Make Seminaries Great Again critiques Reformed schools for shifting from theological rigor to producing "race hustlers" and social justice warriors, citing Westminster's Title IX-driven admission of women. Hosts condemn figures like Russell Moore and Ekameni Yuan for compromising on abortion and nationalism, arguing this "feminization" creates debt-ridden hirelings unfit for ministry. They propose three solutions: excluding women from enrollment to preserve masculine dynamics, attaching training directly to local churches under elder oversight, and reinstating physical requirements like benching 225 pounds. Ultimately, the episode asserts that restoring doctrinal purity and biblical gender roles is essential to defeating a "trash world" and training faithful leaders for King Jesus. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Seeds Planted in Norway00:03:18
Christianity has been greatly served by the scholars, theologians, and pastors that were equipped for defending the faith through study at institutions such as Cambridge, Yale, and Princeton.
Pastors and scholars like Jonathan Edwards, B.B. Warfield, and R.L. Dabney were products of rigorous academic instruction in the Western tradition, and their influence continues to this day.
But as of late, notable output of even Reformed seminaries.
Seems to be nothing more than race hustlers, social justice warriors, functional Anabaptists, and pietists that would make themselves unrecognizable to their forefathers.
So, where did things go wrong?
And what can we do today to fix our seminaries?
Welcome back and good afternoon, gentlemen.
That's right.
The gang's all here.
The gang's all here, finally.
Yeah, we had four weeks where it was me and Michael twice, and it was me and Wesley twice, and now we're good.
Guest appearance by Eric Kahn.
Yeah, yeah, last week.
Michael, ground level, Europe.
Are they going to make it?
How are things looking over there?
I was just in Europe.
I was in Europe.
For how long?
Two weeks?
Not quite two weeks.
Yeah, 10 days.
So, visited friends in England and in Norway.
And I would say where we were in Norway, they are more committed to actually fighting the fight.
Good.
And in England, the issues that we believe very passionately about.
I said, what's the view of abortion here?
He said, oh, we just.
He was a Christian, he didn't, but he said, We as a country, we just laugh at the backwards Americans who are still arguing over things like abortion and kind of a given, given up on the issue there in the church, even.
So, as in, it's not even a fight, yeah.
Someone said that recently, they were traveling, and uh, I think it was terrible to agree with him, but Rod Dreher, and he said, A Christian in a European country, they're like, You are so lucky that this is a fight that's even on the table, right?
It's not even on the table for us, and hasn't been for decades.
You guys are lucky that it's a real conversation, like, will this be allowed or not?
So, well, great, we got a great topic today.
He's saying, We're lucky.
And it's not on the table for us.
We're lucky to have that option.
This is a battlefield for us.
There's real politicians here.
I know he's in Hungary, but isn't he an American?
Well, he left.
I just.
We don't want to go there.
So sad.
It's sad when that guy you really don't like, you're agreeing with him.
We're not conservatives.
Right.
Lord help us.
Lord help us.
All right.
Well, I was about to say, and speaking of conservatives, we've had this episode actually planned for a while, finally getting around to it.
But so the seminary.
The root word actually is seminarium.
It comes from Latin.
There's another.
Prefix, root word in there that I won't say on air, but it means seedbed.
So, a seminary in classical terms has meant a seedbed, and it's intended to be a place where wisdom and knowledge are deposited in men aspiring to the clergy.
And then later on in life, those crops that have been planted, those seeds that have been planted, they grow up and they bear fruit.
They bear fruit in the lives of the clergy, of course, but also the individuals that they minister to.
That it's intended to be this place that cultivates men, that imbues them with knowledge, and then later on in life, that goes on to bear much fruit for the kingdom.
I was reading, doing some preparation for this episode.
And one guy said this, he said, the Reformation, it was birthed in an academic setting.
The Financial Bubble of Seminaries00:12:54
The base of the Reformation was the university.
Martin Luther, Philip Melanchthon, Ulrich Zwingli, and John Calvin formed and clarified their doctrine in the give and take of academic debate.
So, as Protestants, as evangelicals, the seminary and academia have always been very important.
We've needed these men that have dedicated their lives, brilliant men, to studying the languages, studying theology, working out systematic, coherent systems.
And so, from the outset, we have a lot to thank them for.
But The purpose of a system is what it does.
Aaron McIntyre uses that term a lot, and I think it's a good one.
So we can say, in today, in our current time, well, our seminaries are intended to continue that great tradition, to educate men, to prepare them for the ministry, to take those that are aspiring to the clergy and get them ready to go out and do good work.
We can say that, but what is actually happening?
When we look at the notable output, is that what's going on?
That soldiers are going to the front line for King Jesus?
I was just going to say the purpose of a system is not the title that you give it.
Exactly.
You can write sugar on a label and put it on the flour jar, but it's still flour.
So, what you call something, what you say about something, is not nearly as integral to what it is as much as what it does.
What does it actually do?
So, the public school system, we would say, well, it's not for education, it's for producing Democrat voters.
Right, right.
And turning children against their parents.
It's for the purpose of the public school district to put trans kids out Democrat voters.
And make sure that children grow up to hate their parents.
That's what it does.
That is the system.
It's not about education.
Exactly.
Same with seminaries.
I think it's time, if we can say those things about the public school system, I think not maybe in the same way.
In some ways, it's maybe not so severe.
In other ways, I think it might even be more pernicious and sinister.
But we need to start talking about what is, if we're honest in terms of what it does, what is the purpose of seminaries?
That's actually, Nate, if you have that first clip, I'm going to play the clip and then I'll give you the background for it.
BP Kamala Harris has been a leader on so many issues that matter to our communities.
From advancing the child tax credit, which reduced child poverty by 50% in 2021, something we want to continue to work on together, to ensure that families have access to affordable health care like low prescription drug prices, contraception, and IVF, issues that evangelicals overwhelmingly support.
She has also advanced a biblical view of creation care and works to find solutions to the climate crisis, and has been an advocate for racial justice.
Which we all know is rooted in a vision of justice scriptures, which is laid out from Genesis to Revelation.
All people are created in the image of God, and Vice President Harris has worked hard to ensure that we achieve policy solutions that reflect these goals.
All right.
Just before you do this, Wes, I want to just make sure that we don't unintentionally malign our tech guy, Nate.
The little pop up box on the window, that was part of the video.
That was not Nate.
Nathan would never.
Ever be such a normie as to let that happen?
To have a pop up.
All right.
So, what you just heard was a woman named Ekameni Yuan, Ekameni Yuan, was leading a Zoom call, Evangelicals for Harris, a roundtable gathering.
This was like years and years ago.
When I saw this video, Wes, I know.
You're joking, but seriously, when you sent this in our thread as we were preparing for today, I thought, like, I don't know if it's super relevant to show, like, a video that's probably from, like, 2012 or.
God's Honest Truth.
I thought this has to be from 2012 to 2015.
And then you're like, no, my dear brother in Christ, that was from two weeks ago.
That was two weeks ago.
So this is Ekameni.
She's a leader.
She wrote a book.
I think it's called Truth Talks.
She also hosts a podcast, which I went through.
I scrolled some of the podcast titles.
One of them was The Sacred Act of Self Help or Sacred Act of Self Care.
So now why does that matter?
