Russell Moore, Ligon Duncan, Al Mohler etc. Saw it Coming

Conversations That Matter

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Welcome to the

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Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris. Lots going on this week. Shout out to my brother, actually.

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He just, him and his wife, just had their first child, which of course means that my parents are grandparents, and I think they're very excited about that and have been.

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So thank God for a safe pregnancy. That's always a concern, but everything seems to have gone very well.

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And I don't have a picture. I don't have permission to share a picture. I'm sure if I asked, they'd probably give it to me, but anyway,

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I mean, that's, most of you probably don't care about that. That's more something that's big in my world right now. Other things big in my world right now,

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I will be down in Pennsylvania today, actually, and if you're hearing this for the first time, you're welcome to come out.

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I will be at Grace Baptist Church in Muncie, Pennsylvania. Grace Baptist Church tonight, 7 p .m.

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is the presentation time, and I'm gonna be speaking on, of course, social justice, Christianity, and taking some questions from anyone who comes out, and would love to see you there.

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Wanna get into some things today that are interesting to me because of the topics that we cover on this particular podcast.

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We talk about social justice in the church a lot of the time. That's not all we talk about, and it's certainly not all

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I wanna talk about, but it seems to be a prevailing issue that doesn't seem to be slowing down, but the dust is starting to settle in some ways.

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You're starting to see some people line up on different sides, and there's a lot of fence setters still that are trying to, and what

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I mean by that, and it could look differently, but there's a whole group of people right now who seem to wanna take some potshots at deconstructionism.

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I did a whole podcast on this last week, and I showed you people who were trying to ally with deconstructionists, but there are those, especially on Twitter, who are taking potshots at deconstructionism, but they're also really against Christian nationalism and whatever boogeyman media pejorative is out there, and they wanna also be on the side of critical race theory, but they're against it in the abstract, but they still believe in white privilege and systemic racism, and it's confusing, and I think a lot of you are still confused by these particular individuals, and there's a lot of them right now in Christianity.

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Some of them might be your pastors. Just being honest with you, where they sound really good on some things, and then they talk about something over here, which is, to be honest with you, like deconstruction, critical race theory,

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I mean, you're talking about stuff that's very similar. The people who are deconstructing are doing so because of queer theory, critical race theory, feminism.

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They're doing it because they're finding something morally inadequate, they think, in Christianity, generally, and it doesn't match their belief system that they've concocted, and so they want to find a faith that matches what they believe.

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It's really not much more complicated than that. Of course, I went through and explained from Derrida to the present what the process of deconstruction is, what it means, but that's what's going on, and so there's the epistemology, the metaphysics of critical race theory, and the deconstructionists,

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I mean, they're pretty much the same or similar. They're very similar. They can be, I mean, broadly speaking here, but so if you have a guy who's willing to take a strong stand against deconstructionism, but is weak on critical race theory and buys into all the narratives, or many of them that are being spouted about the police and about the history of the country and about the systemic racism in various places in the

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United States, as Al Mohler said, what was it, two years ago, or maybe not even, I think, a year and a half, if that, you know, there's institutional racism is in every, or racism is in every

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American institution, affecting every American institution. That's, I mean, you have those kinds of statements.

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So which is it, right? And this is, I think, the issue that is probably gonna keep us busy to some degree.

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I don't focus on it entirely, but I do, oftentimes, I will take a figure or I'll take a situation and I'll explain, like, okay, here's what's going on here.

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Here's, you know, I know it's confusing, but here's the hypocrisy. Here's them saying one thing that you find very acceptable and biblical, and, you know, as an

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Orthodox believer, and then here's them saying another thing that you're shocked about. And we still have that, but the dust is settling.

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The dust is settling. You have people that are firmly now in certain camps. You have, like, the Jamar Tisbees of the world, and the

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Dwight McKissicks of the world, and the Beth Moores of the world, and the Russell Moores, and, you know, they're all kind of, they're leaving.

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They're going to a separate place than the evangelical world that they inhabited, and they're putting down roots in this compromised version of Christianity, and we can all see it, and it's clear, and I appreciate that.

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I appreciate Thabiti Anabwile saying, I think it was recently, that something along the lines of, you know,

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I'm not gonna quote him directly because I don't remember exactly what he said, but it was to the effect of he's not really an evangelical, or he doesn't feel like, you know, that that was a term that he should be using, and it's like,

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I appreciate that to some extent. Like, at least, you're being somewhat honest about this, and we don't have to play this game, but the games are being played.

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The games are being played. In fact, I just recently was looking up, I was just curious. I was looking up some of the,

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I don't even want to get into specifics because I may use it on the program sometime and may get a lot of people mad if I do, but there were some prominent professors at a very prominent evangelical seminary that some are promoting now as they're conservative.

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And I knew five minutes ago, they weren't taking any of the stands on the issues they actually had an opportunity to take a stand on at their particular institution.

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And so I did some Twitter advanced searches on the use of certain terms, and it was fascinating to me.

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There's a switch going on. There's, and it's so sneaky, right? So you see like from like 2015 to 2019, early 2020, some words,

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I don't even want to tell you what the words are because I feel like people are gonna scrub their Twitter accounts. I don't want them to do that. But some terms are used as weapons against conservatives, pretty much exclusively against conservatives.

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And now since the election, the same terms are being used against progressives.

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And I thought, wow, this is interesting. Why is it that there's a, like someone turned a light switch on and all of a sudden, and now people who are late to the game, not,

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I don't wanna say late to the game. That's not fair. Some might be, but people who are just now kind of realizing what's going on and getting involved are like, hey, this person is a conservative.

