A Follow Up to T4Gs CRT Panel

A Call to Be Bereans and Test Christian Organizations

Hey guys, welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm John Harris, your host. Hopefully a shorter episode today. We're going to have a theme this week. We've already kind of delved into it a little bit, but there's going to be a number of shows this week in which I'm going to, or podcasts, in which I'm going to talk about individuals or organizations as the case may be that I think many have trusted at some point or another or had some confidence in.

The moral of the story, just to let you all know, is we've got to be Bereans. When the Bereans made sure what Paul was saying was in line with the Old Testament scriptures, we've got to do the same kind of thing by making sure that the people and the organizations we trust and partner with are in line with what the Bible says.

If we don't do that, then we can get into some very bad places where we're actually helping, fund, partnering with people who aren't actually doing real Christian discipleship or they have very inadequate or sometimes a really dangerous message that they're preaching, perhaps a false gospel.

We've got to be not heresy hunters where we're just looking and around every corner there's heresy and twisting things to make it heresy, but we have to be discerning when we are going to be listening to people from certain organizations, from any organization, anytime we listen really.

We are going to be especially putting financial backing and support behind organizations that we kind of know what they're about and we're not just naive. We don't just go on trusting this organization is still good because, man, it was good when my dad was involved in it.

Well, it's been a while since your dad was involved in it, right? These organizations change over time. We found that out with a lot of organizations. Anyway, I think people and organizations, we make sure that we are as generous as we possibly can be in the sense that we're giving a benefit of the doubt, but our whole striving is not to read charitably.

It is to read accurately. When we give the benefit of the doubt, it is not with deference because of some consideration of, well, that person's a big shot and I don't want to offend them, or, man, what will people think if I don't really support that person?

It's more of, well, you could read this in a different kind of way that maybe they meant it that way, but it's unclear, and then you say it's unclear, but sometimes people are promoting false gospels and they're saying things that are really not right.

And the truth is right there, and there is no quote-unquote charitable way even to look at it other than trying to bend it somehow. And so our striving is to read accurately, our striving, and that's what the Bereans did with Paul, is to compare what he said to the standard of scripture and then make our determination.

And so today we're going to start off doing some of this with an individual that I didn't realize this, someone sent me a treasure trove of information, but this individual is named Pastor Bobby Scott, and we examined some of what Pastor Bobby Scott was saying last week at the T4G conference.

And he was on a panel with Kevin DeYoung and Mark Dever on critical race theory, and Bobby Scott wanted to use critical race theory as an analytical tool, and I pointed out probably the most, I guess, serious issue with what he said was when he basically said that the room at T4G wasn't ethnically diverse enough, and therefore reconciliation had not happened, and he quoted actually Paul, when Paul talks about the ministry of reconciliation from 2 Corinthians.

And so he uses this to then try to say that there's a failure in some ways, that the gospel is not being lived out, there's a defect somewhere with the room at T4G because it's not diverse enough, and so the ministry of reconciliation hasn't happened enough, and really ignoring, I think, what 2 Corinthians 5 actually is teaching, the context of that.

So we talked about this already, but I didn't realize, I had never heard of Bobby Scott, and so someone sent me all this information, and some of what they sent me was some private stuff that I'm not gonna share with you, but I will say this, it showed me that people like Bobby Scott, and there's certainly many others, have certainly made their ways into conservative organizations and churches, and I'm saying orthodox, conservatively, theologically, and places that you would really think have rejected critical race theory, and don't wanna use it as an analytical tool and all that, and yet you see those same places platforming people like Pastor Bobby Scott.

So I will, I'll leave some of that information out, but I wanna just, I just wanna bring you through some things, because I was a little surprised. Okay, so here's what I'll start with, and this isn't necessarily exhaustive, but Bobby Scott is a contributor at the Just Gospel Conference, that's the BD &ABWLA's conference, and the parent organization, the Front Porch, and the thing is, the BD &ABWLA is pretty radical in my mind at this point.

I mean, he's the guy that said, back in 2018, that white people were responsible, like broadly speaking, for the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and since then he's said some really crazy stuff, and we've talked about it on the podcast, I've talked about Just Gospel in my book, Christianity and Social Justice, Religions and Conflict, just cause it shouldn't be called that, it's politics mostly, it's not just gospel, it's, they're not just talking about the gospel, that's the thing, it's just like deceptive in my mind to call your conference that, it's kinda weird, but I didn't know Bobby Scott was hanging out with those guys, like that was strange to me a little bit, I was like, man, I thought like, okay, he's at T4G, and yeah, there was a false gospel in what he said, it was kinda vague and quick, and yeah, he wanted to use critical race theory as an analytical tool, I just didn't think that he'd be with guys as radical as the BD &ABWLA.

