Quotes out of Context: Hurting Others, Twisting Scripture, and Creating Confusion. #BaalGate

[0:00] nobody likes being taken out of context nobody likes when their words are twisted around and deceptively reframed to say something other than what you meant when you said them and nobody likes when in a disagreement somebody uses Shady bad faith tactics to try and win an argument at the expense of honest conversation and even edifying speech not only do we do this to each other we actually do it with the Bible as well this isn't a hypothetical scenario sadly it's happening every day in our churches and our online communities and even with our enemies So today we're going to weigh the consequences of quotes taken out of context and dishonest speech in general and look at a few ways we might change our approach if we want to be more honest and loving even of those that may even call themselves our enemies uprightness of speech is not an option for Christians it is a

[0:48] requirement and if we take it seriously it'll guide us out of a lot of errors and a lot of heartache and mistreatment of one another that keeps us from being unified which Jesus himself said would be the proof to the world that he is who he says he is so let's jump into it recently my friend Warren mcru whose YouTube channel is called idol killer was on soteriology 101 with Leighton flowers and guest Jordan Hatfield and the three of them were discussing various things that were related to Calvinism and the cognitive dissonance that usually sets in when someone comes to believe in something like double predestination and Warren made an off-hand comment about a certain mindset that he's seen where he was saying for example someone who believes in double predestination they are saved and yet their their infant child for example might not be because there's a pretty

[1:35] heavy strain in Calvinism I would say especially consistent Calvinism that does teach that there are such things as elect infants which means that there are non-elect infants which means that in a calvinist view there would be some babies unborn in the womb who would be doomed to Eternal punishment on The calvinistic View now we could debate the merits of that all day but that is a strain inside of Calvinism and that non-elect baby's phology comes from the London Confession of Faith which is a calvinist confession and Warren made this off-hand comment that we're going to pull up and look at now here's what Warren had to say he's the fellow in the middle here and let's just listen you made mention Leon of like well you know if I'm elect and my children aren't you know that's okay and I just wanted to highlight how that's the same kind of spirit and mindset that the ancient

[2:22] worshippers of pagan deities would engage in when they would sacrifice their children to bail because as long as I get my good drops I'm willing to throw my child on the p as long as I am being blessed financially I'm willing to throw my child on the P it's the same mindset where they're like well God may have eternally reprobated my child but as long as I get into heaven I'm cool with that I don't know about you guys but I mean I've got four children if God's the kind of God that would reprobate your child how do you have the kind of worship and love for that version God I late and late and late L we're just making God in your own image you just want God to be to be like you you want him to align with your own moral standards and who are you how about the image of First Corinthians 13 how about that image of God how about that how about it and so that's

[3:10] obviously some inflammatory language that's obviously he is noticing a parallel that is not a comfortable thing to point out that for a saved parent who believes that their child is rep probate that the continuing on in the belief that God can damn infants is a little bit like saying okay well I'm going to trust in you God to rescue me even though you elected not to rescue my child and I'm going to be okay with that disparity and then he compared it to he said ba all worshippers and yes that's true more more Molech I think is what he was going for people who would sacrifice their actual Child by heating up the the the metal arms of a Molech statue and then laying their child on that to be burned alive as a sacrifice to Molech to keep them alive he's just saying it reminds him of that he's noticed the

[3:58] same kind of energy the same kind of spirit yes it's inflammatory language sometimes inflammatory language is warranted and I would say that saying that God dams infants to torture is definitely something I would object to in the strongest possible terms but here's what he didn't say he didn't say all Calvinists are baby sacrificers he didn't say that the god of Calvinism demands child sacrifice he didn't really do anything of the sort and he was just saying he's noticed this mindset what happened afterwards was a nuclear Holocaust in theological YouTube land commentators from all over the entire internet came out of the woodwork to condemn Warren for saying this but in so doing they really took his words out of context and smeared him as saying that all Calvinists sacrifice their children or that Calvinists think that God