Well, this woman graduated less than a decade ago from Westminster Theological Seminary, not West.
East, the seminary, Philadelphia, the seminary founded by the lion in the faith, J. Gresham Machen, who took a stand against liberalism, where Cornelius Van Til lectured less than a hundred years ago.
Hold up, hold up.
She graduated in homemaking?
What, like, what?
I don't understand.
My brother in Christ, I regret to inform you.
Not in homemaking.
What was her degree?
I don't understand.
See, this is, I'll just be honest.
Part of the problem is not like, hey, here's somebody who graduated from a supposedly very conservative seminary, and look at, you know, look at.
How far off the rails, and now they're supporting evangelicals for Harris.
And IVF, they just kill and slaughter hundreds and thousands of children, freeze them on ice, and most of them get discarded.
It's not just that.
It's also, like, let's just say it.
What is a woman doing in seminary?
Yep.
What is a woman doing in seminary?
I don't understand, like, I said it tongue in cheek, the home mech thing, but seriously, and even that would frustrate me because.
Why would you go into debt for your future husband to study home mech in a college when you could study that with your mother by being her daughter in a home?
So, anyways, I just am going to pull back my feelings there because there's a lot of women who are not getting that, right?
There might need to be a generation of real intentional training.
Yeah, but not at a four year school.
I agree.
Not at a four year school with $150,000 of debt, you know, or $80,000 of debt that eventually, you know, you're basically crossing your fingers and hoping that some Democrat president will make all the conservatives pay for it with their tax dollars.
That's not how you do it.
And for the record, I'm not against.
Women going to school for anything, higher education for anything.
I do think that there may be some cases where a young woman goes to school and studies XYZ because, for a time, as she's waiting to get married, because here's the reality we are in such disrepair that the average 18 year old woman who is conservative, loves the Lord, was raised right by her parents, and does want to be a wife and a mom.
A lot of times, there's not that 20 year old man who is standing right there who loves the Lord Jesus Christ and is working hard and is ready to sweep her off her feet.
Like, so she's like, What do I do?
And I think there's a lot of options.
And just for the record, going to school, I'm not totally against it, but I will certainly say that it is lower on my list.
Like, if you're thinking, What can I do?
Because what you're thinking is eventually the end goal, if God would be so kind, all right, we can't make it happen.
God is sovereign, and not every woman's going to get married.
Sadly, that's just the reality.
But ordinarily, they will.
Ordinarily, they will.
And if that's the goal, being a wife and a mother, then racking up debt for your future husband is probably not the best strategy.
So, There may be some things to go to school for, and in those cases, you're going to a school that's affordable and not racking up debt.
But in most cases, there are certain things that you can be doing as you're waiting on marriage and family where you're making money and where your parents are helping you towards this and helping you towards that.
But all that being said, those are my disclaimers.
But all that out of the way, one school you definitely don't need to be going to is seminary, which is supposed to train pastors, which you can't be.
The Bible literally tells you you can't be one.
So, we're going to coax in young women to rack up debt to pay for our professors to teach them to do something that they're not supposed to do.
I want to come back to some of the output of the seminary because it's like, oh, you got one clip, that was bad, sure, but is that systemic?
We'll get back to that.
But on that point, do you know why they admit women?
A lot of these seminaries, and to be fair, that doesn't really help much, they technically are not typically allowed in MDiv programs, which are intended for pastoral ministry.
They would do something similar to an MA.
Or a master's in theological arts.
But do you know the reason that most of these seminaries have accepted women?
To pay their salaries?
Title IX, which is a federal title, which requires under the Civil Rights Act that schools that can receive federal funding and loans, they cannot discriminate on the basis of sex.
So if a school, like, say, Greenville Presbyterian Seminary, wanted to access for their students, for their faculty, for themselves, federal dollars, what they would have to do is have to have the program open and not discriminate on the basis of any of those things.
And well, does Jesus say the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil?
So these men know, yeah, a woman can't be a pastor.
Yeah, a woman getting her master's of arts in biblical counseling, yeah, it's not ideal.
They would know that if they've read Calvin and any of those guys.
But here's the allure nice $200,000 salary to write academic papers and lecture a couple times a year.
And so a big driving force of this, I would argue, is money.
Yes, there's some of the theology.
Well, an unordained woman can do anything a man can do, and some of these men won't be ordained.
But really, underneath it, I think a lot of it is Title IX.
Eligibility for federal funding, and these seminaries, Daddy government came by with a big check in hand, ready to write it out, and they said, Yes, please.
We'll be happy to open up our own little program and integrate these classes and bring women onto campus for those sweet federal dollars.
Well, it's interesting because since we're going down this path right now, some of the stuff that I looked at was the fact that especially evangelical seminaries are having a really difficult time getting enrollment, getting numbers, maintaining their numbers.
For instance, in Gordon Theological Seminary, Gordon Conwell?
Gordon Conwell.
Yep.
Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary recently announced that they're going to have to sell most of their 102 acre campus in order to stay financially viable.
And, you know, you think 15, 20, 30 years ago, that never would have been.
Tell me, Meredith Klein's legacy, because he lectured at Gordon Conwell, didn't save the institution.
I'm shocked.
Fuller, 2018, it closed three of its satellite campuses and it's selling property in Pasadena, California.
And it's totally, its financial future is totally in jeopardy.
So, one of the things that seminaries have been doing, along with Title IX, because Title IX is there, they have been offering more, shall we say, creative degree tracks.
Okay, so here's a list of some of the degree tracks that are available at seminaries now, evangelical seminaries.
We have Aging and Spirituality, a four year degree.
No, not a four year, two year, an MA at Asbury Theological Seminary.
And what is it?
Aging and Spirituality.
A master's in aging, like getting older.
Yeah.
So, how to do pastoral care towards those who are aging.
Okay.
You've got apologetics and cosmogony.
That's Regent University School of Divinity.
Biblical exegesis and linguistics at Dallas.
That's not that bad.
Black church studies at Ashland Theological Seminary.
Cultural engagement.
Whole master's degree in cultural engagement from Denver Seminary.
Okay.
It just goes on and on.
Islamic studies, Near Eastern archaeology.
That's more academic.
And one of the things that we could talk about is whether some of the academic, like an archaeology degree, does a seminary need to be offering archaeology?
Nonprofit Leadership for Social Justice at Grand Rapids Theological Seminary.
I have friends who went to that seminary.
That's a big Dutch Reformed area, Grand Rapids.
Yep.
Some of the guys like Voss and Bob Inc. and others.
What was it?
Nonprofit Leadership for Social Justice.
An MA.
Nonprofit Leadership.
Okay.
And so.
You should go to that, Joel.
Urban ministry at Grand Canyon Theological Seminary.
The point is, as the seminaries have achieved this sort of financial bubble over maybe the 90s, 2000s, Title IX money came in in order for them to sustain the numbers.
Now that I would argue some people are seeing the fruit of their ministry, which we're going to get to, and are like, I'm not going to seminary, I'm not sending my sons to that seminary.
So they've had to introduce this sort of degree track, a lot of them.
In order to entice new students.
And a lot of those new students, this is just kind of speculation here.
I don't have numbers on this, but a lot of those new students are going to be women, right?
And it's not an empty of track.
