While setting cars, businesses, American flags, and severed pigs heads wearing police hats on fire is now par for the course, some have found a new source of fuel: Bibles.
Left-wing activists bring a stack of Bibles to burn in front of the federal courthouse in Portland. https://t.co/lYWY0x8n8P
“I don’t know what burning the Bible has to do with protesting against police brutality. Do not be under the illusion that these protests and riots are anything but an attempt to dismantle all of Western Civilization and upend centuries of tradition and freedom of religion.”
Proving that the once formerly serious news organization is truly beyond parody, CNN gave the public more ammunition in showing how much they have truly devolved when they released an article referring to women as “individuals with a cervix.”
The article, which details the latest guidance from the American Cancer Society about how women between the ages of 25 and 65 should take part in cervical cancer screening every 5 years, had its narrative co-opted when it was discovered that CNN is apparently now so woke that they can’t even say the word “women” anymore. This prompted a flurry of responses and mockery, with the tweet getting ratioed (“ratioed” is when replies to a tweet vastly outnumber likes or retweets, indicating that people are objecting to the tweet and considering its content bad). and the collective world accusing CNN of erasing women, being anti-science, not knowing what the word “women” is, and wondering whether or not the news organization would start referring to men as “individuals with penises.”
The universal scorn resulted in Matt Dornic, the Head of Strategic Communication for CNN Worldwide, doubling down on the terminology and then further arguing that anyone with a problem with describing women as “individuals with a cervix” is simply “threatened with inclusivity.”
And they wonder why people don’t trust the news media.
Beth Moore has been relatively silent through most of last week’s protests and riots over the death of George Floyd, with only a few general comments here and there. She supports the protest, of course, and reveals that many of the staff at Living Proof Ministries have been marching, and she hopes to join them soon.
But as far as what those protesters will look like for Beth, what she thinks Christians should be doing once they are there, how we interact with others, and what role our faith should play in our motivations for attending, we no longer have to guess.
It’s nice to know that we have some clarity from Mrs. Moore regarding these matters. To summarize:
If you think of the protests as a mission field where you might share the gospel of Jesus Christ with people you encounter there- don’t
If you’re going to “love on them”- don’t
If you’re going to lead people in prayer- don’t
If you want to be a “Christian voice in the crowd”- don’t
If you want to share God’s love- don’t
If you want to witness to people – don’t
Just be a warm body to march and fight violence and racism, but keep your Jesus and the gospel out of it.
Of course, it should go without saying that this from advice from Kristen only applies to White Christians. If you are a Black Christian, you can go and preach the gospel, pray with people, share god’s love, and witness all you want.
If you’re not a person of color, then don’t even think about it.
In the March 25th editorial for Christianity Today, the progressive rag known for giving a platform to every weird and liberally insidious bent, Editor-in Chief Daniel Harrell chastised Christians who are still having in-person church services, writing:
Even if we do practice stringent hygiene and social distancing, coming together as congregations in the face of this pandemic actually mars our witness. Rather than looking courageous and faithful, we come off looking callous and even foolish, not unlike the snake handlers who insisted on playing with poison as a proof of true faith.
Later in the article, Harell commends the notion that instead of physically gathering as a body, we should be practicing “online church” and “the virtual body of Christ,” ostensibly to not look silly or foolish to the unbelieving world who will view our gatherings as dangerous and destructive to our witness. (As if many things we currently do in our services aren’t already considered foolish or strange to the unbelieving pagan- think what happens during communion, or the fact that we worship as God a man they believe has been dead and rotting in the ground for 2000 years. )
We reached out to Harrell and asked what he would say to the belief that far from having church services in these times making us look silly, they reinforce to the unbelieving world how serious and important our services and ordinances are to us? Or the fact that snake handlers are abusing and twisting the scriptures to propagate their hucksterism, whereas congregations meeting on the Lord’s day are not. He did not respond.
In contradistinction to this viewpoint that we might as well be snake-handlers for refusing to give up our services in exchange for interwebs church, we wrote in An Urgent Plea to Not Call Your Livestream Service ‘Church’ Tomorrow of how the two cannot be favorably compared as if they are equal. JD Hall writes:
For the love of all that is good and pure, please do not refer to your livestream tomorrow as “online church.” Please do not tell your church members that it will be “just like going to church, but in your pajamas!” Please do not tell your church members that they will be doing church “in their homes.”
and further
We orthodox-type pastors have been busy pleading with people for years that watching church services online is not the same as actual church. You’ve heard all the arguments…
-A church is an “ecclesia” and an “ecclesia” is an assembly; staying in your home is not “assembling.”
-You can’t – or at least shouldn’t – be observing the ordinances (communion and baptism) by yourself. These are ordinances given to the church, not to individuals. And by the way, -if these things can’t be observed, you don’t have a “church” at all.
-The power of the preached word is somehow special in the assembly. It is more effectual than that which you see on screen. And no, we can’t explain that. But we believe it’s supernatural.
-Lord’s Day worship is corporate in nature. Everyone engaging in private worship at the same time is still not corporate worship. It’s just time-coordinated individual worship.