[4:45] expects them to sacrifice their children when that's not what Warren said I would say comically excepts this isn't comical at all comically James White who affirms infant damnation who affirms that consistent calvinist approach of some infants are damned and reprobate and will be tortured forever and other infants are elect and will be rescued and saved before either of them had a chance to do anything right or wrong erupted in moral indignation by taking Warren even further out of context and leveraging a lot of AD homm attacks no no true Scotsman fallacies and other kinds of logical fallacies essentially trying to just shame and discredit Warren mcgu rather than actually dealing with the substance of his claims and going through the actual words that he said and express say a substantive disagreement with them this whole thing

[5:31] has become called Baal gate and all the parties involved all the people who have responded and Warren himself have put out even more videos trying and explain their positions and I think it's it's led to healthier discourse but by a very very difficult route so this is just a really recent and fresh example of this consistent problem that has been going on in really all human speech since we've been able to communicate but nevertheless this kind of behavior and this kind of an approach really isn't becoming of Christ followers so there's really three ways that I want to examine the way that we are treating one another with our words and how we are being honest or dishonest in the way that we speak whether we know we're being dishonest or not and those three areas are first let's talk about how we handle the scriptures next we're going to talk about how we mistreat one another and then we're going to talk about how we

[6:19] misrepresent others teaching let's start from the top with scripture when it comes to misquoting scripture even a slight twist in wording can lead us miles away from the truth a classic and really easy to find example is Matthew 7:1 which you've almost certainly heard quoted out of context and here is the only part that people read do not judge so this is Jesus speaking it would be pretty important for us to get what Jesus is saying right is that the end of the sentence is there a period there does he finish his thought there and yet how many people have you heard simply say the Bible says do not judge as though there's no further discussion on the pages of scripture beyond that one statement and what it actually says is do not judge so that you will not be judged for in the way that you judge you'll be judged and by your standard of measure it will be measured back to you why do you look at the speck that is in

[7:07] your brother's eye but do not notice the log that is in your own eye or how can you say to your brother let me take the speck out of your eye and look the log is in your own eye you hypocrite first take the log out of your own eye and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye so in the context it's not saying don't judge at all it's saying judge yourself check your own heart make sure that you're not guilty of the same things that you're judging this other person for doing and then you'll be able to see clearly in order to discern and rightly help them see what they're doing wrong so in the context what the passage is actually saying is to judge with humility and awareness of our own flaws not to you know abstain from judging or Discerning things altogether making it just empty rhetoric if we only quote that one part and say the Bible says do not judge so

[7:54] we've already got one really helpful principle reading the verses before and after after the one that you are quoting is likely to keep you from running into these kinds of issues where you get the passage wrong in what it's saying this is just good Bible reading advice in general read the verse and the verses before and after the verse you're reading read the paragraphs before and after the paragraph you're reading read the chapters before and after the chapter you're reading and if we do that it'll be a heck of a lot harder for us to actually get the passage wrong another way that we get ourselves in trouble is if we don't actually read the passages which this current passage is citing or pulling from what kinds of imagery is it using and are there other places in the scriptures where that sort of imagery is used what is said on those PL those pages in those spots so for example let's go to Romans chapter 9 which is another really really famous

[8:42] set of calvinist proof texts in which Paul leverages this example of a Potter having right over the clay to make from the same lump one object for honorable use and another for common use which the calvinist wants to take to mean that God is going to decide to make stuff he wants to destroy and stuff he wants to save and and redeem and the the clay has no say in the matter he's just going to destroy some people and he's going to save some other people and that's going to be what he wants to do but there are two other places where the idea of a Potter and Clay come from Paul is almost certainly quoting from and pulling from one of them and then he uses the same phrasing in another spot to give you an idea of what he means when he uses Potter and Clay analy the first one is in Jeremiah 18 which is where he's almost certainly pulling this from and it goes like this the word that came to