And so, he, and it wasn't a one-off, he was there for this Engaging Cultural Expressions of Complementarian Theology, I don't know what other panels he might have been in, but these are just the two that were sent to me, he didn't really say anything on this panel, but you have some people giving very egalitarian ideas of what, their opinion of what Paul actually teaches, and so that was interesting.

And so then, they sent me also this, these articles from the Sola Network, Sola Network, I guess, is a reformed-ish, that's where the Solas come from, network that is committed to the, influence the emerging generation with the gospel of Jesus Christ, and they have all these nice things they say here, and there's probably people who think, this is wonderful.

But then you read these articles, and it's like watching the 13th documentary, or reading like the 1619 Project, or something like that. And so, you can see these are long, and there's, it's a four-part series, so I'm not going to go over all of it, but a few highlights that I might want to talk about, and there's so many, it's hard to know where to even start.

So he says in his article, part three of this, America's Long Troubled Road Towards Racial Reconciliation, that the Civil Rights Act delivered a critical blow to systemic racism, and yet at the same time, he says that there continue to be aspects of systemic racism that have yet to be dismantled, and one of those is the war on drugs.

And so he talks about some of these disparities, I talk about these in Christianity and social justice, religions and conflict. He insinuates that we shouldn't actually have drugs criminalized, because they don't rehabilitate the user.

And so this is what, these are the, I guess the kinds of solutions that he's advocating. And then you see in this part four, he uses this interpretation of what happened in the Exodus to argue for reparations today in the United States.

So he says in the Exodus, there was systemic and personal problems, and that because Israel was systemically oppressed by the Egyptians, they were slaves in Egypt, and they had their male babies forcibly killed, that there's a category here for systemic sin.

And because there's a category for systemic sin, and because God liberated them from that systemic sin, therefore today, he says, we're going to talk about racism and racial reconciliation in America biblically, then we have to be able to use biblical categories of corporate and personal sin, not just one or the other.

And so I'll just stop here real quick and just say, yeah, I mean, there's certainly sins that are corporate sins, in the sense that you have a entire society given over to certain things. Nineveh would be an example of a society that was given over to false worship.

And so God does judge countries, he does nations, that when the people are given over to something, but that's going to look like the people participating in these sins. And there's an approval for these sins, there's a general participation in these sins.

It's not going to be something where you have a specific group of people, i .e. slaveholders, and then, or really, well, we'll just use, I'll expand this in a minute, but let's say hypothetically, specific group of people, slaveholders, and a small percentage of the actual society is in that category.

And then later, hundreds of years, their children must then go and make some kind of a recompense for the fact that their parents were in these roles. That's not what's being talked about in that narrative.

It's not like, and then God, hundreds of years later, decided, you know what? The Egyptians, those children of the people that benefited from the Hebrew slavery, we really got to do something about this.

Or those who traded with Egypt, they're guilty, and so I'm going to punish them because they were involved even passively in systemic sin because they had Egyptian privilege allocated to them because they were in a society that had slavery at one point in the past.

It's not even comparable, but that's the stretch you'd actually have to make to make this work. But that's not what happened in that particular story. In fact, the emphasis of that story is on God's sovereignty, how he takes Israel out of Egypt.

And what he does is he shows his power, that he is more powerful than the Egyptian gods. And he judges them for their, actually, I mean, he liberates the children of Israel and he judges the Egyptians.

It's not like he's judging them because, well, they enslaved the Israelites, and that's what he's going after is they just enslaved the Israelites. Of course, it's because Pharaoh wouldn't let the children of Israel go that the plagues come.

But the plagues themselves are against the specific gods of Egypt, the places that Pharaoh put his trust in. And it's showing the power of God over the Egyptian deities and the demons, really, and that God purchased Israel for himself, that he liberated them for himself.

And so that's really the big picture here. That's the moral lesson. And God does use evil for good. You see that in the story of Joseph. You see that, too, in his plan for redeeming the children of Israel from the Egyptians and then giving the land that he promised Abraham to them, to their descendants.

And so he was accomplishing something much bigger in this particular situation. Liberation theologians, their focus tends to be very singular. It tends to be very focused on their, well, there was liberation, there's systemic sin going on.