Let's do that second clip.
Yep, let's do that second clip then.
Hold up real quick.
Before we do it, I just want to address this one comment because I think it's an opportunity to provide some clarity.
Eyes of Laura Mars.
Mary Sitting at Jesus Feet00:04:09
She said, Mary sat at Jesus' feet learning, and Priscilla helped.
I guess she's talking about.
Helped the church.
Yeah.
She was a helper.
Doesn't mean that either of these women are going to be a pastor.
So, Mary sitting at the feet of Jesus learning.
So, the way that I would respond to that is simply by saying that we are not against women learning.
100%.
So, one of the things that Paul explicitly says in 1 Timothy chapter 2, I believe starting in verse 9, it might be verse 11, but he says, A woman must learn.
Must learn.
And then he begins to say, In what manner, what kind of disposition she should possess as she's learning.
She must learn in quietness and full submission.
And he's not saying she should learn how to be quiet.
He's saying she should learn, and the implication is, all the things that the men are learning, but where?
This is the key.
He's talking about the context of the local church.
So, Mary sitting at the feet of Jesus, learning, yeah, my daughters, six and five and three years old, are sitting at the feet of Jesus in a proverbial and spiritual, but biblically true sense every single week on the Lord's Day during the gathering of the saints and the ministering of the ordinary means of grace, preaching the word, praying the word, singing the word.
When these things are happening, and then seeing the word and the sacrament of the Lord's Supper and baptism, everyone is sitting at the feet.
And not just men and women, but we're one of those churches that is not discriminating against children.
The person, usually, the feminist savvy person, about 99.99999% of the time, if they go to a church, it's a liberal church.
And you know what that church does?
Number one, it probably doesn't have kids, right?
Because it's hard to procreate when you're gay.
And then two, if they do have kids, What do they do for church?
They send them to a separate room.
They put them in childcare.
Not at Covenant Bible Church.
We have both old and young, both male and female.
And it's not just this, you know, well, there's deep theology for the men, and then there's watered down theology for the women, or deep theology for the adults.
But, you know, the kids are dumb, and we're not going to give them much.
No, no, no.
Everybody is drinking from the same fountain.
Everyone is receiving the same spiritual meal that's being laid before them, seven course meal.
And I'm not talking, not boasting about myself.
Not talking about just the sermon, I'm talking about the liturgy from start to finish, the pastoral prayers, the scripture readings, the Lord's Supper, the singing, the hymns and the psalms, the whole nine yards.
Everyone is eating from the same table.
We're not like those parents who set up their children for failure, who make two meals for the family because they know the kids might complain.
And so the kids get chicken nuggets, mac and cheese, or pizza every single night of the week while the adults eat something else.
No, we don't make two meals.
For two spiritual meals for the adults and the children, or for the men and the women on the Lord's Day, we all come together as the family of God, young and old, man and woman, and we sit at the same table, we eat the same meal.
And that, here's the deal that is what I would liken to the example of Mary sitting at the feet of Jesus and learning.
That's where you learn.
That's what 1 Timothy chapter 2 is all about.
Paul is talking about the context of the local church, he's not talking about seminaries.
So we are all for women learning.
And here's the thing.
If you actually have qualified men going to seminaries and you have qualified seminaries to train those men, then guess who benefits from it?
Everybody, including the women, because then those men come back to local churches and fill the pulpits and teach the Word of God, rightly dividing the Word of God, the Word of truth.
And everybody benefits from that.
The women in our church are learning theology proper, doctrine of God.
They're learning about the impassibility of God.
They're learning about a God without parts and divine simplicity.
They're learning all these things.
Because I don't treat people like idiots when we preach the word of God.
Qualified Men Benefit Everyone00:08:25
I preach the word of God at a high level, knowing that if people have questions, guess what?
Women can ask their husbands, which is exactly what Paul says.
First Corinthians, oh, that's so chauvinistic.
That's just Bible.
If any woman has a question, let her ask her husband at home.
I don't like the way you interpreted that.
I didn't.
I quoted it.
That's scripture.
And then, secondly, if her husband can't answer the question, then guess what?
Then it becomes their question.
And then they go and seek out pastors.
And if the pastor can't answer the question, then I'm going to be seeking out other guys and other ministers who are qualified.
And we're going to, so our church, the whole church, the children, the men, the women, we are learning sound, deep, profound.
Doctrine and the idea that somehow you are barring women from learning, barring them from sitting at the feet of Jesus by not, churches not providing scholarships for women to go to a four year degree in seminary.
I reject.
I reject, ma'am.
Let's play this clip.
Yeah, we'll play it then.
We'll have some comments.
We're here at NSO and we're going to get to know some of our new students and just hear what they're about, what they're studying, and where they come from.
Let's see if we can talk to some friends.
How are you guys doing?
What are your guys' names?
I'm Clara.
I'm Sydney.
What has been your favorite thing about today so far?
Probably breakfast.
Very straightforward.
Meeting new people.
All right.
My name is Zach Johnson.
I was actually born when my parents were students here, so I am visiting my birthplace.
Into the same apartment that I slept in as a newborn, so that's wow.
Full circle.
Full circle moment.
What are you studying?
I'm studying the MDiv in Christian ministry.
Awesome.
I'm here with Holly Ann.
What are you studying?
I am studying the MA Christian Marital Family and Individual Counseling.
Wow, she got it all right too.
Can you just speak a little bit to why you chose Southeastern?
I always kind of knew about their commitment to the Bible and to the Lord.
And when I visited, everyone was very genuine.
I just thought it would be a great place to study as a Christian because I want to be a Christian counselor specifically.
Oh, hey, who are you?
I'm Trevor.
Hey, Trevor, what are you studying this fall?
I am studying for my MDF and church revitalization.
One word for NSO.
What would you use?
I mean, it's been amazing.
I don't really have one word for it, but just being able to get to meet people that are walking through similar stages of life as you, it's pretty cool.
Where's that from, Wes?
This is from a new student orientation that just happened.
SBC Underground posted it on X slash Twitter, just kind of showing what's going on in campus.
But which seminary?
Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.
Yep.
Which is the flagship seminary for SBC.
You're going to have to monologue for a little bit, Wes, because I.
I will get myself in so much trouble if I respond to that.
If you, I'll say this.
What are your thoughts?
If you can't recognize what's going on in that clip, my brother in Christ, you are in the water, you are swimming in it, and you can't get out of it.
Think of the caliber of men.
And not just intellectual.
Like there is intellectual caliber, but also of stature, of discipline, of gravitas, of people like Stonewall, like just speaking more broadly in seminaries, Stonewall Jackson.
And then you look at this.
Robert E. Lee.
Robert E. Lee.
Christian preachers like Charles Spurgeon, who would literally send men away based off of their physique.
Yeah.
There's one man who said, and I understand, just real quick, to play the devil's advocate, people say, yeah, but they didn't have microphones and blah, blah, blah.
And so he was talking about barrel chested men so that they could enunciate and they could project so that their voice would be heard to large crowds in an organic sense.
Uh huh.
Yeah.
And also, Charles Spurgeon has a quote about beards.
And he literally, in typical Spurgeon fashion, right?
He doesn't say, Well, I have an opinion or I think or this is open for, he just everything is dogma with Spurgeon.
