Try Hallow 3 Months FREE - Hallow.com/Knowles Brandon Robertson is a progressive pastor who has taken the internet by storm. Here are a few of his most popular TikToks and why he is wrong. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Being a mackerel-snapping papist, I rarely have the opportunity to encounter the woke Protestant pastors who sometimes make the rounds on social media. | |
| Being an adult man, I very rarely see anything on TikTok. | |
| I really only see it when my producers bring these videos to me. | |
| Chill out, man. | |
| What's your problem? | |
| You! | |
| You're my problem! | |
| But my producer, Mr. Ben Davies, is a Protestant and frequently on TikTok, so he has assured me I must listen to the brilliant theological musings of Reverend... Reverend... I don't think so. | |
| I don't think so. | |
| Brandon Robertson, who is a noted author, activist, and public theologian, as opposed to those private theologians, working at the intersections of spirituality, sexuality, and social renewal. | |
| He is known as the TikTok pastor. | |
| He's garnered over 200,000 followers and 5 million views. | |
| Now, speaking of religion. | |
| This video is brought to you by Hallow. | |
| Go to Hallow.com slash Knowles right now. | |
| Get an exclusive three months free. | |
| That is three months free at Hallow.com slash Knowles. | |
| More from Hallow in just a bit. | |
| Mr. Robertson, take it away. | |
| Do you know that Jesus helps his friend come out? | |
| So it's been like a year since I made this video where I used the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead as a metaphor for Jesus calling LGBT people out of the closet. | |
| And it's been one of my most beautiful videos ever since. | |
| Christians, of course, lost their minds saying, look at you taking that passage out of context. | |
| That's not what the passage is about. | |
| Of course, I don't believe the story was literally about Lazarus being gay and coming out of the closet. | |
| But for thousands of years, Christians have used biblical stories as metaphors for other things in our life and in our world. | |
| And I do firmly believe, based on the Bible, that Jesus wants to see LGBT people step into our full God-created identity as queer people. | |
| Jesus wants to call us out of the man-made closets of shame and repression that so many who claim the name of Christ have forced us into. | |
| To any LGBT person struggling with their faith... Oh, he's a gay guy. | |
| Jesus is calling you. | |
| Oh, got it. | |
| I didn't know that, but he says it's us, so I assume he's placing himself within the LGBT umbrella. | |
| Gay, gay, gay, gay. | |
| This is an amazing inversion, because Christ raises Lazarus from the dead, and this prefigures Christ's own resurrection. | |
| But what does Christ do in this episode with Lazarus? | |
| Lazarus is dead, and then Christ brings him back to life. | |
| What Pastor Brandon over here is suggesting, though, Is that people go in the opposite direction. | |
| Because Christ says, if you sin, you are dead in sin. | |
| The wages of sin are death. | |
| And what Christ does is he frees us from our sin, which is death, and gives us life everlasting by embracing all sorts of disordered sexual behaviors. | |
| One is going in entirely the opposite direction and pursuing what Christians have always considered to be Go ahead! | |
| So it's a devilish little inversion. | |
| Because leftism is a false religion and it apes all of the language of Christianity and it apes even many of the rituals of Christianity, but it just distorts, perverts, and ultimately even inverts. | |
| Go ahead. | |
| Show me the chapter and verse, bro. | |
| Go ahead. | |
| Here's the thing. | |
| You can comb through the thousands of verses of the Bible and find justification for anything you want to justify. | |
| But that's an abuse of the scripture. | |
| This ancient book does not have anything to say about modern medical procedures like abortion. | |
| It doesn't condemn it, nor does it endorse it. | |
| But what the Bible does do is give us principles, morals, overarching themes that we should apply to our thought around these conversations. | |
| For instance, the Bible says every human being is made in the image and likeness of God, and therefore is worthy of dignity, equality, respect, and autonomy over our lives and over our bodies. | |
| And that same dignity and autonomy should be extended to women, to make choices about their bodies, their lives, and what they do. | |
| Likewise, the Bible is not a medical text, so it doesn't tell us when life begins or when personhood begins. | |
| Those are questions for science, not for scripture. | |
| He knows that his argument is quite weak here, so he's not trying to twist scripture to defend his infanticide. | |
| What he's saying is, listen man, we just don't know. | |
| Come on, enough of this Bible talk. | |
| The Bible's just kind of, it leaves this issue alone. | |
| But the Bible obviously doesn't leave this issue alone because the Bible tells us quite clearly in the Ten Commandments that thou shalt not commit murder. | |
| Kill him. | |
| I shouldn't. | |
| We know that God loves the little children. | |
| We know that Christ says whoever scandalizes a child, it would be better to have a millstone tied around his neck. | |
| There's a hubris that comes along with these modern libs who think that everyone who ever came before them was a total dummy and they didn't know anything about anything. | |
| But no, they did. | |
| People knew what babies were. | |
| They knew what pregnancy was. | |
| There were people who attempted to kill babies in the womb to end pregnancies long before Pastor Brandon ever came around. | |
| And the church addressed this question from the very earliest centuries, and the church said, you can't do it. | |
