The NXR Podcast - July 16, 2022


QUESTIONS - What Do You Think About Christian Universities？

Topics
seminaries
Hosted by
Joel Webbon Harrison Smith Antonio Griffith Dale Partridge Wewsley Todd Calvin Robinson
Mentioned
John MacArthur Doug Wilson Reformed Baptist Austin Cook MacArthur Seminary Greg Bonson Al Mohler Boston U Stephen Furtick Albert Moeller Gavin Newsom David Bonson R.C. Sproul Danny Akin Jeff Durbin Jamie White Owen Shroyer Eric Mason Tim Keller John Knox and 4 more
DAILY TRUTH - Why Do People Die？ SUNDAY SERMON - The Sermon Of The Skies (Part 1) - Psalm 19

Episode Stats


Length

14 minutes

Words per minute

181.18

Word count

2,664

Sentence count

167

Harmful content

Hate speech

6

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Pastor Joel talks about his experience at DBU and why he doesn't want to go to a Christian college. Austin talks about John MacArthur and his ideas on hermeneutics and the church's role in Christian higher education.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00 Hey guys, real quick, before we get started, I have a small request.
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00:00:21 Austin Cook. Hi, Pastor Joel. You've mentioned before that you went to DBU.
00:00:25 Do you have thoughts or concerns regarding that institution?
00:00:28 What do you think about the current state of Christian higher education? Good question. Thanks, Austin.
00:00:34 I have no thoughts about DBU. None whatsoever. I attended the school. I have a degree from the
00:00:39 school. I did not live on campus. I never went to chapel. I got a pass for that, so I wasn't just
00:00:47 skipping out, but I had permission not to go. I never went to a single chapel with the school. I
00:00:52 never went to any of the school events. I had no experience in the campus life whatsoever. I showed
00:00:57 up for my classes. I took my classes. Um, I passed my classes, most of them, except I failed art.
00:01:03 And, uh, and I was like, talk to my art teacher. And I was like, this is insane. This is, uh,
00:01:08 this is a, you know, a throwaway class, right? You're supposed to just pass people. And she
00:01:12 said, I know that Joel, um, you are the first student in about 20 years of my art class who's
00:01:18 ever failed. So I, you know, I take that as a point of pride. I think that's pretty impressive.
00:01:22 I am the only student at DBU who failed art class, so I had to end up taking it again
00:01:28 and pass.
00:01:29 But all that being said, my point is I don't really know much about the school.
00:01:34 I really don't.
00:01:35 And the classes that I took, I didn't take a bunch of Bible classes.
00:01:39 I took a few, but most of the classes that I took were business-related.
00:01:43 So I can't speak about DBU, but I will answer your general question about higher education,
00:01:48 Christian higher education.
00:01:50 um yeah i think right now it's it's a slim pickings right you got own strand um i forget
00:01:56 the name of the seminary that he teaches at grace something uh grace covenant or grace bible or
00:02:01 whatever uh you've got master's seminary i personally wouldn't go i love john macarthur
00:02:05 appreciate him i wouldn't go to master's just because there's enough different like john
00:02:08 macarthur is a calvinistic baptist he's not a reformed baptist so he's not confessional he's
00:02:13 not sabbatarian um he uh is pre-millennial he's dispensational right so i want something that's
00:02:18 going to be covenantal, not dispensational, something that's post-millennial, not pre-millennial
00:02:22 or all-millennial. I want something that is Kyperian, a full-orbed all of Christ for all of 0.53
00:02:27 life, not more two-kingdom. John MacArthur is not radical two-kingdom, but I think he falls more in
00:02:32 the two-kingdom camp than the Kyperian camp. So John MacArthur, two-kingdom, pre-millennial,
00:02:39 also just is hermeneutic. He despises the analogical or typological, Christological
00:02:45 aspect of the hermeneutic that Reformed Baptists and Presbyterians would embrace. So Reformed 0.94
00:02:51 Baptists and Presbyterians, we would have a historical, grammatical, historical, grammatical,