And Spurgeon straight up said, To not have a beard is unbiblical.
Yep.
It's unmanly and unbiblical.
Well, that one is not about your voice.
You know, that one doesn't have a functional, like, no.
Charles Spurgeon just straight up would judge guys.
I'm going to decide whether or not I'm going to train you to be a preacher based off of your character, your godliness, your theology, your theological aptitude, intellectual capacity.
And also, if you look like a dude, there was a guy who preached.
If you don't, go home.
In his lectures to students, and he said, I had to send him away because for all the gold and Tarshish, I could not have kept a straight face as he spoke.
Wow.
Literally, his voice, like, you do not have the voice to be a minister.
And so I don't want to.
Pick on these kids, but I mean, they're young.
Like, these are what we're supposed to send to the front lines.
The culture war is as thick as it's ever been.
The church is in more need than ever before of good godly ministers, good godly men to fill pulpits.
And it's, for one, it's 50% women.
So that's 50% that won't be going to the pulpit.
Spoiler, probably about 25% of them will in due time.
Yes.
So half of that can't even go into the pulpits.
Then the other half, it's this.
Like, well, this is what we have to.
Part of it, maybe we pick this apart a little more later on, but part of it is that I think that we don't know what seminaries are for anymore.
Right?
And so if seminary is just to provide the brand new Christian a place to explore his journey in Christ.
That's just not seminary.
That's not seminary.
That's actually a local church.
Right.
That's a local church.
But that, you know, some of the people in that clip, like this was the.
The myth of the university, have the college experience, find yourself, discover who you are, just apply it in a Christian context.
Not, we're training warriors to go out and advance Christ's kingdom from the pulpit and in writing and in scholarship of what Christ has said through the word and what the church fathers have said throughout history.
Like, this is not military training here.
This is not the army of the living God here.
This is find yourself and.
Come do it at our game.
This is the role playing in many ways.
Yeah.
One other thing that I noticed, right?
So I've, you know, you guys bought me some time, so I've been able to calm down.
I think I can say it very, very calmly.
But is it just me?
Maybe, you know, I could be biased, but I saw a lot of chicks.
Yeah.
Like I think 50% might be low.
I think 50%, like if I said half were female, I think that that would not be accurate.
I think it was well over half.
Wow.
Now, that doesn't mean that, like, I don't have the roster in front of me, but I'm just saying, This is still a video that they put out, I'm assuming.
It's something that they feel good about.
They think this is putting our best foot forward.
This is what we want to represent.
So, that doesn't mean that over half of their enrollment is female, but it does mean that in terms of what we want to present, we want to present that in our video, we want to display as though over half of the people here on campus are women.
Well, this just happened at Reform Theological Seminary in Jackson.
They posted a video of new student orientation.
You got blasted for that one.
I got.
I didn't get destroyed because I was right and I got way more likes than comments.
But people were mad because I pointed out it was about 50% women.
It was a bunch setting.
Some of them were maybe wives.
So maybe even it was 30, 40%.
But this is at Reformed Theological Seminary.
I couldn't find the quote.
Calvin himself commentating on 1 Timothy.
He says, If a woman should spend all her days in the church, in prayer and piety and teaching and service, that would not be as acceptable to God as to rear up the home and to love her children.
In the Reformed tradition, that is what we've believed, that the place of the woman is.
The home to serve and to love her husband if she is married, to love her children, to teach them.
And then we pan out then and we look at the incoming class of RTS Jackson, and it's 40% women to go do what?
To go girl boss?
To go be like, imagine walking into marriage counseling and it's Kaylee who's 25 with an MA in biblical counseling.
I'm sorry, I'd say, oh, I must be in the wrong room.
I'll see myself out the hall.
Women and the Reformed Tradition00:15:26
Yeah.
Right.
Let me.
Do we want to hit a break?
Yeah, let's go ahead to our first commercial break and then we're going to come back.
We're going to engage with the chat.
You guys go ahead and we've already done a little bit, but we want to be in the habit each week of trying to answer some of your questions.
So if you say, hey, make it clear it's a question, question, and then go ahead and state it.
And we're going to come back.
We're going to deal with a few more, a little bit more of the subject matter, but then we're going to start engaging with you guys and answering questions.
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Welcome back.
Thanks for adding those questions.
Those of you who had questions, we'll go ahead and get to them a little bit later in the segment.
I did promise I would go back and give a little bit of a list of some of these individuals that are influential.
Yeah, we're in the U.S. What do we do?
Well, what we do comes after who?
My bad.
Why is the problem?
Because we played a clip of someone, Evangelicals for Harris, and someone could say, well, okay, come on.
You found one bad person that graduated from the seminary.
That's not the whole story.
But I'm going to go through and I'm going to name, I'm not going to take a ton of time with this, name some of the most influential and subversive individuals and where they came up, where they taught, and how they got their influence.
So one of the big ones is Russell Moore.
Russell Moore went to SBTS and not only went there, then went on to professor there.
And do you think he would have been appointed to the ERLC where he did all that damage if he did not first spend 10 to 15 years in the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary circuit?
Absolutely not.
That's where he made a name for himself.
Went there, taught there.
Ed Stetzer at SBTS.
Stephen Furtick went to a Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
Lots of great stuff coming out of him.
Jamar Tisbe, one of the greatest race hustlers out there today.
I mean, he's got the grift on point.
Yes.
He was on a podcast, it was a decent time ago, like two years.
And there's a woman there talking about queer theology and the inclusion of everyone.
didn't breathe a word of protest when he came out of RTS in 2016.
Ligan Duncan, another terrible example, chancellor of RTS, was singing his praises.
Jamar Tisby is a bright right, right?
Well, he did a great Mason, it's my bad, but he was singing his praises.
Jamar Tisby is the future of Reformed theology.
He is a bright, brilliant mind who's going to go on and defend theology of God and the Reformed tradition.
It's just embarrassing.
Some of these other issues, the crucial point of attack.
And people have done a terrible job with them.
Timothy Keller, that's Gordon Conwell, and then taught till the end of his life at RTS.
He's bad on abortion.
He's bad on a number of things, sadly.
Abortion was a big spot.
Paul David Tripp, Westminster Theological Seminary, lectured there.
Race relations.
Wait, wait, wait, wait.
He lectured on race relations?
Not at Westminster, but in 2020.
He did a struggle session on the stairs of his apartment.
I remember that.
It was a struggle session for all struggle sessions.
But how did these people have their names?
They went to conservative evangelical seminaries.
Attended, taught, wrote books, wrote academic stuff, and then got their name, their conference circuit, this, that, or the other.
Dude, what year was it for you guys when you realized that the phrase gospel centered just meant voting for Democrats?
For me, it was 2018, which I'm ashamed to say.
It took me Eric Mason writing Woke Church.
And that's when I left Acts 29, and I realized, oh, gospel centered just means pastors ignoring everything in scripture but the gospel and avoiding the law of God.
So that their parishioners who already vote for Democrats won't leave their church and will continue to tithe.
I feel embarrassed to say it, but it took me until 2018 to realize that.
Gospel centered means pastors who assuage the conscience of Democrat voters so that their churches can be larger.
Yeah.
Yep.
But what year for you guys?
It was when I heard you say it.