Those are all good, and true, arguments. But here’s the thing, those rules don’t change because of a pandemic.
Watching the computer at the same time in individual homes doesn’t magically become an “assembly” just because coronavirus exists. A contagious virus doesn’t somehow make a Bible study with no right to observe the ordinances into a “church.” If we are serious about what is, and what is not church, then we have to admit that logically, coronavirus doesn’t change any of that.
Please, please be careful about how you advertise your livestream church-substitute. Keep in mind that however you advertise your livestream will be used as a reason to stay home from church after the coronavirus threat is over.
In the March 25th editorial for Christianity Today, the progressive rag known for giving a platform to every weird and liberally insidious bent, Editor in Chief Daniel Harrell made some unflattering comparisons and chastened Christians who are still deciding to have church services in these trying times, writing:
Even if we do practice stringent hygiene and social distancing, coming together as congregations in the face of this pandemic actually mars our witness. Rather than looking courageous and faithful, we come off looking callous and even foolish, not unlike the snake handlers who insisted on playing with poison as a proof of true faith.
Later in the article, Harell commends the notion that instead of physically gathering as a body, we should be practicing “online church” and “the virtual body of Christ,” ostensibly to not look silly or foolish to the unbelieving world who will view our gatherings as dangerous and destructive to our witness.
We reached out to Harrell and asked what he would say to the belief that far from having church services in these times making us look silly, they reinforce to the unbelieving world how serious and important our services and ordinances are to us. Or the fact that snake handlers are abusing and twisting the scriptures to propagate their hucksterism, whereas congregations meeting on the Lord’s Day are not.
We will update this post if and when he responds.
In contradistinction to this viewpoint that we might as well be snake handlers for refusing to give up our services in exchange for interwebs church, we wrote in An Urgent Plea to Not Call Your Livestream Service ‘Church’ Tomorrow of how the two cannot be favorably compared as if they are equal. JD writes:
For the love of all that is good and pure, please do not refer to your livestream tomorrow as “online church.” Please do not tell your church members that it will be “just like going to church, but in your pajamas!” Please do not tell your church members that they will be doing church “in their homes.”
and further
We orthodox-type pastors have been busy pleading with people for years that watching church services online is not the same as actual church. You’ve heard all the arguments…
-A church is an “ecclesia” and an “ecclesia” is an assembly; staying in your home is not “assembling.”
-You can’t – or at least shouldn’t – be observing the ordinances (communion and baptism) by yourself. These are ordinances given to the church, not to individuals. And by the way, -if these things can’t be observed, you don’t have a “church” at all.
-The power of the preached word is somehow special in the assembly. It is more effectual than that which you see on screen. And no, we can’t explain that. But we believe it’s supernatural.
-Lord’s Day worship is corporate in nature. Everyone engaging in private worship at the same time is still not corporate worship. It’s just time-coordinated individual worship.
Those are all good, and true, arguments. But here’s the thing, those rules don’t change because of a pandemic.
Watching the computer at the same time in individual homes doesn’t magically become an “assembly” just because coronavirus exists. A contagious virus doesn’t somehow make a Bible study with no right to observe the ordinances into a “church.” If we are serious about what is, and what is not church, then we have to admit that logically, coronavirus doesn’t change any of that.
Please, please be careful about how you advertise your livestream church-substitute. Keep in mind that however you advertise your livestream will be used as a reason to stay home from church after the coronavirus threat is over.
Paige Patterson was instrumental in the so-called Conservative Resurgence in the SBC a generation ago. Along with Paul Pressler and a few other leaders, Patterson championed Biblical inerrancy and used the springboard of Adrian Rogers’ election to the SBC presidency to painfully but successfully begin eradicating the SBC of its non-inerrantists.
In reality, the Conservative Resurgence – more than anything – demonstrated that claims of inerrancy are not synonymous with Biblical conservatism. With the hardcore (and often unethical, deceitful, underhanded and plainly sinful) denominational warfare against the “liberals” behind them, the old guard rested in comfort knowing that they had won the Convention from the bad guys. In reality, while the classical liberals with conscience and fortitude resigned (or were fired) with integrity, many of the less-than-honest liberals simply signed on the dotted line of inerrancy and went underground. Social progressives like Russell Moore simply don’t rise to the very top of the SBC iconoclast without more than few liberal professors dripping their worldview into the caldron of his educational experience. Likewise, Paige Patterson’s tenure at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary demonstrates that it takes more than inerrancy to be a Biblical conservative.
Patterson, while holding to a few of the more frivolous eccentricities of fundamentalism, like a total prohibition against alcohol consumption among students, enrolls Muslims and enrolls Mormons at the SBC-subsidized seminary. Because the sacred calf of Patterson’s strand of fundamentalism is ‘soul-winning,’ these shockingly bizarre enrollments have been done in the name of evangelism and have received applause from the current generation of SBC messengers who grew up believing the Conservative Resurgence was a black-and-white, dragon-slaying conquest of good versus evil and Paige Patterson walked on water by the wonder working power of Scriptural inerrancy. And yet, the only world where enrolling Mormons and Muslims in an SBC seminary can be considered “conservative” is the bizarro land of Southern Baptist celebrity leadership.