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They're with us there. And there's a lot of opportunists out there.

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There's a lot of people that don't have firm convictions. There's also just a lot of people who switch sides and they don't really, sometimes on fundamental issues, but they don't ever retract or explain why they were on the opposite side.

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There's so many people I know that about. I don't always talk about it. It's not necessary to talk about it, but just be aware of it.

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So this whole dynamic, it's confusing, it's messy, it's muddle in the middle.

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It's a mud puddle in the middle. But that's part of the reason this show,

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I think, exists is people want explanations. They wanna understand what's happening.

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They wanna understand where someone falls because they're not saying it clearly. If they just said it clearly, if Al Mohler just came out very strongly and clearly and he retracted things he had said previously that contradict what he's saying.

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Now, it would make things so much simpler, but he's not gonna do that. And most of these guys don't do that.

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It is one of the big rules that I found, and I don't think it's just evangelicalism, I think it's elitism in general, is this aversion to ever admitting you're wrong about anything.

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And we don't wanna do the apology thing where you do a forced apology, a fake apology generally, because the mob says you'll lose everything if you don't.

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And even then they still take everything. Usually you get canceled. And you're forced to apologize to people you did not offend and claim as authoritative some media personality generally to go on their show and we don't do that.

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We're not doing the virtue signal apology thing. No, I'm talking about a legitimate, authentic apology.

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I was wrong, I misled people. I'm so sorry, I really am. Now I think differently about this.

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Here's what I'm thinking now. Let me correct the errors that I previously made. Is this not the whole issue with Grove City College right now?

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Just if there was a humility from the beginning at the administration level, and they said, you know what, we are so sorry.

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This was wrong for us to allow these people to speak in chapel. Let us argue against what some of the things they said on critical race theory issues.

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And let us cancel this class or offer another class to contradict, something, some kind of way of navigating this class they had, this woke class that they're offering.

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The implicit bias training, you know, let's be very transparent about this.

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This is exactly what was taught. We're releasing the documents and the things that we can't agree on, we're gonna just say, we're not doing this anymore.

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And we apologize to the parents who are paying to have their kids here. If they just did that, they wouldn't have the problem they're having now.

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Guarantee it, 100%. Wouldn't have the problem they're having now. But because there is such an aversion to ever admitting you're wrong.

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And why is that? I don't know completely. Obviously pride has something to do with this. I mean, I've pointed out pharisaical tendencies among Christian elites before.

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I don't know if that plays into it. I think it probably does. But they can never be wrong.

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They can never show that they've made a incorrect decision. And unless there's like a cancel mob that's about to pin their backs to the wall, and then maybe for self -preservation, some might say something.

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But for the most part, they don't say anything. They won't retract. They won't apologize. They won't correct.

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And instead they deflect, they disguise, they deny. And this is the situation we have going on.

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And I've become more and more convinced that we have a managerial class, not of pastors and people who are close to the

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Lord, people who know the word, people who communicate the word effectively.

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And because of their spiritual status, they are in the positions they are. That's not what we have.

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We have a managerial class. We really do. And people who know the language, know how to manipulate others, know how to convince them of their authenticity, legitimacy, leadership qualities, et cetera.

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And they can work themselves into positions of authority. And I've seen this. I've been at three different Christian seminaries and institutions.

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And I've seen this at every single institution I've been at. Some more than others, though. Some a lot more than others.

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And I don't wanna say, because one of them actually is a fairly well -known and conservative institution, but I saw this like crazy.

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The internal politics were nuts. One of the reasons I didn't want to stay at that particular institution, there's the people who got platform, the people who got positions at the institution were not the people with leadership qualities necessarily.

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I'm just telling you flat out, this is not how it works, generally. It's not, and it's not people who, independent thinking is really discouraged, okay?

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If you're actually seen as a threat if you're too independent in your thinking. In fact, if you ask good questions in class,

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I found this out the hard way, just good, challenging questions, but good, you know, you're paying to be there.

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You wanna know things. You can get confronted about it. There's a certain type of person that makes it to the top of these organizations.

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And it's the kind of person who plays ball, who plays on the teams that are already present and can position themselves in the power structure without rocking the boat too much and threatening the people above them, but supporting, playing a supportive role.

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And when you have that, you end up with weak leaders. You end up with political animals in the top of your organization.

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You don't end up with people of substance and character and conviction.

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You end up, and they'll use those words, but it's, look at their actions. You're not gonna see it.

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And I saw many weak men. I've seen many weak men, super weak, just cannot take a stand.

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Always thinking about their, sometimes their retirement or the position they want next.

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And this will jeopardize it if they say anything. And they don't want to ever give up that power.

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And so they try to perpetuate the institution that they're at or the big church that they're at.

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They're just, that's what they're doing. It's not a vision for, they've lost the vision for the purpose of their organization, why it exists in the first place.

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The organization doesn't even matter. It's about the kingdom of God. It's about advancing the kingdom of God.

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It's about discipleship and evangelism and promoting a

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Christian ethic. And these are the things that organizations get started for. And then it becomes about perpetuating the organization.

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Organizations are a means to an end. They're trying to accomplish something in the world around them.

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And they have a purpose, a telos. And then it morphs into, it's not about that purpose anymore.

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It's still, you know, that shell exists. You have to use that rhetoric for donors. But it becomes about just protecting, perpetuating, preserving the organization.

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And that's what everyone has their allegiance to. That's what they, that's where they get their financial support and security through.

