A friend sent me a draft e-mail, that he wrote to a family member, who has rejected historic Christianity for progressive Christianity. He was asked to give the basics of salvation, and his attempt to explain the gospel to her is below. My advice included taking out the Christianese terms. Do you think he did a good job? I think his emphasis on what is not the gospel (what needs to be rejected) makes this a first-class explanation of the gospel.

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So, you’ve asked the 10,000 talent question (alluding to Matthew 18:23-35).  You are basically asking me what I think the Gospel is.  I’ll try to answer that in a minimalistic way, using my own characterization of it rather than just making doctrinal statements.

One must accept that there is a God, who is a higher authority than themselves.  How much one must first believe about that God is debatable, but candidate beliefs would be that He is personal (having a mind like, but greater than, ours), powerful, and the creator of this cosmos and everything in it — He owns it all.  Our natural intuition is to see beauty, order, complexity, and “design” in nature.  There is a difference in belief vs unbelief in that some think it is just the appearance of design and some acknowledge their intuition that it actually is designed.

One must acknowledge their moral intuitions, and recognize that there are actually right and wrong things in this world.  It’s not just whatever you want to do, or whatever society decides in a given time or culture.

Given that morality is then understood to be a transcendent thing (universal and independent of time and culture), the connection is made to God as the author of this moral law.

One must then recognize that he/she regularly fails to live up to this law, even according to just their meager understanding of it, and even by the standards of morality that they make up for other people.

One must not try to suppress this, or therapize it away.  One must recognize there is a problem and real moral culpability.  One must recognize that they feel guilty and have self-esteem issues because they actually do have guilt and issues.

One must make the connection between guilt and their standing before God.  Being good sometimes and in some ways does not erase the bad you do, past, present, or future.  One must be willing to bend the knee to God’s will regarding morality.

One must also come to see the moral failure (sin) in their lives as a bad thing that they’d like to be rid of, rather than excusing it as the fault of others, or revelling in it as part of the pleasure of life, or shrugging it off as just “who I am.”

One must appeal to God in these matters for both forgiveness and help in living as they should.

Given that God has provided a champion for the problem that humanity faces (the backstory of which not all will fully know), one whose heart is truly yielded to all these things will naturally and eagerly receive Word of this as Good News.  God has solved the seemingly irreconcilable demands of both justice and forgiveness in that champion.

Those with ears to hear will receive this solution — Jesus — and believe what He has done in life and on the cross for their sake — the resurrection being both confirmation of His divine authority and also the sign of the defeat of death which awaits us all, and is the only barrier between us and facing this God whom we fail at every turn.  They will believe on (or upon) Jesus as Lord and their means of salvation, surrendering dependence upon their own ideas of self-righteousness and earning the favor of God.

The outward expression that we have understood and accepted these things is that we have made Jesus Lord and committed ourselves to following Him, conform our character to His, resist our sinful inclinations, and are interested in learning all about Who God is and what has been done for us in Christ.

This commitment to the Lordship of Christ naturally leads to the acceptance of subsequent beliefs.  If Jesus is indeed Lord, then He holds all authority, and what He said and taught to His followers is our guide — the New Testament.  And if this is the divine story, as intended by God for men, then we have reason to believe that it is comprehensible to us, and He will insure (in spite of the fallibility of men and demonic plots) that its essential message will not be lost or corrupted until all things are completed.  Given that Jesus affirmed every categorical section of the Old Testament, and claimed to be its promised Messiah, then that, too, is a source of truth and understanding.

Those doctrines that are sometimes characterized as “essential” for salvation, are merely the highlights of this redemption narrative, which are those things being clear and consistent, and which indicate that someone has yielded themselves to the authority of Christ and the scriptures, and understands these things.  It is not that believing them is what saves, but they are what the saved naturally come to believe.  Confessing them is the tangible, verbal act of affirming the Gospel, but is not necessarily identical to a life committed to putting it into practice, which is saving faith.

