Dr. J. Ligon Dunan III, is the Chancellor and CEO of Reformed Theological Seminary who has been drifting in a big way for years. He took a pot shot at John MacArthur for telling Beth Moore to ‘go home’ a few years ago, partnered with gay priests at conference events, had a CRT syllabus at his University, and famously lamented that his black friends have a really good reason not to trust him: because he was a white man, drinking the bitter lies of the burgeoning progressive movement. Ligon Duncan is not someone to be trusted, as Justin Peters recently covered.
Speaking with Mark Dever during a panel together at the 2022 T4G’s Protecting Christian Freedom When Everything is Politicized, Duncan suggests that there is great wisdom in a pastor never letting congregants know which side of a political conflict he leans or where he stands on major political issues.
DEVER: …poverty and I’ll pray about things like that to the one who can make a difference, and Republicans, Democrats, Independents in the congregation can hopefully say ‘amen’ to the prayers, because we want the welfare of everyone. I’m not getting into the prescriptive- cause SR74 to pass this week – You know, that’s, that’s over to the political process and mysterious sovereignty of God. You know, I’m gonna pray for these ends that we know are biblical.
DUNCAN: Biblical ends, I think that’s huge. And I have a quote, to kind of follow on the idea of sort of the spiritual mission of the church and what you’ve just said, from Samuel Miller, who was one of the founding professors at Princeton seminary, at the end of his life, he said this:
“I resolved more than 30 years ago, never to allow myself, either in public prayer or preaching, to utter a syllable in periods of great political excitement and party strife, that would enable any human being so much as to conjecture to which side in the political conflict I leaned.”
Now, he’s not saying ‘I’m not going to pray against somebody killing 6 million Jews’, or ‘I’m not going to pray when the Emperor Decius tells by people that they have to offer sacrifices to his spirit or die. I’m not going to say anything about that.’
But very often we will elevate matters of political strife to that level, when they are not that level. And Samuel Miller is saying Be very careful about that.