Yep.
There you go.
Yep.
Perfect.
Yeah, about 2018, 2019.
I remember listening to you and I was like, oh, yeah.
That's pretty much it.
And then we saw it in 2020 on display.
Who else crumbled?
Jonathan Lehman.
I think it was actually Westminster that he also taught some visiting classes at, or maybe RTS.
Christian political engagement.
Owen Strand, R. Scott Clark, Kevin DeYoung, seminary bred, seminary teachers, and their political engagement has been terrible.
Just listened to today.
I did it in the car, which I don't recommend.
If you were in your car, do not put on mortification spin with Carl Truman and Todd Pritt because you'll want to crash your car.
You will look for the easiest way out to stop the pain and the suffering.
Todd Pritt and Carl Truman, for anyone who's not familiar, they're the ones who put Amy Bird on the map.
Amy Bird is a feminist who they hosted on their podcast many times and unleashed her on the OPC.
Yeah.
In the OPC.
And then eventually she started getting a blog.
And then she started, what was that book in 2018?
Responding to Biblical Manhood or Womanhood.
Yeah.
Yeah.
She came out of that.
No, but I don't think it was just responding to.
I think it was like.
Beyond gender roles.
Yeah, beyond.
Or like leaving or deconstructing from, you know.
Recovering.
Recovering from the Bible.
That's what it was.
Recovering from the Bible.
And now she preaches on Sunday morning.
She does.
Carl Truman and Todd Pritt, who put her on the map, where she is now deconstructed, preaching on a Sunday morning.
Where does she preach Sunday morning?
Not in the OPC.
Not in the OPC.
Maybe in Carl Truman's living room, like a personal sermon for him.
No, it comes from the Presbyterian Church.
I think it's somewhere in the East.
I believe it was Tennessee.
I remember.
They were all very excited that Amy Bird.
Such a bummer.
Because I remember reading the, what was it?
The Triumph.
The Triumph of the Modernist Help.
Exactly.
I remember reading that and saying, yeah, it's a pretty good book.
I didn't think it was as amazing as everybody else, but I was like, yeah, this guy, I'm just being petty and envious if I can't acknowledge.
This guy is a good thinker.
He's got a good mind.
This is helpful.
And I remember he came to our town, to Georgetown.
There was a church that hosted him, and he gave a presentation that was similar to the book, just like in a general sense, this is bad, and it deals with questions of identity, and it answers them precisely in the opposite way that the Bible wouldn't.
So, yeah, that's really good.
But then there was a follow up for pastors only the next morning that was hosted.
And I got to go, and it was maybe 25 other pastors in the room.
And in that scenario, it was a QA where we got to actually engage with them.
And I remember asking, you know, some practical questions like, you know, well, okay, with transgenderism and these kinds of things, what do you do if there's a gay pride parade, you know, in your hometown?
And, you know, they're marching through the street.
And in some of these cases, as we've seen, you know, like guys who are straight up naked and, you know, gyrating in front of little children.
So, like, what do you do with that?
And then I was even, you know, and he gave an answer that was just kind of weak.
And so then I even pressed further and just saying, like, well, can you, Can you oppose it?
Can you stand and preach and tell them that this is perversion?
And can you oppose it?
Is there any muscular option?
And the answer was pretty clear no.
Well, he just said today in that episode that I listened to, they were talking about Christian nationalism.
So, of course.
I mentioned the Amy Bird thing to say their discernment, their record's already rocky.
He said this, but they, that is Christian nationalists, are an existential threat to congregations and denominations.
And that's why we need to be very aware.
Of what's going on online relative to individuals coming forward for ministry now.
And he actually said, when we get seminarians and we're testing for their ordination, we need to be asking them if they're Christian nationalists.
That's what they said in that episode today.
No, because they want that, because they would weed it.
Exactly.
So they're banning, catch them.
Spurgeon will ban the unmanly men, and they will ban the ones who want their nation to honor God.
Right.
The ones that, which also is the masculine.
That's right.
And that's what it really comes down to.
Again, a system, it's not what it's called, it's what it does.
The purpose of a system is what it does.
And so, the purpose of the seminary system, I think we have to acknowledge at some level, it is to crush masculinity.
I really believe that.
So, whether it's Carl Truman and OPC seminaries trying to weed out Christian nationalism, wanting a nation to be distinctly Christian, to honor God, and to legislate.
Here's the thing and to legislate both tables of the law.
In other words, having the same views as John Calvin.
Right.
And John Gill on the Baptist side.
The confessional view.
And I know about the American Revision.
It's still perfectly on that side.
It's perfectly.
Yeah.
Whether it be Philadelphia or whether it be London, it is perfectly compliant with both.
But the point is, it's not just that.
It's not just like, oh, we want to weed out politics.
If you subtract it down to the lowest common denominator of trying to ban a muscular political approach or not too much cultural engagement or this or that, what it all has in common is.
The purpose of seminaries is to feminize the church.
That's right.
I believe that.
I really do.
So it's like, what have we seen?
We've seen the current iteration of seminaries.
Exactly.
It's not what it was supposed originally, but that's what it is today.
And if you think, well, but I'm in the OPC and they're super conservative, the guys, the OPC gave you Amy Bird.
That's right.
You just have to own that.
All right.
That's like, I'm not saying you suck with everything.
I'm grateful for the OPC in many different ways, but that's a giant L and you have to wear it, you know, just like the scarlet letter A, you know, like you have to walk around and you have to say, you know, by the grace of God, you know, there's hope, but also unclean, unclean.
We unleashed Amy Bird on the world.
That is.
That is you.
And Carl Truman.
And that's you.
You got to own that.
Well, think about this in the 90s.
But my point is, with that and the video we showed, all the women coming to.
So whether it's their enrollments with all the women, or whether it's banning Christian nationalism with OPC, you know, like conservative seminaries, or whether it's this, that, and the other.
I really do think that the point of seminary is to feminize the church.
I really do.
What did Westminster Seminary?
They finally got all the faculty together to write a book in the 90s.
And what was it against?
Abortion, transgenderism, the sexual revolution against theonomy.
Right.
Westminster, which provides, it's not affiliated with a denomination, so it is not technically a peaceful organization.
Okay, so say that again.
This is in the 90s.
I remember.
So in the 90s.
The clip from Greg Bonson is pretty based on that.
He's like, you have to lock your windows at night.
He's like, right?
Like, people are there.
Murder is at an all time high.
There's this going on and that going on.
And you want to.
You got everyone together because it's hard to get everyone together against theonomy.
That's your big concern.
So they got all the faculty.
This is the project.
Can we get everyone together?
Can you write this?
Can you write that?
Zach has a fantastic comment.
I don't know if we should read it, but hey, Zach, I know you're listening and you just, like the scripture says, give honor where honor is due.
Well done, brother.
That is, you did well.
All right.
How do I fix it, though?
I can't say it.
No, I won't say it.
I can say it on our show.
The problem is I get picked up by somebody else and then it'll be seven seconds.
Yeah.
And that'll be the only thing.
They'll be like, yeah, Joel Webbin, doesn't he believe in mermaids?
And he also said that one time.
Yeah.
Anyways, that's what you're known for.
Right.
All right.
We've pointed out the problems.