00:02:56 literal hermeneutic, but a fourth piece of analogical, meaning we would be able to read
00:03:02 certain things in the Old and New, but especially the Old Testament and see them as typological
00:03:06 pointing towards Christ, where MacArthur can do that, but he can only do that when explicitly
00:03:11 said or mentioned by an apostle in the New Testament, whereas we would be able to say
00:03:16 the apostles are not just giving us the exclusive and exhaustive individual cases, but they're
00:03:23 actually giving us a hermeneutica principle for reading the Old Testament.
00:03:26 And so we can look at other passages of Isaiah, for instance, or Ezekiel or Jeremiah that
00:03:31 are not cited by the apostles in the New Testament and given their fuller meaning.
00:03:35 And yet we can look at these other passages and with careful hermeneutics and careful
00:03:40 exegesis to say, yeah, this also points towards Christ, or this has a new covenant fulfillment,
00:03:45 right? So John MacArthur, I would disagree on his hermeneutic. I would disagree on the fact
00:03:48 that he's dispensational, not covenantal. He's non-sabbatarian. He's non-confessional.
00:03:54 He's pre-millennial. So he's more in the two kingdom camp than the Kuyperian camp. 0.84
00:04:02 So all that being said, it depends where you're at, right? Austin, it depends. That being said,
00:04:08 John MacArthur is faithful in many regards. And he is, you know, more than well underneath the
00:04:16 banner of orthodoxy. So he is orthodox and better than just orthodox. I think he's orthodox and
00:04:22 faithful. And I'm grateful for John MacArthur in a million and one different ways. But I would not
00:04:29 go there given my convictions and my understanding of theology and the scripture and how to read the
00:04:35 scripture, and also just the need of the hour. I think providentially in the time and place that
00:04:41 God has put us, I think one of the things that we desperately are in need of is all of Christ
00:04:46 for all of life, not just the home of the church, but applying all of Christ for all of life. I
00:04:51 want to fight, I think Christians should be fighting the culture war. Number one, I think 1.00
00:04:54 we have to wake up and say there is a culture war. And two, that that is a part of our Christian
00:04:59 mission. Now, that's not a substitute. It doesn't overshadow preaching the gospel and evangelism
00:05:06 and conversion, but it is a part of the Great Commission. Making disciples, going and baptizing
00:05:12 and teaching involves teaching people to live out the gospel and to also live out God's law,
00:05:19 his moral law in every realm of life. And that includes the political sphere, that includes
00:05:24 culture, the arts, academia, medicine, all these different things. And so that's something that
00:05:30 MacArthur has gotten involved in the culture war when it encroaches on his doorstep, right?
00:05:35 So when Gavin Newsom says, you got to shut down your church, then John MacArthur will take a
00:05:40 culture war stand. And I'm incredibly grateful for it and his courage because a lot of guys didn't.
00:05:46 But I think it's beyond that. I think that we actually need to be infiltrating
00:05:50 every area of life and bringing the gospel to bear. So all that being said, I think that's
00:05:55 the need of the hour. My differences in terms of philosophy of ministry, theology, and hermeneutics
00:06:00 would make it to where I couldn't go to master's. However, if you could, great. If you're
00:06:06 dispensational, if you're non-confessional, if you're non-covenantal, if you're
00:06:12 premillennial, if you have a literal grammatical historical hermeneutic, which I do, but you
00:06:18 reject the analytical portion, so you would disagree with Sinclair Ferguson, you would
00:06:23 disagree with R.C. Sproul, you would disagree with guys like that, then MacArthur, his school,
00:06:30 I think would be great for you. So you could go to MacArthur Seminary. So you got Own Strand
00:06:36 and whatever the name of his is. I forget. You've got MacArthur. There's some other ones that are
00:06:41 faithful. I think there's like a John Knox seminary that I've heard good things about.
