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Two topics today. Enjoy!
All right, I've got a nice cup of tea here. Still too hot. I'm not normally a tea guy, but I found this really good black tea with some holiday spices on it. Fantastic. Fantastic. Anyway, I wanted to talk about something that I've been tweeting about a little bit the last couple of days.
But before I do, I have this tweet here from Mrs. Beth Moore. And it's fantastic. You might remember a couple of days ago, Beth Moore was clutching her entire pearl necklace. Horrified, shocked, appalled, disgusted with Joel Askell, one of the nicest guys that I've ever met online.
Anyway, she was very offended because Joel said that Dwight McKissick, Pastor Dwight McKissick, was stupid. And she said, Joel, how could you? How dare you? She was ready to call his manager. I mean, she was serious.
Delete this tweet right now. Insults are unbecoming of Christians. And we all laughed it off because obviously that's stupid. Obviously, we understand that insults are not necessarily off limits for a Christian.
Now, we should be careful about those kinds of things. And in this case, Dwight McKissick had been saying a string of stupidity. And so he was called stupid for saying many, many stupid things, which I think personally is an apt name for someone who says a lot of stupid things.
And so Beth Moore is highly offended. But we didn't take it seriously because we know that Beth Moore and people like her do this kind of thing all the time. Insults are not out of bounds in their opinion.
And I agree, they're not. Here we have a tweet, a perfect example. I like this tweet. It strikes me like Beth Moore is doing her best to be sort of, you know, one of those like macho discernment blog, you know, it's that kind of person.
Here's what she said. She says, somebody must be honest, must honestly be spiking the water in the church pipes with LSD. If we're buying into the using the gospel of Jesus Christ as the biblical reason to ignore injustice, we've lost our ever loving minds.
Knock yourselves out. I'm no academic, but I know a jar of nuts when I see one. Now this, I think it's a funny tweet. I mean, it's really stupid and it's definitely wrong. And it's a lie. It's a lying tweet because nobody says that the gospel of Jesus Christ means we should ignore injustice.
Not a single person says that. I'm very confident in saying, normally I try to scale that kind of rhetoric back, but no, there is nobody that says that the gospel of Jesus Christ is the biblical reason to ignore injustice.
Nobody says that. So it's a lie, but I kind of like the rhetoric. It's a little spicy. Now you may or may not know this, but LSD is a psychedelic drug and you may have been lucky enough to never had to deal with somebody that's on LSD.
I have dealt with many people that have been on LSD and other psychedelics. In fact, I myself have been on LSD and other psychedelics and they're no fun. They're terrible. They're bad news. I mean, you can't tell what the difference between reality and fantasy is.
And even if you can, you're still scared of the fantasy. It's not a good drug. Not at all. As if there is many, many good drugs. But anyway, the point is that she's calling her opponents, her theological opponents insane here.
A jar of nuts. She knows a jar of nuts when she sees one. She's saying that they're insane. Not only is she lying about them, saying they believe something that they do not, but she's also calling them insane.
Somehow this doesn't break the etiquette and decorum rules that she's set up, but calling someone stupid does. This is why we laughed it off because we know there's no principles behind any of it. It's just you criticize someone I like and that's out of bounds.
You can't do that. That's unbecoming of a Christian to criticize people that I like. This is not, Beth Moore is not the first person to come up with this kind of thing. I've been told many times that there's a certain class, the anointed class of well-respected leaders in evangelicalism that are out of bounds.
You can't criticize them. And that's not true. But that's not really what I wanted to talk about today. What I wanted to talk about was this. I tweeted out, what do you think? Why are there lots of blogs questioning George Whitefield's salvation for owning slaves, but little to no blogs defending excommunication for the people who vote for pro-abortion politicians?
What's the disconnect? And somebody responded to me and he put it very aptly. This is Dale Ford. Dale Ford said, owning slaves in the 18th and 19th centuries, well, you're a terrible, wicked, sinful, despicable person.
You're not even a true Christian if you do that. But voting for pro-baby killing candidates in the 21st century, well, it's complicated. That's a good point. I completely agree. There was another example of this that came from Tom Buck.
Tom Buck made a fantastic point. Let me see if I can find it here. I am not sure if I'm gonna be able to find it quickly. Hold on. Yeah, here it is. Tom Buck. He says the current SBC logic. Now before I go on, this is not just the SBC that does this, but Tom Buck happens to be in the Southern Baptist Convention, so that's his main concern.
Here's what he says. He says, patriarchy, it's a vile term because it has bad roots and awful consequences. Complementarianism is an unhelpful term because it has bad consequences. Critical race theory and intersectionality, it's a helpful analytical tool in spite of their evil roots and bad consequences.