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That's where they get their social life through generally. That's where they get all their identity and their status through.

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I'm part of this organization. I'm a professor over here. I'm pastor so -and -so. We're prominent in the community.

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People know about us. All these things, all the things really, the Pharisees also really were very interested in.

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Those are the things that become what make the organizations run.

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And frankly, organizations that have come to that point, they don't deserve to exist any longer. They really don't. And I, as much as it's gonna hurt me to see some organizations really go down the tubes as secularization, but the anti -Christian nature of the current zeitgeist increases.

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I know deep down that there's going to be a winnowing effect.

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It's a purification to get rid of some of this corruption. Some of these guys should be taking honest jobs as mechanics, as something that is not putting them in this position of leadership where they have the opportunity to damage people's souls and provide a failed leadership model for younger people coming in their wings.

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So I was not expecting to go on that. I have actually stuff to get to today, but we're now deep into the podcast at this point.

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So let me show you some things. I wanted to talk about, let's see if I can pull it up here.

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Just two things that came across my desk. One is this, and I thought it's so interesting.

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This happens semi -regularly with Mr. Russell Moore. An evangelical rethinks the pill.

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And I'm not gonna tell you when, I'll tell you after the date on this, but this is from Russell Moore.

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And Russell Moore writes, those of us who are conservative confessional evangelicals often use the term

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Christianity today evangelical. Really? Often, he says.

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By this we mean one who is a bit ambiguous on the key issues of conviction and who seeks to get along with the regnant culture by almost any means necessary.

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Summed up in that term are years of frustration about a magazine that once brimmed with conviction and theological gravitas.

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This is Russell Moore. Russell Moore who works for, guess what? Christianity Today. And is completely described by this paragraph that he himself wrote in 2005, end of 2005.

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So what can happen in 17 years? A lot.

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I'm just pointing out, Russell Moore was not always on everything the way he is. I mean, there was something not, maybe it was a while ago.

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I thought it wasn't too long ago, but now I'm getting fuzzy on it. It might've been a while ago. Someone had brought up the fact, though, that Russell Moore speaks positively about patriarchy.

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I bet if we even typed it into the search bar here, I bet you'd probably find articles on it.

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Now, see, I wouldn't know which one to go to right off the top of my head here, but there's, well, here's another one.

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It is 2005, re -imagining patriarchy. He said, in last week's

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Evangelical Theological Society, I argued for a word. Contemporary Christians greet with fear and loathing, patriarchy.

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The paper, After Patriarchy, What? Why Egalitarians Are Winning the Evangelical Gender Debate can be accessed here.

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Since then, the conversation has continued. And so this is a paper that he, let's click on it.

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Oh, you can't find it now, okay. This is a paper, I'm pretty sure I've seen this paper where he argues for the use of patriarchy, that, you know, why should we shy away from that?

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It's a good legitimate term, the patriarchs, right? I mean, this is, and this was

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Russell Moore, 2005. Now, Russell Moore, 2022, is a completely different person.

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How? How in the world? And I'd like to suggest one possible answer for it.

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And I'm actually gonna do it without, we're not gonna go to Russell Moore, we're gonna go to one of Russell, well, the person who really created

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Russell Moore, Al Mohler. I want to show you a few clips from this, and we'll comment on it a little bit as we go.

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But I think that this explains, at least, and again, I created some categories at the beginning.

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There's the people who were firmly fixed in this compromised Christianity camp. It's not really Christianity at all.

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Then there's the Orthodox ones, and then there's this muddled kind of middle, we're not sure, we're gonna change, kind of depending.

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And I think for some of those people, and many of them are on this stage, in my opinion,

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I would certainly consider Mark Deverling and Duncan Al Mohler. And yeah, to some extent,

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I know I might get pushback for this, and to some extent, Kevin DeYoung would fit into this as well. Just because of Kevin DeYoung's, I haven't talked about Kevin DeYoung a lot, but Kevin DeYoung's lack of clarity on certain things.

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He wrote a great paper against reparations, but then he also, I have a statement someone sent me from the pulpit he made a few years back that's very along the lines of the

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CRT -infused racial reconciliation stuff. And he hasn't been very clear.

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That's the problem. When there's been opportunities, he's got a platform to be able to talk about errors that are going on right in front of him.

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He can name the names, he doesn't do it, really. And that's why, and so again, this muddled middle is, or fence -sitters, this is where, these are the people that there's a lot of confusion about, just because they haven't really been clear, or they give, their positions seem to contradict themselves sometimes.

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And so I would certainly consider people on this stage to be kind of in that. And I don't know all of them.

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Again, I don't know Peter Williams, and I don't know Simon Gathercole at all. So I'm not gonna say anything about them.

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But the others on this stage, I would say, people are confused still about, to some extent, many people are, at least. Some, I think, have caught on that there's an opportunism, there's, in some ways, a compromise in certain areas of conviction, and that's why, perhaps, there's, but there's, in a process, just like, and that's what

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I wanted to point out. Russell Moore was in a process. He started much earlier, I think, than a lot of these guys, and he's gone farther.

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But some of these guys are also, I think, in a process. So I want to, without, and I'm not getting into the details of, you know, we talked about it on this podcast.

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I've given chapter and verse on a lot of this stuff. I wanna talk about, though, why this might be. So let's start here.

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I'm gonna just play for you some clips from this, and they're talking about the future theological threats that we can expect.

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And this was from 2014. It was eight years ago, and here's what this group of folks thought about the future theological threats at Together for the

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Gospel. Already killed a church in 200 years and trying to deploy them in evangelicalism, and we see that happening all around us.

