Youth Targeted Calvinism / Book of Romans Torn to Pieces in Service of “Gay Christianity”

Well greetings and welcome to the dividing line. Got a lot to get to uh today. I uh i start off by uh tweeting a link that was uh sent to me. I had never heard of this before. Youth targeted calvinism.

Yes youth targeted calvinism uh sbc today. Always a sbc today sbc voices always interesting places to you know when the insanity of the rest of the world just isn't insane enough for you there's a place where you can go to find.

And uh so dr rick patrick the senior pastor the first baptist church of silicauga alabama uh wrote an article posted today on youth targeted calvinism. And uh just to give you a sense of the the depth of the analysis uh here uh calvin under the subtitle an angry god calvinism is associated with neo-puritanism.

Obviously calvinism predated puritanism. But anyways we tend to view the puritans as peaceful people who dressed modestly and made friends with the indians. I'm sorry but calvinist puritan cotton mathers is certainly the most infamous leader responsible the salem witch trials.

And calvinist puritan jonathan everett's best articulated the view that god disposition is primarily angry. I'm sorry it's it's just so painfully obvious that dr patrick okay have you ever read john edwards.

Do you know do you understand why those of us who have read large swaths of edwards in fact i think i think one of the reasons i have to have my really cool progressive lens glasses today is because of those those two books over there uh with the red the the the fourth and fifth from the left are the works of jonathan edwards the the banner of truth two volume micro print.

I mean like you can put half a book on a page all right. Those of us who have actually read edwards more than just a sermon by edwards but like entire books by in fact maybe some of his not so famous books um you know what what word that even edwards fans and admirers eventually get sick and tired of that.

You want to you just want to eat really salty chips for an hour. Sweet. This the edwards used the term sweet so often that in all modern published versions of edwards works there is a warning to all diabetics prior to reading the book and they come with a little syringe of insulin.

I mean that's how often he uses the term sweet. Um if you think that sinners in the hands of angry god is exhaustive jonathan edwards sir you are as ignorant as the day is long of jonathan edwards. And in light of something else that happened after the last program um why is it that people get on the internet and think that they can comment about stuff they know absolutely positively nothing about including even commenting about what people said that they didn't listen to.

What is this. I mean the world's gone nuts. It really really has. So anyways um it continues on. In his best known work edwards wrote the god that holds you over the pit of hell much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire abhors you and is dreadfully provoked his wrath towards you burns like fire.

He looks upon you as worthy of nothing else but to be cast in the fire. He is of pure eyes and to bear you in his sight you are 10 000 times as abominable in his eyes. The most hateful venomous serpent is in ours.

You know what he said that. And i'll bet you dollars to donuts. Pastor patrick i looked around. I did a a little just a little digging around dr patrick. Sorry i this is really bad for someone who has an earned doctorate in something.

Um i bet you i could find three or four sentences in a row that i could put together and completely misrepresent you too. Yeah. Well it is great that god pours out his wrath upon this is this is one of the reasons that some of us honestly wonder if sbc voices sbc today if these may not sort of be onion type sort of sites you know where you know it sometimes makes you wonder if if maybe we're doing the onion thing because it's hard to tell in the net it really is at times.

But this this one would this one would sort of give you an idea while it is granted that god pours out his wrath upon sin and unrepentant sinners will surely burn in hell. Edwards paints the picture of monstrously capricious deity for whom the saying of kumbaya kumbaya my lord on a youth group camp out seems wildly out of place.

Oh it's really published man it's right there get it before it disappears. I i wonder if there's such a thing as youth targeted armenianism. No no there's. No no it's youth targeted traditionalism. That's what traditionalism.

It's amazing that these guys actually want the term traditionalist. That's just shocking to me. But anyways i tweeted that out and a lot of you have commented on and went really seriously uh and i go yeah really seriously it's it's actually there.

Youth-Targeted Calvinism and Misrepresenting Jonathan Edwards

Hey uh week from um week from today i will be in south africa lord willing and uh we have a schedule up. We put it up today. Uh you were probably getting as many complaints as i was. You're probably getting as many complaints as i was.

We didn't have a schedule up and so i guess that's why it ended up being posted today. Um but on friday october 9th and it's not quite friday october 2nd in south africa. Well no it is yes it is nine i think it's nine hours so yep it's it's yep midnight uh is it really.

