During a “climate criss” lecture at SEBTS last year, Jonathan Moo, an Associate Professor of New Testament and Environmental Studies at Whitworth University, shared his extreme understandaing of “creaton care” for the Christian, telling students they ought to buy carbon credits if they take any flights. He recommended giving money to Climate Stewards USA, a project run by “A Rocha,” a nonprofit where he’s on the board, and then tells them “in order to be faithful to the gospel, we must care well for God’s creation. It’s not an option.”
“I have an argument this evening, which is pretty obvious I guess from my somewhat perhaps controversial title. That is, that in order to be faithful to the gospel, we must care well for God’s creation. It’s not an option. It’s not just something we might add on to lots of other programs we might do. It’s not even just a clever strategy for evangelism, although I do consider it one of the ways in which faithful Christian witness might must be lived out in our time, and one that many people around us, many of my students are longing to see the church do more fully.
And the reasons why this is absolutely vital and to be woven into all that we do and proclaim, is first and foremost, because it is part of the Gospel. It is part of what it is to love God and neighbor. If we love God we will care for the world that God created and declared good. If we love our neighbor, we cannot help but care for the world of which they are part. So, to love God and neighbor is to care well for the creation.”
He continues:
I think most of us don’t need simply another list of things that that might look like, or a new set of programs to add to all the other things we already do. We need to have our eyes lifted again to the mountains. Our eyes focused again on the gospel to see again the world afresh that we might do that.
This is not just a recommendation but a binding of conscience. Moo starts out his lecture by stating a failure to care for creation is not being "faithful to the gospel." This is explicitly in the context of "global scale" CO2 scapegoating, not just local, tangible conservation. pic.twitter.com/ZB0ogKw0L3
SEBTS email confirms Karen Swallow Prior shared Bucks’ rough draft with ‘persons for possible publication.’
Tom and Jennifer Buck deny ever authorizing Karen Swallow Prior to share the manuscript with publishers. In fact, the Bucks say there is evidence she never shared it with a publisher.
(Capstone Report) Professor Karen Swallow Prior shared the rough draft at the center of the attempt to blackmail Tom and Jennifer Buck with potential publishers, according to Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary (SEBTS). Tom and Jennifer Buck claim that Karen Swallow Prior did not have their permission to share the rough draft. And in fact, the Bucks say there is evidence against her having shared it.
In an email obtained exclusively by the Capstone Report, SEBTS said that Karen Prior “never shared” the rough draft “with anyone trying to disparage them.” However, in the same email the school’s leadership confirmed that Karen Swallow Prior “shared it with persons for possible publication.”
In fact, SEBTS claims Karen Swallow Prior shared the rough draft with those persons “at their request.” However, the Bucks deny ever giving Karen Swallow Prior that permission.
“There is no evidence whatsoever that she gave it to any other publication,” Tom Buck said. “We didn’t give her verbal or written permission to send it out to anybody.”
Under threat of termination, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary (SEBTS), presided over by Danny Akin, has released a new policy making receiving the COVID-19 vaccine mandatory, with any faculty who fails to comply forced to wear a mask and undergo regular testing. This is in order to be compliant with the highly unconstitutional OSHA mandate.
In an email sent out by Ryan Hutchinson, the Executive Vice President at Southeastern, on Monday, Hutchinson explained:
If fully vaccinated (see policy for definition), you will complete a form communicating your vaccination information. You will receive a separate email requesting this information.
If not fully vaccinated, starting January 9th, you will be required to wear a properly fitting face covering when inside. Starting February 9th, you will begin to report your weekly testing information through a link to a form that we will provide to you closer to that time. Please note that people that have had COVID-19 in the last 90 days will not need to do weekly testing but will need to complete the weekly form attesting to their status.
Tellingly, SEBTS has done nothing to help their employees. This is in sharp contrast to SBTS, where seminary president Albert Mohler, to his credit, has done some good, filing a lawsuit against the Biden Administration. Instead of joining the lawsuit in solidarity, Akin has chosen instead to comply with this hideously unconstitutional policy.
Three weeks ago, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary (SEBTS), one of the six seminaries funded by the SBC and led by Danny Akin, announced that the former SBC President James Merritt was joining the staff as Visiting Professor of Preaching and Christian Leadership.
“I cannot believe I have been so honored to be asked by my dear friend Dr. Danny Akin to be a visiting professor at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary,” said Merritt. “I am humbled beyond words and honored to be a part of a great faculty like that. I give Jesus all the glory!”
One week ago, he retweet a sermon from his son and encouraged his thousands of followers to listen to it, commending it as both “brilliant” and “faithful to the gospel. The sermon was, in fact, terrible. The fact that his son is a “Side A” Sodomite made matters all the worse, with Merritt refusing to walk back his words of praise and admiration but rather doubled down.
Yesterday morning, we released audio from a former staff member who accused James Merritt of assault and battery, as well as telling racist Jokes.
Later that evening, Danny Akin announced that James Merritt had resigned from his teaching position he was set to start in December and that he honored his request.