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Simon? Yeah, we just had a statement by Steve Chalk in Great Britain, who is one of the most well -known, calls himself an evangelical, and saying that orthodox conceptions of scripture, we can't hold to them anymore.

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These things are happening all the time. One thing I'll say to look out for in the next couple of years,

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Don Carson has been editing two volumes, which are sort of successors for this generation of the old volumes,

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Scripture and Truth, and Hamletics and Authority in Canon. So we're thinking, threats coming up in the next couple of years, you're saying watch out for Don Carson.

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Yeah, sorry. I'm sorry. Meaning, make sure you buy the book and read it.

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That's what watch out for. I want to affirm what Lig said, and I think he's exactly right, in terms of formal revisionist proposals or rejections of Sola Scriptura, coming from, as you said, the evangelical fringes,

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I think that's true, it's always been true. But what's at the evangelical center? Sometimes just a lack of confidence in Sola Scriptura, on the part of a lot of pastors and a lot of laypeople, who even though they would never argue against it, functionally, actually operate on the basis of a different understanding of Scripture.

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And so one of the things we need to call evangelicals to, is believing what we say, and operating by it.

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Amen. One of the typical evangelical ways of getting off track is to undermine the sufficiency of Scripture.

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We believe it, it's true, it's authoritative, but if somebody could maybe die and tell us what heaven is like, and then come back, and make a movement.

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Now that would be amazing. Or if Jesus could call me, and tell me. Is that what that John Piper book was about?

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John Piper? No, that's John Piper. John Piper, just for his Piper. Yeah, yeah, that right.

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I think also the point that Kevin made yesterday about the clarity of Scripture as well, that this is not something which needs decoding.

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When we give people the Scriptures, we're not giving them this mystical, mysterious book.

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Dan, do you have a conflict of interest when you're saying that? Because you make your money off of being paid by the university to teach people how to read this book that you're telling us is clear.

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Yeah, yeah. I show them how clear it is, yeah. I hope you do, brother.

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I hope you do. Okay, what about doctrine of God? Are there any problems that you can see?

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I know you don't know the future, but any things you see that would be good to help these brothers think about? Yeah, I think apologetically, what we need to note is that the major force of the new atheism coming now and of the larger response in the culture is not the old epistemological undermining of theism.

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It's not the ontological undermining of theism. That is, it's not saying that God can't be known or that God's an absurd category.

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It's not saying that God doesn't exist in terms of kind of the old ontological kinds of claims you had in the atheism of the 20th century.

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Now it's a moral charge. It's saying that God as is revealed or claimed to be revealed in the scripture is an immoral deity, a

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God who would impinge upon my personal autonomy and define my sex life that would define good and evil in these categories.

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And then they just take the biblical narratives and say, the God who behaves this way is not a God worthy of worship nor a

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God worthy of our affirmation of his existence. That's a new form of the apologetic challenge. So this is the difference you mentioned last night between Bertrand Russell and the new atheists.

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Absolutely. They didn't attack Jesus. They do attack Jesus. Now they're attacking God directly. And I do a lot of speaking on college and university campuses, and this is what

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I get back now. I don't get the old analytic philosophers talking about the fact that there's a non -falsification principle.

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That's left far behind. Now it's God insofar as he is understood is intolerant and oppressive and I want nothing to do with him.

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I watched this in the meta of a conservative pastor's blog.

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He had taken a biblical stand on the issue of gender, same -sex marriage and such and a huge fight broke out in the comment section.

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And advocates who were for same -sex marriage were arguing, well, actually the

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Bible doesn't speak against this. And there was a voice that came in and began saying, actually no, the

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Bible does consistently condemn this. There was back and forth argument at the end.

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The voice that was saying, yes, the Bible does condemn this said, and that is why

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I reject Christianity. So you had the old arguments were, well, the

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Bible really doesn't say that. And if we just understood it, we'd understand that it's actually not condemning these sorts of things.

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And amongst those who are arguing over the issue of, for instance, same -sex sexual attraction and relationships and all the rest, that there is that now very clear shift in the argument from that's not how you have to read the scripture.

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Now I do know that, for instance, Matthew Vines, I think, has a book coming out in just a matter of a few days, in which he's gonna be trying to argue again that.

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But what's already interesting is the response in the blogosphere to his proposal from the other side, that is from the same -sex attraction positive normalization side is saying, it's a useless argument, is give it up, just repudiate the scripture and leave it behind.

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Right. I just think that what we've got is a number of moral objections again being made against the scriptures.

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And then we also have a false response, which is made because let's remember that much of heresy or error comes from apologetics as well.

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The whole liberal Christianity is an apologetic movement fundamentally. And so what is happening is people are sometimes adopting

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Marcionite solutions. Let's downplay what's going on in the Old Testament. Let's not say, yes,

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God is really true there. And there are other things that people are trying to do with partial inspiration of scripture where effectively they're wanting to rescue some of Christianity and leave the rest behind in their response.

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We actually have two sorts of errors. One is the one straight from the more atheist skeptical sort.

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And the other one is the counterpart from within those who self -identify as Christians, but don't want to stand for the whole of scripture.

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So some future theological issues are clearly not just about God, they're about humanity. They're about how we view ourselves in the light of the truth.

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I mean, you mentioned... Let's stop there for just one moment.

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And I'm going to skip ahead a little bit in this. I want to briefly just say, and we'll talk more about it, but two basic issues seem to come up there.

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One was inerrancy. And the other one was, so attacks on the Bible. And I think maybe sufficiency was mentioned.