And again, this is another example of that inconsistency. You'll get people that'll defend critical race theory as something that you could potentially use even if it's not quite correct, but if you say patriarchy, they freak out.
You say complementarianism, well, that's unhelpful. What's going on here? Why do you get people writing George Whitfield blogs and yet would call you a legalist if you said that people that are pro-abortion should be excommunicated, which should be the easiest thing ever.
Think about it. If you think it's cool to kill a certain class of people just for the fun of it, then you can't be a Christian. I'm sorry. You have to leave my church. That should be the easiest thing ever, and it's very easy to
I mean, you'll get these people that'll write, well, George Whitfield wasn't even a Christian. No one would ever say this about Nazis because people write articles against the Church of Germany, how they failed in Nazi Germany, and they certainly did.
They certainly did. If we had a party today that their platform was, hey, we're going to round up all the Jews and we're going to slaughter them, if someone who called themselves a Christian voted for that party, you'd be like, dude, get out of my church.
You psychopath. You cannot be in my church. You can't be a Christian and do that. I'm handing you over to Satan for the destruction of your flesh. Have fun out there, but you can't be here in this church, and that'd be correct.
How come we don't get that with abortion, right? Well, I asked people Hold on, let me take a sip of my tea. I asked people what their opinion on why that was, and I don't think there's any one right answer here, but here's my opinion.
What we have in our Christian big evil blogosphere, people who do podcasts, people who have platforms and speak at the conferences, what we have are a lot of men who want to play the man, but they don't want to be the man.
They want to look like they're manly and ferocious and standing up for truth against all these odds, but they don't want to actually do anything that risks anything. Once there's actual risk involved, that's when they want to nuance things to death.
That's when they want to be like, well, it's complicated, because here's the thing. You don't have to face the firing squad to say that George Whitefield may not have been a Christian because he own slaved.
You don't have to face You don't face any real scrutiny, like any real scrutiny. Your job's not on the line if you say that slavery is a bad thing, or at least was a bad thing in America. You don't risk anything.
You can write very strong sounding words and play the man all day against slavery and against Whitefield who cannot defend himself, and against patriarchy. That's the big boogeyman. I'm standing up against the
I'm a real man. No you're not. No you're not. You're a role playing character. You're playing a role. You're pretending to be a strong defender of truth, but the minute it risks anything, the minute it could cost you your job, the minute there's economic risk involved, you might lose your job.
You might not get platform. You might not get the next book deal. The minute that that happens, well, you want to nuance things to death. This is what I think is happening too with people that write articles against critical race theory these days, but they don't name any names.
They don't apply it. See, you can write articles about critical race theory and how it's wrong all day long, but if you never apply it in real life, all you're doing is role playing and it's worthless.
It's worthless if it's never getting applied. It's just head knowledge. You have to actually do the work as well. I'm not saying that the head knowledge is not good. We need to be able to identify critical race theory and its problems and things like that, but you also need to do the work.
You can't just have nice thoughts. You have to be a man of action as well. Here's the problem. If you're just role playing, because role playing is helpful. I role play. I don't know if you've ever done this, but maybe I'm just crazy.
I don't know, but when I'm in the car or in the shower sometimes, I'll have conversations in my head and I'll think about if I was talking to this person and this person said this to me, how would I respond?
I'll even sometimes out loud will respond as if I was in a conversation or as if I was in a debate or something like that. That's role playing. That's very helpful, but if that's all you do and you never take it to the streets, so to speak, it's worthless.
We don't need more role players. We need people that are men of action. If all you're willing to do is write articles about how George Whitefield is, it might not be a Christian and it's how slavery is bad and all the things that are popular to be against because everyone's against slavery, but not everyone's against the Democrats.
Not everyone's against abortion. If you come out strong, guns blazing against abortion, that could risk funding. That could risk your job. You men out there that are role playing on these blogs and at these conferences, you need to start growing some cojones because it doesn't take any cojones to write an article about how critical theory is bad, but it does take some backbone to say, and here's an example of someone teaching that it's very influenced by critical theory.
You don't have to anathematize them. I don't anathematize Walter Strickland, but he's teaching critical theory and it would be very helpful if someone who had a big platform who was writing these articles and things like that would name his teaching and say, no, this is not Christian teaching.
Brother Walter Strickland might be a brother, but this is not Christian doctrine that he's teaching. That would be extremely helpful, but so many of you won't do it because you're role playing. We don't need more role players.
Anyway, I'm going to go back to my tea and calm down. Absolutely delightful. I hope this video was helpful. God bless.
