Al Mohler Changes Positions on Some Important Issues

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I'm your host John Harris and it is a transition day for me. This is how we know we've gone from summer to fall.

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I am drinking my first cup since the summer of warmer, or I should say hot, tea.

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It's a flavor I've never had before. I don't do the pumpkin spice thing. A lot of girls like that during this time of year.

00:35

That's not something I do. I don't do coffee really. I'm not a coffee person, so the pumpkin spice, coffee, no thanks.

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However, I made an exception, and this morning was that exception, and I tried some pumpkin spice tea.

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It's flavorful because I take the entire tea bag, and I'm a Baptist, so I fully immerse it.

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You've got to get this tea bag completely saturated with water, and then you keep it there until the job is done.

01:04

The job's not done until I'm finished my mug of tea. People who have been converted by me to drink their tea this way, thank me.

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I'm just telling you, try it. It's better than just a little bit of a dunk and then put it somewhere else.

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That's just weak flavored water. You don't want that. You want real tea. I have some pumpkin spice tea, actually, this morning from Gold River.

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It's a good standup company. Rather than going to that woke corporation, why don't you get something quality?

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It's not that it's just a company that shares your values. They actually have a good product, and I wouldn't just say that to you.

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If you're south of the Mason -Dixon line, then you might want to still get their iced tea.

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They still offer it. You can go get some American iced tea, but if you are where I am, and you're looking outside and it's a dreary day, and it's getting cool at night, you're definitely going to want to get some hot tea.

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I would recommend for this time of year, get the pumpkin spice. I was skeptical, and I'm a believer now, so GoldRiverCO .com.

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How's that? That's a good deal. Go to GoldRiverCO .com today and get yourself some tea.

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It is really good. Yes, it is very good.

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All right, so I had a couple of things I wanted to talk about today, and I want to start here.

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This happened over the weekend, and it's telling. It's telling about, for those who still are caring,

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I know not all of you do at this point, probably, but I know some people still are trying to figure

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Al Mohler out, and still have some hope that he's going to do something. I'm very positive about, and I'll get to that later in the show, just for those who are confused over this statement, but I am positive about some changes

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I've seen in him. I don't think it's necessarily reflective of, perhaps, a deeper convictional change, as much as I think it's probably more pragmatic and opportunistic.

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The reason I say that is, I can only say that, really, because of years of watching Al Mohler, and the decisions he makes in reaction to controversial situations.

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The story I want to start off with is no different than that pattern I see. I want to start here with a tweet from Al Mohler.

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It says this, Evidently a media platform has announced the release of some of my material. No communication with me or my staff.

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No permission from me. Material is taken from my addresses to Evangelical Theological Society.

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Taken aspirin. I'm not moving to Russia, now or ever, yet. I tried to figure out at first, what does he mean by taken aspirin?

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I'm not moving to Russia. I think that confused a lot of people. What he's saying, I believe, now, if you have a different take, please put it in the comment section because maybe there is a different take

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I'm missing, but I'm pretty sure what he meant was that he is not associating with Canon Press, which is the organization, the media organization that he's talking about that's based in Moscow, Idaho.

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So Moscow, Russia, it's a play, it's a joke. So Canon Press is, of course, associated with Doug Wilson, and Canon Press, if I can scroll back and find it, made a post, there it is, on September 8th,

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Dr. Albert Mohler joins the Canon Plus Catalog this week. Don't miss out our next drop of content.

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Subscribe today to MyCanonPlus .com. And so you have five different contributions from Al Mohler, and these are just transcripts of addresses he gave to the

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Evangelical Theological Society. So they're taking these addresses and they're putting them in a more,

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I guess, digestible form, and I don't know if they read them to you or what, but you can access them at this particular media platform.

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Now, that's what they did. Al Mohler then, on the 11th, in the evening, says what he said, and then, or sorry, the 10th, and then

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Canon Plus starts coming out with their own statements. So here's one.

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In reaction, literally, Canon Plus just puts MyCanonPlus .com. They're using it as an advertisement for their media platform.

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So we're the media platform, here we are. They retweet Al Mohler and put

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MyCanonPlus .com. They retweet Al Mohler's post again and say, get your first month of Canon Plus for $0 .99

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when you use discount code Mohler, which is kind of funny. You have to admit, it is kind of, there's a humor to it that instead of shrinking in shame or trying to do damage control, they just own it, and then they not only own it, but they use the name

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Mohler to give potential customers a discount code. On their product.

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So if you want to go read Al Mohler's content that he's upset that they have, you can use his name as the promo code to get access for cheaper.