As Tom Buck would succinctly point out on Twitter “What should make anyone angry is not that James Merritt resigned, but that he did not repent.” Last we heard, he was doubling down on his defense of his son, rather than answering questions of how his actions are defensible in light of 1 Corinthians 5:9-13.
Furthermore, the fact that Danny Akin wasn’t the one to pull the trigger upon hearing Merritt’s defense and promotion of an unrepentant homosexual preaching a sermon, regardless of whether it was his son or not, is a damning indictment upon his leadership. This also does not answer a host of questions we have, as pointed out by Allen Nelson, who also previously sent an open letter to SEBTS about the issue:
“I appreciate Dr. Merritt stepping down from SEBTS. He should. I also appreciate Dr. Akin honoring that request to resign. A gracious departure is okay. But, a big BUT, what’s not okay is the silence over *the* issue at hand.
Reminds me of when @BethMooreLPM left SBC. She *should have* left SBC as she wasn’t Southern Baptist for a long time. And we didn’t need blog posts lamenting her departure. She left because she wasn’t Southern Baptist. And it’s sad that wasn’t addressed by many in leadership positions.
BUT: Dr. Merritt’s situation is different. He has declined an SBC seminary professorship *because* he has endorsed the preaching of an openly gay man and a sermon that was gospel-less calling it faithful. (This is all the more sad since the gay man is his son.) Now Dr. Akin has accepted the resignation b/c Dr. Merritt doesn’t want to be a “distraction”. (Well, a bit too late!)
But what is left unaddressed is the sin and now we are left to wonder does @SEBTS agree merely that Dr. Merritt is a “distraction”?
OR: Does SEBTS uphold the BFM 2000 in opposing homosexuality? Does the school affirm the preaching of openly gay men and gospel-less sermons? This we don’t know publicly because SEBTS and Dr. Akin haven’t responded publicly. They’ve merely cited the “distraction.”
Further: Because Dr. Akin lauded Dr. Merritt as “a model for us all” what does this mean in terms of Merritt’s approach to the preaching of openly gay men? Should southern Baptists also affirm this type of preaching or not? This is simply not clear from Dr. Akin’s tweet.
Also: Is Dr. Merritt remaining in the SBC? I assume so. But if this is his position on homosexuality, how can his church be in step with the BFM 2000? And how can he be applauded as a model for us all?
Finally: I very strongly do not like the political type tactics of accepting a resignation and move on and not address the issue. Political parties can do that but not gospel people. Gospel people address sin, confess sin, repent of sin, forgive sin, and reconcile.
But As long as our leaders cannot model gospel humility and repentance and confession of sin, there’s little hope for turning ye olde SBC ship.
Ultimately, this is an example of making a bad situation worse with a failure of courageous leadership.
Well, well, well Danny Akin. For one part of the “seminary six” who signed a statement declaring that Critical Race Theory is incompatible with scriptures, you sure have a lot of explaining to do.
This, of course, is the result of James White, Pastor of Christ Our King Community Church in Raleigh, North Carolina preaching a Chapel Message at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary (SEBTS) on February 2nd.
SEBTS is one of the six seminaries operated by the Southern Baptist Convention, a repository for all those delicious cooperative dollars that SBC congregants sacrifice so greatly to give and is overseen by Danny Akin, surely the squirreliest of the bunch. Though Akin distances himself from CRT in word, he does not do so in deed and practice, with frequent collaborator Pastor White demonstrating that the message of Critical Race Theory is alive and well at SEBTS.
In the sermon, White “connects Mark 2:1-12 and the hypostatic union with American chattel slavery and social justice, accusing conservative Baptists of leaving the resurrection of Christ out of gospel presentation.” Include an obligatory reference to a fear of lynching by white folk and a note that the gospel of forgiveness of sins by faith in Jesus isn’t enough, and you have one for the ages.
The point of the story is this. It’s not who’s Southern Baptist, who’s not Southern Baptist. It’s not even simply a doctrinal argument. The point of the story is the doctrinal argument that clarifies who Jesus is. That’s what’s at stake. And it’s at stake because historically, when you’re a slave holder, historically, when you’ve not honored the Imago Dei, historically, when you’ve enforced and endorsed segregation, historically, when you haven’t changed positions of power, here’s the problem with that. Historically, when you align up with the nationalistic America rather than the gospel of Jesus Christ, the problem with that is simply this: that you misrepresent who Jesus is. And so Jesus changes the whole trajectory of this. So now that it’s about him, the paralyzed guy just happens to be there in the midst. Similar to being a tool of the story. I got news for you: I know you think that your ideas and everything are so important, but you’re simply just a product and a tool of the story about Jesus. And honestly, I really don’t care whether the Southern Baptist Association goes forward or not, because what’s most important is: will the gospel of Jesus Christ and will Jesus be represented correctly? That is what’s most important…
I serve a Christ who does the impossible when we do the unthinkable. I hope this is a generation that doesn’t get distracted. See, I serve a Christ that I can talk correctly about the historic reality of who we are as black people and white people. I serve a Jesus, who, where we can talk correctly about the injustices that’s been done to the black church. I serve, see, you got to understand, I’m even dressed that way today, because, understand something. From the top up, I’m dressed for the conservatives. From the top up, I’m dressed for you. From the bottom down, I got on my jeans because I’m ready to do some work. Then I got on my boots, too. And I wear a bow tie as a reminder that I tied this myself, and by tying it myself, my neck will not hang from anybody’s rope anymore, because I’m afraid of what I might say that there’s a possibility of lynching. Because black men often had to say those things, and their speech was relegated off of that. But my speech will not be relegated. I tied this myself this morning. And I have to wear that to remind me of speaking truth…
What you see here in Mark chapter 2 is the hypostatic union. That’s to help some of you seminary people out, to make sure that you understand your education is valued and very much so. But it’s the hypostatic union, that you see God and man at work. Don’t try to put him in a box. He’s the God that can deal with the pain of what you and I are going through. He’s a God that’s very present in any kind of sociopolitical framework that you might want to take him out of. But guess what? He’s also the God that can heal and has authority above all of that. God and man always comes together in the hypostatic union that we see here in scripture. Jesus could have just left him on the pallet. He could have just said, “I forgive your sins,” and that would have been enough. See, I’ve heard many say you just need to preach the gospel, and that is enough. But Jesus is showing the holistic purpose of him being God and man. He doesn’t leave this man paralyzed, because when you leave someone simply talking about forgiveness of sins, you leave them at the cross but you don’t take them to the three days later of the resurrection.