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If it wasn't mentioned in that particular clip, I know it's mentioned elsewhere in this. And then the other one was attacks on the character of God that he's really, that his law as represented in the scripture is immoral in some way.

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So attacks on... So they're both attacks on the Bible, but the first one is more the legitimacy of the

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Bible. Is it accurate? Can we really trust it? These kinds of things. And the other category is, is it moral?

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And we'll talk about it more in a second, but I want to skip ahead to the end here.

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There's some points that are made in the middle. One of them actually was really interesting. Al Mohler tries to make this point about a new determinism that's this threat.

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And he compares the LGBT stuff to Daniel Dennett, who's an atheist, determinism that you're just who you are.

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And I couldn't disagree probably more with that. I don't think that's... I think he might've, on that particular issue, read the times a little wrong because you did get that impression with, hey,

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I was born this way, but I'm trapped in my orientation.

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But with the transgender stuff, now you're seeing, you can just become a guy, you can become a girl, you can be anything you want.

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And I think that's actually was the play from the beginning. And the born this way thing was, it was an attempt to, who determines what you were born as?

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What is the attempt to even find a possible genetic link between certain sexual behavior and the way you're wired?

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And in this way, undermine revelation from God about who you are.

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And including, by the way, natural revelation on who you are not just special revelation, but the created order, undermine the whole created order by trying to find something in creation.

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And that's the confusing part, I think. It's like, you're trying to say, it's obvious that someone is who they are, that there's certain obligations and a certain nature that comes with being a man or a woman, including in the category of sexual behavior.

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But the attempt was to undermine that, to really bring that kind of behavior into a realm of somewhat subjectivity, that actually those things, the biological nature does not actually determine activity, that there might be something else that actually determines why someone has certain proclivities.

31:28

And this is the time Al Mohler is saying things like, well, I repent. He said,

31:33

I repent of speaking against the idea that there's a same -sex orientation.

31:39

And he uses that word. And I know that this clip is in enemies within the church. I talk about it some.

31:45

I think they play me commenting on it and then they show the clip. But Al Mohler did this in the same year that he did this conference.

31:52

I don't know if it was before or after, but it was 2014 at, I think it was Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. And we're gonna talk about that more in a minute too.

32:00

But I just wanted to point out that I think that with the LGBT stuff, that was the trajectory from the beginning.

32:07

And initially they were using arguments that would somewhat maybe be palatable to people at that time who were not,

32:17

I mean, you look at the polls from, they changed quite a bit, especially after 2015.

32:23

But they used arguments that would have been palatable. People would have respected science.

32:28

So if you can get science to say, well, there's this gene, you can sway people. It was a tactical maneuver.

32:34

But at the end of the day, it was all about creating this subjective, I am who I create myself to be.

32:40

And it's against the actual created order that God in his providence has set up.

32:47

That was always, it was always a gripe against the creator, always. And some people could see it.

32:54

Some people, I think Al Mohler misread that a little bit, but so we're gonna come back though to this whole attack though, because it's in this vein that I think a lot of compromise has happened.

33:07

This discussion, it was interesting to me, because I thought, well, this might explain why some of these guys have pushed so far left.

33:15

And if you don't see it yet, you will, I think. Let's go to the end of this. We don't have much more.

33:21

I just wanna play for you some more from this. And we'll see what you think.

33:28

Here we go. He is our only hope. So we have to be clear and sharp on that.

33:35

And that's gonna be misunderstood by people. It's gonna be offensive. We're gonna have to clean things up, but we just have to keep pushing that.

33:41

Al? I wanna talk about the very same thing Kevin was just talking about. I think we do need a very clear heads up on this, because these are not arguments that just may be made in the future.

33:51

They're being arguments made right now, just not quite so publicly as we should expect they will be very quickly.

33:58

And they'll be public even this year. Well, I think they're public now in some sense, but what I mean is it's gonna be a matter of very public focus and controversy.

34:06

It's gonna be a dividing line amongst those who at least are publicly identified as evangelicals.

34:12

And it comes down to whether or not we believe in repentance as necessary for salvation. It's the old lordship salvation debate coming back, but coming back is headline news.

34:21

That was something that caught the attention of Christianity Today. This is gonna be a debate that catches the attention of the Washington Post.

34:27

That's gonna be a very different thing. But the other thing that's coming in this is that we have to understand that it's gonna be an obedience to scripture or not.

34:34

In 1 Corinthians chapter five, the apostle Paul says have nothing to do with those who do such things within the church, cast them out.

34:44

And I mean, frankly, that's a horrifying reality when you look at the catalog of sins that are involved there, but unrepentant sinners don't have a place in the church, according to the apostle

34:54

Paul. And that's a hard thing in terms of our contemporary inclusiveness, but that's what's there.

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And we also have to know in 1 Corinthians chapter five, that Paul said, I didn't tell you not to associate with such people in the world because then you have to come out of the world.

35:12

And there's a distinction between the church and the world that what Kevin was first bringing up just denies.

35:18

The church is to be a different community living by the law of Christ. I also think in light of what Pete said, there are some people saying, evangelicals have a private and future salvation.

35:29

It's about a personal relationship with Jesus that eventuates in heaven. We need to reject all that. We need a corporate civic salvation that happens now.

35:38

And there will be many evangelicals who are falling for that and who will fall for that. It's again, the misrepresentations and the dichotomies that are false juxtapositions that are created in that kind of literature and need to be rigorously tested against scripture.

35:55

And we need to articulate a faithful view of what salvation entails. Pete, only if it's quick. All right, we're gonna stop there.

