the attributes of God.

We just need to come back to, hey, you should help people. You should be about the gospel.

You should serve in your church. The church is important, right? These kinds of things. It's just, it's odd to me.

I don't know if that's because, I was just assuming it's because the evangelical and the neo -evangelical impulse is to kind of find a very baseline levels of agreement.

So you can have a broad range of people at your events. That's how you have big events. That's how you have big book sales, big

Christian radio, big songs. You are finding that baseline that everyone agrees on. I think that might be part of it.

I think it's also perhaps the reduction of any kind of serious thought or approach to hard issues and the avoidance of some of the hard issues, perhaps to some of the more controversial things.

These are all things going through my head as I'm listening to some of these presentations. So that's just giving you my general,

I suppose, critique and concern about the continuance of pop evangelicalism.

But I wanted to play a specific clip for you. So I'm gonna get to some of the questions and comments.

And by the way, as long as I'm on for the next 45 minutes or whatever, if we run out of time, I will take whatever questions about anything.

Because I realize there's a lot that's been going on online regarding Calvin Robinson.

And of course, some of you who are following me on X know he unfollowed me. And we had, I guess, a little back and forth.

I thought I was being nice, but I guess I was, I don't know, too hard on Catholicism or something. And yes,

I don't mind talking about the Moscow Ogden thing or any of that. We can talk about whatever you want.

But I do have to get to some of these things. So the first thing that I wanted to talk about since I'm already talking about it is

Kevin DeYoung's presentation. We're gonna talk about Kevin DeYoung and his presentation at CrossCon. And he quotes

Stephen Wolfe. But, and I'll just tell you broadly, his whole thing is that the

Great Commission is not about nations as corporate entities, but as individuals within nations. So making disciples of the nations means making disciples within nations of individual

Christians. And for the population of the church, and then the church is the entity that carries out the mission of Christ.

And so he wants to overturn this notion that nations can be discipled as corporate entities. So that's his point.

I think he makes six or seven points along those lines. I actually don't really have a problem with his point. I don't think it's relevant to Stephen, but he quotes

Stephen. And I think it's interesting to hear how Kevin DeYoung thinks about really what he's talking about is the new

Christian right. And I wanna respond to some of the things he said. So I'll play the clip first. Here it is. Message is to make sure that when we talk about God's mission in the world and the mission of the church, that we have our story straight.

Increasingly, you hear some Christians tell a story of God's work in the world that is less about saving sinners, bringing them into the church, the church as a witnessing community, the church as an outpost of the kingdom, less about that, less energy, enthusiasm toward that, and more about a call to transform culture, save civilization, and even create, build, or restore

Christian nations. And 15 years ago, if well -meaning churches were drifting in their

God -given mission, it was because all of their energy and excitement was around the arts, justice, shalom, human flourishing, all good things, but not mainly the story the

Bible is telling. I want to convince you or perhaps remind you that the story of God's work in the world is church -centric and soteriological, that is having to do with salvation, church -centric and soteriological rather than nation -centric and civilizational.

Some Christians have made the argument that only a Christian nation can present to us, quote, a complete image of heavenly life.

Now, to be fair, these Christians would not deny that God saves sinners and brings them into the church for discipleship and worship.

At the same time, however, in this telling of the Christian story, the church is often given as a means to an end, that is the impression one gets is that the church, yes, it's important, plays rather a supportive spiritual role, a kind of chaplain to the larger societal aims whereby the civil realm ought to be ordered to people's complete good, or let me put it in a different way.

The vision in this impulse of God's work in the world is nation -centric rather than church -centric so that the energy of the church gets directed toward the building of Christendom or the saving or the reestablishing of Christendom and the establishment of a

Christian civil society. The purpose of this. Okay, all right.

Hopefully everyone can see and hear me as I go through some of this. So you heard what Kevin DeYoung had to say, and then as I summarized, he goes into six or seven reasons that you shouldn't interpret the

Great Commission as discipling nations as a corporate entity. Now, I will point out first that the Great Commission obviously says to make disciples, and this means teaching them the things

I have commanded. So there is a place for the law in this. Kevin DeYoung wouldn't deny that. And obviously that goes beyond just the gospel and creating converts.

This is also applying the law of God to your daily life. And that's gonna include people who are civil magistrates who have responsibilities for the corporate entity, whatever they live in, empire, nation, district, county, town.

So it's important. And I don't think, there is a phrase I didn't include in here where sort of a very fast thing

Kevin says, but he does say that he doesn't want anyone to feel like they can't be patriotic or they can't care about their country.

So obviously he thinks you should be able to care about your country, but he's very concerned that there are, and he mentioned

Stephen Wolfe, not by name, but he quotes him as an example. He mentions people following Stephen Wolfe in his book,

Case for Christian Nationalists, that they would confuse the role of Christianizing the world, the government, the culture, whatever, and that making converts and functioning as a church.