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Then they end up retweeting this. This is interesting, and it got a little bit of play.

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So here's the retweet. Al thinks being on Canon Plus is worse than having critical race theory taught at his seminary.

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I'll repeat that. Al thinks being on Canon Plus is worse than having critical race theory taught at his seminary, and Canon Plus then retweets that, which is just, it's amazing to me that they do this.

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So it's just not done often in evangelicalism, because if you want to be part of the guild in the evangelical elite circles, you have to have good relationships with the other members of the guild, the other people who are involved in the industry.

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And Canon Press, I think I kept saying Canon Plus. I think Canon Plus is their app. Anyway, Canon Press is kind of separate from that.

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And they're very self -aware of this, and they're forming, I think, their own platform, their own hierarchy, in a sense.

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And they are perfectly content separating themselves from the

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Cool Kids Club. They don't need to sit on that table, because they're saying, our table is a Cool Kids Club.

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That's basically what's happening. Now, the interesting, or the part that doesn't quite make 100 % sense to some

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Canon Press fans is, why did you have Al Mohler stuff in the first place?

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Well, Doug Wilson, who, I don't know what his position at Canon Press is, but it may be the founder.

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But anyway, he put out on September 10th, so that same evening, he put out a response to Al Mohler's tweet.

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And this is what he said. I need to make a brief announcement. A day or two ago, Canon Plus added some of Al Mohler's content from a number of years ago, from back before the woke virus days.

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A firestorm of sorts broke out on Twitter, with one gentleman commenting on how much of the times have changed.

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Al Mohler and Doug Wilson doing something together, and Wilson is the one who got into trouble.

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This was taken by some as a sign that Canon was going woke, or something like that, which is not the case at all.

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Al's stuff back then was really good, and we stand behind it, unlike Al, apparently. But others in the comment thread following Al's tweet were questioning whether or not it was an ethics issue.

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And he puts in bold, I can assure everyone that it is not an ethics issue. In other words, they didn't steal this material from Mohler.

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Everything was published on the Canon Plus app, was acquired, on the up and up, fair and square, and all legal -like.

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Whoever was advising Al to put some distance between himself and Canon was a bit hasty, and ought to have done some spade work before telling

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Al to put his skirts away. I may add more in a little bit. Comments are open. All right, so this is, some people are calling this just an epic troll, but the only reason

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I would talk about it on this podcast, it's not because I want you all to go subscribe to Canon Plus or anything like that.

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You can, if you want to do that, that's up to you. But I want to just focus in on the reaction that Al Mohler has, and then the point that I think correctly,

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Canon Press and Doug Wilson are both making here, which is that you seem to have a problem with any association with us.

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You seem to have an issue that you need to address publicly, because a few of your addresses are found on our particular media platform.

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We didn't, they didn't, they're not altering his addresses, they're not, there's really no association other than they're taking something that Al Mohler has already crafted, and they're just exposing it to a new audience.

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But because Canon Press has a certain reputation with some people, so I think it's a, if you want to use the high school analogy,

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I think that's actually perfectly appropriate. You have the cool kids table, at least they think they're the cool kids, and then you have kind of the renegades, the people who light couches on fire for no quarter

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November, right? And so the cool kids table, you can't be associated with the lame kids over there who light couches on fire.

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Canon Press, Doug Wilson, Moscow stuff, right? There has to be a separation here. And Big Eva has no problem partnering with all kinds of people that have theological issues.

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There's no issue with Al Mohler, and this is what they're correctly, I think, making a point on, having woke or critical race theory affirming, at least aspects of it, professors at the seminary.

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Even right now, there are books, I'll show you actually, I'll show you. There are books right now that are still being taught at the seminary that affirm aspects of critical race theory, and that's not seen as an issue, but yet this is.

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This is an issue that must be addressed directly. Let me show you what I'm talking about, and I want to work up to a conclusion

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I think I've made before, but I want to insert some new information to that particular conclusion. So let me show you this first.

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What you're seeing here are two screenshots. The first is Southern Seminary's Instagram profile and a story that they posted of a picture of Al Mohler in chapel saying, we're excited to welcome a new trustee.

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Her name is Courtney Reisig. Courtney Reisig is quoted in this as saying, I have so much gratitude for this place and the people here, and I'm honored to be back at the trustee for the institution that has given

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Daniel, I think that's her husband, to me so much. And so she says this. Well, on her Instagram from March 6th, 2021, she has this posted.

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This is a trustee, Al Mohler's welcoming to the school, posting a picture of removing the stain of racism from the

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Southern Baptist Convention by Jarvis William and Kevin Jones. And if you read the book, you'll notice that it advocates aspects of critical race theory.