It is not just a one off here and one off there.
It is a systemic problem.
Can I just say one other thing before we go there?
Go for it.
There are seminaries like the Masters Seminary where they do not allow women.
Yep.
They do not allow their students to go into debt to pay for seminary.
They're not taking government money.
And yet, a lot of the people that are coming out of them are not the manly warrior types.
Right?
Like, it is not just an issue.
Joel, I think you're onto something.
It's not just an issue of, well, the seminaries that took government money or not.
There has been a prevailing trend to make Christianity feminine.
And when that is the goal, the training for those who will train other Christians is to feminize them as well.
And that's why when Zachary Garrus writes a book, Masking Christianity, that until not long ago was just common thought and belief, it's this firestorm.
And so, I like, I just, Wes, before you go into fixing it, I want some people, Joel, you've said this, when we talk about public schools, they'll say, yeah, those are all terrible, but mine is great.
Right.
And some of them are going to say, yeah, seminaries are terrible, but the one, you know, the one that we send our guys to is fantastic.
And it's like, you need to ask yourself, how many of the products of the seminary that your church sends men to are battling for truth, not compromising truth?
So we're not saying social justice on relevant cultural issues.
Right.
There's lots who are battling for cultural issues.
They're the woke social justice Christians.
So, how many of them are based theologically and are fighting the current battles?
Not very many of them.
Defining the Purpose of Seminary00:11:22
To credit where credit is due, the forward to Zachary Garrison's Honor Thy Fathers, an anti feminist work, was written by Joseph Pippa, who is chancellor or president at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary.
They do admit women.
I actually had a really good friend who went there, but it does seem like overall a rigorous program, especially if you're going there for more the academic part of it, the formal instruction versus the actual being made behavior into a masculine man.
So, great point, Michael.
I'm going to say these three things.
They are not going to be the only things that are going to fix it, but I think they are the base level.
To getting back to where our seminaries are just even putting out people that are not going to counter signal other Christians, that are not going to go to war with, not the world, the flesh, and the devil, but turn their fire on the Christians out there doing good work.
So, three things, I'll read them all, and then we can discuss maybe each one in turn, maybe more, maybe less.
Get women out of seminary.
There's, in a seminary context, again, not all education we've talked about, but in a seminary context, get women out.
We've talked about why for the women's, but also the dynamic of a woman in a classroom, women are less aggressive.
Which is good and right.
That's how God made them.
They're less aggressive, they're less confrontational, and they're more passive.
That changes the dynamic of a classroom.
It neuters the type of male initiative, edge, and discipline that should be present in the men that we would hope would come to our pulpits.
So, men that are going to preach, men that are going to engage the culture, men that are going to live godly lives.
We want them at some level to have an edge.
But if every single classroom they have to share and debate and do group projects with is 50% women, 30% women, 20% women, That classroom is going to be suited to the feminine sensibilities that God has made women to have.
God made women to be more passive, to be less aggressive.
And those are wonderful in their context.
And the context is not a classroom where we're training men to go into pastoral ministry.
So get women out of seminary as professors as well.
As professors as well.
Yeah.
I'm not just enrolling.
Yep.
Students and professors.
Attach pastoral training to local churches.
We had a question on this.
I'll dive more into detail on that a little bit after.
But at least for the time, I think it's wisest that seminaries be attached to churches.
Attached to the oversight, attached to the elders, attached to the structure, the teaching, the lecturing of pastors in a local church.
And then finally, make seminary manly again, like you said.
And there is a faux masculinity, so I'm not talking about a bench press requirement.
Although, I truly believe this.
Guys, Weston's been doing this for a while now, so this is not just clickbait.
You make the entry requirement to seminary, bench 225 for three, and you would fix seminaries in 10 years.
I'm not even kidding.
If you made that, and not to have to do it every year for the rest of your life, but you're a man, you're preparing for entry into seminary, you need to actually be a man.
You need to actually have a little bit of a chest.
A man in his 20s should be able to get there in like three to four months.
And if you don't have the discipline to do that, we don't really want you.
I'm sorry.
There's lots of good men out there.
So making seminaries manly, that starts with faculty, well disciplined men who look sharp, who present well, who have, like I talked about, an edge to them, who teach, are godly, they're strong, they're willing to say offensive things.
Make seminaries manly again.
Get women out and attach them to local churches.
Those, I think, would be a great starting point in this, yeah, to making seminaries great again.
Make seminary great again.
Yeah.
They were great, and they are not anymore.
I think that's well thought out.
That's good.
Michael, any thoughts?
Yeah.
I just, the only one I'll add, and I already said this, is just, and I don't know where this change can happen, but the perception of what seminaries are for needs to change.
And part of that's going to be godly men coming into leadership at seminaries and then just putting an end to the nonsense.
Saying, no, we are not providing church revitalization, inner city church revitalization programs.
And so I don't think that there's really any other way than for godly men going to seminaries and saying, we're not offering these fluff degrees.
This is not a place to find yourself.
This is not a place for you to, as a baby Christian, study.
It's not that.
So at some point, seminaries are going to have to properly position themselves and define themselves.
And part of that is, this is not a new idea to us.
We've mentioned it before, but part of that is not elevating the pastoral ministry as the only viable option for ambitious, well qualified men who love Jesus.
Who love Jesus.
Yeah.
And so if the church and pastors esteem other things, other programs, then seminary doesn't have to be this end all Christian experience.
It can just be a tool that trains pastors.
Right.
Trains pastors in.
Theology and to think about relevant issues, but is simply just that.
Brian Sauvay, I think it was in a King's Hall episode, and they talked about it might have been seminaries and education.
But they said the ideal situation is you have a church that's been established, and there's a young man who shows potential and desires it.
So he's been vetted, families know him.
And then seminary is merely the addendum on what might be an already qualified man to go on and do that vocationally.
So he's already a leader, already godly, already qualified, already leading his family.
There's just a piece on some of the systematic theology that he hasn't been able to learn because maybe he works a full time job.
That's where the seminary comes in.
And then probably he comes back to the local church to benefit.
And again, he's installed as a pastor, not as somebody, somebody mentioned just sending out your resume across the nation.
He's not so and so from the Denver seminary that we don't know from Adam.
It's a young man who came up in this church, who we've known him and his family for 10 to 15 years.
We've witnessed him grow as a man.
And now he has a formal theological education.
He's sharp as attack, he can rebuff any assault in the scripture, and you bring that man back in.
That man back in, that is the recipe for someone who will do decades, by God's grace, of good, faithful, godly ministry.
The situation we have now, the attrition rates for ministry, they're bad.
A lot of men don't stick with it.
They spend all the money and they don't even continue in ministry.
But that one, it's not going to be perfect.
That's going to get you a lot better success, fruit, and godliness on the long term than the current model we have right now.
Right.
But what it would mean is probably just a lot less people go to seminary.
Well.
And so it's just, it's, well, you know.
It's funny because everybody is very, very, very concerned, troubled and concerned.
The Concerned Bros, right?
There's such a thing as a Theo Bro, but there's certainly such a thing as a Concerned Bro.
We've got a couple in the chat right here.
I'm looking at them.
The Concerned Bros are real.
And one of their deep, deep, deep concerns is grifting.