So he thinks that the church is the mission. That's the primary thing. And that there's a group of people coming on the scene who don't think the church is the primary mission of God and that the church needs to be somehow used for the purpose of creating a great society.

I think there's so many thoughts in my head right now, it's hard to narrow them down, but I think that the first thing that probably stands out to everyone who's any familiar with Kevin DeYoung is that throughout the woke wars,

Kevin DeYoung sat on the board of the Gospel Coalition. He was, at the very least, any critique he may have was with kid gloves for folks like Tim Keller, who he shared a denomination with, right?

Or Ligon Duncan, guys who went strong woke. He mentions in a very general sense that there were these people, and he's talking about them,

I assume, who wanted to engage in social justice and that this was, you know, they had an imbalanced view, but how often did he actually get up there and start quoting them?

Like he does Stephen Wolfe, giving quotes from Tim Keller or Ligon Duncan and say, or Scott Sauls or anyone in his denomination and say, these men have done something very terrible.

This is, here's a quote, and I'm gonna spend the rest of my entire session in this speech basically debunking what

I think they believe. I can't recall offhand, that doesn't mean it doesn't happen, but I cannot recall him once doing that.

In fact, I can recall an occasion from the pulpit when he started making his congregation feel guilty for slavery.

I can recall him saying things that sounded kind of woke. I cannot recall him ever applying the kind of pressure he's applying right now to the new

Christian right, which is what I think he's talking about to social justice guys. So equal weights and measures,

I think there's a problem here and admittedly, it's easier to punch down.

It's easier to take a swipe at people outside your circles, but it's obviously more necessary when it's people inside your circles to point out their potential error.

You can do it graciously, you can do it behind the scenes first, but you eventually if they're gonna keep going on a bad direction, you do need to point it out to people who are following them, right?

So this is what I've tried to practice to the best of my ability when I've seen problems that are close to me.

I generally do have that instinct to try to talk to that person first and try to rectify it and see if they'll course correct and all of those kinds of things.

That's just natural, that's what we should be doing, but it's very rare from my experience in the halls of power in these evangelical institutions.

So that sticks out at me a bit. Maybe it's not the main point to make, but the main point I think is this,

Stephen Wolfe doesn't actually make the point that Kevin argues against in the rest of this talk. Stephen says, and I included the quote here, for those listening, you couldn't see it, but it says, many today want to call the instituted church a colony or an outpost of heaven, but this conflates the principle image of heavenly life.

Now, focus on that image, heavenly life, put that in the back of your mind and we'll come back to it. With a complete image of heavenly life, the

Christian nation is the complete image of eternal life on earth for in addition to being a worshiping people, the

Christian nation has submitted to magistrates and constitutes a people whose cultural practices and self -conception provide a foretaste of heaven.

So there's two things I want you to put in your back of your mind. The first is heavenly life, and the second two words is on earth.

In the sentence, the Christian nation is the complete image of eternal life on earth.

If you cut out eternal on earth from that sentence, it can mean something very different. It can mean that the main goal of the,

I mean, you could do what Kevin Young is doing. You could say, oh, the church just exists because the Christian nation is the complete image, right?

Well, it's the complete image where? This is the important thing. And this is,

I think, what Kevin kind of misses. So there's a difference between temporal life and eternal life in Stephen's book.

Here's another quote for you, and I'll bring this all together. The end of the civil law is the common good of the civil community.

The common good is common in that it refers to good conditions of the whole. Civil law aims at the common good by seeking to establish and cultivate social conditions in which each part of the whole is afforded an opportunity to seek for himself and his household, the complete good.

So this is the other things Kevin Young is talking about, the complete good. So the complete good where? You know, what category?

How is he talking about the complete good? Are we talking about earthly life? Is he talking about heavenly life, right?

This is where Kevin Young kind of steps over that. He doesn't talk about the, he just, he does a conflation, right, because he doesn't use the categories

Stephen is using, and then he imposes Stephen's quotes onto categories I don't think Stephen would impose them.

Now, I don't have these up on the screen, but let me just give you a few things from Stephen's book.

And I'm doing this, by the way, somewhat randomly. I typed in the church on a search on the

Kindle version of Stephen's book, The Case for Christian Nationalism. Comes up 118 times, the church.

That's not just church, the church, okay? And here's one of the sections here.

I'm just gonna click on one. This is from page 234.

We'll start here. He's talking about, I guess it's

Ray Ortlund. As with most critics of cultural Christianity, Ortlund assumes a sort of ecclesiocentrism in which the institutional church has become a quasi -alternative civil society, taking on distinct

Christian culture. Excuse me. Hence, he does not deny that Christians need a

Christian culture. Only he makes the church the sphere of that culture. The church is thus more than an administration of the sacred things for eternal life.