And so when you only preach necessarily theological truths without sociological and practical realities, you got a cross gospel but you don’t have a full gospel, because the resurrection says there will be change. You cannot have theological truth without social impact, because that would mean you would say that people are free and still leave the chains on. We’ve had a history of that. We have. You don’t simply have vertical celebration without horizontal reality.
[Editor’s note: Thanks to @wokepreachertv for the clip, transcript, and even part of the video description. It’s not theft, it’s flattery ;)]
A prominent Southern Baptist leader has declared that white Christians need to “give up power” and “surrender leadership at the table” to ethnic minorities in order to foster kingdom diversity, except he is not volunteering his own positions of prestige to be sacrificed on the altar of white privilege.
Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary (SEBTS) President Danny Akin, who recently took heat for signing a statement against Critical Race Theory that didn’t really come out against Critical Race Theory, has come to the forefront of the CRT discussion in a recently unearthed 2018 video from the ERLC (color us surprised!) where he pushes standpoint theory and regurgitates every conceivable race-baiting cliche imaginable, particularly his “indigenous to our nature” nonsense.
To the question of “What do white Christians need to be mindful of when speaking out about Racial reconciliation?” he explains:
White Christians need to learn above all things, I think, to be good listeners. Over the last several years as I’ve tried to held build a culture for racial reconciliation and kingdom diversity, which is a core value of Southeastern Seminary, I’ve come to understand more and more that my perspective is not the perspective of my African American brothers and sisters, or my Hispanic brothers and sisters or my Asian brother and sisters.
They really do see life differently. They’re operating out of a different paradigm, a different context that’s very different than mine. And I didn’t really realize that until I stopped talking and began to listen.
So I think one of the things that white evangelicals, in particular, have got to do is become better listeners. In addition to that, we have got to be willing to surrender power, which is again, not indigenous to our nature.
As I often say, not only do we need to invite ethnic minorities in our room and to have a seat at the table, we even need to be willing to surrender leadership at the table if we’re really going to make progress and really help our brothers and sisters understand we see them on an equal plane with ourselves.
Great. He can start with himself and Russell Moore, and take most of the other seminary presidents with them.
The fact is that Danny Akin is overseeing the most rapidly liberalizing anti-revival in the history of any institution of the Southern Baptist Convention. During the tenure of Paige Patterson at SEBTS, it could be counted on to have been a stronghold for conservative principles. Now, its president does ads promoting atheist groups, they do Malcolm X read-ins, promote Black Liberation Theology, and recently hired one of the most extreme leftists in evangelicalism, Karen Swallow Prior.
Akin has been in power for years, ruling his little kingdom with a tiny woke fist, but apparently, he doesn’t want to lead by example and surrender his own power and seat of influence seat to some darker-skinned brothers, all the while enjoining others to do so.
Southern Baptist Pastor details examples of Critical Theory infecting Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.
Buck: ‘Standpoint Epistemology is root of Identity Politics.’
Buck: ‘Whether Dr. Akin realizes it or not, the language he employs was spawned by Critical Theory and Intersectionality advocates.’
(Captsone Report) Southern Baptist seminaries are infected by Critical Theory and Intersectionality, according to Southern Baptist pastor Dr. Tom Buck. Buck, pastor of First Baptist Church Lindale, Texas, detailed the problems of these godless ideologies infiltrating SBC seminaries with a focus on the problems at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary (SEBTS).
Dr. Buck explains that in a recent SEBTS chapel service the seminary President invoked elements of Critical Theory in a discussion of hermeneutics.
According to Dr. Buck, “Dr. Akin implies that there’s a particular way that White Southern Males read the Bible as opposed to Northwestern Black Lesbians, and while he’s correct that we all have biases that can influence us. The problem is he imports race and gender identities into the discussion of…