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I've done the layman's work and gone through it with a fine tooth comb, at least Jarvis Williams's chapter. And if you do even just a search, if you want to download it on Kindle and just search critical race theory, it comes up two or three times in the book in a positive way.

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And Courtney Reisig says this about the book. I'm really glad this is required reading for my Southern Baptist history missions class.

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Oh Lord, may it be true. That's not ancient history. This is required, was required last year in the

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Southern Baptist history mission class. So it's not like the issues that have been exposed at Southern Seminary are all taken care of.

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In fact, they were never addressed. There was never an apology. There was never a retraction. And there was damage control from Matt Hall, who has since left, from Curtis Woods, who has since left, and from Jarvis Williams, who's still teaching there.

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But some of the other things that are being advocated, the soft peddling of CRT ideas, which other professors have also been involved with.

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It's not just those three. You have obviously Kevin Jones here and you have Herschel York. In fact, a friend of mine,

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Josh Summers, did a whole article you can go check out where he writes about an interview Herschel York did and says, hey, he's advocating a soft form of critical race theory here.

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So it's not limited to those three, but because two of them are gone and because we haven't heard as much from Jarvis Williams, partially because I think the evidence was just in.

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It's just proof, the proof that Southern Seminary was advocating forms of critical race theory, aspects of critical race theory was undeniable.

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And so it's like, why would you keep putting more proof out there? I felt this way. Why would I keep doing all this digging when there's overwhelming evidence and it's just denied?

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There's no actual grappling with the truth. Well, I just want to remind everyone, this hasn't gone away.

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So you do have things like this. You do have this, which is something that was pulled up by Protestia last year.

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So again, not ancient history. So this is their seminar schedule for July 12th through 16th of last year.

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And it has Dr. Tyson Gardner teaching black church history in the community. So they have him coming in to teach a class there or doing a video class,

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I guess, for the professor of doctoral studies program. But then when you look into who this guy is, and look, he's not teaching dentistry, right?

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He's not, not that they don't offer that there, but he's not teaching something unrelated. He's teaching literally black church ministry in the community.

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And he's advocating on a social media for the 1619 Project. He's advocating to vote for Raphael Warnock because we need to raise the minimum wage to a livable wage and it's a racial justice issue.

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He's, I mean, the pro, blatantly pro -abortion, pro -LGBTQ candidate. And he's retweeting

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Raphael Warnock to say we should vote for him. I mean, there's all kinds of things here that just screenshots from his social media that just say,

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I mean, he's a fan of Russell Moore and Jamar Tisby and their work. I mean,

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I could read for you some of these tweets, but I don't think I need to. This is a guy who's would be certainly on the left.

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And when it comes to critical race theory, he literally even says here, the

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Tea Party Patriots posted on Twitter, critical race theory is a hateful racist ideology that should not receive one cent of taxpayer funding.

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And then he responds, you don't know CRT then. Anything that aims at the destruction of white supremacy has always been demonized.

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CRT is not anti -white, it's anti -white supremacy. If that's what you want, be honest enough to say that. He says here, again, you have an individual who tried to, let's see, basically taking a shot at critical race theory.

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Critical race theory is nothing more than taxpayer funded anti -white racism. It's not education. And then Tyson Gardner says, young man, you don't really know what

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CRT is. You are stating what you have heard and are protecting the white supremacy that it seeks to demolish, that's shameful.

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So, and here he is again, he's posting here. He's posting Jim Artisby in a positive way with fire, the flames mean that Jim Artisby is on fire.

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He's what he's saying here is truth. And Jim Artisby says, the fear mongering around critical race theory has its roots in the ages old attempt to exonerate the nation and congregations of their complicity by making racism purely individual and impersonal rather than confronting how racism functions in systems and institutions.

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P .S. Christian nationalism is the real issue in many churches and Christian organizations. So this is Tyson Gardner.

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So this is a guy who at least last year was teaching a class at Southern Seminary.

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So it's not like this stuff has just gone away overnight. I mean, Jarvis Williams is still teaching there.

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And long after he was exposed for advocating aspects of critical race theory, he said this in late 2020.

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And when we think about white supremacy, it's not only the overt violent expressions that you see on the television in Charlottesville, for example.

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But white supremacy is an ideological construct that believes that whiteness is superior to non -whiteness.

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So then how this shows up in part is it shows up in curriculum, right?

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I'm a seminary professor and in theological education, you're hard pressed to find many evangelical institutions that have a regular requirement of black and brown authors.