It is the site for gospel culture. So he's actually critiquing someone who is taking the church and making the church something it's not.

The administration of sacred things for eternal life is what the church is. It's not about creating this gospel culture on earth.

Now, I would suggest that actually, that's something similar to what Kevin DeYoung is saying. Kevin DeYoung is saying you don't take the church and use it as this means by which you create a

Christianized society. Well, Stephen Wolfe is saying, I think, something fairly similar here. He's saying you don't take the church and try to create this culture out of the church that is broadly outside, has these implications and effects outside the church.

That's not the role. That's not the place of the church. So he goes on, let me just keep reading.

He says, which supplies Christians a sort of relationship and goods that they might get in a civil society if it were

Christian? Okay, so he's making a separation. You have civil societies that are Christian and then you have the church.

And these are two different things. They're not the same thing. At least intuitively, everyone seems to recognize that when you reject the idea of a

Christian civil society, some essential elements of life is left unaccounted for. And so you must expand the church's functions and roles in the life of a believer.

As a result, you get a church full of programs, ministry teams, and onsite outlets for Christian resources for most areas of life.

And I've been in churches like this. You wanna go bowling? Well, you should start a bowling league at the church.

All activities should be funneled through the church and the authority of the elders. I'm here to tell you that's wrong. That's not right.

It's not wrong for your church to have things that you do, but to think that all activities must go through the church or the authority of the elders, this is just not right.

The church does have a narrow role and it does have implications and effects on the rest of life as you live and you cultivate in a spiritual knowledge and understanding and life together and all of this.

You will live differently in the world, right? You will be a better bowling, what do they call them?

Bowling teams, I guess, member of your bowling team if you are hopefully a

Christian growing in the church than you would if you had not been. But anyway, I digress. He says, as a result, you get a church full of programs.

You effectively get an ecclesial civil association and conflation of two species of association that effectively confounds both.

I am no longer surprised by the regularity of Christian opinion pieces claiming that the church must do more for this or that group or to solve this or that problem among Christians.

So he's trying to actually defend the church here against people who would use it and try to harness it to change the culture in an ecclesiastic direction.

Let's just maybe go to one more randomly, okay? So this is the very next.

Now, let me just go like way farther in the book. We'll go up to just see.

I don't know what I'm gonna be clicking on but I'll click on one. Let's see. Page 324, it seems like he talks about the church an awful lot.

Let's see. Oh no, those are footnotes, okay. I'm way past the, let's go to 315. The prince as prince therefore protects the church as a servant of Christ, not as a servant of pastors.

More specifically, the prince is a servant of Christ as mediator, though not. So he's talking about a political leader and a political leader protecting the church.

Not in an ecclesiastic function but as accountable before Christ in a magisterial function.

He says more specifically, the prince is a servant of Christ as a mediator, though not as one formally under Christ as mediator.

To order the civil realm according to the fullness of revealed religion. Thus he ought to order the civil realm to the divine precepts of Christ, the king of the church.

Doesn't sound like me, to me, like this is someone who's trying to make the point that you use the church to Christianize the culture, that it's a temporal identity and a temporal function that the church now is subsumed by.

That doesn't sound like what he's doing. It sounds like if anything, he's saying that the civil or the magisterial function is to actually cultivate, one of them at least, is to cultivate people for heavenly life, to prepare them for that kind of thing, to assist the church in a way.

I suppose, I don't know if he would take issue with me using that language, but that's what it looks like. He says the actions of the prince in advancing

Christ's spiritual kingdom brings Christ to modes of reign as God, as the mediator into explicit unity.

Put another way, albeit less precisely, God the creator has obliged civil rulers to enforce the first table of the moral law.

And so they must concern themselves with religion, even revealed religion. So thou shalt not murder, that's a religious principle.

So I'm not gonna keep reading along these lines. I hope it's clear to people that Kevin DeYoung, oh,

Tim Bushong, okay, I'll make my point, but this is important. Tim Bushong has corrected me. It's not a bowling team and it's a bowling league.

I should know this, I should know this. I've just never been part of one. The Dutch did settle the area that I live in, but there's not enough of them left to have bowling alleys everywhere.

And so I don't know if I know anyone who's a member of a bowling league, but thank you, Tim. Living in the Midwest, I'm sure there's a lot of Dutch and a lot of bowling leagues.

So for those who don't know, bowling is a Dutch sport. So going back, Kevin DeYoung, I think is, he is critiquing something that needs to be critiqued,

I think, from probably more of a theonomic reconstructionist bent. I think there would be advocates of that who might claim that making disciples of the nations, they actually try to do what

Stephen's saying here and Stephen's critiquing too, that they expand the ecclesiastic function to include more of a civil function.