Welcome to episode 49 of the Knight and Rose podcast! In this episode, Wintery Knight and Desert Rose interview Dr. Frank Turek about the revised and updated edition of “Correct, Not Politically Correct”. If you like this episode, please subscribe to the podcast, and subscribe to our YouTube channel. We would appreciate it if you left us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Podcast description:

Christian apologists Wintery Knight and Desert Rose discuss apologetics, policy, culture, relationships, and more. Each episode equips you with evidence you can use to boldly engage anyone, anywhere. We train our listeners to become Christian secret agents. Action and adventure guaranteed. 30-45 minutes per episode. New episode every week.

Episode summary:

Wintery Knight and Desert Rose interview Christian apologist Frank Turek about the updated and expanded edition of his book “Correct, Not Politically Correct: About Same-Sex Marriage and Transgenderism”. Why should the government favor natural marriage? How should we respond to arguments for same-sex marriage? How has same-sex marriage change society?

Outline and transcript

Downloadable PDF of the show outline. (Hosted by Mega) This is the outline that we made for this episode. It contains extra points that may not have been addressed in the actual show.

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Episode 49:

Speaker biographies

Dr. Frank Turek is the author or coauthor of five books, including I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist and Stealing from God:  Why Atheists Need God to make their Case. As the President of CrossExamined.org, Frank presents evidence for Christianity at churches, high schools, and secular college campuses. He has also debated several prominent atheists including Christopher Hitchens and Michael Shermer, Founding Publisher of Skeptic Magazine. Frank hosts an hour-long TV program each week called I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist which is broadcast Wednesday nights on DirecTV Channel 378 (NRBTV). His radio program and podcast called I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist with Frank Turek airs on 182 stations every Saturday morning at 10 a.m. eastern and is available continuously on the free CrossExamined App.

Wintery Knight is a black legal immigrant. He is a senior software engineer by day, and an amateur Christian apologist by night. He has been blogging at winteryknight.com since January of 2009, covering news, policy and Christian worldview issues.

Desert Rose did her undergraduate degree in public policy, and then worked for a conservative Washington lobbyist organization. She also has a graduate degree from a prestigious evangelical seminary. She is active in Christian apologetics as a speaker, author, and teacher.

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Music attribution:

Strength Of The Titans by Kevin MacLeod
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So, there was a time when men could be less picky with women, and everything would be fine. The woman would not turn crazy, and attack the man. The government would not step in and get involved. But today, men need to accept that times have changed. And men have to be more careful about who they marry. And the government and the courts are much more likely to step in an ruin the man’s life.

Here’s a story Rose sent me from Daily Wire.

Excerpt:

A San Francisco dad is fighting a nightmarish custody battle for his toddler son, who he says is being raised “non-binary” by his mother, who claims to be genderless.

Harrison Tinsley, 31, is seeking full custody of his son Sawyer, 3, who currently spends half of his time with Tinsley’s ex-girlfriend, the boy’s mother. Sawyer’s mother, 30, uses they/them pronouns for the boy and puts him in dresses and makeup, photos provided by Tinsley appear to show. Sawyer also told his dad that his mother put him in princess shoes on a trip to Disneyland, a video of the conversation shows. Sawyer’s mother may have thought about raising her son “non-binary” before he was even born. In what appears to be a Facebook post during her pregnancy, she refers to Sawyer as “my sweet baby boy or girl or neither if that’s what you feel.”

Sawyer himself rebels against his mom and insists he is a boy, his dad says.

[…]Gender confusion is not Tinsley’s only concern for his son — he is also concerned for the child’s immediate safety.

Back in 2021, Sawyer’s mother was arrested and booked in jail for felony child endangerment when then-1-year-old Sawyer fell off a bed during an altercation between the mother and her roommate, police body cam footage viewed by The Daily Wire shows.

The San Francisco police gave custody of Sawyer to the mother’s two dads for the night and put her on a psychiatric hold at the hospital. She was ultimately not convicted of a crime.

