(Free the States) On September 15, Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) President Bart Barber unleashed a vicious, dishonest Twitter attack against SBC pastor Dusty Deevers. (Watch Deevers’ response to the various attacks here.) One day later, Barber Tweeted an equally dishonest thread against the Abolitionist Movement in general.
On Friday, Barber “repented” on Twitter. Unfortunately, the “repentance” was nearly as bad as the original tirade, and in so doing, Barber put on a clinic teaching us how not to repent.
“A little more than a month ago, I used the word ‘obsession’ to describe @DustyDeevers‘s approach to abortion law, specifically with regard to coerced minors. I repent of that. The word ‘obsession’ not only assumes motivation but also implies something bordering upon mental instability. It’s an inflammatory and accusatory word.
“What makes it worse is that I did it intentionally because I was angry—angry at Deevers’s unwarranted and unprovoked attacks against @LeatherwoodERLC. In my anger, I sought to match Deevers’s own hyperbolic incivility. But my actual job is not to mimic Deevers hyperbolic incivility; my actual job is to imitate Christ’s gracious truth-telling.
“And I know…everyone moved past this weeks ago. But the Holy Spirit has not. And so, I apologize for my intemperate tweeting, I retract the word ‘obsession,’ I thank those of you who called me out on it back then, and covet your prayers for me to do better.”
Repentance is a defining theme in the Abolitionist Movement. Just about everybody has been either apathetic toward or unbiblical (to varying degrees) in their efforts to fight abortion, making repentance something of a rite of passage into the movement. Repentance is so central to abolitionism that the theme of the 2022 Abolition Now Conference was “Repent With Us”, and featured public repentance testimonies from abolitionist leaders like T. Russell Hunter, Blake Gideon, and Jon Speed.
Repentance is part and parcel to the Christian life. The first of Martin Luther’s 95 theses stated, “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ‘Repent’ (Mt 4:17), he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.” This makes learning how to repent important crucial to the individual Christian and to the movement to abolish abortion.
Working from Barber’s thread, let’s look at three ways to “repent” that undermine true repentance.
PARTIAL REPENTANCE IS UNREPENTANCE
When we repent, we must own everything we did wrong. In The Gospel Coalition, Joel Lindsey writes:
“Deep repentance demands full confession. Though it seems counterintuitive, the only way to be truly covered by Christ is to fully expose your sin. In the process of repentance, we must fight to be utterly transparent before God about the depth and breadth of our sin. Only ruthless honesty will suffice—and lead to freedom and joy.”
Lindsey is writing more specifically about confessing sin to God as the sinner pleads for ultimate justification and righteousness in Christ. But the principle applies just as well to sins committed by a believer against a brother. Confession and forgiveness are crucial to the Christian life and partial confession or forgiveness won’t do. Barber’s partial repentance is merely a bone being thrown to those upset with his thread, without actually admitting the sins that simply must be admitted.
Barber made a handful of bad arguments in favor of incrementalism in the thread, but this section will focus on sins committed. Specifically, Barber sinned against Deevers or abolitionists in the following ways:
1) LYING ABOUT DEEVERS’ “OBSESSION” AND COERCED 16 YEAR-OLDS
While Barber repented for using the word “obsession,” he did not repent of the general accusation that Deevers supports sending coerced 16 year-olds to prison.
Barber wrote: “[U]nless you 100% agree with every jot and tittle of Deevers’s obsession with sending 16-year-old girls to prison for succumbing to the coercion of their parents to have an abortion, he will label you ‘against the innocent preborn.’”
This is the most viciously slanderous sentence of the entire two threads, and the word “obsession” has nothing to do with it. Only a monster would support sending to prison a 16 year-old who has been coerced into abortion. No sane person anywhere supports sending to prison vulnerable people who commit under duress what would otherwise be criminal acts. It’s obviously evil and insane to do so, which makes Barber’s accusation an extremely serious one.
Never in his life has Deevers said anything that could even remotely suggest any degree of support for sending coerced minors to prison. Barber is accusing Deevers of horrifying evil based on nothing…to continue reading, click here (and trust me, it’s an excellent, worthy read)
Editor’s Note. This article was written by James Silberman and posted at Free the States