But that's not what Stephen's saying at all. So to use a Stephen's quote and then to paint the new Christian right as this is what they're trying to do, it's not accurate.

There may be people like that, but my suspicion is Kevin DeYoung is taking categories that are a little older, probably at 15 or more years old that he's known.

It's just a suspicion I have. I'm trying to give him the benefit of the doubt. And he's applying these categories, oh, this new

Christian right stuff, it's just like theonomy or something. And I remember critiquing Greg Bonson or Rush Jr.,

whoever he did, and this is my critique. And now, because he critiqued

Gary North or whoever, he's thinking that this is the same thing.

It's not, it's not the same thing. If you just read the rest of Stephen's book, Stephen says something similar. All right,

I've beat that dead horse long enough. We'll go on to something else since we don't have a lot of time anyway. I want to talk about J .D.

Greer, and I will get to your questions and all of that, but I need to talk about this first. So where to start?

So these are older clips, but they came up again. And I realized I never talked about these on the podcast and it is an important point.

And it does go along with some of the ecumenical talk lately as well. So I think I can kill a few birds with one stone by bringing this up.

So I just realized I didn't have the first clip that I wanted to play for you ready. Let me see if I can find it quickly.

And if I can't, then I'll play another clip for you. I have two clips of J .D. Greer. Okay, I found it. Here's the first clip that I want to play for you.

This is from a few years ago. I think it's probably more than five years ago. I want to say it's like 2018.

So it's probably, yeah, seven years ago or so. This is J .D. Greer talking about whether Muslims and Christians worship the same

God. Here we go. I get asked this question a lot because I served as a missionary among Muslims and I wrote a book called

Breaking the Islam Code. And I'm not trying to be evasive, but I do think you got to make sure you're asking the right question.

You know, if the question is, are there multiple ways to God and does God receive the worship of Christians and Muslims alike?

The answer is absolutely not because Islam is a false way of salvation. It presents basically salvation by works.

And it outright denies several key things that Christianity teaches about God, like God being a trinity and the personal nature of God and just a number of things.

You know, there is some question as to, because Muslims say they worship the God of Abraham.

And there are some missionaries that have found it helpful to start with that and say, like Jesus said to the woman at the well in John four, who you think you're worshiping, you're not actually worshiping.

When Jesus confronted her, Samaritan woman who was worshiping wrongly and had wrong ideas about God. He didn't say you're worshiping a different God.

He said, you're worshiping, attempting to worship the one creator God the wrong way. And I've heard people talk about that as an approach to Muslims.

And I think it has some merit. I think when you're a missionary on the field, one of the things that you're, you know, trying to do is you're trying to say, you know, this

God that we believe has created the world has been speaking to the prophets. This God was revealed fully in Jesus.

He is a trinity and Muhammad is not an accurate prophet of him. If somebody says that I have less problems with them saying

Christians and Muslims are attempting to worship the same God, but in two entirely different ways. All right, yeah.

It's just like the woman at the well, I guess. They, you can worship God, the same

God, the same identity in a way that's inappropriate or wrong, but it's the destination's similar, the same.

Let me play you another clip of J .D. Greer. Actually, it's a few clips. Maybe I'll interject myself into some of these clips and give a few comments, but then we'll bring it all together and I'll talk about why this is coming up now.

So this is from 2020. So it's two years later after the clip I just played you. And this is

J .D. Greer dialoguing with Omar Suleiman at an event at North Carolina.

I think it's at a new university there in North Carolina, I think, but he's at an event and it's sponsored by Veritas Forum and Brother, no,

Neighborly, sorry, Neighborly Faith. Neighborly Faith is an organization that I wanted to talk about. I actually started doing a little bit of digging on them a few years ago and I thought, wow, this seems very compromised.

And a lot of it has to do with trying to get Christians and Muslims to see similarities in each other and promote cross -dialogue.

And I had, I won't say who it was, but someone told me that they didn't want me to talk about it yet.

I actually stumbled on it and no one was talking about it. And they said, don't talk about it, John. We're gonna have a team look at this and stuff.

And I don't think that ever came, I wish I would've just talked about it. I don't think anything ever really came of it, but it's a compromised organization in my opinion, but they were one of the ones who sponsored this.

And here's some clips from that night, that event in 2020 between J .D.

Greer and Omar Suleiman. We understand that when we live in a country that we're grateful that we believe in the freedom of religion.

And that means that we need to be able to not only get along with, but to cherish and to stand alongside of, and even fight for people who believe different things than we do.

And we're grateful for the Muslim neighbors that God has given us. And we want to advocate for their protection, their rights, their interests as much as we would as if they were our own.