| And the church has been consistent on this point for 2,000 years. | |
| And we see the reasoning for that in the Bible, and we can see the reasoning for that in the natural law, in the objective moral order, and we see it consistently for two millennia, no matter what Pastor Brandon says, in the year of our Lord, 2023. | |
| Right now, go to hallow.com slash knolls. | |
| In a society teeming with irreligion, like the irreligion that we're hearing right now, it can be incredibly challenging to ground oneself in what we know to be true and good. | |
| Choose today to embrace your faith and start building a habit of prayer. | |
| Join me and thousands of others on Hallow, the number one Christian prayer app in the United States. | |
| Hallow is helping everyone to maintain a daily prayer routine. | |
| It can help you. | |
| Download the app for free at hallow.com slash knolls. | |
| You can set prayer reminders and track your progress along the way. | |
| Not sure where to start? | |
| How about you check out my favorite podcast, Father Mike Schmitz's Bible in a Year, available on the Hallow app for brief daily readings and reflections, or pray alongside Mark Wahlberg and Jonathan Rumi Despite your name-calling, I'll answer your question. | |
| With Halo, you can customize a personal prayer plan that works for you. | |
| Listen wherever you are with downloadable offline sessions. | |
| Download Halo at Halo.com slash Knowles. | |
| Get an exclusive three months free that is three months absolutely free at Halo.com slash Knowles. | |
| Despite your name calling, I'll answer your question. | |
| There is not a single condemnation in all of the Bible of premarital sex. | |
| There is a mistranslation in the New Testament of the Greek word porneia into the old English word fornication, which does in fact mean premarital sex. | |
| But if you look up the Greek word porneia, it does not neatly translate to fornication. | |
| It's a mistranslation. | |
| Porneia in Greek is what we would call a junk drawer word that means all sorts of sexual immorality. | |
| And that category of what is sexually immoral is different based on what culture or values you have. | |
| So there is no clear condemnation of premarital sex in the Bible. | |
| Now, yes, I do believe lust is a sin. | |
| Lust is when you objectify another person. | |
| You strip them of their humanity and make them an object of your sexual gratification. | |
| That is condemned in the Bible because the Bible tells us to treat every human with full dignity and respect. | |
| So that is why lust is condemned. | |
| This is the most coherent thing I've heard this guy say. | |
| He points out that porneia is a difficult word to translate, and it doesn't neatly translate into any specific sexual category that we use in English. | |
| And that's true. | |
| Now he comes to the wrong conclusion. | |
| He says, and because we know that sexual immorality is contingent on one's culture, we know that today, presumably because our culture approves of premarital sex, the premarital sex is not a sin. | |
| That's where he goes wrong, because sexual morality is not contingent on one's culture or on one's own personal views, but it's objective. | |
| It's established by God. | |
| And so once we've figured that out, we realize that premarital sex is in fact immoral. | |
| But then we can take it further, as Pastor Brandon is pointing out, and say, actually, all sorts of sexual activities are immoral as well. | |
| That sex has a purpose, just like our bodies have a purpose, like our marriages have a purpose. | |
| When we twist those things away from their purpose, or to undermine their purpose, then things go awry. | |
| Talk about twisting the Bible to fit your own agenda. | |
| Jesus never said that marriage is between a man and a woman. | |
| What you're referring to is a passage in which Jesus was asked a specific question about a specific... About marriage. | |
| He was asked by one of the teachers of the law if it was lawful for a man to divorce his wife. | |
| He was asked a question about heterosexual marriage. | |
| And he responds... Also known as marriage. | |
| ...about that heterosexual marriage. | |
| He quotes from the book of Genesis and says, a man must leave his father and mother and cling to his wife, and the two become one flesh. | |
| Therefore, divorce is a sin. | |
| Jesus was condemning the divorce of a heterosexual couple. | |
| He was never asked about marriage between two people of the same gender. | |
| Because that's not possible. | |
| He kind of undermines his own point here, because he says what Christ is referring to can be seen in the book of Genesis when marriage is described as the union between a man and a woman. | |
| Oh whoops, I wasn't supposed to say that. | |
| Jesus was asked a specific question about marriage in specific terms and so he refers to an earlier description in the Bible about how marriage is between a man and a woman. | |
| Oh whoopsie daisy. | |
| At the time of our Lord's sojourn on Earth, and for all manner of millennia before then, no one anywhere seriously believed that marriage could exist between two men or two women. | |
| Lesbians! | |
| Marriage was understood for all of that time until about, I don't know, like 2015, to be about sexual difference, the union of man and woman as coupling, complementary human beings for the good of the spouses and for the sake of the generation and education of children. | |
| And so to try to apply this scripture to LGBT marriage and relationships is to take it out of its context and to twist its meaning. | |
| Stop twisting the Bible. | |
| Yes. | |
| Stop. | |
| Please. | |
| Please stop twisting the Bible. | |
| Sorry, Pastor Brandon. | |
| We'd be happy to have him on the show, though, to discuss these things. | |
| Until then, I'm Michael Knowles. |