Lig Duncan and that Infamous Clip Making the Rounds

Show Outline with Links

Introduction

I was going to be doing a bit of traveling, and so last week I wrote and recorded a few of my blog posts prior to departure. That was all fine and everything, but the end result was that this post is not going to be recorded to video until next week. You video-content types are just going to have to soldier on in an old school fashion, remembering that man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward. But here I am now, in print anyway, and I hope to make up for everything with some extra zesty adjectives.

And, for the record, extra zesty adjectives should not to be confused with anything like slander. Extra zesty would be phrases like extra zesty. Slander would be phrases like “misbegotten son of a whatnot,” which is the kind of thing that would never pass muster here, not while I am serving as the proprietor.

Slander Is as Slander Does

There were any number of things about this clip from a larger interview that were objectionable, but I would like to start with the one that is simply screaming for attention first. They were talking about the “Moscow mood,” and incidentally, if this keeps up, we are going to have to do more for Kevin DeYoung than merely thank him for his naming abilities, and simply start paying Kevin royalties. Okay, back on track. The whole subject they are discussing in the clip is “the Moscow mood.”

And in that context, Lig says this: “Mocking and slander not a Christian way of dealing with anything.” And then, in the very next breath, he says, “No reason to think they are even Christians.” Now just think about that for a minute. You may, if you are given to hyperbole, want to think about this for a doggone minute.

So we have a disagreement over the limits that Scripture sets on polemics. We believe that we have provided detailed argumentation from Scripture, in writing, for the stance we have taken, and for the practices we follow. Others differ, which is to be expected. Now in light of that disagreement, on various occasions we have repeatedly offered to sit down with our critics in order to discuss these matters, hashing them out the way brothers should. With really rare exceptions, we have been consistently refused.

Now, what would be said about us, in this context, over such a disagreement, if we questioned the salvation of our critics? What would it be called if I said that there is “no reason to think that Lig Duncan is even a Christian.”That’s right. It would be called slander because that is exactly what it would be.

My forehead gets hot just thinking about it.

But Lig Duncan transitioned from a condemnation of mocking and slander straight into a slanderous accusation. We are not Christians because of extra zesty adjectives? No, no, he might say. It is not the mockery by itself that causes him to say these things, but rather the slander. The slander would be the problem. To which we would reply, and this would seem to be germane, “what slander?” Who am I supposed to have slandered?

If slander is to be defined as speech that is simply disagreeable to the recipient, then Jesus slandered the Pharisees, Amos slandered the cows of Bashan, Isaiah slandered the daughters of Zion who were strutting their stuff at the mall, Paul slandered the Judaizers, David slandered Goliath, and John slandered Diotrophes.

But that is not what slander is. To slander someone is to make false and damaging assertions about someone. I italicized that word false there to make it more visible to our critics. And it has to be false according to the standards of someone who understands how human language works. Jesus did not slander the Pharisees because they did not literally strain out gnats and actually swallow camels. And neither did He slander Herod when He called him a fox, a saying that Lig mistakenly put in the mouth of John the Baptist.

When asked about one of the defenses for our polemical behavior that we make, i.e. that we are following a biblical pattern, his reply was a simple denial: “Jesus was neither a mocker or slanderer.” Now it is quite true that He was not a slanderer because it was strictly speaking true that His adversaries were of their father the devil. When He went on to say that all of them had graduated from Bag O’ Snakes Seminary, this was also true. He wasn’t making any false claims at all.

But as is most apparent, He did mock them, mercilessly. They would cross the sea to make a convert, and when they succeeded, they would make him twice as much a son of hell as themselves. His followers were not to take the pearls of truth and throw them down in front of the hogs. When it comes time to give alms, perhaps that is not the time to signal the trumpeter in your entourage so that he might tarantara your generosity. Then there is the matter of throwing elbows in the scramble for the chief seats in the synagogue. He also pointed out how they would make their phylacteries broad enough that the sunlight might glint off of them. It was important for the man on the street to see how holy they were being. So sure. Jesus would never slander, He would never make a false accusation. But would He ever say anything that the enemies of truth would want to say was slander? And it was undeniable that He was a master of devastating mockery.

Alone in a Room?

Lig also accuses us of LARPing, playing the tough guy role online and I suppose he is thinking about flamethrowers. And then he says, interestingly, “put ‘em in a room and you’d have ‘em in a fetal position in 3 seconds.” Now if that was an offer, I am prepared to say, “deal.” But I don’t think it was an offer, actually, come to think of it . . .

Let me tell you a little story from a few years ago. Back during the time of FV controversy, there was all sorts of churn and commotion going on in the Reformed world. During that time that was so fraught with, you know, fraughtness, I was traveling to the South for some other ministry venture, and as a result I was going to be in Jackson, where Lig was. We contacted him beforehand, and offered to meet with him privately in order to talk through some of the issues. There would be no microphones, no cameras, no publicity. Just a face-to-face meeting. We made the offer, and it should be obvious that we were not the ones who declined.

So we never got the chance to put Lig’s fetal position thesis to the test. But I can say that we were willing to try it out. And he, for some reason, was not willing to try it out.

Just to wrap this issue up, we are prepared to make something like this happen. Just name the room.

Indiscriminate Grenades

Lig also said that we are fond of “lobbing grenades indiscriminately in every direction,” so let me say something about that, if I might.

It only seems that way. When Gideon attacked the Midianites with his 300 by night, he did so according to a very specific plan, one assigned to him by God. There was nothing indiscriminate about it. The whole thing was thought through, and calculated to achieve a certain effect—and it was an effect that was in fact achieved.