And I just feel like too often, and I'm sure we'll get into this tonight, there's a polarization as if it's other.

It's like we got one community and another community, but really, civically, we are citizens of a place and we want to serve and love each other.

One of the things that I, kind of on top of all this and discouraged within the Christian community, is

I feel like one of the greatest challenges for us is remembering that the weapons and the strategies of the world are not things that the church is really supposed to engage in.

That's not how the kingdom of God is supposed to be brought in. We have a savior who consistently resisted all efforts to bring in the kingdom of God militarily or politically.

We want to be an influence, yes, on our government. We want to be an influence in society like salt and light, but that's different than launching a strategy that is trying to take over or trying to turn a nation into a

Christian nation. Because of that, I think, you know what, because what happens, you know, as Christians in America have seen some of these things and they've noticed this, they've reacted with this kind of posture of fear of like, okay, the foundations are being shaken and we're no longer, our message is no longer welcome.

And things that 50 years ago, everybody agreed on about marriage, for example, now it's actually, you're ostracized if you believe that.

And because of this posture of fear, it's caused them to do, I think, two very unhealthy things. One is you begin to excuse or rationalize the faults of, say, a strong man who comes in to offer protection.

And you say, well, it doesn't matter what he or she, as the case may be, what he or she does, if they're going to give me protection, then it justifies that.

I'm not even gonna talk about the faults. And it causes this witness that is just very confused, you know, because it's like, we're more concerned with this political and military strategy or this political protection than you are, you know, the real message of the gospel.

It also causes you, as Omar, I think alluded to, to react with fear to people who are on the outside.

Like we need to kind of huddle up and this is who we are and this is what we need to protect this. And this is those things when those are just, both of those are values that are antithetical to the gospel of Jesus Christ.

I don't think there's really any way to deny that on some level because the predominant religion in the

United States right now that is enthroned in our universities and in the media and in Hollywood and the

New York Times is secularism. And that's every bit of religion as anything else because it's a worldview with a set of values and a set of right and wrong and a set of even its own forms of secular salvation.

And anything that teaches contrary to that is considered to be outside. And so I think recognizing that.

Now, I do want to say this and I'm not trying to just be politically correct. I do understand that for an

American Christian, particularly a white Christian, that there is still a heritage and a place of privilege that I would have in this culture.

And so I wouldn't try to just equate and say, oh, everything that you experienced, we got it way worse or anything like that or even on the same level.

Because I think, as I talked to Omar and others, I mean, there are some things that they deal with that are assumptions and stereotypes that are unfair and that I would never want one of my own children to be subjected to.

Yeah, for those of you that are Muslims and you are here, I want you to know very sincerely that we're glad you're here.

Many of you, I don't obviously even know your name and so I don't want to say something inauthentic, but we love you. We think you belong in this society and we really do want to stand beside you.

We want to be your friends. We feel like there are things in your community and the way that you look at life that are beautiful.

And that, I mean, one of the most enriching times of my life was when I lived in that Muslim majority country and was able to learn some things.

You know, there's nothing about being in another culture that makes you look at your own and say, man, I kind of thought we had it all figured out and I was wrong.

And so, and we really do. And I feel like there's a lot that we want to learn and we want you to be patient with us and help us learn what it looks like to look at life through your eyes.

And it's hard for us, honestly, because we're selfish people. And so we only think of ourselves. And so if you can be patient with us, because most of us have not ever had the experience of being in a place where we weren't in the majority.

And that's a difficult transition for us to make. And I'm just telling you, it's difficult. And what I'm telling you,

I don't speak for, I can't wave a wand and make it, but I know we want to learn that and we really do want to fight alongside of you.

All right, well, so Muslims and Christians worship the same God, I guess. They are just as, you know, they're on the same level as far as having, trying to think how to put this.

Greer's, how to summarize what Greer was trying to advocate there with, I don't think,

I'm gonna actually rephrase what I was about to say. I was about to say that they're on the same level as far as being citizens and having access to public accommodations and privileges.

But I don't actually think that's true. I think Greer puts Muslims above Christians. That's what it sounds like to me, especially towards the end of that dialogue.

He's a, and you heard it, he's a white Christian too. And that's just a place of privilege that Muslims don't have.

So Muslims in this country are subject to some kind of a persecution because they're

Muslim. Yeah, tell that to the guy in Ohio. Was it last week who got arrested for speaking out, preaching the gospel outside of an abortion clinic.

I mean, it's just crazy to me. It's just crazy. We don't have, you know, when you ask people about Christian terrorism, they say

January 6th. They can't give you examples of actual Bible -believing Christians ever doing anything like that.

There's an example from just last week of a radical Muslim doing something like that in New Orleans.