Yeah yeah it is. That's midnight there. Uh so a little over a week from now i am going to be engaging graham codrington. And if you go to graham codrington .com i think it is you can watch a bunch of videos none of which have anything to with this.

But uh you will see that graham is a fine looking gentleman. Uh will certainly win the cool looking uh suit. I'll be wearing a bow tie so i'm not even competing. That's just sort of a just let you know ahead of time um don't want people.

I want people to be you know sitting there the whole time not listening to what we're saying because they're trying to figure out who's better dressed person. So i'll just i'll just i'll get rid of that problem right from the start.

Um no i just i don't know if he could rock a bow tie. He may show up with one now. Anyway i'll bring an extra one for you graham if you want one um i get it back though uh but you have to tie it. That's there's the there's the the tough part anyway uh grace point church duncan road 2191 south africa.

Um we will be debating the subject homosexuality. I'm not even sure exactly what the specific focus is going to be yet. Um i have i am thankful that mr codrington has been posting on his um website a series of articles that has certainly given me a good idea.

I mean seems fair i've published a book. I've done. Um yeah i don't think dr lez's bow ties are back in style. Well with some people um you know it's it's obvious it would be very easy for graham to know where i'm coming from.

Um there are a lot of people who are sick and tired of hearing what i've said in the subject. But five hours in response to vines five hours response to gushy a published book number of debates. Pretty easy if you want to if you want to know where i'm going to be coming from what my bibliology is what my understanding of the the canonical witness from genesis on is in regards to god's creative purpose um the role of men and women the fact that god differentiate between them.

And there is a purpose for that. Uh all that kind of stuff. Um it's easy. Um i'm very thankful that graham he hasn't finished the series he hasn't finished the series. Um and some of the stuff coming up would be helpful uh because he hasn't gotten to his comments on matthew 19 yet uh but he did on the 21st get to romans one.

So he's done all the old testament stuff and and basically uh takes what i have identified as a radical new covenant theology perspective. And that is there is not a single law in the old testament relevant to us today.

Period end discussion move on from there. Now i spent a lot of time getting to that point. Um but all of the work that has been done down through the years demonstrating you know in in modern terminology the intertextuality of first corinthians 5 with leviticus 18 and and things like that out the door.

Um fundamentally the reason that leviticus 18 and 20 is irrelevant and does not tell us anything about god's uh view of homosexual behavior uh is because it's in the old testament cultic has only to do is no more relevant than than mixed fibers.

So all the work that i've done i'm not any i'm not breaking any ground but just simply demonstrating uh the the fact that you can in fact look at the old testament law place it in its context read its original languages.

Graham has graham went to seminary um so he's he's not ignorant of these things um all that stuff just thrown out the window just just uh so so obviously we we even though he says he came from a conservative baptist reformed background which would seem that we would have a lot in common.

Um in reality our our understanding and view of of things very very very very different. And so we get we get to romans one and i will admit that a new argument was presented. I had not run into this one before.

I mean there are so many ways around romans one generally you know you we've i've got james brownson queued up here. Well we'll get back into his stuff on romans one. But i had never encountered this one before never ran into this one before it was.

It's it's a new one and we'll see how uh how you might respond to it here. Um let me just read. He provides very kindly a summary before each article so you can sort of get into it a little bit faster.

Romans one is the heart of the discussion about gay marriage as paul appears to appeal to a natural law that has been in place since creation. The plain reading romans one makes it clear that paul has in mind people who have taken their sexuality and this is his understanding their sexuality to excess and gone against nature descending to sexual depravity.

This does not describe lgbt people seeking a lifelong monogamous covenantal relationship. Now i have to stop right here. Uh yesterday a day before yesterday i did a search because i've taken all of his articles put them into a pdf file and i did a search for that phrase.

And he doesn't always use all the same words. So i had to search a few times sort of put them all together. But throughout graham's work this phrase lifelong monogamous covenantal relationship appears over over 20 times just in the blog articles and the series isn't done.

And it's always in the context. And obviously this has nothing to do with. And then what you do is you take what your final conclusion is. Because that isn't that what the final conclusion is about is that what the final conclusion of graham covington's position is is that there is such a thing in the christian faith despite the utter silence of the bible despite the fact there's not a single positive word said about homosexuality not a single positive word that gives us any indication that marriage could ever be anything other than a male and a female.