[9:29] Jeremiah from the Lord saying arise and go down to The Potter's House and there I will announce my words to you so I went down to The Potter's House and there he was making something on the wheel but the vessel that he was making of clay was spoiled in the hand of the Potter so he remade it into another vessel as it pleased the Potter to make then the word of the Lord came to me saying am I not able House of Israel to deal with you as this Potter does declares the Lord behold like the clay in The Potter's hand so are you in my hand House of Israel at one moment I might speak concerning a nation or concerning a kingdom to uproot it to tear it down or to destroy it if that Nation against which I have spoken turns from its evil I will relent of the disaster that I plan to bring on it or at another moment I might speak concerning a nation or con concerning a kingdom to build up or to plant it if it does evil in my sight by not obeying my

[10:16] voice then I will relent of the good with which I said that I would bless it and In this passage it is explicit that God is saying the clay has a right to respond and then once again here in 2 Timothy Chapter 2 starting in verse 20 Paul leverages the same exact imagery and listen to how he says it now in a large house this is verse 20 there are not only gold and silver implements but also Implements of wood and of Earth and wear and some are for Honor While others are for dishonor therefore if anyone cleanses himself from these things he will be an Implement for Honor Sanctified useful to the master prepared for every good work so does Paul seem like he is placing the blame for the state of the tool on the person using the tool or on the tool itself In this passage and in the passage he's almost certainly quoting from the tool is the one that's at fault not the one who made it now in Romans 9 God is free to do

[11:05] what he will with the kinds of tools he has available to him if he's got a bad tool that's broken or a bad vessel that warped itself while he was trying to shape it he is good and right and just to destroy it and if there was a vessel a a pot that was sensitive to his shaping that was willing to listen that was willing to obey and not bristle against the hands of the one making it he is free to rescue that one so this is just another way in which we actually mishandle the scriptures and if we were more careful we would probably avoid getting a lot of things wrong simply by looking at these two rules number one what do the verses before and after this have to say so that I'm making sure I understand the exact context into which this sentence was spoken and then the second rule is let's go back and look at the other places that are leveraging the same idea especially if it's one that

[11:53] this author might be quoting from you know you're never going to find someone in the Old Testament quoting from the New Testament but you'll find a lot of new testament use of the old and then instances where the same author if we have that luxury sometimes we don't is using the same sim symbolism and imagery in a different spot to try to reconcile and make them all make sense most of our problems in biblical ex aesus and study come from when we're not actually doing ex aesus but we are importing ideas we had before we came to the text onto the text to make them make sense and the only way that you can really get away with that is if you're not taking into account the context before and after and the other usages and references of the same idea other passages of scripture and there are a million other good rules for good biblical hermeneutics and good biblical ex aesus that we don't have time to go through in this video I would love to make another video on that if that's interesting to you let me know in

[12:40] the comments I'd be happy to make one if it gets enough interest but the next thing that I want to talk about is how we misrepresent each other not just as Believers in intramural debates but even unbelievers people that we are trying to reduce their words and twist their words to mean something other than what was intended when they spoke and this is a very dishonest tactic this happens most straightforwardly when people hear you say something and then they will simply supplant your words rather than trying to understand them they'll supplant your words by saying something like so you're saying and then they will fill in the blank in a really uncharitable way with whatever they want to caricaturize or smear you as saying there was that really really famous Jordan Peterson interview where he was keeping his cool in the middle of a conversation with someone who seemed this lady who seemed absolutely dead set on making him out to be this crazy monster and that's a

[13:27] difficult thing to do so it was it was a really remarkable video for a lot of people whatever you think about Jordan Peterson he really comported himself well in that interview because he was he was being misrepresented he was having his words twisted and reframed goalposts moving and all sorts of other logical fallacies which we're going to dig into in a second and in the moment he was keeping his cool remaining calm and then calmly clearly rearticulating his thought but it would be better if we just didn't treat each other like that in the first place so what are some things that people do whether they're thinking about doing it or not that causes them to misrepresent other people's words the first broadly is what I'm going to call logical fallacies you know I don't typically like the way that Greek philosophy has wormed its way into Christian thought but the idea of logic and syllogisms is a very helpful heuristic and a very helpful toolkit that we can use to kind of assess the