But the Midianites did not feel like everything was going according to plan because the plan had been to sow chaos and panic in their minds. To them everything seemed indiscriminate. Everything seemed like chaos. The point here is that surgical strikes from one side can seem like indiscriminate grenades to careless observers. I earlier mentioned our biblical defenses of the satiric bite, and this is one of the central criteria. The targets of such satire need to biblically legitimate targets, and indiscriminately blasting people in every direction is strictly forbidden.

So we do not engage is polemical carpet bombing. We are not practitioners of Agent Orange satire. However much we are provoked to respond in that way by video clips such as this one, we manfully resist.

A Misdirected Jesus Juke

Lig quotes a professor friend who says that a very common question he gets from seminarians is “how do I love a world that hates me?” He argues that this is the central challenge, and he rejects what he assumes to be our stance, which is that of trying to “make them hate us more.”

And in this, he reveals the central rhetorical mistake of the soft evangelical world, the thing that makes them so easily manipulable. This is what places such a big steering wheel right between the old evangelical shoulder blades.

Of course the goal is not to make them hate us more. But it is crucial to not care whether or not they hate us more. When this happens, it is at that point that they no longer have any purchase in our deliberations. So long as we care—the way Big Eva cares—about the possibility of disdain from the world, the world will always make sure to have a supply of that disdain readily available. They will summon it up on demand, and evangelicals then scramble to maintain their winsome cool vibe, not realizing how seriously off-putting that has become. It was always off-putting to discerning viewers, but the problem is now a glaring one. It is now at gaaakkk levels.

So what we are doing is not giving lost souls the raspberry. What we are doing is winning the grudging respect of our adversaries, and we are doing this by means of not caring whether or not we have their respect. Nebuchadnezzar was furious with the three sons of Israel for a time, but after a few things transpired, he came around to a different frame of mind.

Let’s follow the story out. We have multiple examples of this kind of thing. The most recent was the respect that pastors now have provided they didn’t go along with the COVID flop sweats. How do you love a world that hates you? Well, for starters, you don’t panic right alongside them.

Big Eva

Lig’s questioner spoke to him as though he were one of the “patriarchs” of Big Eva, one of the bigwigs, and asked him for the straight skinny on that whole topic. The response Lig provided was that much of the discourse concerning Big Eva was complete nonsense.

One of his reasons was that a number of the critics of Big Eva, folks that hate The Gospel Coalition for example, represent organizations that have “more money, more reach, etc.” This was said as though the problem with Big Eva was that it was big.

But nobody minded Big Eva being big. That’s why they got big—because evangelicals liked the gospel, and they liked coalitions, and they liked banding together to engage with the culture. They celebrated that part of it. The problem was that Jeshurun waxed fat and kicked. The problem was that once Big Eva got big, they went soft, and began drifting left. They started cozying up to the whole idea of woke. For just one example, Ligon Duncan wrote the foreword for Eric Mason’s Woke Church, a bit of writing that did not—let us speak frankly—age well.

And when I say that it did not age well, it also has to be said that his foreword was pretty bad in the moment of publication, which was pointed out at the time.

So this is what is meant by Big Eva. It does not refer to the biggest evangelical organization out there. It refers to the biggest organization of evangelical cool kids. The size and budget of the organization does not matter, not even a little bit. Focus on the Family was always way bigger than The Gospel Coalition. But Focus was never cool, and could not under any circumstances ever become cool. Ken Ham’s Answers in Genesis is really big. Millions have gone through the Ark Encounter. Is Ken Ham one of the accepted cool kids? Don’t make me snort.

So Big Eva refers to the soft left of conservative evangelicalism. This is the side of evangelicalism that can be steered by articles in The Atlantic, by opinion pieces in the Washington Post, and by the sneers of never-Trumpers. The leaders of Big Eva have to be conservative enough to have some purchase on the rank and file evangelicals out there, and liberal enough to care what the progressives think. So Big Eva is the clutch that the World uses whenever it wants to drive the evangelical car. The general discrediting of Big Eva means that they will have to find a new clutch.

And for some reason, Lig points to Daniel, a high ranking official in the Babylonian government, as though we would have difficulty with that. So here I am, on that very subject.

Sounds FV

In a passing reference, Lig also questioned our doctrinal soundness. Our theological views were suspect, he said, on “church, gospel, fidelity.” He said there were problems “at each of those levels.” His tone was serious, his intimations dark.

I know what we should do. This would not be the quiet room fetal position experiment, but something more like a public debate setting. But it would be a different kind of debate. Let’s set a time and place, and Lig and I would both bring an unmarked copy of the Westminster Confession of Faith. Every member of the audience would also be given a copy of the Westminster Confession of Faith as they come in.

The format would be this. We would alternate asking each other questions about the Confession. The questioner would read a passage, and ask the other for his understanding of that passage, and then to say whether or not he affirms it. As I have noted elsewhere, there are lost valleys in the Confession that no white man has ever seen.

And incidentally, this would be a good place to note that in my review of Woke Church, linked above, I pointed out how chummy Lig was with suspect understandings of the dikai-word group, so long as the weirdness was coming from a black guy speaking for the marginalized. And yet somehow he is not chummy with me, one who is of Scottish descent, and who wears the Westminsterian understanding of the dikai-word group around my neck like a feather boa, like they do in the Highlands. No comprendo, as we bilingual people sometimes say.

As the “Moscow mood” has gained more and more traction on other topics, I have noticed that periodically some Internet rando will jump into a comment thread with “your friendly reminder that FV is deadly heresy.” What an event like this would do is demonstrate that if I am guilty of deadly heresy, then so is the Westminster Confession. This would no doubt come as something of a surprise to the people who had assembled there, in that they were expecting a somewhat different result. But these are the sorts of things with which we should learn to roll.

I trust it would be a most informative evening.