Despite all of that the conclusion is that for christians lifelong monogamous covenantal relationships in marriage are a gift from god. So if that's your final conclusion that's what you're getting to.

Graham codrington's a brilliant guy. It's dr codrington. I'm not sure the doctorate's in him but i saw in his thing. It's dr codrington. So this is a smart man. How can you not see when you are constantly inserting the conclusion of your argument into your argument that you are reasoning the circle that you are assuming what you have yet to prove because i reject that there is any such thing biblically speaking from a christian worldview as a homosexual lifelong monogamous covenantal relationship.

The term homosexual destroys the meaning of monogamous and the reason for monogamous i mean monogamous when you think about it what is monogamous actually referring to one man one woman. You're even having to to redefine the reason for that the sexual binary is right there.

So monogamous is out the window covenantal only if you redefine the covenant of marriage as defined in scripture. Which is why i say all the gay christian movement every single bit of it is utterly 1000 destructive of christian orthodoxy.

It is impossible for gay christianity to remain orthodox because gay christianity cannot affirm the sufficiency of scripture. It's impossible can't be done. And time will demonstrate this time will demonstrate this.

And of course by the way all of his sources all of his sources boswell brownson skanzani and mollincott scroggs vines gushy complete imbalance. Not not even a pretense not even a pretense of even citing the other side.

I i could pull it up here and do a quick search but i do not recall a single citation of gagnon or anybody uh in response anywhere in all this material. Not not even once anyway. So it's it really strikes me as a tremendously strange thing that someone obviously so insightful in other areas the man speaks all the time on business trends and futurism and and all this kind of stuff travels the world doing it cannot see that to over and over again say well this has nothing to do with my conclusion which i'm not driving through scripture at all which i cannot show you a single shred of evidence would have ever even crossed the mind of an inspired writer of scripture.

I realize inspired writers somewhat of a misnomer. But you know what i'm talking about it. It really makes me wonder how does this work. It would be so troubling to me so very troubling to me to have to argue in this fashion.

And and i'm gonna i'm gonna tell them that just straight up. I mean how can you not see what you're doing here. I reject the existence of these things. Here's why i reject. So you can't keep saying what has nothing to do with that.

You can't keep reasoning in a circle. And yet almost every single book that i've read in the past decade does exactly that. Um so anyway continue on the summary here. Sorry uh the flow of the letter to the romans is such that the list of sins in romans one listen to this see how you'd respond.

It's because i when i first read this i had i was doing the double take thing. Like huh i mean i've heard all about you know brownson and his his nature shame honor you know run over to first corinthians long hair argument pederasty uh greek culture roman cult.

Oh it's it's you know every book that comes out has its own you know spin on the same stuff. It's never taking paul seriously. It's never following his argument. It's never following the argument right through romans one.

And actually starting there and then it's always this. Let's come up with our conclusions first before we ever get to the tech stuff. And i've read dozens and dozens of these books since 2000 or so when uh jeff neal and i were working on the same sex controversy.

So man it's wow 15 years of this stuff old news. But i was expecting fully expected the the nature thing. And i should mention after this he posted another article which i found very very interesting.

Um yeah check check this out. I'll scroll up to it. Um he says in the previous article this series which is the one i'm reading the summary on i brought together the scholarship of a number of theologians who argue convincingly.

Here's an even faster summary. So i'm sort of letting the cat out of the bag that the letter paul wrote to the romans had the goal of unifying jewish and gentile christians. In this context romans 1 18 through 32 is best seen as a discourse familiar to hellenistic jews that paul actually refutes and uses against his readers especially the jewish christians in romans 2.

Never heard that one before had you. But then check this out. I'll explain more in a second. But then check out this bold type paragraph. I realize that conservative readers may feel that this is too much of a stretch of interpretation.

I wish i had an understatement award to provide to graham here. I want to therefore approach the same text from a more traditional viewpoint and show that even then bold and italics this text does not refer to lifelong monogamous covenantal same gender relationships.

I want to show that it even though the authors of scripture could never have allowed for this construction given their worldview since they didn't talk about it. I mean you know it's like they say they found water on mars.