36:05

I'm gonna make a few comments on this. The last thing Lincoln Duncan said there, there's gonna be people who come and they're gonna try to articulate a corporate salvation in the here and now.

36:14

You know what he's talking about. This is the social justice Zeitgeist. These are the people who want a corporate salvation.

36:22

It goes back to the social gospel. It goes really back to the revival movements in the American context, at least.

36:27

But there's a political counterpart to this. It's a political religion. And it fuses with Christianity.

36:33

In fact, it was born in a Christian context. Even during the French Revolution, Rousseau was from where?

36:40

Geneva. He was supposedly a Calvinist. You know, not one we'd recognize, but he is, but it was within these

36:49

Christian countries, supposedly, that socialism, Marxism, all this arose. And that is what has given birth to the objection that you're just about an individual personal relationship with God, you fundamentalists or you evangelicals.

37:04

You want a pie in the sky, and you're not concerned with the suffering that happens here on earth.

37:10

We need a gospel that is fuller, that can account for and help with the current situations that are happening right in the here and now.

37:19

Guess who touts that kind of a belief? Eric Mason does.

37:26

It's in his book. I write about it in Christianity and Social Justice, Religions in Conflict, which by the way, is on Audible now.

37:32

You can get it on Audible if you wanna listen to it, if you're not a reader, a text reader. I guess that's reading now.

37:38

So people say I read and they've listened on Audible. Anyway, I digress. Eric Mason believes this.

37:45

Guess who wrote the foreword to Eric Mason's book, Woke Church and praised it? Lincoln Duncan. How could that have happened?

37:52

That book came out in 2018. That's only four years after Lincoln Duncan had made the statement at T4G. Al Mohler is struggling, especially if you watch the rest of it.

38:04

And this is generally when you listen to Al Mohler on any of these panels. So I don't wanna read into it too much.

38:12

There's sort of a word salad. There's a lot of pontification, but you feel like, well, that guy's smart.

38:18

But afterward, you're like, I can't really tell you much of what he said, like in a bullet point fashion. It's just kinda, maybe you could remember one or two of the points, but he's very, he's kind of all over the place and he makes points.

38:33

And perhaps I, I don't know, maybe I'm like that a little bit too, that kind of stream of consciousness, way of talking about things.

38:42

But there could also be a little bit of a, he's uncomfortable, I don't know.

38:48

He's certainly forward looking. He's saying, look, hey, this kind of a controversy, about just simple biblical truth, about repentance from, and he's specifically talking about homosexuality, this could end up in the

38:59

Washington Post. If they find out this is what Christians believe and this is not within the political parameters of acceptability, then we're gonna be in trouble.

39:10

That's the point he's making. And we need to figure out apologetic ways of dealing with this. And so I wanted to show you first the foundational issues and then where they're getting specific.

39:21

And they got specific at the end. And they correctly identified the issues that would be and are now threats to the church on the surface, the

39:30

LGBT, and then this social gospel, social justice stuff. But before that, when they were laying the foundation, they're saying it's really an attack on the word of God.

39:40

It's on the character of God. God's not just, look at his word. And they're gonna find all kinds of things that don't fit in with today's morality, all kinds of things that we would consider in the here and now oppressive.

39:51

How could the Bible condone of the way that women are treated? And why would there be slavery and laws regulating it but not any command to abolish it?

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How come, I don't know, there's genocide, quote unquote. That's the typical atheist way of framing the issue when the children of Israel go into these pagan nations.

40:12

And the list would go on and on and on about all the things that don't line up with today's egalitarian assumptions.

40:18

And Al Mohler, he's recognizing that. The panel's recognizing that this is the objection now.

40:25

It's not, hey, how could you believe in Noah's Ark or a talking donkey? It's now, how can you believe in a book that promotes these horrible things?

40:37

God must be evil. And then also with that, we can't trust the Bible. We can't really know.

40:44

Who knows what it's really saying? These are, and you see these attacks so clearly today.

40:50

That's what the social justice movement is doing. And it's a wide umbrella of all kinds of things at this point.

40:55

But you have in that an attack on the sufficiency and the inerrancy. And I would say more fundamentally and more importantly, and I wish more people would talk about this, the very nature of revelation itself, whether God actually did communicate in such a way people can know.

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If you have to go through a lens of some kind from an oppressed perspective, then he didn't really communicate in a way you can know.

41:20

And how do you know that is a correct oppressed perspective to get your information from? Maybe there's a more oppressed perspective.

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But we do know if you are, according to the sociologists, an oppressor, you just have to shut up and listen.

41:34

You have nothing to say about justice. And even in this translates to Bible studies, you really, your opinion of what the

41:40

Bible says, your study of it doesn't really matter as much. That's an attack. That's an attack, not on the sufficiency primarily.

41:46

It's an attack on the very nature of revelation. It's an attack on the untruth itself.

41:52

It's so fundamental. And you have, of course, the attacks on the nature and character of God that he, or a twisting into, and there's an acknowledgement of this, a twisting into another

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God. We don't believe in that harsh God. We want to rearrange things, reinterpret things, deconstruct, reconstruct, create a situation in which we can take certain parts of the

42:17

Bible as legitimate that we like, and other parts we can kind of get around, and we can have a

42:22

God that we worship, an idol in our own image. And so that's exactly what we see as well today.

42:28

When you see these problem verses on these areas that why would the Bible say this about homosexuality?

42:35

Well, does it really say that? Did God really say, right? The serpent's whisper can be heard.