[14:15] viability of ideas unfortunately most Christians aren't either aren't trained in doing this well and avoiding logical fallacies or they're intentionally using logical fallacies to try to smear people that they view as a theological threat everyone knows some of the basics like ad homm attacks where you're attacking rather the substance of the person's critique you're attacking the person themselves often with made up sort of slanderous claims about the kind of person that you're imagining that they are I'm going through a lot of this right now or concepts like gaslighting which is a bad faith tactic meant to try to cause a person to doubt their own cognitive faculties and their own ability to make sense of or Reason through a situation or even their recollection of past events or things like false dichotomies where the argument is Advanced that there's only two possible ways to approach this

[15:02] situation when there might be 10 or 15 but you're being pigeon hold into picking between two things that you don't like when those aren't the only two options available to you for example Calvinism and arminianism that's a false dichotomy there are other views but what a lot of people I've found don't know is that there are hundreds of possible logical fallacies and all a logical fallacy is is when an argument or an idea is Advanced that doesn't have adequate support either the logic doesn't follow some of the points are irrelevant or the premises are false so this and this therefore this and either one of two of the first two this is are wrong or the last one doesn't follow from the first two premises it's using false reasoning whether false on its face or false in that it's irrelevant or disconnected to try to advance an argument and there are hundreds of these

[15:49] but just to put out a lesser known one that I think is really important to give you the idea let's talk about for example the no true Scotsman fallacy this is also called the appeal to to Purity fallacy so let's imagine someone has made a general statement all teenagers are drunkards and thieves then another person comes along and gives a falsifying counter example saying here's a teenager who is not a drunker and a thief and then the first person decides to exclude that person as a counter example and so the first person might say something like well he's not a real teenager he's an adult at heart so they're coming up with a way to preserve their stupid idea in the first premise by justifying it after the fact so the classic example is that person a says no Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge and the second person says well my uncle Angus is a Scotsman and he puts sugar on his porridge which is that falsifying counter example and then the third

[16:37] person says well no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge how often have you heard Christians dismiss the validity of another person's faith in Jesus Christ based on a really narrow interpretation of Doctrine and so dividing the church over a debated matter not to continue to pick on Calvinists but to be frank they use a lot of these logical fallacies Calvinists have a a particular view of God's sovereignty where they say that he must be in total deterministic control over at least all people's desires if not all people's actions the first would be compatibilism the second is determinism and really they're both determinism and they have that view other people pulling from the same data have different views Armenians Mists and open theists of all Stripes disagree with that view and yet folks like RC Sproul when asked if he thought that Armenians were saved he said yes barely

[17:24] saying things like no true Christian believes that God is in anything less than total control over the entire universe if there is one Rogue molecule anywhere in the universe then God ceases to be God rhetoric like that and that's a logical error that excludes genuine Believers from the faith community for just not fitting some arbitrary standard undermining the inclusive message of the Gospel which limits itself only to those who trust Jesus to rescue them from their sins not trust Jesus to rescue you from your sins and believe this certain Doctrine and it's this kind of bad faith argumentation that I think was going on in the situation with Warren where sure what he said was inflammatory I agree it was really intense and I think that he was justified in being intense with what he said and how he said it but rather than dealing with the point of contention the actual issue and addressing that with some other claims

[18:13] counter claims counter examples to falsify what they would imagine was you know what what Warren's actual position was for example some Calvinists said well I don't believe in infant Dam nation and so Warren's claims and Warren's words didn't apply to them now if Warren had actually said that all Calvinists believe this then that would have been fallacious reasoning but that's not what Warren said and we really get ourselves into so much trouble this becomes so difficult to untie and untangle and really treat each other with anything resembling charity if we're taking each other out of context we're twisting words we're using bad argumentation bad logic and and Hasty rhetoric we're doing a disservice to each other we're doing a disservice to God and we're doing a disservice to the community of people who don't trust in Jesus yet by mistreating and misrepresenting one another in this kind of a way all that is required for