Let's say we find martians and martians come down here and live amongst us. The bible never says anything against marrying martians. And therefore you know it's just like okay. But the point is he recognizes that's a bit of a stretch.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It is definitely a bit of a stretch. All right. So uh here's let let here it is again the flow of the letter to the romans is such that the list of sins in romans 1 is used by paul to set up his jewish readers and create a counterpoint which he will use against them in romans 2 and 3.

The list of sins is therefore more about what jewish people found repulsive in gentiles than what paul did. We cannot use this list to focus our attention today on a specific group of sinners. Now think for just a moment.

Think of how foundational fundamental to the christian worldview romans 1 is. And you are saying that paul was actually refuting that. Think about the just the absolutely fundamental nature of its discussion of idolatry the nature of the creator creation distinction suppression of the knowledge of god foundation to apologetics.

It's incredible insight into the darkening of the mind that suppresses the knowledge of all of that. Paul actually didn't believe that. In fact the single article one 21 year old article from 1994 written by a liberal new testament scholar that to my knowledge nobody nobody in 21 years has expanded upon accepted utilized made foundational thinking this concept.

But he found it. And that one single article is the foundation that he provides for this idea. And in that article yeah this is he understands what the guy was saying in the article. Problem is um well the problem is in the article.

It says that paul was deriving this from a jewish source but strangely and oddly enough never tells us what the jewish source is. Because of course it's all hypothetical there probably was a jewish source we we just don't we just don't know what it was.

But paul was quoting from it because this isn't really paul. And this this grand insight never before known in church history until approximately 1994 is what we need to adopt to recognize that romans 1 and its testimony and its statement about homosexuality is irrelevant to us today.

Um from the literary context it makes the most sense to see romans 1 18th of 32 as a well-known discourse against gentiles taken from jewish writings that paul pulls into his letter so well known that no one's ever seen it.

This is by far by the way the most desperate uh attempt i've ever seen. I think that's why he has to continue on and let's try another one and do the standard nature stuff. You know natural law isn't genesis.

Blah blah. And of course to people that he's quoting you know he quotes matthew vines. Well who's matthew vines is big source brownson. Does brownson take this view completely not. I mean brownson is 100 opposed to this.

His everything we've listened to him from already on romans 1 and we'll hear the rest of romans 1. This is so idiosyncratic. I've i've i've i don't i can't think of. Well maybe maybe uh soteriology 101's readings of some texts in romans 9 might be his idiosyncratic in other words way out there.

But wow. And and it is so far out there that i'm awful glad i'm very thankful that i had the opportunity of reading this. The only thing that concerns me is will his reading of matthew 19 be as far out there.

Because when you encounter something that is absolutely a historical exegetical theological novum and and you know to come up with a complete novum means you really have to believe that you have an insight.

Nobody else in the church has ever ever ever ever had the reformers did not believe that about themselves. By the way they really didn't. Their argument was they were restoring something that had been believed uh long ago and had become encrusted over by roman tradition they weren't going.

Hey we don't care. No one's ever seen this before we were. We're much smarter and all that kind of stuff. No but when you encounter a theological novum it's one thing to go really. But that's not really an argument and it it can be a real challenge to come up with a meaningful refutation.

I mean having listened to this now and having been able to think about it seems pretty obvious. I mean what what basically the article does. And uh you'll see the bill coming through. I sent you the email.

I think in fact i think i said it to you last night uh you have to get the the yeah uh cost me 30 bucks to buy the article but gotta have it because it's it's the one thing it is. It is absolutely the one thing that he depends upon in this particular uh article.

Is this one article that came out in 1994 and so i had to i had to have it had you can you can get online too if you want to spend uh 30 bucks to pick it up. He meant he quotes a lot from nt right. But believe me nt right doesn't take this view either uh and in fact would would find it i think extremely uh strange but the the guy's quoting is phil money of calvin porter and he wrote an article in 1994 on this subject and like and basically what he does is he tries to turn this.

He draws from a bunch of greek a bunch of sources that discuss various forms of greek rhetoric and tries to shove romans 1 and 2 and 3 into a particular pattern of greek rhetoric which then means that 1 18 through 32 is being set up as a foil.