But there's still, it seems like the Christians are still the ones targeted, even in the military.

It is domestic, radicalized, homegrown terrorists who are

Christian nationalists who are the problem. I've talked to many guys in the military. That's what they tell me. That's what they're teaching there.

They've really, they've taken the foot off the pedal when it comes to going after Muslim quote -unquote extremists, fundamentalists, whatever.

So Greer has this posture. He added in 2020, to my knowledge, he hasn't backtracked any of this.

He hasn't apologized for any of it. There's nothing that leads me to believe he doesn't still agree with this kind of thing.

Now, my understanding, I wasn't here for the genesis of whatever this argument was, okay?

So I don't know where exactly this started, but my understanding from people who were telling me about it and then started sending me screenshots and stuff was the genesis of this recent controversy with Neil Shenvey apparently has to do with this.

And I don't, Neil's not somebody I talk about much. For those who don't know who he is, he attends J .D. Greer's church and he is a

Christian apologist. That's how he, he has a website. That's how he presents himself.

And this came back up because he decided to tweet out these two things.

So he says, do Jews and Muslims worship the same God? He says, I was inclined to say no, but Acts 17, 23 seems hard to square with this.

If pagans worshiping at a pagan shrine to an unknown God, we're worshiping God in ignorance. What are the implications?

Now, let me just read for you. Let's go to Acts 17. Here it is, Paul at Mars Hill. So Paul stood in the midst of the

Areopagus and said, men of Athens, I observed that you are very religious in all respects. For, and that means devoted, superstitious, some translations

I think say, but he says, for while I was passing through and examining the objects of your worship, I also found an altar with this inscription to an unknown

God. Okay, so this is brilliant on Paul's part. He's passing through, he's seeing all these false gods and there's one to an unknown

God. He says, therefore what you worship in ignorance, this I proclaim to you. Now I'm gonna stop there. Does this imply that they are worshiping the true

God? No. It just says they're worshiping something in ignorance. They have a statue there or an altar,

I guess, that's in a pantheon of this. So a polytheistic system, obviously it can't be the

God of scripture they're talking about here. They don't know, they don't have a description of this

God and they're worshiping in ignorance. Do, any religion you want, pick any religion.

Do tribal peoples worship God? No, not the true one, right?

When I'm talking about tribal peoples who are animistic, they believe in these tribal religions.

So this would apply to, I think, just about any religion. When they worship, then what does that say about them?

What are they actually doing? Well, they're recognizing some things. Romans 1 even talks about this. You can see design, you have a conscience.

There's things in the world that tell you you're not alone. Someone has put you there. You may get some things right as far as like someone created this place, right?

And the God of Islam created this place. God of Christianity created this place. There's a creator, okay, that's an attribute. But it's not like, just like I'm a human and I share humanity with another human.

I have a different identity though than that human. We're not the same person. Someone addressing me saying, oh, well,

John's similar to Ed or Frank or whoever. They're also a man.

They have two things in common with John. They're a man and they're a human. Well, you're still not addressing me, right?

So he's looking at them and he's saying, you're in false worship, basically.

That's what he's accusing them of. And it's a gracious way. It's a smart way of going about this.

But he's saying, I'm gonna proclaim to you, verse 24, the God who made the world and all the things in it, since he is the

Lord of heaven and earth and does not dwell in temples made with hands. Well, there you go. He's talking about guys who are worshiping gods in temples made with hands.

He's talking about a polytheistic system and now he just contradicts all of it. He says, nor is he served by human hands as though he needed anything since he himself gives to all people, life and breath and all things.

Wow, so he doesn't need the service you're giving, the unknown God. And he made from it one man, every man of mankind to live on the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times and boundaries of their habitation that they would seek if God might, they might grope for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us.

So he's not in this altar to the unknown God, but he's not far from you. So you got it all wrong.

You're worshiping in ignorance. Let me proclaim to you the God who actually runs the show here. And then he goes on,

I'm not gonna get into the rest, but the whole thing is a contradiction of their entire system, including to the God of the unknown

God here. So he's not making an argument that, yeah, you're actually worshiping the true God.

You're worshiping the same God I worship. You're just doing it a little wrong. It's not that.

It's that, no, you're actually engaging in false worship here. Let me tell you about the true

God. I don't think this is hard. Personally, Neil seems to want to make this out like this is this deep discussion and there's all this nuance, but I don't think this is super hard to see what

Paul's doing here. So anyway, that's Acts 17.

Now to Neil's credit, I think I included this. Let's see here if I did, because I just saw this before the podcast.

Oh, let's finish first. I forgot this. Okay, so Neil also said something else here. Neil also said, someone said, okay, but can you answer the question?

Do Muslims and Christians worship the same God or are you really unsure? And he says, again, I think it requires clarification.

