Episode Notes

Lemuel: I am Lemuel Gonzalez, repentant sinner, and along with Amity Armstrong, your heavenly host, I invite you to find a place in the pew for today’s painless Sunday School lesson. Without Works.

Amity: Today we will investigate an instance of heathen idolatry a CPAC. Yes, someone a actually made and worshipped a golden idol. There is a historical precedent for this, and we discuss that in The More You Know.

First, though, we are going to speak about taking a stand in a brief edition of Canon Fodder.

Canon FodderPopular Bible teacher Beth Moore may be the most high-profile Southern Baptist to publicly cut ties with the conservative evangelical denomination in the last year, but she is not the only one to go.Some say a string of recent departures should serve as a wake-up call for the Nashville-based network of churches. "Southern Baptists need to do some soul searching of why so many African-American leaders have left and now why their most prominent woman leader has left," said Ed Stetzer, a Southern Baptist pastor and executive director of the Wheaton College Billy Graham Center. When the author and Bible teacher Beth Moore announced she was leaving the Southern Baptist Convention this week, she cited the “staggering” disorientation of seeing its leaders support Donald J. Trump, and the racism and sexism revealed in her community by his presidency.

Ms. Moore is not the leader of a church, a role inaccessible to Southern Baptist women. But as an itinerant speaker, she attracts significantly larger — and more engaged — audiences than most church leaders.

Ms. Moore has an electric stage presence. She is also an “exegetical powerhouse,” said Kate Bowler, a historian at Duke Divinity School who wrote about Ms. Moore in her 2019 book, “The Preacher’s Wife: The Precarious Power of Evangelical Women Celebrities.” Rather than simply telling personal stories or offering generic inspiration, she goes deep on biblical texts that can look dry or complicated to the untrained eye.

Ms. Moore’s books are ubiquitous in evangelical Bible studies, which are often targeted to one gender; like secular book clubs, they tend to function as intimate social gatherings as well as sites of literary analysis.

In recent years, Ms. Moore has achieved a new fame online that is distinct from her writing and speaking career. On Twitter in particular, where she has more than 950,000 followers, she found a new audience including men and non-Christians, and space to speak on topics beyond her usual portfolio of women’s issues and spirituality.Her new outspokenness has turned her into a kind of avatar for evangelical women who may be theologically conservative but are increasingly uncomfortable with the cultural politics they have seen revealed in their churches since the 2016 election.In August, Ms. Moore issued a thread that read like a fiery sermon, directly addressing the racism she saw in the white evangelical world.“White supremacy has held tight in much of the church for so long because the racists outlasted the anti racists,” she began. “Outlast THEM.” She exhorted her readers to ignore name-calling and to take the long view.And, as always, she directed them back to the text:“Stay in your Bibles,” she wrote, advising her followers to read the Old Testament prophets, starting with Isaiah, for insight into “God’s displeasure over injustice.” Then read through the Gospels, she wrote, and the rest of the New Testament: “Read, read, READ.”

About her departure, she has said:

"I love so many Southern Baptist people, so many Southern Baptist churches, but I don’t identify with some of the things in our heritage that haven’t remained in the past,"

"I do not believe these are days for mincing words. I’m 63½ years old & I have never seen anything in these United States of America I found more astonishingly seductive & dangerous to the saints of God than Trumpism. This Christian nationalism is not of God. Move back from it."

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/11/us/beth-moore-evangelical-women.html

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/03/11/bible-teacher-beth-moore-black-pastors-cut-ties-southern-baptists/4652217001/

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/03/09/beth-moore-southern-baptist-convention-president-donald-trump/6931983002/

The More You Know

Lemuel: Imagine that you are the leader of your people. You didn't want the job, but you were given it by a powerful and impetuous tribal God who cannot be resisted, even by the most powerful empire on earth. Jehovah, the fierce God of the enslaved hebrews remembered his promise to his often delinquent people by rolling through Egypt, crushing all opposition to his will. He directed you to take his people out into the desert to their ancestral homelands.

The people you are leading are not prepared for this. They are hardy from the rigors of living exclusively to work, but they are not prepared for mass migration through a hostile region filled with wild animals, and wild men. Worse than this, those people don’t remember this tribal God who rescued them! They have been in Egypt for so long they only know the Egyptian Gods, and not this strange, invisible God who is terrifying!

Yes, Jehovah is terrifying! He is invisible, and he is everywhere. He could be over your shoulder, watching you when you sleep, watching you always. He has a very rigid idea of right and wrong. Do you want to anger him?

Amity: Hell No!

Lemuel: Jehovah turns rivers to blood! Jehovah kills firstborn children! Jehovah sets up world leaders so that he can crush them and their kingdoms into powder.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-K8qi_AoXI

Lemuel: In the interests of scholarship, I will point out that the scripture cited in Pulp Fiction is not genuine. The desert trek is hard on the ancient Hebrews. They have been divorced from their culture and religion for many years. While stopping at Mount Sianai, the place where Jehovah first revealed himself to Moses, and there God revealed that he would reveal himself. The mountain would become holy; people were not allowed to approach on pain of death. They had to wash their clothes, bathe, and abstain from sex. God was going to appear in thunder and lightening and something that would sound like a trumpet blast. Moses would go up the mountain and talk to him.

Jehovah gives Moses a very specific set of laws. Ten of them. The first of his commandments was this:

“You shall have no other gods before me.

As if that was not clear enough, God explains his directive in detail:

You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.

Now, while Moses was speaking to the Most High, the Hebrews were in a desert camp, terrified of the noises and clouds and thunder. When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said, “Come, make us gods[a] who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.”Aaron answered them, “Take off the gold earrings that your wives, your sons and your daughters are wearing, and bring them to me.” So all the people took off their earrings and brought them to Aaron. He took what they handed him and made it into an idol cast in the shape of a calf, fashioning it with a tool. Then they said, “These are your gods,[b] Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.”When Aaron saw this, he built an altar in front of the calf and announced, “Tomorrow there will be a festival to the Lord.” So the next day the people rose early and sacrificed burnt offerings and presented fellowship offerings. Afterward they sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge in revelry.

Jehovah warns Moses that the people have turned against him and were worshipping an idol. Moses has to convince Jehovah not to kill the israelites for the offense. Moses descends from the mountain, and discovers the worshiping the calf.. In a rage he shatters the commandments, written on slabs of stone, and demands the camp separate into separate groups, those loyal to Jehovah, and those who are not. Then he orders the priests to slaughter the disloyal.

Yes, the Old Testament was all about hard men, and hard women, and a God who could not be disobeyed. I bring this story up because it illustrates something about the nature of the new conservative movement. It no longer has a clear set of morals, motives, or ideas. It is a cult, and the deity they worship is also made of gold.

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