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And often what happens is whiteness becomes the standard by which all good theology is judged.

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You understand what I'm saying? Amen. So that if it's right theology, it's written by a white scholar who is contextualizing that theology for white audiences.

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And so one of the things we see is, and hear this very, very carefully, there's racism by intent and there's racism by consequence.

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You can have racism operating in a context whereas there are no individual racists.

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And that in part is the way in which white supremacy works in a socially sophisticated way. When you have whiteness as the priority and when folks work and operate in such a way with curriculum, with economics or with policies to maintain and to posture and to privilege that whiteness and then to require those who are non -white to culturally colonize to whiteness.

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So then we think about reconciliation and ethnic hostility. The solution is not more black and brown faces in white spaces who colonize to whiteness.

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The solution is fundamentally, yes, the gospel, the cross, the resurrection, right?

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The blood of Jesus, but also dethroning white supremacy in all of the forms in which it shows up in Christian spaces, folks.

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Because when Jesus died to disarm those principalities and powers, one of those principalities and powers,

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I would argue, is white supremacy and all that it entails. So feel that tonight.

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White supremacy is not just violence or KKK or lynchings. It is also the belief directly or indirectly that whiteness is rightness and everything else to be judged by that.

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I think this is a good opportunity just to remind everyone about what critical race theory is, because what you just heard Jarvis Williams advocate certainly includes key aspects of CRT.

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But people often, when you say that CRT, will say, you don't understand CRT. Oftentimes, it's people who don't understand it themselves.

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So let's go to a standard. And I've often advocated this standard. I've reviewed it many times, and we'll just do it again.

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Richard Delgado's book, Critical Race Theory, he talks about seven different things, seven different teachings that would characterize it.

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First, racism is normative, just the default setting. There's racism. Second, race is a social construct created in order to allocate privilege.

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It's called the social construction thesis. Third, white privilege maintains white dominance. Fourth, colorblindness keeps minorities in subordinate positions.

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Fifth, majority groups tolerate advances for racial justice only when it benefits them.

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That's interest conversions. Sixth, voices of color have access to special knowledge. I call that standpoint epistemology.

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And seventh, the history should be reinterpreted according to minority experiences. That's called memory studies in the historical discipline.

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So all these aspects they contribute to, these teachings, are what people are talking about when they talk about critical race theory.

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And you just heard, out of Charvis Williams' mouth, four or five of these elements. He wants to create some kind of a quota system or a proportionate system where black and brown voices are platformed, because if they're not platformed, then what happens?

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Well, the white privilege maintains the white dominance. The default setting is it's just racist.

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These evangelical institutions he's talking about are just racist. I mean, racism is normative. He even says blatantly that race is a social construct created to allocate privilege.

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He basically says that. It's a social construct, and he says this many times. So it's not like we're just pulling this out of nowhere and just making spurious accusations, hoping they'll stick because we hate

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Southern seminary. Far from it. I considered going to Southern. It grieves me to see this, but this is an ongoing issue, unfortunately, at that particular seminary and in the

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Southern Baptist Convention as a whole. It's not going away. They use different terms now that they're using other terms, and I can't even keep up with probably all the different tactics they're utilizing, but you'll hear things like cultural intelligence to advocate the key aspect that I just talked about here, the idea that voices of color have access to special knowledge, standpoint epistemology.

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Oftentimes that's going under the radar as cultural intelligence. So in order to understand how to communicate scripture or any teaching to another group, the contextualization process is fraught with all these barriers, if you're a white male, especially.

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And so you need some cultural intelligence, and often the assumption with this cultural intelligence teaching is that, and again, it's hard to define because it's used so loosely.

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That's, I think, part of the design of this, but I've heard it used this way that you must really submit yourself to and enter into the assumptions of that particular social demographic.

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And unless you do that, unless you take this, quote unquote, humble approach where you're sitting and listening and just taking in and repeating, and you're not adding any of your own perspective, you're just imbibing the perspective of this particular aggrieved social group who has access to knowledge you don't have, then you're not really doing ministry.

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That's what's happening in quarters of evangelicalism. And it's concerning because it hasn't gone away.

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It shifted. Southern Seminary itself scrubbed a bunch of the things on their website that blatantly advocated

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CRT ideas. And so they've implemented the tactic of trying to cover up their tracks.

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But the problem persists. And there's other things students who are at Southern Seminary have told me about other things

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I don't have screenshots or primary sources for, so I won't give them to you. But I know that there's more than what

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I'm even showing you here. And so you have the situation that exists and you have Al Mohler's track record.