[19:00] salvation as a Christian is Faith In Jesus trusting in Jesus to rescue you and this is exemplified in the thief on the cross when we reflect on his faith it's really easy now to challenge the complexity that's often added to the requirements of Salvation arguing for a return to the straightforward belief in Jesus as Lord at the heart of Christianity is a simple yet profound truth salvation is a gift of Grace accessible to anyone who believes regardless of their theologic iCal knowledge or their moral perfection and no matter how zealous we are for some other doctrines and some other beliefs no matter how important we think they are we don't get to tack those on to saving faith in Jesus and then exclude everybody else in the kingdom of God who doesn't agree with us and say that they're barely saved that's bad faith argumentation it's heeded rhetoric and

[19:48] it's not good Logic the truth does not give up ground to inquiry or to lies if we think we are right we need to focus on Integrity in all debate and discussion and disagreement we need to advocate for the strength of honest argumentation over winning at all costs especially as Christians our goal should be to seek truth together rather than victory over one another which I recognize is difficult in a culture that so heavily emphasizes confrontation over conversation if we can fulfill the most basic commandment of loving our neighbor as ourselves and treating others the way that we would want to be treated will avoid these kinds of inflammatory approaches that create Division and destruction rather than mutual love and life in Christ and of course we also do this exact same thing to our forefathers

[20:37] in the faith I think a classic example is Pelagius so the heretical beliefs known as pelagianism is a 14-point list of things that all Christians I think would disagree with you can look them up yourself if you're curious just so that you're aware I don't agree with these things but what's crazy is that Pelagius the person for whom pelagianism is named didn't teach any of those 14 points a Dustin is the person who created this 14-point list that he then used to smear and outside and other and get rid of pus one of the few times Pelagius was recorded coming to his own defense he disagreed with all but one half of one point saying this is not what I teach and so Augustine was the first person to misrepresent Pelagius by slandering him and smearing him with this whole long list of Insane beliefs and the tragic part is that in the hundreds if not th actually thousands of years since then

[21:26] people have continued to slander the name of Pelagius by associating with these beliefs that he didn't even agree to I've seen all kinds of other instances where people for example will quote a church father as believing a certain thing and then they'll pull out this tiny section of one of their writings when it turned out what they were doing was doing was actually quoting someone they disagreed with so irus said this but what he was actually doing was quoting someone earlier than him to put his words on paper so that he could disagree with it so let's tie this all together when we're reading scripture when we're talking to one another when we're quoting people from the past let's all please commit for the love of God to treating scripture carefully in the fullness of context not just what's written before and after but what's being quoted and what's happening in the context of the the document that's being written for example Paul's letters who was he writing to what was

[22:15] he writing about what was going on in that part of the world at that time let's do that let's let's be charitable with one another let's treat the other person the way that we would want to be treated let's not just slander and dismiss people that disagree with us let's take their actual words in and treat them with respect focusing our disagreements on the actual points of contention based on their actual words not just our misrepresentations of them to set up an easy straw man to knock over and then when we're quoting people from the past especially people who can't defend themselves or come up with a defense of what they were actually saying when their words were when were mistreated and twisted let's treat them with some charity too remembering all the while that what leads a person to entry into the kingdom of God God is not having a Scantron test with all of the correct answers filled in there's one

[23:03] answer that matters it's do you trust that Jesus Christ the son of God has died to rescue you and have you asked him to do that for you it's that taking your own feet out from under you so that you're not supporting Yourself by your own weight and trying to stand on your own Merit before God but simply saying I know I've sinned Jesus please rescue me and so I'm so thankful that the kingdom of God in heaven will include Calvinists Armenians molinist open theists premillennialists and amillennialists and post millennialist and since those people are all in the kingdom of God part of the household of faith brothers and sisters to Jesus Christ children of God the Father And since Jesus said in John 17 that the world will know that he was sent by God and that he is who he says he is if we are unified if we are one in Christ then we need to put away

[23:53] things like bad faith argumentation and logical fallacies and redefining words and twisting words and taking people out of context cuz that's not loving and that's not the way that we would want to be treated and if you have the truth the truth does not give up ground to inquiry or to lies better to defend it with good arguments if you really believe that you're right now if you want to see me trying my absolute heest to put some real context behind a disputed passage check out this video up here on John 6 and why I have come to believe that it does not teach Calvinism love youall even my calvinist brothers and sisters I'm glad we all serve the same savior further up and further in