This is God is on the side of the poor and the oppressed, and therefore that's what we need to focus and emphasize those things and then apply them today. And then the applications today are for these solutions like reparations, which is where he gets.

He actually links right here to this article that's in Courts. Courts is not a Christian publication, but it's a what U .S. slavery reparations and post-Holocaust Germany have in common. And it makes the argument for the idea that, well, we ought to have reparations.

In fact, I'll read for you the end of this. He said, the U .S. government paying reparations today for state terror that ended 150 years ago poses numerous practical challenges. They include identifying, rightly identifying rightful recipients in the source, sourcing the money appropriately, whether state-based or federal.

Those who say they did not benefit from slavery must be persuaded that reparations are required to right a moral wrong. Polling shows a majority of Americans oppose cash payments as a redress for slavery, but old injustices don't simply disappear with time.

Left unaddressed, they fuel the kind of division, shame, and resentment that, as America knows well, can divide a nation. And the reason for this, though, is because this is people who don't actually believe or they don't have a belief in hell, they can't, there's a problem on the accounting balance.

There's injustice that has happened, and it must be, there must be a payment made. There must be. We are human, and we want sacrifice, and that's just natural. It's actually wired into us. Someone's got to do something.

And so we know that people who have died without Christ, who have participated in evil things, are actually punished for that in an eternal punishment known as hell. But people who don't believe in that, it's got to happen in this life.

And if it's punishing generations later, then you do that. And of course, this plan has nothing to do with actually going to those who were the prime original beneficiaries, the people who actually went out, captured their tribes, members of tribes, and then sold them to Europeans or people, you know, shipping, the shipping industry or something from the Northeastern mariners.

It's not going to them, the people in Africa who are actually doing this, and demanding of them some kind of payment. It's always, it runs along these Marxist lines of class conflict that will benefit the political Marxists in the United States.

It always does that. And that this is no exception. And this is what Bobby Scott, though, is ultimately, he's saying that he doesn't want Marxism. He don't need Marxism. And at the same time, though, then the solutions he's given, I mean, these are neo-Marxist solutions to this.

How do you prevent Marxism from gaining a hold when you're going to present it like, well, there's a category for systemic racism, systemic sin, systemic oppression, corporate sin. And therefore, based upon that, generations later, we got to punish these people for things their ancestors did and not have some kind of a government mechanism that comes to be, that is put in place in order to make things equitable.

I mean, I've talked about this before. I don't want to, you can go back and watch a whole episode on reparations. And I talk about the impracticality of it. I talk about the immorality of it, doing it at this point and to the people that are people want to do it too.

So but this is a guy, and again, I'm not doing this to, it's so hard for me because I tend to want to go and really critique these things. But I'm trying to just give you the big picture here that just, this is a guy who at T4G went to Master Seminary and apparently has more influence than I even realized.

And this is someone who has some very radical ideas. And so he's, the person who sent me all this stuff also sent me, I guess, in their neck of the woods, there's a number of, he's part of this network, Shepard LA, or I guess it's Nine Marks, Shepard LA, and they have conferences and stuff.

So maybe this is a conference, let's see. Yeah, they have a conference. So the people who are part of it, interestingly, if you do this and type in Masters, you'll find, okay, this guy, PJ Tabayan, Master Seminary grad, Masters University and Master Seminary actually.

You have them Bobby Scott, another Master Seminary grad. You have this individual, Nam Park, Master Seminary grad. Let's see, there's a couple people who aren't, then you have, I'm not going to go through all their names, but you can see another guy, Master Seminary grad.

You can see here, another, actually that guy's not, another guy, Master, there's a lot of Master Seminary grads in this particular list, which I thought was just interesting to me. And so from what I'm told, this is, more Master Seminary grads.

This is the conference that's coming up, Nine Marks event, Shepard LA conference. And the people speaking are PJ Tabayan, Mark Dever, Bobby Scott, Jonathan Lehman. And that's the conference, I guess. And so there, this is, I don't know, I'm just, I'm looking at connections and I'm not trying to do like the Glenn Beck chalkboard thing where, you know, it's like, and they're compromised because this guy over here who doesn't have a, you don't want to do that where it's unrelated, but this is actually kind of related.

You see the, and the reason I'm saying that is because you see a guy like Bobby Scott who actually does have some radical ideas. And I showed you last week, has promoted ideas that would be in keeping with a false gospel.