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Here's just a basic chart of just some of the things that Al Mohler has advocated for over the years.

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Al Mohler changed positions on homosexual orientation and conversion therapy in 2014 and 2015.

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He actually did a 180 on homosexual orientation, even apologizing for the previous stance he held, which was that homosexual orientation was not a legitimate category from a

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Christian perspective. On conversion therapy, he started speaking out strongly against it during that same time period.

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Whereas before, he had been not an aggressive advocate of it, but he at least saw that efforts to ban it were threats to religious liberty.

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And that language ceased until very recently, which I'll come to at the end of this particular podcast.

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It's interesting because there's another change going on. There's a lot of pivots. If you follow this for any length of time, you can start to detect who the opportunists are because when the political winds shift, they tend to also shift their position.

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Al Mohler did that with these two subjects. And then he also believes that Southern Baptists, this is as late as 2020, are guilty of a sinful absence of,

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I believe this was 2019, are guilty of a sinful absence of historical curiosity by ignoring racism and the stain of racism on the denomination that will never go away until Christ comes.

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I think it was 2019 when he did this panel with,

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I think it was North American Mission Board, but it was with Jarvis Williams and Matt Hall was there, and I believe

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Curtis Woods. And they talked about the stain of racism that the Southern Baptist Convention has.

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And there's video of this stuff. There's evidence of all this stuff. Most of it is in the book, Christianity and Social Justice, Religions and Conflict, which

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I wrote. You can get it on Amazon or you can go to worldviewconversation .com and get a copy. It's all documented there. Al Mohler also characterized the

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United States in 2020 as conceived in racism and that it affected, this racism, every structure in the

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United States, every structure. He connected the shootings of Michael Brown and Breonna Taylor to police racism.

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He signed the SBC statement connecting George Floyd's death to systemic injustice and past oppression. Now this is

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CRT stuff, guys. It might be soft CRT. It might just be certain aspects of CRT, but it's this idea that racism is normalized.

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It's accepted. It's systemic. And it's permeating every aspect of our culture so that there needs to be,

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I mean, the solution is obvious if that's true. There needs to be some kind of process of radically altering all these different institutions so that they're not racist anymore.

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Even though it's not racism that's implemented in law, it's not racism that's in policy.

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It's just under the surface somewhere. I mean, this is critical race theory stuff. I just read for you the key points of critical race theory.

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And this isn't any different than what Jarvis Williams was saying, except his emotion, the way he communicates it is different.

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And he doesn't go to the extent Jarvis Williams does. But he insinuated the phrase

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Black Lives Matter is acceptable. He did not sign the Dallas statement because it approved of white supremacy. I kid you not.

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There's a video of this. He opposed critical race theory in the abstract after Resolution 9. And yet he defended the motives of the resolutions committee who brought us

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Resolution 9. He hired and defended Curtis Woods, Jarvis Williams, and Matthew Hall, all who pushed critical race theory pretty blatantly, aspects of it at least.

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He defended Danny Akin and Adam Greenway on social justice issues, yet not Founders, not

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Conservative Baptist Network, or John MacArthur on the same issues, social justice issues. He approved of condemning the

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Southern Cross and retiring the Brodus gavel. This idea that racism is connected to, so part and parcel to, characteristic of, definitional to symbols and objects that honestly are used and implemented for other reasons, but they become completely trashed and only associated with racism in a critical race theory framework, which is why these things are going the way of the dodo bird.

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He approved of Russell Moore's performance while Moore was pushing the needle left. I believe that was 2018. He advocated a $5 million scholarship to fund limited, a fund limited to black students.

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So it was only black students could get this fund because, and this is the real reason there's a problem with this. The first half of this sentence isn't the problem.

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The second half is. The reason for it is because the institution, Southern Seminary, owed a special debt, and I quote, a special debt to African American Christians.

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So because they owe a special debt, I mean, what do you call that? Is that reparations? Is that affirmative action?

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They owe this money. This is money owed to black students. He was exposed by Russell Fuller and Tom Rush.

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Russell Fuller being a former professor there, Tom Rush being a trustee there.

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And then he insisted, this is recently, that Jennifer Lyle's relationship with, who was that,

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David Sills, was not consensual despite countervailing evidence. And Megan Basham did some work on this, and he just insisted without evidence that it wasn't consensual.

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So this was the Me Too stuff. So Al Mohler, this is how he's pushed the needle left.

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And this explains to me who he is. And I just think this is just one more example recently of Al Mohler not just hesitating to have an association with anything that would be considered too conservative, but being quick on the trigger to make sure publicly that people know he's not associated with something that's too conservative.