And then when chapter 2 begins and he changes his address who are you that this then becomes the big thing. This is the big transitionary moment. And this demonstrates i mean to the rest of us and to all of church history and to all christians that ever come before it was painfully obvious that paul was then turning his attention to the having stated clearly what the bible itself teaches on the subject of the universal sinfulness of man and that it is central central to his argument that that remain in force.

Because when he gets to his conclusion in chapter 3 he's going to say we have concluded that all are under sin without romans 1. That makes no sense. The foundation of 1 is continued in 3 and comes to conclusion 3.

I mean it just turns the book of romans into well again if you're if if you're trying to revise the entire christian faith that's what you have to do to create quote unquote gay christianity. You've got to change the faith.

And so the result is going to be destruction all around. And if you have to end up destroying romans well you know. Okay i guess we just get to destroy romans. Um but that unfortunately is exactly what is taking place here.

All right. So i'll go back to the summary in case i haven't explained it well enough here. In fact romans 2 1 through 5 makes it clear that paul refutes the statements in romans 1 18 to 32 and sees them as part of the problem and shows that god is against anyone who thinks this way about the gentiles or anyone for that matter.

That's not what romans 2 1 through 5 is about. I mean you can you can make this kind of assertion but listen to what says. Therefore you have no excuse everyone who you pass a judgment for in that which you judge another you condemn yourself for you who judge practice the same things.

That makes no sense if he's arguing that the previous section is actually wrong he's talking about hypocrisy. I mean and we know that the judgment of god rightly falls upon those who practice such things.

But do you suppose this oh man practice what things. The things of chapter one. But do you suppose this oh man when you pass judgment of those who practice such things and do the same yourself that you will escape the judgment of god.

Isn't that clear. Or do you think lightly of the riches of his kindness and tolerance and patience. Not knowing the kindness of god leads you to repentance. But because of your stubbornness and repentant heart you're storing up wrath for yourself.

The day of wrath and revelation. The righteous judgment of god he's talking about he's going to say later on merely possessing the scriptures merely possessing the law of god and not doing the law of god does not make you right with god.

It's so plain so obvious. And it is clearly um it is clearly an example. The article by porter is clearly an example of what you see in a large portion of scholarship where you're trying to get published.

And the idea is you need to come up with something new. And in the christian faith there should be a respect for the word of god and a respect for the generations have come before us that should moderate and control and restrict the willingness to be this wildly zany with eisegetical foolishness.

But it didn't stop porter. And so now you see the utilization of this by a man who is seeking to promote the redefinition of marriage to the point of the fundamental distortion of marriage etc etc. There you go there you go.

So anyway i go back to a good summary of paul's opening chapters. And in fact the whole letter to the romans comes in romans 14 13 through 14. Therefore let us stop passing judgment on one another. Instead make up your mind not to put any stumbling block or obstacle in the way of a brother or sister.

I just have to stop complete ignorance of context. Come pleat romans 14 is inter christian relationships in regards to disputable things that is not the context of romans 1 2 and 3 at all. This is absolutely um what's the what's the term i'm looking for.

Uh if you if you sue somebody not malpractice malfeasance malfeasance in exegesis is the only way to describe this manhandling of the text. It's horrible. Uh it's shocking. And it the stuff before this had been pretty standard revisionist stuff.

You know surface level hyper new covenant to theology stuff. And and um you know your your standard uh type of thing. Uh the stuff on arsenic coites again standard. Even though he recognizes paul is deriving this straight out of liticus 18 and 20 he ignores that he says yes this is where he's getting it from.

But then when he finally makes applications what it actually means it's not what it means in litigus 18 and 20 for some strange odd reason. Um so it's not that there hadn't been clues that they could get this bad.

But i never expected something like this. Uh so the quotation from romans 14 totally out of context completely different context. Finally the only issue paul raises it can be transferred to the modern day issue of same gender sexuality is an appeal to the nature of things.

We will deal with this in the next section of this study which of course is the same thing brownson is doing and the stuff we've been reviewing there. Um so how would you respond. Uh you know again here's here's may i make application.

Please please may may i make an application. Um i wasn't planning on doing this. But there is a reason why i emphasize the necessity of doing your homework before addressing something now there is a balance here because no one has all knowledge no one can be prepared for every single objection statement position.