Likewise, Patterson earns conservative credentials for his position against female preachers (and good on him), but doesn’t guard the pulpit against doctrines flatly at odds with Christian orthodoxy.
PATTERSON EMBRACES CAMPBELLISM
Patterson has routinely rejected traditional Southern Baptist positions on a whole host of issues, but most recently, has apparently rejected the conservative Southern Baptist position against the heresy of the Campbellites, and has chosen to have a prominent Campbellite celebrity soon speak at the seminary chapel. Simply put, Patterson would have been widely repudiated for this decision in the Southern Baptist Convention among our founders as a denominational liberal.
Preaching at SWBTS chapel on October 26 (2016) is Alan Robertson, a Campbellite preacher who is best known as the cleanly shaven Duck Dynasty brother. Like other Campbellites, Alan Robertson teaches that we are justified by baptism. In other words, he teaches that baptism saves. While the Robertson clan may be popular among a wide swath of American Christian culture and in conservative, flag-waving politics, his doctrine is fundamentally opposed to the Sola Fide-drenched Gospel of Christian orthodoxy, not to mention to Southern Baptist teaching. A conservative Southern Baptist female cannot preach at Southwestern (the author of this article is in full agreement, by the way), but a Campbellite preaching a false Gospel can. Patterson’s so-called “conservatism” is fundamentally schizophrenic.
TRADITIONAL SOUTHERN BAPTIST REJECTION OF CAMPBELLISM
The Southern Baptist Sunday School board produced anti-Campbellite material for many years in order to educate Southern Baptists on the danger of their unorthodox doctrine and false gospel. Southern Baptists and Campbellites had great antipathy from the time of Alexander Campbell until the 20th century Revivalist movement gutted the SBC (and most of the rest of evangelicalism) of doctrinal distinctives and theological depth. Baptists responded not only vitriolically to Campbellism because their teaching that Baptism saves, but because their ‘Restorationist Movement’ fanaticism caused many Baptists to go the way of Landmarkism in response. That a Campbellite would preach in a Southern Baptist seminary truly would have astounded the founders of the Southern Baptist Convention – and not only the founders, but the early twentieth century leaders as well.
The document above is a pdf from the SBC Sunday School Board in 1900 providing “one hundred reasons for not being a Campbellite.” But apparently, our forbears couldn’t have anticipated the appeal of reality television celebrity status that has so bewitched Paige Patterson.
Southern Baptist antipathy toward the Campbellites come from a few points of grave theological disagreement:
First, Campbellites were founded by Alexander Campbell. Campbell and his father absconded from the Baptist faith in 1834, soon founding the Campbellite religion. Their chiefest initial claim is that no denomination was correct and that the “institutional church” lacked the apostolic authority to baptize (similar to the apostasization of Roger Williams). The solution was to restore the true and apostolic church, the actual church of Jesus Christ that went back to Galilee (a number of sub-christian sects were founded during the “Restoration Movement” during this time period, including Mormonism). Secondly, the Campbellites approved baptism done in the name of Jesus only, as opposed to the Triune formula used by Christian orthodoxy, leaving them open to charges of Sabellianism (the Robertson clan, for example, uses the Jesus-only formula). Third and most egregiously, Campbellites taught that Baptism saved – and not merely saved in the wider sense of an exhaustive Ordo Salutis – but that Baptism in fact justified (Campbellites still teach this today). The theological difference between Baptists and the Campbellites are in fact far, far greater than Baptists and Lutherans (who believe in baptismal regeneration but keep in tact Sola Fide) or other paedobaptists. Fourth, Campbellites taught that in order to be saved, one must be baptized by a Campbellite minister (they still teach this today) and that one must be a member of a Campbellite church to remain saved (most still teach this today). Fifth, there were other less significant differences, like their forbidding musical instrumentation, that are not heretical but still are greatly annoying to Baptists.
Baptists hammered Campbellites with sermons, books, lectures, Sunday School materials and advertising propaganda that warned them to flee from their false doctrines and warned others to stay away from Campbellites. Heck, they even suggested that maybe Campbellites acted the way they did because they were inbred. But perhaps to sum it up best, here’s screenshots of an anti-Campbellite poem published by the SBC Sunday School Board.
While the truly-traditional Southern Baptists might have had a particularly polemical vibe that is off-putting to modern day practitioners of soft-Christianity, it’s nonetheless amazing that in a little over one hundred years an SBC seminary president would be having a Campbellite preach to seminary students. Is there a good reason? Perhaps Campbellites have changed their doctrinal stances or repented of their teachings? Have Southern Baptists changed their doctrinal position? Has believing that Baptism saves less heretical than it was a hundred years ago? Of course, the answer to all of these questions is no. The only thing that changed is that Southern Baptists, post Conservative Resurgence, have been lulled to sleep with the fairy tale that the good guys won – and because of that, theological liberalism is far from us. In fact, some of those who led the Conservative Resurgence have demonstrated the willingness to compromise and nearly each and every important doctrine that we hold dear.
And unfortunately, Paige Patterson is willing to compromise on the very Gospel itself.