00:06:45 So there's a few. Also, you could go to Doug Wilson and do his Greyfriars thing. Now, I don't know if you'll get in. It's only like, I think, 12 or maybe 20 guys, but it's just a part of his local church, which I think is one of the best things when you get seminary level training, theological training in the context of the local church.
00:07:05 but it's, it's still robust and hefty and lots of reading assignments and writing assignments
00:07:10 and preaching. And you get to sit in on a Christ church, Doug's church there in Moscow, Idaho,
00:07:15 their elders meetings, um, and all these different things. And so a lot of guys have done that and
00:07:20 gone out of that into formal ministry and been, um, justice trained, if not better trained than
00:07:25 going to your typical traditional seminary. Um, other than that though, like right now the SBC,
00:07:31 I don't, you know, I don't feel great about Al Mohler's seminary.
00:07:35 I think Al Mohler says the right things, but he continues to harbor critical race theory
00:07:41 professors.
00:07:42 And you can just look at the library at Southern Seminary and find Woke Church on the shelf
00:07:49 by Eric Mason and those kinds of things.
00:07:50 So, and I think I mentioned Albert Mohler, not to say that he's the worst, but I think
00:07:54 that that would be the best.
00:07:56 Danny Aiken would be worse.
00:07:58 So I think that's the best of the six, you know, SBC seminaries.
00:08:02 And even that one, I would just be a little bit nervous about.
00:08:07 So I would say there's a handful of some seminaries that might be worth going to.
00:08:12 But that said, I think there's so much opportunity today by God's grace and in his providence
00:08:19 with the internet and all these different things and podcasts.
00:08:22 And I mean, you can do Bonson U, right?
00:08:24 With Apologia, right?
00:08:25 So you can go to Jeff Durbin, James White, you can go to Apologia, and they have this
00:08:29 for free, all of Greg Bonson's teachings.
00:08:32 They call it Bonson U, Bonson University.
00:08:34 You can take that for free.
00:08:36 You can, for $8 a month, you can get the Canon Plus app and just a plethora of content.
00:08:43 Right now, I'm going through the, it's like a 37-part series by Kenneth Gentry on post-millennialism,
00:08:49 and it's the recordings, super old.
00:08:51 You can tell it's tapes, and they have to stop to turn over the tape.
00:08:54 But you can hear what he's saying.
00:08:56 It's old, not great quality,
00:08:57 but you can hear what he's saying.
00:08:59 And so it's super old, but it's his seminary class.
00:09:02 It's like a 37 part seminary class
00:09:04 and that I'm getting for $8 a month by doing Canon Plus
00:09:09 and a whole bunch of other stuff too.
00:09:11 You can get courses in economics
00:09:12 by Greg Bonson's son, David Bonson on the Canon Plus app.
00:09:16 So I just think that between the Moscow guys,
00:09:20 between Apologia, between our ministry,
00:09:22 between other faithful ministries, there's just enough content that you can get. Yes,
00:09:27 there are some things that you probably, well, you can get these too, but you just probably
00:09:32 won't do. Here's what seminary does. Seminary, in some sense, it forces you to learn things that
00:09:37 you would not want to learn on your own, like languages. Some guys want to learn that, but
00:09:43 typically guys are much more interested in systematic theology and biblical theology than
00:09:48 they are Greek and Hebrew, myself included. So I'm weaker personally. I'll admit that I am weaker
00:09:54 on languages than I probably would be if I had spent years and years in seminary. But I am
00:10:01 stronger than a lot of seminary graduates that I know in other areas that because of their seminary
00:10:08 and some of their compromise in that seminary, they didn't give them a full orbed theology on
00:10:14 blank and you know, this or that. So all that being said, it depends on you. It depends on
00:10:19 the gifts that God's given you. How, how disciplined are you? Um, all those kinds of
00:10:24 things. Um, but assuming that you're disciplined and you're motivated and you want to be in