Um but in doing apologetics we try to lay the the strongest foundation we can so that when we encounter stuff we can give a consistently biblical response. But in this situation thankfully i'm not going to be facing at least on this text a perspective that i've never heard of before.

If i had not taken the time and it takes time uh if i had not taken the time to download all these articles convert them to mp3 listen to them. On a long ride yesterday i had started um i had started reading through the material on the flight back and marking things hadn't gotten romans one yet.

That was the last article in the you put all the articles together it was over 120 pages in pdf formats. Those aren't. They aren't small pages. Those are large pages. Um if i had encountered this in a debate my hope is i could have given a meaningful response.

I'll be able to give a much better thought out response because this is such a fundamental attack upon the consistency of the book of romans. It is so far outside of the realm of anything that any meaningful scholar has ever come up with before that it's obviously going to upon reflection provide you with numerous examples of how utterly unusable and unworkable the theory is and how the text itself refutes it.

But so many times i've gone into debates with liberals and they have not even taken the time to google my name let alone read anything that i've written. They don't care. It's irrelevant to them. We don't have anything worth listening to.

We have we have nothing meaningful to say. To begin with nothing meaningful is it. And you've seen some of the results of that um the first debate with dan barker uh university of illinois uh the debate with father peter stravinskis.

Um father peter stravinskis uh yeah um they they they're obviously at a tremendous disadvantage. So it's not just simply a matter of well you know it would be wise to do this because it would give us the advantage in in the debate.

No i think there is a truth honoring issue here that i brought up on the last program. Um that really i think the internet somewhat minimizes this. I think it is create a culture in which reaction and response is so fast and is expected to be so fast that we have simply traded off depth and consistency for speed and emotion.

And some people think that you know i'm compromising if i if i don't utilize all the arguments that could be used against falsehood. Well i can only use arguments that happen to be true and that happen to be fair and happen to be consistent.

And i could have gone into this and said you know i've debated this thing so many times you know what's what's he gonna have to say. And probably would have held my own but you see i'm sitting here going we're spending lots of money to fly me to south africa.

The folks in south africa uh you know are are giving of themselves uh to make this happen and to put the effort into organizing these things. And we're going to be videotaping this. You know we just posted some new videos up online i put them on twitter today from earlier in the year.

Um and you know remember i mentioned the the fellow that came up to me while i was in zurich and lo and behold god used debates that we did back when i could still do a comb over pretty well you know had i still had my 1980s large glasses um the whole nine yards and used those even though the video quality back then couldn't be what it is today still use those in this young man's salvation.

So we've been trying to get people like matthew vines to step up to the bat. And do you know david gushy you know he can call us he can say we're in sin but he won't defend that. Um they lack the integrity to back up what they're saying.

So here i am going to south africa primarily to do three debates in durban with muslims there including another with ayub kareem who will be representing the akhmadidot perspective on the deity of christ that's going to be extremely useful.

And two with yusuf ismail in in the juma masjid again tremendous opportunities. But this opportunity came up and i had a choice to make. I've been pretty busy recently two weeks home after 18 days in the road ain't much.

If you travel you know you get home. There's also stuff to get. You're all behind on all sorts of things. Um but i have the lord's really placed a a burden upon my heart to be prepared especially for this debate.

This man's a professional speaker professional speaker and he has spent a lot of time reading revisionist material a lot of time and so i am taking him very very seriously. And thankfully i did so because because this is an amazing perspective and in the midst of a debate you well first of all it's gonna be extremely important for me.

I don't know what the order of speaking is going to be. What if i go first. What if i go first and did not know that he took this perspective as i prepare my opening statement and dealing with romans one will i not be able to present romans one in a much stronger way.

Now if i hadn't done this then i may have been accurate in my handling romans one. But if i don't know that my opponent is basically going to say romans one paul's refuting that then i'm only going to be able to respond to that in the shorter and shorter time periods that come afterwards which means in much much much less depth.

And if i can make my presentation on romans one demonstrate its absolute the absolute necessity of following the flow of thought through demonstrating he's clearly drawing from the creation accounts. Demonstrating that it's in perfect harmony with the old testament law.

Demonstrating that it's in perfect harmony with romans two and three. Now i can make those points. I can demonstrate the incoherence of the counter-argument before the counter-arguments even made. That's why when i can't you can't always do this you simply can't always do this.