And he's, and what organizations is he part of? And, you know, very involved when, well, Nine Marks, the Nine Marks Shepard LA conference. He's involved with this Solos Network thing. He's involved with T4G obviously, with the Front Porch, and the Front Porch is the one that I would say, like, I would have known that that one was, was off, but, but here's, here's another video of Pastor Bobby Scott.

And then again, this just reinforced in my mind, some of the things that I've already been saying, but including the way in which the gospel is handled here. So let, let's start, I mean, I don't, I have a bunch of notes cause I listened to this whole thing.

I'll just give you, cause I don't want to make this long. I'll just give you a few of the things he says, and then I'll play for you a clip, but a few of the things he says. He says that, he talks about how no one believes our stories.

And he talks about like Eric Gardner and George Floyd and how no one believes their stories of racism that's against them, meaning black people, black, black people have these stories. No one believes them.

And, and it's like, but you don't know that Eric Gardner's situation and George Floyd's situation were motivated by, we don't know that racism motivated those things. And I should say ethnic partiality, catching myself.

We don't know that there was some kind of ethnic partiality that motivated that.

I see how the officer shot him in the back and finally charges were brought and the officer went to jail. But black Americans, we'll tell you that a thousand times over without videos and no one believes our stories.

Yeah. No one believes our stories that, but the stories are, this is racism. We don't know that in these situations, this was racism. That's, that's the whole problem. And he says the police, well, let's just go to a few of these choice clips here.

And administrating so-called justice, then you, then you, then you have a problem. And so I think for African-Americans, because it's, it's a story and a painful narrative that when we see it, we're like, ah, this is COVID -19, this is racism.

And I know there's many of my brothers that I respect and they want to say, oh no, these are bad apples and isolated cases that, but when you're an African-American and you've experienced a judicial system that was built to use oppressive force, to keep slaves in check, to keep black people docile during the a hundred years of Jim Crow, we have a police system that's built like that.

You still going to have pockets of that. It's still going to rear ugly hair from time to time. And we simply have to say what it is when we see it.

So we have to say what it is when we see it. And he obviously before he gives Eric Garner and George Floyd as examples, and this is a police system it's built, it's built like that. This is something you hear from 13th.

This is something you'd hear from 1619 project is what you hear from the new Jim Crow. These are the kinds of, the things he's saying are what you'd pick up in these more radical readings of American history.

And it's today there's racism in the police departments because what's the reason? Well, because years ago there were slave patrols and it's just, that's what it's built off of, which isn't accurate, but that's what we get.

So he uses, I'm not going to go to all of these. He talks about America being characterized by racism. He actually oftentimes in this whole dialogue talks about America did this to black people. America did this to not even like, hey, there was certain individuals did this.

This president did this or, you know, these bad people did this to these people. It's America. It's a very 1619 type of way of reading. It's always, it's America. It's fundamental to what America is. It's just, it's this whole idea of taking, of thinking of America as an idea and abstracting America has led to this kind of thing where America is not this organic culture that forms in different places or different than other places.

It just becomes this one kind of singular entity that exists in the abstract, which was supposed to promise all these great things, but actually failed. And it's America doing this. America's punishing.

America, this will lead, if you use this language so much in this narrative, I'm telling you, this will lead to the children of people like this getting radicalized. People in churches like this, they'll get radicalized over time.

That's just, it creates that kind of grudge, that bitterness. It's the root of it when you adopt this kind of a narrative. Let's see, I think there was, okay, so he says, and this is maybe the most interesting thing, it's kind of an off comment here, an offhanded comment, but he says something about the reconciliation that the gospel brings.

And this is what I, this is more important than anything else I think I've talked about in this, the critique of the United States, the way he's handling scripture, this is more important to me. Check this out.

I think if we go back to Augustine's, that we have a dual citizenship, that we're citizens of heaven, Christians are, we're part of a new family, we're one. And the gospel does that, that when the gospel is preached and by God's grace is believed, there's repentance, there's new life, there's someone's born again, they're reconciled to God.

And once they're reconciled to God, they also become reconciled to people who are radically different than them in all kinds of ways. Jews and Gentiles could be reconciled into one family, slaves and their masters in the Bible, and I'm not talking about chattel slavery, could, would be reconciled in biblical language.

So what was that? Jews and Gentiles can be reconciled, slaves and freedmen can be reconciled, but not chattel slavery, gospel can't do that apparently, I don't get that. Like why? I don't even know what to say to something like that.