00:10:28 ministry and you want to be in ministry faithfully able to teach, um, with, with experience and
00:10:34 knowledge. Um, if you have that desire and you have that discipline, I think you can,
00:10:38 you can learn without going to seminary, or you could go to a few of the good ones. But by and
00:10:46 large, the days of, oh, well, let's just go to this seminary and pretty much any Baptist seminary
00:10:50 or any Presbyterian, we can trust them. I think those days are gone. The last thing I'll say,
00:10:54 bringing a full circle all the way back to our question about Baptist polity and who has authority
00:11:00 within the 1689 Reformed Baptist church polity for administering the Lord's Supper or baptism
00:11:06 or preaching or teaching. That's one of the beauties of being Reformed Baptist. So, I don't
00:11:10 know what you are, but I'm Reformed Baptist. And if you are Reformed Baptist, ordination,
00:11:18 the institute that has the authority to ordain ministers of the gospel, elders and deacons
00:11:24 within Reformed Baptist theology, church polity is the local church. It is the common suffrage,
00:11:30 is the language used in the 1689, meaning it's the majority vote of the members of that church.
00:11:36 So that's, again, I think that's one strength, right?
00:11:40 And I understand on the other side of the coin, you can make that out to be a weakness.
00:11:43 Like, oh, well, you're going to have a bunch of Baptist preachers that aren't theologically
00:11:47 sound because they never got a formal education. 0.56
00:11:50 That's possible.
00:11:51 Yeah, you could have some uneducated Baptist preachers, but you could also have some highly
00:11:58 educated, formally educated, but compromised Presbyterian preachers.
00:12:04 And I think we've seen that.
00:12:05 So in the Baptist world, you've got guys who don't have a degree, and they do some things that are bad, like Stephen Furtick is in the Baptist world, technically.
00:12:19 On the Presbyterian side, you've got Amy Byrd.
00:12:23 You've got Tim Keller, highly educated, but he's a Marxist, straight up.
00:12:29 right? So you can have the highly theologically trained Marxist, or you can have a Baptist who's 0.80
00:12:36 faithful, but it's like, gosh, I wish he knew a little bit more, you know? And obviously these
00:12:42 are extremes. You can, in both worlds, you can be highly trained Presbyterian and faithful,
00:12:46 and you can be a Baptist and not dumb. You know, you could be an educated, you know, and trained
00:12:51 Baptist. My point is just to say that within the actual Baptist confession, within Reformed
00:12:57 Baptist polity. You don't have to go to seminary to be a minister of the gospel, to be an elder.
00:13:05 And to be fair, on the Presbyterian side, this wouldn't work in the PCA, it wouldn't work in the
00:13:10 OPC, but if you're a part of Doug Wilson, his Presbytery, the CREC, they don't require that
00:13:21 someone go to seminary because if they did, then Doug Wilson would not be qualified. Doug Wilson
00:13:26 did not go to seminary and he knows far more and is far more faithful than most people who have
00:13:31 gone to seminary. And so his, his Presbytery has recognized, okay, that's an extra biblical
00:13:36 requirement. The Bible doesn't say thou shalt go to seminary. What the Bible does say is you must
00:13:41 be able to teach. It doesn't say how you get there. That's the point. The Bible says, here's
00:13:46 the benchmark. Um, but it doesn't say, and the only way to get there is with this curriculum
00:13:51 and this syllabus and these professors and this piece of paper giving you, you know, your
00:13:55 credentials. Seminaries like to pretend as though that's in the Bible, but it's not. The Bible says
00:14:01 you must be able to teach, which means you must be diligent to learn. And the reality is, in our
00:14:07 day and age, there are more and more avenues to learn, and to learn well if you're disciplined,
00:14:13 if you have that desire, without taking a loan and without giving your money to a seminary that
00:14:20 you find out halfway through your degree is woke. Okay. So that's my answer. Thanks so much for
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