And they think that somehow anybody with a podcast has a monopoly on grifting.
But if we want to talk about professional level, like gold tier level grifting, Like, right, because I mean, I'm over here, you know, just doing a podcast, and I may be a grifter, but I must not be very good at it, you know, because if we want to talk about champions of grifting, um, we're talking about entire, you know, like 200, 300, 400 acre campuses, you know, and stone buildings, and you know,
millions and hundreds of millions of dollars of assets, and you know, employing you know, hundreds of people, and all you know, 10 year professions where you can never lose your job and good retirement, all like now that.
That is a grift.
But it ain't the podcasters.
It's the seminary.
Seminaries have become like it's like anything else, just like a mega church or anything.
The purpose of the system is what it does.
And sadly, at this point, seminaries are an end in themselves.
It's not a means to the end of actually benefiting the church.
It's just how can our seminary grow?
Not how the Church of Jesus, but how can the seminary continue to grow?
Well, one way you can get anything to grow is if you double the market.
You know, and say, like, hey, you know what?
Upon further research, you know, we went back to the scripture and we realized that, I mean, yeah, okay, you know, maybe a woman still can't be a pastor.
We'll keep our, you know, our complimentarian, soft complimentarian card, you know, in our back pocket.
But there's no reason that a woman can't go to seminary because, I mean, that's great.
If she racks up $80,000 of debt, you know, training to do something that the scripture won't allow her to do in the first place, that's great, you know, because she's going to teach her kids, you know.
And don't we want, you know, a seminary trained woman to teach her kids, you know?
And it's like, no.
We want intelligent, well-learned women training their kids, yes.
But I don't think that you have to do that for $80,000.
I don't think that you have to do that at seminary.
We are not against women learning.
What we're against is we're against grifters charging women $80,000 to learn with no way of getting a return and keeping women, in many cases, from doing the very thing that God has called them to do because they're racking up debt and it's actually going to become a hindrance, not a help, but a hindrance towards.
Marriage and family, the very thing that a lot of these young women actually in their heart of hearts would like to be a wife and a mother, and you're actually putting them behind, not ahead in that endeavor.
Well, and along those lines, it troubles me that whenever this conversation comes up, with due respect to the commentators, because I don't know you or how many times you may have raised this objection in your life, but it's troubling that in general, when this conversation comes up, someone comes along and says, Well, you think that a woman can't learn theology.
And our perspective on where we are to learn theology is like maybe this is a product of seminaries.
Maybe they've marketed themselves as the place to learn the Bible.
That is a profoundly unchristian idea.
It's a profoundly un American Christian idea, right?
That you would have to go to seminary to learn the Bible.
Well, if that's the case, then yes, we are withholding theological knowledge from.
Great swaths of people.
But I need more and more and more seminaries.
No, the church and fathers, and even go read a book, are to be the ways that the Christians in a society learn theology.
And God help us if the perception is the church is not for learning.
The church is not for learning theology.
And this is maybe a product of the seeker sensitive movements who were a mile wide, an inch deep, where you don't learn theology when you go to a church.
And so maybe that has contributed some to the idea that, well, if you really want to learn, you must go to seminary.
But that is a A fatal idea to the life of Christians and to the church.
Yeah.
Let's hit our second commercial break and then we'll take the questions.
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Well, welcome back.
In this final segment, we've been taking questions, so if you have a question, go ahead and Phrase it as a question, a question mark, give it a preface or something like that so we can see it.
It was a good question.
Peter asked a set of questions that we'll get to, but Paul asked a good question.
I'm going to read it out and I'd like to hear your guys' thoughts.
Priorities for Biblical Education00:12:59
Paul said this I have a daughter.
What would be a biblical education I could give her?
I kind of want to try it.
I just want to try to say his last name.
Paul.
I don't know if it's his last name.
Art Yomenko.
Oh, I like that.
I saw that and I said, there's no way I'm even trying.
Paul, great to have you in the chat.
I saw that last name and I felt embarrassed because the first thought that I had was like Hayao Miyazaki.
And most people will not even know what I'm talking about.
I'm not going to explain it because I don't want to embarrass myself further.
So, anyways, Paul, good question.
The question is how do I teach my daughter?
If I'm not going to send her to school, pay 80 grand, 120 grand, what do we teach her?
What do you think?
I do think that there's a certain sense where we're preparing our daughters.
Generally and specifically.
So, of course, you're going to know your daughter.
You're going to know the giftings that God has given to her.
You're going to know the abilities that, you know, so you might have a daughter who's just quick with math and you might say, look, you could maybe learn accounting or something like that that you can do from home and certainly your family budget.
You can manage your husband's business.
That would be a direction.
But you might have a daughter who it's like you need to marry a guy who's good with math because you've got other skills, but he's going to be doing more of the math side in your family.
So there's a sense where there's not a cookie cutter answer.
But if we're talking higher education, my priorities are things that enhance and align with feminine virtues, things that can be done from and for the home, and things that are not going to put her on a career path where maybe she is single for a couple of years, so she does take a secular job.
And she's supporting herself that way, and then she gets married.
And now to pull the plug on this career is an unthinkable idea for her.
So, feminine qualities, qualities that will benefit the home, that can be done from the home, and certainly not things like if you send your daughter to law school and she has $120,000 in debt, she's going to have to work for X amount of time to pay that off, regardless of whether she gets married or not.
Right.
That's good.
I agree.
Something I would say is just.
I've always been a fan of books.
I just think that there's this one scene with Goodwill Hunting, the movie where he kind of is putting the highly educated Ivy League student in his place.
Will, the main character, is poor and he can't afford to go to the school and pay tuition.
But he's smart.
And he said, the real shame is that you're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to get an education that you could have got with a library card and a few overdue fines.
You know, something like that.
And so, now I'm not saying that there is something to be said for organized and disciplined study.
Yeah.
The reality is that by not going to seminary, there are certain things that you will almost certainly neglect.
You will because you just won't like them.
You won't like them.
Exactly.
Yeah.
You just won't like them.
Like I, you know, in different seasons of my life, I've beefed up my understanding of different subjects as I've developed interest for those subjects or the need or the need, or I've been around.
I've, you know, in relationships and community with other people who are interested about those subjects.
And so then would drive me, you know, having a season where I'm particularly interested in church history, you know, and right now I'm particularly interested in one, you know, subset of church history, namely the Crusades, because me and every other, you know, man around 40 and under read, you know, Defenders of the West and, you know, and God's Battalions and, you know, and so, but my point is like, there's a lot.
There's a lot that can be gained simply by studying and by reading.
And, you know, if you want disciplined studies, you know, I mean, all these seminaries, for the most part, have their curriculum and their, you know, all their courses and all their classes and the books for those courses and classes listed for free online.
A lot of them have videos too that you can watch.
Yeah, a lot of them have videos.
So, just for the record, because somebody in the chat continues to just absolutely insist that we don't want women to learn.
No, that's not what we're saying.
We don't want women in debt.
That's what I'm trying to say.
What I'm saying is that I don't think that we should send our daughters to seminaries, which their whole design, or at least it was supposed to be originally, was to train men for the ministry.
And the Bible prohibits women from preaching and from pastoral ministry.