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He doesn't do the same thing, though, on the left end of the spectrum, which is why over time it kind of pushes the needle left.

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Now, I look at Al Mohler's behavior lately, and I see a few things that are very interesting to me that would suggest somewhat of a pivot.

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For example, Al Mohler believed in the not too recent past, not too distant past, that a woman seeking an abortion should not be penalized.

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Who is the guilty party in an abortion? It is the person who brings about the death of the child.

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The woman seeking the abortion is not without moral responsibility, but she is not herself bringing about the death of the unborn human baby.

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That's the crucial issue here, and that's why the pro -life movement has consistently sought to criminalize abortion at the level of the person performing the abortion.

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That is, unlike what Nicholas Kristof argues here, a morally consistent argument, and it has been consistent over time.

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Of course, now he is saying this. This is from the Southern Baptist Convention earlier this summer.

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I believe that there are many cases in which demonstrably there is not just an abortionist who should face criminal consequences, but a woman seeking an abortion.

32:47

Again, here's Al Mohler on the issue of same -sex attraction, homosexual orientation from 2014.

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Early in this controversy, I felt it quite necessary in order to make clear the gospel to deny anything like a sexual orientation.

33:02

And speaking at an event for the National Association of Evangelicals 20 -something years ago, I made that point.

33:08

I repent of that. This complex of same -sex challenges coming to us is something that is deeply rooted in the biblical story itself and something that we need to take with far greater seriousness than we've taken in the past, understanding that that requires a far more robust gospel response than anything the church has come up with.

33:27

And now here's a recent statement from Al Mohler on the same subject. A homosexual or same -sex orientation is itself sinful.

33:37

It's not morally neutral. It is itself an identity that is incompatible with a biblical understanding of discipleship.

33:45

Now, whether it's this or it's other issues like the response to the virus and how Southern Seminary and Al Mohler were pretty aggressive about it initially, and then kind of after the dust had settled,

33:58

Southern Seminary joins in. I believe last I heard they were still involved with this.

34:04

Maybe I'm wrong, but they joined in with a lawsuit against the national government. So first, very supportive of the narrative and then very against the narrative.

34:13

Or, I mean, you could look at Al Mohler's support of Donald Trump in 2020 versus where he was in 2016.

34:20

There's legitimate reasons for people to change positions on things. But someone like Al Mohler, though, as smart as he is and not in a developmental stage,

34:30

I would say, he's pretty subtle. He's been a president of a major seminary for decades.

34:37

For him to change positions on such fundamental issues, I think, is a little bit different, especially without an acknowledgement, really.

34:44

He acknowledged in 2014 that he was changing a position on same -sex orientation and his view of it, but he just reversed that position and there's not an acknowledgement of it.

34:54

And this is, I think, more often what happens. In fact, J .D. Greer just did pretty much this exact same thing.

35:00

Check this out. This is what J .D. Greer said in 2019 on preferred pronouns.

35:06

Personally, I think, again, this ought to be a charitable discussion. I lean a little bit toward generosity of spirit.

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That's where Andrew Walker, that's where he also is. If a transgender person came into our church, came into my life,

35:19

I think my disposition would be to refer to them by their preferred pronoun. When we want to talk about gender,

35:27

I will be clear with them on the truth. Yeah. Here's what J .D. Greer, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, is saying now about preferred pronouns.

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Answer to the question, is it okay to use a person's preferred pronouns? It begins and ends with no.

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And however we choose to conduct ourselves in the conversation, on the front end and the final, in our final word to them, we got to be clear in what the

35:49

Bible says about gender. So what's going on here? What explains all of this? What explains the pivot? And there's other professors, actually, at Southern Seminary I can bring up to show you pivots on,

36:00

I mean, one of them was, stood out to me because it was a, I'm not going to say who it was, but it was a professor at Southern Seminary who's considered very conservative now.

36:08

And I looked up what he was saying about conspiracy theories before the last presidential election.

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And up until the point of the election, everything that, every time he used the term conspiracy theory just about, he was referring to right -wingers.

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After the election, every time he used the term conspiracy theory, he was referring to left -wingers just about.

36:30

So there's a pivot that happens, and it happened, it seemed like, sometime around the election.

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And it's very confusing because here's where I think a lot of y 'all are out there, and I'm with you.