One example that's been used in the past is if Lois Lane loves Superman, but doesn't know his secret identity, does she actually love

Clark Kent without knowing it since the two men are the same? Do you see why this becomes a complicated issue?

Hmm, ah, we're using Superman. So Superman and Clark Kent are the same person and someone can think they're,

I don't even know what to say. Like I'm literally at a loss for words with that argument that that's like Muslims and Christians.

So as Muslims like Clark Kent, Christians know it's actually Superman and it's the same person.

It's got, Clark Kent and Superman have the same attributes though. Clark Kent's pretending to be something else.

The God of scripture is not pretending to be Allah. I don't even, just get that out of here. Just get that out of here.

I can't take this seriously. So Neil did say, to his credit, and I would be wrong if I didn't include this.

He goes, I deleted two tweets about the relationship between Christianity, Islam, and Judaism because I don't want to mislead people about the fundamental incompatibilities of the world religions.

I apologize for posting them. I'll reiterate that evangelicals should clearly affirm that there aren't many paths to God, that non -Christian religions are false and that God does not accept the worship of other religions.

So I'm glad he said that. But he's saying, because he doesn't want to mislead people is the reason that he deleted them.

So it's really, I guess, about us. We misunderstood him or something. It would be better to say

I was in error. I just spread error. And the error is also the error my pastor spreads.

That's why this has come up now. And I realized I never talked about it. And for some reason that is vivid in my mind because I remember when

Greer did this in 2020. And I remember specifically choosing not to talk about it. Well, I'm talking about it now. And since Veritas Forum or whoever was hosting the recording has deleted it, you now have some clips so you know what

Greer said at that forum. All right, well, we have talked about that.

And I only have like nine minutes left, hops. So where are we going to go? We don't have a lot of time.

I wanted to get to a few things. Let's do this real quick. I'm going to be quick on this. Not that.

Let's talk about, man. Oh man, I have so many things I want to say. Not enough time to do it.

This is what happens when I schedule myself one podcast after another. Well, Grace Community Church and Master's Seminary and the

Master's University are all ministries that John MacArthur oversees. Pray for John MacArthur, by the way. He is in the hospital.

He is not doing well from what I understand. Pray for him. Someone pointed out to me, a bunch of people actually, that Master's University that was hosting

Mark Dever for their chapel and how could this be happening? And so I just wanted to say, I understand why people are saying that.

And if you want proof, you can go to the Master's Seminary website. Here it is right here. You just scroll down chapel schedule.

There's Mark Dever right there. So they're hosting him. And I get why some people are upset about this.

Mark Dever. I remember, I talked about it in the podcast when Nancy Pelosi was trying to push the

New Deal, Green Deal through, he posted George Bush praising Pelosi and said that it was civility and kindness.

He was the one that said George Washington probably wasn't a Christian because he owned slaves, basically. He was the guy in the

Shepherds Conference panel to make things closer to Grace Community Church there and the Shepherds Conference, who really was not helpful in clarifying social justice concerns.

He was the guy who kind of helped Jonathan Lehman. And he's connected to Jonathan Lehman and Thabiti Annabouile and these guys with nine marks who have gone woke on things.

But on the COVID stuff, Grace Community Church opened up and basically Jonathan Lehman criticized them for opening up and Mark Dever ran cover for him.

He recommended divided by faith. He was one of the first guys to do that in evangelicalism. He signaled support for the peaceful protest in 2020 when his church was closed.

Earlier this year, there was a panel on voting and he gave terrible advice. I talked about it on the podcast. It was just so vague and it meant, it just didn't help

Christians in any way navigate their steward, their vote. And so people are wondering, honestly, like, hey, nine marks has pushed some woke stuff.

Mark Dever hasn't exactly been always friendly to Grace Community Church with his critiques and why is he there?

The answer is, I don't know. And I need to say it because a lot of people were asking me, I don't know. I do know this though, and maybe this is a possible explanation.

There's a lot of guys at the Master's Seminary, maybe even

Master's College. I know at the Master's Seminary at least who have gone to Southern Seminary and there's people inside the seminary have told me this, that we've got guys who've gone to Southern Seminary, they come back to teach and they have loyalties to Big Eva, Southern Baptist, Southern Seminary type stuff.

Mark Dever, I don't know if he's still teaching at Southern, but he was. So that could be an explanation, I don't know. I don't know anything beyond that, but would

I have him come? Probably not, no. He's got good stuff on ecclesiology, but I wouldn't have him come.

And that's all I have time for because I only have a few more minutes. And I think there's, what else did I wanna get to here? SEBTS, where I went to seminary,

Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. I was just gonna show you this. I don't have a lot of time, but I'll briefly show you that.