So we're saying women who primarily, first and foremost, that doesn't mean that out of the overflow of her domestic family, Feminine virtue and ministry at home, that there's not an overflow like the Proverbs 31 woman, that it begins to overflow into other things and this and that, and blah, blah, blah.
That's fine.
That's not what we're talking about.
But we're saying first and foremost, it is domestic, it is feminine, it is wife, it is mother.
That's first and foremost.
And what it certainly can't be, which it seems like most people in the chat are agreeing with, most of them are, it's cute, you know, when you're complimentary and think you're conservative.
But, you know, everybody, you know, is pretending to be conservative in the chat today.
And so then you would all agree that the woman can't preach and that she can't be a pastor.
So what does that mean?
It means she doesn't, if she's first and foremost called to be a mom.
Wife and a mom, and she can't preach or be a pastor, then can we just agree that maybe the first step of direction that we take is not racking up 120 grand of student loans at seminary?
That's what I'm saying.
I'm not saying that there's one subject matter that that seminary is going to cover that she can't learn, but she doesn't need to learn it there.
She doesn't need to be there.
She can learn it with her dad.
She can learn it with her husband.
She can learn it by herself and just studying with all the ancient fathers and reading Aquinas and reading. Athanasius and reading Calvin, and all that.
I'm not prohibiting any of that.
If anything, praise God that a woman would feel if it's born out of a good desire to love God more, to know Him.
Right.
If she's in this stage of being an adolescent and she's not yet married and she has time on her hands and she wants to be productive and she has a desire for knowing God, the study of God, that's what theology is.
All that's great.
I'm just saying that she doesn't need to go to the place that was invented originally for training pastors if the book.
Namely, the Bible says that she can't be one.
That doesn't make sense.
And more than the debt thing, too, and you're alluding to that right there at the end.
If a woman goes to seminary, part of her self conception, her purpose, right?
Because when we educate ourselves, it's usually for a purpose.
If I go study to be an attorney, my idea is I got to do something with law to justify the four, six, or whatever, seven years that I spent studying law.
And if we send women to seminaries, part of their perceived purpose in life is going to be some sort of theological.
Training of others or ministry, vocational ministry.
And so, even from right there, we set women who go to seminaries up to assume I have to do some sort of ministry, right?
Even along with the debt that they rack up, their perception on their calling in life is some sort of ministry or some sort of theological training.
Yeah, you saw that in the video.
I'll say just add one more thing and we can hit the next questions to Paul's point.
But if you're All of your children, your sons and your daughters, if they're well catechized and taught coming up through the ranks, they will know so much Bible just by virtue of learning the Westminster Shorter Catechism, learning memory verses, sitting under teaching.
We talked about family integrated, sitting under the teaching of a pastor thousands of times.
So if you get to that point and they're 18, I would say, if it's a good family, most children, and even some men that maybe will go out and do some type of blue collar work, have enough of a biblical foundation.
That should last them through the life.
The disciplines of prayer, the disciplines of the Sabbath and of worship, personal devotion.
Those should all be instilled by 18.
So, we're thinking about like a biblical education.
Well, it's going to happen at home, gradually to the point where at 18, I would say most boys and girls, if they've been brought up right, they have enough that they need for the most part, and that can be supplemented as needed pastoral counsel, wisdom, things like that.
But yeah, I would say, yeah.
Mostly you should know.
It's good.
Know your Bible, and if you're well taught, you will.
All right.
Peter Sawyer.
Let's read all three of these questions.
So, what are the thoughts about the system in place where young men, age 22 to 25 or so, go to seminary and then send out resumes to churches for employment?
Does this system, so the system he just talked about, sending out resumes, does it not produce hirelings?
Last question Should we not instead recognize qualified men from within the body?
I think we'd agree on all three points.
You said earlier you were going to touch on this topic.
I think it was in response to this question, right?
About the seminaries and local churches.
Yep.
Yeah, we touched on it a little bit, but.
It is strange that we live in a time.
I think of people that I visit that are older than me, and I ask them, like, oh, where are your kids?
What are they doing?
And they always report a variety of states California, Texas, Colorado.
When so and so is here with our grandkids, it is very novel that we would travel as much as we do.
So we talk about sending out resumes.
So, say you even go to a seminary local to home, but you didn't come up in the church, that kind of process we talked about.
You're going to be sending your resume all over the place.
There are going to be congregations that you don't know from Adam.
They're going to be people that aren't familiar with you.
You're not familiar with them.
You're going to go to a state where you're maybe not familiar with the culture, the type of things that people do there in their free time.
So it is not an ideal system.
And exactly to his point, those young men, they send off the resume because they've graduated.
They're not connected to a local church that was actually supporting them as they went through seminary.
So they send it out and then they leave family.
That's ideally, if anything, they've probably already left family to go to seminary.
But then they leave family and they go somewhere else.
And then they're alone, two time zones away, making $40,000 a year.
And struggling, and that system absolutely does produce men that go and go, No, I can't do this.
We want to go back.
I'm not actually cut out for this.
So, it does, I would say, produce hirelings, and it is much more preferable.
I think we would all agree a young man in a local church.
His gifting is recognized.
He himself has the desire, the first qualification, 1 Timothy 3.
He desires to be an elder.
The church supports him then in his ministry.
Maybe he goes away for a little while to seminary, but then he comes back for service in that church.
That is much less likely.
To produce a hireling, produce someone who doesn't stick with the ministry than what I just described.
Yep, agreed.
That's good.
I would say it's acceptable.
You know, you think of like in the U.S., early in the U.S., they would call ministers over from England to the U.S.
And so there is a history of, especially in the Presbyterian church, right?
You're calling ministers over.
Yeah, there is.
There's nothing wrong with that.
It's not inherently wrong, but.
I think, Wes, what you're saying is the training of a man going into ministry is more than the two or three years he spends in ministry.
Exactly.
And if those two or three years are spent at a seminary, good, solid seminary, that's one thing.
If the overall context of his training is the evaluation of his character, of how he's leading his family, if he's married already, all of those things coming up through the church, the pastors, the local pastors recognize a gifting.
But what so many young men and women now are doing is they're treating seminary like a college, and it's like, what do I want to do?
Well, I think maybe I'll just go to seminary, right?
Rather than a church putting their stamp of approval on someone, not that he's perfect, but saying, look, we believe this is a calling, it's a desire you have, and rather than send you to go be a lawyer, we believe that God is setting you apart to go to ministry, do ministry, and we're going to support you in that.
So when you come back, there'll be a place for you, or we'll help you find a place at a church in the area.
That's a totally different model than the well, let's go to the seminary that gives me the best scholarship, and then I'll go to the church that will take me.
Join Us for Early Access00:03:20
All right.
Let's go ahead and.
What?
I was going to say, you got a UFO question.
I see it.
I see it.
I'll save it for another time.
All right.
All right.
I appreciate it.
Jonathan Johnson, I see you.
I hear you.
I feel you.
You're speaking my language, but I just don't have it in me today.
So let's go ahead and land the plane.
Nate, do we have any more commercials for today?
Conference.
All right.
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Yep.
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And so, Wes, you wrote the article this week.
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I would say, too, as someone who writes the article and then sometimes navigates a discussion that doesn't touch on the article just because of where it goes, the article generally has things that we don't talk about here in the discussion.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
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