36:43

The dust is settling, but it hasn't quite settled because for the last few years, when this social justice fight has been raging, statism,

36:54

MeToo, BLM, CRT, I think what we've expected to some extent,

37:01

I know I expected this initially, is that there was going to be some very clear lines. The Dallas statement was,

37:06

I think, an attempt to draw those lines. And what's actually happened is those lines, at every turn, the attempt has been, it seems, in evangelical elite circles, to muddy those distinctions as much as possible, to hide, to try to somehow appeal to both sides and do so in very sometimes subversive ways or just clever ways.

37:33

And you do have now kind of three groups of people instead of two, instead of there's like, we're for this, and then we're against this, you have, we're for this, we're against this, and we are in the middle of, we're so desperately trying to appeal to both sides as much as we possibly can.

37:50

Usually, though, with the added feature that we're going to tip it a little more left, at least, because we understand that we have to say the necessary things to support conservative causes or else we'll be run out of town with torches and pitchforks.

38:08

But the left can actually kind of hurt us more, especially in a Democrat administration. So there's an attempt,

38:17

I think, to kind of go soft left. Those are the three positions in my mind. Of course, parallel political categories, you see them along political categories, but there's also a parallel theological kind of theological distinctions in this whole soup.

38:38

So that's why I wrote the book, Christianity and Social Justice, Religions and Conflict, to show that you have

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Orthodox Christians on one side trying to hold on to truth against all these forces that are opposing truth.

38:51

You have the forces that are opposing truth and those helping them, but then in the middle, there's this, if you want to say middle, but there's this, they don't really help those who are defending.

39:03

If you think about it as like a castle where the truth is and you have the forces surrounding it, you have those who won't get in the castle, they won't side directly, or at least they won't make it look like they're siding with the forces who are sieging the castle, but they kind of stand somewhere in both armies, making their way to and between both of them, and they say, there's no battle, or the battle's over here when you clearly look and it's not a battle, it's an open field.

39:34

The battle's literally raging on the other side of the wall, but they won't, they say, well, the battle there isn't important, they downplay it.

39:42

There's that group of people. And so it mirrors theological lines, too, and you have to come up, you have to be inconsistent somewhere along the line, and so to J .D.

39:51

Greer's credit, I think at least he's admitting that he's changed his position. That doesn't happen so often, and with some leaders, very few, very, very, very few, there is a sincerity there, there's a willingness, there's a teachability, there's a humility of, man,

40:07

I was caught up in something I shouldn't have been, but with the vast majority of evangelical leaders who seem to try to be, who

40:14

I've noticed are making subtle shifts, or in Al Mohler's case, some obvious shifts, there's no recognition that that's what they're doing, and it doesn't seem like there's an interest in trying to actually be consistent.

40:25

This is why I've said for now maybe two years, I view Al Mohler as an opportunist. I don't see any other way to view him, because if you try to take a consistent measuring rod and compare it to his behavior, he doesn't actually match it, no matter what rod you use.

40:44

So that's, I think, a further confirmation of what I've always really thought concerning the way

40:49

Al Mohler's operated, and I think he should be treated accordingly. Now there's two things about this, and one is you don't trust someone like that.

40:57

It takes a lot of time to build trust with someone who has a track record of kind of waffling, so I think that trust can be built up.

41:04

It would take a long time, and there would have to be repentance involved. I mean, it would be a process. So you don't trust someone like that.

41:11

Number two, though, number two is, I think, and this is where I might get maybe in trouble with some of the hardliners on my side of the fence,

41:19

I think we can actually rejoice over this kind of changing of positions here. I think it's a really good thing that Greer changed his position.

41:27

I think it's a really good thing that Al Mohler's changing some of his positions to match a more orthodox Christian perspective, whether it's sincere or not.

41:36

I agree with Paul when he talked about those preaching the gospel from bad motives. I think we can actually say that if Al Mohler's supporting true and right things, even if it's from less than honorable motives, good for him.

41:48

But yet there's the mistrust, and the mistrust comes out with things like this canon press thing, where Al Mohler is quick on the draw to disassociate himself from canon press, which may be fine to disassociate himself, but why isn't he quick on the draw to disassociate himself with,

42:04

I don't know, Rachel Denhollander and with those who are more on the left?

42:10

Why doesn't he disassociate with Danny Akin and with what's happening in his own seminary with Jarvis Williams and the book

42:17

Jarvis Williams just came out with? I didn't even show you that. Why doesn't he disassociate himself with things that he previously promoted that were wrong and do it very honestly and openly and publicly?

42:28

He doesn't do that. He wouldn't defend Tom Askew or John MacArthur. You pick the controversy.

42:35

He doesn't weigh in generally, unless it seems like he can figure out where the advantage is going to be, if the numbers are with him.