Sean Perron, who I think he was the one who wrote the article for Center for Baptist Leadership, critiquing an article from one of their faculty members,

Dr. Brooks, that I'm gonna just boil the whole thing down here. That implied or really said, for people who have damaged relationships with their father in counseling scenarios, you can present

God to them in these feminine maternal ways if that helps them. And so Sean Perron kind of gave a takedown of this, and it really comes down to, he had like four things, but it really came down to this,

I think, that the Bible presents God as masculine. Masculine pronouns, ontologically, he is masculine.

That doesn't mean that it's a contradiction when there's maternal things said. I mean, there's maternal things we even can say about men, their care and concern and these kinds of things, but ontologically,

God is a man. And that Dr. Brooks article basically messes with that.

And Southeastern had to make this statement. Center for Baptist Leadership came back and said, basically, your statement is inadequate.

You still have many of the major, here's the statement, many of the major problems. And then one of their other professors kind of ran cover.

And when I saw this, I was like, this is so typical. This is so what I'm used to. So Kristen Kellen said, just in case there are any questions about what we teach at SCBTS, all the faculty signed the

Baptist Faith and Message 2000 abstracted principles together. They always do this. The Danvers Statement. We sign all these statements, therefore we're solid.

And then she's asked a question. Sean Perron asked, what do you think about encouraging counselees to view

God as their mother if they have a bad view of their earthly father? And this is what he did. She says, Sean, this is not a question in good faith.

You and I both know it. So I am not going to engage your question. It's the same thing every time. How dare someone accuses us?

We signed these documents. Like, well, yeah, you're not in keeping with them though. And then it's like, you're not being nice.

It's always style points. And so, yeah, there's stuff still going on in SPC seminaries that isn't good.

In fact, I think someone told me Curtis Woods, the guy who was the chairman of the, he even used critical race theory in his dissertation at Southern, but he was the chairman of the committee that gave us

Resolution 9, the resolutions committee for the Southern Baptist Convention is gonna be teaching. I think they said, was that either

New Orleans or maybe it was the one in Texas, Southwestern Seminary.

So I didn't have the information pulled up. Someone just told me that though. So there's still stuff in the SPC that I think is worth being somewhat concerned about.

So, all right, I need to make one last announcement and then we're going to take some questions for like the last minute of the podcast.

So here's the announcement, Christianity and the Founding Conference, it's coming guys. You want to sign up, Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania, April 25th through 27th.

We got Sam Smith, chair of the Liberty University History Department, Stephen Wolf, Jared Lovell, Zachary Garris, Sean McGowan, Jacob Tanner, myself and Paul Gottfried.

Registration, 30 bucks, that is a steal. VIP dinner, $50. We're gonna have some barbecue guys and some peach,

I think it's peach pie. All the information is on the website. You can go sign up right now, go to Christianity and the

Founding. I want to see you there. I want to see as many people as we can get there. This is going to be a great conference coming up.

Okay, now I have two minutes. Let me get to some questions here and comments. Anna says, have you read these books?

Everything you were taught about slavery is wrong and the untold truth about the transatlantic slave trade. I don't think I have, no.

If I have, it would have been just clips of them years ago. So no, I don't think so. Herminio Hernandez says, theonomists would say the

Great Commission would disciple the nations and all that Christ commands. Yes, this includes civil realm. Has magistrates learn how to rule godly by the word of God?

Okay, no critique against theonomy has held up. That's what Greg Bonson says in his book. I have it on my shelf, theonomy and Christian ethics.

I don't think that's necessary. I think there's just some critiques that make sense to me, but theonomy, you always have to have the person define it, what they mean by it, because there's now general equity theonomists.

And anyway, I think there's actually some good things to glean from theonomists, including reading people like Gary North and Rush Dooney and Bonson and all these guys.

I think there's an ideological tendency, which I don't have time to talk about. But don't Arab Christians still use the word

Allah to refer to the God of the Bible? I don't know if they do.

I don't know. Maybe some liberal ones. I don't think, yeah, that's a whole controversy because the term

Allah apparently comes from like pagan pre -Islamic sources. Listen to him talk this long,

Islam is punished. I think he's talking about me having Greer talk is punishment because I had him talk so long. Christianity should be treating all other religions as threats, but also recognize we are here to disciple them.

We are here to disciple, yeah. And this is something for immigration policy and something worth considering.

You know, you change the character of your country, the more people you import, you have other religions. Like this is a no -brainer. Why hasn't

John MacArthur retired? Don't know. All right, I got to end the podcast.

Join me in about two minutes for the American Churchmen podcast. We're going to be starting and we're going to be discussing the new

Christian right. And I wrote an article for TrueScript on cautions for the new Christian right. And I'm going to be giving you some of my unfiltered opinions about some of this and even some of the reactions to it.