Like, of course the gospel can, the gospel did. In fact, have you read the slave narratives and the slaves who are grateful for the Christianity that their master taught them? Yeah, there's stories that exist that are horrible and oppressive.

And there's also a lot of good stories and I've read them, good in the sense that God uses evil to produce good, where you have Christian slave masters who end up teaching slaves about the son of God, Jesus Christ and salvation in him.

And it's that it can't bring about reconciliation between those people. It can't, not in that labor relationship. That's one labor relationship. Their key, the gospel can't bring a reconciliation. Why?

Why not? And furthermore, and I talk about this in Christianity and social justice, religions and conflict. The Greco-Roman slave system, the Roman slave system, there's a lot of things connected to that, that in many ways were much worse than what happened in the United States, you didn't have gladiatorial arenas in Georgia, we're going to watch these slaves fight to the death for our own entertainment.

And no, there were certain things that were, I mean, even the idea that, you know, there was abuse in the sense that masters would abuse, sexually abuse slaves. Yeah, but it wasn't like an accepted thing, broadly speaking in the culture.

That was though in Roman culture, a very accepted thing for masters to use their slaves in those kinds of ways. So I'm not saying that it was all good. And that's a problem, unfortunately, that people oftentimes, you say anything that tends to paint something else as maybe worse in general than American slavery, then you've committed a horrible crime because we know that's the worst thing that's ever happened in the history of the world, which is, or just someone who doesn't know history, horrible things have happened all over the world to all, every people group has basically a story at some point in their past of something terrible happening to their ancestors.

And American slavery is something that we're very glad is gone because we value personal responsibility and that's what we want to encourage. And, of course, the whole idea of tribal warfare in Africa being the, and man capture, even along the line in many of those cases being the thing that supplied a labor force, we know that's wrong.

We know some of the laws that were connected with slavery, like trying to prevent slaves from read because of fear that they might read some radical abolitionist literature, which would create slave revolts and violence.

You know, we, we know that the kind of thing is wrong. We, so, so we obviously, we know these things, right? I don't know of anyone who doesn't know this and doesn't think that, that, that, that, that kind of thing was wrong.

But the idea though, that you can't have a Christian master reconciled with a slave in the, in the gospel is, is just, it's offensive. It should, the cross can reconcile those people. In fact, it can reconcile people today in abusive employer and employee relationships.

It can reconcile people in abusive marriages. It can, it can do a wonderful work in, in all kinds of relationships that exist. To limit it like that is just incredible to me. To, it's similar to the comment that he made at T4G, where he basically looked out at the audience and there's a lack of diversity and says, we have a long way to go where we have, we can do better.

He says, we can do better at the reconciliation, at the work of reconciliation, God has called us to the second Corinthians five reconciliation. And it's like, wait a minute. So what you're saying, cause that's about being reconciled to God.

Does that mean that like the gospel hasn't had the full effect it should in this room because it lacks diversity. I mean, it's the same kind of thing here. It's like, well, you think the gospel it's limited somehow by it, but you can't really do anything with that relationship by promoting the kind of unity that the gospel produces.

I mean, that's just offensive to me. And that's, that's what you're getting though. And, and so the moral of the story being at the end of the day, we have to have discernment, even when it comes to people who've gone to seminaries that we, that many of us at least have trusted in the past or organizations that many of us have maybe trusted in the past.

You just gotta be, you have to be discerning with these things. You have to be a Berean and check out the people that you have, even speak at your church and stuff, because we were in a time of great deception and great confusion.

And when it's confusion, that's so fundamental over something as basic as the gospel, then, and you know that, you know, you can't, you can't have that person speak. You can't, you have to clarify with that person at the very least.

And, and, and these are serious things. These are errors that end up sometimes having eternal ramifications to them. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to pick up tomorrow with something. Now, there was a panel that Bobby Scott was on with another individual in the PCA.

And that's what I want to talk about tomorrow. We're going to, I'm going to save that video because there's a video that I was like, oh wow, we're going to, we're going to talk about this. And what are conservatives in the PCA doing about this?

And so tomorrow we're going to continue this theme of using discernment, making sure that even people that you might like or came from good organizations that you think are on the right side of this are doing good work.

Make sure that you're, that you're examining what they're doing. And if you're going to get behind it, you know, try to be sure and then go ahead and get behind it, but you want to be sure first. And so some of this stuff might be a little disappointing to some of you in the PCA, but I think a good reality check is important.

So God bless. Hopefully this will be an encouragement to you in some way to, to be more discernment and, and, and we'll continue tomorrow.