42:43

In the Southern Baptist Convention right now, the numbers are most people in the SBC still are generally going to, at a convention, agree that the pastoral office is only given to men and not to women.

42:57

So it's safe right now to get on the side of, you know, it's for men.

43:05

And it's, I think, becoming, because of the whole overpush of transgenderism, and,

43:13

I mean, it's been insane this last June, I think with the library hours and everything else, I think it's becoming safer to some extent to come out against those things.

43:23

Now, the Hegelian dialectic is still at work. There's still this kind of like two steps forward, one step back, two steps forward, one step back.

43:32

And the left pushes, pushes, pushes on an issue. And then it kind of corrects, you know, the pendulum comes swinging back, but it doesn't go all the way.

43:41

So it goes to the right, goes to the right, but it doesn't actually go all the way to the right like it did before.

43:48

And then it swings back even harder to the left. That's the tendency over time. So I would expect people who kind of shift with the wind to do that very thing, to push with the left, to kind of be drug along by the left to some extent.

44:01

And then when they get to the momentum slowing down, the movement, you know, BLM isn't marching in the street anymore.

44:08

Yeah, kind of come back a little bit, kind of come back a little bit. I noticed on a podcast recently, I won't play it for you because of time, but I noticed

44:16

James Lindsay was saying, someone sent it to me, that basically Al Mohler was bringing in Marxist strategy into his school and it was being implemented there.

44:28

And he just said it matter of factly. And he was referring to an interview he had done with Al Mohler on Thinking in Public, it was called,

44:40

I want to say a year and a half, maybe two years ago. Where Lindsay directly contradicted things that Al Mohler had said even two years before that.

44:49

For example, saying racism will never go away. It's a stain that's upon us. It won't go away until, you know, on this side of heaven, but in this world.

44:58

And he's saying these things and Al Mohler's kind of nodding along, or at least he's not contradicting what Lindsay's saying.

45:04

And Lindsay did all this. And then recently Lindsay put a podcast out there where he says,

45:10

Mohler was, he was going along, but it's because he's implementing this Marxist strategy. There is a two steps forward, one step back, two steps forward, one step back going on in a lot of these institutions,

45:22

I think. And we just have to be aware of that. We have to be, the struggle is we want so badly to take people at their word.

45:30

We want to read as some would call it charitably, but what we need to actually do, I think as Christians is read accurately.

45:36

We need to use discernment, not be so suspicious that everything is tainted in some way.

45:43

That's what ideologues do. That's what the CRT folks do. We need, we can't do that. We need to be open to the fact that people change positions, that positions that were once held aren't held anymore.

45:55

People do evolve in good ways. That is possible. But at the same time, don't put your guard down.

46:02

Look for patterns. That's how over time in various situations, you can test one's character.

46:08

You can see who someone actually is. And so I think that's just wisdom.

46:14

That's just prudence. That's all it is. It's just practicing discernment. I mean, these are the kinds of things that if you're even on a local church level, you have to implement when you're going to approve leaders for eldership or deaconship, really.

46:26

You have to make sure that they're consistent in these areas. You don't look at a, you know, punctiliary,

46:32

I can't even say this word. You don't look at a point of action moment, just like one snapshot, punctiliar.

46:38

You don't look at that and say, well, that's who this person is. You have to look at a broader portion of their life and say, are they consistently this way?

46:49

And that's how you know whether they're qualified or not. And it does take time. I'm not putting a limit on it. I don't know exactly how much time, but I'm thinking, you know, year, years.

46:59

You know, especially with someone who's shown a pattern of waffling over the course of decades, it would take years.

47:06

And so I haven't changed in my view of Moeller. The reason I did this was because some people, I think, are starting to be like, hey, he's coming back to us.

47:13

Well, you gotta think through, okay, why, what might that be? So let's rejoice for the things he's doing. And if he's being pulled along by some of our efforts, those in a more orthodox camp, in my opinion, then great, but don't let down your guard.

47:27

All right, I hope that's helpful for some of you out there in thinking through some of these things. I would say the same thing about Tim Keller.

47:33

I would say the same thing about, if Keller were to do that, about a number of others in evangelicalism, we trust but verify.

47:42

But we do trust when it is verified, when there's a pattern there, when there's true, genuine repentance there, we definitely trust.

47:49

And I would be the first to welcome Al Moeller and just say, I'm so grateful that you went back on some of the damage you've done, that you're correcting.

47:58

And I'll be the first to do that, trust me. I mean, he was a kind of a hero to me. It broke my heart when

48:04

I saw him kind of giving aid and comfort to the social justice movement, but that time is not now.