This sounds terrible, but what can single men learn from this? Well, we recently had a story where an Army vet was charged and convicted of murder for defending himself from an Antifa terrorist who was armed with an AK-47. Why? Because this happened in Austin, TX, which is incredibly liberal. So, step one would probably be to be careful where you live. Harrison lives in California.

Second, he shouldn’t be making babies with women he’s not married to. The whole point of marriage is to make sure that there has been some communication and vetting before you get into the bedroom and make babies. Marriage protects babies from parents who are only interested in fun. Babies aren’t fun. That’s why we used to make people commit before having them.

This, look at this woman’s background. I always ask women “are your parents still married?” when taking them out on dates. It’s a very important question.

Now watch this:

The mother herself now identifies as “non-binary,” although she did not when she was dating Tinsley, court documents show.

Fourth, she runs an ultra-progressive non-profit:

LGBT issues have been a major theme in her life — she was adopted and raised by two older gay men in the Bay Area, where she still lives and runs an ultra-progressive non-profit.

What a woman does for a living is a really important clue to their personality. Don’t get involved with ultra-progressive women. Recent studies show that white progressive women have extremely high rates of mental illness and drug use.

Speaking of mental illness, here’s number five:

During the psychiatric hold at the hospital, Sawyer’s mother told a psychiatrist that she has borderline personality disorder, a condition that can involve impulsive and risky behavior, the psychiatrist later testified in San Francisco family court.

Child Protective Services investigated the police incident and concluded that Sawyer’s mother was not a safety threat to her son. Her mental health was a “complicating factor, but not a safety issue,” reads the CPS report, provided by Tinsley.

Sawyer’s mother was on five different medications for PTSD, mood stabilization, ADHD, and anxiety at the time of the CPS investigation, the CPS report said.

Sawyer’s mom can be heard on the police body cam footage mentioning that she drank alcohol earlier the same day.

You can’t count on government and courts to do the right thing for children. They don’t see women as guilty, they don’t punish them as long as they punish men, and they don’t think that male leadership is good for children. (“Smash the patriarchy”) This is why you don’t make babies with progressive women. They will do terrible things to your children (abortion, transing, let live-in boyfriends molest them, etc.) and no one will listen to you. I blogged about a case from British Columbia, Canada, and then another case from California.

Look:

Sawyer’s pediatrician, Dr. Danielle Alkov, works at a youth gender clinic that offers hormone therapy and so-called gender-affirming surgery referrals. She testified as an expert witness in court and said she has worked with children as young as 12. She also mentioned a nearby clinic that works with children as young as 3, Sawyer’s current age.

The court ordered that Alkov continue to be Sawyer’s primary care physician.

This part reminds me of the case from California that I mentioned, where the female judge refused to let the father present scientific evidence about the harm of transing his child:

Tinsley’s lawyer said he had planned to present scientific materials demonstrating the harm of treating Sawyer as if he had no gender, but they ran out of time in court.

During that trial, Sawyer’s mother said in court that she has had suicidal ideations multiple times in her life.

Also, false accusations are normally taken seriously in blue cities and blue states:

Meanwhile, she has defamed Tinsley repeatedly, he said. Sawyer’s mother has called the father of her child a rapist and even claimed Sawyer is the product of rape and that Tinsley has raped other people as well, a friend told police. She began making these allegations when Tinsley started fighting for custody, he said.

This is not the way that men should be spending their life savings:

Tinsley said he has spent all the money he ever saved on legal bills. His mother even contributed additional money, but funds are running low, he said. He recently started a fundraiser in hopes he can afford to continue fighting for custody of his son.

“I will do anything to keep my son safe and happy with who he is. I hope to inspire other parents with similar situations to be brave and speak up,” Tinsley told The Daily Wire.

In the meantime, Tinsley says he takes off work on the days he takes care of Sawyer, reading to him, taking him to the park, and spending as much time as possible with his young son.

My advice to men is to only have children with women who are staunch conservatives who hate feminism, CPS, public schools, divorce courts, socialism, etc. Otherwise, they are going to turn on you and hurt your children.