42:41

That is what's going on right now. And informally evangelical circles. And so what

42:47

I wanted to point out to you was in 2014, a lot of the guys on this T4G panel were correctly identifying the future.

42:53

They're not ignorant dummies. That's the defense I hear quite a bit. Well, they just don't know.

43:00

How could they? No, that's like their job. That's like, especially like someone like Al Mohler who keeps up with things the way he does.

43:07

No, they know exactly what's going on. They're not, it's not for ignorance that they seem so wishy -washy.

43:15

It's not because they're just not paying attention that they haven't actually called out the false teachers in their own midst by name publicly.

43:23

It's not because they lack information somewhere. They know what's going on and probably more than even

43:30

I do on some things. Because they're within the guild.

43:36

They're seeing the private correspondence. They know exactly what's going on. And you need to understand this.

43:42

We talked about this with a few days ago at the article about Francis Collins and how, you know, why is it that Christopher Hitchens could see right through him and say, this isn't a serious

43:52

Christian. This isn't a guy who knows theology well. But then the Christians are platforming him. And the article makes the point is like, look, you know,

44:00

Tim Keller had such a close association with him. He had to have known. And that's my point to you is they know.

44:05

Don't bring up the ignorance defense for these guys. They were correctly predicting where things would go in some ways in 2014.

44:13

They got the general categories right. And then you see them capitulate. And that's what I wanted to focus on.

44:19

That's the point I really wanna make here. Why is it that they capitulate? Why is it that they try to go so far and no farther, but we're gonna go with you walk a certain amount.

44:28

We're gonna, I'm gonna write the four to woke church, Lincoln Duncan, Mark Dever, you know, on the single issue voting and the acceptance of some aspects of what we now would term critical theory, critical race theory, but the divided by faith.

44:45

And he did that whole panel at T4G years later in 2018 or 19, I think it was 2019 where he, you know,

44:51

George Washington couldn't have been a Christian. He owned slaves and, you know, racism has been horrible. The church is so complicit.

44:56

And he did this in like 2019. And, you know, Al Mohler. I mean,

45:01

I have a whole list that I've just posted the other day on Facebook about Al Mohler.

45:07

And I'm not gonna go over it right now, but all the things that he has done to position himself in such a way that you can't really nail

45:14

Jell -O to a wall. And he's, but he's put, he pushes the needle left. Now he's trying to do this pivot where he's on the right more, but it's a, it seems like political maneuvering.

45:24

That's how it tastes. And I think that's exactly what it is. That's, and what would motivate that?

45:31

What would motivate the man in 2014, who's saying we got this challenge from the LGBT lobby in the same exact year, he's saying,

45:38

I apologize for the position that I took for so many years on homosexual orientation. I repent of it. I believe there is homosexual orientation.

45:45

And he uses the very words the world uses to identify this, this innate sense that someone has this, this deep desire that's intrinsic to their identity.

46:01

Shouldn't be anyone's identity biblically, but he compromises. Why does he do it?

46:07

And I think it's because they see so clearly the threat and they're afraid of it, perhaps. They know what's going on.

46:15

Yesterday, I talked about an article in the Jacobin and how now, if you are a

46:23

Christian who thinks that you should evangelize people who are Jewish, that's anti -Semitic. I'm telling you what the Jacobin says today will be said on mainstream news sources tomorrow.

46:34

It's out farther left. It's communist, but the media is too, for the most part.

46:40

And that's where they're gonna end up. I think they see this.

46:45

I think they know that this is happening. They think they understand the context they live in. And there's a lack of faith somewhere along the line that we're just gonna stick with the truth.

46:56

You know, Al Moore even said, we got to stick with what the Bible teaches, right? I mean, he knows, but then the same guy, that same year saying what he said at the

47:03

URLC, there is a sense in which these guys, some of them, it seems like what they think is that they can outmaneuver, they can strategize, they can somehow play the game and win or at least create a haven for their institutions and preserve them.

47:26

And I got news for you, you won't. A few verses I wanted to read for you. Start here with Galatians chapter one.

47:37

The apostle Paul says this, and he talks about a false gospel coming in, which of course, that's exactly what we have now.

47:47

Lincoln Duncan identified it and then wrote the forward to a book that promoted it. But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to what we have preached to you, he is to be accursed.

47:59

As we have said before, so I say again now, if any man is preaching to you a gospel contrary to what you received, he is to be accursed.

48:06

For am I now seeking the favor of men or of God, or am I striving to please men? If I were still striving to please men,

48:13

I would not be a bondservant of Christ. Apostle Paul knew the challenge.

48:19

The challenge was you're gonna offend people. You're not gonna please them. If you take a hard stand against this gospel, this false gospel.

48:28

How about the apostle Paul again in first Thessalonians two verse four, but as we were allowed of God to be put in trust with the gospel, even so we speak not as pleasing men, but God, which trieth our hearts.

48:44

That's King James version. Usually pull it up in the NASB, but I guess I pulled it up in King James. Not as pleasing men, not as pleasing men.

48:54

We're not trying to please the media. We're not trying, by the way, James, I didn't even pull up this verse, but it just came to me.

49:00

The beginning of the book of James, when there's social justice warriors love to use this passage because there's a whole section on favoring the rich person.

49:09

A rich person comes into your assembly, you give them the good place to sit and don't do that. Don't show partiality.

49:15

Well, guess what? It's exactly what these evangelicals do. The correct application today is not, well, you're just favoring the white people because there's a disparity that exists.

49:25

Yeah, disparity doesn't mean that necessarily. Could be reflective of it, but it doesn't mean that.

49:33

How about this? How about this interpretation or this application, I should say? The media, the

49:41

Hollywood, the political establishment, pretty much every institution of power, big business are all trumpeting the same thing, okay?

49:50

Pro -LGBT, pro -BLM, pro -feminist, whatever.

49:57

And your evangelical institution tries to garner favor or at least be allies or be somewhat tangential to what they're trying to accomplish.

50:07

You just have a parallel in your church. You know, hey, we're doing something here too. We're gonna go march against racism when everyone else is doing it because guess what?

50:15

We're, okay, what is that? What is it when you respect the voices coming from the

50:23

Washington Post and the New York Times and write op -eds perhaps in those papers or do interviews on CNN or the

50:29

Houston Chronicle? What is it when you favor the people that work at these particular places and you walk on eggshells trying not to offend them and trying to navigate that minefield and be technically orthodox if you can, but just not too harsh so that you'll offend them?

50:48

What is that? What is it when your church is, you're crafting, you're a pastor, and you're trying to craft your church to appeal more to postmodern millennials, urbanites, and so you're going to disregard the others in your church who aren't in that category because you have your eye to the future and what's coming next just on the horizon.

51:09

And this is the way to reach this next generation. And so you're going to change your music and everything else about your church, the way you preach, maybe even the way it looks to try to favor that particular demographic.

51:26

What is that? What is it when your church changes and downplays certain things because you want to appeal to Democrats?

51:33

Or, and that wasn't a problem years ago, but now you're talking about the party of Romans 1.

51:38

What are you trying to do when you do that? Is that not partiality? Is that not favoritism?

51:44

Is that not trying to garner the approval of men? And the answer is yes, of course it is.

51:50

John 12 says this. Nevertheless, many even of the rulers believed in him, but because of the

51:58

Pharisees, they were not confessing him for fear that they would be put out of the synagogue, for they love the approval of men rather than the approval of God.

52:08

Someone who knew the truth and didn't articulate it publicly, at least not fully, because of fear that they would be put out of the synagogue, that they would be on the out, that they wouldn't have the platform, they wouldn't have the 401k.

52:27

Not back then. That's what I'm saying today. I'm applying it today. Nothing's changed in the nature of man.

52:34

Men will always disappoint. That's why you have to have your trust in God ultimately.

52:40

And then look for the men who buck this trend, take hits, sacrifice themselves, don't care what other people think, at the, you know, if it's going to be at the expense of truth.

52:56

I am, I'm very disappointed in these guys. They have proven that they are not effective leaders and they are not worthy of leading anything at this point.

53:07

And that is my, that's my honest assessment. I know that sounds harsh, but that is my honest assessment of these guys. It's been shown,

53:14

Lincoln Duncan, Al Mohler, Mark Dever, I would put him in that category.

53:19

I know many, you know, still really have a lot of hope for Kevin DeYoung, but it's like, man, you've let so many things pass by that, you know, you'll talk about certain errors, but you're avoiding the ones that are right within your purview to do anything about.

53:33

I mean, this kind of character is toxic to the church. It means all the defenses are down and we just, we might put up defenses around things, you know, we're really careful about that prosperity gospel stuff.

53:48

We're really going to name the names of those people. We're really going to be so careful about the hardcore progressive

53:54

Christians who deny things like penal substitution or something. We're going to be, but when it comes to the really popular stuff that has the movements that have, that stream from the world and have immense pressure.

54:09

And if you buck those trends in any form, you're going to be in trouble. It's just weakness. It's confusion.

54:15

It's lack of clarity. It's who knows what this person, what you believe. It's just, it's a surrender.

54:21

It's a white flag. And it's really unfortunate to me that it's, you know, it's come down to these pastors without a lot of resources and without a lot of standing there and that are fighting many of these battles.

54:36

And they're going to, by the way, this is how it works, guys. They're the ones that are going to get the media attention.

54:41

Okay. It's going to be like JD Hall. It's going to be Pastor Kerry Gordon. It's going to be people, even people with not greatest theology.

54:51

I can't remember the guy's name in Florida now. Man, I can't remember his name. The pastor who initially got in trouble for opening his church up, even though he was complying with all the regulations who had a prosperity side to him.

55:04

That's where all the media attention went. It's going to be Greg Locke. You know, these are the people that are going to get the media attention more than anyone else.

55:12

And it's because they're actually taking stands on things. Whether you like the way they're doing it or not, they're actually doing it.

55:21

And John MacArthur, right? You know, another example of this. It's the people who won't compromise, who have a fixed understanding of this is the truth and we're not going to deviate that ended up getting the attention.

55:33

And these guys just become irrelevant over time. And every year that goes by, they become less and less relevant as they politically maneuver.

55:43

And it's like they're big fish in a small pond. The pond keeps decreasing and they keep, you know, trying to hold on to this evaporating pond that they have.

55:55

It's really sad actually at the end of the day when you think about it. In the name of trying to be relevant, trying to attract unbelievers, trying to keep their institutions from being canceled and trying to navigate this.

56:08

And that's my assessment, okay? That's what I think. That's the only explanation that makes sense to me of the actions that we see.

56:14

In the name of all these things, they end up losing. And they end up losing them in the end and they're nightmares of, you know, what the media is going to think about Christians is going to happen anyway.

56:28

And all they've done is put themselves in positions of neutralizing believers who otherwise could have stood up strong.

56:35

So this has gone for way too long. I was hoping for a short podcast, but I just got going. I hope this is helpful for you in some way, especially scripture at the end.